Tag Archives: energy

Standard Alternative Energy

In a slight irony, The Rockefeller Brothers Fund has joined the fossil fuel divestment movement.

Given the RBF’s deep commitment to combating climate change, the Fund is now committing to a two-step process to address its desire to divest from investments in fossil fuels. Our immediate focus will be on coal and tar sands, two of the most intensive sources of carbon emissions. We are working to eliminate the Fund’s exposure to these energy sources as quickly as possible. Given the structure of some commingled investment funds and investments in highly diversified energy companies, we recognize there may continue to be minimal investments in our portfolio in those energy sectors, but we are committed to reducing our exposure to coal and tar sands to less than one percent of the total portfolio by the end of 2014. As we take the steps to divest from coal and tar sands investments, we are also undertaking a comprehensive analysis of our exposure to any remaining fossil fuel investments and will work with the RBF Investment Committee and board of trustees to determine an appropriate strategy for further divestment over the next few years.

In working to align our endowment investments with our mission and programs, we will adhere to the longstanding mandate of our board of trustees that our assets be invested with the goal of achieving financial returns that will enable the foundation to meet its annual philanthropic obligations, while maintaining the purchasing power of the endowment, so that future generations will also benefit from the foundation’s charitable giving. In uncertain and volatile markets, these financial goals are not easy to achieve. Therefore, our divestment from fossil fuels, which is now underway, will be accomplished through a careful process of evaluating our exposure and a phased approach that proceeds as quickly as is prudent.

peak oil is still nigh

This Telegraph article suggests that OPEC expects oil prices to come roaring back relatively soon, and when they do there are worries that the drop in investment caused by the current low prices will make it impossible to keep up with demand. And market speculation can supercharge the up swing when it comes.

Mr al-Badri said the world needs an investment blitz of $10 trillion to replace depleting oil fields and to meet extra demand of 17m barrels per day (b/d) by 2040, yet projects are being shelved at an alarming rate. A study by IHS found that investment for the years from 2015 to 2020 has been slashed by $1.8 trillion, compared to what was planned in 2014.

Mr al-Badri warned that the current glut is setting the stage for a future supply shock, with prices lurching from one extreme to another in a deranged market that is in the interests of nobody but speculators…

The paradox of the current slump is that global spare capacity is at wafer-thin levels of 2pc as Saudi Arabia pumps at will, leaving the market acutely vulnerable to any future supply-shock. “In the 1980s it was around 30pc; 10 years ago it was 8pc,” said Mr Descalzi…

By the end of this year there may be a “small deficit”. By then the world will need all of Opec’s 32m b/d supply to meet growing demand, although it will take a long time to whittle down record stocks.

So to put it in stock and flow terms, there is a big stock built up right now, and demand is less than what can physically be supplied (these are flows), so prices are low. When (if?) the global economy picks up at some point, demand may be greater than what can physically be supplied. The stock will gradually get used up, and as investors start to realize it is getting used up and supply will not be able to keep up, prices will rise, maybe fast. High prices will eventually spur investment and the cycle will repeat. This is how it plays out all other things being equal. But some of the other things are renewable energy, maybe nuclear energy, carbon credits/taxes/caps, maybe approaching physical limits on the big Middle East oil reservoirs, food and water economics, public sentiment, and geopolitics, all of which can shift the economics at the same time fossil fuel technologies and markets are going through their gyrations. Interesting times.

killer robot news

In killer robot news, there is a drone now that can roam around on its own and kill by injecting poison with a needle. No, it’s still not Ray Bradbury’s mechanical hound, which I am still expecting any day now. This one is roaming the Great Barrier Reef murdering starfish.

I still find it just a tiny bit disturbing. But I also wondered if chemical pesticides could be replaced by tiny drones that target specific pests. That is likely to be one topic of the science fiction masterpiece series I plan to write as soon as I become unexpectedly independently wealthy and retire from my day job. Of course, in my science fiction book, they will probably start running amok and killing all the pollinators, which will of course threaten the world food supply. But then someone will invent a pollinator drone, which will seem like a good idea for awhile until in a desperate attempt to save the world’s remaining natural ecosystems, we seed them with these various drones and they, well, run amok somehow. Aren’t most science fiction stories about something or other running amok?

And in one more robot story, there was an autonomous quadcopter unveiled at CES (you’re supposed to just know what that stands for) that can supposedly carry human occupants, although nobody has been brave enough to ride in it.

Ehang, the drone maker, claims its all-electric quadcopter, the Ehang 184, is the first in the world that is capable of operating autonomously. According to the company’s announcement, the vehicle is like an oversized drone – built just big enough to carry a single passenger. That passenger supposedly has only to plug in their desired destination, sit back, and enjoy the ride while the aircraft takes off and climbs up to 11,000 feet. If there is a problem, Ehang says the human passenger can take over the controls and pilot the chopper to safety…

Despite the skepticism, Ehang officials believe their autonomous quadcopter could revolutionize personal travel on a global scale. “It’s been a lifetime goal of mine to make flight faster, easier, and more convenient than ever. The 184 provides a viable solution to the many challenges the transportation industry faces in a safe and energy-efficient way,” said Ehang CEO Huazhi Hu. “I truly believe that Ehang will make a global impact across dozens of industries beyond personal travel. The 184 is evocative of a future we’ve always dreamed of and is primed to alter the very fundamentals of the way we get around.”

There are obvious military uses – no needles attached to these but I don’t see why there couldn’t be. It might seem dangerous to drive these things around town. But one more thought I have is that if we replaced our rubber-wheeled cars with something like this, it could obviate the need for so much pavement even if it were just elevated a few inches or feet off the ground. Maybe they could be soft and just bounce off each other at low speed without damage. Maybe they could stack or hang on hooks rather than needing horizontal parking lots. Maybe we could get rid of a lot of pollution and flooding caused by all that pavement, plus a lot of the toxins that come from tire and brake dust. It might take more energy though to both elevate these vehicles and propel them around than we use on cars now, I am not sure about that. A clean cheap energy source would always be a good idea.

December 2015 in Review

Now it’s time to review December 2015, before we get on to reviewing 2015 as a whole.

Negative stories (-10):

  • Some car dealers are deliberately talking customers out of buying electric cars that they want, because the car dealer will make less money on oil changes. (-1)
  • Breaking news: we can’t believe everything we hear on the internet. Some of it is deliberate government and corporate propaganda, and some is “online filter bubbles” or marketing algorithms telling each of us only what we want to hear. Data used by all these algorithms is becoming more and more valuable. (-1)
  • Cyberattacks or superflares could destroy the U.S. electric grid. (-1)
  • Guns cause gut-wrenching, accidental deaths of children quite frequently in the U.S. The U.S. has a rate of violent assault 5-10 times higher than our close Anglo-American cousins, which in turn have higher rates than most of Europe and developed Asia. (-1)
  • I mused about whether it is really possible the U.S. could go down a fascist path. I reviewed Robert Paxton’s five stages of fascism. I am a little worried, but some knowledgeable people say not to worry. After reading Alice Goffman’s book On the Run though, one could conclude that a certain segment of our population is living in a fascist police state right now. There is some fairly strong evidence that financial crises have tended to favor the rise of the right wing in Europe. (-2)
  • After more than a decade of drought, there may not be enough water to sustain both Lake Powell and Lake Mead in the U.S. desert southwest. Some are suggesting draining Lake Powell. (-1)
  • This year’s “super El Nino” might have happened with or without climate change, but climate change made it more likely. I have to admit though I enjoyed sitting on my front porch in shorts on Christmas here in Philadelphia. (-1)
  • Jeffrey Sachs makes a pretty good case that the rise of violent religious fanaticism in the Middle East is largely the CIA’s fault. (-2)

Positive stories (+13):

    • Las Vegas is planning to go all renewable by 2017, mostly centralized solar. (+1)
    • Children have a natural aptitude for learning to recognize patterns. Now all we have to do is figure out which patterns we should be teaching them to recognize. (+1)
    • Some U.S. Presidential candidates want to invest in infrastructure, which is good. A national infrastructure plan might also be good. (+1)
    • Ericcson released some technology predictions for 2016 and beyond: Artificial intelligence will start to assist us without the need for smartphone screens. Virtual reality will start to come into its own for tech support, sports, dating, and shopping. And we will start to see more sensors embedded in our homes and eventually our bodies. (+1)
    • Trends in Ecology and Evolution made some technology predictions too: “managed bees as transporters of biological control agents, artificial superintelligence, electric pulse trawling, testosterone in the aquatic environment, building artificial oceanic islands, and the incorporation of ecological civilization principles into government policies in China”. (+1)
    • A serious but treatable infection can destroy a tumor. (+1)
    • Self-driving cars could drastically reduce the amount of land required for parking in cities. There are some moves toward car-free central cities around the world. (+3)
    • We had the Paris agreement. It is possible to be cynical about this agreement but it is the best agreement we have had so far. (+2)
    • New York City recently finished planting a million trees. (+2)

So we end the year on a positive note!

November 2015 in Review

What did I learn in November? Let’s start with the bad and then go to the good.

Negative stories (-10):

  • The World Economic Forum’s 2015 Global Risks Report came out. Some of the top risks are interstate conflict, water crisis, failure of climate change adaptation, unemployment and underemployment. Hmm, that “interstate conflict” items might be what we used to call “war”. And I think there might be one underway right now in the Middle East, which Jimmy Carter says we are getting all wrong. And it just might be caused by the other items on the list. And speaking of war, there is a new book on the Vietnam War aimed at the middle grades, but it seems pretty harsh for that age to me. (-2)
  • I noticed that Robert Costanza in 2014 issued an update to his seminal 1997 paper on ecosystem services. He now estimates their value at $125 trillion per year, compared to a world economy of $77 trillion per year. Each year we are using up about $4-20 trillion in value more than the Earth is able to replenish. The correct conclusion here is that we can’t live without ecosystem services any time soon with our current level of knowledge and wealth, and yet we are depleting the natural capital that produces them. We were all lucky enough to inherit an enormous trust fund of natural capital at birth, and we are spending it down like the spoiled trust fund babies we are. We are living it up, and we measure our wealth based on that lifestyle, but we don’t have a bank statement so we don’t actually know when that nest egg is going to run out. (-3)
  • This crop of presidential candidates is easy for comedians to make fun of. I enjoy it but think it may be a contrary indicator for the health of the country. (-1)
  • Bicycle helmets are not making U.S. bicycle riders any safer. This is why we need streets designed on the European model to be safe for driving, bicycling, and walking. It’s 100% known technology and there can be no excuses! (-2)
  • In current events, we had the awful, shocking terrorist attacks in Paris. I suggested that the long-term answer to violence caused by angry young men anywhere is to understand why they are angry, address their legitimate grievances, and give them productive work to do. Short term, we also have to detect and disrupt any plots involving nuclear or biological weapons, of course, because we can’t afford even one. (-2)

Positive stories (+9):

car dealers sabotaging electric cars

The New York Times says car dealers are actively subverting peoples’ attempts to buy electric cars, even when they really want them. One reason they cite is that electric cars need less service like oil changes, and dealerships actually make a lot more money from service than from sales. This may be a rational explanation. But part of the explanation may also be that people can get sucked into longstanding institutional cultures even when they are highly irrational. I face this quite often in my work, and I have faced it around the world – groups of people can be incredibly motivated to defend the status quo, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence that there are better ways, and even when the people in question are young, intellgient, well-educated and well-intentioned. Sometimes the facts just do not matter. I don’t have the answer to this, if you do please let me know.

Low-cost solution to the grid reliability problem

I have heard from know-it-alls that the problem with renewable energy is that it is intermittent and hard to store. I have always thought there are many ways to deal with that – charge a battery, pump water uphill, heat something, wind a spring, compress air, electrolyze water into hydrogen and charge a fuel cell. Those are my thoughts with absolutely no expertise at all, but luckily the experts are thinking about this too:

Mark Z. Jacobson, Mark A. Delucchi, Mary A. Cameron, and Bethany A. Frew. A low-cost solution to the grid reliability problem with 100% penetration of intermittent wind, water, and solar for all purposes. PNAS 2015; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1510028112, 2015

This study addresses the greatest concern facing the large-scale integration of wind, water, and solar (WWS) into a power grid: the high cost of avoiding load loss caused by WWS variability and uncertainty. It uses a new grid integration model and finds low-cost, no-load-loss, nonunique solutions to this problem on electrification of all US energy sectors (electricity, transportation, heating/cooling, and industry) while accounting for wind and solar time series data from a 3D global weather model that simulates extreme events and competition among wind turbines for available kinetic energy. Solutions are obtained by prioritizing storage for heat (in soil and water); cold (in ice and water); and electricity (in phase-change materials, pumped hydro, hydropower, and hydrogen), and using demand response. No natural gas, biofuels, nuclear power, or stationary batteries are needed. The resulting 2050–2055 US electricity social cost for a full system is much less than for fossil fuels. These results hold for many conditions, suggesting that low-cost, reliable 100% WWS systems should work many places worldwide.

July 2015 in Review

I’m experimenting with my +3/-3 rating system again this month, just to convey the idea that not all stories are equal in importance. The result is that July was a pretty negative month! Whether that reflects more the state of the world or the state of my mind, or some combination, you can decide.

Negative stories (-21):

  • In The Dead Hand, I learned that the risk of nuclear annihilation in the 1980s was greater than I thought, and the true story of Soviet biological weapons production was much worse than I thought. (-3)
  • Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, among others, are concerned about a real-life Terminator scenario. (-2)
  • I playfully pointed out that the Pope’s encyclical contains some themes that sound like the more lucid paragraphs in the Unabomber Manifesto, namely that the amoral pursuit of technology has improved our level of material comfort and physical health while devastating the natural world, creating new risks, and leaving us feeling empty somehow. (-1)
  • Bumblebees are getting squeezed by climate change. (-1)
  • The Cold War seems to be rearing its ugly head. (-2)
  • There may be a “global renaissance of coal”. (-3)
  • Joel Kotkin and other anti-urban voices like him want to make sure you don’t have the choice of living in a walkable community. (-2)
  • I think Obama may be remembered as an effective, conservative president, in the dictionary sense of playing it safe and avoiding major mistakes. Navigating the financial crisis, achieving some financial and health care reforms, and defusing several wars and conflicts are probably his greatest achievements. However, if a major war or financial crisis erupts in the near future that can be traced back to decisions he made, his legacy will suffer whether it is fair or not. (-0)
  • We can think of natural capital as a battery that took a long time to charge and has now been discharged almost instantly. (-3)
  • James Hansen is warning of much faster and greater sea level rise than current mainstream expectations. (-3)
  • Lloyd’s of London has spun a scenario of how a food crisis could play out. (-1)

Positive stories (+7):