Tag Archives: energy

Steven Koonin – climate science not settled

Steven Koonin has written an article in the Wall Street Journal called Climate Science Is Not Settled. According to his bio at the end,

Dr. Koonin was undersecretary for science in the Energy Department during President Barack Obama’s first term and is currently director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University. His previous positions include professor of theoretical physics and provost at Caltech, as well as chief scientist of BP, where his work focused on renewable and low-carbon energy technologies.

If I can paraphrase and oversimplify, he thinks that climate science is still too uncertain to make any decisions other than investments in “low-emissions technologies and in cost-effective energy-efficiency measures.” And lots more research, of course. Here is a short passage:

Even though human influences could have serious consequences for the climate, they are physically small in relation to the climate system as a whole. For example, human additions to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the middle of the 21st century are expected to directly shift the atmosphere’s natural greenhouse effect by only 1% to 2%. Since the climate system is highly variable on its own, that smallness sets a very high bar for confidently projecting the consequences of human influences.

A second challenge to “knowing” future climate is today’s poor understanding of the oceans. The oceans, which change over decades and centuries, hold most of the climate’s heat and strongly influence the atmosphere. Unfortunately, precise, comprehensive observations of the oceans are available only for the past few decades; the reliable record is still far too short to adequately understand how the oceans will change and how that will affect climate.

A third fundamental challenge arises from feedbacks that can dramatically amplify or mute the climate’s response to human and natural influences. One important feedback, which is thought to approximately double the direct heating effect of carbon dioxide, involves water vapor, clouds and temperature.

But feedbacks are uncertain. They depend on the details of processes such as evaporation and the flow of radiation through clouds. They cannot be determined confidently from the basic laws of physics and chemistry, so they must be verified by precise, detailed observations that are, in many cases, not yet available.

You don’t want legitimate scientists with alternative viewpoints to be censored or silenced, so it’s good to read through something like this and draw your own conclusions, while keeping in mind an overwhelming majority of scientists have come to the conclusion that the science is certain enough, and the potential consequences serious enough, to justify action now. His last argument makes no sense to the engineer in me at all, that we shouldn’t try to make projections now using our best understanding of the physical relationships in the system, that we just have to wait until there are changes large enough that we can measure them. If we always did that the entire fields of science, engineering and technology would pretty much grind to a halt, and the rest of our civilization with them.

oil prices

It’s interesting that oil prices have slipped back below $100 a barrel ($92.92 for West Texas Intermediate, $96.65 for Brent Crude as I write this on September 15). An NPR article blames this mostly on weak demand, but also maybe on unexpectedly higher supply from North America. Some people are predicting this trend will actually continue:

The International Energy Agency made that point last week, when it said a weaker economic outlook in China and Europe is causing a remarkable slowdown in global demand growth. And demand is declining, West says, as global supplies surge due to the energy boom in North America — including shale oil production from North Dakota and Texas.

“There’s another 3 billion barrels a day that’s coming into the market and staying in the market,” he says. “This has really changed the global supply-demand balance very substantially” — and helped bring more stability to the market…

Fadel Gheit, managing partner and head of oil and gas research at Oppenheimer & Co., says oil prices will still spike higher when severe disruptions occur. But he thinks global supply will continue to grow and keep prices in check.

He predicts that will happen as fracking technology improves, reducing the costs of production.

“The break-even point continues to decline. Yes, we needed $80 [per barrel] oil for the North Dakota Bakken oil development to continue,” he says. “Now, it’s about $65. Five years from now, it could be $50, or even $40.”

In the quote above, I skipped over plenty of dissenting voices in this fair and balanced coverage. Nobody really knows why markets do what they do in the short term, and anything can be rationalized. Then when you go back and look at the data later, often the longer-term trend is staring you in the face. Over the past 10 years or so, the longer-term trend is oil hanging out around $100 or so, whereas it used to be $20-40 for decades and decades before that (this is all adjusted for inflation.) So we’ll see, but I’m not ready to pronounce $100+ oil dead yet just because we’ve been at $96 for a few weeks.

grid parity

If a good indicator of grid parity is articles about grid parity, then grid parity seems to be here. This article from Renewable Energy World has a good roundup of recent articles on grid parity and the possibly dire consequences for traditional utilities.

And yet the thesis of the Renewable Energy World article seems to be that all this is overblown. Their main argument is just that people won’t switch because they are stubborn. I don’t buy that. I agree that people are not just economic robots who will do cost-benefit analysis and switch instantly, but if the economics is pushing them off the grid then resistance will gradually fade, until one day it will be a landslide. The one thing I think could slow it down would be reliability. It might be annoying and even dangerous if your entire house is giving you a “low battery” signal. Sure, you could keep a diesel generator around. But that involves storing diesel fuel. It would make more sense to just keep a backup battery. But every once in a while, that backup battery might not be enough, so you might need a second backup battery, and so on. Neighbors or whole towns could share a backup system, but then you would be starting to build a grid again. You could have a natural gas generator, but then you need to be on a natural gas grid, and if I had to choose between the electric grid and the latter I would rather go electric.

We can take it as a good sign or a bad sign that traditional utilities are starting to fight back through lobbying and through the courts. They are trying to get states (examples: Florida, Virginia, South Carolina, even Pennsylvania, ) to outlaw or limit selling energy back to the grid, on the grounds that the customers who don’t do it will then have to pay more. This is true as far as it goes – if all but a few people go off the grid, the ones who are left will be stuck paying for the entire traditional system, which doesn’t work. So as a society we can probably afford to support some early adopters, but once it really starts to catch on it’s all or nothing. Lobbying and buying off politicians might slow the tide for awhile but not forever if the forces pushing us in this direction are strong enough. The traditional utilities can either find a way to get in on the game or die.

 

Elon Musk

Elon Musk says he is trying to put people on Mars in 10-12 years, put sustainable colonies on Mars longer term as a hedge against human extinction, build cheap batteries for cheap electric cars and houses, build cheap solar panels to charge the batteries, and protect us against killer artificial intelligence. He also thinks other people should advance the Hyperloop and figure out how we can live forever. I think this is a pretty good to-do list.

alternative energy

This article (in the descriptively name journal Energy) describes how California could move to an all-renewable energy future, then tries to put an economic value on that. It is always the link between air pollution and health that surprises me. Why don’t people get more upset that power plants and vehicle exhaust are literally taking years off all our lives when there are other alternatives out there?

This study presents a roadmap for converting California’s all-purpose (electricity, transportation, heating/cooling, and industry) energy infrastructure to one derived entirely from wind, water, and sunlight (WWS) generating electricity and electrolytic hydrogen. California’s available WWS resources are first evaluated. A mix of WWS generators is then proposed to match projected 2050 electric power demand after all sectors have been electrified. The plan contemplates all new energy from WWS by 2020, 80–85% of existing energy converted by 2030, and 100% by 2050. Electrification plus modest efficiency measures may reduce California’s end-use power demand ∼44% and stabilize energy prices since WWS fuel costs are zero. Several methods discussed should help generation to match demand. A complete conversion in California by 2050 is estimated to create ∼220,000 more 40-year jobs than lost, eliminate ∼12,500 (3800–23,200) state air-pollution premature mortalities/yr, avoid $103 (31–232) billion/yr in health costs, representing 4.9 (1.5–11.2)% of California’s 2012 gross domestic product, and reduce California’s 2050 global climate cost contribution by $48 billion/yr. The California air-pollution health plus global climate cost benefits from eliminating California emissions could equal the $1.1 trillion installation cost of 603 GW of new power needed for a 100% all-purpose WWS system within ∼7 (4–14) years.

autonomous vehicles

Here are two articles on autonomous vehicles: a short one from Streetsblog USA saying they might just mean people will choose to live even further from work, and a long one from Eno Center for Transportation going into very detailed examination of potential costs and benefits.

My thoughts on the first possibility are that this may indeed happen. Some people might try to live way off in the countryside and not mind several hours in the car each day because they can now spend it sleeping, reading, working, being entertained or being social. Some people will like this idea and some will not. Some will like it but make the decision based on financial cost. Let’s remember that government policy is important here – if we tax people in cities and use that money to subsidize highways to the countryside, more people will choose to live in the countryside because the cost (to them) is lower, while the true cost is hidden. Also, if too many people decide to live in the countryside, it will not be countryside any more.

Here’s a quote from the second article:

AVs have the potential to fundamentally alter transportation systems by averting deadly crashes, providing critical mobility to the elderly and disabled, increasing road capacity,
saving fuel, and lowering emissions. Complementary trends in shared rides and vehicles may lead us from vehicles as an owned product to an on-demand service. Infrastructure
investments and operational improvements, travel choices and parking needs, land use patterns, and trucking and other activities may be affected. Additionally, the passenger compartment may be transformed: former drivers may be working on their laptops, eating meals, reading books, watching movies, and/or calling friends – safely.

After mentioning land use in this paragraph, the report never really returns to it, focusing instead on “congestion”. I think the potential for radical land use transformation is the biggest story related to autonomous vehicles, so the fact that it is left out of a report like this illustrates how critical it is to have the urban and regional planning profession involved alongside traditional minded transportation engineers.

“a single, supple mesh of mobility”

I wrote recently about European cities considering a complete ban on private cars by 2050, and I said that didn’t sound so ambitious. Well, according to The Guardian, Helsinki has a plan “to transform its existing public transport network into a comprehensive, point-to-point “mobility on demand” system by 2025 – one that, in theory, would be so good nobody would have any reason to own a car.”

Helsinki aims to transcend conventional public transport by allowing people to purchase mobility in real time, straight from their smartphones. The hope is to furnish riders with an array of options so cheap, flexible and well-coordinated that it becomes competitive with private car ownership not merely on cost, but on convenience and ease of use.

Subscribers would specify an origin and a destination, and perhaps a few preferences. The app would then function as both journey planner and universal payment platform, knitting everything from driverless cars and nimble little buses to shared bikes and ferries into a single, supple mesh of mobility. Imagine the popular transit planner Citymapper fused to a cycle hire service and a taxi app such as Hailo or Uber, with only one payment required, and the whole thing run as a public utility, and you begin to understand the scale of ambition here.

Now, that’s ambitious! I love the vision. It’s not just about transportation – imagine, if all these transit vehicles are in motion, they won’t be parked. When they do park, they can do it in small, out-of-the-way spaces. If they are autonomous, they won’t need so much space to maneuver around each other and around people. If this is the city of the future, what are we going to do with all the extra space?

So it looks like the race to develop the most sustainable transportation vision is a race to the Finnish! Sorry.

EU considering ban on gasoline and diesel powered cars

According to Wired, the EU is floating the idea of a complete ban on gasoline and diesel powered cars in European city centers by 2050.

An ambitious set of goals, laid out in the document “Roadmap to a Single European Transport Area” (PDF), calls for a gradual phase-out of gas-guzzling vehicles in favour of electric vehicles and improved rail networks. The EU wants to “halve the use of conventionally-fuelled cars in urban transport by 2030” before getting rid of them entirely by 2050.

This doesn’t strike me as all that ambitious. We can and will switch to electric, natural gas, and propane powered vehicles a lot faster than that if the economics begin to favor it. And they will if, for example, distributed solar energy comes online in a big way. And I expect to see that in decade, not four decades. However, just the fact that most people and governments see it as ambitious illustrates exactly why it is good to get it out there and in peoples’ minds – it may be more likely to happen that way.