Tag Archives: energy

Bill Gates on 2023

Bill Gates’s year-end retrospective is kind of rambling but here are a few points I pulled out:

  1. Lots more vaccines were administered to children in developing countries using new technologies and new delivery methods. This has made a big difference in child mortality, and that is always a happy thing. He doesn’t really go into details on the new technologies, but I am imagining things like nasal sprays rather than needles, and vaccines that don’t require refrigeration or not as much. And sometimes we just figure out how to make familiar things but make them much cheaper, and this can make a huge difference. Which would illustrate that important technologies don’t have to seem extremely complicated and high-tech to have a big impact.
  2. On the AI front, he says it will accelerate drug development, including solutions for antibiotic resistance. I don’t doubt this, although I suspect the hype has gotten a bit ahead of the rollout. So I would look for this over the next half-decade or so rather than expecting it to burst on the scene in 2024. Bill actually predicts “18–24 months away from significant levels of AI use by the general population”.
  3. He talks about AI tutors for students. I don’t want to be a Luddite, but I am concerned this will just mean less teachers per student, which will be bad.
  4. Maybe AI can just get our medical records under control. This would be nice. Transparent, common protocols for how medical records should be formatted, stored, and shared could also do this though. I can someday hope robots will constantly clean up and organize my messy house as I just throw my things everywhere, or I could organize my house (which would take a big effort once) and keep it that way (which would take small, disciplined daily efforts).
  5. Gut microbiome-based medicine. Sounds good, I guess. Then again, whenever we try to replace nutritious whole foods with highly manufactured alternatives (vitamin pills, baby formula) we tend to decide later that we should have stuck with the whole foods.
  6. “a major shift toward overall acceptance of nuclear” power. Well, it’s been pretty obvious to me for a long time that this had to happen, but maybe the world is catching up. Nuclear could certainly have been the bridge fuel to renewables if we had fully adopted it decades ago. The question now is whether, given its incredibly long time frames to get up and running and the fact that any technology is obsolete by the time it is up and running, and the current pace of renewables, it still makes sense. I definitely think we should put some eggs in this basket though.
  7. He mentions the fusion breakthrough at Lawrence Livermore about a year ago. It’s been a year and we haven’t heard much more – is the time to refine and rollout that technology going to be measured in years, decades, or never?
  8. He talks about the need for more investment in electric grids and transmission lines. Yes, this is unsexy but really needs to happen. Will it?

August 2023 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Immigration pressure and anti-immigration politics are already a problem in the U.S. and Europe, and climate change is going to make it worse. The 2023 WEF Global Risks Report agrees that “large scale involuntary migration” is going to be up there as an issue. We should not be angry at immigrants, we should be angry at Exxon and the rest of the energy industry, which made an intentional choice not only to directly cause all this but to prevent governments from even understanding the problem let alone doing anything to solve it. We should be very, very angry! Are there any talented politicians out there who know how to stoke anger and channel it for positive change, or is it just the evil genocidal impulses you know how to stoke?

Most hopeful story: Peak natural gas demand could happen by 2030, with the shift being to nuclear and renewables.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: There are a number of theories on why “western elites” have not been (perceived to be) effective in responding to crises in recent years and decades. Many have to do with institutional power dynamics, where the incentives of the individual to gain power within the institution do not align with the stated goals of the institution. Like for example, not killing everyone. The possible silver lining would be that better institutions could be designed where incentives aligned. I have an alternate, or possibly complementary, theory that there has been a decline in system thinking and moral thinking. Our leaders aren’t educated to see the systems and or think enough about whether their decisions are on the side of right or wrong.

peak natural gas demand by 2030?

The International Energy Agency is forecasting that global demand for natural gas will peak and fall by 2030. In the short term, the Russia-Ukraine war has led to a drop in supply, a spike in prices, and a shift to liquid natural gas from the Middle East. In the longer term though, the shift is toward nuclear (at least, restarting underutilized plants or delaying retirement of already existing plants) and renewables according to this article. It sounds somewhat hopeful and welcome, although of course still too little too late to stop the unfolding climate catastrophe.

2022 in Review

First, my heart goes out to anyone who suffered hardship or lost a loved one in 2022. People still died from Covid-19 of course, not to mention other diseases, violence, and accidents. People are living, dying, and suffering horribly in war zones from Ukraine to the Middle East to Myanmar. Having said all that, for those of us living relatively sheltered lives in relatively sheltered locations like the United States, 2022 does not seem like it will rank among the best or worst of years in history.

Highlights of the Year’s Posts

These are the posts I picked each month as most frightening and/or depressing, most hopeful, and most interesting.

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • JANUARY: A collapse of the Game of Thrones ice wall holding back the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica could raise average sea levels around the world by one foot, or maybe 10 feet “if it draws the surrounding glaciers with it”. The good news is that no army of zombies would pour out.
  • FEBRUARY: Philadelphia police are making an arrest in less than 40% of murders in our city, not to mention other violent crimes. Convictions of those arrested are also down. Some of this could be Covid-era dysfunction. But there is a word for this: lawlessness.
  • MARCH: What causes violence? It’s the (prohibition and war on) drugs, stupid. Or at least, partly/mostly, the drugs.
  • APRIL:  The use of small nuclear weapons is becoming more thinkable. Just a reminder that nuclear war is truly insane. Assuming we manage to avoid nuclear war, food insecurity might be our biggest near- to medium-term issue. One lesson of World War II is worries about food security played a role in the diseased minds of both Hitler and Stalin. And food prices right now are experiencing a “giant leap” unprecedented over the last couple decades. Food security, natural disasters, sea level rise, migration, and geopolitical stability all can form ugly feedback loops. And no, I couldn’t limit myself to just one depressing story this month!
  • MAY: The lab leak hypothesis is back, baby! Whether Covid-19 was or was not a lab accident, the technology for accidental or intentional release of engineered plagues has clearly arrived. And also, the world is waking up to a serious food crisis.
  • JUNE: Mass shootings are often motivated by suicidally depressed people who decide to take others with them to the grave.
  • JULY:  One way global warming is suppressing crop yields is by damaging pollen.
  • AUGUST: The fossil fuel industry intentionally used immoral, evil propaganda techniques for decades to cast doubt on climate science and make short-term profits, probably dooming us, our children, and our children’s children. Also, and because that is apparently not enough, nuclear proliferation.
  • SEPTEMBER: If humans are subject to the same natural laws as all other species on Earth, we are doomed to certain extinction by our limited genetic variety, declining fertility, and overexploitation of our habitat. So, how different are we? I can spin up a hopeful story where are evolving and overcoming our limitations through intelligence and technology, but time will tell if this is right or wrong.
  • OCTOBER: Hurricanes are hitting us (i.e., the United States: New Orleans and Puerto Rico being the examples) and we are not quite recovering back to the trend we were on before the hurricane. This seems to be happening elsewhere too, like the Philippines. This is how a system can decline and eventually collapse – it appears stable in the face of internal stressors until it is faced with an external shock, and then it doesn’t bounce back quite all the way, and each time this happens it bounces back a bit less.
  • NOVEMBER:  Asteroids could be used as a weapon.
  • DECEMBER: The U.S. legalized political corruption problem is getting worse, not better. This was one of Project Censored’s most censored stories of 2022.

Most hopeful stories:

  • JANUARY: LED lighting has gotten so efficient that it is a tossup on energy efficiency with daylight coming through a window, because no window is perfectly sealed. Windows still certainly have the psychological advantage.
  • FEBRUARY: “Green ammonia” offers some help on the energy and environmental front.
  • MARCH: There are meaningful things individuals can do to slow climate change, even as governments and industries do too little too late. For example, eat plants, limit driving and flying, and just replace consumer goods as they wear out. I’m mostly on board except that I think we need peace and stability for the long term survival of both our civilization and planetary ecosystem, and we are going to need to travel and get to know one another to give that a chance.
  • APRIL: While we are experiencing a disturbing homicide wave in U.S. cities, violent and overall crime are not necessarily at historical highs and are more or less flat. And yes, this was the most uplifting story I could come up with this month. Brave politicians could use the Ukraine emergency to talk about arms control, but if anybody is talking about that I am missing it.
  • MAY: I came up with (but I am sure I didn’t think of it first) the idea of a 21st century bill of rights. This seems to me like a political big idea somebody could run with. I’ll expand on it at some point, but quick ideas would be to clarify that the right to completely free political speech applies to human beings only and put some bounds on what it means for corporations and other legal entities, and update the 18th century idea of “unlawful search and seizure” to address the privacy/security tradeoffs of our modern world. And there’s that weird “right to bear arms” thing. Instead of arguing about what those words meant in the 18th century, we could figure out what we want them to mean now and then say it clearly. For example, we might decide that people have a right to be free of violence and protected from violence, in return for giving up any right to perpetrate violence. We could figure out if we think people have a right to a minimum standard of living, or housing, or health care, or education. And maybe clean up the voting mess?
  • JUNE: For us 80s children, Top Gun has not lost that loving feeling.
  • JULY: Kernza is a perennial grain with some promise, although yields would have to increase a lot for it to be a viable alternative to annual grains like wheat, corn and rice.
  • AUGUST: “Effective altruism” may give us some new metrics to benchmark the performance of non-profit organizations and give us some insights on dealing with existential risks (like the ones I mention above).
  • SEPTEMBER: Metformin, a diabetes drug, might be able to preemptively treat a variety of diseases colloquially referred to as “old age”.
  • OCTOBER: Gorbachev believed in the international order and in 1992 proposed a recipe for fixing it: elimination of nuclear and chemical weapons [we might want to add biological weapons today], elimination of the international arms trade, peaceful sharing and oversight of civilian nuclear technology, strong intervention in regional conflicts [he seemed to envision troops under Security Council control], promotion of food security, human rights, population control [seems a bit quaint, but maybe we would replace this with a broader concept of ecological footprint reduction today], economic assistance to poorer countries, and expansion of the Security Council to include at least India, Italy, Indonesia, Canada, Poland, Brazil, Mexico, and Egypt [maybe this list would be a bit different today but would almost certainly include Germany, Japan, Brazil, India, and Indonesia].
  • NOVEMBER: A review of Limits to Growth suggests our civilization may be on a path to stagnation rather than collapse. Or, we may be on the cusp of a fantastic science ficition future of abundance brought to us by solar energy, asteroid mining (there are those asteroids again!), and biotechnology.
  • DECEMBER: Space-based solar. This just might be the killer energy app, the last energy tech we need to come up with for awhile. Imagine what we could do with abundant, cheap, clean energy – reverse global warming, purify/desalinate as much water as we need, grow lots of food under lights in cities, power homes/businesses/factories with little or no pollution, get around in low-pollution cars/buses/trains, electrolyze as much hydrogen from water as we need for fuel cells to power aircraft and even spacecraft. Solve all these problems and we would eventually come up against other limits, of course, but this would be an enormous step forward. And space-based solar seems like much less of a fantasy than nuclear fusion or even widespread scaling up of new-generation fission designs.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

Brilliant Synthesis

Technology

The last couple years, I led off with other things and came around to a technology roundup towards the end. This year, I’ll just shake things up (yes, I’m wild and crazy like that) and lead off with technology developments during the year.

Solar energy has been a long time coming, but 2022 was a year when it really started to be at the forefront of the energy conversation and hard for the skeptics to ignore. We keep hearing that it is now the cheapest form of energy to build and put into operation. That means it is now limited by the materials needed to produce the panels, by the space needed to deploy the panels, and by the transmission and temporary storage infrastructure. Building rooftops take up a lot of space and are mostly not used for other things, so this seems like an obvious place to put the panels. The oceans of pavement we use to operate and park vehicles make up another somewhat obvious place – we can toughen the panels and drive on them, or we can put cheap roofs over the pavement and cover them with panels. Materials can be an issue because many of them are mined and sold by unsavory characters and governments, and there is clearly an environmental impact. But remember that we are trading this off against today’s coal, oil, and natural gas industry, not against some socially and ecologically blameless party. This industry intentionally lied to the public for decades and in the process did immeasurable damage to a planetary biophysical system.

Metals and minerals are also just limited. But even in hard-nosed economic terms, if solar panels are the lowest-cost option as we are hearing, they are holding their own with the costs of extracting, transporting, and burning fossil fuels. We could tax social and environmental impacts at international borders if we had the courage to do so, but even without that it is hard to imagine a system more damaging and irresponsible than the one we have been dealing with for the past century or so.

People will also say we haven’t kept the distribution infrastructure up to date, and this is true. In the United States at least, we don’t keep public infrastructure in a state of good repair. But we do create infrastructure when big business demands it, and they will demand an electric grid that can support their products when it comes to electric vehicles, devices and facilities. There may be a period of pain between when big business demands it and when the U.S. government provides it, and other countries will almost certainly outdistance us.

Longer term, as Fully Automated Luxury Communism tells it, space for solar panels will not be a problem because we will put them in, well, space. And this is not a far-future fantasy. The technology to gather the energy in space and beam it to the Earth pretty much exists now and governments and companies are seriously working on practical implementation. They swear it is safe, and even if it is not totally risk-free remember again all the death, pollution, and permanent planetary destruction the fossil fuel sociopaths have wrought.

Now, what about nuclear power? If we had really focused on it decades ago, we might not be in the climate change mess we find ourselves in now. It could still be a solution to the climate change mess in the future. But given how long it takes to bring new nuclear technology online at a large scale, and how fast solar energy appears to be scaling up and how reliable it appears to be, is it time to stop working on nuclear? I’m talking about known fission technology here. As for fusion, given that it is “always 20 years away” (no matter the year we are actually in), is it time to stop working on it and just throw all our research efforts at solar?

And materials will not be a problem either because we will produce them from asteroids and bring them to Earth, ending material shortages forever. I say, good but better to just use them to build things in space because we are running out of capacity to absorb the byproducts of the materials we already have down here. Just digging things up that were already in the ground and pumping them into the atmosphere and oceans has caused enough trouble.

By the way, once we are in space and messing around with asteroids, government and private actors will be able to divert their trajectories. It is easy to imagine scenarios where this is a great thing that actually saves all life on the planet. It is also easy to imagine scenarios where industrial accidents or intentional government actions threaten life on the planet. An international treaty and some oversight of this seems like a good idea as the messing-with-asteroids industry really starts to get going.

I don’t have my pet mini-mammoth yet, but biotechnology is continuing to gain steam. The idea of treating aging as a disease to be cured seems almost too obvious, but it seems to remove some bureaucratic obstacles that have been holding science and medicine back. Covid-19 was probably, maybe, perhaps not a lab leak. But it could have been, because the technology to make something like it, or much worse, exists in labs right now. It could be made if it has not already, and it could be leaked accidentally or intentionally, if it has not been already. And like nuclear technology, it will proliferate. Compared to nuclear technology, I think it will proliferate much faster and be much easier to hide. I have trouble envisioning any solution to this that does not involve heavy-handed surveillance.

On the positive side, biotechnology may be able to feed us when there are a lot more of us. With cellular agriculture, we can theoretically make meat or just about any kind of plant or animal tissue, and then we can eat it. We may finally be on the verge of modifying plants so they can make more efficient use of the sun’s energy, which is both exciting and scary. With a combination of abundant cheap electricity (from solar energy), abundant cheap materials, and highly efficient lighting though, we might be able to grow all the food we need in high rises without needing frankenplants.

And finally, the idea of controlling the weather with windmills is pretty fascinating. If we figure this one out, we might be able to end damage from floods, droughts, and hurricanes. But obvious Bond villain Elon Musk will also be able to use this to hold the world hostage for ONE HUNDRED TRILLION DOLLARS. That doesn’t really matter though because he is probably already planning to crash an asteroid into us anyway.

Propaganda, Social Media, and Truth

Social media is being blamed for a lot of our social ills at the moment. When we hear “social media” discussed, it seems to mean first and foremost interactive sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. where anyone can post a short snippet of any information they want and make it available to anybody else on the platform. Youtube also seems to fit this mold to some extent, although Youtube is a mix of personal and professionally-produced content. Then, underlying all this are Google search and other algorithms or “search” engines which are searching both for content to show individuals and individuals to show content. There are bloggers using WordPress and a million other tools and sites trying to get their content out, usually not all that widely if my personal experience is any indication (to the 5 or 6 people worldwide who read this blog regularly?) Then there is the huge ecosystem of Amazon and all the other sites trying to sell us stuff. Then there is professional journalistic media and traditional publishing companies trying to have their say (and sell us stuff), and finally there is some sense of the broader internet underlying all this.

Beyond trying to sell us stuff, corporations and non-profit entities are trying to manipulate all these communication channels to get their messages into our heads. This is propaganda, with the main goal being to sell us stuff and a secondary goal being to create awareness and positive images of their brands so they can keep selling us stuff. Also so people won’t complain to politicians about whatever the corporations are doing and risk those politicians meddling in the system in ways that are averse to corporate profits. At the same time, these companies and special interest groups are paying off the politicians to support their interests behind the scenes. This works out well for them (the corporations, special interests and politicians).

Finally we have the U.S. government and governments around the world trying to influence public opinion, occasionally by providing accurate information, sometimes outright lies, and often something in between.

All this is competing for our “attention”. Personally, I strongly prefer having more information to less, and I do not want to see regulation aimed at reducing the amount of information available to me. I believe, perhaps naively, that I have some ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, fact from opinion, and objective/honest communication from dishonest attempts to influence me. Regulation to protect children might be an exception to this – if social media sites are facilitating bullying and leading to mental health problems and even suicides, that is worth dealing with.

“Great Power Competition”, the “International Order”, and the United Nations

A major world leader of our time died in 2022. Okay, two world leaders if you really want to count Queen Victoria, but I am talking about Mikhail Gorbachev. To me, he represents a moment when optimism and visionary leadership had a chance to flower to the benefit of our civilization. He had a vision of long-term peace and stability, with powerful nation-states ceding some of their power to some form of world government. The basic vision was that no nation-state, no matter how powerful, would be able to succeed through violent means if it was opposed by all other nation-states acting together. With the threat of catastrophic war mostly behind us, humanity could have focused on solving all the other thorny problems, from food to energy to pollution to inequality. This was a beautiful vision, but unfortunately its moment passed us by, and we are back to the old cynical idea of coalitions of “great powers” arrayed against each other.

With the threat of catastrophic violence hanging over us, we are not focused on solving those other problems. The United Nations was supposed to at least be the seed of that new order that would usher in long-term peace and prosperity for our species. To be sure, the United Nations has accomplished a lot when it comes to human rights, science, agriculture, refugees, and other areas. It has also been a place where all the not-so-great powers of the world can band together and make their voices somewhat heard. But the Security Council was supposed to be the One Ring to Rule Them All and make “great power competition” obsolete. This has failed utterly, with the Security Council considered all but irrelevant at this point. Not only is “great power competition” ascendant, we seem to be proud of ourselves for bringing it back. If there is a devil, he must truly love “great power competition”.

With the threat of catastrophic violence hanging over us, we have failed utterly to solve other existential problems such as food security, global warming, sea level rise, ever-growing concentration of wealth, and the specter of a Captain Trips extinction plague whether of natural or manmade origin.

Resilience. Despite taking a gut punch, at the end of 2022 it feels as though our planetary civilization weathered the storm of Covid-19 and has more or less rebounded to something like the trend it would have been on. This is the textbook definition of resilience, and something to feel good about. If we get some time in between gut punches, we at least have an opportunity to work on our other problems while also preparing for the next gut punch. If we don’t make progress, maybe we can at least reach a state of stagnation rather than a self-actuated collapse. Can a civilization be resilient and stagnant at the same time? Maybe this is where we find ourselves, at least in the near term.

Happy 2023!

December 2022 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The U.S. legalized political corruption problem is getting worse, not better. This was one of Project Censored’s most censored stories of 2022.

Most hopeful story: Space-based solar. This just might be the killer energy app, the last energy tech we need to come up with for awhile. Imagine what we could do with abundant, cheap, clean energy – reverse global warming, purify/desalinate as much water as we need, grow lots of food under lights in cities, power homes/businesses/factories with little or no pollution, get around in low-pollution cars/buses/trains, electrolyze as much hydrogen from water as we need for fuel cells to power aircraft and even spacecraft. Solve all these problems and we would eventually come up against other limits, of course, but this would be an enormous step forward. And space-based solar seems like much less of a fantasy than nuclear fusion or even widespread scaling up of new-generation fission designs.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: The Liver King, obviously. What is it about the Liver King I just can’t get enough of. Is it the abs? The huge pectoral muscles?

solar panels over parking lots in France

France is requiring solar panels over surface parking lots with 80 or more spaces. This makes sense for a lot of reasons. But not mentioned in the article is acting as a sort of tax on surface parking lots. I don’t know if it happens in France, but in the U.S. a land speculator can buy a property in the middle of a neighborhood, sit on it for years or decades waiting for a chance to flip it for a profit, and pave it over and make a few bucks on parking in the meantime. This makes neighborhood less walkable, hotter, and contributes to flooding and pollution. So I say make them give something back. Or they can use that land for something better (even a multi-story car garage if this is really needed). And in the meantime, you are producing energy from a renewable source that can even be used to charge the vehicles parked there.

retrofitting retiring coal plants with advanced nuclear reactors

I find this idea of retrofitting old coal plants with nuclear reactors appealing. We are told the new generation of nuclear reactors is safe, and that our fears of nuclear accidents are based on half-century-old obsolete designs. These fears have held back the entire industry for decades, and you can imagine an alternate world where intensive use of nuclear power for all those decades has staved off the climate crisis the world now finds itself in.

The risk of nuclear accidents is objectively much lower than the risk of climate disaster we face. And yet…I have to ask myself if I would want a nuclear reactor a few blocks from my house. There is in fact a very old fossil fuel (oil and gas in this case) power plant a few blocks from my house. There have been accidents both at that plant, at the very old (and now closed) oil refinery nearby, and with the trains that carry oil past our neighborhood. Then there is whatever the air pollution from the plant is doing to my family’s lungs and cancer risk. All these things tell me that rationally I should welcome a nuclear reactor a few blocks from my house. And yet…it is so hard to separate emotions and be purely rational. And I tend to think I am more coldly rational than most people in the neighborhood would likely be if this were proposed. So this would be a tough road. But our power plant is also in a very densely populated urban area, and there would probably be much more out-of-the-way places where it could be tried (and hopefully the handful of people who lived there would be treated fairly).

what is going on in the UK?

The energy and inflation situation sounds pretty bad in Europe and particularly in the UK. Now, these are definitely political opinion articles so I would take them with somewhat of a grain of salt. But if the facts and figures quoted here are even roughly correct (which I haven’t independently verified), if sounds like the UK is losing its middle class.

Let me back all that up with…well…the statistics coming out of Britain are mind-boggling, and I mean that. Consider just a few. Inflation’s projected to hit 18%. 18%. Meanwhile, in the rest of the rich world, it’s peaking — at least for now. I quoted you the one about 70% of households living in fuel poverty already, but consider it again. What would you say if 70% of people in your country had to choose between food and energy? But it hardly ends there. There are more food banks than McDonalds in Britain. Raw sewage is washing up on beaches. Entire villages are running out of water, and soon enough the country will be water poor, yet there’s no plan or agenda to fix any of this.

eand.co

HM Revenue & Customs, on the other hand, suggests that average earnings were £26,000 before tax and £23,500 after tax in 2019-20, but it forgets national insurance, which might reduce this by £2,000, and almost compulsory pension contributions that might deduct another £800 after tax relief, leaving £20,700 to really spend. What that means is that the average household requires two working adults to make it work. It also suggests that having average earnings in the UK means earning less than £15 an hour.

Can such a household now have a decent lifestyle on this level of income? Given that this household is very unlikely to be able to afford a mortgage, rents matter here – and average rents in the UK are now over £1,100 a month, or over £13,000 a year…

What is obvious in all this is that a person on the average income in the UK is already struggling to make ends meet. Frankly, every person and household in this situation is likely to be in financial difficulty. They will already have to make difficult choices. Anything that tips the balance against them now literally leaves them beyond their limits.

Independent

Some of this is certainly due to the pandemic, the Ukraine war, etc. But maybe food, energy, and water prices are also sounding warnings that our unsustainable treatment of the natural environment is finally having consequences. While the underlying trends of pollution, degradation, and resource overuse accumulate slowly and gradually, our society may be able to make small adjustments to adapt to them as long as conditions are relatively stable and predictable. But then random shocks happen to the system, and we are not able to recover back to the trend, and our quality of life can suddenly erode and never quite get back to where it was.

EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2022

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) has a new report out with projections through 2050. The graphs are worth staring at. Here are some takeaways for me.

  • Coal use has crashed from over 20% of energy consumption 10 years ago to around 10% now. The rise in renewable energy mirrors it, from less than 5% to nearly 20%. Natural gas also surged during this period to replace the decline in coal, from around 20 to 30+ percent. Oil just kind of bumps along in the 30-40% range. The projection in 2050 is something like oil 40%, natural gas 35%, renewables 20%, everything else less than 10%.
  • The carbon footprint of electric power generation a decade ago was greater than the transportation sector. It has declined significantly (I assume this reflects the substitution of natural gas and renewables for coal), and is projected to continue to decline. The carbon footprint of transportation and industry is projected to remain relatively flat.
  • The biggest gains in renewable energy are projected to come from solar. Solar is projected to grow regardless of changes in cost, whereas wind and other sources are shown as more sensitive to cost, meaning if cost is high their share stops growing. I assume this has a lot to do with the cost of solar being pretty low already.
  • They show solar energy and battery storage being used extensively to meet peak mid-day demand by 2050.
  • Somewhat disappointing and surprising to me, they show electric vehicles sales only slowly displacing a small portion of gasoline-powered (3%?) vehicle sales over the next 30 years. I hope they are wrong about this one.

I can imagine a past world where safe civilian nuclear technology had been used more widely over the last 50 years or so, and we are not in the climate mess we are in today. Maybe this is even a world where the proliferation of nuclear weapons is less prevalent, but I am not sure about that. This is not the world we live in.

I can imagine a near-future world where homes, businesses, industry, and vehicles are increasingly electrified, and electricity generation is increasingly shifted to renewables. I still think nuclear power might be able to play an important role in this world. But it does not seem like we are headed in the direction of this world, at least not quickly enough to avoid a major train wreck. I hope I am wrong.

February 2022 in Review

The horrible war in Ukraine is obviously the most frightening and depressing thing going on as of early March 2022, both in terms of human suffering and the risk of nuclear war. But I prefer to avoid commenting too much on fast moving current events. I’ll just say that if the world can get past the acute crisis and maybe start talking seriously about arms control again, that could be a possible silver lining. But it seems like we are months or years away from that point. So I’ll pick something else below.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Philadelphia police are making an arrest in less than 40% of murders in our city, not to mention other violent crimes. Convictions of those arrested are also down. Some of this could be Covid-era dysfunction. But there is a word for this: lawlessness.

Most hopeful story: “Green ammonia” offers some help on the energy and environmental front.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I found a 1992 Saturday Night Live skit about the Olympics more entertaining than the actual Olympics. May Phil Hartman rest in peace. I checked on Dana Carvey and he is 66 and doing okay.