The (almost) All-Electric Future

Ian Welsh at Tilting at Windmills has an interesting post on the competing energy ideas favoured by the Democrats and Republicans, and an idea of his own:

The Electrical Economy, the idea, in the early stage, is to move as much of the economy as possible to electricity. While technologies like solar have lousy energy returns (4:1 for solar, for example), if you turn oil into solar panels you get multiplication of energy ratios - so with a 10/1 oil ration times a 4/1 solar ratio - you’ve got a 40X energy ratio. Electrical or hybrid cars, electrical/solar heal (natural gas is going to hit a wall as well), and so on. You can’t move everything off oil, but you can move a lot. Add small local efficient modern nuclear plants which are not designed to create nuclear usable fissiles (and also produce much less waste, are much safer, and have much better energy ratios) to provide baseline energy for times when solar is down, and you have the beginnings of a new energy economy, one which actually has a better energy ratio than the current one.

Get this right, and you can move to a new boom wave, and turn things around in a way, that combined with other real reform, could lead to a generational good economy. Get it wrong and you can turn the US, and the world, into an economic grey land - unlike the current past thirty years, where the majority in the US have essentially tread water, it will be a long generational decline in standards of living for the great majority of Americans.

Needless to say, I agree. In fact, I've agreed for about as long as I've had this blog thing. Where I disagree is the inclusion of nuclear. I no longer think that nuclear is the least safe energy option available to humans - that honor probably goes to coal - but it's certainly not the safest, not the cheapest, and not the best option that will be available to us in the future. That might sound like a copout, but the problem is that nuclear takes a long time to build. Far, far longer than wind or solar. With countries like Germany and Spain building gigawatts of wind and solar every year, nuclear simply can't keep up with that kind of rate (40% per year, albeit from a small base.) By the time we're ready to actually turn the reactor on, it will already be obsolete.

Meanwhile, the intermittency problem with renewable energy may soon be eliminated by adavanced energy storage - I've been excited in particular by ultracapacitors, because of their long lifespan. But there's any number of competing technologies. The point is that if we can power our cars even partially with electricity (which seems certain in the near term) then we can also run our homes off of electricity stored during the day - driving 60 miles (a not-uncommon commute) in an electric car would still consume more electricity than an average family uses in their home every day. If we can do one, we can definitely do the other.

The only thing left to do is crack cheap, high-efficiency solar production, and that looks almost certain to come around within a decade. The NREL is already talking about 65% efficiency from quantum dots. Mated to a cheap form of electrical storage, that would make even todays "zero-energy" homes obsolete - the new homes would be energy exporters. At the very least, a homeowner would be able to power all of their energy needs, from cooking and heating to driving.

Ian and I agree on the need to move everything possible off of petroleum - which to my mind means everything. What transport can't be replaced directly by electricity (tankers, trucks) will need to be replaced by biologically-derived fuels, if at all possible. But if we can replace cars, most trucking (more than 100km trips moved to rail) and aviation fuel with electricity, and carry the remainder with biofuels - remembering that agricultural biofuels are only one possible source of fuels - then I think we should be in good shape.

If we're really lucky, then maybe we can reverse the decades-long trend of declining per capita energy consumption that has correlated with stagnating standards of living in the west, combined with disastrous declines in the poorest parts of the world.