I’ve been thinking…
The title of this post has been a running gag in our house for decades. It’s usually something my wife will say to introduce a discussion about something that will likely cause some upset in my life.
“I’ve been thinking about … getting the house painted”
“I’ve been thinking… that we need to sell the house”
You know how it is. While it always causes me some stress, I have found over the years that these things are always worth listening to, and often worth acting on.
So it is, that I’ve been thinking for years about writing a book about the energy transition. I’m not new to book publishing, having co-authored a well respected book on dynamic modeling and controls as well as a few monographs, but this would be my first foray into the popular press. I want to write a book that demystifies the energy transition and (hopefully) help dispel some of the myths and a lot of misinformation that has surrounded this hot button topic for the last 3 decades.
I’ve long been inspired by they work of David MacKay, late of the University of Cambridge. He was a physics professor who wrote a terrific primer to renewable energy called Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air. This book is a free download and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to gain a better understanding of how energy is used in society and how we can think about a transition away from fossil fuels. In his book, MacKay reduced the energy consumption in the UK to the share borne by each individual in the UK and adopted the unit of kilowatt-hour (kWh) to measure energy. From then on, all discussions of uses and sources of energy were reduced to the number of kWh/person/day. It was a very effective way of reducing big numbers (with which people often struggle to gain meaning) to something that could easily be imagined by most people. In that respect, he started by looking at how we live in modern society an built a ‘bottom up’ approach to energy development and substitutions to get away from fossil fuels.
More recently, I’ve been inspired by a course I just finished teaching at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. It was part of their “JanPlan” program where students take one intensive course for the month of may, usually delivered by folks other than the regular faculty. When I offered to teach a course about the energy transition (entitled “Can you get there from here?”) the offer was readily accepted.
After a bumpy start, I spent just under 4 weeks leading 10 of Colby College’s finest through a journey looking into the same topics that MacKay explored in his book, but instead of a bottom up approach, I looked at the problem from the top down. We started with the big picture of energy sources and sinks on the US, as summarized by the Energy Information Administration (EIA). From there each of the students developed their own version of this chart that was carbon neutral. More on that in future posts, but for now, I want to spend some time on the big picture.
There’s a lot to process here and I’ll be going into it in more depth in future posts, but the most salient point to me is that nearly 60% of the energy (mostly fossil fuels) that we mine, extract, refine, transport and, ultimately burn, is lost. Our system of generating and delivering electricity is only 41 % efficient. An that leads me to my first piece of mis-information to dispel.
Twice in the past month, I’ve heard individuals with connections to the natural gas industry talk about this significant energy loss but then ascribe nearly all of it to the grid itself, that is the wires and substations that make up the the transmission and distribution system that stretches across the country.
That is simply and unequivocally wrong. My all estimates, the transmission and distribution system (what most people perceive as “the grid”) loses somewhere between 4% and 8% of the electricity that is put on it. Most of that lost energy ends up as heat in the wires.
Here’s the important part: The lion’s share of losses are inherent in the process of burning fuels to make heat and harnessing that heat to turn a generator. It’s not that the machines (i.e. power plants) are poorly designed, they’re not. In fact they’re a marvel of modern engineering. It’s just one of those nasty facts of life that the universe has saddled us with. The details would require a mini-lecture on the 2nd law of thermodynamics and a pop quiz, but suffice to say that combustion is inherently inefficient. Full stop.
But the figure above only tells part of the story. The folks at Lawrence Livermore National Lab have been tracking the same data with more details on the non-electrical uses and losses, as shown below:
It’s not just electricity generation that throws away our hard-earned energy, it’s transportation (burning gasoline and diesel to make our wheels move) and heating our homes and businesses and much of what we do to manufacture the goods of modern living.
What I really like about this chart is that it calls out a HUGE distinction that is often lost in the discussion:
While we extract, refine and transport over 93 quadrillion BTU’s of energy (more on that in a later post) every year, we only need 32.1 of those in terms of the services that energy provides.
In future posts, I’ll be diving into these, and a lot of other details as we examine different approaches to our continuing energy transition.
