Hello, Jim.
It's been a while since we've had a sustained discussion on energy production of the types we had when you were contributing here on a regular basis. I note that your points are forewarning for the most part, and not necessarily prescriptive of a regimen needed to avert the calamities of which you write, although the implied intent behind your words shine through to that effect, nonetheless.
There's probably no other way to address fifty years out in a realistic fashion, due to the mutual dependence and the lag-lead relationships of yet unknown technological breakthroughs to those of today, or how we will ultimately be harnessing energy in the year 2054.
It's easy to liken this to how explorers must perceive the universe while embarking on unknown expeditions of the types that Marco Polo and the team of Lewis and Clark set out to accomplish during their respective eras. Or going to the farthest depths of the earth's oceans for the first time, for that matter. (Even there some have contemplated extracting energy from geothermal outlets, but that's another post.)
In my own field I note the futility and the mega-personnel-years that I'm sure many have chalked up as being "wasted" in just a short period of fifteen or twenty years, relatively speaking. Here, leading-edge networkologists during the Seventies were plotting the way to a nirvana-like switched services paradigms with milestones targeted at the year 1990 and beyond, only to have those plans go up in smoke when it became apparent that the Internet, using an altogether different model consisting of routing instead of switching, would subsume everything in its path. This is a realization that has only recently been more globally, if not fully, accepted, forty years after the blueprints of the earlier switched paradigms I just mentioned were laid out.
I trust that there are many parallels to this in the power generation game, and hopefully we're on the cusp of realizing what some of those are now, fostered further by an increasing number of revelations and discoveries over the next couple of decades.
When you note, "If we don't get a handle on power generation, we'll see people freezing to death, and starving to death - starting with the poorest...", I can only say that we're getting some good practice seeing this story unfold today in many parts of the globe, albeit for a plethora of other reasons.
So I'll conclude that your focus of impending calamity as you write about above is one on North America, Europe and parts of industrialized Asia where such manifestations have not already occurred to the scale you've predicted. Where the protected regions that I've listed above will continue to see necessity as the continuing catalyst behind finding new energy outlets - and very likely do so in what are now among the most unlikely of places over time - my view for the remainder of Earth's four and a half billion or so inhabitants as we count them today is not so optimistic under the present framework of how life supporting resources are being allocated and consumed.
Consistent with how most technologies ultimately find their way to unserverd areas, which is from the center out, I suppose it makes eminent sense to discuss how protected nations (that's us and our industry partners) will fare, first, before discussing how the redeeming technologies that we come up might be ported overseas to those unfit for trading with us presently. And by this I don't mean to imply that optimal solutions will resemble large, centralized power plants, because winning solution may very well lie at the edge, where power is consumed. But that is a different reference frame than what I'm writing about here.
Instead, even energy solutions that align with edge production (i.e., produced and consumed local to the user instead of through the use of thousands of kilometers of high-tension transmission facilities) will need to be developed and born of nations that can most afford the R&D to bring them to market, since the entry price to those are too high and out of reach of the most needy to develop, and ultimately consume, as well. One must be able to afford house wiring and light bulbs before they find a need for electricity to light their homes, in other words.
Much of the problem is not so much keyed to discussions on bituminous coal or fossil fuel related exploitation, or even atomic energy generation. It’s more a function at this time of how energy utilization at the atomic level of investigation is engineered into the fabric of our automated lives, and this that matters a great deal more than we ordinarily consider.
A little over a month ago I came across an article in the al Jazeera press that spoke of the obesity of Americans, and how it has reached epidemic proportions. While it was based in fact, I didn’t like the editorial intent behind it, so I hit the next button and went on. And this may also have an explanation in my also putting on more weight over the past year than I care to admit. No smilies here.
But the message that it delivered has relevance to this topic, even if only in an analgous way, as I see it, so at the risk of the obvious - and I absolutely do not want this discussion unraveling into a discussion on international or partisan politics, I’ll post it below, anyway:
“Obese Americans feed on diet of death”
english.aljazeera.net
One can easily see how the same general areas of considerations that were discussed in this article, albeit covering a different subject matter, are overlooked by the average well-to-do westerner standing on line at the supermarket, or how a manufacturer might overlook how its processes impact energy requirements in a more global setting than the shelf space occupied in a Wal-Mart outlet or an auto dealership, even when the manufacturer has gone to great lengths to assure that its own manufacturing-related power consumption is kept to a bare minimum. Manufacturers are likely to do cost-benefit and tradeoff analyses on power related issues a lot sooner than a consumer might, or ever will, for many cuts of product.
So yes, finding new outlets of energy is one thing. What we wind up doing with those new sources of energy when we find them? That’s something else.
FAC
frank@fttx.org |
