>>>Professor Vaclav Smil calls misinformation and biases<<<
I hard Smil speak down at the American Enterprise Institute once. The lecture topic was in general how long it took for new technologies to penetrate the market. He gave an example of Rudolph Diesel inventing his eponymous engine in 1885(?) but not eing adapted to direct drive in ships until say...1995...to realize ginormous propulsion fuel savings. The guy has a wit - referred to Al Gore as "your Nobelian" in a backhanded slap at Gore's assertion that we could wean ourselves off of coal completely by 2015. Also showed general disdain towards Americans for swallowing the nonsense lock, stock, and barrel. While I didn't enjoy being on the receiving end, I thought his comments justified. Now if the rest of America would spend its days reading the Boom Boom Room we wouldn't be in such desperate energy straits.
Smil lecture synopsis Feb '09. (Video of lecture doesn't seem to be available. AEI let me down on that one.)
Energy Transitions: The Time Factor
Date: Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Time: 1:00 PM -- 2:30 PM
Location: Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036
WASHINGTON, FEBRUARY 19, 2009--Despite recent claims by leaders--such as former vice president Al Gore--that a switch to 100 percent renewable energy generation in America within ten years is "achievable, affordable, and transformative," not one such shift in energy consumption over the course of human history was accomplished in a single decade. According to Vaclav Smil, a professor at the University of Manitoba who lectured at AEI on February 17, the global shift from biofuels like wood and straw to fossil fuels like oil and coal took over four hundred years after the discovery of the technology to reach an effective adoption "tipping point" in many countries.
According to Smil--and contrary to popular reductionist political and historical theory--there is never one single factor that can account for major changes in energy use. Instead, there are many causes whose exact nature and sequence can only be understood in retrospect. For instance, the singular French pursuit of nuclear power conversion after the World War II "sprang from something other than the desire to produce energy," Smil said. It was actually the knowledge that "to make France nuclear was to make France a world power," which stoked the political will necessary to adopt such a policy shift. Still, French ambition was dependent on access to American technical expertise, and even today, nuclear power is but one of many sources of energy in France.
Smil gave similar examples of external and internal factors affecting the evolution of energy use in Great Britain, Japan, Germany, and even the United States. Natural gas, abundant in North America, was originally burned off as a byproduct of oil drilling until the technology needed to capture and transport the fuel to market was developed. He pointed to countless subsequent innovations, such as liquefied natural gas, that are helping to "make out of natural gas what we made out of oil [one hundred years ago]." Which is to say: helping to expand gradually the applications of a versatile energy resource within the complex global economy.
So, given the history of energy transitions, is it likely that America can change its energy base in ten years? "The answer is flat no," Smil emphasized. "Ten times no." Even if the energy base in question simply consisted of electricity generation--not taking into account the way vehicles are powered--Smil dismissed the idea of converting to renewable energy sources within ten, twenty, or even thirty years as purely the stuff of political fantasy.
There are enormous load demands required to run a modern, globalized economy and power grid. Even the current system is not always up to the challenge. To replace the capacity of the current grid with one that relies heavily on inconsistent sources like wind and solar power would be virtually impossible. "Intermittence is something that cannot be wished away," Smil said. Wind power needed twenty-five years of government subsidies to reach the point at which it now contributes 1 percent of the total energy used in America annually. Based on historical calculations in dozens of countries, Smil has calculated that once an energy source reaches 5 percent of the electricity generation market, it will take an additional ten to fifteen years before it breaks the 10 percent mark--a far cry and many years from the fantastic projections of total transformation within a decade.
--JOSH EBOCH |
