Deep Thinkers Part 2
everyone is hooked on go deep, go big or go home
Where We’ve Been
In Part 1, I just riffed about burning stuff on the grandest of scales. The truth is the craziness of such an approach is not limited to just burning stuff in the case of energy. Just because a particular power generation method isn’t based on carbon, doesn’t make it reasonable. We have renewable approaches that in my eyes are on the flat of the hockey stick. Their use these days depends on the pursuit of crazy complexity and scale. I believe this sort of thing is doomed to disappoint us just like blowing up mountain tops, injecting toxic chemicals to bust shale, releasing some gas, and hopefully not contaminating the groundwater, or make seven mile deep holes in the Gulf of Mexico and hoping for the best. Complexity is hard for us humans to resist. We think we are up to it and confidently assume we’ve thought about what might go wrong. So we already covered coal, oil, and gas. What shall we harpoon next?
You Think That Was Big?
All of these approaches for the older technologies always seem to be bigger and bigger bets, larger facilities, all new designs, yadda, yadda, yadda. When the News Networks want to talk about the “energy of the future” they are always showing us reports of some absurd, super-complex fusion reactor and explaining that by replicating the Sun on Earth we should be able to make a lot of energy. What could go wrong? When I was in college in the early 80s, the optimists figured 10-20 years for fusion. Thus far, we’ve only dipped our toes in the water with fusion by building hydrogen bombs. Yikes.
I Almost Have the Nose Finished
My favorite example of this sort of thinking has nothing to do with energy. It is the Crazy Horse Memorial “under construction” in South Dakota near Mount Rushmore. Any reasonable estimate of the schedule or what it will eventually look like is just silly. Here’s the model and here is what it looks like. They’ve been at it since 1948. Stop pretending at a certain point that any of this is reasonable. The originator thought thirty years; he is buried at the monument.
Dam Windmills…
Even the two renewable power sources many of us are familiar with, big dams and mammoth windmills are now in the phase of bigger is better. I am always impressed when I see the big wind farms. The early blades were made of balsa wood and lots of epoxy like those little airplanes of my youth until recently. The trouble is Ecuador was the source of the wood and it has been largely tapped out.1 It seems ludicrous when you simply run out of your preferred tree and just keep pressing forward (the largest turbines have blades longer than football fields now).
Hydroelectric dams have followed the same playbook. Bigger and bigger with no limit too unreasonable. The remarkable Three Gorges Dam over the Yangtze River in China is amazing in its scope (it’s 20X the size of the Hoover Dam). Bigger MIGHT BE better but always presents us with unintended consequences. The scale of the project leads to absurd erosion and an estimated 40 million tons of sediment deposits yearly. The deposits mostly come to lie on the fault line where the dam is built. How ridiculous is that? What could go wrong? While not a doomsayer, I think it will not be a surprise if a major quake results in the future. I think that up to 300 million people live below the dam. You are going to need a sump pump.
Let’s Give Small A Try…
The solar industry differs from all of these. It resides in the world of microchips. They get smaller, faster, and easier to make in ever continuing volumes. The breakthroughs in solar are CONTINUOUS. If all goes well, the sun is good for another billion years. We only have to capture 1/10000 of the input sunlight at prevailing efficiency and that is the whole planet’s energy needs. The solar cells are going to get more efficient as they have over the last 75 years.
Today solar energy is only 3.4% of our total power generation in the US. That doesn’t sound like much. The reality however is the game is over. There is no way for the price of electricity from other sources to drop except for short-term price reductions. Solar will drop in price 70% or more over the next ten years as it has for decades. The game is over because it is ALREADY CHEAPER without subsidy and will drop in price relentlessly just like all silicon-based technologies have since the end of WW2.
In the last decade, the AVERAGE price of solar has dropped 70%. Since 1980, the drop has been 97%. I wish everyday items did the same as gasoline would be 3 cents a gallon. When it was trees versus coal, I am sure the saws got bigger and sharper. When it was coal versus oil and gas, I am sure the mines got deeper. Today, I am sure that old industries eke out their small improvements. Unfortunately for them and to our good fortune, they are a rowboat facing a tidal wave.
For those of you SCREAMING INTO YOUR iPads or Phones, yeah but what about when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow? First of all, there are better sources of information than Facebook and Cable News. You see there is this man named Elon Musk, who many of us are familiar with. Pretending the battery revolution is not already in full swing is ostrich-like. Please sit back and take a deep breath for I have saved the BEST STATISTIC for last. Unless we just stop figuring out how to make our phones faster (no end in sight), the transistor revolution will continue. Renewables and especially solar generation and battery management improve by riding this wave. By 2040 we will generate more electricity with renewables than fossil fuels. That is going to happen regardless of who we are crazy enough to elect as President and whatever they might bellow OR mumble. Something thoughtful and articulate would be a welcome change. You see, science doesn’t care about your feelings. I only look forward to them reporting “I never said that” in only ten short years from now. Even the best estimates for how 2022 will end predict that 90% of new energy added to world production will be renewable and 60% of that new production will be solar.
For those of you who wonder why I did not talk about nuclear fission as an option, it seems if it takes almost twenty years to build a plant, its irrelevance becomes apparent. Why is it sensible in a rapidly changing world to build something for 20 years and operate it for 60 years to amortize the investment? Do any of you have a 20-year-old television???
The Poll & Music
I wonder what my cousin voted for in the last poll? The wonder of ALL OF THIS is we are the first humans to ever get to see things change fast. My parents were born into the age of the phonograph and that’s the way it stayed for 40-50 years! My children were born amidst the age of compact discs and media. They’ve seen more change than the last 1,000 generations of humans. Buckle up.
The song seemed natural. Let me know if you agree with my choice of a tune.
What’s Next
My next post is titled “I Want That”. It is a very light-hearted look at gadgets that we welcome into our lives. They make sense when we get them but their reality can often make us question what the heck was I thinking? Please join me next time. The best of us in the kitchen have master knife skills. Many of the rest of us hope to be “saved by the gadget”. Which one are you?
https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2021/01/30/the-wind-power-boom-set-off-a-scramble-for-balsa-wood-in-ecuador
Your optimism is refreshing. What is your vision for power storage? What will replace the lithium battery? I have read about very ingenious ideas of power storage, but as with wind power and your other examples of bigger is better, they seem to be focused on the large size spectrum rather than hand-held devices. Enjoyable post. You didn't deviate from the topic as you sometimes do.