energy

In 1½ hours, the sun irra­di­ates onto the land masses of planet earth all the energy required by all of humanity in a whole year. Some say it’s just one minute, some say it’s 30mins. This one gives trace­able cal­cu­la­tions and arrives at 90 min­utes. In any case the earth is not in danger of run­ning out of “steam” by a big margin. Fun­da­men­tally, there is no energy scarcity or energy crisis.

Pho­to­syn­thesis is the main method used by nature to har­ness energy for split­ting CO₂ and Water, use the Hydrogen and Carbon to build up bio­mass, releasing the O₂ to the atmos­phere. Plants are “only” 3-6% effi­cient as they do this. Our cur­rent mono-crys­talline PV panels are up to 18% effi­cient. But plants obvi­ously serve other very impor­tant func­tions of air fil­tra­tion, cli­mate reg­u­la­tion, ero­sion pre­ven­tion, shade, beauty and more!

In any account, energy scarcity is man-made, and dig­ging fuel up from under­ground or smashing atoms should be totally unnec­es­sary. Why would we dig up the ground or drill holes into the ground or the ocean beds and take com­bustible stuff out and split atoms and try hard to fuse them and explore all sorts of crazy ideas for alter­na­tive energy? If we really need more than what the sun gives us, there’s wind and water as well that nat­u­rally moves around and we can slow down this move­ment in places and take some kinetic energy from it for our mun­dane pur­poses. Or har­vest and burn up some bio­mass if we have to. So where is the shortage?

We use far too much energy to pro­duce all the stuff that drive our con­sumerist society and our demands for heated swim­ming pools and tumble dryers. So demand reduc­tion is clearly the first most log­ical step – energy effi­ciency and “waste” reduction.

“Renew­able” types of energy:

• every­thing directly fed by solar energy - solar PV, solar col­lec­tors, solar-thermal power
• every­thing tap­ping into kinetic energy brought about by the sun dri­ving pho­to­syn­thesis and the hydro­log­ical cycle: wind, most hydro, biomass
• every­thing driven by the moon: tidal power, and maybe some rather remote wave or ocean cur­rent power that could also be par­tially driven by the tides rather than by hydrology.
• geot­hermal power. (Note that ground source heat pumps don’t use geot­hermal power but work on the effect that the ground is a heat sink and buffer, i.e. stays warmer in winter than the air above, and also cooler in summer com­pared with the atmos­phere. This is why useful heat is extractable from the ground in winter, and some instal­la­tions even drive the
  heat pump in reverse in the summer to
  cool the building while replen­ishing the heat source.)

Nuclear power is deemed a safe and low-carbon gen­er­a­tion method by some, by others a bridge tech­nology toward a fully renew­able energy future. Ura­nium is mined, itself with severe con­se­quences on local pop­u­la­tions, and not being replen­ished, so it is not renew­able. The elu­sive fusion, if even­tu­ally working, would also not be “renew­able”, though there is no fore­see­able shortage of hydrogen.

There are now some inno­v­a­tive nuclear (fis­sion) reactor types that can use Ura­nium-238, that’s the iso­tope that makes up 99% of ura­nium as mined, and still makes up 99% of what we today con­sider nuclear “waste” (or “depleted ura­nium”, i.e. depleted of the U-235 iso­tope that’s used by today’s reactor types). 

There are risks with nuclear power. Now risk is always a ques­tion of who is willing to take, or deny, which sorts of it, for how long, and for what price. The new German nuclear phase-out is a good example. After the Fukushima Dai­ichi dis­aster in 2011, some studies were re-eval­u­ated showing that most German nuclear plants will not with­stand an earth­quake of mag­ni­tude 7 (Richter scale). Tsunamis are not a fre­quent site on Ger­many’s shores, and it is also not in an earth­quake danger zone, but earth­quakes have hap­pened over the last cen­turies. Even if they sta­tis­ti­cally only occur once in 1,000 years, it is a risk, because it is impos­sible to pre­dict exactly when the next one will happen. This was one of the major rea­sons that led to the deci­sion to abandon nuclear power in Ger­many. (There also have been some embar­rassing inci­dents e.g. in the Krümmel plant near Ham­burg, where a trans­former short-cir­cuit caused a fire in 2007, big fuss, trans­former repaired, every­thing checked, finally plant re-started in 2009 and lo and behold, another short-cir­cuit causing another fire! Since then the plant has been shut down and will now not be re-started.)

If a risk is small, but the poten­tial con­se­quences cat­a­strophic, risk assess­ments would gen­er­ally con­sider it high pri­ority. The UK how­ever would have none of this German para­noia. A grad­uate at the London School of Eco­nomics called John Moore even called it a “mis­guided and poten­tially dam­aging inter­pre­ta­tion of the pre­cau­tionary principle”.

The German gov­ern­ment was not willing to take the risk. And why would they? Renew­ables are now so com­pet­i­tive in Ger­many that the hugely effec­tive guar­an­teed feed-in tariff law (Erneuer­bare-Energien-Gesetz) is being phased out.

Over 1,000 new coal-fired power plants were in plan­ning stage world­wide, and China is on average com­mis­sioning one every 10 days. China is also rapidly expanding renew­able energy.

The Inter­na­tional Energy Agency pre­dicts energy demand to go up two thirds (66%) by 2020. Whether that’s real­istic is another ques­tion. Peak oil is immi­nent or has already occurred, only with a couple of decades of hind­sight will we be able to tell. Maybe we’ll start fracking on a large scale and actu­ally trigger an earth­quake that gives us the next nuclear dis­aster. Why can’t we stop before that and look up to our cen­tral star sup­plying us with aplenty, about 3,000 times of what we need, and start focussing much more on har­nessing that, starting with what we have avail­able locally instead of making our­selves depen­dent on long dis­tri­b­u­tions chains, multi-national agree­ments and global markets?