Written by William F. Pickard   

Some years ago, shortly after dawn, I was strolling down an unpaved thoroughfare in Timbuktu, when I passed a beehive oven that had finished its morning bread bake and had its embers scattered in the dust to quench them. The baker had already raked up all the bigger scraps of charred wood; and a small girl was, with notable zeal, gathering up the pinhead sized scraps of charcoal that the rake had missed. It’s what you have to do when you live in the Sahel, where wood is precious and fossil fuel an upper class amenity.

It’s also a situation of scarcity that could oppress RSN’s younger readers when they reach their Golden Years. Experts like Richard Heinberg at the Post Carbon Institute and Gaetano Maggio at the Istituto di Tecnologie Avanzate per l’Energia and David Rutledge at Cal Tech all tell us that fossil fuels are on track to be close to exhausted by 2100, or sooner! Big Oil isn’t drilling in deep water because it’s the manly, adventurous thing to do but because there are so few untapped oil reservoirs on dry land. The shale-gas resource that fracking brought online in the United States is estimated to have so little gas that it could meet America’s present annual gas demand for only twenty years. Fossil fuels are running out. And somewhere down the line, a Big Crunch is waiting – because, no matter how hard you try, you can’t extract what isn’t there!

Leading us into this breach we have a President who last year was asked, in writing, “Many policymakers and scientists say energy security and sustainability are major problems facing the United States this century. What policies would you support to meet the demand for energy while ensuring an economically and environmentally sustainable future?” and who responded, in writing, “Since taking office, I have supported an all-of-the-above energy approach that will allow us to take control of our energy future, one where we safely and responsibly develop America’s many energy resources ...– including natural gas, wind, solar, oil, clean coal, and biofuels – ... I know the country that harnesses the power of clean, renewable energy will lead the global economy in the 21st century. ... My administration is promoting the safe, responsible development of America’s near 100-year supply of natural gas ...”. Unfortunately, the President sort of skirted the sustainability issue. “All-of-the-above” is not a recipe for a sustainable future because the fossil fuels are not sustainable. Although the President didn’t mention nuclear in his list, it turns out that he is at loggerheads with the Congress over permanent disposal of civilian nuclear wastes, and anyway nuclear is at best prospectively sustainable: that’s enough of a double-whammy to remove nuclear from any short list of sustainables. Finally, the anticipated century-long supply of natural gas, while boldly optimistic, counts heavily upon “presumed resources” turning into “proved reserves”: maybe they will, and maybe they won’t. What the Electorate needed was a Grand Bargain that set us on a step-by-step trajectory to a well-balanced budget in Fiscal 2017 – with, in the years following, a massive construction program for our Sustainable Energy Future. What it got was a demonstration of Olympics-class can-kicking.

To the detriment of his and our grandchildren, the President has yet to articulate a credibly detailed plan for smoothly steering the United States from The Age of Fossil Fuels to an Age of Sustainable Energy. Even so, we’d better jump-start something soon, because America has never yet switched fuels in less than fifty years. And there are plenty of unresolved issues to slow the rise of sustainables. To name just two: how does America get the renewable energy from where it’s collected to where the customers are, and how does it match those intrinsically intermittent sources to periodically varying demands?

The question of energy transport over thousands kilometers was solved for fossil fuels by railroads and pipelines. But windmills and solar farms yield electricity, the electricity grid was developed to deal primarily with local generation and distribution, and creating a robust long-distance transmission infrastructure could easily end up costing 10 billion a year for the rest of the century, give or take a factor of two.

Matching intermittent generation to varying consumer demand will require massive electricity storage, otherwise known as the Achilles’ Heel of Renewable Energy. It’s called that because no one has figured out how to do it on the cheap and at the levels needed. Nevertheless, it is easy to show that America would need at least a thousand energy storage facilities in the 50,000 megawatt-hour class and should count on allocating around 100 billion dollars a year, give or take a factor of two, until the end of the century.
To these staggering figures must also be added the cost of actually capturing the renewable energy from the sun and wind. That won’t be cheap, either!

Is it too much to ask that the President stop obsessing about the debt limit or the next fiscal cliff and focus instead on the welfare our future generations? It is obvious that both massive budget cutting, massive loophole closing, and massive spending reorientation will be needed. This endless bickering serves only to distract everyone from our utter lack of a credible energy program. The Electorate should demand better!


William F. Pickard, older'n dirt, is a savant and an expert on sustainability and massive electricity storage.
http://ese.wustl.edu/people/Pages/pickard.aspx