Written by William F. Pickard   

A permanent scarcity of fossil fuel to power the Global Economy seems a sure bet at some point in the latter half of THIS century!

Key portions of the technology needed to switch America to 100% renewable energy exist more in concept than in fact!

The posts on RSN are already pretty damned depressing: whistle blowers being pilloried, nations failing, unemployment rife, environment degrading, and the list goes on. But so far you have been spared most worry about those two blockbuster catastrophes just named above. This happy state shall not long endure!

First, all of the fossil fuel which mankind can ever access is already in place. And no fossil fuel company is claiming otherwise. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. And the gorilla-sized questions are “When will it be gone?” and “What do we do then?”

In advance, no one knows (or can know) when it will ALL be gone. But Professor David Rutledge of Cal Tech thinks that sometime in the latter half of this century it will be 90% gone. And, since Obama took office, at least six other major studies have said much the same thing. Some time over the next few decades we are going to have to come up with different sources for our energy. Only it had better be sooner rather later because mankind has never done this sort of thing before and we can’t afford another engineering fiasco like our missile defense system -- decades in the making and little reliable to show for it. When demand has far outstripped supply is not the correct time to figure out what to do next, because our society can not be counted on to run reliably without fuel. We desperately need to assure our supply of renewable energy right now, before our supply of the fossil stuff crashes. FINDING THE FUEL is in fact the grandest challenge likely to confront our global civilization this century! Simply repeating a mantra will NOT suffice, not even if it is one as potent as “inexhaustible solar energy”, or “all of the above”, or “Generation IV reactors”.

Right now America’s average draw of primary power hovers around 3 terawatts (3 billion kilowatts). A typical modern nuclear generating station for electricity puts out about 1 million kilowatts. So we would need to construct around 3000 such stations. If (fat chance) we brought one new station a week on line, it would still take us 60 years to get to 3000; and by then the first ones we cranked out would be about to expire from old age, so we’d have to start over again at once. That’s a lot of nuclear plants to site when you have to consider NIMBY (not in my back yard) and BANANA (build almost nothing anywhere near anything). That’s also a lot of civilian nuclear waste to dispose of permanently, especially when you consider that our government has been dropping the ball on waste disposal for the last sixty years and that Obama seems determined to override Congress and scuttle the Yucca Mountain disposal facility. So forget about nuclear and trust to sun and wind, especially sun.

If instead one chooses to go solar, it is easy to show that more than enough total yearly energy can be obtained from a square 400×400 km on a side. There is enough empty land in the American Southwest to accomplish this The big difficulty is that there is no sunshine at night, even though the public wants energy on tap 24 hours a day. This is the other big challenge we must resolve. So ...

Second, the technology needed to undergird a renewable society has long been fantasized, imagined, and visualized. But there are gaps in the technology that actually does exist. And the paramount one is lack of massive storage for energy (especially electrical), which gap is popularly known as the “Achilles’ heel of renewable energy”. It turns out that, for each 500 megawatts of average demand for primary power, it would be prudent to have a store of readily accessed energy on the order of 50,000 megawatthours. This is storage on a phenomenal level, not necessarily impossible but sitting at (or perhaps a little beyond) the present day limits of technology. And we could need as many as 6000 such stores!

Building all of that renewable generation (plus the infrastructure to support it) could well swallow on the order of $500 billion a year (give or take a factor of two) from now until 2060 (or beyond). For comparison, in Fiscal 2012 the Federal Government’s “Outlays By Budget Function” report listed $716 billion for Defense, $779 billion for Social Security, and $23 billion for Energy. Even though $500 billion a year is a lot, it’s not out of the question; and public works at that level would be one heck of an economic stimulus. But because America’s approaching energy calamity is still a few decades off, it is unreasonable to expect the free market to make the needed investments. The near term rate of return is just too low. That leaves the Federal Government! And right now it is ponying up maybe 5% of what is required to achieve energy security before our dowry of fossil energy is gone.

Why is there no mention of our energy future on the nightly news? Where is the outcry one would expect from the Legislative and Executive branches of our government? It now has been more than 35 years since President Carter made his famous speech in which he said that tackling our energy problems should be “the moral equivalent of war”. And for most of those years, the issue has been largely ignored. Jimmy Carter, where are you now that we need you?





William F. Pickard, older ‘n’ dirt, is a retiree from Washington University in Saint Louis and specializes in energy matters. He’s pretty much clueless as to how, practically speaking, these impending crises might be surmounted; but at least he has had the good grace not to stand for public office.