Advocates of Renewable Energy: Be Careful What We Promise
Sixty years ago, nuclear was hyped as a source of energy / electricity that would be “too cheap to meter.” The OPEC oil embargo dashed the western world's dream of bountiful low-cost energy but, when Brian Mulroney was elected a decade later, he terminated Canada's research into renewables because “the energy crisis was over.”
That funding cut led to my appointment as head of the Solar Energy Society of Canada, the only grassroots association left in the country to argue for alternative energies. My lobbying strategy was that, even if government perceived no economic need for renewables, diversification of energy supply is a good thing, and there was a growing environmental imperative to adopt sustainable sources of energy for the future health of our planet.
In 1989, Pons & Fleischmann announced their cold fusion system that would generate unlimited electricity. Again, the world’s eyes glazed over with the promise of more bargain-basement energy than we could ever use. The Toronto Star featured my editorial, “Is our world ready for cold fusion?”, wherein I argued that a promise of unlimited and/or cheap electricity would have the unintended consequence of accelerating depletion of our planet’s other resources, by untethering the major economic constraint on their exploitation.
Lay people can be excused for not understanding the complexities of supply vs demand, thermal vs electric, intermittent vs dispatchable, and many other energy interactions, and their confusion is understandable with the teeter-totter of potential from fracking and tarsands, contrasted with the growing evidence that carbon energy is bad for the planet. In light of this uncertainty, advocates of sustainability (including supporters of renewable energy) must argue for the most appropriate use of any energy in every application. Only after demand has been minimized (remember Amory Lovins' concept of 'negawatts'), should we argue for any supply of green power from solar & wind, green heat from geothermal & bioenergy, and green fuel from ethanol & biodiesel.
The growing calls for a transition to 100% renewables fail to explain that electricity constitutes only 20% of energy. Even if we invest zillions of dollars to electrify every end-use for a pure-sine-wave carrier, and if we ignore that 80% of secondary energy in buildings is for low-grade thermal applications of heating space and water, a promise of 100% renewable energy could open a Pandora’s Box.
Solar and wind are inexhaustible, but if technology vendors say they can produce more than enough capacity to meet our current energy wants, how long would it be until consumers demand more? Whether we want to help alleviate poverty elsewhere or simply boost our own affluent lifestyle, this response for more-more-more would be human nature. If you doubt my thesis, ask yourself if you would change anything in your diet if all types of food became unlimited and free? Or in your vacation plans if airplanes no longer paid for aviation fuel? My contention is that free energy would have a dramatic and profound impact on the way we do many things, and many of these impacts would be unnecessary and profoundly negative in the broader picture.
Low-carbon is better than high-carbon, but cheap or excess energy would increase demand to feed our consumerism, and the last innovation our globe needs is an faster and cheaper way to deplete our finite resources. Unless the plan is to relocate to another planet after we pillage this one, we must look beyond the immediate crisis of global warming (yes, it is a crisis and, yes, it is anthropogenic) and consider the wider implications of simply replacing one energy addiction with another.
As I warned a quarter-century ago, any promise that energy could be or should be unlimited and free (regardless of how clean it is) is not a goal which advocates of renewable energy should promulgate. I have always supported green, but covering the world with solar panels or windfarms, without a prerequisite demand for maximum conservation and efficiency, may not benefit humanity because it could eliminate one of the few controls on the exhaustion of our planet’s resources.
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