It's Memorial Day weekend, the official start of the U.S. summer driving season, when, in an annual rite, Americans get mad as hell about energy.
The seasonal one-two punch of a surge in road trips and, typically, a rise in gasoline prices invariably gets Americans griping about an energy system they see as stacked against them. But as the righteous indignation rises along with the pain at the pump, it's worth taking a deep breath and remembering that today's energy dilemma isn't beyond Americans' control. Plenty of places around the globe have made big changes in their energy systems -- when they have decided they have no other choice.
The U.S. itself has embarked on an energy shift, and now the question is how far the shift will go. President Obama today is scheduled to visit a wind-turbine-blade factory in Iowa, a stop where he no doubt will tout the goal of a more sweeping American energy revolution. But America's energy challenge is in important ways unique, and so an American energy revolution would require a particular kind of strategy -- one that's ruthlessly economically efficient.
On this holiday weekend of frequent fill-ups, it helps first to appreciate how much the U.S. energy system is changing already. There really are two energy markets -- one for electricity, the other for transportation fuels -- and both are being transformed by a jump in U.S. energy production. Technological breakthroughs in pulling hydrocarbons out of the ground -- breakthroughs known as hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," and horizontal drilling -- have unlocked vast supplies of previously tough-to-get American natural gas and oil. The gas is burned to make electricity, which powers everything from lights to toasters to beer fridges, a Memorial Day plus. The oil is burned to move planes, trains and automobiles. Thanks to all this new supply, Wall Street analysts and Washington politicians alike are talking about the possibility of American energy independence.
That claim may be a bit too cute, because the U.S. still imports about 45% of the petroleum it consumes. And even energy independence wouldn't be an energy panacea, because America still would have to reckon with the environmental downsides of that domestic production: potential water contamination from natural-gas drilling, air pollution from power plants' smokestacks and cars' and trucks' tailpipes, and greenhouse-gas emissions from the burning of all kinds of fossil fuels.
That raises the question of the prospects for an even bigger U.S. energy revolution. Most green boosters want a world radically different from today's in two ways. It would be more energy-efficient, with buildings, machines and vehicles that require less energy of any sort. And its energy would come from solar panels, wind turbines and other forms of renewable energy, which, the boosters hope, would replace fossil fuels.
In this vision, renewable energy wouldn't replace just the coal and natural gas that today generates the bulk of the nation's electricity. It also would replace the petroleum that powers cars and trucks. Vehicles would run on liquid fuels derived from algae and other crops and on electricity generated from the wind and sun.
How plausible is this vision? No one knows, because the answer depends on how technologies play out. And experts' predictions are all over the map.
The map, though, is highly instructive about another, crucial, aspect of energy revolutions: what makes them happen. Around the world, the places that have achieved major energy shifts haven't done so because of environmental altruism or even, fundamentally, because of technological luck. They've done so because they've been hit with shocks to their fossil-fuel-based economies so jarring that they've concluded they needed to change in a big way. Crises, in other words, count.
Following the 1970s oil shocks, France shifted its electricity production largely from oil to nuclear power; Denmark improved its energy efficiency and then boosted development of wind power; and Brazil became a world leader in fueling a sizable number of its cars with ethanol. After the 1986 Chernobyl accident, which generated widespread fear in Germany about nuclear power, Germany began rolling out some of the world's most generous subsidies to for the solar industry. Today China, faced with a surging population and with urban air pollution often so thick you can taste it, is scrambling to diversify its energy mix.
The U.S. today doesn't face those acute types of energy shocks. Its energy demand is widely projected to remain essentially flat; much of its most severe air pollution has been brought under control; and its domestic oil-and-gas production is on the rise.
What's so hard about the U.S. energy situation is that the drivers for a major shift are so soft: concerns about climate change, about continued reliance on Mideast oil, about losing out to China and other developing economies in a global race to corner a new technology market. As I argue in an essay in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, "Tough Love for Renewable Energy," the softness of those drivers means that renewable-energy technologies, and the generous U.S. subsidies that have supported them in recent years, will need to get much more economically efficient if the technologies are to have a real chance of scaling up. The essay outlines a more-efficient approach.
This holiday weekend, many Americans will feel what seems a powerful pain at the pump. But an American energy revolution that shifted meaningfully away from fossil fuels would require something more than episodic financial pain. It would require ongoing economic smarts.
Jeffrey Ball is scholar-in-residence at Stanford University's Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance. Before coming to Stanford last fall, he spent 14 years as a reporter, columnist and editor at The Wall Street Journal, writing for much of that time about energy and the environment and serving most recently as The Journal's environment editor. Ball also wrote the essay "Tough Love for Renewable Energy" in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs.
Follow Jeffrey Ball on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jeff_ball
Dave Murphy: Obama Campaign Stop at Factory Farm Propaganda Site, Billed as 'Grassroots Event'
U.S. smart grid to cost billions, save trillions | Reuters
Renewable Energy Production Rises in the US
Citing lower costs, Mich. utility slashes renewable energy surcharge | LaurenAWEA
Costly Cleanup Of Nuclear Waste / Cold War's legacy will take at least $230 billion to erase - SFGate
Colorado to Achieve 30% Renewables Eight Years Early | CleanTechies Blog - CleanTechies.com
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html
Nukes get 500M$per reactor per breaks and fossils even more including oil wars, They have for 50 and 100 years, but you think it's time for the 1% of our breaks that go to solar wind and waste should be cut back?
wow.
Rooftop pv solar is already cheaper than nukes. offshore wind and waste bio fuels are half that, on par with oil. solar will beat coal and gas within a few years. But only if we stop giving the fossil and nukes companies billion of dollars in breaks per year! And let's plow it into green energy.
Your analysis left out the biggest fact in all the new energy sources in the last 100 years: breaks from the governments.
Fossil-fuel subsidies are the real job killers | Grist
Nuclear power subsidies
Not true. Scotland for example has been moving toward becoming totally dependent on renewables since 2000, and will be within the next 8 years. This as policy, and not from a headless nudging evolution. Note their department of energy has been renamed the "department of Energy and Climate Change." Spain was on the same track with underground molten salt vats heated by solar power until recently when government administered austerity measures and the oil lobby combined to siphon off investment. Yes these countries have natural advantages, it's very windy most of the time in Scotland and Spain has over 300 days of sunshine a year, but the choice to head towards 100% renewables is sound long term policy.
Marine energy in Scotland: A rising tide? | The Economist
Wind Power In Scotland: A Village Makes It | Earthtechling
Reality, reality. Thou art a fickle wench. Wouldst that humanity, could have its ways with thee.
"when they have decided they have no other choice."
Needs must when the driver pays.
"the question is how far the shift will go."
How long is a loop of recycled string?
"fracking," and horizontal drilling -- have unlocked vast supplies"
Err… Recheck the fuel gauge. Production drops off a cliff, as soon as a narrow fracked layer exhausts.
"other forms of renewable energy"
As yet undreamed of, by current philosophies.
"How plausible is this vision?"
Slightly more plausible than putting a man on the Moon. Plus a lot less lunatic.
"experts' predictions"
like: It’ll never fly. Wright?
"What's so hard about the U.S. energy situation is that"
gas price signs don’t display the military-might-projection component.
What would happen to people’s perceptions, if they did?
"Tough Love for Renewable Energy,"
Or watch that lovechild emigrate, to seek a better future in China?
"It would require ongoing economic smarts."
If a “mature” economy is to be rejuvenated. Rather than retired to a condo in the boon-docks.
U.S. oil production is on the rise entirely because of shale oil, it's the same situation with natural gas production.
In 2035, to meet U.S. natural gas demand, shale gas production will have to quadruple.
In 2035, to replace depleted oil fields, shale oil production will have to triple.
In 2035, in order to produce as much oil as in 1970 (10 million barrels per day), shale oil production will have to quintuple.
and fracking has been around since 1949 - we are just better at it today and it does not pollute ground water...
Scientific Study Links Flammable Drinking Water to Fracking - ProPublica
AllGov - News - Fracking Suspected in Rash of Earthquakes in Unlikely Places
EPA Sees Risks to Water, Workers in New York Fracking Rules | NationofChange
Toxic Chemicals Used In Fracking
Industry Insiders Call Shale Gas a Ponzi Scheme, Invoke Enron — NYT Report - Erica Gies - Green, Like Money - Forbes
I see little chance of unilateral US action that disadvantages the country over already fierce competition from India, China and Brazil. I do believe that both the solution and the unknown are technology leaps that actually deliver more economical and perhaps "greener" solutions.
Things like modern health care. So, if we get rid of health care and similar luxuries we can achieve that 50% per capita energy cut you advocate.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."
Yep, just look at how the American public failed to understand the compound interest formula for home loans just a few years ago...
:-)
I see it, you don't have to convince me of it, but the day-to-day of it just isn't that dramatic in the vast majority of the US.
We be loving the fossil for awhile yet, for good or ill.
generation will probably fall also.The problem with renewable fuels is the price of fossil is falling fast.
The USA has more Oil than all of the rest of the world combined
with the right leadership we can quickly get back to $1.50/gal gas
and economic prosperity
drill baby drill is right!
10's of thousands of high paying jobs drilling and refining the oil
and we can pay off our national debt selling our excess oil
but we need the right leader
and Obama is no leader
The chemical reaction of intense heat, pressure & elements under ground is perpetually creating new oil
http://www.viewzone.com/abioticoilx.html
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/3952