The Future of Energy (is much like the present)

Yesterday, Vaclav Smil, professor at University of Manitoba and prolific writer about energy, spoke at the Future of Energy Series here. His talk was titled "Transforming Energy Techniques," but he mainly discussed how energy techniques are not going to be changing anytime soon. He said it was a historical lecture, and those types of lectures are not given enough about energy, since in the media one usually just hears about new technologies all the time. (He also disliked using the word "technology"; "techniques" are what should be focused on). He was quite exciting and fun to watch. Here're notes:

• The three major "prime movers" on our planet today, the steam turbine, the car, and the electric motor, were all developed in the 1880s, and their basic technology has fundamentally not changed since then. We may have more efficient versions of them, but if the engineers who invented them saw them today, they'd be able to recognize the components. The only modern invention that's comparably important is the gas turbine from the 1930s.


• So, new technologies have not spread. Prime movers capture the market slowly, but stay there for a very long time.


• Same is true for sources of energy: oil only surpassed coal as the main source in the U.S. in 1964. In the 20th century the U.S. used as much coal as oil.


• Before coal, wood was the main source of energy, and for 1 billion people today it still is. The U.S. only switched from wood to coal in the 1880s, in China in the 1960s. Techniques become embedded in society and stay there.


• Once a technique is in place, infrastructure builds up around them. There's tons of investment already in refineries, mines, oil fields, gas lines, etc., that one can't just decide to switch to something else in 5 years, or even in 20 years. He mentioned huge circles of natural gas line pipes that run from Western Siberia, to France to Britain, through Spain back to the Mediterranean to Turkey and Bosnia. These lines would be useless if they didn't have something to pump through them. Change can happen, but it will happen on the order of generations.

• It takes a long time to get high performance. Two other historical examples: people only conquered famine in the 19th century; horses: a good harness only came around for them 1000 years ago, and only in the 19th century did people figure out how to feed them properly.


• Stats on world energy consumption: Subsaharan Africa uses ~5 gigajoules/year, India ~15, China 40, European countries 100-130, Japan 170, U.S. 340


• Energy in China: instead of competing with Japan, China wants to compete with the U.S. So instead of building bullet trains across the country, they put down 6-lane highways.
  
  In the 1980s, they experienced one of the largest housing booms in history. All the buildings though had concrete walls. Concrete is a terrible insulator of heat, and no one had fiberglass + wood, or triple windows.


• Asked if he thought there was any new technology that he thought could catch on, he emphasized that the major problem was scale. Wind turbines only produce 2-3 megawatts each, so the Chinese just plop down a 600 megawatt coal plant instead. The electric car hasn't passed that test, that of having millions of them run for a decade. The internal combustion engine has passed that test. Also he mentioned how if everyone started driving electric cars tomorrow, then we'd have huge drainage of the electrical networks at various intervals of the day as people recharged them, and where would that energy come from? So, he didn't really suggest any potential new energy source/technology.


• He mentioned that he optimized his house so it uses 1/12 of the energy of his neighbors, but this would not catch on in the developed world, because we are a culture of consumption. If we save money, we'll use it to take a plane to Las Vegas or buy a new car. 30% of the houses in the U.S. are custom built, and the average size of those houses are 5300 square feet. So we can't save energy through houses if we need 200 lights to light our homes. The U.S. has a "Texas mentality" and no one is going to opt for voluntary limits on consumption.

So overall, a kind of pessimistic but realistic view on energy. I guess those flying wind turbines won't be a viable solution yet.