The Sun’s the Limit!

Welcome back!

Today we’ll scratch the surface of energy econometrics as it applies to solar energy production. When discussing the energy transition from fossil fuels to carbon-free renewables, we must analyze the theoretical potential, as well as technical and economic feasibility of developing and “scaling up” these technologies to make them suitable for the world’s largest, energy-consuming economies.

I highly recommend reading this comprehensive module on the renewable energy transition from Boston University: https://www.bu.edu/eci/files/2019/06/RenewableEnergyEcon.pdf.

            Theoretical potential refers to how much energy is available hypothetically. For example, the sun generates a whopping 3.9x10^26 watts of power, which dwarfs the world’s 16x10^12 watts (aka 16 terawatts) of power consumption (https://www.pveducation.org/pvcdrom/properties-of-sunlight/the-sun). Put another way, those watts, if converted to mass, equate to 4,000,000 tons of energy every second, and the world currently only captures and converts 44 pounds of sun energy into usable energy per day (https://www.gocamsolar.com/blog/how-much-energy-does-sun-generate). Theoretically, the sun provides the world with enough energy for a year every single day.

Unfortunately, only a small amount of this energy can actually be captured and converted. Up to 50% of the sun’s energy is scattered by dust and clouds in the atmosphere, and doesn’t reach Earth’s surface. Accounting for absorption and scattering, 1.08x10^8 GW (1.08x10^17 watts) of power reach Earth’s surface, which is still 7,000-8,000 times the amount of annual global energy consumption (https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/solar-energy).

Solar potential is further hindered due to variable weather conditions, the limited number of solar panels we can actually build, and the limited ways in which we can store solar energy (batteries, ponds) for use at night. The southwestern United States, northern Africa, and the Middle East are especially good locations for solar plants because they are arid and cloud-free for most of the year, but this limited geographic extent isn’t large enough to power the planet. We are also materially limited and don’t have enough rare earth elements, minerals, and metals to build enough panels to rely 100% on solar power. The technical feasibility is therefore greatly reduced by our geography and material needs.

Now, we luckily don't have to reach 100% of our solar potential. We can have a mixed-source electrical grid using wind, tidal, and geothermal energy. We can also maximize our hydropower by adding generators at existing dams without building new dams. There also remains the solution of recycling our electronic waste and recovering more minerals and metals from our thrown-out phones, computers, and machines. Recycling our e-waste would help make our economy more of a closed-loop system, where we no longer need to mine fresh materials for solar panels, but can strip them from pre-existing consumer goods. This would reduce pollution and leaching from e-waste as well as reduce energy consumption.

Then there’s the economic feasibility of solar power. Frankly, we have more than enough money to make renewable energy cheaper and more profitable. Gas is literally publicly funded. Global fossil fuel subsidies were $4.7 trillion in 2015 and $5.3 trillion in 2017 (https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/climate-change/energy-subsidies). I cannot overemphasize how MASSIVE a trillion is. “A stack of one billion dollar bills would be 67.9 miles high. A trillion dollar bills would reach 67,866 miles into space,” (https://exhibitcitynews.com/how-big-is-one-trillion-dollars/). If we took some of those trillions of dollars away from fossil fuel companies and gave them to renewable companies, we could easily make renewables the cheaper, more attractive consumer option.

As a closing thought, a long-time commenter mentioned that solar panels are currently being manufactured in the Uyghur Muslim concentration camps in the Xinjiang province of China. I do not condone these human rights violations and have, for the entirety of my professional life, insisted that America responsibly source our energy technologies and consumer goods while recycling our waste. Manufacturing our own panels would bring many jobs back to our shores. If you’d like to read about how America, the country that first developed solar technology, lost the solar advantage and allowed development and manufacturing to move overseas, I recommend reading this article: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/06/why-the-us-doesnt-really-make-solar-panels-anymore-industrial-policy/619213/.

We have the technology to rebuild our grid.

We have the money.

Now, we need action. We need vision and bravery.

Energy: A Crash Course. Generation and Consumption.

Welcome back, readers! It’s time for a crash course in energy.

For review: 1 kilowatt (kW) = 1,000 watts. 1 megawatt = 1,000,000 (1 million) watts. 1 gigawatt = 1,000,000,000 (1 billion) watts.

Energy is the ability to do work. Humans can perform work, and we do so by metabolizing food for kinetic energy. But we are quite limited in our output, producing only 100 watts at rest, 300-400 watts over sustained periods of time, and up to 2 kW in short bursts, like sprinting (http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph240/labonta1/). For most of our existence on this planet, we were hunter gatherers, chasing game and foraging. When we adopted an agrarian lifestyle roughly 10,000 years ago, we domesticated animals to assist us in performing labor for the purposes of planting and harvesting crops. Draught animals like horses and oxen can sustain 600-1,000 watts of power on average, also with bursts up to 2 kW (https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/draught-animal). An improvement upon the limits of human labor, to be sure, but a small improvement.

Then we invented windmills about 3,700 years ago, mostly for crushing and milling grain and pumping water (www.historyofwindmills.com). Capturing wind is ancient technology. Humans have literally sailed the world for millennia, and traditional windmills generated about 14kW of usable power, which allowed for more food production and spurred population growth (https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/how-does-the-power-output-of-a-traditional-windmill-compare-to-a-modern-wind-turbine/amp/).

The invention of the (coal-powered) steam engine marked the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and completely altered the way humans lived and worked. Steam had been used for various purposes in previous centuries, but became a commercially successful technology capable of performing mechanical work in 1712 due to developments made by Thomas Newcomen, and later, improvements made by James Watt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_steam_engine). Suddenly we had engines cranking out up to 1800 kW of power! Steamships appeared, then steam locomotives crisscrossed industrialized nations, and steam-powered machinery became commonplace in factories. Our consumption of coal fueled our growth, and our growth fueled our consumption.

Most electricity in the U.S. (and the world) is produced by turbine generators which use a fluid (air, steam, water, combustion gases) to move a series of blades mounted on a motor shaft (https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/how-electricity-is-generated.php). The generator then converts the kinetic energy of the moving blades into electrical energy. Power plants burn coal or natural gas to generate steam to turn the turbine. Nuclear power plants generate heat and steam through the process of fission (atoms splitting apart), which then turns the turbine. Hydroelectric dams turn the turbine with the power of flowing water. Modern day wind turbines use the energy from air currents. It’s the same design recycled again and again, powered by different fluids and fuels.

Now let’s talk numbers. There are multiple units for energy (watts, joules) but we tend to standardize to “watt-hours”. A kilowatt hour (kWh) is 1 hour of electricity usage at a rate of 1 kW, but this can be scaled up to be megawatt hours or gigawatt hours (https://ourworldindata.org/scale-for-electricity).

A standard coal power plant is about 500 mW in size and can crank out 3.5 billion kWh per year, which is utterly massive in scale and demonstrates just how dependent we are upon fossil fuels for our electricity (https://www.mcginley.co.uk/news/how-much-of-each-energy-source-does-it-take-to-power-your-home/bp254/). In 2020, about 4,007 billion kilowatthours (kWh) (or about 4.01 trillion kWh) of electricity were generated at utility-scale electricity generation facilities in the United States (https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3) and more than half of this total resulted from the combustion of fossil fuels. When one examines the staggering amount of energy we consume, it should be no surprise that atmospheric CO2 has risen, and will continue to rise, exponentially unless we choose to decarbonize our electrical grid.

I won’t bore you with more mind-boggling numbers, but I will leave you with this parting thought: we CANNOT continue to exploit, pollute, pillage and plunder this planet. We will perish if we do. And I don’t mean individuals will perish. I mean the human species and upwards of 90% of life on Earth will go extinct.

We always have a choice. We live in the most technologically advanced age of our existence. We must reduce consumption and we must harvest our energy from renewable sources. We can always choose to be part of the solution.

Welcome to Callie’s Climate Corner! The Civilian Climate Corps May Offer Us Hope for the Future.

Happy New Year, dear readers! And welcome to Callie's Climate Corner!

I just love alliteration. But my favorite "CCC" will forever be the Civilian Conservation Corps for constructing beautiful, time-tested infrastructure across the nation. During its nine-year existence (1933-1941), the CCC employed about 3 million young men. They built roads, bridges, campgrounds, dams, and strung thousands of miles of telephone lines. We still use the infrastructure they built to this very day! These men also fought wildfires, reseeded grazelands to stabilize topsoil, constructed trails and shelters, and planted upwards of three billion trees (https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/civilian-conservation-corps). A quick reminder: trees are a major carbon sink, drawing CO2 down from the atmosphere and storing it in their biomass. Forests are dubbed the “lungs of the world” and we can’t have a healthy planet without healthy forests.

Looking to the past provides us with potential answers to the most pressing issues we collectively face today. FDR’s CCC existed during two separate crises: the Great Depression and World War II. Today we face the dual challenge of COVID and climate change. It’s an ideal time to establish a modern-day Civilian Climate Corps and put our young people to work. The Climate Corps would be managed by the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture, and its project initiatives would resemble those of the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, and Corps Network. Climate Corps members would continue building and maintaining trails and structures, as well as combat invasive species, remediate wetlands, replant trees (where appropriate), and reduce the fuel loads in overgrown forests prone to wildfire.

Now, ideally, this conservation work would be completed in tandem with a complete overhaul of our expired, failing, fossil fuel- and nuclear-powered electrical grid. And rebuilding our grid would require the work of millions of contractors and manufacturers. Although we will always need to consume some fossil fuels for our transportation and manufacturing sectors, it is quite possible for America to invest in a nationwide electrical grid powered by wind, solar, tidal, and geothermal power.

It’s safe to say that we as a nation have maxed out our hydroelectrical potential , considering we’ve built an estimated 84,000 dams, impounding approximately 17% of the nation’s rivers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dams_and_reservoirs_in_the_United_States). There are many good reasons to remove some of these dams: many are in disrepair and pose safety hazards, while others have choked out fish populations. But realistically, hydro power will need to remain a sizable piece of the puzzle if we are to succeed in our decarbonization efforts. We must maintain and repair the roughly 2,400 dams that produce hydroelectricity, and the fate of other dams will need to be decided on a case-by-case basis.

Now, to this day our potential renewable energy sources remain largely untapped. Wind and solar power have grown cheaper over time, and there is plenty more energy to be harvested from the sun, wind, and the very earth itself than we are currently using. The American southwest is an ideal location for solar fields. The Midwest is well suited for wind farms. Geothermal energy exists everywhere. All that would remain is building a large enough distribution system to transport electricity generated in remote areas of the country to the more populous areas. And more than anything, we must encourage and fund the building of renewably-powered localized micro grids that are more resilient, reliable, and less prone to catastrophic failure than our current system.

I believe it is infeasible to completely disuse fossil fuels, but I also believe it is crucial and well within our technological capacity to increase renewable energy use while simultaneously developing carbon sequestration technology (capturing atmospheric CO2 and burying it deep underground in geologic reserves). Executing such great feats would be a veritable job boom for all workers who build things, and establishing a Civilian Climate Corps would carry on the legacy laid down by the original CCC, a legacy that established, defended, and nurtured our public lands. The United States rebuilt itself after the Great Depression. It is my most fervent hope that we rebuild our great nation once more. Our future is always worth the investment.