‘Green’ Energy Needs a Big Leap

by Will Wilkinson on March 9, 2009

That’s the headline on this LA Times piece on Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s aim to produce “revolutionary” breakthroughs. Incrementalism? Highlights added for your convenience and pleasure:

When Energy Secretary Steven Chu talks about how Americans can break their addiction to oil and coal, he starts with his hi-fi amplifier. It’s so old that the on-off light burned out long ago. But inside lies a technology that — in its day — was as revolutionary as the changes needed to solve the nation’s energy problems.

Radios, telephones and other electronics once depended on fragile vacuum tubes the size of small light bulbs. Then scientists pioneered a smaller, cheaper and more durable replacement called the transistor, opening the way to trans-Atlantic phone calls and a host of other marvels, including Chu’s stereo.

Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, and other experts say similar [revolutionary] scientific breakthroughs are needed to make renewable power sources such as wind, solar and biofuels as cheap and easy to use as costly, environmentally damaging oil and coal. Toward that end, President Obama’s stimulus package contains $8 billion for energy research, including $400 million targeted for game-changing technology.

I’m glad the Times knew enough to add this:

The problem is that over the last three decades, the U.S. has spent many times that much on energy research and development — with nothing like a transistor to show for it.

“It’s very easy to say we should spend more” on research, said Jeffrey Wadsworth, chief executive and president of the Battelle Memorial Institute, which manages several Energy Department laboratories. “What really needs to happen is more effective use of the money.”

As Wadsworth is quick to acknowledge, that’s easier said than done.

Clap harder everybody!

Anyway, if Obama’s Nobel Prize-winning physicist Secretary of Energy says the plan is to shoot for revolutionary, game-changing technology, will folks admit that Obama is in fact shooting for revolutionary, game-changing technology?

[HT: Glen Whitman in comments below]

  • eaglewingz08
    Maybe if everyone says they believe in Tinkerbell and claps their hands, or if they click their heels three times, and say there's no energy like solar energy, Tinkerbell will come back to life, and all our energy problems will vanish. Or maybe if the democraps don't hamstring our energy production by forbidding us from exploring for and producing our own energy which has the potential to be cheap and available for the next five hundred years or so, we wouldn't have to avail ourselves of hoax energy sources and 'solutions' that will kill the economy and drive a tax/fee stake into the hearts of ninety five percent of the American public.
  • DMonteith
    ...exploring for and producing our own energy which has the potential to be cheap and available for the next five hundred years or so...

    Cite please.
  • Paul O'Pinion
    It would be great if the Federal Government could turn on the money spigot and have break-through innovation and technology flow out. Experience has shown us that the money disappears into the pockets of the few, the connected and now, the politically correct.
    True innovation is always market-driven.
  • bbartlog
    BTW, did you know that plants absorb sunlight incredibly efficiently? Like, nearly 100% And that we hardly know how they do it?

    *Absorbing* sunlight efficiently is no trick. A blacktop parking lot does that. If you mean that they convert the sunlight into a store of energy (starch/sugar) incredibly efficiently, I'd have to say - not really. 6-7% is the usual high end estimate after various losses are accounted for. By comparison, cheap solar will get you 10% and solar-with-bells-and-whistles (concentrator and stirling engine) can get you 30%.
    There's still a lot to be said in favor of plants (solar panels don't grow and multiply by themselves) but from a pure efficiency standpoint they aren't that amazing.
  • DMonteith
    The fundamental problem here is that renewable sources are diffuse and therefore require considerably larger investments in infrastructure to harvest than fossil fuels which are incredibly energy dense. This means that significant increases in overhead costs for energy production are just not likely to be avoidable regardless of whether it's government or private enterprise that's doing the heavy lifting.

    A quick scan of oil company investment in recent years shows that stock buybacks are where it's at for people who know how to profit from energy production. Maybe that should tell us something.

    By the way, here are a few numbers on energy return on energy invested to produce it for a few different technologies and sources: historical oil fields--100:1, current oil fields--20:1 (and falling), wind--18:1, hydroelectric--12:1, solar--8:1, coal--8:1, nuclear--6:1, tar sands--6:1, ethanol--2:1(maybe less!). Only "revolutionary, game-changing technology" will overcome both the 200+ percent greater energetic overhead costs (excepting wind, and hydro's got little room to expand) and the massive gap in installed capacity between renewables and fossil fuels within the next decade or two. Might as well call for what you need. Paging fictional libertarian savior-heroes with the intestinal fortitude to withstand 39% top marginal income tax rates!
  • jeppen
    Please note that your EROEI figures are not mainstream. Nuclear and hydro are far better than you quote. Other than that, I agree, adding that another fundamental problem with most renewables are their unreliability. You can only integrate so much stochastic production in our grid - wind probably don't scale beyond 20%. Currently only nuclear really does, aside from fossils.
  • DMonteith
    The numbers for nuclear are actually a pretty tough nut to crack based on what I read here, so I'm not too comfortable arguing this one in either direction. Nuclear's also got so many other moving parts beyond EROEI (security, waste, economics, construction time, depletion/breeders, etc.) that it's really a whole different discussion by itself.
  • uknowbetter
    Solar has some good potential as materials science is making some decent advancements. Nanotech will have a big impact here.

    One concern is that we roll-out huge infrastructure costs too quickly and miss out on breakthroughs in storage and transmission. It's a dumb move to spend $500 billion a year from now when breakthroughs happen 2 years later that would have brought the cost down to $10 billion. That is a big misallocation of resources.
  • DMonteith
    One concern is that we roll-out huge infrastructure costs too quickly and miss out on breakthroughs in storage and transmission.

    Well, another concern is that we start investing in infrastructure late and no breakthroughs arrive to make our procrastination look smart. Following your logic, building the telephone network and failing to wait for the development of cell phone technology was a "misallocation" of a lot of copper.

    Not to endorse Rumsfeld in any way, but you fight a war with the army you have. If the army you'd like to have shows up halfway through, bonus.
  • uknowbetter
    That analogy doesn't work. There is significant progress being made on the nanotech front. If we start rolling out a huge solar network right now and start mass producing solar cells with current technology, we know we are missing out quite a bit on improvements that are right around the corner. There is early-stage research that is showing massive improvements.

    It's like digging up all the ground to put in a telephone network when cellular is 3-6 years away.
  • newshutz
    Most of the solar cell improvement has been due to the semiconductor industry's research.
  • There's also no shortage of private capital investing in green tech (e.g., Al Gore's employer, Kleiner Perkins).

    You can't legislate the pace of technological change.
  • ap
    FTW:

    Yes-We-Can!
  • uknowbetter
    Obama and the other dims just have to stamp their feet hard enough.
  • jeppen
    Well said - it is important to realize that photovoltaics, wave energy and other renewables may never take off regardless of how much money is invested in research. It is also important that hopes that such tech will take off is not used as a pretext to continue expanding coal combustion for "just a few more years".

    However, there IS a "green energy"-field where success is more or less guaranteed - research into next-generation nuclear is not as much basic research as technology development and optimization. Thus it is virtually assured that a sufficiently big and determined effort to develop next-gen nuclear tech will succeed in providing a practical solution to the world's energy needs.

    It will provide means to utilize nuclear fuel 50-100 times better and means to use thorium, which is more abundant than uranium. Thus fuel availability will become a non-issue - economical reserves of fuel will extend into literally billions of years. Mining will be unnecessary for hundreds or thousands of years due to stockpiles of depleted uranium, and waste production will be reduced to 1-2%. Nuclear is the real Green!
  • There's a little word-play here. The telephone was an enormous technological breakthrough, but the the last increment of innovation needed to invent it was small, so small that about a dozen people can be credited as inventing it. A breakthrough is just an increment of improvement that has big consequences. It's still just incremental.

    Will really ought to be highlighting the fact that Chu agrees with him:

    And too much government subsidy for existing renewable energy technologies can impede breakthroughs, he said, because they can become "incentive to make lots of money without too much improvement."

    Sounds like a smart guy to me.

    BTW, did you know that plants absorb sunlight incredibly efficiently? Like, nearly 100% And that we hardly know how they do it? And that it was just a year ago that scientists detected that plants use some kind of quantum mechanical process to do it?
    http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/PBD...

    Solar efficiency progress so far:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PVeff(rev1107...
  • I have said before that it's kind of depressing that the "alternative energy" of today is the alternative energy of my high school days (the 70's).

    That said, there is a reason to suspect that this kind of Hail Mary is our only chance to defeat AGW. You see, we don't as a species actually care enough (IMO we are not quite rational enough) to do the sacrifice needed to bring GHG emissions truly down to where they need to be. We want to drive. As we conclusively proved, we don't want to put on a sweater.

    That means that the only chance is this long-shot, that someone will invent an Alternative Energy that is actually cheaper than coal. It may not be likely, but it's all we got.

    (I'd be happy if we were all ready to be hippies and ride bikes to the love-in, but it doesn't look like that is going to happen.)
  • Snowdog
    Perhaps this research will result in a revolutionary new motor powered by ambient static electricity with the potential to change the world!
  • Jayson Virissimo
    More likely, it will result in Project X.
  • Urstoff
    As any experienced Civilization player knows, focusing too much on research leads to either debt due to not having the taxes to pay for it, or city riots if you raise taxes sufficiently high that you produce no culture.

    Building Notre Dame will bring some extra happiness to all cities on the continent, though.
  • AnotherBen
    We should just restart on "settler" difficulty. We'd already have left for Alpha Centauri if we had done that in the first place.
  • "Brookings proposes the creation of a national network of "energy discovery-innovation institutes" that would link federal researchers with universities and the private sector."

    "The academic and business leaders behind the plan say it would boost the chances for scientific breakthroughs but also help solve a second crucial issue for renewable energy: how to get new technology from the lab to consumers."

    Looks like the business community is all for government-funded research.
  • Cool Cal
    What part of "rent-seeking" didn't you understand?
  • Who is doing the rent seeking, Cal

    Business leaders, academics, or the government?

    Or all of them?

    Seems like Chu is only asking for “revolutionary” breakthroughs in the area of "known unknowns" not "unknown unknowns."

    Just the sort of thing wads of government funding can do.
  • Cool Cal
    btw ... this gets to the meat of what I think is the fatal flaw in "Green" technology subsidies/legislation. We have no idea where the next technological innovation in energy will lead us. And when it does come, it may, to Laurie David's chagrin, not be a so-called clean energy. Who knows, we may discover a way to produce synthetic crude - inexhaustible carbon fuels. Use the existing infrastructure with a few tweaks, but supply with a new energy source. The only problem - it doesn't align with the rhetoric of cleanliness, the "addiction to oil" metaphor which brings to mind nothing more elegant than a bruised and foul-smelling waif turning tricks for the next fix sticks in the mind every time one fills up at the nearest 76.
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