written 28 January 2024
published 4 February 2024
Over the last few weeks, I described the four primary energy sources of our global economy: nuclear, natural gas, oil, and coal. They produce 70 percent of the global electricity and 86 percent of the total energy used. All are forms of stored energy, created long before humans existed. Nuclear fission releases energy by breaking apart heavy atomic nuclei, and the three fossil fuels release energy by combustion of stored hydrogen. They are all finite.
With the exception of coal, the least versatile of the fossil fuels, human consumption has already developed and depleted the richest deposits, leaving only increasingly less economic deposits. We act like a foolish spendthrift, rapidly burning through our energy inheritance. But it's time to grow up, and live within our energy income.
All life starts with stored energy at the beginning, and then makes transition. In seeds, the germ of the plant grows using stored energy until it can draw sustenance from the larger world. Similarly, all egg laying life forms grow on the stored energy in the yolk, before hatching into the larger world. Mammals use the energy from the mother to develop to the point of birth. The very first bacterial life on Earth lived off the abundant chemicals already existing, then population growth and resource depletion brought about the transformational evolution of photosynthesis, drawing energy from sunlight. Humans are now at that stage. Confronted with the decreasing availability of stored energy, we have now developed the capacity to harvest the sun.
The four primary energy sources are expensive, centralized industries, requiring many billions of dollars for construction of the energy hardware, and then trillions more every year for the extraction and delivery of the stored energy to be consumed. This has created corporate monopolies, and supported autocratic governments, which extract massive profits by constraining access. This energy inequity enriches a few, and impoverishes multitudes. Even if a truly democratic, inclusive, society wanted to share, the basic energy system frustrates that impulse, as resources are unevenly distributed across the planet. In addition, the power plants now used can't be efficiently miniaturized for wide spread distribution.
Finally, the way the energy is stored produces debris when the energy is released. Nuclear debris, the fission byproduct, is extremely radioactive, some toxic to life for millions of years, and tends to bioaccumulate. Waste disposal must be secure and very long term, compared to human civilization. Fossil fuel combustion produces chemical debris, which is also toxic to life, and has the added problem of heating the planet, threatening not just our technological civilization, but even continued human existence.
In summary, the push toward energy transition comes for the rising cost of diminishing resources, the desire for energy justice, and the accelerating environmental destruction from the waste products. Fortunately, humanity knows how to make the necessary transition, if we so choose.
The three main renewable energy sources are solar, wind, and geothermal. Solar comes from the ongoing existence of the sun, which we can assume will last longer than life on Earth. It is completely inclusive, freely shining of everyone at least part of the time, and can be installed down to the level of individual houses. Wind is a consequence of solar input, also free, but less evenly distributed. Geothermal taps into the heat of the planet, good for the life of the planet, and also free, but even less widely distributed than wind.
It is important to understand that any cost associated with these energy sources comes from the hardware to collect and store the energy, not the energy source itself. This means there is no inflationary element in the energy, only the fixed cost of the hardware installation and maintenance.
The biggest challenge is to shift how we think about energy. Instead of expecting to produce the energy we want when we want it, we have to collect energy when it is available, and store it for when we need it, which requires restructuring of our culture and energy system.
This is already taking place. However, the greed of status quo investments continues to fund denial of the imperative for this change, so the pace is slower than necessary. But resource depletion and the climate crisis don't care about self-serving, ignorant denial. As the economic and environmental impacts continues to accelerate, more and more people are experiencing the necessity. We CAN leave a habitable planet for our descendants.
