Storing Energy (part 1)

                                                                                           written 2 March, 2025

                                                                                       published 9 March, 2025

      

            Living systems store energy for long term survival.  They gather energy from the environment when it is available, use what they can in the moment, and store the excess to live until they can gather more energy.  

            Energy from the breakdown of food is stored internally as various carbohydrates, proteins, or fats, allowing life to survive in situations with extreme variations in available environmental energy.  Every life form on Earth synthesizes adenosine triphosphate (ATP) as the primary energy carrier for use in living cells, demonstrating the unity of life.  This stored energy carrier powers the essential cellular processes when released.  

            Animals collect and store food externally to achieve the same ends.  For example, bees produce and store honey from collected seasonal plant nectar, which nourishes the whole hive throughout the year.  Humans began wide scale food storage with the shift from hunter gatherer to agriculture.  Improving food preservation, creating greater storage life, has defined human "progress".  The relatively recent advent of refrigeration massively expanded the quantity of food preserved, but with the added cost of increased energy consumption, primarily electricity.  

            The first commercial electrical system was established in 1880.  Until fairly recently, all electricity consumed was produced "just in time", because once electricity has been generated, it must be used immediately.  Production has thus been designed to follow the varying load, and economic growth has been constrained by the amount of electricity able to be produce in any given moment.  Despite that extreme limitation, electricity has transformed our entire economy, even though humanity stores relatively little of the energy we consume each day.  

            For the last several centuries, most of our energy has been generated from fossil fuels, sunlight transformed by living organisms, and then geologically sequestered for millions of years.  Our consumption has increased to the point where all the cheapest, easily available fossil fuels have been burned, and the waste from this combustion is relentlessly changing the environment to conditions never before encountered by humans, risking economic collapse, possibly even human extinction.  This is the real push for the shift to renewables, not a hoax or a fashion statement, but the constraints of a finite energy source on a finite planet.

            However, as critics have pointed out, renewable energy is intermittent, not steady state.  It must be collected when available, not manufactured.  Like life forms before us, we need to develop energy storage at a scale that can support our needs, if we expect to survive much longer with the lifestyle we now take for granted.  Even if we reduce our consumption, acknowledging our real needs take much less energy than our current profligate culture, there are three cycles that must be addressed: day/night, summer/winter, and year-to-year.

            Battery technology has made amazing advances in just the last few decades.  Consider the impact of battery powered hand tools, cell phones, and computers.  Even at grid scale, new and larger batteries are being installed each month, with declining costs and improved chemistries.  Electric vehicles, despite the best efforts of the current president, are becoming mainstream, and will replace fossil fuels the same way cars replaced horses.  Even if the US is tries to be obsolete on the planet, the rest of the world is moving forward.

            Batteries are a good solution for the day/night cycle.  They already help store midday solar peaks for evening power usage.  An EV can last for days between charges.  However, while a long range EV might have as much as 100 kilowatt hours of storage capacity, the City of Ukiah consumes 300 megawatt hours each day, 3,000 times as much. And that is just 1/5 of the power consumed in Mendocino county each day.  While grid scale batteries this large are being built, they are not viable for dealing with the summer/winter cycle, especially not at grid scale.  

            A solar array output can vary from almost nothing on a grey winter day to more than 10 times as much on a sunny summer day.  Large hydroelectric dams have similar variability, ranging from flooding in the spring to droughts in the fall.  The challenge is to be able to capture all this energy when it if freely available, and store it for usage throughout the year.

            This must be existing technologies that have already been demonstrated to work, energetically efficient, scalable to the quantities needed, with stable storage for months or years, and economically affordable.  Fortunately, candidates do exist.

Fracking The Economy

                                                                                     written 24 February, 2025

                                                                                       published 2 March, 2025

        

            Fracking is scraping the "bottom of the barrel", technology use to extract the last bit of oil, thinly dispersed within hard rock.  The industry is forced to this because other oil reserves have already been depleted. 

            Wells are drilled, fluids and sand are injected at very high pressures, fracturing the rock and holding it open, allowing the oil to be extracted.  This process contaminates ground water, causes earthquakes, and requires huge amounts of energy, to produced oil in relatively small quantities.  Fracked wells deplete 80 percent in two years.  The industry now acknowledges domestic fracking is tapped out, having lost billions of dollars.

            Independent of money, it takes energy to produce useful energy.  The Energy Returned On Investment (EROI) for fracking averages 7:1.  In comparison, conventional oil EROI is 20:1 on up, and firewood is 5:1.  A technological society needs an EROI of at least 10:1.  Fracking is a last ditch effort, with massively externalized costs (where someone else pays), an economic loss even for the supposed "winners", and inadequate to power society as we know it today. 

            We see a similar process in our economy today.  

            The three richest Americans are Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg.  Musk bought the social media platform Twitter, and turned it into the hate filled "X".  Bezos owns Amazon, which dominates the economy, and works the employees so hard they have to piss where they work.  Zuckerberg owns Facebook, which no longer fact checks his conspiracy riddled social media empire, while addicting his customers.  These three men are worth over $900 billion, more than the poorest half of Americans.  These winners in the capitalist game are racing to become the first trillionaire.

            Musk, unelected, and unapproved by the Senate, now heads DOGE, the new agency with a mandate from the president to harvest funds from the poor to fund huge tax breaks for the richest, fracking the economy under the guise of fiscal prudence.  Agencies are being closed and Federal employees are being laid off.  Even some MAGA faithful are beginning to see problems.  

            Canceling USAID, preventing them from "giving away" food to starving people overseas, may sound good to some.  However, the money saved wasn't going to the starving people, but to American farmers, who are now being stiffed by the government.

            The IRS has been told not to investigate or prosecute business fraud.  The FDIC prevents banks from gambling with your deposits, but is being considered for elimination.  Does that make fiscal sense?

            Workers who maintain the security of nuclear weapons are laid off.  Air traffic controllers are laid off.  Threats of immigrant deportations are affecting agricultural production.  

            Support for rural hospitals is on the chopping block, and big cuts in health care are proposed.  Eggs cost more due to avian flu in chickens, and a measles outbreak in Texas is spreading, but Federal health control workers are being laid off.  Tariffs against Canadian oil have already caused gasoline prices to rise.  Tariffs against Canadian steel will affect auto prices.  Tourism from Canada to the US has dropped by 40 percent.  All this is inflationary.

            As Federal workers are laid off, family and community economics are disrupted.  Worried people spend less, and financial observers are concerned about recession.  Traditional American allies now realize the US is no longer trustworthy.  Immigrant groups that believed the lies and supported MAGA, now see their lives disrupted.  Locally, Ukiah announced expected grant funds to support wildfire suppression have been delayed, perhaps eliminated.

            This administration believes the climate crisis is a hoax, and repealed all existing climate mitigation programs, removed any mention of climate issues on Federal websites, and is removing EV chargers on Federal properties.  However, in the last 6 months, climate disasters caused over $400 billion in damages, the same fiscal burn rate as Pentagon funding.  Are we really better prepared by ignorance?  Anyone paying attention is anxious and depressed.  

            Sadly, none of this should have been a surprise, as the plan was advertised over a year ago.  But people believed what they wanted to hear, and couldn't accept the dark story there to be read.  Now loyalty to the "Mad King D" is the rule, with no actual job experience or competence required.

            What will it take?  Complete economic collapse?  Several massive climate disasters?  Eventually, everyone will see we really are all in this together, and the mental disease of unlimited exclusive gain is hurting us all.