I got so angry when I drove into the service station and saw the price on the pump. I needed gas so I couldn’t just drive away, but this was ridiculous! Gasoline should not cost this much! As I was pumping fuel, I groused about the cost some more, and wondered if I should fill up or hope the price would go down in a few days and only fill the tank half way. I was very frustrated with “our leaders”—those people in business who run energy companies, and in government those whom we elect to anticipate and solve problems before they occur.
They’d all failed me. They’d failed us all. It had been obvious to everyone for at least 25 years, I thought, that oil would one day run out, that gasoline could not always be cheap, that we could not forever rely on other countries to supply our energy needs. And yet not one damn thing had been done in all that time to guarantee that our energy future would be secure.
I resolved immediately to walk more often to the places I wanted to go. However, living in the Midwest, a place laid out in just such a way as to make driving an absolute necessity for getting around in ordinary life, this was not much of a resolution. In practice, it was impossible to stick with it. I think I walked from home to my friend’s apartment twice. I lived too far away from work to walk there even once.
By the way, did I mention this happened 30 years ago?
What had so incensed me at the pump that day was that gasoline had shot up to the unheard of price of, I think, 77 cents a gallon. To fill my 20-gallon tank it was going to cost me about what I made in five hours, before taxes. Although it costs me less, measured in hours worked, to fill up today, my minivan tank doesn’t hold 20 gallons. I also make a lot more per hour now than I did then with my barely-over-minimum-wage job and I didn’t have the expenses of a mortgage, utility bills, and children. What has not changed is that, as I thought 30 years ago and never would have thought would still hold true today (if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes), not one damn thing has been done in all that time to guarantee that our energy future would be secure.
I don’t know if it’s tragic or just funny that many of the same “fixes” from back then are being suggested for dealing with the current energy crisis. It was true back in the ’70s and it is still true today that we don’t have an actual energy crisis. We’re awash in energy and the world is not running out of oil anytime soon. The crisis is in our wallets in that we don’t want to (or for many of us, cannot for much longer) spend as much for gasoline (or heating oil, or natural gas, or diesel fuel, or electricity) as we are spending now.
This financial crisis is a serious problem for everyone. Though it is easy to pick on people who are driving big SUVs that they suddenly can no longer afford to keep on the road (gas prices went up between 25 and 30% in one year), and laugh at their supposed vanity for owning them in the first place, their money problems propagate through the entire economy. Many can’t sell that SUV because the car shoppers who can still afford to own one don’t buy used cars, especially when dealerships are trying to unload new ones at bargain prices. Everyone else out car shopping is also looking for something small and energy efficient, which means there is also a shortage of small, energy efficient cars, at least for a while. This means most current SUV drivers are stuck with their big vehicles. This means that money will be spent on gasoline that otherwise would have been spent on clothes, or computers, or refrigerators, or TVs, or on trips to the restaurant, or on subscriptions to Analog, or dues to SFWA. . . .
And this means that even a Green waitress—who would never own an SUV, who takes the bus to work, who recycles, who supports saving the rain forests, and who just bought her first little energy-efficient house a year ago—will default on her mortgage when she gets laid off at the restaurant because SUV owners can’t afford to eat out as often.
The national economy will continue to weaken one falling liberal and conservative, red and blue state, Green and non-Green, domino at a time.
As I write this in the summer of ’08, there is talk about reinstating the 55-mph speed limit, a less than perfect idea from 30 years ago. I have myself voluntarily started driving to work with my cruise control set at 60, just to save gasoline. I don’t need any more incentive than the high price to give it a try, and I only lose a few minutes both ways by going slower. However, having lived in New Mexico for a few years back in the ’80s . . . well, I would never want to try to force someone who has to drive 150 miles to and from work each day to spend an extra half-hour or more on the road. If he’s willing to pay for the gasoline so he can continue to spend that half-hour at home, I think that is his right. It is true that if everyone drove 55 on the highways instead of 70 or 75, it would conserve gasoline. But that would only put off the inevitable day of reckoning a short while. And the simple fact is that, if history is any guide, most people will not keep their speed down to 55, and the nation cannot conserve itself into either prosperity or energy independence.
Just as we heard back in the ’70s, once again we are being preached the virtues of clean renewable energy—solar power, wind power, and geothermal power (hydropower, not so much this time around, since no one wants to dam anything anymore). But it is also just as true today that there isn’t enough solar, wind, or geothermal power around to meet our energy needs, nor is there likely to be.
No one disputes that a solar power station big enough to supply the energy we get from a typical coal or oil-fired power plant would have to be huge. The back-of-the-envelope calculation is simple. Assume about one kilowatt per square meter as the energy flux for sunlight at the Earth’s surface. But at 10% efficiency, ten square meters of solar cells are needed to obtain one kilowatt. To get one gigawatt of power, you need one million times that area. That’s a square about two miles on a side. The sun doesn’t shine at night, so figure eight hours a day of useful sunshine—now you’re up to twelve square miles of solar collector to average one gigawatt of continuous power. Even the desert gets clouds, so we’d better double the size again (and that’s being optimistic) to make up for losses we can expect from less than perfect weather. We’re now up to 24 square miles of solar collector for that one gigawatt. A typical power plant supplies about five gigawatts. That means we need 120 square miles of solar collector to equal one typical fossil-fuel power plant, a square eleven miles on a side.
Of course, we’re not going to cover 120 square miles with one enormous solar collector. We’re going to get our huge solar collector by using a whole bunch of smaller arrays all operating together. There will be space between those units with utility roads, junction boxes, and service buildings. The sun will have to be tracked so the rays will come in perpendicularly. An array with moving parts will tend to break down unless it receives regular maintenance. So either from failure or just to receive scheduled care, some areas of our solar power array will always be out of commission at any given time. To compensate for that, it needs to be bigger still.
I could go on, pointing out that such a huge structure is bound to run into trouble from really bad weather, like tornadoes and hail storms and lightning strikes, and maybe snow and ice storms. Even in mild weather, the damn thing is still going to get dirty and will need to be cleaned frequently. I haven’t even touched how much time, manpower, concrete, steel, gasoline and diesel fuel will be needed to build it in the first place.
All of these aspects were known decades ago—they are among the reasons why it was hoped back then that we’d be building solar power satellites in space and beaming the energy back via microwaves.
You can do the same sort of back-of-the-envelope calculation for wind power. No matter how you do it, if you use anything like realistic numbers, you rapidly discover that solar and wind energy will never be more than adjunct sources of energy. I have nothing against either of them in their proper place and under favorable circumstances. Indeed, geothermal power works well for Iceland. But we’re not Iceland. Touting solar and wind power as the answer to our long-term energy needs is simply nonsense.
This brings us to the elephant in the room—nuclear power. Just how in the hell did scientists and science fiction writers allow the promise of clean nuclear power to be stolen from us? Because it wasn’t so clean? Compared to what? Coal? Oil? The very stuff we’re now told is bringing on catastrophic climate change?
Was it the fear of terrorism, that having too many nuclear power plants around would make it too easy to steal nuclear material to make nuclear bombs? But weren’t the planes flown into the World Trade Center powered by fossil fuel? Haven’t the so-called “rogue states” been making their own nuclear bomb stuff with centrifuges anyway?
Was it the waste that won’t be safe for ten thousand years? But haven’t other nations been producing waste anyway, and dealing with it? And why does it have to be stored safely for ten thousand years? Can’t we settle on a scheme that will serve for fifty or a hundred years, and revisit the problem later, just like we do with absolutely everything else? Are there any “permanent solutions” put forward in 1908 that we still follow today?
My solution to the energy crisis? Nuclear power. We already know how, it is less dirty than fossil fuel, power plants require only acres of land, not square miles, and the US has all the uranium she needs inside her own borders. Forget trying to store the waste forever—settle for a century. We should also drill offshore for more domestic oil since nuclear plants can’t be built overnight, and the American automobile fleet won’t be all-electric for some years to come. And we can use wind and solar power where it makes sense.
Oh, and since candidates for president can spend a hundred million dollars to get us to vote for them, maybe we can spend the same to undo the 30 years of anti-nuclear nonsense that brought us today’s energy crisis in the first place.
