Modern civilisation is built on cheap energy.
The sugar and tobacco plantations of the West Indies and Americas were also built on cheap energy, slaves were cheap. The development of machines, driven by cheap fuels, enabled improved food production, improved distribution, the manufacture of goods, improvements in housing. The end of cheap energy has profound implications for the carrying capacity of the earth. Our standard of living depends on our capacity to amplify the human ability to do work, at the flick of a switch, by machines that consume cheap fuel.
Buckminster Fuller went to the trouble of taking the energy being put to work by the world and calculating its equivalent in slaves. For 1950, every human on earth had the equivalent of 38 full-time slaves. They were not evenly spread across the world’s population, North Americans had 347 slaves each, Central Americans had none. As a measure of the increase in energy use the average North American family enjoyed just one slave equivalent in 1820.
A world economy based on wood for fuel and draft animals for agriculture and transport would not support the world’s current population. The more someone has to pay for their slaves the fewer they can afford and the less affluence they enjoy. The cost of energy determines how many and how well people survive.
Fossil fuel is currently cheap and abundant. The average retail price of electricity in the United States in 2010 was 9.88 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh). Renewable energy is far more expensive, sunlight is free but infrastructure is not. Solar powered electricity is about four times more expensive than from coal-fired power stations. To be competitive the price to the consumer must be the same. This can only be realised by taxing fossil fuels or subsidising renewables, whichever way this is done the consumer must pay more. Germany has plunged into renewables only to find that energy is now so expensive that industry is fleeing to cheaper energy economies. The government is busily looking at the best ways to cut and run from subsidies.
Parity is anticipated in the UK in 2015 provided that electricity prices continue to rise. Already a large proportion of the UK population is in a state of fuel poverty, and it’s only going to get worse as those prices rise. Cold kills more people in the UK than car crashes – mainly old, poor people who can’t afford to heat their homes. Is freezing pensioners to death a good policy outcome?
Governments have also thrown money at renewables in the form of grants, with woeful success. Across the world, a few of the more prominent and expensive casualties are Solyndra, Solar Millennium AG, Energy Conversion Devices Inc, Q-Cells, Solon, Solar Millenium, Solarhybrid, Ener1, Range Fuels and Beacon Power Corp. Nearly all of these companies were the beneficiaries of huge government startup grants or loan guarantees. The green jobs created have been extraordinarily expensive and usually short-lived. And the taxpayer will be slugged again to dismantle and clean up many acres of orphaned solar panels. Far from learning from the mistakes made elsewhere the current Australian government is taking the same route here.
One of the arguments put forward in favour of solar is that the price of panels will come down. They certainly have become cheaper recently … but mainly as a consequence of oversupply, they can now be purchased at below the cost of manufacture. Anticipate more bankruptcies.
It has to be cheap and if it can’t produce carbon dioxide then it has to be nuclear.
Nuclear doesn’t have to be uranium based, there is something far safer, that can’t be used to make bombs and is abundant … the fuel of the future could well be thorium.
bobmcgee 