The idea of the energy transition has been occupying a lot of my time and mental capacity lately so I thought I’d put together some thoughts on how we could do it more, shall we say, economically.
It's easy to dream up ways to make progress on the energy transition, not so easy to execute. For example, the plan to have more people go off-grid hits a snag when it cones time to put the pieces together. Want a whole-house solar system? Good luck finding the major components, inverters, batteries, panels, photovoltaic wiring.
If you can gather up those parts, you've made a good start. Now to install it. Priced copper wire lately? Checked in at building and electrical suppliers to see if they actually have any? How about electrical panels? I'm dealing with that now. If just a few more people in the area tried to build a system, there wouldn't be enough supplies to install the systems.
The plan for a better transition should start with questions about scalability and its impact on execution.
Home off-grid solar will always be a bit player. Household electricity consumption is only ~1/3rd of total per household share of national electricity consumption and ~1/20th of total per household share of national primary energy consumption. And the majority, probably well over 80% of households are not suitable for solar due to being apartments, condos, rentals, solar blockage due to trees or buildings, lack of solar resource, or just people who don't want the hassle of maintenance.
What you really want is ~1.5kwe fuel cell for your home, runs off of natural gas, propane or methanol. Just need a small 5kwh battery for it, not a large 30kwh needed for off-grid solar. Supplies all electricity, hot water and heat, except for possibly the coldest months in winter. The 75-100kwh of heat per day output would suffice for most areas.
Where are they? Beats solar by a mile. Blows solar right out of the water. Although a small level of solar would complement it nicely for the sunny summers, charging the battery for use in the evening peak period. And supplying daytime cooling electricity.
Endless media hype about the 150kwe vehicle fuel cell. For that size/weight is a big problem. Fuel storage very difficult, expensive & dangerous. Vibration & shock is a big problem. Auto collision damage = big problem. Short vehicle lifespan = a problem. Home fuel cell has none of those problems. And 100X smaller. Far, far, far more useful and valuable than a fuel cell for vehicles.
Where are they? They should manufactured by the millions and cost about the same a good home furnace. With that price it wouldn't pay to supply electricity to residential area, no need of a suburban electrical grid, just run gas or methanol pipe to each home, the entire residential or suburban area could be run off of common source methanol or gas.
This list is a bit too statist for my tastes. In my view, unfortunately we can’t ban and subsidize our way to prosperity and there is really a limited amount that governments can do. We need more incentives (or better yet “un-disincentives”) for human ingenuity.
The only one on the list I would agree with is the energy education item. Unfortunately most folks are just not energy literate in any way shape or form.
Local food may slightly increase resilience, but growing things on marginal land nearby is often not economically productive as far higher inputs can be required and yields are often lower. If the higher fertilizer emissions overwhelm the transportation emissions then this is a dead end from a transition perspective anyway. This is not to say that I don’t love garden tomatoes and cucumbers in the summer... but that isn’t a scalable food system.
It is by no means a universal or, indeed, a very realistic list of things to do. The education point, I think, is the most important and it's not that far-fetched, as long as there is a will. Saves trouble further down the road as we have seen in real time.
Why not ask the people in Sri Lanka if they like the BS that Vandana Shiva is pushing. This anti GMO, anti fertilizer, back to the land stuff causes real poverty and human suffering, and those people have blood on their hands. But of course they are never wrong- every criticism of them after their policies kill people is just “corporate misinformation.”
Hippies never learn, which is why we have an energy crisis in the first place.
That Sri Lanka case is something we were informed from the mainstream news media... while on the other hand, this other argument is based on more careful argumentation to say the least, involving practical experiences across the world, all of which included careful calculations from day to day how to make a living, and also includes a use of pretty heavy equipment. Hardly hippy stuff. Joel Salatin's argument is for not-so-small farms, for them to be viable. If you take MSM at face value, and avoid addressing actual points in various people's arguments, we're done, our discussion is over.
I've read Joel Salatin. Very interesting stuff. The debate over factory farming vs SME sustainable farming is a very good one. I'm not convinced either way and expect that some combination of both is the optimal strategy. Probably large factory farming for grains. And most other foods can be done by SMEs. New technologies might make smaller farms more practical as flexible programmable machinery becomes more affordable. Tesla robots would make great farm hands for a small farm, reducing the amount of tedious work needed.
I also hate the MSM (this is Substack after all), but when people start having widespread food riots in a country it becomes an interesting story- and the fact that the MSM decides to cover it doesn’t make it untrue.
The abstract of that paper looks like the Agricultural version of Mark Z Jacobsen’s arguments on energy. Just an academic doing calculations to show how their perfect world can work with really sciencey looking calculations. Unfortunately deep down it is just an ideological confirmation bias exercise. Never mind the real world Rube Goldberg machine that has no chance of working. I mean, that whole abstract just reads as, “here is what the Man will say when this shit doesn’t work, but here is why I am still correct anyway.”
Indeed, Shiva is quite a triggering figure for us ecomodernists. But don’t worry, the WEF/Green crowd will always make sure she gets funding for her poisonous ideas.
I think the tax you are looking for Irina is a pigouvian tax. Rather than have CAFE standards in the US forcing americans to drive cars they don't want to, they should have a slow but steadily increasing fuel tax - 1/3 to highways, 1/3 to military (protecting the free flow of oil, the biggest users should pay more) and 1/3 to education or something. Taxing something makes you use less of it - taxing fuel would get people to be more fuel efficient.
That would all be covered by a Revenue Neutral Carbon Fee & Dividend, what James Hansen recommends. It rewards the energy stingy i.e. poor & middle class and penalizes the energy hogs i.e. wealthy. The exact opposite of the various carbon credit, carbon trading, Net Zero, ESG scams that reward the wealthy and penalize the poor and middle class. On top of that, the only way they are effective at reducing emissions is by forcing energy poverty upon the poor & middle class.
That's an excellent point I did not make. Currently, everything governments do about the transition effectively penalises the poor and the medium-income people. This needs to change.
I have a totally different view on that - reduce taxes and reduce government. In fact eliminate personal income tax.
Radical Paradigm Shift?
No!
Personal income taxes were effectively nada in USA right up until the middle of the last century. In fact, just look at pictures of New York City in the 1930's you know when the Empire State Building was completed.
How did that nation build out so much of everything and become so big and powerful without personal income taxes?
Imagine if all citizens had that tax money in their own pocket - imagine how they could help recreate a greener society...
You can eliminate personal income taxes by government funding through tariffs on imports. And most importantly by eliminating all private money creation. Only debt-free public money creation. That would be quite sufficient to fund the government. Personal or corporate taxes though are still needed to prevent excess wealth accumulation by monopolies & cronyism.
The current problems are exasperated by a resource shortage and a labour shortage, so any short-medium term things should be the lowest resource and labour costs.
With that in mind some comments:
1. The whole system of taxes, subsidies, permits, financing should work together to encourage the end results, with as much long term policy certainty as possible to help investments.
3. Residential rooftop solar requires more resources than on commercial buildings due to the small scale. Focus on commercial buildings, parking lots etc. (And add EV charging to those parking lots). I hear pastures may integrate well with PV as shade can be useful for livestock. Wind unfortunately is not great near residences so siting will be hard.
5. Off grid takes a lot more resources unless you go hermit style as the utilization of the resources is lower or more storage required.
9. Depends, transport energy costs are often less than the difference in doing something in the most efficient spot vs average spot.
Other things:
Scrap all the carbon trading schemes and put on a carbon tax. Much harder to game. Rebate enough to make it fair for lower income people. Can have it start at 80% of average for exporting industrial users to stay competitive, or have border adjusted carbon taxes. Eventually this same cale can be paid to DAC to geological storage, but that takes energy so only after the energy crisis is resolved. Now that we need to get to net zero the whole trading scheme premise of "find someone who can make the reduction cheaper than you and pay for the credit" is obselete anyway.
Forget BEV for 10 years and focus on plug in hybrids. Most of the fuel reductions for 20% of the limited battery resources. Also allows more energy flexibility, give cheap off peak power with smart charges when there is surplus, (or those solar covered parking lots), when short electricity use more storable fuel.
Keep / reopen all the nuclear possible.
Unfortunately most of Europe has poor renewable resources for the pop density, so unless you get into nuclear in a big way, all the high energy industries need to offshore. North Africa looks promising for wind + solar to make industrial scale green fertilizer, chemicals, steel etc.
Funny how those "finger-pointing-ecologists" who place all the blame on the oil industry (and blind faith on the green revolution) usually hit the brakes when challenged with solutions similar to your points #2, #7 and #9.
They insist on believing that driving a Tesla makes them pure and guiltless but will never even consider using the same phone for over 2 years, the same car for more than 7 years, taking shorter showers, giving their AC a break, etc. Some would probably bury their heads in the sand if told that, given the embargo, the energy to charge their EV comes from coal power plants!
It's easy to dream up ways to make progress on the energy transition, not so easy to execute. For example, the plan to have more people go off-grid hits a snag when it cones time to put the pieces together. Want a whole-house solar system? Good luck finding the major components, inverters, batteries, panels, photovoltaic wiring.
If you can gather up those parts, you've made a good start. Now to install it. Priced copper wire lately? Checked in at building and electrical suppliers to see if they actually have any? How about electrical panels? I'm dealing with that now. If just a few more people in the area tried to build a system, there wouldn't be enough supplies to install the systems.
The plan for a better transition should start with questions about scalability and its impact on execution.
You're absolutely right. Planning theoretically is easy. The hard part is in the "How".
Home off-grid solar will always be a bit player. Household electricity consumption is only ~1/3rd of total per household share of national electricity consumption and ~1/20th of total per household share of national primary energy consumption. And the majority, probably well over 80% of households are not suitable for solar due to being apartments, condos, rentals, solar blockage due to trees or buildings, lack of solar resource, or just people who don't want the hassle of maintenance.
What you really want is ~1.5kwe fuel cell for your home, runs off of natural gas, propane or methanol. Just need a small 5kwh battery for it, not a large 30kwh needed for off-grid solar. Supplies all electricity, hot water and heat, except for possibly the coldest months in winter. The 75-100kwh of heat per day output would suffice for most areas.
Where are they? Beats solar by a mile. Blows solar right out of the water. Although a small level of solar would complement it nicely for the sunny summers, charging the battery for use in the evening peak period. And supplying daytime cooling electricity.
Endless media hype about the 150kwe vehicle fuel cell. For that size/weight is a big problem. Fuel storage very difficult, expensive & dangerous. Vibration & shock is a big problem. Auto collision damage = big problem. Short vehicle lifespan = a problem. Home fuel cell has none of those problems. And 100X smaller. Far, far, far more useful and valuable than a fuel cell for vehicles.
Where are they? They should manufactured by the millions and cost about the same a good home furnace. With that price it wouldn't pay to supply electricity to residential area, no need of a suburban electrical grid, just run gas or methanol pipe to each home, the entire residential or suburban area could be run off of common source methanol or gas.
This list is a bit too statist for my tastes. In my view, unfortunately we can’t ban and subsidize our way to prosperity and there is really a limited amount that governments can do. We need more incentives (or better yet “un-disincentives”) for human ingenuity.
The only one on the list I would agree with is the energy education item. Unfortunately most folks are just not energy literate in any way shape or form.
Local food may slightly increase resilience, but growing things on marginal land nearby is often not economically productive as far higher inputs can be required and yields are often lower. If the higher fertilizer emissions overwhelm the transportation emissions then this is a dead end from a transition perspective anyway. This is not to say that I don’t love garden tomatoes and cucumbers in the summer... but that isn’t a scalable food system.
It is by no means a universal or, indeed, a very realistic list of things to do. The education point, I think, is the most important and it's not that far-fetched, as long as there is a will. Saves trouble further down the road as we have seen in real time.
There are reasons to think that it is exactly small farms that can feed the world. Viz., https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344943680_The_Myth_of_a_Food_Crisis
Similar arguments have been made by Joel Salatin, and other permacultiralists, Vandana Shiva, etc.
Why not ask the people in Sri Lanka if they like the BS that Vandana Shiva is pushing. This anti GMO, anti fertilizer, back to the land stuff causes real poverty and human suffering, and those people have blood on their hands. But of course they are never wrong- every criticism of them after their policies kill people is just “corporate misinformation.”
Hippies never learn, which is why we have an energy crisis in the first place.
That Sri Lanka case is something we were informed from the mainstream news media... while on the other hand, this other argument is based on more careful argumentation to say the least, involving practical experiences across the world, all of which included careful calculations from day to day how to make a living, and also includes a use of pretty heavy equipment. Hardly hippy stuff. Joel Salatin's argument is for not-so-small farms, for them to be viable. If you take MSM at face value, and avoid addressing actual points in various people's arguments, we're done, our discussion is over.
I've read Joel Salatin. Very interesting stuff. The debate over factory farming vs SME sustainable farming is a very good one. I'm not convinced either way and expect that some combination of both is the optimal strategy. Probably large factory farming for grains. And most other foods can be done by SMEs. New technologies might make smaller farms more practical as flexible programmable machinery becomes more affordable. Tesla robots would make great farm hands for a small farm, reducing the amount of tedious work needed.
I also hate the MSM (this is Substack after all), but when people start having widespread food riots in a country it becomes an interesting story- and the fact that the MSM decides to cover it doesn’t make it untrue.
The abstract of that paper looks like the Agricultural version of Mark Z Jacobsen’s arguments on energy. Just an academic doing calculations to show how their perfect world can work with really sciencey looking calculations. Unfortunately deep down it is just an ideological confirmation bias exercise. Never mind the real world Rube Goldberg machine that has no chance of working. I mean, that whole abstract just reads as, “here is what the Man will say when this shit doesn’t work, but here is why I am still correct anyway.”
Indeed, Shiva is quite a triggering figure for us ecomodernists. But don’t worry, the WEF/Green crowd will always make sure she gets funding for her poisonous ideas.
I think the tax you are looking for Irina is a pigouvian tax. Rather than have CAFE standards in the US forcing americans to drive cars they don't want to, they should have a slow but steadily increasing fuel tax - 1/3 to highways, 1/3 to military (protecting the free flow of oil, the biggest users should pay more) and 1/3 to education or something. Taxing something makes you use less of it - taxing fuel would get people to be more fuel efficient.
That would all be covered by a Revenue Neutral Carbon Fee & Dividend, what James Hansen recommends. It rewards the energy stingy i.e. poor & middle class and penalizes the energy hogs i.e. wealthy. The exact opposite of the various carbon credit, carbon trading, Net Zero, ESG scams that reward the wealthy and penalize the poor and middle class. On top of that, the only way they are effective at reducing emissions is by forcing energy poverty upon the poor & middle class.
That's an excellent point I did not make. Currently, everything governments do about the transition effectively penalises the poor and the medium-income people. This needs to change.
This is the approach Canada has taken. Much less room to play games with a straight up fee.
Tax Collection.
I have a totally different view on that - reduce taxes and reduce government. In fact eliminate personal income tax.
Radical Paradigm Shift?
No!
Personal income taxes were effectively nada in USA right up until the middle of the last century. In fact, just look at pictures of New York City in the 1930's you know when the Empire State Building was completed.
How did that nation build out so much of everything and become so big and powerful without personal income taxes?
Imagine if all citizens had that tax money in their own pocket - imagine how they could help recreate a greener society...
You can eliminate personal income taxes by government funding through tariffs on imports. And most importantly by eliminating all private money creation. Only debt-free public money creation. That would be quite sufficient to fund the government. Personal or corporate taxes though are still needed to prevent excess wealth accumulation by monopolies & cronyism.
The current problems are exasperated by a resource shortage and a labour shortage, so any short-medium term things should be the lowest resource and labour costs.
With that in mind some comments:
1. The whole system of taxes, subsidies, permits, financing should work together to encourage the end results, with as much long term policy certainty as possible to help investments.
3. Residential rooftop solar requires more resources than on commercial buildings due to the small scale. Focus on commercial buildings, parking lots etc. (And add EV charging to those parking lots). I hear pastures may integrate well with PV as shade can be useful for livestock. Wind unfortunately is not great near residences so siting will be hard.
5. Off grid takes a lot more resources unless you go hermit style as the utilization of the resources is lower or more storage required.
9. Depends, transport energy costs are often less than the difference in doing something in the most efficient spot vs average spot.
Other things:
Scrap all the carbon trading schemes and put on a carbon tax. Much harder to game. Rebate enough to make it fair for lower income people. Can have it start at 80% of average for exporting industrial users to stay competitive, or have border adjusted carbon taxes. Eventually this same cale can be paid to DAC to geological storage, but that takes energy so only after the energy crisis is resolved. Now that we need to get to net zero the whole trading scheme premise of "find someone who can make the reduction cheaper than you and pay for the credit" is obselete anyway.
Forget BEV for 10 years and focus on plug in hybrids. Most of the fuel reductions for 20% of the limited battery resources. Also allows more energy flexibility, give cheap off peak power with smart charges when there is surplus, (or those solar covered parking lots), when short electricity use more storable fuel.
Keep / reopen all the nuclear possible.
Unfortunately most of Europe has poor renewable resources for the pop density, so unless you get into nuclear in a big way, all the high energy industries need to offshore. North Africa looks promising for wind + solar to make industrial scale green fertilizer, chemicals, steel etc.
Funny how those "finger-pointing-ecologists" who place all the blame on the oil industry (and blind faith on the green revolution) usually hit the brakes when challenged with solutions similar to your points #2, #7 and #9.
They insist on believing that driving a Tesla makes them pure and guiltless but will never even consider using the same phone for over 2 years, the same car for more than 7 years, taking shorter showers, giving their AC a break, etc. Some would probably bury their heads in the sand if told that, given the embargo, the energy to charge their EV comes from coal power plants!