Unscientific American

Amory Lovins contributed an article to September's Scientific American which I have some serious disputes with.

The basic issue is how to spend money to lower carbon dioxide emissions. The most effective way to do this, as Lovins suggests, is to issue a blanket ban (or as close as reasonably achievable) on the production of electricity and gasoline. This misses the point in that it would force people to go back to a pre-industrial society, where the fortunate own farms and the unfortunate try to seize farms by force (the 17-word summary of world history before the Renaissance). With today's population, we would have to convert almost the whole surface of the Earth to farms. Even with that, there would be widespread starvation. Thus, we need cities, industry, and electricity.

I can't believe I'm writing this.

Energy conservation is the enemy of the consumer and the environment. It stifles innovation; because there is no new demand to serve, no new power plants are ordered. The 1973 oil embargo was one of the main causes of the 1974 nuclear industry collapse, after which no nuclear power plant orders were successful. New power plants are always better than old ones at emissions controls and lower costs, unless activists decide to sue with the specific aim of making the plants more expensive. Fuel conservation is necessary to preserve natural resources. Nuclear power plants are great at fuel conservation--that's the main thing that distinguishes them from other baseload plants.
Consumers benefit from new power plant construction when costs go down in more efficient, modern designs. Eventually, old plants are retired, and even more new ones are ordered. However, if there is no incentive (read: demand for the product, i.e., a chance to recoup investment) to develop a new plant, utilities will stop ordering new plants. Once we burn through the world's natural gas supply in the next 20 years, without more efficient plants (those that are cheaper, in total, to build and operate), utilities will order more coal-fired plants--the old, dependable technology which has the small side effect of killing people by the thousands.
Lovins states that the environment will benefit if emissions are cut when plants are closed to meet decreased demand. This would be correct if (a) demand was not on an inexorable climb upwards and (b) emissions could be indefinitely cut.
In 1979, before the personal computer revolution, Dr. John Gofman said that electricity was not necessary for more than 10% of energy use. He could not have predicted the huge increase in devices that could run on nothing but electricity--computers, cell phones, and other consumer electronics. But he didn't think it out that far. He left no room for innovation. He (and others) also count mechanical work from electric motors not as a necessary use of electricity, but as mechanical work that humans, internal combustion engines, or domestic animals could perform. Likewise with heat and light; both are seen as unnecessary because they could be produced by burning fuel. The truth is that electricity is the safest and most sustainable way to allow anyone to access energy--not just people who have the resources to collect fuel. Collecting fuel also requires the duplication of infrastructure for everyone--something that, while it does create jobs, raises costs beyond the means of the poor and is extremely inefficient. Efficiency is an abstract concept; the lives of the poor, weak, and elderly are not. We need electricity, lots of it, and the cheapest and cleanest generators available.
Emissions cannot be infinitely cut without a greater environmental impact. Would I rather have coal-generated electricity than nothing? Of course--it increases lifespan and standard of living. Today, though, we're not bound to that choice. There are two clean baseload generator types: nuclear and geothermal. Geothermal heat pumps are bound by proximity to greater-than-boiling-point heat sources--a rare condition on Earth. The vast majority of the world needs nuclear. Obviously, you can cut emissions by shutting coal-fired plants down, but only to a point. Eventually, we will hit the limit of modern technology, or there will be an innovation that requires electricity, or the poor will get angry, and we'll need something. During this time of low demand, no new plants will be designed because there's no reason to. Attempts at energy conservation in the name of the environment invariably result in entrenching the old, polluting coal-fired generators. Increasing energy use results in the construction of cleaner and cheaper plants--reducing environmental impact without affecting end-users. Utilities also have more liquid assets to work with when electricity use goes up; thus they are able to afford modern plants.
Just in case this sounds a bit Republican to you, this is clearly not supply-side economics. It clearly emphasizes the importance of demand on the entire electricity microeconomy.

Now, the details!

Lovins points to stock prices as an indicator of the economic value of investments. If a company is able to fool investors, it can make any decision look like it makes economic sense.

"The U.S. now uses 47 percent less energy per dollar of economic output than it did 30 years ago"

Interesting. That's mainly due to the exporting of industry overseas, and its replacement with less-energy-intense IT. Indeed, he mentions later:

"U.S. Environmental Protection Agency economist Skip Laitner calculates that from 1996 to mid-2005 prudent choices by businesses and consumers, combined with the shift to a more information- and service-based economy, [italics mine] cut average U.S. energy use per dollar of GDP by 2.1 percent a year—nearly three times as fast as the rate for the preceding 10 years."

"These savings [on energy per dollar of economic output, whatever he defines "economic output" as] act like a huge universal tax cut that also reduces the federal deficit. Far from dampening global development, lower energy bills accelerate it."

Because in order to make his statistics work, industry has to be exported? Exporting industry reduces the trade deficit (which is what I assume he's referring to, because it sure doesn't reduce the federal budget deficit)? Now energy efficiency causes globalization in the same way that ice cream causes drownings!

Cogeneration does make sense. How you can get heat from wind turbines (see p.6 of article) is an interesting question.

The use of oil and coal costs money. Nuclear, done right, costs less. Wind turbines and assuming that there won't be any technological advances cost much more than either option. He conveniently does not compare relative costs; he simply states that using oil and coal cost billions of dollars.

Energy conservation mainly requires the diversion of resources that could be used in developing new technology. Whether energy bills go up or down isn't the issue. The issue is the difference between costs as-is and costs using other options. Again, he doesn't compare anything, simply stating that he can make your energy costs go down. He may very well be able to. Others do better.

He is lucky to have baseload plants backing up those windmills and solar panels or else generation would be sporadic and prices would soar. 'Backing up' probably isn't the right term--windmills and solar panels provide a fraction of a percent of the electricity for the world. Germany's targets for wind capacity (the amount that could theoretically be generated if everything lined up perfectly, as opposed to what actually happens), have no bearing on the laws of physics.

Reductions in vehicle weight pose safety problems. Apparently he wants to save money at the expense of people's lives.

This "physicist" apparently doesn't know that strength means little to car safety. People were routinely killed in cars without padded dashboards and crumple zones that transmitted the energy from a collision through the chassis and into the passengers. Carbon fiber does the same thing. The issue is, fundamentally, weight. And guess who made those unsafe cars? Henry Ford. I also can't resist his comment that bicycle helmets are made of carbon fiber. They're made of styrofoam, which absorbs energy from collisions.

It is irrelevant how much of a car's energy is used to accelerate a driver. Cargo and passengers are equally, if not more, important. If you want 100 MPG with no passengers or cargo, buy a motorcycle. It saves money and is energy-efficient. However, it does not conform to the requirements of most people and is extremely dangerous in comparison to a car. Nuclear batteries could run a normal car quite well, and seem to me to be a much better alternative than either pollution or risking people's lives.

He shows a graphic on p.3 describing various losses along an electrical system. He doesn't exactly say what system it is; apparently, it's a system which converts the electrical energy coming in from a coal-fired power plant into the highest possible pressure in a fluid. Warning: unless 70+9+10+2+25+33+20+9.5=100, each percentage is not a part of the whole but a part of the remaining energy after the previous value took its cut. Just a little statistical manipulation to make the numbers look bigger than they actually are. On top of that, he doesn't seem to cite any sources for the numbers. Yes, I looked in his bibliography, which wouldn't get past a high-school English teacher. No, it's not there.
Power plant losses (70%): Nothing we can do about it. Cogeneration would be a great way to use the low-grade process heat, but that wouldn't make the electrical side of the system, which Lovins isolates for analysis, any more efficient. The number might be lowered a bit if the boiler heated gas for a turbine instead; I believe Rod Adams ran the numbers but I can't exactly locate them.
Transmission and distribution losses (2.7%): Not much we can do about this, either; barring the construction of even less efficient decentralized generators which duplicate infrastructure. Plus, it is considerably harder to convince 800,000 people to lower emissions than to lower emissions at one plant.
Motor losses (2.73%): Beats me. For electric motors, 90% is pretty efficient. It's certainly more efficient than an internal combustion engine (90% to 13%).
Drivetrain Losses (0.4914%): If you use the right size motor you don't need a drivetrain. I don't know what system he's talking about (maybe a wind generator--they need drivetrains), so I can't analyze it.
Pump losses (6.01965%): This is related not only to the design of the pump, which has nothing to do with electricity generation, but to the fluid being pumped. Again, I know nothing about the system, so I can't elaborate.
Throttle losses (9.9324225%): Yes, pressure does go down when you partially close a valve. That's what it's designed to do. Nothing inefficient about that.
Pipe losses (8.0061345%): Unless you want to coat the inside of the pipe with lubricant and contaminate the working fluid, you're going to have some friction on the inside of the pipe.
Energy output (9.5% using his method, a little over a tenth of a percent using his numbers): Here he switches units again. This neglects the fact that energy gets used in the process and the desired output is not the fastest jet of working fluid possible, but something that a controlled amount of working fluid does.

If he's worried about radiation from nuclear power plants, his home insulation exposed him to about 20 times more radiation through radon than he would have received from the plant. Details, details.

"The 4,000-square-foot structure—which also houses the original headquarters of Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), the nonprofit group I co-founded in 1982—consumes barely more electricity than a single 100-watt lightbulb. (This amount excludes the power used by the institute’s office equipment.)"

Yes, excluding everything, it uses very little electricity.

Why do we use so much electricity? Well, here's an example: I have one 13-inch TV, one VCR, one computer, eight compact-fluorescent lightbulbs, one bedside clock/radio, two telephones, one EnergyStar refrigerator, one EnergyStar dishwasher, one EnergyStar central A/C unit, one EnergyStar clothes dryer, and one washing machine. That's it for electricity for me.

• The 13-inch TV is about average among people I know. It's hanging by a thread (no remote, no speakers, no power switch, many record-stop-play-channels-volume quirks) and will be replaced soon. However, I cannot afford an LCD; the replacement unit will be a tube. This is one of the things Lovins neglects--the efficient items that do cost more cost a lot more.


• My VCR is entering its eleventh year of faithful operation and will continue to do so. I can play DVDs on my computer, so I see no reason to upgrade.


• I'm keeping this (fairly new) computer. I'm sure he would prefer it if I didn't, but I'm going to continue using it. My capital investment in this area is done for the next five or six years, just in time for no-additional-cost Dell LCD monitors and TV tuner cards.


• I use compact fluorescents for major lighting and an electroluminescent panel attached to an extension cord to read at night. Any objections?


• My clock/radio works. It can't use very much electricity, since I don't use the radio very much and it doesn't produce significant amounts of heat. Granted, it's running 24/7.


• The telephones don't show up on the electric bill. However, given that I don't use them very much, and the wire in the phone cable looks about 20 AWG (1.5 mm approximately), they probably don't use very much electricity. I could get rid of one, but I doubt that would make a difference.


• I like life, and I don't want to die of food poisoning. Thus, I'd like to keep the refrigerator. It uses about as little electricity as possible while still working, as opposed to the 1.2-cubic-foot one that I built in 7th grade and used until the refrigerant leaked out.


• The dishwasher is a waste of energy. Got me there.


• My A/C unit is also staying. In the intervening month between the old one dying and the installation of the new one, it was about 85-90 degrees every day. What's technology for but to solve problems like this?


• The dryer is a creature comfort, I guess. I could put clothes out on lines, except for the small animals which frequent my yard and the occasional blizzard.


• The washing machine is about 15 years old. When it dies, in will come another EnergyStar appliance and the electric bill will go down more.


• I use gas for water heating, space heating, and cooking. I would like to convert to electricity for those purposes, but currently can't because it actually costs actual money, something that the head of a six-million-dollar annual budget might be prone to forget.

The average electricity use per month in my region (Northern IL) is 688 kWh/month. My peak in July and August is about 720, and my average is about 400. If Lovins can reduce his electricity consumption to 100 by turning his house into a glass box with a foot of insulation on all sides, constructed to face the Sun correctly in the winter, good for him. But I live in reality--a standard 30'x100' lot, which is more than most people, who live in apartments or row houses and really can't do anything.

Hybrids are twice as efficient as conventional cars? The Toyota Prius gets 50 MPG at best. A 1996 Toyota Corolla gets 30 on a regular basis.

Hydrogen is inefficient and misses the point. See this blog post by Engineer-Poet for details and links elsewhere.

If carbon fiber compressed gas tanks are so commonplace, why was the lack of them a principal reason for the cancellation of the proposed replacement for the space shuttle?

Measuring the costs of efficiency is barrels of oil avoided ignores the fact that some efficiency programs cost more than others and everyone would require a slightly different program. It also ignores other fuels than oil which do not require energy use cutbacks.

Ethanol is economically viable now, but won't be if we try to actually use it. See another one of Engineer-Poet's posts on the topic (Update 12/3: Engineer-Poet objected to the previous link and refers us to another).

"The second alternative is replacing oil with lower-carbon natural gas, which would become cheaper and more abundant as efficiency gains reduce the demand for electricity at peak periods."

News flash: use doesn't go down if you use it to replace something.

Generating capacity of "alternative sources" means nothing. Real, actual, usable output does. Nuclear's much greater capacity factor offsets this difference. Why is "alternative" capacity growing six times faster than nuclear (if it actually is)? Nuclear plants take 15 years to build and aren't built frequently, due largely in part to protesters. Think nuclear plants don't face obstacles, either, or are subsidized? Plus, functionality is not a popularity contest.

Wind generators are reliable in the sense that they do not malfunction frequently. However, they can't generate reliable amounts of electricity, so the mechanical reliability is irrelevant. He also misleads in giving statistics for capacity in European nations and representing them as actual generation. Admittedly, I do not have much near-term hope for nuclear under current political conditions. However, his own data (see graph p.8 of article) shows that nuclear capacity isn't flat even when new plants aren't coming online--capacity is being increased at existing plants via upgrades.

When properly combined under ideal conditions without trying to generate baseload, and combined with large-scale hydro plants, solar and wind produce very little electricity very well. If you take away the baseload plant, or have a cloudy and still day, or inconveniently live in extreme latitudes, it stops working. You can put a nuclear power plant close to water and get electricity and hot water 24/7/365.

Nuclear power plants might be terrorist targets. They would certainly be terrorist targets if flying an airplane into a containment would cause any damage. However, I am certain that they will talk about it in an attempt to terrorize us into shutting them down--which would accomplish their goals at no cost to them. As for terrorist attacks on solar arrays, I have three words: black spray paint.

Nuclear power plants' costs do not change significantly change with changes in fuel costs. About 18 months' worth of fuel is contained in each core, stabilizing electricity prices. Time after time, nuclear power plants have cleaned up behind and propped up other generation methods.

Wind-derived electricity has sold for 2.9 cents per kWh. It does this because baseload plants can prop it up and prevent an eternal rolling brownout. Despite his repeated statements, nuclear receives no net subsidy.

Here's something else obvious: 20,000 wind turbines standing still in one place are equally as useful as 200,000. Yet, he counts electrical generation by capacity, not results, so the bigger wind farm doing nothing can all of a sudden produce all of America's electricity. Uncharacteristically, he also doesn't count line losses.

Solar panels are not roofing materials.

Unless you live on the equator, there isn't much surplus power from solar panels, and certainly not at peak loads. Most of us also do not live in "big, flat-roofed commercial buildings."

If you want to raise the standard of living of the two billion people currenly off the grid in the third world, a great way to do that would be to provide them with dependable electricity. How did we do that here? Baseload power plants and a grid. Every scenario that he gives in which solar and wind even approach working have a grid to provide baseload power.

Notice how in making his case for efficiency, he uses the period of 1977-1985. Quick: how was the economy in 1977-1985? Does anyone remember? This is his great example of what an economy would look like if managed properly.

For some reason, he thinks that carbon sequestration is better than not producing it. Wait--doesn't that mean that it's better to produce less nuclear waste, rather than store it? Yes. We should reduce the amount of nuclear waste produced in this country by getting rid of coal plants, which produce much more nuclear waste per megawatt and do not even attempt to contain it in most cases, recycling spent fuel, and using the balance in batteries and medical applications.

Building nuclear power plants takes time, but replaces an entire coal plant with a zero-emission baseload energy source. What's more effective than that? We have to get electricity from somewhere; it might as well be clean. Using less and less electricity doesn't fix the basic problem and prevents new plants from coming online. Plus, our energy policy should include the incidental costs of killing thousands of people. Environmental protection isn't about making a quick buck.

"The current U.S. energy policy harms the economy and the climate by rejecting free-market principles and playing favorites with technologies. The best course is to allow every method of producing or saving energy to compete fairly, at honest prices, regardless of which kind of investment it is, what technology it uses, how big it is or who owns it."

Here he shows exactly what he thinks of the environment. Cut everything loose! Let the buyer beware! Deregulate! Me, me, me! Oh, and preventing economies of scale from stomping everyone else out requires regulation.

Modern standards allow net metering. Are all grids modern?

Why has fuel economy gone down for the category of "cars and light trucks?" Because there are many more light trucks on the road today. Fuel economy for cars has gone up.

Electrical power generation isn't a "vital project?"