The Great Energy Swindle

‘What the world needs now is clean energy.’ says the soothing voice-over in the oil company TV commercial. ‘Green energy to save the planet. Like natural gas. Yes, already, we are providing millions of homes around the Globe with clean, efficient, abundant natural gas. For you. For the future. For our children.’ Cut to picture of cute toddler being tucked in by doting, protective father. Aaah. So that’s all right, then. An oil company tells us that they are providing clean natural gas to heat, fuel and power our cities. But hang on just a minute; doesn’t natural gas emit as much C02 as oil? And aren’t we running out of natural gas? Didn’t I read in the papers that they are already shutting down the gas fields in Ache? The answers are, in order: sort of, yes, and yes. Natural gas is almost as bad, carbon monoxide-wise, as oil. It produces 70% as much as oil, and half that of coal. So not exactly clean. Clean-er, I think is a better description. When it comes to other pollutants, though, LPG-run vehicles, mainly trucks and buses, emit 70-80% less toxic soot and smog-forming pollutants than diesel vehicles. So a qualified ‘hmmm’ is our opinion of natural gas. And, yes, we’re most likely past ‘peak’ gas, i.e. we have already extracted the majority of the available gas, and it’s diminishing returns from now on. But we’re running ahead of ourselves. Let’s start from the beginning.

What We Need

The world consumes around 500 ‘Exajoules’ of energy per year. That’s 5 x 10(20) Joules of juice, of which over 80% comes from burning fossil fuels in combustion engines. What’s a Joule? You don’t know? Me neither, so I looked it up. It is the energy required to move one ‘Newton’ the distance of one meter. Ah, yes, of course it is. Or the energy required to move an electric charge of one ’coulomb’ through an electrical potential difference of one volt. Which means….Oh, do shut up! It’s a way of measuring energy, all right? Is that so hard to understand?Here are the basic numbers: 37% of our energy comes from oil, 25% from coal, 23% from gas, 6% from nuclear, 4% from bio mass and 4% from hydro-electric plants. We use it as follows: 30%, or so, is spent on transportation, i.e. Planes, Trains and Automobiles (the title of a great movie with Steve Martin & John Candy, by the way). 20% goes on industrial use; making steel out of iron, iPods, toilet seats; that sort of thing. 10% goes on housing, residential and commercial, mainly heating, and 40% is spent generating electricity. Which is used for absolutely everything. A whopping 0.5% of the world’s energy production (Yeehaw!) is from solar energy, by the way. That’s rather ironic, don’t you think, considering that 99% of the world’s energy comes directly from the sun.So the main question that we all would like an answer to, is this: why are we so useless at converting this energy? The sun gives us a million times more energy than we can possibly spend, every single day, for free! It comes in, and just bounces straight out again. Its main commercial application at the moment, it seems, is tanning the fat arses of German tourists in Tenerife. Surely there must be a way to harness this abundance of free energy?

The second question is this: why is more than 80% of the energy we use on this planet generated from burning fossil fuels in combustion engines, a 200-plus year old technology which is highly pollutant, not very efficient and reliant on rapidly diminishing, finite resources? In order to attempt answer this, we will give you a brief overview of the current energy sources, how they work, and what the alternatives could be.

The Glorious Combustion Engine

Engines, in various forms, have been around since the 13^th century; in 1206, the Arab inventor Al-Jazari described a double-acting reciprocating piston pump with a crank-connecting rod mechanism. In 1509, Leonardo da Vinci described a compressionless engine. In the 17^th century, English inventor Sir Samuel Morland used gunpowder to drive water pumps, essentially creating the first rudimentary internal combustion piston engine.And, my personal favourite, in 1780, Alessandro Volta built a toy electric pistol in which an electric spark exploded a mixture of air and hydrogen, firing a cork from the end of the gun.

In 1705 Thomas Newcomen built the first steam engine, which started the industrial revolution. Basically, you burn something, coal, oil, to heat up water in a compression boiler; this creates pressurized steam, and the steam enters a chamber and expands, driving a piston to be pushed back, and then high pressure steam is inserted on the other side of the piston, driving it the other way, and so on, creating a back-and-forth motion, which can then drive a wheel, which can then drive anything you like, from a locomotive to a Spinning Jenny to Britney Spear’s legs. Fabulous. This one invention liberated the serfs, created the working classes, raised living standards and life expectancies and made it possible for us to both move around and to manufacture things. Brilliant. Problem was, you needed a lot of coal, and a lot of water, and a lot of space, so for transportation, in particular, it wasn’t very handy. But it was a lot better than our previous main source of energy, namely oxen.

A hundred and fifty or so years later, the internal combustion engine was invented. The principle here is that rather than creating pressurized steam and injecting this into a cylinder, a highly flammable material, gas or petrol, usually, is ignited inside the cylinder itself and explodes, which moves the piston backwards. You then have the same explosion on the other side, and so on, and motion is created. You can thus a) use lighter and more efficient fuel and, b) since the power is generated inside the engine, it now becomes much more portable. Depending on where you’re from and how you look at it, the internal combustion engine was invented by either Eugenio Barsanti, Jean Joseph Etienne Lenoir, Nikolaus Otto or any number of other people, but it is generally accepted that it was those grand fellows Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz that made it all work and started producing viable cars.

And that’s basically where we are today. Gasified petrol is injected into a cylinder and ignited. This moves a piston, which moves a wheel which moves your twelve hundred kilo car, with a ninety-kilogram you inside it, half a mile down to the shops and back, to buy a forty gram packet of cigarettes. With filter, so you can’t tell you’re smoking. But I digress. Turbo engines, diesel engines, Wankel engines, it’s all the same thing, really.But can’t we come up with something better to help us move from A to B, power our factories and make electricity, since the year 1879? A lot of people are banking on the imminent death of the internal combustion engine; most things can be powered by electricity, including cars, and we can come up with many ways of generating electricity, which is a much cleaner fuel at the end useage point. If we can only figure out how to store it efficiently, and to generate it in small spaces, cleanly, we will be using electricity for transport as well as everything else in the very near future, and so there will be no need for the old combustion engine.

Who the Hell is Charles Parson?

I studied, or, more accurately, pretended to study, modern political history at university, not electrical engineering. My interests are in the arts and humanities, so I’ve never bothered to find what electricity actually is, other than establishing that it’s quite painful to pee on an electric fence. But here’s the thing: you don’t know what electricity is, either, nor does anyone else. I have spoken to many of my left-brain brethren and read many articles, but I have failed to find a clear, concise description of what this energy actually consists of. But never mind, we do know that it exists and we know several ways of generating it.

Again, though, we are largely relying on a very old method, namely a steam turbine which drives a generator, which has moving magnetic fields in it; when these magnetic fields are made to spin, electricity is generated and moved within cables. Spooky coincidence: nobody can explain magnetism, either!

Sometimes the turbines are made to spin by water in motion, usually waterfalls, spinning the turbines, but usually it’s the ole’ combustion engine again, boiling the water and blowing pressurized steam into a turbine.80% of all electricity in the world today comes from these steam turbines, which were invented by Sir Charles Parsons in1884. Most of these steam turbines from 1884 are powered by burning fossil fuels. Now that’s what I call progress!

The Beauty of Grids

The reason we’ve stayed married to the internal combustion engine for a hundred and fifty years is not because it’s cute; rather, like most marriages, it’s a matter of convenience. It’s worked OK so far, and we can’t be bothered to break up even though we know we probably should. And here’s the clincher: with a combustion engine, the energy is stored in coal or oil or gas. Stable, easily transportable products all, that do not rot, whither or wine or waste. There it is, in tanks and containers, until it’s used, at which point it becomes heat. With electricity, you have traditionally generated it far, far away, transported it via cables and wires, used what you needed and squandered the rest. And we haven’t, thus far, been able to generate it in small enough spaces to be viable for cars; hence all the hoopla about hydrogen engines, which essentially entailed a mini-kraftwerk in your car, converting hydrogen into electricity. But nobody’s heard a peep from the hydrogen lobby for years until Honda launched tis clarity model a couple of months ago. But why not more? Why not hydrogen cars everywhere?

With a Solar Energy, the crux is not to make the electricity, it’s the fact that you need it when you can’t produce it, namely in the evenings. So you need to store it for a few hours, and that means massive batteries, which are in themselves highly pollutant both to produce and to dispose of, and cost a lot of money, too. Furthermore, when you store it you lose a lot of it.So the key is the grid. Use solar, wind, water, make electricity and sell it to the grid. Then buy it back when you need it. That way we avoid batteries.

A lot of research is being done trying to solve this problem, both by coming up with better batteries, of which lithium and liquid crystal ones look the most promising, and also by coming up with so-called energy circles. An example here is where the electricity generated by wind turbines running at night off the coast of Norway are used to pump up the water back up to the dams feeding the hydro-electrical plants, which are then switched on during the day. Clever, eh?

If Only There was a Way…

With electric cars, the problem is also one of storage; with current technologies, you can only store enough batteries in a car to run it for a couple of hundred kilometers. You then have to stop and wait for two hours whilst the batteries re-charge. So everyone (oil companies, car companies) is going ‘Oy vey’ and wringing their hands, saying, ‘No, it’s impossible, because it just doesn’t work, see? Can’t make batteries that last long enough, and who wants to wait for hours whilst you re-charge your batteries? Nope! Sorry! We give up! Internal combustion engines it is, forever. Sorry! We’ll give you an engine which runs partly on electricity but mostly on petrol, see? Surely that’s enough to make you all feel cuddly and green, hmmm? Go on, have a Hybrid! You still need oil! You need oil! You need oil!’

But wait! I have an idea. Why don’t we have lots of outlets, ‘re-fuelling stations’ we could call them, all along the roads that could store and sell ready-charged batteries or, for that matter hydrogen? A driver could then pull up at one of these ‘re-fuelling stations’, replace the empty batteries with a charged one, hand over an amount of money, and drive off! The whole transaction should, with some thought, not take longer than a couple of minutes. Hmmmm.

These ‘re-fuelling stations’ could also sell all kinds of other products like BBQ equipment, car cleaning stuff, men’s magazines and even fast food! You could collect coupons when you filled up, and save for a set of crystal wine glasses or a toaster, maybe. That would be great! But, no, that is too far-fetched, surely………….

By the way, dear reader, do feel free to at this point gather your friends and start a revolution, overthrowing the dumb-ass politicians and corrupt, evil oil companies that are driving us all towards a very steep cliff at 200 miles per hour, in a car powered by an internal combustion engine, of course, because there is no viable alternative to fossil fuels (quote, end quote, every single oil company executive and senior politician on the planet).

Viable Alternatives to Fossil Fuels

As we know, 80% of all our power comes from fossil fuels. And although some are cleaner than others, we can all agree that they are, on the whole, highly pollutant. There are of course efforts being made to come up with a way to make them less so, ‘Clean Coal’ being especially hyped at the moment. Still, we do know and agree that fossil fuels are finite, and will run out either in our lifetime or our children’s. So we have to come up with new fuels to fire our combustion engines, and new ways to generate electricity.

And the only exciting-looking alternative to oil and coal on the horizon is algae fuel. This is genetically engineered algae which secretes oil, which is then refined into transport fuels. When burnt, it generates a fraction of the CO2 of a petrol engine. Scores of companies, including all the major oil companies, are investing heavily in algae fuels, billions of dollars. Two people not exactly known for their stupidity, Mr. Bill Gates and Dr Craig Venter, have formed a company called Synthetic Genomics, which is aiming to produce ‘biocrude’ on a commercial scale in the next five years.

But regardless of the success or failure of these and other, more or less palatable, biofuels (don’t get me started on palm oil, for instance), the world is going increasingly electric. Electricity accounts for more and more of our energy consumption every year, so it is more and more urgent to generate it cleanly. And if we stick to steam turbines for a moment, we have several good options.

Turbines can also be driven by steam generated from Nuclear Fusion; about 15% of the world’s electricity is generated this way. France, the most proficient producer of nuclear energy, gets more than half its electricity from nuclear power plants. As we all know, nuclear power is relatively cheap and also very safe; until it isn’t, that is, and then it really is very bad indeed, e.g. Chernobyl. Nuclear power is so efficient that even certain oil-rich countries I can think of would like to have it to hand. For entirely peace-loving purposes such as heating pitta bread ovens and having nice, cozy under-floor heating in the Madrassas and suchlike, you understand.

An old method of harvesting the earth’s energy is gaining steam again lately, namely Geothermal Heat, which is where steam under pressure emerges from the ground and drives a turbine, or hot water evaporates a low boiling liquid to create vapour, to drive the turbine and thus generate electricity. Until recently, you could only tap serious heat very near the earth’s surface, in countries like Iceland, and indeed Indonesia. But lately, Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) has been developed to pipe down cold water two miles into the earth for ‘superheating’, thus making it viable almost anywhere.In its ‘low-tech’ form, Geothermal is widely used in Europe to generate moderate heat; my mum had it installed in her cottage in Sweden, heating it in the winter and cooling it in the summer, and reducing her electricity bill by 50% at a cost of less than $2,500.

Biomass is another fancy word for burning plant matter, really. You gather waste products from the timber and forest industries and fast-growing trees and bushes, turn them into slow-burning pellets, boil water, make steam and….you know the rest.

WTE (waste to energy) is a new and exciting concept, which entails quite simply burning household and industrial waste with the minimal amount of pollution, boiling water, making steam and…..hello, Sir Charles! Personally, I think it’s a load of old rubbish. Sorry, I had to say that. In urban areas, you could easily generate 25% of your electricity, or 50% of your heat, this way. The key is to filter out the toxins from the waste that you burn. In Sweden, they use this method to remotely heat up hot water, which is then piped into homes for heating. Again, storing energy in the form of heat is far more efficient today than storing it as electricity.

Other turbine based methods of making electricity but without Sir Charles getting involved include hydro-electric plants, which we have a lot of in Scandinavia. You also have more experimental methods such as micro hydro-electric systems.

Wave-motion energy has also been making, er, a lot of waves lately. At least three dozen companies are developing ways of capturing the slow but steady and inexhaustible motions created by waves and tides. The market is expected to grow to over $500 million per year in the next four – five years.

Wind power is huge, and will hopefully get more and more and more important, since power generation cost is on par with industry average, and there is nothing but good news from the wind power industry. The Chinese have doubled, and then tripled, their investments in the last two years. Last year alone, world wide investment in new wind power production exceeded $35 billion. In 2020, it is conservatively estimated that we will generate in excess of 20% of all our electricity from wind. Pretty amazing stuff, and happening right now.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Desert

For reasons that I can’t quite understand, Photovoltic Panels are the best-known alternative energy source today. They work by converting light directly to electricity, and I really don’t understand how it works. But it does. PV panels have had a boost lately, with the invention of the so-called ‘thin panels’. This has brought down the price of PV panels from $4 per kilowatt to $1, at least in theory; in Bali, you still pay closer to $3 per KW. Their enormous benefit is their portability; you generate your own electricity, right where you need it; no electricity grid needed, no central power stations necessary. If the prices really do come down and the PV panels become widely available, and can be made in a more environmentally friendly fashion, the benefits would really be enormous. Revolutionary.

But, as usual in life, it is the more pragmatic, boring methods that usually get less attention, and so it is that Solar Thermal Power has been largely overlooked, in favour of its sexy PV Panel cousin, at least until now.Solar Thermal energy can be divided into two main areas: heating / cooling and electricity generation. The first is whereby you collect low to moderate amounts of heat through flat roof panels, in which you run pipes of water, which is then in turn used either as simple old hot water, or used to cool or heat the air (via heat exchangers). A simple hot water system can be bought for a couple of thousand dollars and will, depending on where you live and your electricity costs, save you anywhere from 10 to 30% on your energy bills, with a pay-back of 2-3 years.To generate electricity, however, you need more heat; 90-150 degrees is very well for hot water, but to run a steam turbine you need 400 plus degrees. For that, my friends, you need mirrors, and lots of’em.

Concentrated Solar Power, CSP, works by concentrating light onto pipes or a tower, heating up a fluid to a very high temperature, and using a steam turbine to create electricity. The higher the temperature, the more ‘solid’ the fluid can be, which makes it easier to store and to retain heat, and you can therefore build up a ‘bank’ of heat and produce electricity day and night.

You have two basic methods, the parabolic trough design and the solar tower. The former looks like a trough made of mirrors, in the centre of which runs a pipe containing a fluid, usually a synthetic oil. The second is a tower, containing pipes, in the centre of a park of vertically placed parabolic mirrors, directing the light up and down the tower. This can generate heat of over 500 degrees. The Nevada Solar One in Nevada, the largest commercial CSP plant to date, will produce 64 Megawatts of electricity, enough to supply 50,000 homes with all the power they could ever need.

The problem is cost; if you take away subsidies and taxes and all other external factors, electricity today generally costs 5 to 12 cents per kilowatt to produce. The solar thermal plants that have been built today, mainly in California and southern Spain, generate juice at around 13 cents per kilowatt. That’s not that far off. Below 10, it gets really sexy. Are we there yet? I think we are very, very close.

Window Dressing

Energy is a complicated issue, and there are many other aspects to it than simply generating it. Environmental issues aside, you have issues like national security, safety in handling and production, scarcity and renewawbility, and of course plain cost. In writing this brief and highly unscientific summary, what has struck us is the reluctance by governments and big businesses alike to seek serious alternatives to old-fashioned methods of generating energy and power the engines of industry and transport. Why, when other aspects of our lives, such as electronics, telecommunications and the internet have been transformed beyond recognition in the past ten or twenty years alone, has the energy sector remained largely unchanged for a hundred years? It simply doesn’t make any sense.

If you take our recent awareness of global warming into account, this lethargy is even more baffling. And if you take geo-political security into account, where over a trillion dollars a year is transferred from liberal, secular democracies into the hands of despotic rulers of fanatical Islamist states whose stated aim is our very obliteration, well, then you may be forgiven for wondering what the hell is going on here.There are also some staggering numbers here: the United States spends 14% of its GDP on energy. That translates into approximately 1.5 trillion dollars. Per year. Just in America. The US alone spends three hundred billion dollars annually on buying oil from the Middle East alone. Exxon Oil, the world’s largest corporation, had revenues of five hundred billion dollars last year. Will they be pleased if we use solar thermal power to generate electricity rather than oil, and when we use electricity to fuel our cars rather than petrol? And how far will they go to protect their five hundred billion dollar a year revenue? You tell me.

The Future is Bright, Real Bright

The good news is that there is finally real progress on the horizon. In our view, the three sources of energy that can be expanded by a factor of ten, right now, with existing technology, are Wind Turbines, Geo-Thermal and CSP, with a big caveat to algae biofules and PV solar panels, should the technologies for both improve drastically in the next five years.

Just a couple of weeks ago, a German-led consortium announced a 400 billion Euro investment in Solar Thermal power plants along the entire Mediterranean basin, from Spain to Morocco to Israel to Turkey to Italy; this will, in 10 years time, account for 50% of all electricity production in the EU. Our question is: why not a lot more, now, right now? The technology is here now, and costs can easily be drastically reduced if the volumes are large enough.

CSP is a totally safe, very simple way of generating electricity without the use of expensive components and harmful chemicals like in the (in our view) environmentally dodgy Photo-Voltic panel system. CSP just needs light heat and deserts for maximum efficiency. In Europe and North Africa, there’s plenty, as there are in Southern United States and Australia. China and India, too, are perfect locations for massive CSP plants. And since we’ve cut down all the world’s forests, we have brand new desert areas in tropical areas like Indonesia, South America and Malaysia, too! So what are we waiting for?

An investment of two or three trillion dollars, about the same amount of money that the US and European governments spent last year to bail out those Ponzi scheme bankers (don’t get me started), or indeed what Europe and the US spent on oil in the past twelve months, would build enough solar thermal plants to give the entire world totally clean electricity forever and thus stop global warming, drastically reduce pollution, save our resources and remove dependency on oil. What could possibly be the reason for not making this investment right now, this minute, as a matter of environmental and economical survival? I really would like to know: wouldn’t you?

Perhaps it is the same people, for the same reasons, that we haven’t converted petrol stations to battery stations, where drivers of electric cars could quickly and simply change batteries and drive on; had we done so, we could have converted to all-electrical cars in 99% of the world ten years ago. Why didn’t we? Why don’t we, now, tomorrow morning? Is it me? Am I an idiot? Am I paranoid? Are you?

Yours and Mine

There are things we should do because it works, and things we should (could) do to make a statement. Take solar panels for example. Or rolling the CEO’s of Shell, Exxon and Total in tar and feathers and chasing them out of town. Nonono! Only joking! Back to solar panels. At the moment they cost $3 per kilowatt in Bali. That means, to you and me, that an average home, which needs 10,000KW, will need to have thirty thousand dollars worth of panels on the roof. That sort of house will have currently have an electricity bill of US$5-700 per month. Call it seven thousand dollars a year. So that means a payback time of almost seven years. The equipment, the house, life itself will be broken in seven years, and you’ll probably be senile, divorced, deported or dead by then. And they use tons of precious metals and harmful chemicals to manufacture.So Solar PV panels don’t make environmental or financial sense just yet.

But the Chinese are now claiming to be down to a buck a kilowatt, using these ‘film panels’ that will last for twenty years, so look at the numbers now: ten grand will give you all the juice you need for twenty years with no electricity bills. This is what a stock broker would refer to as a ‘scream buy’. But we’re two-three years away, at least.

So let’s look at things that are available to us all, right now. First, you spend two thousand dollars on a solar hot water system. That’ll reduce your electricity by a thousand dollars a year, so two-three years payback.

Then you change all your lights to CFS lights. Not the LED lights, they cost twenty dollars apiece; CFS, you can buy them in Carrefour for six dollars plus fitting, so eight, if you go for the fancy halogen lights. These babies reduce each light bulb from fifty watts to five. So if you, like most houses in Bali, have 40-50 lights in all (count them; you do, too), you go from 2-2,500KW to 200-250. That’ll cost you another four hundred bucks and save you another thousand dollars a year. THEN, you change your aircons to the new Panasoic Eco Range Air Conditioners. These reduce your electricity usage by half and they don’t spike when they start. They’re $1,200 each though, so not cheap. So five of those, six grand, but it will bring down your bill with 40%. That’s another $2800 a year saving, so a payback of three years and a bit. So, let’s see, you’ve spent, what, $8,500, call it ten grand with a solar pump or two, and the electrician’s fee to put it all in. But your bill will come down from seven thousand dollars to two thousand dollars, so your payback is three years tops. Worth it? Hell yes! You think every Indonesian shopkeeper will do this, once they work out the numbers? Hell yes! And do you think these fifty million Indonesian shopkeepers will put Solar PV panels on their roofs in 3-4 years time, when the technology has improved and costs have come down? You bet. Will fifty million Indonesian shopkeepers, and all of us middle class consumers, have a substantial environmental impact? Yeah, baby! So do it. We did it at our house. We save money galore, and our smugness ratio is up by 700%. Now that’s what I call progress!