Energy, Civilization, and Policy

For NCFCA debaters looking for summer deep-dive reading on the energy topic, Bill Gates in numerous posts recommends the research and books of Czech-Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil. A December, 2017 GatesNotes post, How energy makes life possible explains:

In his latest book, Energy and Civilization: A History, [Smil] goes deep and broad to explain how innovations in humans’ ability to turn energy into heat, light, and motion have been a driving force behind our cultural and economic progress over the past 10,000 years. Yes, our history has a lot to do with kings and queens and games of thrones. Smil shows that it has even more to do with energy innovation.

Mr. Gates tweeted his recommendation of a Science magazine look at Smil’s work, Meet Vaclav Smil, the man who has quietly shaped how the world thinks about energy, (Science, May 21, 2018).

For debaters reviewing federal energy policies, consider this post quoting Smil’s 1987 take on renewable energy in  ‘Lure of the Renewables’ (Vaclav Smil in 1987 for today)  (MasterResource, August 18, 2016):

Perhaps the most distressing characteristic displayed by the pushers of soft energy was the intellectual poverty of their grand designs, their impatient dismissal of all criticism, their arrogant insistence on the infallible orthodoxy of their normative visions.

Another post, ‘The Limits of Energy Innovation’: Timeless Insight from Vaclav Smil (MasterResource,November 22, 2013), offers an historical perspective on energy development and is skeptical of federal government green energy programs:

President Barack Obama has promised an energy revolution in the world’s largest economy, with renewable sources of power and “green” technologies breaking America’s – and ultimately the world’s – dependence on conventional fuels…. But how realistic is this vision?

The federal push to subsidize green (or “sustainable”) energy has influenced foreign aid programs and priorities and been heavily promoted by the United Nations, World Bank, and NGOs. Consider this USAID climatelinks post: Enhancing Capacity for Low Emission Development Strategies (EC-LEDS):

Enhancing Capacity for Low Emission Development Strategies (EC-LEDS) is a flagship U.S. program that has forged partnerships with more than two dozen developing countries—from Colombia to Indonesia to South Africa to Ukraine— committed to and taking concrete actions to achieve low emission development.

Under EC-LEDS, USAID, the State Department, and other U.S. agencies work with partner countries to help develop tools and analyses to estimate GHG emissions and identify and pursue the best options for low emission growth. This empowers countries to evaluate low emission pathways across economic sectors so they can choose the optimum path to low emission development.

But what happens when “low emission pathways” cost more and provide less-reliable power than electricity from burning natural gas, oil, or coal?

The Earth Institute’s Jeffrey Sachs popular 2005 book The End of Poverty was followed in 2015 by The Age of Sustainable Development. The goal of ending poverty seems replaced by the goal of developing sustainably. Does this mean advancing wind and solar power across the developing world is more important than providing the quickest and least expensive electricity, even if hydrocarbon powered? U.S. and Western Europe’s expanding wind and solar projects are being promoted to much poorer countries.

To End Poverty, Increase Access to Energy, (Scientific American, September 17, 2018) is subtitled: “Concern about climate change has unintended consequences for the most impoverished countries,” notes that among the seventeen United Nations “Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs), “access to energy for all” was number seven.

But how much energy “for all”? Well, according the the United Nations, goals for annual energy for the poor of the world would be as much as people in developed countries use in just 33 hours:

Yet the data indicator used by the U.N. to determine energy access success is minimum threshold of 50 kilowatt-hours per year. In other words, the goal would be considered met if a person in India or Senegal used as much energy in a whole year as an average American uses in just 33 hours. 

When wind, solar, ethanol power are cost-competitive with natural gas, clean coal, nuclear, and hydro, for example, they will be in demand by citizens in both developed and developing countries.

The Scientific American Observations post notes:

Scalable energy solutions aimed at business and productive uses do not fit the standard narrative about poverty reduction. They are, by nature, vast in size and industrial in nature. Natural gas is one example of a dramatic, often overlooked solution. It’s worth taking a closer look.

Natural gas is an energy-dense fuel that can be used to generate electricity, power cars and fuel cookstoves, all with significantly lower air and carbon emissions than existing technologies like coal-fired power plants or indoor heating from wood or other solid fuels.

Bjorn Lomborg in Let There Be More Than Light (Project Syndicate, July 17, 2018), highlights benefits of electricity from the grid, almost all powered by burning hydrocarbons, plus hydro and nuclear, then explains that energy goals are both stepped up and down for the developing world:

A familiar refrain suggests that instead of dirty, coal-fired power plants, poor countries should “leapfrog” straight to cleaner energy sources like off-grid solar technology. Influential donors – including even the World Bank, which no longer funds coal energy projects – endorse this view.

Access to grid electricity makes a dramatic difference in the developing world:

There is a strong, direct connection between power and poverty: the more of the former, the less of the latter. A study in Bangladesh showed that grid electrification has significant positive effects on household income, expenditure, and education. Electrified households experienced a jump of up to 21% in income and a 1.5% reduction in poverty each year. …

Over the past 16 years, nearly every person who gained access to electricity did so through a grid connection, mostly powered by fossil fuels. And yet donors say that many of the 1.1 billion people who are still without electricity should instead try solar panels.

Access to Energy is at the Heart of Development,(World Bank, April 18, 2018) reports:

The World Bank has a long track record of helping developing countries expand access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy. It is doing so through supporting grid investments and helping to develop off-grid markets, for example, through programs such as Lighting Global. Since 2010, the Bank has provided more than $5 billion for energy access in over 35 countries through some 70 projects.

Following the Lighting Global link opens a page with picture of happy young people with this description:

WHO WE ARE
Lighting Global is the World Bank Group’s platform to support sustainable growth of the international off-grid solar market as a means of rapidly increasing energy access to the 1 billion people without grid electricity.

Solar may be the way to go for millions of poor people around the world. I rely on solar power for my nifty water fountain and fun outdoor christmas tree lights. But I don’t try to power my refrigerator, hot water heater, washing machine, or other household appliances with solar.

Many articles highlight the benefits and potential of rural solar and mini-and micro-grid electricity. For example, Empowering the powerless—let’s end energy poverty (The Conversation, January 29, 2018) looks at opportunities to bypass bureaucracy and dictators:

Distributed-energy technologies such as micro-grids can provide an electricity-deprived citizen with power — and the ability to create income. This pathway to power delivery is a disruptive force that will forever change the relationship between electricity user and producer. It makes it possible for a citizen with little capital to bypass the heavy hand of bureaucracy and authoritarian dictators.

Micro-grids are usually hampered or blocked in the U.S. by regulated utilities that have been granted monopoly control over local power distribution. Microgrids have many advantages for adding reliance to electric power supplies. See First Utility-Scale Microgrid in U.S. Enters Service (IEEE Spectrum, May 26, 2017) and Are Microgrids the Future for Utilities? (Power Engineering, Sept. 13, 2018 and Illinois Project Opens the Door for Non-Utility-Owned Microgrids (EDF, Environmental Defense Fund, February 28, 2018):

ComEd will work with EDF and CUB to develop an innovative tariff that will allow third parties to create and manage localized power grids that can disconnect from the centralized grid, known as microgrids. Utilities have traditionally controlled electricity delivery, but this decision starts the process for new, competitive players to enter the microgrid game.

Illinois Project Opens the Door for Non-Utility-Owned Microgrids (Environmental Defense Fund, February 28, 2018)

For more on energy resilience, see: Energy Security and Grid Resilience (Climate Etc., April 20, 2019)

A key federal energy policy reform could sidestep the conflicting claims over whether wind and solar are cost competitive with traditional hydro and hydrocarbon energy sources. Let people who want wind and solar energy buy it from firms that which to provide it. Deregulate and decentralize electric utilities and encourage competition.

Suggestions for reforming energy policy and the electricity grids is discussed in Clean energy technologies threaten to overwhelm the grid. Here’s how it can adapt: The centralized, top-down power grid is outdated. Time for a bottom-up redesign. (Vox, December 27, 2018):

…The need for local resilience in the face of climate chaos is growing all the time.

What’s more, the energy world is changing rapidly. A system designed around big, centralized power plants and one-way power flows is grinding against the rise of smarter, cleaner technologies that offer new ways to generate and manage energy at the local level (think solar panels and batteries).

Unless old systems are reconceived and redesigned, they could end up slowing down, and increasing the cost of, the transition to clean electricity (and hampering the fight against climate change).

Energy professionals are aware that strains are starting to show. Energy sector reform is all the buzz these days, with active discussions and experimentation around rate design, market reforms, subsidies, regulations, and legislative targets.

Clean energy technologies threaten to overwhelm the grid. Here’s how it can adapt. (Vox, December 27, 2018)

It’s not clear whether majorities want to pay higher electricity prices to address concerns about future climate changes from hydrocarbon power emissions (CO2). As the scientific and political debate goes on, decentralizing electricity production allows for improving security as well as widening choice so those who prefer wind and solar energy have opportunities to purchase it (much as people are free now to purchase organic food they believe is better for their family and for the environment).

The question for energy planners in the U.S. and in other countries turns on the difference between “planners” and “searchers” trying to make the decisions about which investment are best for electricity consumers. Development economist William Easterly notes that in developed countries we rely on “searchers” or entrepreneurs for most of our innovation and economic development. Government and NGO planners make more of these economic decisions in the developing world, thanks in part of foreign aid from NGOs and western governments.

Bjorn Lomborg in The Poor Need Cheap Fossil Fuels (New York Times, December 2, 2013) concludes:

What those living in energy poverty need are reliable, low-cost fossil fuels, at least until we can make a global transition to a greener energy future. This is not just about powering stoves and refrigerators to improve billions of lives but about powering agriculture and industry that will improve lives.

Lomborg also notes the burden of green energy subsidies hits low-income households in developed countries: Climate-Change Policies Can Be Punishing for the Poor (Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2018).

Lomborg, in Let There Be More Than Light (Project Syndicate, June 17, 2018) emphasizes that pushing solar on the developing world sets limits that don’t go far beyond lighting:

Off-grid energy at this level will never power a factory or a farm, so it cannot reduce poverty or create jobs. And it will not help fight the world’s biggest environmental killer: indoor air pollution, which is mostly caused by open fires fueled by wood, cardboard, and dung, and claims 3.8 million lives annually. This is not a concern in rich countries, where stoves and heaters are hooked up to the grid; but because solar is too weak to power stoves and ovens, recipients of off-grid solar panels will continue suffering.

In 2016, the Nigerian finance minister called out the West for its “hypocrisy” in attempting to block Africa from using coal to solve its power shortages. “After polluting the environment for hundreds of years,” she said, “now that Africa wants to use coal, they deny us.”

Toward decentralized energy
Decentralized decision making has benefits in wealthy countries like the U.S. as well. State and federal Departments of Education don’t have access to the decentralized knowledge or necessary incentives to discover, fund, or provide quality K-12 education.

State and federal energy departments similarly lack needed knowledge and incentives. Yet still these state and federal bureaucracies are charged with deciding which companies and technologies to subsidize and regulate. Plus, today’s energy regulations, programs and policies were set in place decades ago when energy technologies were far less sophisticated.

For an interesting review of recently proposed energy tax policy reform, see: Tax Reform Cuts Big Energy Subsidies, Boosts Support for Emerging Competitors (American Action Forum, November 20, 2017). Summary:

• The House version of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) would cut federal tax subsidies to fossil fuels, wind power, and electric vehicles; AAF estimates these changes would save taxpayers nearly $18 billion over 10 years.
• The distribution of subsidies would pare back preferences for big incumbent energy industries, and include more competing industries under existing tax provisions. This would modestly level the energy competition playing field.
• Tax reform should aim to make the U.S. tax code more pro-growth and internationally competitive—not to reform energy policy. While the TCJA would make some positive changes to energy provisions, it does not eliminate the government’s use of tax subsidies for energy policy.

Read more:  https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/tax-reform-cuts-big-energy-subsidies-boosts-support-emerging-competitors/#ixzz5qHTqXo9U
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