If you had to jump off a sinking ship to a lifeboat and you could only take 60 pounds worth of equipment, would you rather take:
1. One power generator, one gallon of gasoline, one rifle, one round of ammunition
2. One solar panel, one battery, one fishing rod, one net
Call me a fool, but not knowing I will be left on my own, I would rather go with option two and be self-reliant for the next 35 years than pray every day to be rescued (and charged for supplies)
For 16 years now, I have been in the business of harvesting and selling “pervasive energy.” This is what I call anything that can be locally sourced for free. Whether it is wind, cardboard, photons, or banana peels, heck, I would use oil if it were free, did not need tons of work and capital to make it available, and would not kill our children in the process. In all these years, I have had to clash with lots of dear friends, who were, and still are, actively carrying the water of well-oiled (pun intended) PR machines for big oil. It has been baffling to watch them squeeze into the most untenable positions: supporting, both financially and emotionally, a cumbersome and titanic industry that is today the most invasive and costly infrastructure ever built-in human history. But the time has come for all of us – energy industry experts and nonprofessionals alike – to make the rational and emotional transition to the future of energy, to let go of these old tropes, and to fully embrace the opportunities ahead of us.
“What we really need is for traditional players to seize the moment and get on board and for you at home to tune out the naysayer that just what you to make a case for outdated, geopolitically dangerous, and capital-intensive burning fuel.”
Let us start by recognizing (and, yes, celebrating) the role fossil fuels have played in our past. Everything we have today, including the ability to feed the entire planet and double our life expectancy, is thanks to the essential and remarkable contribution of fossil fuel: coal first and oil and its derivatives later. Because of it, we were able to build and accelerate discoveries that augmented our abilities exponentially and take humanity out of extreme poverty (from 96.00 percent of the world population in 1750 to 9.2 percent in 2020). At the beginning of 1800, from a technology and financial standpoint, it made complete sense to feed the modern steam engine with coal rather than wood: it was cheaper to produce, easier to distribute, and had an energy density that was four times as much as wood or charcoal. For a little over a century, coal was the undisputed king of the industrial revolution. We had to wait till the dawn of the 20th century, blessed with new technologies and needs, to see oil creep in and steal the coal’s stage. The “new fuel” brought almost twice the energy density and, (hear here) lower pollution due to substantially less “fly ash” (particulates), thus representing the new source of cheaper, cleaner energy. Just like those resisting a clean energy transition today, coal did cede the way to the oil without some effort. In fact, it was mostly because of environmental concerns (even at that time) that legislators, under tremendous pressure from a broad population led by Suffragettes and concerned mothers, ended up regulating the industry and imposing lower emission standards.
In an effort to demystify the propaganda against renewable energy – promoted by the oil and adjacent industries and embraced by armchair energy experts (e.g., some of your friends and mine) - here are my five key suggestions:
1. Breathe, sit back, and leave the transformation to us. All the players in this industry have the money, the technology, and the momentum necessary to transition to more abundant, cheaper energy in a completely seamless way. The temporary unbearable spike on your utility bills is not due to the transition to renewables but to our well-established reliance on erratic dictators, intergovernmental entities (e.g., OPEC), and monopolistic companies that control the dial of hydrocarbon outputs.
2. Recognize that the era of centralized production and sprawling distribution is officially over. Distributed energy production and storage is the only financially viable solution – and frankly, it is a great one. The national grid is crumbling, and we do not have the money or the need to rebuild it to allow for sufficient management of utility-scale power generation. Renewable energy included. There was a moment when we decided and were forced into accepting that it was smarter to stop laying telephone cables and start relying on the “pervasive” signal transmission capability that was possible because of free ether. We stopped building phone booths, and we started installing cell towers. We have not stopped since, and I would say our life is better today because we can reach our loved ones whenever and from wherever we want without sitting by the phone.
3. Accept that utility-scale nuclear (whether fusion or fission) is a myth. At least the large-scale ones to which we are accustomed. Even the French, who rely almost entirely on nuclear energy (70 percent of their production), and have no regulatory or cultural barriers against it, are seeing their electrical bills increase year over year. Even if nuclear power generation were the cheapest source of energy, or miraculously it was free, it still would not make sense to produce it centrally and distribute it. This brings us back to distribution – all energy sources face the same growing transmission costs due to old and decaying distribution infrastructure.
4. Forget your concerns about paying subsidies for renewables (of course, oil still gets them by the billions). The “pervasive clean energy” no longer needs aid to prosper. Recent bipartisan legislation signed by President Biden will only accelerate its adoption and the benefits it will provide for all of us. This new program is similar to the regulations introduced by Mr. Earl Butz, Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture in the early 70s, which changed our agricultural subsidy program to stabilize both the food supply and the farmer’s incomes after the Great Depression.
5. Acknowledge that your concern over the materials necessary to produce wind turbines, solar panels, and the ultimate culprit, batteries, is unjustified because: firstly, you use materials to build practically self-operating equipment that runs for decades and it is reusable; secondly, we are already phasing out minerals that cannot be sourced locally and/or that cannot be recycled.
So, if you really care about the energy supply chain, then remember that digging for coal and oil, extracting it, protecting it, refining it, and, mostly, moving it around requires MASSIVE amounts of energy and consequent emissions. I am leaving out cleanup costs, healthcare, and the immense U.S. Defense budget, which includes our sweet (green, of course) presence of The Fifth Fleet to protect the Strait of Hormuz between the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf. On top of that, once burned, it will be gone! It will be in your air, in your lungs, but no more in your bank account.
Therefore, my dear friends, a while ago, I would have asked for your help and support. To beg or thump your fists at the door of your legislators while we were rushing to find a solution that would be at the same time reliable and financially sound. Today the wait is over. What we really need is for traditional players to seize the moment and get on board and for you at home to tune out the naysayer that just what you to make a case for outdated, geopolitically dangerous, and capital-intensive burning fuel.
Now is the time to say hello to the exciting, clean, and pervasive energy world. No doubt oil had these same challenges when it was displacing coal, as did the automobile industry when it was displacing horse-drawn carriages, but move forward, friends, and embrace this change – I promise you, you will not want to go back once you do!
