Lights Out!: Ten Myths About (and Real Solutions to) America's Energy Crisis

Image of Lights Out!: Ten Myths About (and Real Solutions to) America's Energy Crisis
Author(s): 
Release Date: 
July 5, 2010
Publisher/Imprint: 
St. Martin's Press
Pages: 
272
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"As difficult as our choices are today, they will be more difficult tomorrow."

Spencer Abraham is the former U.S. Secretary of Energy who now serves as the chairman and CEO of the Abraham Group, an international business/strategic consulting firm. The book jacket is plastered with blurbs of praise from the former CEO of Ford, the CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers, the Director of JPL, and a former astronaut who is currently the director of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

This book is recommended reading for everyone and anyone, as c. The book provides a good overview of the current U.S. energy policy (or lack of), but also contains one or two glaring absences and inconsistencies (which will be pointed out in this review).

Spencer Abraham was an interesting choice to serve as Secretary as Energy for George W. Bush, as when as senator he cosponsored a bill to eliminate the Energy cabinet post. He was appointed with the proviso that he had changed his mind on that issue, which he had (unlike Bush’s appointment to the UN, who actively sought while in office to diminish the UN). Spencer Abraham admits that “energy is a very complex topic,” but this book has been clearly and ably written.

Abraham is not shy with myth-busting as he believes the “propagation of these myths have proved fatal to the development of good energy policy.” The Ten Myths are provided to the reader in bold print on the first page of the first chapter of the book:

1. We can achieve energy independence.
2. If gas prices rise abruptly it must be due to an oil company conspiracy.
3. Global warming is a complete hoax
4. Nuclear plants are just as unsafe as they were at 3 Mile Island.
5. Renewable energy is universally popular and completely safe for the environment.
6. We are entering the age of natural gas that will follow the ages of coal and oil, and it will largely solve our energy problems.
7. Raising CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards 30% will produce 30% reduction in oil consumption.
8. Electrical transmission lines cause cancer.
9. All you have to do is to choose the right energy technology and subsidize it.
10. All we need is a new Manhattan Project to solve our energy needs.

It would be impossible to cover everything but a few key points in this review. Myth #1, American oil peaked in 1970, when we produced 10 million barrels per day. World peak oil discovery happened in the 1960s, and peak production from conventional sources around the world occurred in 2006. Today we consume 14 million barrels per day and 60% of it is imported. It appears that we can’t replace oil in U.S. as an important source of energy for the foreseeable future. Even if we drill-baby-drilled in Alaska, there might be only two years’ worth of oil there (at 1M barrels/day).

As to Myth #2, The price of oil today matches the rate of inflation, and as to oil company conspiracies, Abraham admits that at the time of California’s power outages, he hadn’t followed the goings on at Enron as well as he should, which negates the busting of this particular myth.

As to Myth #3, Abraham believes in science, which put him (quietly) on the opposite side of the president who appointed him.

For Myth #4, his claim is that science and technology have advanced well beyond the events of 3 Mile Island in 1979; that half of our current fleet of 104 working nuclear plants had been completed after 1979.

In regards to Myth #5, the claim is that for any renewable source, there can be found a lobbyist squarely against it. For example, wind mills produce an annoying hum, can cause death to birds and bats that fly into them, and alter scenery to the worse whether placed on mountain ridges or off the coast.

Myth #6, LNG exploitation is in its early stages; natural gas is better for cooking or heating than for replacing coal. Gas turbines that produce 20% of our energy are 39% of our capability. Gas turbines are mainly used for peak power as they are easy to start and stop but expensive to run. And anyway it’s too soon to tell as estimates tend to be optimistic. Are there 60 years worth of LNG or only 15 years?

In Myth #7, auto mileage improvements only reduce the rate of energy consumption, but will never reduce the total amount used. If miles per gallon improve, people will simply travel more. (Abraham does not address the role of public transportation in reducing oil consumption, a serious oversight.)

Myth #8 has long been argued as flawed by science. But to explain the reason why, Abraham does not mention science’s explanation, the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation, perhaps because that would counter his argument favoring greater numbers of nuclear plants.

Myths #9 and #10 are based on the limits of science. There is no clear-cut technology winner to back, and the Manhattan Project was a feat of engineering, not science. “There is no game-changing source of power waiting around the corner.”

For future policy, Abraham proposes a mix of energy sources, what he calls the 30-30-30 plan. 30% renewable, 30% nuclear and 30% clean coal plus LNG by 2030.

Abraham addresses each element of the 30-30-30 plan in turn. Today, only about 3% of our energy needs come from renewable sources—and the unanswered question is how to grow renewables from 3% to 30% (except by additional funding for research). The current sources for renewables come from solar, wind, biomass, geothermal, hydroelectric, tides, and hydrogen (maybe). There are immense obstacles to increasing the amount of energy from these sources in a short period of time. Hydroelectric can’t be really expanded (6% of U.S. total energy) as most every useable location has already been dammed. Ethanol has been shown by recent attempts to scale up to be not terribly effective as an energy substitute. The problem with wind and sun is that these sources are intermittent, and efficient storage of electrical energy on the large scale remains an open problem in science. Mechanical storage has been solved, for example, by raising and lowering water levels in a reservoir, but this solution suffers from NIMBY, Not In My Backyard.

And what of CO2 in the environment? The amount of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere are as high today as they were 650,000 years ago, the data coming from ice samples from Greenland. That there is a need to reduce our carbon footprint, reduces the likelihood of licensing new coal fired plants. The point of the cap-and-trade policy was to take the paying for carbon sequestration out of the hands of the government (through taxation) and placing the responsibility into the hands of the pollution producers. Costs would then be paid for indirectly (by you and me in increased prices). Cap-and-trade failed politically due to the uncertainty in effectiveness of “offsets.” Offsets allows a carbon polluter to offset pollution rather then remove it directly by paying someone else to do the carbon sequestration, for example by planting trees. Are carbon emissions produced by coal plants in Europe offset by planting trees in Africa? Is the whole concept a shell game? No one knows, and cap-and-trade as a policy goes into political limbo.

Abraham claims the only way to reduce greenhouse gasses effectively is to transition from coal to nuclear power. Nuclear power currently provides approximately 20% of U.S. energy needs, but no new licenses have been given since 1980. Abraham wants to grow the number of nuclear plants by 50% (50 new plants in 20 years) and in exchange reduce the equivalent number of (dirty) coal-fired plants. The issue unaddressed is that 50 new nuclear plants have to be placed somewhere, into someone’s back yard. But what about nuclear waste? The proposal to house nuclear wastes at Yucca flats is in political limbo. Abraham then puts his foot in his mouth in arguing that there is no such thing as nuclear waste by defining “waste” as something else, a manner of semantics that might remind the reader of a different politician’s parsing of the word “is.”

Note that oil being more problematic is not addressed at all in the 30-30-30 plan, and further on Abraham addresses the difficulties inherent in the politics of oil, but does not offer any solution. In fact the problems related to oil are worse than they appear, there have been no new oil refineries build in the U.S. since the 1970s, and the bottlenecks to increasing the U.S. energy supply have been as much in infrastructure, that is, new refineries and transmission lines as much as they have been in maintaining or growing the oil supply.

Cracking shale for oil has shown 10% growth per year since 2006, but there is a question as to how long these reserves will hold out, ranging between 15 and 65 years. Coal contains contaminants that include sulfur and mercury. There have been attempts to bring power plants in line with environmental regulation to remove these contaminants before they get into the environment. Old facilities are grandfathered in and do not have to follow new regulation, while new plants must fully comply. Repairs of old plants thus become a judgment call. If the cost to repair an old plant is high, the facility would be considered a new plant after repair and full regulation would apply. So rather than upgrade, utilities instead skimp on repair. We all know where that tactic can get us. One new technology towards clean coal is coal gasification. Clean coal, Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) converts coal to methane and the pollutants come out of the process. IGCC is still in its infancy, and methane does still produce greenhouse gasses.

The biggest threat to U.S. energy use is the law of supply and demand. Economic growth is tied to affordable energy. That is why there is continual pressure to: drill in U.S. oil reserves, drill in protected nature areas in the Rockies and Alaska (ANWR—Alaska Natural Wildlife Refuge), drill off the Gulf coast (where a significant portion of our seafood comes from), and in deep water, and other counter-productive tactics. But more drilling is not the long-term answer.

Oil is not a domestic issue but a geopolitical one. The dominant issue to date has been oil as import. Global energy demand is expected to increase much of which will go to India and China who will be competing with the U.S. We do get much of our natural gas from Canada and Mexico, but there are problems with transport, and their energy supplies are also up for global competition.

The two major questions to be asked are: “Does the amount of oil we import really matter?” and “Does it matter from whom?” The big risk is what would happen if the control of oil fell into unfriendly hands, (the prevention of which causing two wars with Iraq). Related to this is the fear of terrorist attack that can be used to drive up prices. As for cartels, OPEC may be a force for good or for evil depending on your point of view. Their intent is to produce market stability but they do this by manipulating the price (by varying the amount of oil they produce). If the U.S. begs for their help to reduce prices (by pumping more oil) this only increases our political debt, helping maintain their decidedly non-democratic regimes and increases the percentage we import.

Abraham also takes the time to point fingers and assign blame why not much has changed in U.S. energy policy in the past 30 years. Basically Americans are in a political stalemate of various inconsistent opinions. It is easier to do nothing, to complain and suffer the consequences than to do something and suffer the consequences. One problem with U.S. politics (and probably any government’s politics) is that it takes a crisis to get any attention at all. Abraham states, “When oil hit $145 per barrel, I remember thinking how absurd it was that we were once concerned about $30-a-barrel oil.” And concerns shifts from the environment to “drill-baby-drill” sound bytes.

The problem more or less is how to balance the concerns of U.S. energy needs, the environment and costs, and how to achieve this balance through energy policy. As to the policy itself, which energy resources to conserve and which to exploit, which technologies to use and which refrain from using, one needs to be able to predict the impact of any choice over time—which is near impossible. Simply raising taxes on energy use will certainly reduce consumption, but raising them will hurt the poorest first, and raising taxes are never the popular choice in politics. And to which technology will the tax dollars go?

And so we continue to have an inconsistent policy with no traction. Everyone should be concerned. As difficult as our choices are today, they will be more difficult tomorrow. At some point there will be no room to maneuver.