I'm going to discuss a graph which was posted to Technocrat a few days ago, astonishingly, it generated no comments.
This image / graph shows US energy consumption, measured in Quads, a Quad is one Quadrillion (ten to the 15) Btu, 97 Quads is approximately 103 ExaJoules, an Exajoule is (ten to the 18) Joules.
The original page is at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and I could go on about how the same graph for earlier, pre-global warming environmentally friendly green eco tree hugging years showed, arguably, more alternative and renewable energy sources, but I won't, because that isn't the point.
What is the point?
Well, I'd like you to scroll your eyes up a few inches and look at that graph again, and tell me what, if anything, leaps out at you from it.
Done?
Having just done the kill-a-watt experiment in my home, and found that fully half of my electrical power consumption was computers and IT related, and that fully half of my modern appliance filled kitchen's electrical consumption was the bloody fridge freezer, and given that I am generally "mean" and "careful" and yet I was still more or less "wasting" 50% of my energy, I started to get this nagging feeling.
The nagging feeling revolves around the idea that even those of us who make some sort of effort to efficiently use resources (which is of course an utterly different world from absolutely having to make do with a limited resource, e.g. wartime rationing) STILL END UP WASTING ABOUT 50%
Think about that for a minute... given freedom, even those of us who try to be efficient end up wasting half the energy we consume.
So, back to the graph. 97 Quads
Imported electrical energy was 0.08 Quads
Nuclear power supplies 8.1 it ALL goes to electricity generation.
Hydro power was 2.6, 0.04 of this went to Industrial, the rest to electricity generation.
Biomass / other, 3.2, 0.9 to electricity generation, the bulk to Industrial
Natural Gas, 19.6 plus 3.6 imported, 5.7 goes to electricity generation, the remainder split between Industrial and Residential / Commercial.
Coal, 22.6 plus 0.4 imports, 20 goes to electricity generation, the rest goes to industrial.
"Oil" 14.9 plus 24.3 imported, 0.9 to electricity generation, small amounts to Residential / Commercial and to Industrial, the bulk, 25.6 to transportation.
So, out of 97 Quads, 38.2, goes to electricity generation.
Coal, Nuclear and Hydro all basically all go to electricity generation.
Natural gas goes to Electricity, Residential / commercial and Industrial.
Oil basically doesn't go anywhere near electricity generation.
So we (I say we, because although this is USA data for 2002 there is no reason to assume that power stations in other countries work under different laws of physics) consume 40% of our energy consumption making electricity.
The electricity made is distributed approximately one third to Industrial and two thirds to Residential / commercial. That is, the electricity that makes it to these premises is shared out in that ratio.
26.3 Quads, or 69% of all the energy generated is lost as waste.
So basically 69% of all the Coal, Nuclear and Hydro resources allocated to electricity generation are wasted. By the time it gets to the distribution box in our factories, offices and homes, electricity is already running at only 31% efficiency, and this is 40% of the total national energy budget.
Is this starting to sound familiar?
Residential and Commercial uses absorb 19.6 Quads, and "only" waste 25%.
Industrial absorbs another 19 Quads, and "only" wastes 20%.
Transportation, well, it absorbs 26.5 Quads, basically all "oil", and wastes a staggering 80%
So, speaking as an Engineer.
58% of the total energy budget is wasted.
84% of that wasted energy is wasted in electrical generation and transportation.
The lions share of that wasted energy is generated by irreplaceable fossil fuel.
Lets analyse a bit deeper.
Undoubtedly, much of the lost electrical power is lost somewhere between the power generating station and the distribution board in the factory, office or home.
The engineering solution to this problem is two fold.
generate electricity as near to the point of consumption as possible.
generate electricity any way you like except by consuming fossil fuels.
The only workable solution is each city has a grid connected local nuclear power plant, the grid will provide resilience, the local nuke plant will provide transportation efficiency.
There are no other practical alternatives. Anyone who says wind etc knows less than nothing about power generation, BASELINE PRODUCTION, BASELINE DEMAND, wind just doesn't fit, and needs INSTANTLY on call power reserves from some other plant.
We will save masses of fossil fuel, note, solid or gaseous fossil fuel, not liquid.
The transportation problem is a lot tougher.
A LOT tougher.
Not from the engineering perspective.
Wasting 80% of our energy in transportation is quite fixable from an engineering perspective, as it removing irreplaceable fossil fuels as the source of that wasted energy.
This is a problem that is eminently fixable, from the engineering point of view, especially if we have already bitten the bullet and populated our national power grid with thousands of local nuke plants.
But I'd have to be a dictator....
The Romans were famous for their amenities, I imagine the free men who lived near to the river got quite pissed about the losses to their civil liberties when the Roman engineers built an aqueduct, and the told them they couldn't take water from it, or touch it, even though it went past their door, and cut their driveway in half.
Kennedy got famous for pushing the USA into the Apollo / Moon programme, which was a MAJOR engineering challenge and triumph, but it was focused, contained, localised and small scale.
The height of the British Empire was like the height of the Roman Empire, the imbalance in power between the Empire and the lands it stood in and surveyed was astonishing, and importantly, not significantly military, sure, militarily we and the Romans could kick ass, but we both sometimes got bloody noses, but the military angle was only a small portion of the real power we wielded.
So we went to places and imposed our engineering on them.
For the American reader, imagine a history where you went and built the Iron Horse across the country, found the various natural resources, exploited them, but did this all with native American Indian labour, sure, you sent engineers and managers and clerks of works and policemen to these places, but you didn't actually EMIGRATE your population there, you were colonials, in the proper, old fashioned sense of the word.
So Nebraska and Wyoming today would have roads, railways, telephones, electricity, in just the same way that Zambia has, but it would be run (politically) and populated by American aboriginal peoples mainly.
In this alternate reality the modern Wyoming might have a railway system like modern India, carrying passenger numbers daily that we who invented and gave them railways cannot even begin to imagine even on our most congested inner city commuter routes... or it might have a railway system like Zambia, essentially collapsed and useless, a bit like the rural UK railway system, and I guess the rural US railway system.
But there's the thing, once you give people the FREEDOM, they end up, even those who genuinely try to act efficiently, acting incredibly inefficiently and incredibly wasteful of resources.
We cannot, in all conscience, so anything except squirm silently in our seats when it comes to discussions about Amazonian deforestation, Chinese ecological disasters, or suchlike, when we are, as ably illustrated from our of data and graphs, the poster boys of the solar system when it comes to inefficiency and the ineffable link between inefficiency and the irreplaceability of the resource being consumed, e.g. fossil fuels
This is WITH ALL THE BENEFITS OF THE MUCH LAUDED CAPITALIST, FREE MARKET, competition, profit led efficiency motivation and all the rest of that crap.
The bottom line.
As an engineer, I could radically improve the situation, but I would need absolute power, not mere military superiority, having Abrams tanks and spy drones to your Ak47 ain't enough, I need a similar superiority in engineering skill and ability.
I talked about Kennedy and Apollo, that was just a dog and pony show, the USA *really* impressed the world, and people like my dad, 50+ years ago, when, in just one of many different avenues of industrial might, just 18 shipyards went from nothing to producing nearly 3,000 complete, seaworthy, ready to rock, and by any standards of the day PRETTY BLOODY IMPRESSIVE quality and specification, Liberty Ships.
The record was laying the keel to launch in 5 working days.
If that doesn't blow your mind, you really have no concept of the basic engineering challenges involved, it blows away the entire Apollo programme.
So there is the thing, our very civilisation rests upon the freedom to profligately waste absolutely irreplaceable fossil fuels like there is no tomorrow. No surprise then that even individuals like myself who try to be efficient waste broadly the same proportion of energy as our efficient, capitalist, market driven system.
It could, emphasis on "could", be fixed before the irreplaceable fossil fuel sources that we are currently using so awfully and embarrassingly inefficiently actually run out to the point where supply can no longer hope to meet demand.
It could, but it won't be, because we treasure this illusory "freedom" today, and like the song goes, "tomorrow never comes".
Tomorrow will come, even if the USA nukes everything and seizes all the fossil fuel on the planet (and actually ends up as victor in such a military excursion) tomorrow will just be postponed for a bit, not long, war is hugely wasteful of energy.
WHEN tomorrow comes, and there simply is not enough fossil fuel around to meet today's level of 87% of our consumption, then it becomes a simple choice of continuing to waste between 70-80% of that irreplaceable fossil energy and turning the lights off one city at a time, or doing whatever it takes to improve efficiency by a significant margin.
Once you bite THAT bullet, and accept that you either turn the lights off one city at a time or do whatever it takes to improve efficiency dramatically, the other shoe drop and the 9 billion ton gorilla punches you in the teeth, and you accept that whatever steps you take to dramatically improve efficiency, it is a losing battle, even if you achieved a magical 100% efficiency, one day a "tomorrow" would come and supply would no longer meet demand and you'd have to start turning the lights off one city at a time, until there were no cities left.
So the drive for efficiency, which will make Liberty Ship and all associated production look like a tea party, will be the side show, the main event in the big ring will be eliminating all fossil fuels as a fuel source, and in practical terms that means nuclear, so fission is another stop gap strategy, the goal is commercially viable fusion.
Freedom?
Freedom is a funny thing, my grandfather was torpedoed three times in WW2 (fought in the battle of Jutland in WW1) off tankers and lived to tell the tale.
In the lifeboat freedom does not grant you the ability to walk on water and not drown, or drink seawater and not die, or live on fresh air and not starve.
Whatever cultural, political or economic measures we apply, the remaining number of Joules of available fossil fuel energy remains the same.
"Freedom" doesn't come into it.
It isn't even the philosophical freedom of "the rich man, and the poor, are both free to sleep under bridges" (to paraphrase Jaques Thibault) but more "the rich man, and the poor, are both free to walk to the river for water, when there is no more power"
"Freedom", like "capitalism" is just a philosophy that will not survive the coming energy crisis.
Perhaps, in the cyclic nature of all things, both can be re-incarnated in new forms when we get commercially viable fusion.
That's what the graph tells me, that our industrial commercial energy sector is designed to centralize and condense money way more than it is designed to distribute power efficiently or economically. Sounds like they had a plan long ago, thunked up in the cigar smoke filled room, and stuck to it.
You can look at it in a macro scale and envision some sort of enlightened government working hand in hand in an open fashion with these huge industries turning them into cost equivalent charities, like a non profit, normal example might be a food co-op, or look at it at realistically (because that other approach will never happen, they'll let the whole thing collapse before giving up energy vendor lockin and monopoly and cartel business models) a personal micro economic sized scaled and realize the bastards are never going to do anything to help you the consumer out unless it goes to further enrich them, even if that means they screw themselves in the longer run, because short term megaprofits rule, always. You'll have to do it yourself in other words, get personally energy independent through production and lessening demand at the same time until you reach a balance.. I honestly don't see any way around it. Theoretically it is possible for the government and big business to do it, practically speaking I don't see it happening. That leaves personal energy self defense as the remaining option. the people who are the most into it near as I can tell use a hybrid approach, wind,.solar, fuel generator of some sort, along with some serious demand dropping and some simple lifestyle changes. That is by far and away the most common totally off grid, ta heck with the energy companies model out there, because the totality covers all the bases.
Example on simple demand dropping to take advantage of the production scheme, back at the last place we lived with mostly all solar power, we did the washing machine action roughly around 1 pm in the afternoon,(then the stuff goes out on the "solar clothes dryer") because that was the solar height input combined with the fullest batteries. Watered the garden then too, again, from running a heavy demand well pump. You try to limit heavy demand at night, just the lights and computers, etc. SunFrost fridge and freezer instead of cheapest energy hog boxes from appliance mart. Stuff like that. Maybe it won't scale to whole regions, but apparently our way of trying to scale anything to whole regions size is the main problem. I see it in ag, if joe consumer could more efficiently buy food closer to the farmer it is WAY cheaper for him and WAY more profitable for the farmer, a win/win situation. but, we have the 19 layer middleman distribution model instead. We make on this farm slightly under 5 cents net on a chicken. Think about that when you go to the store and see what they cost, a cheap clucker, small whole bird at the store, maybe 3 bucks US, and just wonder where all the rest of that money goes. I bet it is the same with energy sales in all the forms there.
Simple solution (the way forward, the place to get focused) to all this energy and so on expensive mess, a mindset change. This is just an "anyone you" deal here. General. Stop living as a..a freeking termite or something..part of some borg resistance is futile corporate nation or region and start living as yourself/family first. Personal sovereignty, that freedom deal, and work up from there, and [corny but true] throw off the yoke of brainwashed perpetual serfdom to "the man" [/corny but true]. It's like being in a damn cult or something, it is just silly.
The alternative "way" starts with awareness and mindset, and thanks for the nice thought provoking article. I knew there were inefficiencies and have *always* been suspicious of the vendor lock in centralized distribution model, but had no idea exactly how bad it really was. This is inspiring in away to get me to work even harder to achieve independence and to stop getting my pocket picked.
I think Zogger has it about right there but it doesn't have to be (and usefully isn't) quite polarized that way. Government and big business still have good chances of helping, quite a bit -- but they probably have to be led by changes in consumer demand.
Funny anecdote: a couple of years ago the CEO of GM appeared on a radio quiz show on public radio. There was an interview part and he was just kind telling little stories about this and that. "What's your favorite new thing coming from GM?" and he started talking a little bit about electric drive trains and really good mileages in a current concept car and the audience interrupted him with loud cheering and applause. It was quite striking -- this is a very polite audience and they shut down the talk for a few seconds just to voice approval.
In more recent news I read that GM is starting up a Web 2.0 chat site, with some executive-hosted forums, with an interest in exploring this strangely unfamiliar phenomenon called "what the customers actually want".
We'll see. The cynics in all of us are unified in their skepticism, I'm sure. But... anyway: what you say about personal sovereignty is good but don't reject the ways that can turn into demand and thus change both big corps and government.
In politics/government, I want the representative Constitutional republic I am alleged guaranteed via contract. I don't have it now (much) excepting for those parts I just "buy" myself, how I act. I have no consumer choice. There certainly isn't much difference in the two parties on the issues that matter to me, for example unlimited fast offshoring as promoted by both parties, plus unlimited importation of wage diluting cheap labor. Nuts. Is the government for the people, or for the top 1% CEOs and corporate stock holders? Where can I buy another option, the one where we have these things called "borders"?
I offer a modest level of internet lobbying efforts, such as this post. that and the odd phone call or snail mail letter to my reps, and that is about it anymore. I am mostly soured on the political process, although I still vote, I am not confident the vote is clean (I would bet it is routinely hacked now with blackbox voting), nor do I think the media picked candidates are the best choices ever. And I really am suspicious of high level lobbying and the "bags of cash" method of government we apparently have. It just doesn't look like what I am supposed to have, but it is a "take it or leave it" proposition from the "company store".
With marketplace goods and services it is similar, to be practical I get what I can get, but I modify my behavior and am always striving for independence over dependence. For example, if the local power monopoly would offer a 10-20 year purchase plan at a fair price for solar PV, they might have a sale, but they don't, and most likely won't, it disrupts theire vendor lockin model. Offering me an open ended contract to lease power from sources I may not like and 100% on their terms with zero bargaining ability is not a free market approach, it is kowtowing to a government sponsored cartel. Bogus. I still use it but am gradually moving away, as that gradual part is all I can afford right now. Another, the layers of middlemen food distribution model doesn't offer me all the organic food I want at a price I can afford, so I have to go to self production to fill the gaps. Another, you can't "save money" with their mandated fiat currency, because they constantly hyperinflate it *on purpose*, the boom and bust cycle is all they sell at their company store, it's a pure loser proposition to try and just save their money, so people are forced to either support their (mostly rigged) stock market, in competiton with high level insiders who rotate in and out of "government", or purchase various government bonds which are to me fairly bogus and pretty unethical liens on our collective future kids labor once they grow up, or something like that, short term bond purchases is borrowing from ourselves but having to pay interest to..huh,whom again, how does that work again?? That is an over simplification, but more or less true. It's crazy so I won't have anything to do with it.
The only other options are like precious metals, opening your own business with the surplus cash, etc, so that is the consumer reaction I have, that and garnering more normal consumer day to day purchases in bulk when they are on sale, example, need jeans/slacks/shirts etc, I am an adult and the size doesn't change, so when I go to get them I get them on sale and by the dozen or whatever, lasts years that way and I beat the heck out of inflation and actually "make money" in a sense, an investment kinda sorta. With the MAFIAA products I purchase (I am normal there, I like a few movies and some music now and then) used, because I think their "new" prices are at a cartel gouging level, but used is closer to what I think is a more realistic price. Same with books, same with vehicles, same with a lot of stuff.
So, I vote with my wallet all the time, stay within the system, albeit in more unusual ways than most folks I guess, part because of want, part from necessity, part from just being ornery and "old fashioned" I guess. I don't like being ripped off, gouged or lied to, and big business and big government does that constantly. Not all the time, not in every instance,I won't say that, but enough so that it hit the annoying level to me years ago.
I more or less trust tangibles more than intangibles. I heard too many first person recollections of the great depression to ignore. For some reason when I was a kid I was fascinated with what life was like for the previous generations that was still fresh in their minds so I hassled them for stories all the time. It *stuck* with me.
And when it comes to energy, both electricity and liquid fuels, I know as a mech and geek that I am always going to want those things, pretty useful stuff really after all, but I have no way of knowing what they will be charging me other than probably a lot more than now which is already too expensive, so getting independent just makes more long range sense and cent$ to me.
And by ratchet jawing and "showing by example" in meatspace and cyberspace, in a small way I hope to influence others to at least think a bit more creatively and more long range, because the better off our society is, the more wealthy and secure, the better off all of us are, me included. I gain no profit by society collapsing or people going through hard times, so if I can help people avoid and mitigate around potential hard times..well.. cool beans and stuff. Costs me a little typing, not bad. That's my investment into society I guess.
Interesting point of view Guy, and I don't disagree.
I'm involved in communications for a fusion project right now, and I'm enjoying being a small part of something really important, but as I get more familiar with the energy issues facing us today I wonder more and more on what basis we (the human race) count ourselves as a civilized and sophisticated life form !
There is nothing more important on the planet right now than solving the energy problem while we still have time (if indeed we do ! )
By the way, my Grandfather fought at Jutland too, and lived to tell the tale !
There is nothing more important on the planet right now than solving the energy problem while we still have time (if indeed we do ! )
My point exactly, and nice to hear someone at the real sharp end of our ONLY practical way out echo it.
WHEN the fossil fuel energy supply meets the current consumption and efficiency standards head on, I figure we may have 20 years, or a generation, before all practically achievable inefficiencies are eliminated (irrespective of cost) and the only remaining option is to turn out the lights one city at a time.
20 years ain't long enough to build 10,000 local nuke plants and make massive inroads into transportation energy efficiency and dependency on fossil fuel, not unless we forget everything else and all go balls out wartime style production, screw market forces.
So we are looking at a sea change that will favour new nation states with resources, populations and geographic features that favour the new status quo.
I believe the only way to achieve the aim is for ALL fusion approaches to be fully funded and given maximum support without any interference to satisfy outside agendas. The scientists and engineers will really need all the help they can get to achieve it... the technical challenge is really big... especially with the clock ticking !
One of the complicating issues as I see it is that projects like ITER and HiPER (which is what I'm involved with) have projected life-spans which vastly exceed those of governments and, as a result, politicians tend to glaze over when the realities are explained to them. Difficult to connect something with "winning votes" when it's a project which needs decades to deliver !
The answer is "hearts and minds", and that's what I bring to the party. If enough sectors of the world audience are allowed to become aware of the realities in time, the politicians and government officials will come along simply because there is no other choice. In my business you start slowly, but build up the picture at a rate which never exceeds the observeable advance of the project. In this case, unless the huge injection of effort you hint at suddenly starts to happen, progress will continue to be gradual. That's not going to stop me trying however !
For these long term projects, yours in particular? Are you far enough along to approach one of these various multi billionaires and pitch it as a direct R&D funding to product project? Bypass governmental funding completely? Or go public, have an IPO? Successful man made fusion power that works is a license to print money in the "beyond the dreams of avarice" category. It would make exxon look like a corner oil change outfit. Any work towards doing it that way? Personally, I am in favor of fusion over fission, right now that means solar PV or thermal (my personal big bet is on that, that's where most of my spare energy cash has gone, and it works and is paid off, my project this year and next is biofuels for the diesel truck), but long range what ya'all are working on as well.
I wouldn't hang my hat on a price, with a project so complex, so unpredictable and so long-term, but I believe current wisdom estimates the price tage at around $ 1,176,488,105.40 US (give or take a few cents), and that'#s for a project needing 20 to 50 years to deliver commercial energy !
Frankly it's not possible to be accurate on estimates like this, not least when several of the technologies to make it possible have yet to be mastered.
I think the problem with one major investor is that (like any sensible businessman, rather than a global-scale philanthropist) he is going to be looking for a profit at the end (you mentioned a "license to print money), whereas the science needs to be international and beyond the reach of rights lawyers and energy salesmen. This technology can only make the difference IF it isn't cashed in on the way oil has been (oiul being in limited supply and on only a few locations in quantity). We have seen oil costs leap hugely in recent times, but the real cost of extracting a barrel from the ground hasn't changed much, so someone somewhere is getting very fat while the world struggles to heat its home, fuel its car and run its energy grid. One great thing about fusion will be that the fuel source is so commonplace that the profits will go to the engineering companies who can build the reactors... these really won't be easy !
A lot of folks invest for their children and grandchildren, knowing they won't make any money for themselves, a "trust". Pretty common really, along with just humanitarian chartiable efforts. Perhaps a similar effort with a public long range IPO set out quite clearly and simply might work as to expectations and timescales, etc. If it is open globally to anyone to invest..maybe it could work. Given enough forward press..who knows! It is such an ambitious sort of project,perhaps a new way of doing long range business is warranted.
Biofuels. On the farm here we use a lot of diesel with the equipment (dozens all told of tractors and big trucks and odd this or that large equipment,crawlers, pans, trackhoes, loaders, big mecha looking stuff out in the weeds I ain't even sure what it does yet but still looks cool, etc %^) plus the big backup generators), plus I just got a ratty diesel truck, the target project vehicle for this endeavor. I only have a few sources of scrap biowaste to choose from, so I'll be exploring all of them, locally acquired restaurant grease (I don't think this is sustainable for too long though), waste chicken feed (heavy carbohydrates and fats, it is mostly ground corn actually), and then waste chicken litter. This latter is more of a wildcard but we get *tons* of it every 40 days or so from three different farms. The litter is chicken "exhaust"-still heavy with a lot of nutrients- combined with the pine shavings the floors are layered with. Right now this stuff gets composted in large composting sheds, run through several turning cycles or "heats", then gets spread on pastures, some ours, some gets sold off to large grain and turf farms. Interestingly enough, the largest buyer of that is also the local guy who is doing a big sunflower to biodiesel project locally here, so in a sense we are already involved in this effort, our composted litter is part of the fertilizer for the sunflowers. Now he has gone whole hog large scale commercial, but was already setup to produce mass quantities of the feedstock, he normally does corn and soybeans but sunflowers were doable with his equipment as well. I have a read of a few experiments to just use the chicken litter directly instead, so if it works that is our best bet, even if yields are small.
I looked into growing jatropha, real big in India now because it is a weed that produces heavy and needs little care, but we are a little too far north for it, it is more a subtropical at best plant. Basically anyplace you can grow citrus is OK for that.. The other oil crops (the sunflowers or canola/rapeseed, etc) take cleared decent farm land, but we need the pastures we have for cattle and can't spare enough really for the quantities/acreage needed, so it is our scrap waste we have now or nothing there. This will be next summer sometime before I get to it, some of the mechanical components I have already, but some are going to have to be purchased, along with some chemicals needed for biodiesel production like methanol, etc.
This sounds like a really interesting project. I have never been involved with this side of the energy challenge, but it occurs to me that there might be scope for exploiting a mutual advantage... I am working on a TV documentary about the whole world energy challenge, (main reason is to explain to the uninitiated the complexities and important issues surrounding fusion power), but while shooting in California last summer I did some great material at a big wind farm on the hills near Lawrence Livermore. If I am back shooting in the states again, maybe I can work the schedule to do some footage of the outfit you describe. Where is it and please can you send me some pictures to give me an idea of how it might work as a TV shooting location ?
I am curious as to which ship his Grandfather was on also.
I am assuming he was not on a German Ship. :-)
So, he probably was not on Indefatigable, Queen Mary, Invincible,
Black Prince, Warrior, Defence, Tipperary, Shark, Sparrowhawk,
Turbulent, Ardent, Fortune, Nomad, or Nestor.
Mine was in HMS BARHAM, and I still remember the grizzly tale I coaxed out of him when, in his last days, I finally persuaded him to talk about it. But that's another story (as they say)...
No shortage of much more expensive fossil fuels and energy supplies, less me guess as at least twice as expensive. Coal transformed into all other needed fossil fuels, oil from shale and sands, and bringing ten *large multi-reactor* nuke plants online per year etc. (forget about the friendly neighborhood mom & pop nuke plant, cute but ain't happening in this universe)
Now what happens what the huge additional cost, added at each and every stage of creation of wealth, hits an economy where profit margins are thin, personal and national debt stretched to the limit of ability to pay interest?
What happens depends how fast it hits, a transition over thirty years isn't as painful as less than ten (in latter case economy collapses but lack of money will be the least of most people's worries then).
What we're talking about is a race against decay of peak sweet crude (2004-6 or thereabouts) against bringing the replacement online. Estimates for how fast the production will drop is estimated at 2% to 8% per year, meaning in 30 to 50 years the alternative have to be fully online.
Now thus far this business of bringing alternatives online, would we call the effort serious, or half-hearted? Can it continue at a leisurely pace while alternatives brought online very slowly, decades of time at this rate?
Maybe having cost of transport double will be a wake-up call, if it doesn't ruin us.
Now what happens what the huge additional cost, added at each and every stage of creation of wealth, hits an economy where profit margins are thin, personal and national debt stretched to the limit of ability to pay interest?
Is that a trick question?
Government steps in to give an unfair advantage to 'choice' industries. The consumers(if the serfs can even afford to consume anymore) end up paying more for energy while the 'best' tech has to compete in an unfair marketplace.
I make the prediction that we will see a major push towards the nationalization of the energy sector within our lifetimes in the 'free' world. The 2016 presidential election is where I call it starting to become a key issue, assuming nothing too revolutionary happens like the citizens actually manage to take back the government following the recession that even the 'mainstream' economists are saying is soon to be upon us -- as soon as the Fed shuts down the money taps (well, they don't actually blame the Fed's policies).
Maybe having cost of transport double will be a wake-up call, if it doesn't ruin us.
What makes you think it hasn't? The rates may have not doubled (or maybe they have with fuel surcharges tacked on) but the fuel costs certainly have in the last 4-5 years.
The real question is what percentage is due to inflation instead of 'peak oil'.
Most of this extra cost gets absorbed up and down the industry and through efficiency increases where possible -- there has been a major push for 'non-idle' technologies to save a gallon an hour x the 14 hours a day you can't drive x the millions of trucks on the road every day.
I am the person who posted that chart, I think I should clarify a few things to you.
First, the original post was from Bruce Parens, who was wondering about whether Biofuels were really going to make a difference. I posted the chart to support the answer, which is probably not.
Second, and more importantly, you are basically misreading the chart. This chart is basically using units of BTU's. A BTU is a British Thermal Unit. A quad is a 10^15 BTU's. Coal, Natural Gas, and Petroleum are all naturally measured in BTU's. About the only thing you can do with those resources is burn them to produce heat. Uranium is also "burned" to produce heat.
For electricity generation, the heat is fed into a heat engine to produce electricity. Due to thermodynamics, the conversion is not 100%. 100 BTU's of heat fed into a modern power plant will produce approximately 40 BTU's of electricity, with the remaining being 60 BTU's of waste heat. For electricity, we typically use units of kilo-watt-hours (kwh).
Both BTU's and Watt-Hours have the same fundamental units -- kg-m^2/sec^2. The conversion factor is 1 BTU = .293 Watt-Hour. However, they are not interchangible. While you can run .293 Watt-hours of electricity through a resistive element and get 1 BTU's of heat. You can not take 1 BTU of natural gas and get .293 Watt-hours of electricity. It is thermodynamically impossible. (Please don't bore me with a discussion of Carnot cycles, where are big, slow, and hideously expensive.)
The 1st law of thermodynamics is "you can't win" -- energy is conserved.
The 2nd law of thermodynamics is "you can't break even" -- heat to electricity generation has unavoidable losses.
Now, getting back to the chart. All that energy that is is being pumped into electricity generation that is coming back out as "wasted energy" is unavoidable wasted energy due to conversion of heat into electricity.
A modern electrical power plant is very efficient. The people who build them worry about getting as much power out of them as they can. They are also very big and expensive.
Third, if you had read my original post, I pointed out that you could use the waste that comes out of power plant for further uses. For example, if you live next to a power plant, you can use the waste heat to heat your home, or feed it into a concrete plant, etc. My preferred use of all that waste heat is to run it into a Fischer-Tropsch process to convert carbon feed stock (coal/CH4) into petroleum. Which is what I said in my post.
In the transportation system, we take petroleum, burn it to produce heat and run it through a heat engine to produce energy to move matter. Since the engines need to be portable, they can not be as big and efficient as the modern power plants. Hence, they have a lower energy conversion efficiency than electrical power plants. Hence, getting back to the chart, there is even more wasted energy in transportation.
The bottom line is that your interpretation of the chart is way off and your conclusions need to be totally reevaluated. Any engineer who stayed awake during the thermodynamics portion of their physics class already knows all this stuff. Did you ever have any exposure to thermodynamics in school?
Both BTU's and Watt-Hours have the same fundamental units -- kg-m^2/sec^2. The conversion factor is 1 BTU = .293 Watt-Hour. However, they are not interchangible. While you can run .293 Watt-hours of electricity through a resistive element and get 1 BTU's of heat. You can not take 1 BTU of natural gas and get .293 Watt-hours of electricity. It is thermodynamically impossible. (Please don't bore me with a discussion of Carnot cycles, where are big, slow, and hideously expensive.)
The reason they aren't interchangeable is that you need more information - the temperature range over which your BTU is working. Once you have this you can get a conversion factor, which will typically have your .293 Watt-hours being equivalent to significantly more than 1 BTU at the temperatures of interest. This is why you can replace your resistive heater with a heat pump and get, say, 4 or 5 BTU of home heating for your .293 Watt-hours of electricity.
I am the person who posted that chart, I think I should clarify a few things to you.
First, the original post was from Bruce Parens, who was wondering about whether Biofuels were really going to make a difference. I posted the chart to support the answer, which is probably not.
Sure, no argument there.
Second, and more importantly, you are basically misreading the chart. This chart is basically using units of BTU's. A BTU is a British Thermal Unit. A quad is a 10^15 BTU's. Coal, Natural Gas, and Petroleum are all naturally measured in BTU's. About the only thing you can do with those resources is burn them to produce heat. Uranium is also "burned" to produce heat.
Err, no, I am basically not misreading the chart..
Coal, NG, Petroleum, you can do a hell of a lot with them OTHER than simply burn them, but either way you still use them up.
When you do burn them, you can burn them as efficiently or inefficiently as you like... the bunsen burner uses the same amount of gas, whether the air valve is open or shut.
Uranium fission is not "burned", there is no chemical oxidation / reduction reaction happening
For electricity generation, the heat is fed into a heat engine to produce electricity. Due to thermodynamics, the conversion is not 100%. 100 BTU's of heat fed into a modern power plant will produce approximately 40 BTU's of electricity, with the remaining being 60 BTU's of waste heat. For electricity, we typically use units of kilo-watt-hours (kwh).
Well there we go my son, the inefficiencies of the various forms of heat engine have been known since the days of Watt and Diesel, most of our design elements (crankshafts, poppet valves) are a century old.
Just because we only get 40% efficiency does not mean that the laws of physics prohibit higher efficiencies.
Nor do the laws of physics mandate that we run heat engines of irreplaceable fossil fuels.
Both BTU's and Watt-Hours have the same fundamental units -- kg-m^2/sec^2. The conversion factor is 1 BTU = .293 Watt-Hour. However, they are not interchangible. While you can run .293 Watt-hours of electricity through a resistive element and get 1 BTU's of heat. You can not take 1 BTU of natural gas and get .293 Watt-hours of electricity. It is thermodynamically impossible. (Please don't bore me with a discussion of Carnot cycles, where are big, slow, and hideously expensive.)
Oh please, one minute you're turning electricity into heat, then your turning fossil fuel, not into heat, but into electricity, and claiming this proves something, it doesn't.
The 1st law of thermodynamics is "you can't win" -- energy is conserved.
No, it is "In any process, the total ENERGY of the universe is unchanged", it does not say ANYTHING WHATSOEVER about not being able to win, or efficiencies of conversion.
The 2nd law of thermodynamics is "you can't break even" -- heat to electricity generation has unavoidable losses.
No, it is "the entropy of an isolated system will tend to increase over time, etc" and high entropy = low ability to do work, still the same energy, just no "slope" to it that you can use to extract.
Heat to electricity generation does have losses, present day losses are NOT unavoidable, we are NOT facing a light speed barrier here.
Then you forgot the third law, "as temperature approaches absolute zero, entropy of the system approaches a constant" the heat death of the universe in other words, there is no more "slope" from which to extract useful work.
Trying to run a steam based turbine electrical generation system at the boiling point of water is a LOT less efficient than at high levels of superheat, steeper slope see.
The hotter your heat source, the more efficient you can get, cos the steeper the slope is from which you can extract work.
Fission in a nuke reactor ain't that hot, lost colder than an oxy acetylene flame, we have a physics problem today (which I am sure the guy working in ITER will chime in with) which is CONTAINING heat energy so it goes where we want to do work, and not vapourise our physical engines.
Now, getting back to the chart. All that energy that is is being pumped into electricity generation that is coming back out as "wasted energy" is unavoidable wasted energy due to conversion of heat into electricity.
NO IT IS NOT UNAVOIDABLE wasted energy. It is only unavoidable if we stay at present technology levels, there is NO PHYSICAL LAW that limits the conversion efficiency to 40% or so, and most importantly, the point you keep missing, there is NO PHYSICAL LAW that says we must consume irreplaceable fossil fuels to make electricity.
A modern electrical power plant is very efficient. The people who build them worry about getting as much power out of them as they can. They are also very big and expensive.
A modern electrical power plant is very efficient compared to a century old electrical power plant, I'll grant you that much.....
A modern electrical power plant does not represent the pinnacle of anything, it is just the current state of the art, no more.
Third, if you had read my original post, I pointed out that you could use the waste that comes out of power plant for further uses. For example, if you live next to a power plant, you can use the waste heat to heat your home, or feed it into a concrete plant, etc. My preferred use of all that waste heat is to run it into a Fischer-Tropsch process to convert carbon feed stock (coal/CH4) into petroleum. Which is what I said in my post.
I did read you original post.
The russians had municipal heating from just these methods.
YOUR preferred method is burning irreplaceable fossil fuel, then using the inefficiency of that methods to help burn still more irreplaceable fossil fuel.
MY preferred methods is get off the fossil fuel bus before the tank runs dry and leaves us all stranded in bum fuck nowhere with no further options to fuel the bus.
In the transportation system, we take petroleum, burn it to produce heat and run it through a heat engine to produce energy to move matter. Since the engines need to be portable, they can not be as big and efficient as the modern power plants. Hence, they have a lower energy conversion efficiency than electrical power plants. Hence, getting back to the chart, there is even more wasted energy in transportation.
Dude, you aren't getting it are you.
If internal combustion engines ran on bags of methane from pig shit nobody would care, we did it in the last war, provided you accept that fleet mileage is limited by pig shit availability.
As it is, we are burning up IRREPLACEABLE (in human societal time scales) fossil fuels, and we are being woefully inefficient about it, THAT IS THE PROBLEM.
Hey, I *love* the sound of a hot V8 with fancy cams and zoomis as much as anybody and more than most, and I mourn the passing of the era, but the era is passing, and we can't change that.
The bottom line is that your interpretation of the chart is way off and your conclusions need to be totally reevaluated. Any engineer who stayed awake during the thermodynamics portion of their physics class already knows all this stuff. Did you ever have any exposure to thermodynamics in school?
The bottom line is that my interpretation of the chart is spot on, we waste more than half of the irreplaceable fossil fuel energy sources that we consume, nearly 80% in some scenarios, since fossil fuel is a finite resource that is a NO BRAINER to anyone with a brain, we are charging headlong into a brick wall.
As a time served engineer and well educated public school boy, I don't need lectures from you WRT thermodynamics, particularly as you seem to have a far looser grasp of them than I do.
I'm not trying to be insulting, but when I read what you wrote I keep thinking of Beavis and Butthead chanting "Burn thtuff" because that appears to sum up your approach to electrical generation and transport, burn stuff, so burn all those fossil fuels and just accept the state of the art in conversion efficiencies, however low that may be.
As such, you present your self as part of the problem, not the solution.
We have the technology, right now, even without room temperature superconductors, to wipe out a lot of the electrical losses by building thousands of local, grid connected power plants, and we can take care of all essential transport power requirements with pantograph and overhead cables, will screw the private car owner, hence my comment about freedom.
If you are going to go after recapturing and using waste energy, fine, but capture the waste energy from power sources that do not involve consuming irreplaceable fossil fuels.
The cynic in me says we can all me kyoto protocols for 2030, in fact we won't help being able to meet them, as the wells run dry.
I will say it again, the chart itself shows "useful energy" and the far larger "lost energy", and not at all coincidentally most of the "lost energy" comes from the consumption of irreplaceable fossil fuels, I am not mis reading anything.
If you like, I will talk about and explain to you the concept of entropy, or the "slope" of an energy gradient from which you can extract work.
High entropy and little slope from condensation of water molecules, but the Sun powers that system so Hydro gets a solar recharge and doesn't use finite resources.
The chart is about how we currently create and use energy.
We currently produce electricity via heat engines. If you want to postulate a future where we are not using heat engines, great; but that is not how we do it now.
The maximum thermodynamic efficiency of a heat engine is limited by the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The limiting efficiency of a heat engine is the Carnot Efficiency = (Tout - Tin) / Tout = 1 - (Tin / Tout), where Tin and Tout are measured on an absolute temperature scale. Real heat engines have lower efficiencies than Carnot efficiency. Here's a link -- www.engineersedge.com/thermodynamics/carnot_cycle.htm
The chart is talking about using heat engines for generating power. Thus, the vast majority of the losses are heat engine thermodynamic losses. Yes, there are losses due to electrical transmission, but if you magically replace the current electrical grid with your super-conducting grid, the chart would still be dominated by heat engine thermodynamic losses. When it comes to heat engine efficiency, the Carnot efficiency is every bit as limiting as the speed of light.
Your view of what I think should be done is erroneous. I will clarify it for you so you won't make that mistake again.
I believe that electrical generation is going to continue to be dominated by heat engines into the forseeable future. I like solar, wind and wave energy, but I do not see them being the dominate form of electrical energy production ever. When it comes to running heat engines, I prefer to burn nuclear fuel rather than coal and petroleum. For the near future, I would recommend breeder cycle nuclear power plants. The current crop of one pass through nuclear power plants are too inefficient in their use of nuclear fuel. Longer term, I would like to use a nuclear fusion based system.
When it comes to transportation, I think we still need to use heat engines. I think PHEV's (Pluggable Hybrid Electric Vehicles) are a great idea for moving people around. Fuel cells may be able to eventually replace the heat engine in PHEV's. Fuel cells can have a higher efficiency than heat engines. A huge battery break through might allow us to completely dispense with heat engines and/or fuel cells, but such a break through should not be banked upon. With the exception of railroads (which can be electrified), the transportation sector will be fueled with liquid hydrocarbons. (Again, I have no problems with hydrogen economy other than the engineering is really hard.) For liquid hydrocarbons, I would prefer that the are produced at the above mentioned nuclear power plants via a process such as Fischer-Tropsch (there are other processes.) While the current crop of Fischer-Tropsch processes use either non-renewable coal or methane as the feedstock, my preference is to move towards carbonized argricultural byproducts for the feedstock, since they are renewable.
While I quite dubious that CO2 emissions are quite as dangerous as other people think, the architecture I outline above happens to be CO2 neutral. The liquid hydrocarbons used by the transportation sector come from argricultural byproducts which got their carbon via photosynthesis.
The chart for my energy architecture would look remarkably similar to the current chart, but there would be no coal and petroleum inputs. The waste energy would still be dominated by heat engine inefficiencies just as the current chart is so dominated.
I have nothing against solar, wind, and wave energy, they will help.. I have nothing against super-conducting power grids, they will help. I have nothing against heat pumps and co-genereration, they will help. I have nothing against broad energy conservations efforts such as better home insulation, tankless water heaters, lower power electronic devices, etc., they will help. Even after all of that effort, I feel the heat engine will still be the dominant form of power generation in our technological civilization for a long time to come and the wasted energy portion of the chart will remain largely unchanged due to Carnot efficiency limitations.
For the near future, I would recommend breeder cycle nuclear power plants.
with centuries of thorium supply? how is that "near future"?
the heat engines get more efficient the hotter you run them, plenty of molten salt reactor designs around a 1000 degrees C, some even 1400 or more (the technical nuclear engineering term is f-ing hot 8D), you can convert to K and plug that into the carnot efficiency equation. things look just a tad better, heh, than what we get now from a 600 degree C PWR nuke plant.
but for some strange reason I don't see the U.S.A. moving in this direction (breeders and more efficient nuke plants in general) even though some other major powers are. Instead we're taking a headless chicken scatter brained approach)
Sorry, for "near future" I meant the next century or two. Eventually, if you think the human race is going to be around for more than a century or two, the human race is going to have to switch to a fuel that is undeniably plentiful -- some sort of fuel for fusion will do the trick. We can only dig our fuel out of the ground for so long.
If you dig around on the net, you will find that the current Uranium and Thorium mining operations are geared to the current market demand. If any country goes on a nuclear building spree, those operations will have to be expanded. That is why I like breeder cycle nuclear reactors, you get way more energy per pound of fuel you dig out of the ground.
I agree, you get more efficiency out of a heat engine if you run it hotter. Material and operational limitations are the limiting factor. Wouldn't it be neat if there were some way to run a heat engine at Tin=1,000,000K. Talk about efficiency... Totally wishful thinking of course.
The current US policy is to let the marketplace decide. In general, I thank that is a reasonable policy. However, I am frustrated by the government distortions to the market. Why aren't power companies building nuclear power plants? Well, the short answer is that the legal environment for building nuclear in the US is totally insane. The cost overruns and delays due to the legal system for building nuclear have made them largely uneconomical. There are many power companies that are willing to build more coal fired plants, but they are in the same quandry, will the legal environment change to make those uneconomical as well (due to CO2 caps.) The net result is analysis paralysis and not much happens except energy prices keep increasing.
It is not all doom and gloom. At least one US company has announced that it is going to request a license from the NRC to build a new nuclear power plant. The plant design in question has already been built and operated for a number of years in Japan, so there are no "does it work?" issues. The question is can the NRC deliver a regulatory process that measured years rather decades.
High Energy, your love is lifting me... Part 2
This image / graph shows US energy consumption, measured in Quads, a Quad is one Quadrillion (ten to the 15) Btu, 97 Quads is approximately 103 ExaJoules, an Exajoule is (ten to the 18) Joules.
The original page is at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and I could go on about how the same graph for earlier, pre-global warming environmentally friendly green eco tree hugging years showed, arguably, more alternative and renewable energy sources, but I won't, because that isn't the point.
What is the point?
Well, I'd like you to scroll your eyes up a few inches and look at that graph again, and tell me what, if anything, leaps out at you from it.
Done?
Having just done the kill-a-watt experiment in my home, and found that fully half of my electrical power consumption was computers and IT related, and that fully half of my modern appliance filled kitchen's electrical consumption was the bloody fridge freezer, and given that I am generally "mean" and "careful" and yet I was still more or less "wasting" 50% of my energy, I started to get this nagging feeling.
The nagging feeling revolves around the idea that even those of us who make some sort of effort to efficiently use resources (which is of course an utterly different world from absolutely having to make do with a limited resource, e.g. wartime rationing) STILL END UP WASTING ABOUT 50%
Think about that for a minute... given freedom, even those of us who try to be efficient end up wasting half the energy we consume.
So, back to the graph. 97 Quads
Imported electrical energy was 0.08 Quads
Nuclear power supplies 8.1 it ALL goes to electricity generation.
Hydro power was 2.6, 0.04 of this went to Industrial, the rest to electricity generation.
Biomass / other, 3.2, 0.9 to electricity generation, the bulk to Industrial
Natural Gas, 19.6 plus 3.6 imported, 5.7 goes to electricity generation, the remainder split between Industrial and Residential / Commercial.
Coal, 22.6 plus 0.4 imports, 20 goes to electricity generation, the rest goes to industrial.
"Oil" 14.9 plus 24.3 imported, 0.9 to electricity generation, small amounts to Residential / Commercial and to Industrial, the bulk, 25.6 to transportation.
So, out of 97 Quads, 38.2, goes to electricity generation.
Coal, Nuclear and Hydro all basically all go to electricity generation.
Natural gas goes to Electricity, Residential / commercial and Industrial.
Oil basically doesn't go anywhere near electricity generation.
So we (I say we, because although this is USA data for 2002 there is no reason to assume that power stations in other countries work under different laws of physics) consume 40% of our energy consumption making electricity.
The electricity made is distributed approximately one third to Industrial and two thirds to Residential / commercial. That is, the electricity that makes it to these premises is shared out in that ratio.
26.3 Quads, or 69% of all the energy generated is lost as waste.
So basically 69% of all the Coal, Nuclear and Hydro resources allocated to electricity generation are wasted. By the time it gets to the distribution box in our factories, offices and homes, electricity is already running at only 31% efficiency, and this is 40% of the total national energy budget.
Is this starting to sound familiar?
Residential and Commercial uses absorb 19.6 Quads, and "only" waste 25%.
Industrial absorbs another 19 Quads, and "only" wastes 20%.
Transportation, well, it absorbs 26.5 Quads, basically all "oil", and wastes a staggering 80%
So, speaking as an Engineer.
58% of the total energy budget is wasted.
84% of that wasted energy is wasted in electrical generation and transportation.
The lions share of that wasted energy is generated by irreplaceable fossil fuel.
Lets analyse a bit deeper.
Undoubtedly, much of the lost electrical power is lost somewhere between the power generating station and the distribution board in the factory, office or home.
The engineering solution to this problem is two fold.
- generate electricity as near to the point of consumption as possible.
- generate electricity any way you like except by consuming fossil fuels.
The only workable solution is each city has a grid connected local nuclear power plant, the grid will provide resilience, the local nuke plant will provide transportation efficiency.There are no other practical alternatives. Anyone who says wind etc knows less than nothing about power generation, BASELINE PRODUCTION, BASELINE DEMAND, wind just doesn't fit, and needs INSTANTLY on call power reserves from some other plant.
We will save masses of fossil fuel, note, solid or gaseous fossil fuel, not liquid.
The transportation problem is a lot tougher.
A LOT tougher.
Not from the engineering perspective.
Wasting 80% of our energy in transportation is quite fixable from an engineering perspective, as it removing irreplaceable fossil fuels as the source of that wasted energy.
This is a problem that is eminently fixable, from the engineering point of view, especially if we have already bitten the bullet and populated our national power grid with thousands of local nuke plants.
But I'd have to be a dictator....
The Romans were famous for their amenities, I imagine the free men who lived near to the river got quite pissed about the losses to their civil liberties when the Roman engineers built an aqueduct, and the told them they couldn't take water from it, or touch it, even though it went past their door, and cut their driveway in half.
Kennedy got famous for pushing the USA into the Apollo / Moon programme, which was a MAJOR engineering challenge and triumph, but it was focused, contained, localised and small scale.
The height of the British Empire was like the height of the Roman Empire, the imbalance in power between the Empire and the lands it stood in and surveyed was astonishing, and importantly, not significantly military, sure, militarily we and the Romans could kick ass, but we both sometimes got bloody noses, but the military angle was only a small portion of the real power we wielded.
So we went to places and imposed our engineering on them.
For the American reader, imagine a history where you went and built the Iron Horse across the country, found the various natural resources, exploited them, but did this all with native American Indian labour, sure, you sent engineers and managers and clerks of works and policemen to these places, but you didn't actually EMIGRATE your population there, you were colonials, in the proper, old fashioned sense of the word.
So Nebraska and Wyoming today would have roads, railways, telephones, electricity, in just the same way that Zambia has, but it would be run (politically) and populated by American aboriginal peoples mainly.
In this alternate reality the modern Wyoming might have a railway system like modern India, carrying passenger numbers daily that we who invented and gave them railways cannot even begin to imagine even on our most congested inner city commuter routes... or it might have a railway system like Zambia, essentially collapsed and useless, a bit like the rural UK railway system, and I guess the rural US railway system.
But there's the thing, once you give people the FREEDOM, they end up, even those who genuinely try to act efficiently, acting incredibly inefficiently and incredibly wasteful of resources.
We cannot, in all conscience, so anything except squirm silently in our seats when it comes to discussions about Amazonian deforestation, Chinese ecological disasters, or suchlike, when we are, as ably illustrated from our of data and graphs, the poster boys of the solar system when it comes to inefficiency and the ineffable link between inefficiency and the irreplaceability of the resource being consumed, e.g. fossil fuels
This is WITH ALL THE BENEFITS OF THE MUCH LAUDED CAPITALIST, FREE MARKET, competition, profit led efficiency motivation and all the rest of that crap.
The bottom line.
As an engineer, I could radically improve the situation, but I would need absolute power, not mere military superiority, having Abrams tanks and spy drones to your Ak47 ain't enough, I need a similar superiority in engineering skill and ability.
I talked about Kennedy and Apollo, that was just a dog and pony show, the USA *really* impressed the world, and people like my dad, 50+ years ago, when, in just one of many different avenues of industrial might, just 18 shipyards went from nothing to producing nearly 3,000 complete, seaworthy, ready to rock, and by any standards of the day PRETTY BLOODY IMPRESSIVE quality and specification, Liberty Ships.
The record was laying the keel to launch in 5 working days.
If that doesn't blow your mind, you really have no concept of the basic engineering challenges involved, it blows away the entire Apollo programme.
So there is the thing, our very civilisation rests upon the freedom to profligately waste absolutely irreplaceable fossil fuels like there is no tomorrow. No surprise then that even individuals like myself who try to be efficient waste broadly the same proportion of energy as our efficient, capitalist, market driven system.
It could, emphasis on "could", be fixed before the irreplaceable fossil fuel sources that we are currently using so awfully and embarrassingly inefficiently actually run out to the point where supply can no longer hope to meet demand.
It could, but it won't be, because we treasure this illusory "freedom" today, and like the song goes, "tomorrow never comes".
Tomorrow will come, even if the USA nukes everything and seizes all the fossil fuel on the planet (and actually ends up as victor in such a military excursion) tomorrow will just be postponed for a bit, not long, war is hugely wasteful of energy.
WHEN tomorrow comes, and there simply is not enough fossil fuel around to meet today's level of 87% of our consumption, then it becomes a simple choice of continuing to waste between 70-80% of that irreplaceable fossil energy and turning the lights off one city at a time, or doing whatever it takes to improve efficiency by a significant margin.
Once you bite THAT bullet, and accept that you either turn the lights off one city at a time or do whatever it takes to improve efficiency dramatically, the other shoe drop and the 9 billion ton gorilla punches you in the teeth, and you accept that whatever steps you take to dramatically improve efficiency, it is a losing battle, even if you achieved a magical 100% efficiency, one day a "tomorrow" would come and supply would no longer meet demand and you'd have to start turning the lights off one city at a time, until there were no cities left.
So the drive for efficiency, which will make Liberty Ship and all associated production look like a tea party, will be the side show, the main event in the big ring will be eliminating all fossil fuels as a fuel source, and in practical terms that means nuclear, so fission is another stop gap strategy, the goal is commercially viable fusion.
Freedom?
Freedom is a funny thing, my grandfather was torpedoed three times in WW2 (fought in the battle of Jutland in WW1) off tankers and lived to tell the tale.
In the lifeboat freedom does not grant you the ability to walk on water and not drown, or drink seawater and not die, or live on fresh air and not starve.
Whatever cultural, political or economic measures we apply, the remaining number of Joules of available fossil fuel energy remains the same.
"Freedom" doesn't come into it.
It isn't even the philosophical freedom of "the rich man, and the poor, are both free to sleep under bridges" (to paraphrase Jaques Thibault) but more "the rich man, and the poor, are both free to walk to the river for water, when there is no more power"
"Freedom", like "capitalism" is just a philosophy that will not survive the coming energy crisis.
Perhaps, in the cyclic nature of all things, both can be re-incarnated in new forms when we get commercially viable fusion.