3000 Quads

The debate about future growth in energy consumption is obviously informed by, if not centered on, the spectacular growth in China.

China’s economy took off in 1978 and it is still growing:

China’s growth since 2005 has been just as spectacular, averaging about 10% per year.

But looking ahead towards 2030, 2050 and 2075 (which is the purpose of this weblog), we run into a dreamy, ‘yeah but’ quality in discussions about China. If you Google the phrase ‘Can China Sustain Growth’, you get more than 5 million search returns, and a lot of the links go to reasoned arguments making the case that China cannot, in fact, keep growing at the same rate.

And maybe they can’t. I note that people have been pessimistic about China’s growth for twenty years without being right yet, but if their thinking is sound, it may just mean that they were premature in their bearishness. And that happens a lot.

I’m not competent to evaluate the real future of China’s economy. I suspect that they’ll continue to grow robustly but have periods where growth slows dramatically. That’s sort of what happens to countries after they pass a certain point in development.

But in terms of energy consumption, I’m not really sure that the state of a country’s economy at any given point is the most important metric. Although energy use slowed during the most recent recession, and actually declined for a couple of years in the U.S. and some European countries, if you look at the history of American energy use, you’ll note one thing:

Our energy use climbed dramatically from 1900 to 1975. That period included the Great Depression, two world wars and several recessions. I think once a developing country gets a taste for energy, it’s tough to let go.

Although I’m extremely proud of the work I did in ‘Energy Consumption in the Developing World 2030‘, it’s really a baby step towards developing a global view on the future of energy for the planet.

Next steps for me are to extend the forecasting through to at least 2075 for the developing world and to start on the developed world thereafter. I’ve spent some time over the past month trying to understand the drivers of energy consumption in the developed world to try and get an intuitive feel of which way the cat is going to jump.

The ‘developed world’ as I use the phrase is limited to members of the OECD. This is merely a convention I use because international energy statistics are conveniently broken out between OECD and non-OECD nations and used as a proxy for ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ nations. But it’s relatively easy to identify subgroups within each category that don’t look like the rest of the members.

For example, within the 34 OECD nations we see that 4 countries–Chile, Mexico, Turkey and the U.S.–are slated to grow in different ways than the other members, in part simply because their population is projected to grow significantly over the first half of this century, while other OECD members will see either stable or declining population levels. This means that for some measures it will be a bit confusing to treat the OECD as a homogenous unit.

For example, while the 30 other members of the OECD are wealthy, stable and could perhaps best be described as the ‘reclining world’, the 4 countries I just mentioned actually account for 42% of the overall GDP for the OECD, mostly due to the inclusion of the U.S. as a developed-but-still-growing-country (Quick–someone think of a good acronym!). The same is true for population. The U.S., Turkey, Mexico and Chile account for 40% of the OECD’s population. To make it trickier, as new countries are added into the OECD club, there’s a good chance that they will look more like the 4 outliers than the recliners that have the most seats at the table.

In my paper, I differentiated between the non-OECD nations by noting that some (mostly in Asia and Africa and Latin America) were growing quickly, and I calculated a 5% annual growth rate for their energy consumption through 2030 (and speculated that that rate would hold through 2075). I suspect the same segmentation will be appropriate for the developed world as well, and I may end up abandoning the convenience of OECD vs. non-OECD nations and creating my own groups. (It would be nice if I could use just two groups, but I’m not an optimist about that.) And I’m pretty certain that I will find myself at odds with the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration again. I may be writing a similar paper saying that while the majority of OECD countries may follow their very-low-growth projections of 0.3% per year energy consumption, the countries that matter most will be growing more quickly.

But they play the game on the field and I’ll actually have to do the work before making the case. Feel free to chime in and help me construct the right framework for doing this. It’s going to take at least a month, so we all have time to think about it.

The announcement that two nuclear power plants have been approved for construction in Georgia is likely to be the biggest energy news of the year.

The most obvious reason is that it will add clean and dependable baseline energy to Georgia’s power mix for close to a century. Each AP 1000 reactor will produce about 1,154 megawatts of electricity. As Georgia is one of the top consumers of electricity in the country, and because much of their electricity is provided by coal, this is welcome news. The two new reactors will provide more than a quarter of the state’s electricity needs. Georgia consumed about 1 quad in energy in 2009, and they  burned about 1 million short tons of coal in getting it.

However, despite Scientific American’s protestation in the linked article above, the larger impact is in breaking the logjam in getting new nuclear back into our energy mix. These two plants are the first to be approved since 1978. Nuclear currently provides about 20% of our electricity, but a lot of the existing fleet of plants are aging and need to be replaced. We also should seriously consider commissioning more nuclear plants to increase their overall percentage of our portfolio of fuels.

This may sound a bit strange–the DOE EIA projects that America’s long term energy consumption is not going to increase dramatically–from last year’s 98 quads to between 105 and 111 quads in 2030. However, if we are smart, the mix of fuels used to provide that energy will change drastically during that period, and in ways that the EIA doesn’t seem to take into account.

The next time mileage averages are published for the U.S. fleet, expect to be surprised at how much better mileage the country is getting as a whole. More hybrid cars are being sold, conventional cars are responding to their competition by arriving equipped with more fuel efficient engines, and all-electric cars are starting to arrive on the lots of dealerships.

It will take time for electric cars to have an impact–between 15 and 30 years. And that’s being optimistic about improvements in battery technology. And realistically, all-electric cars will do better in some regions than in other, colder ones. But as the fleet begins to change over to electric (and it will–government fleets, rental companies and large corporations looking to burnish their reputation will essentially make the market), we will begin to use less oil and more electricity.

It’d be a pity if that electricity was coming from a coal-fired plant.

The two new nuclear plants just approved are part of a roll-out of five new plants in total (well, one isn’t new–it’s just been tied up in the regulatory jungle for a long time). If we got the science and the safety right (not a trivial question), then this could be the start of something big.

Coal plants are cleaner than they used to be–up to 77% cleaner, depending on how it’s measured–and the EPA in the U.S. is fighting to get them to be even cleaner. Coal mining is safer than it used to be–and we’re fighting to make it even safer.

But coal mining still produces mercury, which is really a poison. It still produces fly ash, which is not only unhealthy in the air, but gets stacked up in dumps that are not stable–too many of them end up sliding into rivers and streams. It is still dangerous. Too many miners are killed or injured at work, and too many suffer the aftereffects long after they’ve left the mines.

We use a lot of coal in the United States. It is burnt as the fuel providing about 45% of our electricity. Our environmental standards, while not the best in the world, are good at trying to limit the damage caused by our need for coal. But these environmental standards carry their own cost, and that cost is borne by both government and industry.

In developing countries the need for fuel is growing so quickly that they haven’t had the time to develop standards to protect their citizenry from the effects of pollution and lax safety rules. Coal is a big part of their fuel mix and that’s only going to grow. China, which is looking everywhere for energy solutions, is serious about going green, building wind and solar and nuclear as quickly as it feasibly can. But their dependence on coal will be ongoing throughout the century.

Old King Coal supplies about 21% of America’s energy needs overall. It supplies about 69% of China’s. And whereas America’s future energy growth will be moderate, China’s will be explosive. I have calculated here that their energy consumption will grow from 100 quads to 247 quads by 2030. And their use of coal will grow from 69% to 70% over that time. The same is likely to hold true throughout Asia, as quickly developing countries latch on to the fuel that has the least expensive sticker price.

But even to the extent that they are aware of the hidden costs of coal, they are for the moment willing to bear the pain associated with mining deaths, mercury in the air and water, etc., etc., as life without adequate energy just isn’t worth living.

So as we move to a future (in 2075) where we are likely to consume six times as much energy as we do today, and most of it will be in developing countries reliant on coal and without the mechanisms to make coal as safe as it is here, I guess the only silver lining is that the U.S. is focusing on an industry sector that will be hugely relevant to the people undergoing this dramatic transformation:

Healthcare.

It’s no accident that Charles Darwin found so much of interest in the Galapagos Islands. Islands are natural laboratories and experimentation is frequent and vivid in isolated environments.

It’s true for human energy consumption as well. Many islands have to import all their fuel, such as Hawaii. There are a lucky few like the Dutch Antilles, where per capita energy consumption is double that of America–731 mbtus per person per year, mostly because they were fortunate enough to find oil and build an oil refinery on Curacao. There are some, like New Zealand, with low populations on the Ring of Fire that might find a fortunate combination of environmentally friendly fuels to serve their needs. And some, like Madagascar, that will be so constrained by poverty as to leave one perplexed on how they will meet their current, let alone their future energy needs.

The Philippine Islands (there are 7,000 of them comprising a land area a bit larger than Arizona) are home to 101 million people.  It is considered close to a middle income country, with a GDP of $4,000 per person, but in fact many of the metrics found in the CIA’s World Factbook look more like those of a poor country–maternal mortality, infant mortality–all the aspects of poverty found worldwide in the absence of access to energy. (That’s a concept I’ll be turning to over time, not that it’s something I invented.)

One of their primary natural resources is timber. One of the threats to their environment is deforestation. The Philippines imports 310,000 barrels of oil every day. Oil is expensive, the Filipinos are not rich, the wood gets burned. But the Philippines are also lucky enough to have access to geo-thermal power resources, and 15% of their electricity comes from hydropower.

However, islands have it tough in modern times. Although the Philippines are expected to grow in population from 100 to 140 million by 2030, their GDP is not expected to take off like some of the other countries in Asia. Per capita growth is expected to only have a CAGR of 2.6%.

From the outside, it looks as though a major constraint to development in the Philippines is lack of access to energy. Too much of their money goes to oil imports, they are too poor to really build a renewable infrastructure, every penny they spend on energy is a penny not spent improving the health of their citizens. It’s a trap other islands and isolated communities face, and the partial solution that the Philippines is adopting–a diaspora of workers to countries who need the labor–is a stopgap measure at best.

For the purposes of this blog, the important thing is to note what looks very much like a latent demand for energy–cheap energy–that, if available would trigger a massive spike in energy usage as it powered the Philippines to a rapid development that would catch them up to world standards in a hot heartbeat. I wrote yesterday that the Philippines had a per capita energy consumption of 14 mbtus annually, a scandalously low figure. But the people are too intelligent, literate, active and ambitious to be satisfied with that.

Whether that energy is provided by hydro, solar, geothermal, ocean thermal, wind or fossil fuels, they will get the energy they need.

I don’t know why this happened. I was planning on doing a post on the Philippines–I had included their statistics in the report published on the side of this weblog, and read the numbers I am about to present, and nothing happened to me then. I had read about renewable energy in the Philippines, especially their progress with geothermal energy, and nothing happened to me.

So today I was thinking I would check and see if there are new statistics about energy consumption there that would back up my thesis, that energy growth is happening faster than anyone predicted.

And now I’m just sitting here staring at the screen. Because the Philippine Islands, home to 94 million people, uses 1.3 quads per year. That works out to 14 mbtus per person per year. This vibrant country full of bright and energetic people are energy starved and after looking at stats for richer countries (we in the U.S. use about 340 mbtus per person per year, about 100 quads in total) it just gives me a new perspective on what poverty really is. The energy I use in two weeks has to last a Filipino all year long.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been there and know a lot of Filipinos here in the States.

And I do know there are countries that make the Philippines look rich in energy (Mali averages 1 mbtu per person per year). And the fact that the Philippines doubled their energy use between 1980 and 2000 somehow makes it seem worse.

But this got real in a hurry. For me at least.

Although we all should cheer the fact that energy derived from solar power increased dramatically in 2011, champions of alternative energy aren’t quick to boast about the total power it supplied. That’s because it didn’t supply very much.

Solar power capacity (not delivery) increased from 18 gigawatts to 24 gigawatts between 2010 and 2011. The world’s energy consumption was 15 terawatts.

So one burning question about solar is will growth be arithmetic or logarythmic. If the pace is 1, 2, 3, 4, we’ll need to get our coal-digging shovels out. If on the other hand it’s 1, 2, 4, 8 then the magic of compound growth will have solar providing significant energy.

Since all the figures for solar are always given in watts capacity, let’s stay with that measurement instead of my preferred quad.

If energy consumption does double by 2075, we’ll need about 30 terawatts. A bit more than 1,000 times growth. (Oh, don’t gulp yet…  it’s undignified. Whimper, moan and beg for mercy…)

If the past–since 1978–is any indication, we’ll actually get there. Solar has increased in capacity by an average of 36% annually–and we only need an increase of 11.6% every year to get there.

Here’s historical performance, courtesy of Professor Emanuel Sachs at MIT:

Now, nobody should think that innovation and penetration can improve at an incredibly high rate forever. Moore’s Law doesn’t cover every industry, and the logistical chain for microprocessors is infinitely more complex (and therefore amenable to continuous improvement) than the chain for solar power.

But it doesn’t have to improve forever–if it improves for four more years it’ll be cheaper than electricity provided by coal in most places and it’ll be off to the races. Increased installations of solar will cease to be driven by improvements and begin to be driven by comparative advantage.

We won’t mind.

There is no wall big enough to contain the great migration that is now in the process of changing the world.

This migration isn’t from Mexico to the U.S., or from Pakistan to the UK, or North Africa to Greece and Italy. It is happening within the borders of the countries of the developing world and consists of people leaving the farm for the city lights.

According to the FAO, in 1960 about 400 million people lived in cities. That number grew to 2.9 billion in 2008 and is expected to reach 4.9 billion in 2030.

That has an impact on energy consumption. Many in the developing world will be abandoning the burning of dung and firewood for the greater fuel density found in coal.  They will be turning on a light switch for the first time, and the consumption of electricity will extend to televisions, washing machines, computers and refrigerators. A study in Bhutan found that only 40% of rural households had electricity. 91% of their energy needs were met by firewood. Their biggest single need for fuel was for cooking. The biggest energy use in cities is for personal transportation, followed by washing machines.

Funnily enough, the overall trend is true even in the U.S.,  where rural households consume about 10% less energy than  do urban ones.  Update: Don’t want to start any urban legends here–I was looking at aggregate consumption, not per household or per capita. Big Whoops. Thanks BillC for calling it to my attention.

Perhaps more to the point, in China an urban household consumes 60% more than a rural one.

And the numbers get tougher. Currently, half of China’s population lives in cities. That is projected to grow to 75% by 2030–and that’s 75% of  a much larger population than they have today. And it’s just as true throughout the developing world:

Economist 2011

A larger number of people. A larger percentage of whom are moving to an urban environment where energy is more easily available–and less expensive. A larger number of people moving into the stage of the economic cycle where they can acquire the amenities that make life worth living–all of which consume energy.

I sometimes wonder if 3,000 quads is in fact an underestimate.

The Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration has a graph showing U.S. energy consumption since 1775:

In 1880, the U.S. used about 5 quads in total. In 2010, the DOE’s revised (downward) estimate was 98 quads. The compound annual growth for those 130 years was 2.32%, which is almost exactly what the DOE EIA projects for the developing world between now and 2035. But growth was not evenly spaced throughout this period.

The great energy development phase for the United States occurred between 1900 and 1975, when energy consumption grew from 9.5 quads to 72 quads, a CAGR percentage of 3.71. However, this growth started after the U.S. was halfway finished with the grand demographic transition, the move away from agriculture as the primary means of existence for most of the population. By 1900, the percentage of Americans farming for a living had already fallen from 90% to 40%.

That transition has yet to take place in most of the developing world. Because it is their stated intention to telescope this process into a shorter timeframe than that used by the U.S. (and the rest of the developed world), their consumption of energy will increase at a faster percentage. But that’s another story.

Jean-François Mouhot, writing in the UK’s Guardian (a former employer of mine) has written an essay entitled “Once, Men Abused Slaves. Now We Abuse Fossil Fuels.” (h/t to Collide-a-Scape)

In it he writes that his students were frankly incredulous that humanity could tolerate a practice as barbaric as slavery. He then connected the use of fossil fuels to slavery, writing , “Intriguing similarities between slavery and our current dependence on fossil-fuel-powered machines struck me: both perform roughly the same functions in society (doing the hard and dirty work that no one wants to do), both were considered for a long time to be acceptable by the majority and both came to be increasingly challenged as the harm they caused became more visible.”

He goes on to elaborate on the analogy, making a rather tortured case that fossil fuels is a crime in the same way that slavery was a crime. He hopes that society awakens a moral collective conscience to fight fossil fuel use in the same way that abolitionists created a consensus against slavery.

It is amazing that a professor of history could so clearly miss one of the glories of human history. (To be fair, he is aware of what fossil fuels contributed to the reduction of slavery, but he clearly equates the two as moral crime.) Slavery, a fixture of human existence for millenia, left the stage at the same time that we learned how to use fossil fuels. That’s not a coincidence. Slavery  became less economically competitive with free labor as labor saving devices made it feasible for fewer people to do so much more work that it was possible to pay them, thereby removing much of the moral stigma and high costs attached to large-scale endeavors previously only made practical by forced labor. It became cheaper to pay 10 workers than house, feed and guard 100.

We see this perhaps most clearly by removing the political flash point of slavery and looking at paid domestic service. During the period after the abolition of slavery, the number of families wealthy enough to afford domestic servants grew dramatically. And the number of domestic servants grew as well.

In the decades between 1900 and 1940, the number of domestic servants in the United States grew from 1.5 million to 2 million. However, the ratio of servants to 1,000 families dropped from 94 per 1,000 families to 60. Similar drops occurred in both Germany and Great Britain.

(There’s a bit of chicken and egg circularity here. As industrialization replaced agriculture as the main engine of employment, factory jobs which paid more than domestic service were more easily available. But those factories ran on fossil fuels as well.)

What Professor Mouhot is doing is worse than chicken-and-egging. He is ignoring the role that fossil fuels played in liberating populations from the drudgery of domestic service. (It is now instrumental in liberating the grandchildren of servants from the drudgery of manufacturing.)

I don’t know why Professor Mouhot is separating fossil fuel usage from the rest of the technology innovations that spurred human development. Perhaps the current enthusiasm to reduce their usage (which I share wholeheartedly) has colored his thinking. But the use of fossil fuels freed us. Professor Mouthot seems to think we should abandon fossil fuels on moral grounds whether or not we can replace them.

And that’s just crazy. Develop alternatives? Yes. Reduce waste? Yes. Improve efficiencies? Yes. But throw away the engines that freed all men and women (not just slaves) from a lifetime of servitude and drudgery?

No.

I think the case made here for a doubling of energy use by 2030 is both strong and intuitive–in the developing world, energy consumption has been growing quite strongly, more strongly than projected, and shows no sign of slowing. Because it appears that the developing world’s energy use will grow at 5% per year as opposed to 2.3% a year, world energy consumption should reach close to 1,000 quads by 2030, as opposed to the 500 it used in 2010 or the 721 projected by the EIA for 2030.

So far, only Willis Eschenbach has kicked back on those numbers–and it’s really the sources, not the logic or calculations, that has him quizzical about what we’re discussing here.

But although I have asserted that this growth will continue, reaching 2,000 quads (or so) in 2050 and 3,000 quads (or so) by 2075, I have not shown my work yet. Well, that’s because I haven’t done the work yet–or not at the same level as I did showing growth through 2030.

Because there’s a lot of work involved, it’s going to take some time. Here at the outset, I’m going to explain why the hypothesis is logical enough to merit this exploration.

We’ll do this by working backwards and then by looking at history. Let’s assume that the UN’s medium projection of population for 2075 is close enough to work with–that there will be about 9.5 billion souls on this planet at that time. Let’s acknowledge human failings enough to admit that there will still be a Bottom Billion that we haven’t succeeded in liberating from the ranks of the very poor.

There will then be 8.5 billion people in various phases of the process we call development. They will be using more energy than they do now, and they will be increasing their energy usage dramatically. Let’s arbitrarily assign them an energy usage equivalent to what Americans use today–about 323 million btus per person–and look in horror at the total: 2,745 quads, and add another 100 quads burnt messily and inefficiently by the Bottom Billion. A grand total of 2,845 quads every year.

As most of this energy will be probably provided by coal, this result is close to catastrophic. So it is worth investigating.

The world’s energy use grew from a grand total of 21 quads in 1900 to 500 quads in 2010, a growth rate of 2.92% over 110 years. Although that’s higher than the EIA projects for the rest of this century, it’s lower than the 5% I use for the developing world. But that 2.92% was adequate only to develop the lifestyles used by people in the rich countries, now totaling 1.2 billion. To extend the miracle of modern life to an additional 7 billion human beings, and to do it in the next 65 years instead of 110, growth will have to be faster in those parts of the world that want so desperately to join us at the top of the pyramid. So, while the EIA is probably safe in their assumption of slow growth in the rich world (they think it will be about 0.3% per year), their assumption of 2.3% CAGR for the developing world will not provide the energy they need to develop to the same level projected by numerous institutions, ranging from the World Bank to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The alternatives are stark. Either the world will not develop as fast as everybody thinks, or the world will need a lot more energy for that development to actually happen.

So I guess it’s worth doing the work.

Let’s look next at how energy consumption increased in the U.S., since we’re using its per capita consumption as a benchmark.

I’ve been avoiding the discussion of global warming/climate change, because it always degenerates into folly. However, here it is as simply as I can put it.

I have made as strong a case as I can that energy consumption on this planet will grow faster than expected, reaching 1,000 quads around 2030, 2000 quads around 2050 and 3000 quads around 2075. As things stand now, over half of that energy is expected to be produced from burning coal or liquid fuels.

The world used 3,730 quads between 1990 and 2000, a period of time when temperatures rose rapidly. We will be using an amount approaching that total every year during the lifetimes of your children.

What I have written above alarms me.

There’s sort of an 11th commandment in the renewable energy sector–‘Thou shalt not speak ill of another renewable form of energy’. So I’ll have to phrase all of this carefully.

Without speaking negatively of other forms of renewables I want to speak about why solar is the best of the lot.

Nah–I’m not going to get away with that.

We in the solar industry are not any nicer or better-behaved than professionals in the wind power industry. We’re not kinder to small animals and we don’t eat better food.

But the reason we’re going to win is inherent in the properties of solar as it is offered on the market. Let me explain.

Wind power as it stands today is marketed by large, multi-national companies (usually divisions of really, really large companies like GE) to equally large government bodies or utilities. It’s big business. It operates on big business timelines and is subject to the constraints that normally make big business difficult. If government starts to frown at wind power, it hides under a rock until things change.

For many of the multinationals, wind power is almost a sideline–they don’t live or die on wind. For some, in fact, it’s there to provide a green sheen to their reputation. So they don’t pay as much attention to it. And this has led them to ignore important pricing and supply signals, which led them to raise prices at really inopportune times, halting the momentum of their particular sector.

Wind is more expensive to install–but it’s also more expensive to maintain. You can’t put it up and forget about it. And when it fails, it does not fail gracefully–there are pictures of burning wind turbines all over the intertubes.

As I said, we in the solar biz are not better people than those in wind. But we can sell smaller scale systems to homes and businesses. We’re not exclusively tied to the same dinosaur customers. There isn’t the same concentration of manufacturers–there are maybe 10 serious wind turbine manufacturers. There are thousands (for now) of solar manufacturers. That’s why innovation is helping us more than wind right now–we’re not brighter than they are. We’re just under greater pressure from the competition.

Finally, although the big solar farms in the desert get the publicity (when it isn’t being lavishly bestowed on solar companies going out of business), solar’s footprint can be small enough to grow quickly without attracting hostile attention from the real forces that would fight us–the fossil fuel industry and (until recently, when they finally woke up) the utility companies. We snuck in under the radar, letting fracked natural gas and offshore wind farms get all the ink while we kept slapping small systems on your neighbor’s rooftop and the warehouse down by the strip mall.

So now we’re here. Imagine that.

In 2010, renewable sources of energy (mostly hydroelectric) produced 55.2 quads, or 10.5% of all the primary energy used on the planet.

The Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration expects production of renewable energy  to almost double by 2030, to 100.6 quads. At which point it will represent 13.9% of their projected total for that year (721.5 quads).

If energy consumption is closer to my projection of 963 quads, that same 100 renewable quads would be exactly the same percentage of the total as it is today…

What is our goal? To safely provide enough energy for the current and future population to allow for development and enjoyment of a lifestyle demanding as much energy as Americans now are privileged enough (and wasteful enough) to permit themselves.

This is 3,000 quadrillion BTUs. That’s how much energy a population of 9.5 billion humans (the probable population in 2075) would use if they used the same energy per capita as we do in the U.S. (327 billion BTUs per person right now). Note that most of Europe gets by on far less, and they have a pretty good lifestyle, so 3,000 is certainly an upper limit, not a conservative estimate.

Just to state the obvious, we probably cannot and certainly don’t want to do this with fossil fuels–not unless we want the world to look like China’s most polluted cities. We’ll certainly continue to use them–but they’ll get hard enough to find and prepare that they’ll be much more valuable commodities than they are today, and we’ll be using renewables shortly because they’re cheaper and easier to produce.

Last year renewable energy provided us with 52 quads. That seems like a very long ways from 3,000. But thanks to the miracle of compound growth and endless innovation, to reach 3,000 quads from renewables by 2100 only needs an annual growth rate of 4.6%. To do it by 2050 would require heroic growth–about 10% per year.

Is this feasible? The workhorses of renewable power right now are hydroelectric power and combined heat and power (also known as cogeneration). Hydroelectric power is set to double over the next 20 years, and CHP is growing so fast that nobody can keep track of it.

The renewables that get all the press–wind, solar and biofuels–have grown strongly over the past decade, but from such a small base that one has to wonder if they can continue at the same rate. I certainly think that wind has peaked–at least temporarily, due to the fall in the price of its natural competitor, natural gas. I think biofuels have a long ways to go in terms of fourth generation algae, but ethanol and biodiesel can fill in for the moment.

My long term bet is on solar power, which is dropping in price and spreading in terms of deployment and possibilities. From simple solar thermal for home water heating to complex concentrated solar power stations, solar is spreading like wildfire.

But for all the possibilities, the total energy from renewables has only grown 2% per year since 2007, in a favorable investment climate and with all the good will in the world.

We’re going to have to do better, which is why I’m certain we’ll have to look at nuclear.

And while we’re doing so, we can certainly look at the other elephant in the room–energy efficiency, or ‘negawatts’ as Bush the Elder termed them.

We currently waste half the fuel we burn in producing electricity, and there are endless opportunities to improve energy efficiency in our homes, offices, manufacturing plants and in the appliances and machinery we stick inside them. We could save billions and reduce power consumption greatly by being a bit more diligent in this regard.

For the moment, the final score is that renewables can and probably will play an important part in our energy future–but they won’t be enough on their own. Nuclear power and improving efficiency will have to step in to get us over the hump.

But note the above–we don’t need to invent a new technology or completely turn our economies on their heads. We just need to keep doing what we’re doing, take it seriously, and trust the innovation engine inherent in free market societies to do the job.

And we’ll get there.

India is the best example of how an inability to provide energy to those who need it is both a cause and a result of the problems afflicting the developing world.

India’s consumption of energy is rising quickly–at 7.9% per year since 1946 (So why does the DOE think that will fall to 2.3%?). But although India produces a lot of coal and has significant hydroelectric resources, it isn’t keeping pace with rising demand. So India needs to spend money on oil imports that it would probably rather spend on roads and schools. A lot of that oil is attractively priced from Iran, which needs a reliable customer because of its own problems with foreign affairs, so this complicates India’s relationships, especially with the US.

But India really has little choice. 800 million people in India burn dung and whatever firewood they can find for fuel. 40% of the households in India aren’t even hooked up to the grid. Power blackouts and fuel shortages have been holding Indian industry back for decades–and it isn’t getting better.

India is trying to compensate with domestic development of nuclear, hydro, wind and solar. But India’s poverty and the high price tags for getting those sources up and running have made it a long, slow process.

The latent demand for energy in India is such that if energy was magically made available to the country at a price they could afford, energy consumption would triple in nanoseconds–and keep growing from there.

Development is tough.

Don’t think you’re powerless. You are not.

Put solar panels on your roof or in your back yard. Buy an electric car. Use solar power to charge your batteries as well as supplement the electricity for your home.

Use less electricity at home. Replace the gas you’re using now with solar power.

It’s real, it’s measurable, it’s beneficial and it’s available now. And you could not get the solar charger from the company I work for. You’d have to use a competitor for that (although we’d be happy to put the solar panels on your roof).

Do it. Seriously–if you live in the American Southwest or West Coast, you really should do it.

If energy use is set to effectively double between 2010 and 2030 (and this blog has tried to make the case that it is), and if most of the fuel to power that energy use is expected to be coal, then we have a problem. Several problems really, ranging from air pollution, mercury and fly-ash to mining fatalities, black lung and CO2 emissions.

But as I hoped to show in my previous post, the infrastructure we’re planning to build does not change the portfolio mix–the percentages of energy we will get from nuclear, hydroelectric, natural gas, wind and solar farms–and coal–don’t look set to change. For every old coal power plant we retire in the U.S., China and India will build two or three. And for every new nuclear power plant we build throughout the world, the developing world will clamor for more–but that ‘more’ will be delivered by coal.

Kind of a pickle we’re getting into.

In order to change the equation, we would need fuel sources that could be built without long term planning and permitting schedules, sources that could respond to local needs and conditions. It would be ideal if they didn’t have a large footprint, as that is often the cause of planning and permitting delays.

And it would be nice if the energy was clean.

So I offer for your consideration solar power. Not the big photovoltaic solar farms that are beloved by utilities (as it meets their requirements to generate clean power without surrendering ownership or control).  They are just as difficult to permit as other plants. Their electricity has to be piped to customers, often at long distances. A plant the size of a coal-fired plant produces a tenth of the electricity.

Nope. We really have one realistic hope to get us through to 2030 without choking on our own exhaust. And that’s your roof. The roof of your home. The roof of your business. The roof of your church, synagogue, fire department, school and city hall. Rooftop solar produces local power for local consumption. It requires zero additional footprint. The investment is real–but getting cheaper by the month. The fuel is free–and will remain so forever.

I work for a solar power company, a home solar specialist. I am not writing this because I work for a solar power company. I went to work for a solar power company because I wanted to write this.

Solar power produces 0.1% of this country’s electricity. There are roughly 160,000 homes with solar panels on their rooftops–and roughly an equivalent number of offices, warehouses, IKEA or Walmart stores, community centers, etc. with solar.

But solar power drops in price by an average of 7% per year. By 2015, it will be cheaper than electricity provided by a utility for about half of American home owners. It already is cheaper in places like Hawaii, the Netherlands, Aruba and Curacao. Utilities keep raising prices. Solar keeps getting cheaper.

After 2030 we will need to supplement solar–but that’s the subject of another post. For now, while other fuel sources are running frantically on a treadmill just to maintain their percentage of the market, only small-scale solar can effectively serve as a substitute for coal.

Depending on how you count them, there are between 430 and 440 nuclear reactors operating worldwide in 30 countries. They provide 14% of the world’s electricity.

There are 60 plants under construction, mostly in Asia. And there are plans at various level of completion for another 150 and proposals for 340 more. And if all of them get built, nuclear power will provide about 14% of the world’s electricity. You have to run pretty hard to stay in the same place in a world where development is the major story.

Broadly speaking, the same is true of hydroelectric power, wind and solar. There are ambitious plans for dramatic growth–China is planning 22 major dams along its mighty rivers, and its neighbors are planning even more (and are contracting with China to build them). But that won’t be enough to keep pace with the growth of demand.

Wind and solar could grow by 36% per year for 20 years (as they have for the past ten) without moving the dial on how much they contribute as a percentage of energy provided.

What we’re planning to do for the most part is build an awful lot of coal plants in the developing world, and replace aging coal plants with natural gas in the richer countries.

So it looks like the energy fuels portfolio is pretty much set. It takes a lot of time to plan, permit and build these facilities. We pretty much know how much power we’re going to get from various fuel sources to provide the 963 quads we will need in 2030.

Or do we?

Both the IEA and CARMA put the number of power plants worldwide at about 50,000. Of these, the IEA carries information on about 2,300 coal-fired plants that use about 7,000 individual generators. However, Platts UDI Directory has listings for over 160,000 electricity generating power units.

The typical size of a coal fired power plant is 500 megawatts. China has over 600 coal fired power plants and is building more. Depending on which urban legend you’re listening to, it’s either one a week, two a week, one every 10 days, or maybe one every 30 seconds…

The number of producing oil wells has fallen under a million–it would appear that there are more than 800,000, down from almost a million 20 years ago. The oil is refined in about 700 refineries around the world.

There are 435 nuclear power plants either in operation or under construction in the world as of January 2012. The United States has about 124 of them, France about 85.

Although there are about 800,000 dams worldwide, only about 45,000 of them are considered large enough for commercial hydroelectric power. (Global Markets for Renewable Energy, BCC Research, 2010)

There appear to be a bit more than 200,000 wind turbines operating around the world. (Based on a 20% market share attributed to Vestas, which claims to have sold 39,000 turbines worldwide.)

Platts UDI also has listings for more than 8,500 simple-cycle, combined-cycle, and gas turbine plants worldwide.

There are probably several hundred solar power plants throughout the world, although their total energy contribution is quite small in the scheme of things.

That’s what we’re working with. It creates 500 quads of primary energy for us to use and abuse. It cost a lot of money, it takes a lot of space, and it creates a lot of pollution–a lot of which is CO2.

So let’s play mix, match and build. How do we want to configure a portfolio of energy sources that will provide six times as much energy?

…was up 12.2%, according to China’s National Energy Administration. That’s not the same as total energy consumption, but it kind of hints that the U.S. EIA estimate of 2.3% might look a tad low…

China’s energy consumption averaged 9.57% per year between 2000 and 2010.

In 2011, overall consumption grew 11.5%.  The EIA shows China’s consumption at 104.6 quads for 2010, 107.0 for 2011, and they project 110.7 for 2012. Their new and improved projections for 2030 are 177.9 quads.

Would anyone care to wager what year they actually surpass that last figure?

I think it’s time for a general discussion of the major theme advanced here in the early stages of this blog.

I am seriously suggesting that the world will use six times as much energy in 2075 as it does today. In the posts below I’ve tried to show why. In this post I would like to discuss what it means.

I think to a certain extent we’ve been sleep-walking into the future, because we’ve been distracted by two arguments that are important in themselves, but peripheral to this larger issue.

The first argument was about peak oil, the idea that the easy oil had been dug out of the ground and future supplies were going to be harder to find and harder to extract, driving up the price.

The second argument was that the cumulative concentrations of carbon dioxide since the industrial revolution had already started significant global warming and that far from planning to use more energy, we needed desperately to reduce our current emissions.

Those are real arguments and I don’t want to minimize them. (Nor do I really want to get sidetracked into re-fighting those wars.) But they have obscured the reality that the developing world is charging ahead into a future where they are determined to live the way we do. One aspect of living the way we do is consuming energy at the same rate we do.

We burned 500 quads of energy in 2010. My calculations show that we may well burn 3,000 quads in 2075. I’d really like to get some feedback on what this may mean for us all.

There are two pitfalls I want to avoid falling into in discussing the medium term future as it relates to energy consumption.

The first is straight-line mania. Example: We used 500 quads in 2010. If we use 3000 quads in 2075, let’s just multiply everything by six. So, if we have 50,000 coal fired electricity plants now, we’ll have 300,000 coal fired electricity plants then. I don’t think for one minute that that’s the way it will play out, and just a quick look at headlines over the past decade show that we react more quickly than that assumption would include.

The second pitfall is doomsterism–that consuming 3,000 quads will precipitate a crisis that causes such a radical reordering of the world’s economies and political systems that it makes prognosticating useless. I don’t think that’s going to happen either. Will using 3,000 quads a year have an environmental and climate impact? Yes, without a doubt. Will we be swimming in lakes from Kansas to Kamchatka? No, we won’t–the consensus on climate change and alternative energy will guide decisions that will begin (note: begin) to mitigate some of the impacts of our energy consumption, primarily in the portfolio mix of fuel sources.

It’s something we’re going to have to manage.

Because of the intensity with which the climate wars have been waged over the past couple of years, it’s probably best for me to lay my cards on the table right here at the beginning:

• Do I believe that burning 3,000 quads a year will have an impact on the climate? Yes. Definitely.
• Do I believe that that impact will be negative overall? Yes. Definitely.
• Do I think we should begin taking steps now to reduce that impact? Yes. Definitely.
• Do I honestly believe there are actions we can take that will materially reduce that impact? Yes. Definitely.

That’s one of the reasons I’m doing this.

Okay. I’ve made my case here that the world will somewhat unexpectedly be burning almost 1,000 quads of fuel in 20 years’ time.  When I muster up the courage to get back into the data, I’ll strive to make the case that we’re on course to consume 2,000 quads in 2050 and close to 3,000 quads by 2075.

In the meantime, I intend to blog for a while about what a world that consumes that much energy will look like and the choices we can make that will influence the outcome.

What you will not ever see me do here is to say that 1,000, 2,000 or 3,000 quads is too much energy to consume. I don’t believe that. If that is the appropriate amount of energy to consume to help the world develop to a standard of living that the people living in it consider adequate, then I think we need to do that. Indian farmers should not have to burn dung because politicians  think energy should be rationed.

I’ll be happy to explore the role energy efficiency can play in helping us keep the environment clean and maybe lower the demand we put on energy producers. But I pretty firmly believe that we’re going to need energy in the amounts I’ve been writing about.

Hi all,

Here is the Excel worksheet that contains the data used in preparing this analysis:

Country worksheet published

Here is a PDF report of that analysis. It roughly replicates the posts that began this weblog, with some exceptions I’ll explain in a moment.

Energy Consumption in the Developing World in 2030 v3

In my preliminary posts on the blog, I was working off a slightly different list of countries that included some countries I consider to be developing rapidly (e.g., Turkey and Mexico) but are already in the OECD. I backed them and a few others out and now have a list of 125 countries that are not in the OECD. So some of the headline numbers change slightly–however, the broad sweep of the analysis is not affected by these changes.

Bleg

Anyone who takes the time to read this will quickly note that the conclusions are heavily dependent on selecting the appropriate ‘partners’ used to highlight the development path of the countries I look at here.

I would greatly appreciate any help offered in insuring that the partner countries I chose are in fact suitable for the comparison I use them for.

Repeat of Research Findings With New-ish Numbers

I looked at projected energy consumption totals for 125 countries that are not part of the OECD and have populations of over 1 million. In 2010, these 122 countries had a combined population of 5.86 billion, and a combined GDP of $21.3 trillion. By 2030, they will account for 7.17 billion people and their combined GDP is projected to be $41.17 trillion.

In 2006, these countries consumed 251.16 quads. The EIA projected (in 2010) that in 2030 these countries will consume 438.86 quads, a CAGR of 2.26%. My methodology indicates that these countries may well consume 672.33 quads, a CAGR of 4.02%.

That would permit the inference that global energy consumption will be closer to 951 quads than the EIA’s 2011 projection of 721 quads in 2030. The difference between the EIA’s estimate and ours—233.47 quads—is greater than the current energy consumption of the U.S. and China combined. (I get to that total by assuming that EIA projections are accurate for the OECD at 278.7 quads.)

What drives the difference? For 106 of the 125 countries, we paired these countries with other, similar, countries that had preceded them along the development path, and used historical figures of per capita energy consumption and per capita GDP to provide new figures. For the other 19 countries we were unable to find suitable pairings and took the EIA estimates instead.

The EIA calculated a 2.2% CAGR for the developing world in their 2010 report (and increased that to 2.3% for their 2011 update). Our calculations, when including the countries where we accepted the EIA estimates, showed a CAGR of 4.02%. For the countries where we were able to find a paired country as an analogue, the CAGR was higher, at 5.07%.

The countries where we were unable to find an adequate ‘paired’ country had a 2006 energy consumption total of 33.9 quads and are projected by the 2010 EIA report to consume 58.3 quads. They included major energy producers such as Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and the United Arab Emirates, countries that are already consuming very large amounts of energy per capita. They also included high income states such as Taiwan and Singapore. In both cases we felt that we were unable to determine if further development would result in higher per capita energy consumption.

Thirteen of the countries we paired with examples yielded CAGR figures lower than the EIA. Almost all of those countries were Eastern or Central European states, including Russia. Their energy consumption in 2006 was 41.9 quads, and the EIA projected (in 2010) that their 2030 consumption would be 56.2 quads. Our estimate for 2030 energy consumption for these countries was 50 quads.

The BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) explain much, but by no means all of the discrepancy between the EIA’s projections and our own. According to our projections, those four countries will account for 405.36 of the 672.3 quads from this set of developing countries. The EIA had projected (we infer, from the CAGR percentages applied to non-OECD nations) 243.2 quads from the BRICs.