Deep Currents

The following is a straightforward summary of the central arguments and facts from The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy. The arguments are set up to support a cavalier attitude about energy consumption, a position that is hardly tenable in light of the need for environmental conservation and climate-change mitigation, but it contains a great deal of useful background information on the subject of energy and a several worthwhile arguments.

Central arguments

• Energy sources are nearly infinite. The energy we can access depends on how effective we are at capturing it, which we can do better the more energy we have available to begin with. Energy supplies will continue to spiral upwards and prices will continue to trend downwards so long as we keep improving our extraction technology.
• The fact that we use almost all of our energy (80-95%) in the process of purifying it is not only to be accepted but celebrated. Purifying energy is what provides us with better quality of life and the ability to acquire even more energy.
• The more we use the power-switching chips to replace mechanical energy distribution, the more our electricity demand will rise, since they will not only replace existing power switches but also enable a new round of innovation. For example, cars’ power trains will soon become electric, allowing them to run off of both internal-combustion engines and battery-stored grid electricity. Much of the American factory floor will also become electric and robotic.
• When an energy-based technology increases in efficiency it becomes cheaper and as a result is used more widely than before. To achieve a net decrease in energy usage the efficiency gains of the new technology must outweigh the increase in energy usage that results from its increased use. The best example of this is the light bulb, the improvement of which produced a panoply of lights, radios, radars, and lasers whose use adds up to a massive increase in energy usage.

Summary

The twilight of fuel and the ascent of power

• Most of the cost of energy is in processing, purification, and conversion
• The U.S. consumes about 100 Quads (quadrillion BTUs) per year
• The price of oil has stayed fairly stead over time in spite of the fact that the distance from the well-head keeps rising
• For 200 years our technologies for energy extraction have improved faster than we’ve consumed the existing supply
• The more energy we capture and use, the better we get at it, and the more we can find and use in the future
• In 1910 we were still using 27% of our farmland for feeding horses
• We do three things with our 100 Quads: we make electricity (40%), move vehicles (30%), and produce heat (30%)
• We spend about $400 billion every year on raw fuel, and $500 billion on new equipment to concentrate and convert energy
• Electricity is by far the most expensive and we spend the most on it at $230 billion a year
• From the 1930s to the 1970s oil was used heavily for electricity but now power plans primarily burn coal
• Car buyers are insensitive to mileage because fuel is under 20% of a car’s lifetime cost
• Not only has the price of oil stayed relatively flat over time but the price of retail gas and electricity have steadily declined
• Over 85% of the growth in U.S. energy demand since 1980 has been met with electricity
• 60% of our GDP is from electrically-powered industries, and 15% more is expected by 2028
• Between 80 and 95% of the energy we consume is used up in the process of purification before it is put to use

Voracious technologies

• “Horsepower” was James Watt’s measure of the energy of one horse lifting 550 pounds of coal out of a mine at one foot per second—which he picked because the earliest use of the internal combustion engine was to mine more coal
• Engines, like fuels, have developed to have higher power density: they now provide more power in less space
• Many pundits expected the demand for electricity to level off around 1980 but those predictions didn’t anticipate the microchip
• Since ENIAC was invented in 1946 logic gates have become exponentially more powerful and also exponentially more efficient
• In 1999 electronics consume about 13% of U.S. electric power
• The more information we produce and consume, the more our power demand will grow, in spite of any attempts to conserve
• As logic chips have gotten smaller and more efficient, power switches (MOSFETs and IGBTs) have enjoyed similar growth in precision, efficiency, and capacity for channeling electricity
• These digital power switches have given us total control over voltage and current, enabling the creation of devices such as microwaves and lasers that depend on precise power control
• Today the advances in digital power switches are bringing improvements to industrial heating, communication, lighting, and electronic vision
• These new waves of innovation will only further increase the demand for power

The virtue of waste

• It is only by throwing most of the energy away that we can put what’s left to productive use
• Any characterize our energy economy as wasteful on account of how much power is lost along the way at leach stage of purification since 95% is consumed before we can put it to use
• The point is purification, not efficiency: unpurified energy is far less useful, and it will always take massive amounts of low-grade energy to produce small amounts of the top-shelf stuff
• We need energetic order far more than we need raw energy
• The reason for all the waste being necessary is simply the second law of thermodynamics: to get useful work out of a system, not only do you run the hot side hotter, you keep the cold side cooler, because it is the differential that matters, and as the heat energy cools off it becomes disordered waste

Saving the perilously efficient grid

• The bigger a stationary power plant, the more efficiently it can burn fuel, because it has les surface area and can therefore run hotter
• The country’s power plants burn energy three times as efficiently as car engines
• As our grid has grown, the average distance that electricity travels to reach its customer has also increased
• Deregulation has given great freedom to the generators and brokers of energy but left the grid companies under control, the result of which has been a decline in grid investment even as use has grown
• If regulators offered an incentive the grid could be made smarter with more advanced control software, interconnected data networks, and high-speed, high-power switches at key network notes
• Another key element in a smart grid is dynamic power pricing, so that electricity is more expensive at peak periods and less expensive in the valleys, along with power meters that display the current price
• New York City uses about 11GW, 8.8GW of which it can provide for itself and 3.7GW of which it imports from neighboring areas

Fueling the silicon car

• The vast majority of a car’s energy is consumed in hauling its fuel, engine and power transmission systems
• Since humans first began riding horses we’ve continued to use about one ton of vehicle to move one human passenger or a couple of hundred pounds of freight—a ten-to-one deadweight-to-payload ratio
• Cars today produce roughly 100kW peak and 20kW average power output, with an additional electric load of 2kW at peak and 1kW on average
• Digital power switches promise to soon replace the gears, pumps, and belts that today transmit and modulate the engine’s power
• A digital power transmission system is both higher performance and lighter by several hundred pounds
• Electric drive trains already power industrial machinery such as GE’s 6,000 horsepower AC6000CW locomotive, Komatsu’s 300-ton capacity mining truck, and many fighter jets and submarines
• The important implication of this is that cars will be carrying batteries that they can charge from the grid where the energy can be generated from coal, nuclear, natural gas, solar, or wind
• Electric-drive cars can even act as backup generators, contribute power back, though it will be expensive since at $2/gallon the power generated by hybrid gas engines costs about 35 c/kwH
• One possibility is that fuel cells will replace the internal-combustion engine as a car’s mobile source of power, but producing hydrogen is still inefficient today

Bulbs, radios, and negawatts

• The more energy-efficient a technology grows, the faster it is adopted and applied in new ways
• The best example of this principle can be seen with the development of light bulbs
• After Edison created the light bulb, DeForest added two filaments to create the vacuum-tube electronic amplifier, which is what enabled Marconi’s radio
• Radio waves were pushed into the radar band during World War II with the “cavity magnetron,” a new kind of bulb that could emit light at microwave frequencies
• Lighting finally reached its peak with the laser, which is tremendously useful but consumes a mountain of power
• Each of these “better bulbs has not reduced consumption but increased it
• When the transistor arrived in 1948 it was soon improved to be capable of running solid-state amplifiers (which gave us cellular phones starting in 1983) and eventually solid-state radar
• Solid-state lighting arrived in 1962 with the first LEDs, which are far more space and energy-efficient than incandescent bulbs
• LEDs are so efficient that they are now used for everything from cell phones to baseball-park video screens to fiber optics to millimeter-wave radar that will soon be standard on cars
• These newly efficient bulbs are individually far more efficient but have been adopted in such high quantities that their power usage now far outstrips what we would have consumed for lighting without them
• That same lighting technology is being used to power solid-state lasers which are so powerful that they stand to replace most other methods of heating in our industrial sectors
• Efficiency comes naturally in these technologies simply because energy is expensive to consume

The paradox of efficiency

• The same growth in digital power switches that are enabling electric-drive cars are also enabling lighter-weight factory machinery
• Efficiency comes naturally: where 200 years ago no engine was more than 10% efficient, performance hit 20% efficiency by 1900, 40% by 1950 and is now at 50%
• These gains in efficiency reduced the price of power, resulting in higher demand
• For any new technology that is more energy-efficient to actually save energy its improvement in efficiency must outweigh all the new demand it generates
• Electric-drive cars will be more efficient but will also allow cars to carry many more electrically-powered additions such as radar; the electric drive will also enable many new kinds of robots, scooters, and lifters that were not feasible or economical before
• Some argue that the advent of the Internet will reduce our need for transportation and thereby our energy demands; however, our total energy use has continued to rise rapidly while the cost of transmitting information has dropped

Power, productivity, jobs, and GDP

• The rise of digital power is going to bring about a new industrial revolution that will let American workers keep a strong lead in productivity over foreign laborers in China, India, and other rapidly-developing economies
• The robotic factory automation of the 1980s was much-vaunted but ultimately only useful for large-scale manufacturing and some simple tasks
• Now we are seeing technology such as the Da Vinci surgery system that amplify and perfect human effort to a degree not before possible, enabled by: small and precise motors, fast and accurate sensors, , and fast computers to process the data
• Chip fabs are another good example, filled with ultra-precise machinery that operates largely without human control
• Digital power could transform the 30% of the U.S. economy that is still based on manufacturing
• This will eliminate job that require humans today, but history shows that those people will find other work—work that may be even better thanks to the new technology
• As evidence, today every American uses power equivalent to being served by 200 humans and yet unemployment remains low

Insatiable demand

(no notable points)

Saving the planet with coal and uranium

• We have actually been very effective at reforestation: we started with a billion acres of forest, then cut down enough that by 1920 we were down to 750 million acres, and since then we’ve reforested to the point that we now have somewhere between 20 and 80 million more acres than we had then; we’re now replanting trees 30% faster than we’re harvesting them
• The U.S. is actually a carbon sink, as reported in a 1998 issue of Science, thanks to all these trees
• Photovoltaics capture about 30 watts per square meter (w/m²), but New York City consumes about 55 w/m², which means that it would take more area than the city covers to provide it with solar power
• Power from plants of any kind likewise requires massive amounts of land
• You can put solar in the desert or on rocky plateaus but then the transmission costs become very high
• Nuclear plants, however, not only take up very little space but also produce very little waste which is easily stored and then buried deep underground

Infinite supply

• As stated earlier, the price of energy has trended down over time, thanks to increasingly effective technology for harvesting raw fuel
• We now consume about 345 Quads of raw energy in total
• The coal stores we know of hold about 200,000 Quads, enough for centuries, and oil shale holds about 10 million quads
• The more energy you have in hand, the better you can hunt for more
• Someday soon we will find out how to create fusion reactions that will let us harvest the 10 trillion Quads of deuterium that sit in the planet’s oceans
• Whether energy supplies spiral up or down depends on two things: what materials are available and how cunning we are at finding them

(no notable points in the final two chapters)

Written: July 23rd, 2008