A Renewable, Electrified Future Just Makes Sense

President Trump just announced that he is beginning the process of withdrawing the United States from the Paris accord to combat climate change, joining only Syria and Nicaragua. Nicaragua did not join because the accord was not aggressive enough and Syria is in the middle of an awful civil war and has more immediate concerns.  So basically, the United States, the largest historical emitter of carbon dioxide, has decided to do nothing about the most important problem the world has ever seen, a problem for which it bears significant blame.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about climate change and the renewable energy technologies that will help us avoid its worst effects. One thing has occurred to me over the last few years.  It started by thinking about internal combustion engines in cars and comparing them to electric motors. But the point is more general, and it is this:  Once you consider the realities of a renewable energy future, you realize the fossil fuel present makes no sense. It is dirty, ugly, loud, and inefficient.

Consider our current situation.  The large majority of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, oil). We use these fuels for a variety of benefits: transportation, electrical energy production, and heating. Generally, this requires us to burn this fuel, often at high pressure and temperature. The resulting high pressure moves pistons and turbines, lot of massive parts moving at high speed and temperature (and therefore requiring a lot of maintenance). The burning requires careful regulation of air and fuel, via valves and pumps. The resulting heat must be managed with coolants and more pumps. The exhaust contains a variety of toxins including particulate matter, heavy elements, nitrogen and sulfur oxides, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, and is responsible for secondary pollutants such as ozone. Some of these can be significantly scrubbed from the exhaust, but require additional additives, pumps, electromagnetic scrubbers, etc.

Now step back and take a look at that.  It's an incredibly complex system. Pumps, pistons, turbines, valves, coolants, additives, filters, scrubbers. It's the reason there are so many wires, tubes, belts, lubricants, etc. under the hood of your car. But the same sorts of mechanisms exist on larger scales at coal and natural gas power plants.

Now consider how we harvest and refine the fuels that feed those incredibly complex engines. They're in the ground, but most of the easily accessible stuff is already gone.  Most coal today is done via "surface mining", where we literally remove the ground that sits above the coal seam, dig up the coal and put the ground back. Often, we just dynamite the ground out of the way (mountain top removal). All of this completely destroys the plants, rivers, and animal habitat on the surface. It also dredges up a lot of toxic heavy elements that have been buried for millennia. Natural gas (and some oil) is produced by drilling deep wells, having those drills then drill horizontally in multiple directions, and then pumping in chemical laden water at such high pressure that it literally fractures the shale.  Oil is now often harvested by drilling to extraordinary depth and pressure, often in the ocean, where spills are difficult to contain. Once the petroleum is retrieved, it has to be refined, which requires more energy (heat), more chemicals, and creates more pollution.  And all of these fossil fuels need to be transported thousands of miles via ship, pipeline, or train.

This entire system is totally ridiculous.  It requires countless moving parts and therefore a lot of maintenance (drills, pistons, valves, pumps, turbines, ships and trains), countless chemicals (for fracking, refining, purifying the exhaust), requires a lot of energy itself (for drilling, transporting, refining, and purifying the exhaust), and emits an enormous amount of pollution.

Now juxtapose the current system to the one that I envision for the future. The primary source of energy will be the Sun.  Cheap, durable, solar panels will blanket the roofs of all buildings.  These have no moving parts whatsoever, and they last for decades. These solar panels produce electrical energy without digging up the earth, without noise, without moving parts and costly maintenance, without pollution.  They just sit there, for decades. And if they're producing power when we don't need it, it can be stored in batteries, again, with no mechanical parts. Electrical cars will replace internal combustion engines.  All of those hoses, valves, pumps, coolants, belts, will be replaced with a battery, and wires -- no moving parts, except the one you actually want to move, the axle.

The purely electrical vision of the future is so much simpler, cleaner, quieter. And soon it will be cheaper.  For existing electronic appliances (our phones for example), this simplicity is ingrained, and Nissan pointed this out in a commercial for its all electric car, the Leaf.

For a moment, imagine that our electrical appliances were powered directly by fossil fuels.  It's a preposterous thought, that we would put up with the complexity, the noise, the pollution, the maintenance.  Twenty years from now, we will look back on our current energy infrastructure the same way.

The renewable, electrified future just makes sense. And, by the way, it will save the world from catastrophic climate change.


[Addendum: Yes, I know we're not there yet.  The last piece of the puzzle is the battery.  They need to be much cheaper and more energy dense (and ideally use elements more common than lithium). But the batteries are improving rapidly. As the research on and production of batteries improves over the next decade, we can start by replacing 20% of our energy with renewables and upgrading the electrical grid. After that, we can have wide scale adoption of electrical energy storage and solar power). ]