Energywise

An article in the current issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the magazine founded by Manhattan Project physicists to address global security issues in the widest sense, argues that the world nuclear industry is bound to contract in the coming decades. Though the capacity of the world reactor fleet has continued to increase modestlyâ''by 3 gigawatts per year from 2000 to 2004, then by 2 GW/yr in the following three yearsâ''much of that has resulted from â''uprating,â'' not additional construction. Uprating refers to efficiency improvements made to existing reactors, a process that has added 5 GW to U.S. nuclear capacity since the 1970s

Today, only 35 reactors are under construction worldwide, and even if additional orders are soon placed, new nuclear power plants will not come online fast enough to replace those being retired. Just to stay even, 70 additional plants would have to come into operation by 2015, and another 192 in the decade starting in 2015. Considering the average global lead time for nuclear plant construction is greater than nine years, itâ''s clear that new construction will not outpace retirements at least until late in the next decade.

Note, however, that lead times vary widely by region. In China, India, Japan, and South Korea, it takes just five years to take a nuclear power plant from conception to completion.

An article in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, published by the American Institute of Physics, describes very small photovoltaic arrays that could be used to power micromechanical devices. The appearance of a new technical journal in renewables is itself notable; so too the description of techniques that could be used to make tiny PV power supplies for MEMS devices such as those used to detect chemical leaks.

Scientists at the University of South Florida, Tampa, employed a photolithographic technique to isolate individual PV cells and make output contacts for a 20-cell array; they laid down series connections by thermal-vacuum deposition. So far they have engineered arrays to produce 7.8 volts, about half of what would be needed to power a chemical detector made of carbon nanotubes, and they expect to achieve the requisite 15 V by the end of the year.

Engineers working in the teeming cities and lonely deserts of North Africa are creating the last links in a power grid that will ring the Mediterranean Sea. Sharing electricity over this 'Mediterranean Ring' could secure Europe's power supply with clean renewable energy, accelerating North Africa's development and knitting together two worlds that seem to be racing apart â'' those of Muslim North Africa and an increasingly xenophobic Europe.

We make the case for all this unabashed optimism in Closing the Circuit - my feature in this month's print issue of Spectrum. Closing the Circuit is the product of two years of on-again, off-again research that came to fruition with on-site reporting in Libya and Morocco this summer.

The timing is fortuitious: North African countries - in many ways among the most progressive in the Muslim world - face a rising threat of Islamic fundamentalism, including increasingly deadly attacks by Al Qaeda-aligned militants. Economic development and democratization are the best hope for a North African renaissance. At the same time Europe's growing dependence on Russian oil and gas and desire to slash carbon emissions has intensified interest in North Africa's energy resources.

The scale of the potential exchange is immense: Analyses by the German government estimate that solar power generated in scorching North Africa could meet Germany's entire electricity demand. No wonder then that the Union for the Mediterranean launched by French president Nicolas Sarkozy this summer to spur cooperation between Europe and North Africa is fleshing out a â''Mediterranean solar planâ'' as one of its first actions.

The geopolitical and social import could be bigger still. Consider what Dominique Maillard, President of French grid operator Réseau de Transport de l'Electricité, said when asked last month what the Mediterranean Ring represents during an interview last month for the European Energy Review. Maillard began his response by noting that the electrical interconnections between the European countries got started in 1951 - well before the signing of the Treaty or Paris, which created a European coal and steel market, and before the Treaty of Rome in 1957. "At the dawn of Europe, energy - and even electrical energy - had therefore already preceded politics," says Maillard.

The implication by extension is clear: Electrical interconnection can be the forerunner for peaceful codevelopment among the countries of the Mediterranean, even including Israel. Call it informed optimism.

According to the conventional wisdom, the only way to discourage emission of carbon dioxide is to establish a carbon trading system, despite the cumbersome administrative infrastructure such a system requires and the controversial decisions that have to be made about permits and penalties. Why not a much simpler uniform carbon tax? If you donâ''t mind my echoing James Carville, BECAUSE ITâ''S A TAX, STUPID! But hey, itâ''s an all new ballgame, so perhaps itâ''s time to consider how such a tax could fit into the comprehensive tax reforms President-Elect Obama has outlined.

Mainstream economists have always preferred a carbon tax to a trading system because a tax would establish a completely level playing field, with organizations and individuals penalized in exact proportion to the carbon they emit; everybody would be free to adjust to the new situation as best they could, without the government having to constantly jigger the system to influence whoâ''s coming out ahead and whoâ''s falling behind. A carbon tax appeals to climate scientists too, for essentially the same reason. If youâ''re a coal-fired electricity generator, youâ''ll pay about twice as much tax as an oil-fired generator and three times as much as a gas-fired generator because per unit electricity you produce, coal is about twice as carbon-intensive as oil and three times as intensive as natural gas.

Politicians hate carbon taxation for the obvious reason. Once I asked a top environmentalist who had played a big role in designing Californiaâ''s ambitious carbon reduction program why they had opted for carbon trading rather than taxation. â''If you can ever find me two state assembly members who like the idea of a carbon tax,â'' he said, â''maybe Iâ''ll get interested.â''

Could a carbon tax look different to politicians in the context of the tax reform program Candidate Obama proposed? If the very rich are to be taxed more and the working and middle classes less, so that the Reagan and Bush tax reforms are essentially reversed, why not include a carbon tax, with proceeds earmarked for green tech R&D, relief for low-income people most sharply affected by higher electricity bills, and jobs creation in the coal-dependent states most adversely affected by higher electricity pricesâ''precisely the mid-western battleground states, by the way, that won Obama the election.

If, say, a carbon tax were tuned to hike the cost of coal-generated electricity by 50 percent, as I have proposed in a book, the predictable effects would be roughly as follows: average electricity prices would rise 25 percent (since coal accounts for half of our power generated), prompting consumers to use energy more parsimoniously and rely on more efficient devices; wind energy would be highly competitive with coal, and nuclear energy would be quite competitive enough, so that it would require no further subsidies or guarantees; the various approaches to carbon capture and storage would have a fighting change of asserting themselves in the market over the next 15-25 years. And by 2015 or so, the United States would be in step with international efforts to curb carbon emissions.

President Obama might ask himself this: Does he want to propose yet another cap-and-trade carbon trading system that will run to hundreds of pages and be a sitting-duck target for opponents eager to portray it a tangle of red tape? Such a system will be a target too for critics pointing out, perfectly accurately, that a trading system is just a disguised, roundabout way of putting a price onâ''that is to say, taxingâ''carbon.

Perhaps President Obama would rather say that the honest thing to do is just enact a carbon tax, in a system that can easily be described in three pages, and which will be an integral part of a complete progressive tax system, in the tradition of the Roosevelts and Wilson.

The International Energy Agency, the OECD organization in Paris that has the job of tracking trends and spotting major emergent issues, will report next week that oil prices will quickly rebound to $100/barrel and higher when the world recession recedes and that theyâ''ll be $200/b and up by 2030. So reports todayâ''s Financial Times, having obtained an advance copy of the executive summary. According to the FT, though prices may stay low for a time, â''it is becoming increasingly apparent that the era of cheap oil is over.â''

From now to 2030, says the IEA, there will be transfer of $2 trillion from the oil consuming nations to OPEC (and that calculation does not appear to include non-OPEC suppliers, notably Russia). This means the consuming nations will be expending 5-7 percent of their GDP on oil, compared to 4 percent in 2007.

One caveat: the IEA warns that â''current global trends in energy supply and consumption are patently unsustainable.â'' People seem to forget when they use the word unsustainable what it means: that the trends cannot be sustained. In other words, ultimately the IEA is saying that what it is predicting to happen will not actually happen because it cannot happen.

So all the specifics in next weekâ''s report have to be taken with a big IFâ''that is to say, roughly speaking, the IEA is saying this is what would happen (eg. 7 percent of GDP spent on oil in 2030) if all the things that we cannot anticipate happening in response to higher prices did not happen although they actually will happen, because otherwise economic life would be unsustainable.

A followup to this blog will guide readers to the full IEA report, as soon as itâ''s posted next week.

ClimateProgress.org, the website and blogging central closely associated with Joseph Romm, is reporting that David Hayes will be in charge of all Obama transition planning on energy and the environment, and that the EPA transition planning team will be headed by Robert Sussman and Lisa Jackson. All have substantial political and professional credentials. Hayes was deputy secretary of the interior in the Clinton Administration. Sussman ran the environmental practice for a leading DC law firm and has been a fellow of Jon Podestaâ''s Center for American Progress, while Jackson most recently was head of New Jerseyâ''s environmental agency and just two weeks ago was named chief of staff to NJ Governor Jon Corzine.

Both Sussman and Jackson are now prima facie leading contenders to be named Obamaâ''s Environmental Protection Administrator. Sussmanâ''s closeness to tranisition chief Podesta would seem to give him the edge, but note that Jackson, an engineer who happens to be African American, has helped New Jersey adopt exceptionally hard-headed and far-sighted energy policies, as reported here, not once but twice.

Energywise readers may have got the impression from Bill's last post -- Critical Election? Critical Century! -- that Martin Rees was commenting directly on the election, though he was not. Here is some more elegant prose that actually is about the election's critical importance to climate and energy policy and the hopes riding on the Obama Administration to come. The text is a statement released yesterday by R.K. Pachauri, director general of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in New Dehli and Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- the UN-sponsored body that seeks and sells scientific consensus on climate science and policy. Pachauri celebrates Obama's election as a cause for optimism:

The presidential elections in the US have vindicated the power of democracy as the most responsive form of government of the people, by the people and for the people. In respect of policies related to climate change, there was obviously a major divergence between the position of the Federal Government and that of the people at large, state governments and the cities in the US.

President-elect Barack Obama has not only been very clear in emphasizing the need for the US to engage in global solutions to meet the challenge of climate change but also in respect of bringing about a major shift in US energy policy.

The US now has a unique opportunity to assume leadership in meeting the threat of climate change, and it would help greatly if the new President were to announce a coherent and forward looking policy soon after he takes office. There is every reason to believe that President Obama will actually do so. This should please people across the globe, because US leadership is critical for mounting global efforts to meet this threat effectively. For this reason itself, apart from several others, the election of Mr Obama is a development that should generate optimism all-round.

Pachauri's statement was forwarded to members of the Society of Environmental Journalists by Arul Louis, a fellow at the International Center for Journalists in Washington, DC.

Sir Martin Rees, an eminent Cambridge University astrophysicist, has an article on science in the next century in the current issue of The New York Review of Books, in which he covers space, nuclear weapons, climate change, green energy, resources and population, epidemics, weaponry of mass destruction, and ultimately the social responsibilities of scientists. As The New York Review may not be the usual destination for IEEE Spectrum readers, Rees's arresting final remarks may be worth quoting at length. Here they are:

â''. . . This century may be a defining moment. It's the first in our planet's history where one speciesâ''oursâ''has the earth's future in its hands.

Suppose some aliens had been watching our planetâ''a "pale blue dot" in a vast cosmosâ''for its entire history, what would they have seen? Over nearly all that immense time, 4.5 billion years, the earth's appearance would have altered very gradually. The continents drifted; the ice cover waxed and waned; successive species emerged, evolved, and became extinct. But in just a tiny sliver of the earth's historyâ''the last one millionth part, a few thousand yearsâ''the patterns of vegetation altered much faster than before. This signaled the start of agriculture. The changes accelerated as human populations rose.

But then there were other changes, even more abrupt. Within fifty yearsâ''little more than one hundredth of a millionth of the earth's ageâ''the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere began to increase anomalously fast. The planet became an intense emitter of radio waves (i.e., the total output from all TV, cell phone, and radar transmissions). And something else unprecedented happened: small projectiles lifted from the planet's surface and escaped the biosphere completely. Some were propelled into orbits around the earth; some journeyed to the moon and planets.

If they understood astrophysics, the aliens could confidently predict that the biosphere would face doom in a few billion years when the sun flares up and dies. But could they have predicted this unprecedented spike less than half-way through the earth's lifeâ''these human-induced alterations occupying, overall, less than a millionth of the elapsed lifetime and seemingly occurring with runaway speed? If they continued to keep watch, what might these hypothetical aliens witness in the next hundred years? Will a final spasm be followed by silence? Or will the planet itself stabilize? And will some of the objects launched from the earth spawn new oases of life elsewhere?

The answers will depend on us, collectively. . . ."

In Michael Crichtonâ''s silly but immensely successful State of Fear, the plot turns on the ludicrous poetic conceit that climate scientists are not merely sweeping inconvenient facts under the rug, but conspiratorially covering them up. (At the end, the book stops being merely laughable and turns really nasty, with Crichton sadistically killing some of the scientists off.) Among Crichtonâ''s inconvenient truths supposedly being suppressed: the puzzling pause of the earthâ''s warming in the mid-twentieth century, asymmetric climate changes in the northern versus southern hemispheres, andâ''the point Crichton most emphasizesâ''the fact that parts of Antarctica appear to be warming rather than cooling.

In actuality, those issues have been out in the open and under constant discussion among climatologists for decades. I, a mere amateur observer of the ongoing debates, have had a personal theory about the puzzling mid-century pause for years, but as it has no intellectual standing whatsoever, I wonâ''t bore you with it. Nor will I attempt to lay out the various theories about the asymmetric behavior of the poles, as our understanding of the subject appears to be very incomplete, and the technicalities much too complex for anybody but a specialist to truly grasp.

However, Nature Geoscience has published this week, in its Oct. 30 online edition, a major new scientific report on Antarctic warming, along with an exceptionally lucid commentary by Andrew Monaghan of NCAR and David Bromwich of Ohio State. Since the articles appear to be readily accessibly only to people who have Geoscience accounts, I am going to recapitulate the findings in a little more detail than I ordinarily would.

The report, â''Attribution of Polar Warming to Human Influence,â'' is by eight scientists, among whom the principal is Nathan P. Gillett, a climatologist at the University of East Anglia in the UK. In their introductory précis, the scientists remind readers that in the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (its fourth assessment), Antarctica is described as the only continent on which anthropogenic global warming has not be conclusively shown. Using novel simulation techniques and data from four major climate models, the climate scientists say they have now found that Antarctic warming must also be human-induced. As the commentary explains, they arrived at this finding by ingeniously disentangling the â''internal and external forcing mechanisms that have contributed to the recently observed variability in near-surface temperature near the poles.â''

By way of background, the commentary notes that Arctic (North Pole) near-surface air temperatures have warmed at about twice the global rate in the last 50 years. â''One of the most dramatic consequences has been the steady decline of sea ice coverage, punctuated by the shocking record minimum in sea ice extent in September 2007â''about 20 percent below the previous recordâ'¿. Other consequences of Arctic warming include increased river runoff, decreased snow cover, permafrost degradation, and a shrinking Greenland ice sheet that is contributing to the rise in sea level.â'' But changes in Antarctica have been much less homogenous. â''Antarctic sea ice over has in general not undergone the marked decline seen for Arctic sea ice, and there has been relatively little change in near-surface air temperatures over the vast East Antarctic ice sheet during the past half century.â''

But in West Antarctica recent ice core evidence shows that the ice sheet underwent â''strong warming with substantial superimposed variabilityâ'' during the past 50-100 years. Several large glaciers in the region are moving faster, adding to sea level rise. On the Antarctic Peninsula, temperature increases of up to 3 degrees Celsius since the 1950s â''are among the largest on Earth for that period.â''

The commentators go on to discuss the relative paucity of observations in Antarctica, and the very considerable uncertainties in accounts of the regionâ''s temperature variations. But this much seems clear: parts of Antarctica have been warming sharply, and those changes are not consistent with natural cycles.

POSTSCRIPT: Michael Crichton's death last week coincided in an unfortunate way with this unabashedly one-sided post. For more scrupulously balanced appraisals of his work, start with Charles McGrath, William Grimes, and Dave Itzkoff in The New York Times.

A year and a half ago IEEE Spectrum published a feature article making the case that geoengineeringâ''deliberate modification of the earthâ''s climateâ''will have to be part of the solution to global warming. In recent months thereâ''s been an avalanche of geoengineering articles, for which weâ''d like to take credit, except that the main pulse came not from us but from Paul J. Crutzen, the Nobelist who codiscovered the mechanisms behind the creation and destruction of stratospheric ozone. In an August 2006 article, Crutzen put his considerable prestige behind engineered climate modification, specifically the idea of pumping sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight and cool the earth.

Crutzen is a starting point for a feature in this monthâ''s Scientific American by science writer Robert Kunzig, who surveys three major approaches: pumping SO2 to create a â''stratospheric sulfate sunshadeâ''; telescope designer Roger Angelâ''s concept for building a sunshield out of small silicon nitride disks at the Earth-Sun Lagrangian; andâ''perhaps most arrestinglyâ''whipping sea salt up into the atmosphere to speed and enhance cloud formation over the oceans, using so-called Flettner ships.

Curiously, Scientific American prefaces its geoengineering feature with an editorialâ''an eloquent and well-reasoned one, to be sureâ''arguing that undue emphasis on climate modification puts the cart before the horse: â''Proponents . . . see geoengineering merely as a stopgap measure to buy time for emissions reductions, which may take decades to achieve. But what is the point of buying time? Every year that we put off those reductions makes our job that much harder.â''

This blogger agrees that emissions reduction must take priority. But wouldnâ''t it still make sense to have geoengineering tools at our disposal, to use if catastrophic climate changes start to take place, despite the worldâ''s efforts at emissions reduction? New Zealand ecologist Philip Boyd, in an article and interview, says we should critically evaluate the main geoengineering ideas now, throw away the ones that are plainly no good, and put the remaining ones in a â''climate change toolbox,â'' ready for use in a climate emergency.

If youâ''re looking for criteria to decide which geoengineering ideas make sense and which donâ''t, a good place to start is the May-June issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which listed â''20 reasons why geoengineering may be a bad idea.â'' (Risks of unintended consequences, which loom large in Kunzigâ''s article and SciAmâ''s critical assessment, rank only 20 on the list compiled by Rutgers ecologist Alan Robock.) The top two are the uneven regional effects to be expected from sulfate shielding and the continued acidification of the oceans that will take place irrespective of counter-warming measures.

A technical article that Robock wrote this year with two coauthors evaluated regional climate effects from injection of SO2 in the tropics and Arctic regions. They found that sulfate shields â''would disrupt the Asian and African summer monsoons, reducing precipitation to the food supply for billions of people.â''