Free Energy Servants!

By
Branko Terzic

Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla both believed electricity in the future could come directly from the sun. Both viewed coal as a dirty fuel and Edison spent a great amount of time and resources looking for a way of extracting energy from coal without combustion. You could say he was looking for “coal” cold fusion as a way of extracting energy from high density coal.

Both understood that there was a lot of energy available from the sun. Today’s technologies to capture the sun’s energy are predominately photovoltaic (PV), not known to Edison and Tesla, and wind.

However, as an engineer I am realistic about the sheer magnitude of our energy infrastructure and the physical realities of a major displacement of fossil fuels with solar, or wind energy and without new nuclear power-plants. To replace a 1,000 MW coal-fired power plant (on a 1.5 square mile site) would take about 19 square miles of PV panels, like a small city’s worth land. Replacing today’s fleet of coal and gas power plants of 793,000 MW installed capacity would require 15,000 square miles of PV panels and a lot of batteries (yet to be developed). That would be about the land area of New Hampshire and Connecticut together.  Replacing wind generation for coal and gas would need at least 79,000 square miles, which is a little bit less land than Kansas, and that does not include a capacity factor adjustment for availability.

That brings up another potential issue with large scale global solar and wind installations. Canadian author Andrew Nikiforuk writing in The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude (Greystone Books 2012) cited a 2008 study published in an article in Ecological Complexity by Anastassia Makarieva, Victor Gorshkov and Bai-Lin Li. There the authors assert that:

“Any large scale consumption of solar energy, currently perceived as harmless and environmentally friendly, will have a catastrophic impact of these critically important life supporting processes…” 

According to Nikiforuk the authors’ “… findings indicate that renewables could at best provide no more than one tenth of human energy consumption without destroying the delivery of critical energy flows upon which life depends.” 

The only alternative, according to Nikiforuk, is to reduce demand. The title The Energy Slaves comes from estimations of the number of inanimate energy “slaves” currently supporting our lifestyles. Nikiforuk calls for nothing less than a “systemic reduction of the number of inanimate slaves in our households and places of work.” 

Of course, that will be hard to do without really significant improvements in efficiency or conservation (in the form of the avoidance of some tasks or services). What would the average household like to give up? Air conditioning, refrigeration, sump pumps, garage door motors etc?

Nikiforuk estimates that the average household is served by about the equivalent of 33 helpers. (Not counting transportation) This seems low as my own estimate is that an average of 4 kilowatts household electric demand (at 13 strong men for every kilowatt) would be about 52 helpers. But this is way below the number of helpers (kW) needed for peak demands of 20 kilowatts when air conditioners and refrigerators kick in at a suburban residence.

And who knows? Improvements in efficiency and life-style enabled conservation could still surprise us.

In 2022, renewable energy supply from solar, wind, hydro, geothermal and ocean rose by close to 8% That increase, referring back to the Makarieva et al 2008 study and its 10% tipping point, brings us globally in 2023 to about 8% of total energy coming from solar and wind.