How Energy Transition Models Go Wrong
I have written many posts relating to the fact that we live in a finite world. At some point, our ability to extract resources becomes constrained. At the same time, population keeps increasing. The usual outcome when population is too high for resources is “overshoot and collapse.” But this is not a topic that the politicians or central bankers or oligarchs who attend the World Economic Forum dare to talk about.
Instead, world leaders find a different problem, namely climate change, to emphasize above other problems. Conveniently, climate change seems to have some of the same solutions as “running out of fossil fuels.” So, a person might think that an energy transition designed to try to fix climate change would work equally well to try to fix running out of fossil fuels. Unfortunately, this isn’t really the way it works.
In this post, I will lay out some of the issues involved.
[1] There are many different constraints that new energy sources need to conform to.
These are a few of the constraints I see:
- Should be inexpensive to produce
- Should work with the current portfolio of existing devices
- Should be available in the quantities required, in the timeframe needed
- Should not pollute the environment, either when created or at the end of their lifetimes
- Should not add CO2 to the atmosphere
- Should not distort ecosystems
- Should be easily stored, or should be easily ramped up and down to precisely match energy timing needs
- Cannot overuse fresh water or scarce minerals
- Cannot require a new infrastructure of its own, unless the huge cost in terms of delayed timing and greater materials use is considered.
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