Category Archives: Energy

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Going into a house that was partially collapsed by an earthquake two days ago and is being consumed by a fire that started this morning, to tell the residents that they also have a serious termite problem, is not fun. It takes a special kind of guy. But I have to say this; while we have been mesmerized by coronavirus and the stock market crash and the shutdown of the entire economy and the onset of a depression, it is also the case that the entire American oil industry is crashing. We will be trying to deal with this long after we again start thinking of beer when we hear the word “corona.”

Don’t take my word for it. “We are on the verge of a major collapse [of the oil industry]” says former energy secretary Rick Perry. “The oil patch is falling apart,” says the mad-hatter investment guru Jim Cramer. When it’s finally getting through to intellectual giants and perpetual cheerleaders such as Perry and Cramer, something is definitely going on.  Continue reading →

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Mr. Damocles, please go to the nearest courtesy phone. We found your sword. (Des Moines Register photo)

The reason that industrialism kills whatever industrialism touches is that it has only one answer to every question, one solution for every problem: scale it up! Get big or get out! But as I and many others have been pointing out for years, the economies of scale sought by industries are always accompanied by a dark twin: concentration of risk. The bigger the manufacturing plant, the lower its unit costs of production, but also the greater the pollution emitted, the denser the traffic generated in a small area, etcetera. The other thing to remember about these penalties of industrialism if that many of them are deferred. By the time the full effect of the pollution is felt, the owners of the factory have grown rich, sold out and retired. 

This is what is now happening to the wind-generation industry. The first of the giant wind turbines erected are reaching the end of their service life — much sooner than anticipated — and it turns out, nobody worked up a plan for that. The school-bus sized nacelles and generators can be refurbished or their steel recycled, but the vanes are another matter. They are too big to die.

The blades have been increasing in size since the first of them went up circa 1985, but to pick a median size, a 200-foot blade contains nearly 19 tons of epoxy, fiberglass, PVC foam, wood fiber and other stuff. That’s almost 60 tons of stuff (per turbine) that can’t be crushed or recycled or composted. So what do you do with it? Take it to your friendly neighborhood landfill.  

If this strikes you as a small problem, let it strike you again. First of all, the blades were expected to outlast the turbines, which were expected to last at least 20 years. But the units are barely making 15 years, the blades failing because of manufacturing defects (mostly), lightning strikes, and unusual local wind conditions. So they have to come down. Continue reading →

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When do you write the obituary for a zombie? When you determine that he has no heartbeat or brain activity? Shoot, he’s just getting started. (No, I mean it. Shoot!) A limb or two has rotted and fallen off? He’s still going. That’s America’s oil industry today. No signs of life and still going. 

That’s why I stopped writing obituaries for the American oil industry four years ago. It was not that I changed my mind, or doubted for a moment that the industry was on the verge of collapse; nor was I convinced by the cacophony of liars proclaiming a new era of American energy independence and domination of the global oil industry. It was and remains a colossal lie, gallons of lipstick applied to the rotting carcass of a pig, and yet the pig is still widely regarded as healthy and beautiful.  

A brief reality check is in order. Continue reading →

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DOOMSDAY MACHINE — using the electricity of four refrigerators, demanding the power just when it is most difficult to provide, increasingly essential to comfort and even life throughout the world: this could be the machine that brings it all down.

Crushing household debt, a collapsing real estate market and a contracting economy have strangled consumer spending in China, especially spending on big-ticket appliances. One result of this is that sales of air conditioners have tanked, leaving manufacturers in China this spring with about 50 million finished units unsold, stacked up in inventory. 

This is terrible news for industry and consumerism, but it’s good news for the planet. Because, it turns out, our frantic efforts to keep ourselves cool while the planet heats up are accelerating the heating of the planet.  You could call it a feedback loop. Continue reading →

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On the right, a windmill of the kind used for hundred of years to do specific tasks — usually pump water — in specific locations. It was built mostly on site, using mostly renewable materials. On the left, the modern industrial version. Hold your applause.

Of all the bulls crashing about in the “renewable energy can save the world” china shop, none is more grotesque than industrial wind power. I have never come upon an array of behemoth wind turbines looming over a mountain ridge in West Virginia or Pennsylvania or elsewhere without feeling like I’ve been transported into the movie version of War of the Worlds, without expecting to see the flash and crackle of laser beams shooting down attack helicopters. The feeling of doom they inspire, it turns out, is appropriate.

To misquote Buckminster Fuller, “Industry kills what industry touches.” They take a good idea like organic food and turn it into industrial food. We get interested in living off the grid on solar energy and they give us enormous solar “farms” and a whole new grid. We think about hoisting a wind turbine above our house to help with the energy demand and they say, no, wait, we’ve got a better idea that makes a whole lot of money and sounds green. 

So they gave us wind turbines. Now we have 57,000 of them in 41 states, a number that has more than tripled in ten years. This is great, says the industry, because it’s renewable energy, not like that terrible old fossil fuel energy that polluted the air and kills the planet. But it turns out — especially now that the earliest wind turbines have reached the end of their service life and are posing one of the world’s worst recycling headaches — that the case for industrial renewables is not so great. Continue reading →

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This is where solar power shines: providing power needed by the site, on the site, without the grid.

I remember clearly the horror I felt when the truth about the new-generation solar panels from the well known company of Solar One Illinois was revealed to me which was quite surprising to hear as it was so good. It was a field day of sorts, at a farm, during which we  were learning about a massive solar installation, sufficient to power not only the house and barns but an array of commercial freezers and refrigerators. Older solar panels required thick cables to route their 12-volt output to an inverter that changed the voltage to 110. But these new panels, we were told, each contained its own inverter and so yielded 110 volts without the need for thick cables or an external device.

It was only later, and tangentially, that the downside of this new development was revealed. Someone said something about how nice it must be to live without fear of the grid going down. The response was that well, actually, if the grid went down this enormous solar array would stop producing electricity because the solar panel’s inverters required an external power source to function. Continue reading →

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In the good old days (1929, here) a gusher like this paid you over a hundred times what you put into it. Today, not so much.

In the early part of the 20th Century, when a wildcatter struck oil, he got a return on his investment of 100 to one. For every unit of energy he used to find and bring the oil to market, he got 100 units back (money is simply a token for the energy, a marker of its value). On that EROI — energy return on energy invested — of 100:1, more than on any other single thing, rests the advent of the Industrial Age and the American Empire. When we discovered oil we won the lottery, a lump sum payment of enough cheap energy to do whatever we wanted to do, until it ran out. 

It hasn’t quite run out yet, but something else almost as serious has happened. Today, when an oil company extracts shale oil from rock by fracking (hydraulic fracturing) the EROI is five to one, one twentieth of what it used to be. From a well that costs many multiples of a standard oil well to build and operate, and that will be depleted in three years instead of the traditional 20 or more. This set of facts, more than any other, explains why the Industrial Age and the American Empire are in their final throes.   Continue reading →

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At about 7 am last Sunday, the power went out simultaneously in five countries — all of Argentina, most of Uruguay and parts of Paraguay, Chile and Brazil. About 50 million people were affected as homes, businesses and cities were crippled for about 12 hours. One power company blamed another, one country blamed another, but eventually a consensus emerged: the system had been brought down by a cyber attack. 

It remains to be seen whether or not this explanation was a way of deflecting attention from the culpability of executives and governors who have presided over the long deterioration of electric grids everywhere. But it is true — and a great irony — that much of what utilities have spent in recent years to upgrade the grid has made it far more vulnerable to bad actors.  Continue reading →

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Yet another contribution of a recent scientific report to the United Nations [See Scientists to UN: Brace for Impact] is to highlight a massive blind spot in modern thinking about how economies work. Economies cannot be understood, says the report, nor can their behavior be predicted, when no one takes into account their real costs. In the words of the report: “the economic models which inform political decision-making in rich countries almost completely disregard the energetic and material dimensions of the economy.” Continue reading →

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It’s been pump and burn for two and a half centuries. Now the bills are coming due, and there’s no way to pay them.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations commissioned a world class group of biophysicists to contribute a background report for the forthcoming UN Global Sustainable Development Report. To paraphrase what the scientists told the UN: Brace for Impact.

A longer version of what they said is that the modern world is besieged by myriad existential problems, all of which share two characteristics: their root cause is our mishandling of fossil fuels; and they cannot be solved by the world’s existing economic and political institutions. These ideas will not be new or strange to denizens of The Daily Impact, but it is new to see them expressed in such uncompromising terms by so lofty a scientific group. Continue reading →