Be prepared to execute a world-class eye roll. It seems the US Dept. of Energy stinks at, well, saving energy in their use of IT hardware. The report Department of Energy Efforts to Manage Information Technology Resources in an Energy-Efficient and Environmentally Responsible Manner [30 page, 1.2 MB PDF], by none other than the Depart of Energy, says:

Despite its recognized energy conservation leadership role, the Department had not always taken advantage of opportunities to reduce energy consumption associated with its information technology resources. Nor, had it ensured that resources were managed in a way that minimized impact on the environment. In particular (from the summary cover letter):

• The seven Federal and contractor sites included in our review had not fully reduced energy consumption through implementation of power management settings on their desktop and laptop computers; and, as a consequence, spent $1.6 million more on energy costs than necessary in Fiscal Year 2008;
• None of the sites reviewed had taken advantage of opportunities to reduce energy consumption, enhance cyber security, and reduce costs available through the use of techniques, such as “thin-client computing” in their unclassified environments; and,
• Sites had not always taken the necessary steps to reduce energy consumption and resource usage of their data centers, such as identifying and monitoring the amount of energy used at their facilities.

We concluded that Headquarters programs offices (which are part of the Department of Energy’s Common Operating Environment) as well as field sites had not developed and/or implemented policies and procedures necessary to ensure that information technology equipment and supporting infrastructure was operated in an energy-efficient manner and in a way that minimized impact on the environment. For example, although required by the Department, sites had not enabled computer equipment power management features designed to reduce energy consumption. In addition, officials within Headquarters programs and at the sites reviewed had not effectively monitored performance or taken steps to fully evaluate available reductions in energy usage at their facilities. Without improvements, the Department will not be able to take advantage of opportunities to reduce energy consumption and realize cost savings of nearly $23 million over the next five years at just the seven sites reviewed. We noted that the potential for reduced energy consumption at these sites alone was equivalent to the annual power requirements of over 2,400 homes or, alternatively, removing about 3,000 cars from the road each year.

In a word: Ouch.

In more than one word: When some entity–individual, business, government office, university, whatever–fails to take steps that save energy, reduce environmental impact, and return an instantaneous financial benefit for no cost, then someone has screwed up.

Which begs the question: How diligent are you in taking these steps? Did you put your electricity vampires on cheap switched outlets? Do you use the power settings on your computers? Do you use ceiling fans (assuming you have them) to minimize your use of air conditioning? And, yes–did you change your light bulbs?

Have you taken any steps to make your workplace or your kids’ schools more energy efficient?

If the answer to any of these is no, then how much of a financial benefit (or guilt avoidance) do you need to make you overcome your inertia and take action?

Greenpeace has thrown down the gauntlet (by which I mean mouse pad) and issued the Cool IT Challenge, “a campaign to turn IT industry leaders into climate advocates and solution providers.” From their About page:

This website exposes the gap between what the IT industry could do to fight climate change, and what they’re doing today. As the leaderboard shows, there’s a long way to go (hint: They’re scored out of 100). [Note that as of this posting, the scorecard’s best rating was a measly 29.]

The Cool IT Challenge is a climate change campaign born of the experience of the Greenpeace Guide to Greener Electronics: Public pressure, humour and a bit of luck can move even the most stubborn industry giants into action.

Why start a climate campaign for the IT crowd?

Our planet is on the brink of runaway climate change and the consequences will be catastrophic. Our changing climate affects everyone.

The Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector creates two percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. That’s the bad news. The good news is that its services and products could cut the world’s emissions by an estimated 15 percent when applied in industry, buildings, transport and power sectors. Smart 2020, A report by The Climate Group on behalf of the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI), with independent analysis by McKinsey & Company, has all the details.

Politicians will meet in Copenhagen this December to agree a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. A strong Copenhagen deal will create the right market conditions for a massive roll-out of smart technologies — the stuff that the IT industry makes. So you might expect IT CEOs to be lobbying governments for a strong deal? Well they’re not… yet.

Assessment 1: May 2009

The first results of the Greenpeace Cool IT Challenge expose the IT industry’s inadequate leadership in tackling climate change despite its claim to have the immense potential to enable 15 percent cuts or more in all global greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 (Source: Smart2020 Report).

To really deliver on this potential the IT industry needs to look beyond just cutting its own emissions and deliver climate solutions for the rest of the economy while urgently using its influence to call upon world leaders to deliver a climate saving deal at the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen in December.

The Cool IT Challenge will be updated regularly, with the second version debuting in August.

(You can find the report mentioned above and more information about Smart2020 on the project’s web site.)

Based on my personal experience in the computer business, I enthusiastically agree.

I’ve contended for a long time that one of the biggest sources of wasted energy in the IT sector is caused by Windows, specifically its boot times that you can measure with a sundial.[1] I’m convinced that this is why so many users leave their PC’s on 24/7: It’s the only way to get a quick start up time, and they don’t see the immediate cost of leaving a PC on constantly, as that expense only shows up at the end of the month, and even then it’s blended in with all of their other electricity consumption. (Perhaps we need to steal an idea from those instantaneous MPG meters in some cars and create a little desktop widget that lets you configure a power consumption level and price of electricity so it can show you how much your PC usage has added to our electricity bill in the current session and month. Hmm. Might be time to whip out ye olde programming tools.) Each individual laptop or desktop PC doesn’t consume much power, but multiply that by a lot of hours and then by many millions of PCs just in the US, and you’re talkin’ about some pretty hefty energy waste.

The other area where IT people really do a poor job is data center cooling. The numbers I’ve seen say that for every watt consumed by hardware to do real work, it takes another 1.0 to 1.5 watts to cool it. Add to that the fact that many data centers have horribly misconfigured and mismanaged cooling, which typically run 24/7, of course, and the amount of waste is staggering.

Why, one might well ask, would IT managers not be much more aggressive about squeezing waste out of their operations? I think the answer lies in two factors:

First, good old fashioned inertia and ultra conservative practices. They’ve done things one way for years and had very little trouble with hardware outages, so they’re extremely hesitant to mess with their operations, particularly when it comes to cooling data centers. Many people in that business will choose to stay the course, even if they’re pretty sure they’re paying more for cooling than is truly necessary, rather than make a change to save some money and wind up triggering a much more expensive failure because they didn’t adequately cool their hardware.

Second, many facilities have cut personnel to dangerously low levels. They’ve taken “doing more with less” from a hackneyed slogan to a fetish, and in the process created an environment where their people are running as fast as they can just to keep even with “must do” work. There’s simply no human resource available to evaluate and implement any sort of data center reorganization plan.

But there is a lot that can be done, even in such a strained environment. New, less power hungry chips and disk drives will reduce the energy appetite of PCs and data centers, without the owners even realizing it. Plus, the continued adoption of virtualization technologies in data centers can often let them do the same job with less hardware. And who knows, maybe some day PC users will learn to turn off their bloody systems at night, along with their cable modems and networking gear.

Hey, a computer and energy geek can dream, can’t he?

[1] Here I’m talking about real world boot times, not a synthetic benchmark that boots a fresh installation with nothing at all added. Firing up Windows and waiting for it and your obligatory Internet security software package to reach a usable state (meaning it’s no longer saturating the disk with I/O and making even the simplest action painfully slow) is a study in annoyance.

One of the points I’ve mentioned here — you can’t manage what you can’t measure — is something that I think will become increasingly important in the coming years. Whether you’re concerned about peak oil and the legendary lack of data transparency regarding OPEC reserves and operations that Matt Simmons and other have talked about endlessly, or climate chaos and gathering the information needed so decision makers at all levels of society can choose truly “greener” options (and not merely make semi-educated guesses), measurement is a Very Big Deal.

We’re seeing a lot more attention being paid to measurement and management in the E&E arena. Some things, like WalMart outfitting their 18-wheelers with aerodynamic fairings, seem like no-brainers that were just waiting for the right combination of economic incentive and corporate perception of self-interest to be implemented. Others, like package delivery services planning routes to avoid left-hand turns, seem silly, at least until one sees the actual (as in measured) cost, fuel, and CO2 savings.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I think we have to remain open to measuring the real world and the things we do in it, especially when those numbers surprise or annoy us; we’re surrounded by unknown inconvenient truths, to borrow a phrase, and should be aggressively trying to discover, understand, and respond to them. One very minor example of this approach was my recent post, Stop the CNG insanity!, in which I pointed out how little CNG vehicles do to reduce greenhouse gases, despite their being almost universally lauded as a much “cleaner” technology. If you accept that CO2 emissions are a grave problem for humanity, requiring something akin to the “80% by 2050″ emissions reduction target that’s typically used as the standard, then CNG vehicles make no sense whatsoever.

All of this ran through my mind as as I read the article,MIT: ‘Alarming’ use of energy in modern manufacturing methods:

Modern manufacturing methods are spectacularly inefficient in their use of energy and materials, according to a detailed MIT analysis of the energy use of 20 major manufacturing processes.

Overall, new manufacturing systems are anywhere from 1,000 to one million times bigger consumers of energy, per pound of output, than more traditional industries. In short, pound for pound, making microchips uses up orders of magnitude more energy than making manhole covers.

At first glance, it may seem strange to make comparisons between such widely disparate processes as metal casting and chip making. But Professor Timothy Gutowski of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, who led the analysis, explains that such a broad comparison of energy efficiency is an essential first step toward optimizing these newer manufacturing methods as they gear up for ever-larger production.

“The seemingly extravagant use of materials and energy resources by many newer manufacturing processes is alarming and needs to be addressed alongside claims of improved sustainability from products manufactured by these means,” Gutowksi and his colleagues say in their conclusion to the study, which was recently published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology (ES&T).

Gutowksi notes that manufacturers have traditionally been more concerned about factors like price, quality, or cycle time, and not as concerned over how much energy their manufacturing processes use. This latter issue will become more important, however, as the new industries scale up — especially if energy prices rise again or if a carbon tax is adopted, he says.

…

Solar panels are a good example. Their production, which uses the same manufacturing processes as microchips but on a large scale, is escalating dramatically. The inherent inefficiency of current solar panel manufacturing methods could drastically reduce the technology’s lifecycle energy balance — that is, the ratio of the energy the panel would produce over its useful lifetime to the energy required to manufacture it.

The new study is just “the first step in doing something about it,” Gutowski says — understanding which processes are most inefficient and need further research to develop less energy-intensive alternatives. For example, many of the newer processes involve vapor-phase processing (such as sputtering, in which a material is vaporized in a vacuum chamber so that it deposits a coating on an exposed surface in that chamber), which is usually much less efficient than liquid phase (such as depositing a coating from a liquid solution), but liquid processing alternatives might be developed.

…

The bottom line is that “new processes are huge users of materials and energy,” he says. Because some of these processes are so new, “they will be optimized and improved over time,” he says. But as things stand now, over the last several decades as traditional processes such as machining and casting have increasingly given way to newer ones for the production of semiconductors, MEMS and nano-materials and devices, for a given quantity of output “we have increased our energy and materials consumption by three to six orders of magnitude.”

One message from the study is that “claims that these technologies are going to save us in some way need closer scrutiny. There’s a significant energy cost involved here,” he says. And another is that “each of these processes could be improved,” and using the analytical tools developed by the MIT team for this study would be a useful first step in such a detailed analysis.

Let me try to boil my response down to a few observations:

• It makes absolutely no sense to compare anything except the production of goods that can substitute for one another. Microchips and manhole covers? I couldn’t care less. Tell me what we get in exchange for making those chips (or manhole covers), or show me different alternatives, such as better ways to make the same chips, better ways to make functionally equivalent chips, or ways to reorganize businesses that require fewer chips in the first place. But this kind of comparison is so crude that it’s meaningless.
• Of course manufacturers are concerned about price. And they always will be, too. All businesses measure things by money, whether it’s the cost of inputs and processes or the price of outputs. The only way you can change what companies do is to forbid/mandate them (essentially imposing a very high price for non-compliance), or create financial incentives for them to make more efficient cars or consume less electricity in their offices, or whatever. I had no trouble at all with society using incentives and regulation to alter the behavior of industries, as long as it’s done intelligently and based on solid information.
• The final graf I quoted above contains another one of those broad brushings I see all the time that makes my head spin around. All energy is not the same. Just like the microchips and manholes example from the first bullet above, lumping all energy consumption into a single cell in a spreadsheet is far too crude a measure.[1] It draws no distinction between a kWh produced by burning coal or oil and one produced by a wind or solar farm. Are we to believe that all of the differences we’d see in a total lifecycle analysis of those energy sources are insignificant?

[1] Once again, Albert Einstein comes to the rescue with his reminder to make things as simple as possible, but no simpler.

The NY Times has published a fascinating profile of Jane Lubchenco, the recently approved head of the NOAA:

The marine ecologist Jane Lubchenco has long urged scientists to abandon the habitual reticence of the research community and spend more time engaging the public and public officials about scientific and technical issues.

Now Dr. Lubchenco, a professor at Oregon State University, is following her own advice all the way to Washington to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the government’s premier science agencies.

This is only the latest step in a long career of practicing what she preached. In 1997, as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Dr. Lubchenco called for “a new social contract” for science, aimed at helping policy makers take steps to sustain the biosphere.

The next year, she founded the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program, which trains environmental researchers in communication, policy-making and related skills.

She was an organizer of the Communication Partnership for Science and the Sea, which since 1999 has offered information on marine conservation science to policy makers and the public. And she was a founding director of Climate Central, a Web site that went online last year with what she calls “credible and nonadvocacy” information on global warming.

Although some global warming dissidents expressed dismay over President Obama’s choice of an outspoken climate activist to head a leading government agency that deals with climate issues, a wide range of scientists acclaimed the appointment — and Dr. Lubchenco was approved by the Senate without objection on Thursday.

“If you look at her record, it’s pretty stunning,” said Jeremy B. C. Jackson, an oceanographer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He cited a range of her work, including what he called “path-breaking” studies on the ecology of algae and seaweed, her deciphering of biological interactions along rocky shorelines and her wider assessments of environmental sustainability.

It’s a longish piece that touches on several interesting points and is definitely worth your time to read in full. Personally, I was delighted to find someone with that level of commitment to public service in such an important “science role” in the US government.

For the purpose of this post, I want to focus on the part quoted above, and how it relates to our current energy and environmental situation, as well as how we view our individual roles in the coming years and decades.

I want to make it excruciatingly, redundantly, annoyingly clear at the outset that I’m not one of those people who expects or wants the whole world to leap to the ramparts to fight for my personal hot button issues. We certainly have more than enough of those online at the various E&E sites, and one more would be a step in the wrong direction.

I also have a very traditional, perhaps idealistic, view of science and scientists. I would strongly prefer to see a metaphorical wall between science and policy, with scientists doing their thing and policymakers doing theirs. This is unrealistic, of course, given how much of what policymakers do, from passing laws to directly funding research, that impacts what scientists can do. But my inclination is still to have the scientists stay out of public policy, and the politicians to consider what the scientists say to be reality and not merely another political weapon for their next ideological crusade or election campaign.

When I look at our two big challenges of peak oil and climate chaos[1], my idealism withers before the overwhelming urgency of our current situation. We simply don’t have the luxury of time to keep everyone on their own side of my metaphorical wall and let things work themselves out “in due course”. When we’re this close to a point of no return on climate and this close to the worldwide peak in oil production, then we have to take a lot of risks or suffer far more pain from inaction. These risks most notably include much more drastic public policy measures, which will certainly result in some expensive mistakes (corn ethanol simply leaps to mind as one example), and trying some truly science-fictional things, like one or more geoengineering schemes. In essence, we’ll have to make a lot of educated guesses that will have enormous ramifications, and many of those guesses will be colored by brute force politics.

I don’t like that situation in the least, and I hope no one reading this site likes it, either.[2] But I thin it would be incredibly disingenuous to try to wish it away. Peak oil is real and imminent, and climate chaos is real and already present. Both situations will only get worse over the next decade or two, potentially far worse if we’re stupid enough not to act in our own self interest.

In a slightly broader sense, this discussion of unpleasantries touches on something I’ve been talking about since I launched this site (albeit originally with respect to just peak oil): Everyone from every corner of the ideological landscape will have things to love and things to hate. Government haters will get more government and nuclear power haters will get more nukes (although it remains to be seen just how large the “nuclear renaissance” will be, given the role economics will play); solar and wind power lovers will get more of both, and those distrustful of corporations will get both more money funneled in their direction as well as more regulations placed on them. You can no doubt add many examples of your own to the lovers and haters lists.

This is the world we’ve created for ourselves and our descendants, and it requires us, assuming enough of us have the intelligence to recognize what’s going on, to have the courage to break the old rules of business as usual and find better ways to do almost everything that human beings do. This means change at all levels of society, from the largest governments, corporations, and other concentrations of economic and other power, down to individuals. It’s a hell of a mess, but the only people who are more wrong about it than the ones who can’t or refuse to see the problems are those who think it’s beyond our ability to fix.

[1] Of course, those are my picks for the two big challenges, for reasons regular readers know quite well. I’m sure other people would pick other issues as “the” big ones most deserving of our attention, and even argue about the number of critical issues.

[2] The Apocalypticons who see it as a sign of our impending, well, doom, and the Cornucopians who see it as a temporary glitch on our way to whatever econoerotic vision of free market nirvana they secretly foster are both cordially invited to take a flying leap.

The debate over the size and scope of nuclear power’s role in our future won’t be settled any time soon, I suspect. Between the people who truly love the technology (or have a huge financial incentive to love it), and those who consider it the technological equivalent of the Ebola virus, we can safely assume that the verbal arm-wrestling over nukes will be an essentially permanent fixture of of our shared infosphere, kind of like nuclear waste, sad to say.

This came to mind in recent days as I read several articles related to nuclear power, starting with Is small the future of nuclear power generation?:

Distributed energy generation, hailed by most environmentalists as the future of sustainable electricity production, is about powering a country with hundreds, potentially thousands, of renewable and clean energy systems with some help from natural gas.

It’s efficient because power is generated where it’s used. It’s flexible because projects can be built quickly when needed. It saves money in the long run because there’s less need for expensive transmission lines that carry the power elsewhere. And if one generator fails, its relatively small size means it doesn’t threaten the stability of the entire system.

This, of course, is the antithesis of centralized power generation that relies on a dozens or so large nuclear and fossil-fuel plants. Proponents of distributed generation cite the massive size and cost of nuclear power plants as one reason, beyond safety and waste-management concerns, and the technology is unsustainable and far too risky.

Not so, argues one start-up firm from Santa Fe, N.M., which has high hopes of expanding the definition of distributed generation to include nuclear power.

Hyperion Power Generation Inc. has developed a garden shed-sized nuclear reactor that can produce enough heat to generate 25 megawatts of electricity for up to 10 years.

That’s enough energy to power 20,000 homes, but still tiny by current nuclear standards. An Advanced Candu Reactor, for example, is 48 times larger and a next-generation Areva reactor is 64 times larger.

Hyperion, which calls its reactor as a “nuclear battery,” licensed the technology from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. It plans to sell the reactor for about $30 million (U.S.) and says there’s potential to sell 4,000 of them around the world by 2025.

Ignoring the silliness of the “nuclear battery” name, the basic thrust of this idea–smaller, decentralized, and likely diversified electricity generation is definitely where I think we’re headed. Just the need/desire to exploit local resources–wind, geothermal, wave/tidal–will push us in that direction, in addition to the savings mentioned above. But neighborhood nukes? Really? Despite the manufacturer’s claims of perfect security for thousands of these units dispersed around the US (or the world?), there’s still that nasty and expensive issue of managing forever the nuclear waste. Using nuclear power now amounts to putting a permanent tax on ourselves for the cost of managing and guarding that waste. That’s of the same degree of shortsightedness as building new, non-sequestered coal-fired power plants in 2009.

And then there’s the whole “where’s the evidence we can trust ourselves to manage nuclear materials on that time scale?” issue, as pointed out a pair of Independent articles this week.

Nuclear power station owners ‘allowed leaks’:

Nuclear power station operators unlawfully allowed radioactive waste to seep from a decontamination unit for 14 years, Chelmsford Crown Court has heard.

Waste leaked into the ground from a sump at Bradwell power station in Essex between 1990 and 2004, the Environment Agency claimed.

Magnox Electric Ltd, which had operated the station, denies 11 breaches of legislation governing the disposal of radioactive waste. Mark Harris, on behalf of the Environment Agency, told the jury that leaks were caused by a combination of poor design and a lack of checks and maintenance. He said the power station was no longer running.

IoS Investigation: Officials plotted Sellafield cover-up:

Top civil servants and nuclear administrators colluded to prevent MPs from challenging a massive sweetener to a private business taking over the running of Sellafield, internal documents in the hands of The Independent on Sunday reveal.

The documents, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, also disclose that the Government pushed through the handover at breakneck speed because it feared that the “unstable management arrangements” of the controversial Cumbrian nuclear complex risked its safety.

Yesterday, a leading Labour MP announced that he would try to get a parliamentary investigation into the revelations in the documents, which run to 140 pages and had been so heavily censored prior to release that many whole pages, and the names of most of the officials involved, have been systematically blanked out. Paul Flynn MP, a member of the House of Commons Public Administration Committee – which examines the performance of the Civil Service – is to ask it to inquire into what he calls “an egregious example of obstruction of parliamentary accountability”.

The bottom line is that there are many people in this world who value money more then your safety or mine, and at least some of them wind up in positions of incredible power, whether in government or in corporations that oversee or actually run things like electricity plants.

But I digress.

Let us assume, for the moment, that we can overcome all of these management and oversight issues. We figure out, somehow, a way to hire only those people people with the highest standards and deepest commitments to the common good for critical positions regarding electricity generation. And those people do a perfect job of managing that vast, interlocking, set of agencies and companies. What will nuclear power cost us then?

As Joe Romm points out in Exclusive analysis, Part 1: The staggering cost of new nuclear power, the economics of nuclear power ain’t a pretty picture, either:

A new study puts the generation costs for power from new nuclear plants at from 25 to 30 cents per kilowatt-hour — triple current U.S. electricity rates!

This staggering price is far higher than the cost of a variety of carbon-free renewable power sources available today — and ten times the cost of energy efficiency (see “Is 450 ppm possible? Part 5: Old coal’s out, can’t wait for new nukes, so what do we do NOW?”).

The new study, Business Risks and Costs of New Nuclear Power [PDF], is one of the most detailed cost analyses publically available on the current generation of nuclear power plants being considered in this country. It is by a leading expert in power plant costs, Craig A. Severance. A practicing CPA, Severance is co-author of The Economics of Nuclear and Coal Power (Praeger 1976), and former Assistant to the Chairman and to Commerce Counsel, Iowa State Commerce Commission.

This important new analysis is being published by Climate Progress because it fills a critical gap in the current debate over nuclear power — transparency. Severance explains:

All assumptions, and methods of calculation are clearly stated. The piece is a deliberate effort to demystify the entire process, so that anyone reading it (including non-technical readers) can develop a clear understanding of how total generation costs per kWh come together.

I haven’t yet read the 37-page report, linked in the quote above, but I suspect it’s safe to say that the infowar over nuclear power will play out pretty much as one would expect: Nuke lovers will bash this report as being deeply flawed and presenting a wildly high estimate of the costs of nuclear power, and nuke haters will consider it proof that “nuclear power just doesn’t make sense/work/can’t compete with renewables”. Lather, rinse, repeat.

)Note: As I was writing this, Joe posted the follow-up to the above article, Warning to taxpayers, investors — Part 2: Nukes may become troubled assets, ruin credit ratings.)

So, where does this leave us? Have we done nothing more than execute a perfect plot loop[1], fueled by a few billion keystrokes in print and online, and come back to where we began? Not entirely, as we’re now talking more openly about the wisdom of using nuclear power (or coal or wind or …) as well as the notion of decentralizing and diversifying electricity generation, something I’ve been yapping about for nearly four years on this site, and other people have likely been pushing for a lot longer than that. That’s not as much progress as I’d like to see, especially given the proximity of nasty things like peak oil and the growing impacts of climate chaos, but it’s inarguably progress nonetheless.

Having learned nothing from my prior attempts at crystal ball gazing, let me end this post with some predictions:

• The debate over nuclear power will continue to expand to include “nuclear batteries” and a more explicit discussion of economics, possibly even including questions over the supply of nuclear fuel. Here in the US, the main focus is mainly on safety issues, including the proliferation of nuclear material and safe storage of waste.
• The proliferation issue will be solved (or we’ll simply convince ourselves it’s been solved) in not much longer.
• The waste issue will be an enormous mess essentially forever.
• The nuclear option will only be rejected after at least one, likely several, spectacular failures. I’m not talking about core meltdowns, but economic and failure-to-build-out-quickly-enough catastrophes. The companies that build reactors and do everything else in the nuclear power food chain are too well financed to be simply turned away. They will continue to get their government financial incentives, they will build some more plants, but they will be very expensive and nowhere near what we need to replace the massive installed base of coal-fired plants. Nuclear power will indeed help us reduce CO2 emissions, but only at a high cost and to a very limited extent.
• Anyone (like me) who points out the reductions in CO2 emissions and cost savings possible from plain old conservation will continue to be labeled a wacko tree hugger.

[1] A plot loop is a phenomenon in fiction where some seemingly big, important set of occurrences takes place, but then turns out not to matter when the story continues on as it was pre-loop.

When you obsessively read and write about peak oil (and global warming), as I do, it’s very easy to get so close to the topic, so thoroughly cocooned in your own vision of said Big, Scary Event that you don’t just miss big patterns (forests and trees, and all that), but you skip over some details that deserve a bit more discussion. This latter phenomenon came to mind recently in an e-mail exchange I had with Kory Sorrell, a TCOE reader and occasional commenter.

With permission, I’m quoting his observations on peak oil and where we’re collectively heading:

I would suggest that the peak oil debate has shifted a bit. There is little support for the idea that we can increase flow rates (that is what peak oil is about) significantly going forward, certainly not at the rate an extrapolated demand would require.

I believe peak oil theory gets a bit muddled — and folks started talking past one another — because it starts off as a geological concept, but one then has to start adding political (oil is largely a national resource) and economic influences like the export land model or current drops in demand due to the economy or changes in prices due to fluctuating currency valuation to get a more complete picture. Actual flow rates at any one time vary due to a number of causes, but putting this all together, some folks are suggesting we have hit at least Peak Oil Lite - we may not produce much more per/day going forward and this may trail off for a variety of factors, including resource nationalism, geological constraints, (eventual) decreases in demand. Whether this is good or not, I don’t know. I’ve seen suggestions that, all considered, it’s better to hit an earlier constraint, as we can deal with it sooner and face unremitting geological constraint later — in other words, at least political constraints can be mitigated, whereas there’s just no persuading the earth to yield more than it can.

Having read my share of peak oil books, articles and websites, I now focus more on (1) decline rates, since this informs our pace of adaptation — that’s why this upcoming IEA report is a Monster. One way or another, we will adapt, and the Doomsday scenarios are hardly inevitable, though I suspect we may have some unpleasant times, especially if we are looking at rapid decline scenarios. (I have a hunch that this early report will be qualified in several ways, but we’ll see). (2) The second thing I now focus on, already indirectly touched on, is forms of adaptation. The Hirsch Report is a great place to start, but that is primarily an assessment of mitigation through liquid fuels substitution (CTL, etc.). I think there is also a tremendous amount of change in the offing in terms of behavior — all the sorts of things Simmons, for example, suggests: telecommuting, carpooling, 4-day work week, moving closer to work, etc. — but also other changes that include reducing the number of cars on the road (China is already doing this in at least two ways: encouraging electric motorscooters (there are some 15 million in use now, I believe) and taking cars off the road by license plate number (800,000 per day)). And of course this is in addition to the just over the horizon gradual replacement of our fleet with much more efficient ICE cars and then all electrics. To put it much more briefly, we are going to rapidly diversify and electrify our transport sector to use less oil; the question is, how quickly can we start outrunning depletion? While the numbers are daunting — how do we make up for a 5% a year reduction (4-4.5 mbd)? — this is spread out over a lot of economies. Assuming that since the US has to make up 25% of that (since the US uses 25%), that is 1.125 mbd. Hard, maybe; impossible, no. Note in the Hirsch Report that 70% of all driving is /discretionary/:

In the short run, much of the burden of adjustment will likely be borne by decreases in consumption from discretionary decisions, since 67 percent of personal automobile travel and nearly 50 percent of airplane travel are discretionary.32

page 24, http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/others/pdf/Oil_Peaking_NETL.pdf

(In other words, to echo a recent article I read elsewhere, we’ll have to do something “radical” to conserve oil: stay home.)

To draw this to a point, I would invite responses to the following. As the above paragraph suggests, I have a somewhat middle of the road view of what’s in front of us. I think we really need to steel ourselves for some very difficult and sobering times, but I see Martenson’s “the next 20 years” to be a bottleneck, on the other side of which we may have genuine progress and a future worth fighting for. In other words, I do not see an inevitable Long Descent to a world of ever-less-energy, but a painful travail opening on to a lush energy future. This is a future with very little coal, lots of renewables and 4th generation nuclear power (see Kirk Sorenson’s website). It is also a world where we are coming down from our peak population (fast forward that population bulge Martenson depicts in the Crash Course). Obviously, we have plenty of opportunity to ruin this melioristic vision, have had plenty such opportunities already (the usual reference to the Cuban Missile Crisis will do), and will likely make this all a lot harder than is necessary. But even tempered thus, it seems to me that this “20 years from now” is entirely possible, maybe likely, and in any case is the future we should work for.

My take on this:

• I think we definitely tend to talk past each other in this debate, and part of the reason is the failure by people in different parts of the debate to ignore certain parts of the big picture. KS is right that what constitutes or triggers peak oil is far more complex than simply geology. I’ve made this point perhaps a billion times on this site, but given how seldom it’s recognized online (except in the most perfunctory way and then ignored),
• I’m firmly in the camp that says the sooner we hit peak oil for above ground reasons, the better. That leaves more carbon in the ground, where it can’t contribute to global warming, and it also leaves us more of a supply buffer for future years, in case we can’t find the political spine to transition away from oil as quickly as we “should”.
• The IEA report, which is due next week and has already been the subject of much press leakage (e.g. Highlights of the IEA report), will indeed be a Monster–at least for those of us who pay attention to such things. I fear that between mainstream consumers who’ve never heard of the IEA and some of their elected representatives[1], this will be just one more Monster that gets swept under the bed, at least in the short term. I will have more to say on the IEA report in time.
• We will indeed make very large changes in our behavior, but only after we’re sufficiently forced by economics to do so.[2] The tiny minority of people who lead significantly greener, less oil-dependent lifestyles will be a sliver of the market until either the free market or our elected representatives raise the cost of living a gray life.
• The key point in Sorrel’s e-mail, and the part that moved me to get his permission to post it, is his observation about how we’re in for some very tough times, but we’re not necessarily making a monotonic descent in terms of the quality of life. This is the crucial dividing line between the ever gleeful doomers and those of us who recognize the reality and seriousness of peak oil, but temper that with the knowledge of humanity’s ability to respond to a crisis. It’s also the point that triggers the bizarre e-mail I get from people who accuse me of being nothing more than the latest economist villain straight out of central casting, someone who thinks we can sit back, ignore peak oil and global warming and everything else so many fret about, and watch as the magic and glorious market solves our problems.

  Put another way, on the spectrum of views about peak oil, we have the peak oil deniers at the far right. Just to the left of them is a mix of camps, including those who think that peak oil will only happen 50 or 75 years from now, as well as those who think the rate of decline in production will be so gradual that natural market adjustments will gently ease us out of oil consumption without so much as mussing our hair.

  Further left is my crowd–the “peak oil is real, imminent, and a very serious problem” camp.

  Far to my left, in the “here be dragons” part of the map, are the doomers.

  I’m not entirely sure where one group should be placed, the people who think “the” problem we face is global warming and that peak oil is therefore a blessing because it will constrain our emissions. They probably belong to my right, between me and that mix of people who think peak oil is real but won’t be a major problem for a variety of reasons. This group, which is almost entirely devoted and passionate environmentalists, is definitely worth paying attention to, however, as they present a perfect example of why viewing such vast and complex problems as peak oil or global warming as standalone issues is so dangerous. Once again, blind men, meet the elephant.

Thanks to Kory Sorrell for the e-mail and permission to reproduce it.

[1] I note, with a mixture of resignation and horror, that in this week’s elections everyone’s favorite Senator, James “global warming is the greatest hoax in the history of mankind” Inhofe of Oklahoma, was returned to office via 56.7% of the popular vote.

[2] Regulation and legislation fall under economics, as the cost of violating the law and being caught and punished offsets all or part of the gains from cheating.

I promised that I would post the link to the video of my interview about and demo of hypermiling with a local news channel, so here it is.

I was interviewed by Virginia Butler of Rochester’s all-news channel, R News. The story and video are currently the top item on the “Going Green” page. Once it gets bumped from the top slot and has its own link, I’ll update this post.[1][2]

Regular readers of TCOE know that I’m not exactly a fan of how mass media has been covering energy and environmental issues. For two semi-pyrotechnic examples, see Single-issue idiocy and Media blockheads, although they appear to be written by my evil doppelgänger. But this most recent experience gave me reason to hope that not all is lost.

When I talked with Virginia on the phone and in e-mail, and then during the in-person interview, it was very clear that she understands the relevant issues and was not about to make the same kind of mindless mistakes I’ve seen countless times in local and national media. She’s also a dedicated hypermiler, getting about 25% more miles/gallon in her Buick. The camerawoman on the piece, Helen, seemed to be similarly well informed. Plus, she showed up with enough cool photographic gear to make a long-time camera guy like me drool uncontrollably.

The realist (cynic?) in me has to ask, though: Are these islands of media sanity enough? Or will they simply be washed away by the marching morons, the paid or ideologically driven deniers and delayers, like one of the Pacific islands already being submerged by rising sea levels? I honestly don’t know, but I’m convinced that this ongoing info war is literally the most critical determinant of how our shared future will turn out. That’s right–it’s more important than economics, technology, and even the amount of oil in the ground or CO2 in the atmosphere.

The info war is biggest single multiplier in the equation, for one simple reason: Nothing will happen on the scale needed to deal effectively with peak oil or global warming or all their knock-on effects like water shortages, rising sea levels, loss of agricultural acreage, etc. without a massive push from mainstream voters and consumers. Absent any such push, the politicians and corporations of the world will be almost entirely focused on short term, selfish interests; it’s up to us to provide them with absolutely unmistakable evidence that it’s in their own best interest to address these issues with all the urgency they require. We can’t assume that enough politicians and corporations and other large concentrations of power will have the foresight to do the right thing; we have to drag these decisions into their extremely limited planning horizon and appeal to their often warped priorities.

This has been the mission of this site since day one: To educate and activate mainstreamers as a way to act in their own, and therefore everyone’s, best interest.

[1] Yes, I know: I have a voice made for typing. Why do you think I’ve never done a podcast version of this site?

[2] One note on the video: In some of the shots of me inside my car I look like a much bigger and burlier guy than I really am. That’s a function of (1) being photographed inside a small car, and (2) being photographed at close range with a wide angle lens on a “lipstick camera”. In person I also look much more like George Clooney than one would think from that video. Helen must have accidentally left the “nondescript 50-something white guy of Sicilian heritage” filter on the camera.

Update: See the bottom of this post for some information about the recently launched EcoDriving program.

I’ve made no secret of my love for what I call “mild hypermiling”, by which I mean employing just the safer practices. Some of the things people do in their quest for ever more miles/gallon (like drafting behind 18-wheelers) are just plain nuts, so I don’t do them and I definitely recommend that others don’t even consider them. Life is short enough as it is.

This topic is front and center in my attention right now because I will be doing an interview/demonstration of hypermiling for a local news channel (Rochester’s R News) on Monday morning. Assuming all goes well, those of you just dying to see me tooling around in Space Wart, my beloved Scion xA, will be able to watch the video online sometime next week. I promise to let everyone know when it’s available, even if I look hopelessly dorky.

But back on topic–why should you hypermile? I mean, isn’t it work? And isn’t it less fun than driving like a typical American (a.k.a. a bat out of hell on acid)? Honestly, the answers are no and no. Once you give it a try and see that you’re pouring less money into your gas tank and dumping less CO2 and other pollutants into the atmosphere, then it becomes profitable, and it’s even a nice little challenge to make your driving more interesting.[1]

One benefit of hypermiling that almost never gets mentioned is that it makes you a safer driver. If you’re paying more attention to traffic signals and the overall flow of traffic (as you constantly look for all those little opportunities to get from point A to point B with less fuel) and less attention to your iPod, texting, nav system, cell phone, etc., it can only help.[2]

I’ve appended some links below to the US EPA and Ford sites with the details, but these are the techniques I most strongly recommend:

• Accelerate more gently
• Don’t speed
• Remove excess weight from your vehicle
• Coast up to stops whenever you can without causing problems for other drivers
• Keep your car properly maintained (tuned up, tires properly inflated, clean air filters, etc.)
• Find ways to minimize the amount of driving you do (car pooling, combining errands, etc.
• If you have more than one vehicle available, use the most efficient one

(You should employ as many of the tips on the EPA site as possible, of course.)

In case you’re wondering how much oil consumption widespread adoption of mild hypermiling would save the US, the answer is: A lot. The US burns almost exactly 9 million barrels of oil/day in motor fuel (not including airplane fuel and other transportation consumption). Even a paltry 10% reduction in US motor vehicle fuel consumption, definitely a low-ball estimate, would save 900,000 barrels of oil per day, or 328.5 million barrels/year, and reduce the US trade deficit by over $39 billion dollars/year (at the current price of $120/barrel).

If you’re not using these techniques, all of which are painless and most require precisely $0.00 investment, then you have no right to complain about the cost of gasoline or how “no one does anything about global warming” or any of the other whiny things we hear all the time.

EPA: Gas Mileage Tips has links to the next few pages below plus an interesting video on how to save money by driving smarter.

EPA: Driving More Efficiently has the main hypermiling tips, including projected savings.

EPA: Keeping Your Car In Shape tells us about things keeping your car tuned up, properly inflating your tires, etc., with projected savings. It’s funny that whole tire pressure thing hasn’t received more attention from someone high profile, like a presidential candidate. Go figure.

EPA: Planning and Combining Trips

Ford: FORD ECODRIVING TIPS HELP LOWER FUEL COSTS is basically Ford’s press release packaging of the same advice. I’m including it so you can send this link to your friends and relatives who think that Governments Are Evil and Corporations Can Do No Wrong.

Update: Since writing this post, I found out about EcoDriving USA, a web site and program that’s apparently funded by various car companies and the NADA (National Automobile Dealers Association). There’s some good information on the (needlessly Flash-heavy) site, including some how-to downloadables on the Educational Tools page.

[1] I’ve heard numerous reports from people that one of the best tools for getting people to drive smarter is the instantaneous MPG readouts on some hybrids. These gizmos should be mandatory on all vehicles.

[2] I feel obliged to say something incendiary here about the morons who drive on local roads and even highways while combing their hair, applying makeup, changing clothes, reading the newspaper or doing Who Knows What, all of which I’ve seen people do, so I will: Stop it, Stop It, STOP! IT!. You people are freakin’ nuts and should have your licenses permanently suspended for doing such things, even if it doesn’t result in an accident.

Update: As Jim Kingsdale points out in an update in the post linked below: “J. Peter Lynch, author of the essay posted below, is not the famous former manager of Fidelity’s Magellan Fund named Peter S. Lynch. Nonetheless he has addressed an important topic, the full cost of our use of fossil fuels.” I’ve left the rest of this post unchanged.

Jim Kingsdale has a post up that includes a longish piece by the financial deity Peter Lynch on the cost of energy. Please go read the whole thing, but let me present just a few snippets to entice you to do so:

In my opinion, “Energy” is the number one problem facing the U.S and the world as we move forward into the 21st century. In fact, I think that it may be the greatest problem that mankind has ever faced. All the other “problems” we hear about on the evening news – health care, social security, housing crisis, credit crunch etc. are ALL “small change” compared to the looming worldwide energy crisis. The problem facing us is so large that I am really beginning to believe that people, as well as, governments are simply in mass denial and refuse to believe the magnitude of the approaching problem. Keep in mind that reasonably priced, available energy is what gave birth to our mighty industrial revolution and is what separates the U.S. and the rest of the developed world from becoming third world countries.

This is a problem that CANNOT be ignored and must be addressed rapidly, with a detailed long term plan that MUST be based upon a comprehensive accurate evaluation and assessment. There is still time to move forward, but time is running out and we have to stop with the politics as usual and start to focus on what we ALL need to do for the common good.

What is the price you pay to purchase a gallon of gasoline for your car? Depending on what part of the country you live in, it is probably between $4.00 and $4.50 per gallon.

But what is the “real cost” of that gasoline? Does it count ALL of the direct AND indirect costs to the consumer, society and the nation of our continued and insane dependence on fossil fuels?

I think not.

Everyone knows the posted price, but very few realize or stop to think about the true costs. There are a number of “hidden” costs that most of us do not realize. It may not be obvious but we are quietly paying these additional costs every day. These additional indirect costs actually make the “real” cost of the gasoline and all other fossil fuel related items many times higher than it seems at first glance.

Unfortunately our government does not utilize all of the necessary cost components in order to arrive at an accurate “true cost” number. As a result, they are using a faulty equation, which, of course, will result, EVERY SINGLE TIME, in an incorrect answer and subsequently a fault ridden policy that is based upon error after error.

Some of these costs and associated penalties:

• Health Related Costs
• Air Pollution
• Water and Land Pollution
• Thermal Pollution
• Macro Economic Costs
• National Security
• Global Warming

[Lynch then addresses each item in the above list.]

We can lower our healthcare costs, reduce our air, water and thermal pollution, develop a more stable economy, create an enormous number of U.S. based jobs and become a far more secure nation if we just begin this inevitable process of evolution toward renewable energy sources - solar, wind, biomass, ocean power, energy efficiency and conservation.

We need to educate the American people about the real truth of the current situation and then apply, what has always been America’s greatest “assets” - technical ingenuity, creative innovation and our “can do” attitude.

Now you can see what the “real costs” of our addiction to fossil fuels are. We need to be preemptive and undertake this NOW, before we find ourselves in the midst of a worst-case scenario.

Please go read it all.

I’ve argued perhaps a billion or so times on this site that we need a wide range of actions to deal with our looming energy and environmental issues. We can’t rely on just a grass roots movement or just government action or just leave it all to “the free market”. We need them all, which means we have to be smart about how we combine their costs and benefits; we’re quickly running out of time for stupid or half-hearted measures.

Part of our action has to be expressing our collective will through elected officials, i.e. government action. The nastiest reality of all is that while some people will do what’s right on energy and environmental issues simply because they know it’s the right thing or they get satisfaction because doing it proves their moral superiority, not nearly enough people will act that way. For every member of the Sierra Club or Greenpeace (or regular reader of this site, frankly), there are many more Americans who want nothing more than the cheapest out-of-pocket expense for energy possible, and they reject everything else as a plot by the New World Order or environuts or (gasp!) Al Gore to take over their lives.[1]

Therefore, we need voters and consumers to educate and activate themselves, and force politicians seeking their support as well as corporations seeking their money, to adopt a longer planning horizon and a more enlightened approach and do the right thing.[2]

We also need people to make the myriad of changes I’ve been screaming about on this site for years, like using compact fluorescent bulbs, driving fewer miles, hunting down and killing electricity vampires[3], improving the insulation of their homes, using as little space heating or cooling as possible, etc.

And above all, Lynch is right: We need to do those things now.

(Lest anyone miss the enormous, neon sign hanging over this discussion, let me point to it explicitly: About four years ago when I started this web site and project, I chose the name “The Cost of Energy” precisely because I wanted people to adopt a more expansive and encompassing mindset and consider all the costs of our energy use, not just the immediate and obvious ones measured in cash flow.)

[1] And for the life of me, I have never figured out why the people who say such inane things believe for a moment that other people would want control of their lives. That’s a stupefyingly weird alloy of paranoia and egomania.

[2] For those of you who just laughed at the planning horizon and enlightened approach stuff, answer me this: How much better off would Ford, GM, and Chrysler be today if they challenged Toyota and Honda in developing hybrid vehicles in the 1990’s instead of dismissing it? For that matter, how much healthier would they be, and how many fewer people would they be laying off directly and indirectly, if they had simply put more emphasis on smaller, more efficient vehicles instead of binging on trucks for years, like an unsupervised kid in a candy store? It’s easy to be smug and make fun of calls for the kind of change in corporate boardrooms that I think we need, at least until corporations are greedy and willfully ignorant and then reality bites them on the ass. Then everyone starts wailing about “could GM really declare bankruptcy???” instead of treating this as a huge and very painful object lesson in how companies should be run.

[3] These are all those little things around your home that suck a little (or a lot of) electricity all the time, even when they’re not being used. Do you really need to have your cable modem and router turned on all the time? Do you need to leave your PC on 24/7, even though Windows doesn’t boot so much as it gestates? Walk through your house and do a quick inventory of what’s plugged in, and how often you really use it, and I’m willing to bet you’ll find a good $5 of monthly electricity you can painlessly eliminate. And if that’s too much trouble, then please send me that $5/month (PayPal to lougrinzo [at sign] rochester.rr.com), as I need it to keep this project afloat.

You would be hard pressed to find a better example of why “timing is everything” in our quickly evolving energy markets than the Airline Armageddon that continues to unfold before our eyes. First, a quick overview of the situation with a focus on hedging of fuel prices by airlines (emphasis added):

Hedging Against $200 Oil:

Rising jet fuel prices—one of the industry’s biggest costs—have helped send seven airlines into bankruptcy this year, and more could follow. One exception to the sea of red ink so far is Southwest Airlines (LUV), which has saved billions since 2000 by successfully hedging against increases in oil prices. But with each rise in oil prices, that strategy gets more and more expensive.

…

A hedge is a financial instrument that allows investors to lock in certain prices to act as insurance against the possibility that the open-market, or spot, price of that commodity will rise. If the price then rises, the company gets a financial payoff that cushions the blow of higher prices. In this way, investors can actually make money using hedging as insurance, giving them an advantage over competitors in the marketplace.

Southwest is currently the only major airline with most of its fuel costs hedged at lower prices, largely because it is the only large carrier with the cash flow to do so. For 2008, 70% of its fuel needs are hedged at $51 a barrel. That means that while competitors have to contend with spot prices hovering around $120 a barrel, Southwest can buy oil at less than half that. Access to this discounted price means Southwest feels less pressure to pass on higher costs to customers, which could afford it more market share as competitors hike ticket prices.

…

Even an expert like Topping, who spends his days consulting with oil experts and poring over analyst reports, says he doesn’t know for certain where oil prices are headed. But for now, indications point upward, which justifies more hedging. “There doesn’t seem to be hope for a big price drop unless an unexpected dramatic event took a big chunk out of demand,” says Topping. While high prices are beginning to slow demand for oil in Western countries, developing nations like China and India have an ever-growing thirst for oil. Consider that the U.S. currently has 800 vehicles per 1,000 people, vs. fewer than 30 in China and India. As those countries’ economies ramp up—and as hundreds of millions of people seek their first cars—energy demand will also rise.

…

Indeed, many airline executives shy away from the risks involved. “I think airlines have been reluctant to hedge because corporate culture views futures as a gambling tool,” says Stephen Schork, an energy consultant in Villanova, Pa., and editor of The Schork Report, a daily energy newsletter. “But they’ve been reluctant to their own detriment. If you’re an airline without a significant hedge, you’re in a difficult spot.”

All this stuff about hedging vs. not hedging won’t matter if oil prices stay essentially where they are for years. (And just to be clear, I would consider a price retreat to, say, $100/barrel later this year before a big run up to $150 or $175 in 2009 to fall into the category of “essentially where they are”.) Eventually enough of the right people will figure out that oil isn’t going to be cheap anytime soon, and the practice of hedging will all but disappear, whether airlines consider it “gambling” or not.

Consider, by contrast, the car business. A gradual rise in gasoline prices will push people to more efficiently use oil for transportation–higher MPG cars, driving fewer miles, driving smarter, etc. The increased demand for more efficient cars pushes car companies to develop and make them, and the adoption of them and the other oil saving measures lowers the overall consumption of oil and moderates the price. Or so says conventional economic theory. If the price rise is much quicker, then we have what we’re seeing today, with a rapid shift to more efficient vehicles and the sales and prices of new and used light trucks plummeting. But even in that scenario, which we’re living through as I type this, there’s still a huge amount of low-hanging fruit for us to pick. Picking said conservation goodies isn’t always cheap or fun, but they undeniably exist, and exploiting them softens the blow of the oil price increase.

As the pressure from rising gasoline costs grows, so will the market response, in terms of the mainstream marketing of electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids, as in the plethora of such cars all set for the 2010/2011 time frame. This is the ultimate response to a high price, the wholesale demand destruction through a mix of adopting alternatives and abandoning the consumption completely.

Back to airlines. They can’t dramatically increase the fuel efficiency of their planes (equivalent to trading in a 20 MPG SUV for a 35 MPG sedan), or they would have done it years ago. So they’ve been forced to fly fewer and smaller planes in an effort to maximize seat utilization–as they say in the movie business, it’s all about putting butts in seats. They can also resort to using hypermiling techniques–flying slower, taxiing with only one engine, carrying as little excess weight as possible–but that results in a pretty small savings on a percentage basis.

Their only hope in the short run is to raise ticket prices or impose other fees and hope that not too many customers switch to train travel or skip flying altogether. Unlike cars, there really is no chance for an orderly (which is to say pleasant) transition while “the markets sort themselves out”, as economists put it, aside from the arrival of large scale alternative ways to fuel jets (lots of luck with that one) or a huge drop in world oil prices (likewise).

The bottom line: Airlines have less and less room to stand in the market, thanks to the growing use of oil for non-air-travel purposes around the world. There’s nothing to suggest that that situation will change anytime soon.

Recent posts with related articles on the discussion board (all open in a new window):

• Squeezed airlines clip wings
• How do you solve a problem like jet fuel?
• Airlines discover hypermiling
• BA left on the runway

Frequent correspondent EP sent along some real-world data regarding the power supplies in computers.

I’m posting it here in its entirety to stress the importance of “little” energy savings. Many people are focused on really huge, obvious savings, like increasing the US CAFE standards to something that will have an effect (the new ones are a bad joke), but the small changes can add up to a major benefit. Saving 10 or 20 watts on a PC power supply becomes very important when you have [1] many millions of them running, and [2] they’re running for hours every day, and in many cases 24/7. We have a pretty sizable amount of potential savings right there for the picking, as soon as we get serious about pursuing it.

(Speaking as someone who’s done far more than my share of Windows re-installs and upgrades, for myself and friends and consulting clients going all the way back to version 1.0, I wonder how many kWh of electricity could be saved every year if Windows booted in a reasonable amount of time and didn’t give people such a huge incentive to leave computers running around the clock. But I digress.)

Anyway, on to EP’s missive:

90% efficiency should be possible. Part of reaching that would be to stop chasing insanely powerful power supplies. My P4’s and AMD desktops and servers are between 40W and 160W power draw.

First some interesting sites. This one assumes a lot such as a 40W to 60W power draw with estimated savings of only 5W or so. In reality - my tests show 25% savings - even at low power levels like 60W. But these power supplies shine on a server or high end machine sucking back >100W - giving a payback of 2 years or less (asuming $0.10/kWh, computer on 24×7).

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article684-page5.html

The EarthWatts PS seems to have been released around OCT 2007 and I’d not heard of it - and I’ve been asking my suppliers for just such a power supply. Antec server cases I bought just 8 months ago had the older, much less efficient power supplies.

A web site with info about the 80Plus certifcation - this is just a PDF on it which Google found.

http://www.80plus.org/manu/psu/documents/CORSAIR-CMPSU-550VX-550W-Report.pdf

Ok - the numbers as I measured them.

Basically most computer switching power supplies are only about 65% efficient. I’ve seen exceptions - IBM Evo, Compaq micro case which were signif. more efficient (65W for the Evo and Compaq P4’s vs 100W for a P4 with a generic power supply).

The Antec I tested is PS-AN-EA380, $53 Cdn each (compared to about $30 for a run of the mill 300W power supply).

By “regular power supply” I mean older and non Earthwatt Antec, AOpen, SPI, DTK or other generic power supply.

Test case - P3 computer system
------------------------------

                Standby Draw   In BIOS   In Win XP

AOpen FSP250        4W            52W       52W

Antec Earthwatt     4W            36W       36W

Test case - AMD 2.4GHz Athlon 64 system with Cool 'n' Quiet 

enabled (double the power rating if Cool 'n' Quiet is not 

enabled and double it, nearly, again if it's not enabled on a 

dual core CPU)

-------------------------------------------------------------------

                Standby Draw   In BIOS   In Win XP

AOpen FSP300        7W            84W       59W

Antec Earthwatt     5W            64W       43W

I’m not impressed by the standby power draw. I was hoping that it would meet the 1W or less spec. But there is an aprox 25% improvement in efficiency of conversion from AC to DC. Part of this issue is, I believe, the actual amount of power drawn by the motherboard when it’s in standby.

For new servers I have - 153W in Linux for Core 2 Duo’s - the power draw would be reduced to 115W. Savings would be about $40/year in electricity alone. Other benefits include less load on the UPS, better uptime with the UPS, less heat generated (basically 25% less since server rooms don’t have monitors).

I’ve emailed to complain to SPI and AOpen about their horrible power supply efficiency. I’d heartily suggest that you all do that too. This is one of the easiest ways to cut costs, deal with heating and beat a path to a slightly greener future. Only Antec provided a phone line to complain to - SPI and AOpen only provided an email forum on their sites.

“Efficiency”? You know, the thing we used to call (gasp!) conservation, before that became so last energy crisis.

(As far as I’m concerned, there is only the slimmest sliver of difference between efficiency and conservation, and it has to do with intent. If you buy a more fuel efficient car because you like it, that’s (unintended) efficiency, but if you do it at least in part to reduce your gasoline consumption, then that’s conservation. To be honest, I use the terms interchangeably, except when I’m hanging out with the rest of the energy geeks at our favorite bar, Watt’s Up?. But I digress.)

Back on topic, the issue at hand is US views of efficiency/conservation measures. Specifically, I think we’re finally reaching the point where energy prices are inflicting enough pain on enough people–from individual consumers to business people to those managing budgets for almost any organization, like schools and religious institutions–that Americans are (finally!) willing to think explicitly about efficiency and how they can trim their energy expenses.

My initial reaction: It’s about freakin’ time, people.

My secondary reaction: I find it extremely sad that years of information, even in the truly pathetic US mainstream press, about the evils of our energy-profligate ways, from global warming to an insane level of oil dependence (often relying on countries that don’t like us), to a ballooning trade deficit (we buy about 1.4 billion dollars of oil every day from other countries, at current prices) weren’t enough to get people to budge a micron. It took $3.50/gallon, the latest mule kick to the forehead, to wake them up and start herding them, however slowly and halfheartedly, in the right direction.

All of this came to mind when I (and a few bazillion others, I suspect) received an e-mail from Marianne Lavelle at US News and World Report about a series of efficiency-themed articles they’ve published online:

• Putting Your Home on an Energy Diet
• Three Ways Businesses Can Save on Power
• Efficiency: the Unloved Solution That Works

Good articles, even if there’s not too much there that regular TCOE readers don’t know already.

The real value of these articles is that they’ll help spread the efficiency meme to all those US consumers who claim to be “too busy” to make even the slightest change to become more energy efficient, or who think it will be “too much of a hassle”.

And that’s where you can play a role, via a simple experiment. Tell your friends, neighbors, co-workers, and relatives about these articles. Tell them you’re tired of throwing away money and you’re making some changes to your home or workplace. Provide details, if possible–”I saved $5/month on my electricity bill and $15 on gasoline without really trying”. Ask them if they have any tips for spending less on energy, even if you’re sure they’re the last people on the planet who will conserve; if nothing else, the question might jump-start their own budget assessment process. Don’t mention Al Gore, global warming, peak oil, polar bears, or any of that. Just stick to the money angle, and see if you can get them to pay attention to the market’s latest mule kick and take some evasive action before the next one happens.

The fact that it will help them and everyone else on the planet can remain our little secret.

I suspect that when I talk about public policy on this site, I lose about half the readers. Think of it as the online equivalent of the old publishing axiom that every equation in a book intended for a mainstream audience cuts the readership by 50%. It’s an exaggeration, but not nearly as much of one as we would hope.

Anyway.

A couple of items related to public policy popped up recently.

The first is that Senator Clinton released her energy plan. You can find it on the energy page of her campaign site, or download it directly here (16 page, 90KB PDF).

Allow me to crib the summary posted by Joe Romm over on ClimateProgress (emphasis added):

• A new cap-and-trade program that auctions 100 percent of permits alongside investments to move us on the path towards energy independence;
• An aggressive comprehensive energy efficiency agenda to reduce electricity consumption 20 percent from projected levels by 2020 by changing the way utilities do business, catalyzing a green building industry, enacting strict appliance efficiency standards, and phasing out incandescent light bulbs;
• A $50 billion Strategic Energy Fund, paid for in part by oil companies, to fund investments in alternative energy. The SEF will finance one-third of the $150 billon ten-year investment in a new energy future contained in this plan;
• Doubling of federal investment in basic energy research, including funding for an ARPA-E, a new research agency modeled on the successful Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
• Aggressive action to transition our economy toward renewable energy sources, with renewables generating 25 percent of electricity by 2030 and with 60 billion gallons of home-grown biofuels available for cars and trucks by 2030;
• 10 “Smart Grid City” partnerships to prove the advanced capabilities of smart grid and other advanced demand-reduction technologies, as well as new investment in plug-in hybrid vehicle technologies;
• An increase in fuel efficiency standards to 55 miles per gallon by 2030, and $20 billion of “Green Vehicle Bonds” to help U.S. automakers retool their plants to meet the standards;
• A plan to catalyze a thriving green building industry by investing in green collar jobs and helping to modernize and retrofit 20 million low-income homes to make them more energy efficient;
• A new “Connie Mae” program to make it easier for low and middle-income Americans to buy green homes and invest in green home improvements;
• A requirement that all publicly traded companies report financial risks due to climate change in annual reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission; and
• Creation of a “National Energy Council” within the White House to ensure implementation of the plan across the Executive Branch.
• A requirement that all federal buildings designed after January 20, 2009 will be zero emissions buildings.

To start with the easy stuff, the increased R&D funding is a no brainer. I’m happy to see it, but anyone beyond a high school level of understanding of our situation knows this has to happen.

Cutting electricity use 20% by 2020 is a pretty decent goal, but I’m not bowled over.

55MPG and 60 billion gallons of liquid biofuels by 2030 sound very aggressive, but are they really? If the electrification of transportation happens at anywhere near the rate most people studying this expect, then both of those numbers will be moot in 23 years. Our new vehicles will get far more than 55 miles per gallon of liquid fuel, simply because they’ll be using ridiculously little liquid fuel. And 60 billion gallons of biofuels won’t be a big deal because we won’t need that much liquid fuel in 2030. The US uses about 140 billion gallons of motor fuel per year now, and I would be surprised if we’re using 60 billion gallons/year in 2030 after 20 years of adding ever increasing numbers of vehicles to the mix that depend on electricity for some or all of their energy needs. Anyone who thinks that Bill is the only Clinton with political smarts and a command of the policy issues should now go directly to the back of the class.

The Smart Grid City is another no brainer, albeit one with a spectacularly bad name. Again, the future of transportation is electrons, and we need to design, fund, and build the infrastructure to support that as soon as possible.

After reading Senator Clinton’s plan, the obvious question is: Do we see Al Gore’s hand in this? And to be even more pointed, do we see evidence here of a deal to keep Al out of the 2008 race? Frankly, I don’t much care. I’ve long ago concluded that unless there’s something completely unexpected, like a deadlocked convention, Al Gore simply won’t be running–he has far too much he can do for the environment, without the endless political limitations and hassles that come with being a sitting president. If he had a hand in formulating this policy, that’s fine. I doubt it happened that way, as I’ve heard all the public reports that Al and Hill aren’t exactly BFF’s.

The bottom line is that this is clearly a plan that recognizes the issues the US is facing, and seems to be leaning hard in the right direction. I was particularly happy to see the emphasis in the plan on efficiency (can’t use that nasty word “conservation” with Americans, so “efficiency” will have to do, just as “achieving oil independence” has to substitute for “saving our ass from peak oil”), and the opposition to new nuclear power subsidies.

The other item of interest also comes from Joe Romm’s site, The Political Climate is Changing, Part I:

Why is the political climate heating up? The candidates’ polls may be showing that voters have reached the proverbial “tipping point” on the issue. For example, a poll conducted last July by Yale University, Gallup and the ClearVision Institute registered some startling numbers that haven’t received enough public attention. Among its findings:

• 71% of respondents are personally convinced that global warming is happening;
• 69% believe global warming is caused at least in part by human activity;
• 48% believe that climate change already is having dangerous impacts on people;
• 68% of Americans favor an international treaty that requires the U.S. to cut its carbon dioxide emissions 90% by 2050;
• 85% support a higher CAFÉ standard, even if it raises the price of a new car by $500; and
• 75% of respondents said the presidential candidates’ position on global warming will be a factor in deciding whom to vote for.

My initial reaction was, “It’s about freakin’ time, people!”

My secondary reaction was, “Can a peak oil guy get some love around here? We’ve got more than one problem, ya know.”

The real value here, of course, is that nothing, and I mean not one thing, will alter public policy quicker on the e+e front than a shift in the views of voters. The actions of the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave aside, politicians do care what voters think, so getting the voters on board is critical.