I’ve been fiddling around trying to find the glitch in the Matrix, and this, to me, absolutely *has* to be it. This one not even I can believe:
Out of all things, how can we possibly have overlooked WATER?
I am not sure why, but no one I have heard talking/writing/debating about climate change has even mentioned the most fundamental question behind all of it. Not a single person. That, to me, *cannot possibly* happen in an honest-to-goodness “real” world. Below, I’ve attempted to explain such an astounding oversight — phrased as though it actually happened through a natural series of explainable events.
[In other words, if the world actually IS real, and this WAS an understandable oversight, this post will address that oversight, which in my view is the first one we need to consider before we can go about solving the problem. There’s no use proposing (to say nothing of comparing the efficacy of) various “Green New Deals” until we look at the root of the problem.]
To begin…
I saw that famed Stanford researcher Mark Z. Jacobsen recently presented yet another whopper of a proposal — one which offered a global price tag north of $70 trillion, albeit with an asterisk indicating we could hope to see this amount of savings over a modest number of years. With all due respect to Mr. Jacobsen — perhaps more than due respect to him, considering that I have myself invested several thousand hours studying this topic, I personally visited his office at Stanford, brought him lunch from the Indian hot truck located outside, and sat for an hour in the cafe below waiting for him, ultimately leaving a note which went wholly unanswered — I think there are several things he has failed to consider.
Actually, that understates it…
I know for a fact that there are salient points he has failed to consider. Points which matter. If you sense any disrespect, it’s because I’ve already done everything I could reasonably do to point these things out to him (and others) and it’s not specifically directed toward Jacobsen so much as it reflects general frustration toward the countless thousands of climate scientists who I know work very diligently but without considering AT ALL the root of the problem. Many of whom are similarly all hands aflailing but similarly without the ten minutes necessary to sit down for a cup of coffee. Sorry, but I can’t and I don’t respect that. “Busy” is NEVER a valid explanation when opportunity cost analysis makes it clear that you’re not paying attention to the right things.
And I can prove that what I just said is the case. I have below.
No one would reasonably argue that climate change is an energy problem. Dr. Jacobsen apparently considers this so self-evident that his proposals focus primarily on second and third tier energy use reductions and transitioning the global supply to renewable sources — primarily solar, wind, and hydro. But while valuable, such a top down assessment that we have the available space and can undoubtedly do this — even one supported by a liberal amount of math — says next to nothing about how it should actually be done. Worse, further analysis shows all that work to be almost completely useless: It establishes an upper boundary cost, nothing more.
And it would actually push us in the wrong direction in terms of implementation.
Now I know I’m ruffling feathers here, so I’ll be very specific about what I’m saying in order to avoid unpleasant, unnecessary, and potentially irrelevant commentary/complaint loops:
When I say “second and third tier” use reductions, I’m specifically referring to efficiency gains which come from smarter use of smarter energy.
Jacobsen and his colleagues appear to believe that the most substantial improvements to energy use come from — as a first order of business — wasting less heat in the process of producing it, and being more efficient (think smart homes and smart grids) in the way it is used. I am not debating or disparaging these concepts; they are important.
What I’m saying is that those are definitely not FIRST TIER considerations. They are NOT the most fundamentally important factors. In my parlance, “first tier” considerations seek to change how we think about energy and the economy — they don’t consider the economy as sacrosanct, but rather the physics of energy production and transmission. It is this definition which I will use below.
Thesis:
To build a sustainable economy, we must first consider energy in the physical abstract. It is of comparatively little use to consider the economy and only afterwards address how the economy can be served by energy.
It is abundantly clear that this is precisely what Jacobsen et al have done. They evaluated current data about energy use and our economy, then made projections forward about a transition to serve it with renewables based on what we can reliably determine are the parameters of those renewable energy sources as best we currently know them.
Mark and his colleagues essentially presupposed the economy and then said, “here’s how we can serve what is.”
This is all dressed up in some fancy math, but it’s an overly simplistic approach and it doesn’t really help us figure out what we should actually do. In fact, it suggests a much LESS efficient approach to distributed renewable energy than one which I know for a fact is somewhat readily available to us.
Working “backwards” is a demonstrably more effective approach. That is, looking at energy first and then determining how what we know about energy can best serve the economy we know we have based on the way we know that economy developed. In order to do this, it’s best to take a big step back and think about how it (energy) comes to us: with patterns but somewhat inconsistently. Also how we use it: opportunistically.
Cities grew up on coasts for a reason. The most basic reason was energy: Shipping was the most cost effective and convenient way to move goods, and where goods were, people aggregated. Where those people aggregated, services were and are needed. The economy grew on energy, certainly, but the way it grew was based on efficiency. We know this is the case. We certainly didn’t continue the terribly challenging and inconvenient process of hunting down whales for oil for very long when drilling a hole in the ground proved significantly safer and more efficient, and we won’t continue drilling holes in the ground for very much longer when we know that doing so will kill us. And so while it’s wonderful to see that our existing infrastructure — provided it were covered in enough rooftop solar — would be more than adequate for our energy needs, and wonderful to know that we have enough wind power…
…we already knew these things, and any B+ junior high school student could have let us in on what to absolutely no one is a terribly big secret.
Storage and energy transmission is the root of the problem, not energy.
We already knew we had/have enough energy: it’s everywhere. The problem isn’t having it and the problem ISN’T collecting it — or rather the latter part there is the trivial part of the problem. The difficult part is having it where we want it when we want it, and it sure doesn’t take a team of Stanford scientists to figure that out. In fact, said team picked the low hanging fruit and more or less completely ignored the more relevant and pressing problems: transmission and storage. Vaguely figuring that “if we have enough renewables” it won’t matter.
Um, sorry, but NO.
The “instant on” nature of our current (largely electrically based already) economy will not allow such a generic “put it everywhere” solution to work. For it to work, such a system would also need to be several times larger than its base economic requirements, or it would need to include significantly more storage — which we do not have and which we currently have no plans to scale up anywhere near quickly enough. Such a system absolutely WILL cost significantly more than one based on large scale storage — which, as a reminder, is the way our current one works.
Our system works based on storage, NOT on electricity. Sure, there’s a grid — a moderately in some places reliable one — but it’s a grid which is based almost entirely off various forms of STORED fossilized energy. And the only way to store the volume of energy that we need to — reliably and cost effectively AND soon — is with water.
It’s the only way, and you can argue about it until you’re purple in the face but you’ll still be left holding a price tag well over $70 trillion if you do.
We need to figure out how to do all of this more efficiently (storage and transmission/delivery), and since that has been a significant focus of my studies, I’m going to explain how, RIGHT NOW — simply enough that anyone can understand it.
We know plenty about solar radiation, and we know plenty about wind power. Unfortunately, we consider the movements of water about our atmosphere almost as an afterthought. Water is the bastard stepchild of the renewable energy world. It’s the best of all our renewable energy sources in a number of ways, but it’s paradoxically seen as unreliable. Why?
Because it’s never where you want it to be when you want it to be there.
That’s an overstatement, actually. The book on hydropower begins and more importantly ends with, “it’s geographically limited. It’s great if you have it nearby, but if it’s not nearby, it doesn’t help you.”
In other words, we’re whining about where water happens to be when all we really need to do is grab an appropriate shovel and a bucket.
This is all bewildering to me, considering the fact that we need on the order of about 8 billion gallons (~30 million metric tonnes) every single day for basic human life and far more than that all things considered. Bewildering, considering that a significant fraction of the water we use moves itself around without much of our help at all. Why is it that we continue to think of water — of hydropower — as an afterthought? Why despite that it is one of the most mature and consistent energy sources and storage solutions in the history of humankind?
Why considering that virtually all human populations have sought and settled near sources of water for all of human history? Why considering that the primary reason they’ve done this is because of the energy cost of moving water? Why considering that hydropower installations are consistently the most cost effective, large scale, and durable solutions we have at our disposal?
Why do we continue to consider hydropower as “geographically limited” when we’ve had the means at our disposal to significantly alter geography for well over a hundred years?
*we built the Panama Canal in 1881. It is 50 miles long, 15.2 meters deep, and (now) 49 meters wide.
*we built the Suez Canal in 1859. It is 120 miles long, over 75 meters wide and over 15 meters deep.
*we built the Erie Canal in 1825. It is 363 miles long, 12 meters wide at the top, 8.5 meters wide at the bottom, and 1.2 meters deep.
More recently, the largest power generation facility in the world was built in China on the Yangtze River: The Three Gorges dam. It has an installed capacity of 22,500 MW and an annual generation of roughly 90 TWh. For reference, this is more than triple the power consumption of the Los Angeles metro area. The dam was originally envisioned in 1919 but was completed and only became fully functional almost a hundred years later, in 2012.
How could we POSSIBLY have overlooked water, considering all of this?
…and now that you’ve waited sufficiently long for the answer, here it is:
Subsurface artificial rivers. a.k.a. Boring Company tunnels.
The Boring Company — one of Elon Musk’s brainchildren — currently digs tunnels of 3.8 m diameter “at any depth” for $10M per mile, inclusive of reinforcements and wiring. These tunnels were Musk’s answer to what he calls “soul destroying traffic.”
What Musk doesn’t yet realize is that they are far more effective for energy transmission and storage than they are for moving people. They are excellent for transmission and storage of water, which makes them excellent for transmission and storage of energy.
Besides which, people still move toward water (and the energy sources which have developed around water) as a general rule. We still grow and move crops based on the availability (or lack thereof) of water. We still need water and we will need significantly more of it and better distribution of it as weather patterns become less predictable.
Getting people where they want to go is FAR LESS IMPORTANT than making sure water and energy is where they currently are, and also far less important than making sure we have enough food and that things don’t burn. The net net is that it is
far more effective to move water than it is to continue behaving as though it cannot be moved and that people need to move to it, and supplies from it.
We simply needed to give up that relatively simple and outdated notion.
And now you can probably see why this strikes me as a terribly impossible joke. How could I possibly have been the only one to do this simple equation:
volume = cross sectional area * length
V = (pi)*(r²)*(length)
= 3.14159*(3.8/2)²*length
= 11.34 m² * 1609.344 m
= 18,250 m³ per $10,000,000
“Any depth” implies that a vertical head for hydropower generation — to use an simple example — can be 1 kilometer. This then implies that a single 100 mile tunnel ($1B) can be connected to a corresponding tunnel ($1B) which is vertically displaced by one kilometer for roughly the following cost, and with roughly the following hydropower generation and storage parameters:
100 miles * 18,250 m³/mile = 1,825,000 m³ (volume of 100 mile tunnel)
…and such a tunnel would be lower in overall volume than the Panama (1881), the Suez (1859), or even the Erie (1825) canals.
The last of which I happened to grow up less than a mile from:
Low bridge, everybody down…low bridge for we’re coming to a town…
…and you’ll always know your neighbor, you’ll always know your pal…
…if you’ve ever navigated on the Erie Canal.
It would also cost significantly less — in inflation-adjusted dollars — than any of the aforementioned canals. Both in total cost and cost per unit volume of earth moved.
Q: But what could it possibly accomplish to dig two tunnels?
A: More effective transmission and distribution of renewable energy resources.
…AND WATER.
From https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/hydropower-d_1359.html
The theoretically available power from falling water can be expressed as
Pth = Ï q g h
where
Pth = power theoretically available (W)
Ï = density (kg/m³) (~ 1000 kg/m³ for water)
q = water flow (m³/s)
g = acceleration of gravity (9.81 m/s²)
h = falling height, head (m)
= 1000 kg/m³*(flow rate)*(9.81m/s²)*1000
= 9.81 x 10⁶ *(flow rate) in Watts
Examining the available large scale generators/turbines used in the Three Gorges dam (China) we can see that large scale hydro projects use turbines capable of handling on the order of 500–1000 cubic meters per second. Considering the head height of the proposed solution (significantly higher than the Three Gorges dam, which caps at 950 m³/s at a head height lower than 700 m) we can comfortably use the 1000 m³/s estimate, yielding the following power rate:
9.81 x 10⁹ Watts at 1000 m³/s, and 1,825 seconds ~ 30 minutes of power production at that maximum production rate.
9,810 megawatts, and
9,810 * 1825/3600 = 4,973 megawatt-hours
…for a pair of Boring Company tunnels properly positioned and running a continuous loop of water using a centralized, more affordable to build renewable energy generation production facility 100 miles distant from — but creatively connected to — a population center. About 50% more power than the entire Los Angeles metro area uses at peak, as readily available as a faucet under the ground.
It is inarguable that such a system can be built, the more important question is what would the final cost to build such a system be, and what are the available alternatives and their costs?
We already know that Tesla’s 100 MW/139 megawatt-hour storage battery in Australia cost roughly $63M U.S. to install, and that it saved about a third of its construction costs in a single year. In other words, the South Australia gridscale megabattery is extremely cost effective.
We can thus compare the proposed solution to get an idea of what its value per production and storage capacity would be.
The proposed solution represents an extrapolated known value of:
= 9,810 MW * $63M/100 MW = $6.18B {for energy production}
and
= 4,973 MWh * $63M/139 MWh = $2.25B {for energy storage}
The proposed system’s primary costs are as follows:
(1) cutting the tunnels ~$2B
(2) connecting the tunnels with hydropower generation components on the “urban” or downward end of the system (? these would displace existing long distance transmission systems, and along the length of the tunnels provide cost effective high throughput vehicle charging stations which we also need)
(3) building renewable energy production facilities to pump water from the bottom tunnel to the top tunnel on the “rural” or upward end of the system (this component we have to build anyway, and Jacobsen et al proposes to do it on existing rooftops, which would cost about twice as much or more)
The Boring Company’s current cost per mile is $10M — which the above analysis seems to show is already cost competitive — but the company projects this cost could drop by more than half.
In my view, the most important takeaways from the above quite loosely described system are as follows:
- it can be done anywhere for essentially the same cost
- it is infinitely scalable
- it allows generation to happen anywhere
- it allows energy transmission to take place for a low fixed percentage cost which is equal to the cycle cost of power/efficiency of the pumps/generators
- it is largely based on mature technology
- it allows energy “recovery” to happen in a continuous line above the tunnels essentially at any power output required — which will undoubtedly be most useful for transportation purposes
- it is FAR more durable than lithium ion ‘grid-scale’ storage solutions
Other notes:
- it forms the basis for a sensible and cogent plan for water transmission and access, i.e. it is not solely a renewable energy transmission and production plan
- it greatly decreases the cost of installing the necessary renewable energy generation production facilities by centralizing them
- it largely eliminates the source of a series of wildfires which have recently happened in California (i.e. unmaintained power lines adjacent to combustible material)
- it has far lower cycling costs than lithium ion battery “grid scale” competitive batteries and it allows us to direct our quite limited lithium ion battery production capacity toward uses which are more vital: in transportation units — where they can mitigate carbon emissions more effectively
- it can connect the energy supplies of entire countries for quite reasonable costs. As a simple example, it is comparatively easy to show that significantly more than 40% of the entire US population could be connected to power and water by a single series of tunnels of less than 20,000 miles in length, costing — as of this writing — just $400B for the tunnels themselves. Less than 2/3 of the Pentagon’s budget, and less than 0.6% of Jacobsen’s global budget to service about 2% of the world’s population.
The storage capacity of 20,000 miles of paired tunnels, from the previous example, would be approximately 1 terawatt-hour, and the aggregate hydro production capacity would be nearly two terawatts — almost 300 times the peak energy usage rate of the Los Angeles metro area.
More importantly, properly designed, such a system would more or less completely eliminate the issue of temporal variability of wind and solar energy sources, because it would essentially connect our energy system as a means of leveling out supply and demand.
It would also facilitate prioritizing socially relevant access to clean water and energy, which is something many or most climate scientists continue to regard as important, but rarely factor into their plans significantly. Subsurface desalination plants, offshore wind, geothermal pumps, and countercurrent heat exchangers for compressed air energy storage will have to make it into my next piece, because this one is already getting pretty long.
And now, Scotty, you can either beam me the hell off this crazy ass planet or stick the lot of that in your pipe and smoke it good and hard.
If you enjoyed this piece, please tag Elon Musk and/or The Boring Company in twitter, and share it via your social media network. If you see issues or have questions, send them my way: negativecarbonroadtrip@gmail.com
