Energy challenges break into two categories, stationary and mobile. Let’s talk about Stationary Energy Challenges.

When we are talking stationary, we are talking about buildings. Buildings use energy in two ways, electricity and burning natural gas, propane or oil.

According to Kent Peterson, past president of ASHRAE (which is the group of engineers that design the mechanical systems in buildings) buildings use 71% of energy and produce the largest percentage of greenhouse gases. This is due to the fact that what engineers call the built environment (buildings) use electricity mostly generated by coal.

Have you heard the statistic which shows that much of today’s smog pollution in Los Angeles is caused by coal fired power plants in China?

Check out this site which shows you how dirty (or clean) your local energy producer is:

http://carma.org/region/detail/644

Check out Peterson’s assessment of the built environment’s energy appetite on this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOvBbBkwR5g

How do we solve our Stationary Energy Challenges?

Politicians say: clean coal, nuclear energy, green energy.

Endependence says:

Clean Coal: there is no such thing. Maybe there will be someday. But think about it, mineworkers risk their lives to remove coal from the ground. We burn that coal to make electricity which releases carbon dioxide. It is acknowledged by almost everyone that we need to stop releasing so much carbon dioxide. So we will clean the coal by “capturing” {how?} the carbon dioxide and then “sequestering” {shove it in a hole where it will never bother us again} the carbon dioxide.

This hole has to be somewhere that will never be shaken up enough by normal geologic processes (earthquakes, volcanoes and the like) to release the carbon dioxide. Have you heard about the controversy in Nevada over Yucca Mountain, the place the government chose to store all the nuclear waste?

In the case of clean coal, it seems you would have to create a Yucca Mountain type carbon storage “hole” under every coal powered power plant. Or truck the captured carbon dioxide to a centralized place like Yucca Mountain. Seems pretty far fetched, pretty far off in the future and very expensive.

Nuclear Energy: same kind of problem as clean coal, what do you do with the nuclear waste? Here are some sites to find out about the controversy over Yucca Mountain in Nevada, the place that the federal government has decided is the best place to store our nuclear waste permanently.

Check out these sites to find out about nuclear waste storage issues: http://library.thinkquest.org/17940/texts/nuclear_waste_storage/nuclear_waste_storage.html

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/students/waste.html

Right now in the United States, almost all of the nuclear waste ever generated at every nuclear plant in the country (about 20% of our electricity comes from nuclear power) is in a giant boric acid pool next to the nuclear plant.

Other big problems with a nuclear solution to our stationary energy challenges are that it takes years to build a nuclear power plant, they are very expensive to build, and the “decommissioning” of the plant often costs more than the original building cost.

This site from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Agency says decommissioning costs at least $300,000,000.00.

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/students/decommissioning.html

Green Energy: when politicians talk about Green Energy, they are usually talking about renewable energy such as solar power, wind power, geothermal power, tidal power and energy made from biomass (organic materials, like plants and animal waste).

Of these technologies, both solar power and wind power are proven power generators which could be expanded easily, but with a cost.

The reason that currently we only get 2% of our energy in the U.S. from renewable sources is simple: cost.

Fossil fuels are cheap compared to renewable sources, especially coal. The problem is that the dollar cost of coal doesn’t take “externalities” (an economist’s term) like the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by coal burning into account.

To be truly energy independent, we need to use renewable energy instead finite energy sources (coal, oil, nuclear).

Net Zero Energy Buildings: back to Kent Peterson from the building mechanical engineers group. He says the solution to the Stationary Energy Challenge is two fold: buildings that don’t take in any more energy than they put out and a move to renewable energy sources. If you watch this video from Peterson, you will see that his organization, ASHRAE, has set a goal of Net Zero Energy Buildings by the year 2030.

It doesn’t require huge breakthroughs in technology, just a refinement of the design of buildings and the mechanical systems we are using now, and the will of society to make the choice to invest in a movement toward true Stationary energy independence. (combine energy and independence to get endependence)

Check out Peterson’s Net Zero Building views on this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y3YuxbCcDM

Energy independence_a phrase near and dear to every politician these days.

Going beyond the pander, what does energy independence mean?  True energy independence would be getting energy from sources that are renewable. That leaves out oil and coal. Nuclear could be an option, but the problems of waste disposal and the tremendous cost to build and maintain nuclear plants are huge hurdles, despite the rhetoric to the contrary. That leaves solar, wind, tidal, geothermal and biomass.

There are three levels of energy independence: Personal, Local and National.

How can an individual contribute to energy independence in each of these areas?

Personal: there is a lot of low hanging fruit to save energy in our personal lives because we have been accustomed to cheap energy.  We waste a lot, some estimates are that up to 30% of U.S. energy consumption is waste.  Simple low cost lifestyle changes can reduce energy use dramatically - things like using compact fluorescent lightbulbs instead of incandescents, turning off phantom power, using a clothes line instead of a dryer, taking the bus, riding a bike, etc.

To be truly personally energy independent in a technologically advanced country requires an investment in a renewable energy source like a solar electric system and reliance on human powered transportation or an electric vehicle.  Small problem, solar power is expensive to purchase and install (but very easy to maintain) and there aren’t too many practical electric vehicles.  For the near term, personal energy independence “will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued, but never attained”.

Local: there are movements to make local communities energy independent. There is plenty of potential energy around, biomass from the local landfill could be converted to natural gas, and community wind or solar farms are a possibility.

Some communities are promoting the use of compressed natural gas as an alternative energy source, and T. Boone Pickens insists that CNG can be our transition fuel for transportation while we move to electric vehicles or hydrogen vehicles.

What can an individual do to achieve local energy independence? Get involved with (or start) a grass roots organization to plan for a world with dramatically more expensive or less available energy. A good example of such an organization is A.P.P.L.E.

http://www.apple-nc.org/about.html

National: this is what the politicians usually mean when they talk about energy independence. Drill, baby, drill_all of the above_green energy_yada, yada, yada.

The facts, there is plenty of energy, there just isn’t enough cheap energy to go around. Every day, enough solar energy strikes the earth to supply the entire planet for a year.

True energy independence would require investments in the technology to capture the renewable energy all around us. The idea that using more coal or more oil is going to make us energy independent is preposterous. It might make us less dependent for a while, but energy independence means moving to renewables.

What can an individual do to affect the national move toward energy independence. First, think about the proposed solutions, and reject those that are just stalling techniques. Second, accept the fact that we are going to have to invest in a national energy infrastructure to insulate the country from the ups and downs of the global demand for “cheap” energy (fossil fuels). Third, do your part in the Personal and the Local energy independence areas. It may take a real crisis to wake America up to the requirement for national energy independence. A smaller personal and local energy footprint could be the only way to insulate yourself from such a crisis.

What do you think?