The Energy Question - Part 1

If you stay in a moderately big city and just  look around yourself, will understand that we humans are addicted to energy. We need it in almost every step of our life and in fact our whole economy is underpinned by energy. Remove the source of energy and our whole economy will come crashing down like a pack of cards which no amount of bailout packages will be able to revive. At current rates of consumption our oil sources may last us out a hundred years or so. But the problem with fuel burning is the question of greenhouse gases and global warming. We may have the oil, but who is going to take care of the fumes? Several armchair intellectual organisations have proposed quite a wide array of solutions, with a wide range of practicalities, but none in my honest opinion, is practical enough. 

Foremost, among their plans is to decrease the average per capita energy consumption, and that too drastically. All this sounds quite noble but the majority of the world's population is located in the continents of Asia and Africa, and there too a significant proportion live in abject poverty. With an optimistic eye towards the future, I believe this population would within the next fifty or so years reach the status of developed nations. What does this entail? An exponential increase of energy demand. The global projected energy consumption is likely to shoot up by maybe an order of magnitude or more. The currently developed nations have hogged the energy resources of the world for more than three centuries now and even today contribute to the bulk of global pollution and global warming. India, with a population five times that of USA, consumes half as much as energy. This means that the average US citizen consumes almost 10 times as much energy as the average Indian. Most development projects in the modern world are energy dependent. As more and more agriculture will be mechanised to increase productivity, and larger tracts of lands are to come under irrigation, energy demands are bound to increase. Moreover, countries like India have still predominantly a rural agrarian population. This leads to significant underemployment in the agriculture sector. The economic condition of India cannot be improved without creation of a large number of jobs in the secondary, tertiary and quaternary sectors which necessarily entails a shift of the demographics from the rural to the urban, which again requires increased energy. It has been noted by several economists that as per capita income rises, if it outpaces inflation, then consumption also rises. A very poor man does not need anything, but a moderately solvent person will require a fan, while raise the income a bit higher, he demands an AC. Implicit in all these long-winded arguments is the increase of energy consumption. So, asking these nations to suddenly decrease their energy consumption even below their current consumption, smacks of downright neo-imperialism. And why will these countries agree to it also? Why will these countries sacrifice their progress in the altar of global good, when the priests themselves are the worst sinners? Hoping for a decrease in consumption thus to me is pure daydreaming with no grounding in practicality at all.

The second point raised by the green brigade is that we can switch over completely to non-conventional sources of energy. Quoting Greenpeace, "They are abundant, and we can obtain them now only." Both points are technically right, feels politically very correct yet stands on very weak operable principles. Just from the tone of their voice you can feel this was uttered by a history graduate whose knowledge of the energy problem starts and ends with some web surfing and whose contribution has mostly been sloganeering. Even though this solution appears quite practical at first, it however suffers from several fatal flaws in its reasoning. First of all is the implicit point is that non-conventional energy is cheap. This is quite wrong. Yes, they are damn cheap to run, but not to install. They have very high starting costs, and since they give typically far lower yields than most conventional sources you have to operate them for a period of hundred years or so before you can say they are cheaper. Second is another implicit assumption that global energy consumption will remain mostly the same, or will increase slightly. I have already refuted this in the previous paragraph and won't waste time by repeating myself. The third point of abundance is basically a half-truth. Global incident solar energy will cover twice your energy bills if harnessed by current technologies. But people forget that solar energy is a fickle source, that is not available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You would thus need appropriate storage systems, driving up costs and wastage. Also it's energy density per unit area is very low, you would again drive up costs in building elaborate distribution systems, not to mention increased transmission losses. And finally to cover even our current energy bill, we need to cover almost 50% of the surface of the earth with solar cells! Thats almost laughable in its impracticality. Most of these arguments can be extended for wind, tidal and geothermal energy too. Except geothermal, almost all are fickle. And too little in amount to be the primary source. You may shout out "Iceland!" but the population of Iceland and India can never be compared. Such non-conventional sources can never be the primary source for large, populous nations. 

What we need now, even though it ticks all the right boxes, is nuclear fusion, the anathema of Greenpeace. Why we need urgent research on this topic and why the eco-political hijacking of anything nuclear must stop I will expand in my next post.