Indian
grid failure offers lesson to us all
1
August, 2012
A Washington
Post story yesterday
about the (so far) two-day electricity blackout that affected 600
million citizens was a study in trying to find an answer to the acute
predicament facing Mother India. Numerous officials are cited in the
article, mainly scratching their heads, baffled over the cause of
grid collapse. Yet one paragraph stood out for its more definitive
take on the problem.
Indian industry leaders blamed the incident on a large and growing gap between electricity demand and supply, something that the government has failed to tackle despite repeated pledges to do so. Some senior government officials say reform of the power sector is the greatest challenge facing Asia’s third-largest economy in the next few years.
None
of this should be surprising, and not just because of India’s large
population, its less than up-to-date grid, or its unwillingness to
exploit coal reserves at a faster rate (environmental concerns are at
least a partial check on extraction in India).
But
the incident is a cautionary tale for us all.
In
the US we may be staring at our own fate in India’s crisis. I’d
suggest getting ready for it to come to a neighborhood near
you sooner rather
than later. Even the
recent derecho was
a reminder that, in fact, electricity doesn’t come from the
switches on our walls, and that even our grid
can look like spit balls and duct tape when an angry Mother Nature
comes calling.
Of droughts and dry holes
According
to the International
Energy Agency the
world hit peak
oil in 2006.
In his book Peak
Everything: Waking Up To the Century of Declines,
Post Carbon Institute senior fellow Richard
Heinberg notes
similar global peaks in coal (remaining stock is of a lower quality)
and uranium (along with fish stocks, topsoil, fresh water and grain
production). Resources are thinly stretched, though the population
(and leadership) apparently hasn’t gotten the memo.
Meanwhile
industry touts the merits of fracked natural gas, oil shale, and tar
sands as saviors against any reputed declines. But James
Howard Kunstler,
author of the peak oil classic The
Long Emergency,
and more recently, Too
Much Magic: Technology, Wishful Thinking and the Fate of the Nation*
disagrees. He argues that all three of these unconventional fossil
fuel sources are mostly bubbles, with far less actual energy
potential than industry claims (a claim they make, incidentally,
mainly to part sucker investors from their money).
The
issue at stake with these unconventional fossil fuels is foremost the
costs of extraction, which aren’t lessened because of the reported
advances in fracking and horizontal drilling — extraction machinery
with huge price tags for build out and use. The energy it takes to
extract and refine the resources remains high, while the
water-intensive application sucks up massive energy (whether or not
it’s a drought year), and the impact on local roadways,
infrastructure, and ecosystems is profound.
But
in the end, for natural gas at least, the rapid rate of decline
curves, the preponderance of dry holes, and the low ratio of return —
not in dollars, which float independently of geological
reality, but in the energy returned on energy invested or EROEI —
tell the real story, making future costs prohibitive, a definitive
drag on the economy. Natural gas seems dirt cheap now, but as the
other factors catch up, and supply tightens, prices
will rapidly increase.
Either
way, accelerating global warming makes clear we can’t keep going
headlong down the dirty energy path.
And
all this leads us to the US’s own failing infrastructure, aged
power grid, and centralization of power plants, a very vulnerable
position for the so-called greatest nation on earth.
Responses, not solutions
It’s
true that no amount of renewable energy will let us live at the scale
we currently enjoy, with our copious consumption, brazen
wastefulness, indifference to conservation, and suburban development
patterns. Yet there are myriad applications for conservation and
renewables (with the latter as distributed rather than centralized
power) which create jobs, move money, and set the stage for a shift
to an undeniably lower energy future. Aggressively moving on this
front can also prompt at least a temporary stimulus to the broader
economy.
It’s
easy to see India’s grid collapse as India’s problem alone, what
with it being a developing nation and all, and for having such a
large population (twice the size of the US) — the whole demand
outstripping supply thing in its most obvious presentation. But
demand is outstripping supply worldwide; that is what peak oil, peak
coal, and peak nuclear is all about.
Energy IS the economy, stupid
Why
this topic isn’t at the center of this year’s presidential race
is beyond me because, if “it’s the economy, stupid,” I can
guarantee you that, in spite of the delusions of the popular form of
genteel gambling known as investment banking, the entire economy
rides on the primary economy. And, as neoclassical economists fail to
note at our whole society’s peril, the
primary economy is the economy of nature, natural
resources. In our case, on 21st century Earth, that is the energy
economy, which is still the fossil fuel economy. Just try pulling
energy out of the equation and two seconds later enjoy an “Aha”
moment.
Energy
is in everything.
Energy
is the conversation behind every conversation about the economy,
modernity, our way of life, the culture that rides on that, women’s
rights, wealth and poverty, education, international relations, war,
peace, family, children and everything else.
Presidents
have been pointing
this out again and again for 40 years.
But still we act like it’s new news.
With
the derecho we only had six million without power on one side of the
country. But with computers, almost everything’s linked now. What
isn’t linked along a direct line is linked somewhere indirectly.
The derecho was a dress rehearsal for even bigger blackouts
inevitably coming in the future, and the domino effects that come in
its wake.
India’s
600 million powerless for two days (so far) is a warning to us all.
Time to pay heed.
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