'You Say You Want a Revolution' in the Physics of Energy: Good Luck Green New Deal
Author's note: The following is derived from my February 26, 2019 testimony regarding the future of DOE’s ARPA-E, before the Congressional Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Subcommittee on Energy where my remarks begin at 41:50.
It seems like everybody wants a revolution in energy tech. From Green New Deal proponents to Palo Alto’s pundits where we hear that “clean tech” is on the cusp of “a 10x exponential process which will wipe fossil fuels off the market in about a decade.”
You’d be excused for suspecting such a revolution might be just around the corner. After all, we live in a time of technological marvels. It has become a cliché to offer as an example, Moore’s Law, which brought us smartphones, far cheaper and far more powerful than a room-sized IBM mainframe from 30 years ago, and along the way, “disrupting” so many old industries. Even the staid International Monetary Fund invoked the digital analogy weighing in with its Riding the Energy Transition manifesto: “Smartphone substitution seemed no more imminent in the early 2000s than large-scale energy substitution seems today.”
But analogizing silicon and energy domains, as seductive as it seems, is based on a profound category error. A digital-like transformation in how energy is produced or stored isn’t just unlikely, it can’t happen with the physics we know today. We can illustrate how fantastical this kind of thinking is.
If combustion engines could achieve Moore’s Law scaling, an engine could shrink to the size of an ant and then generate a thousand-fold morehorsepower than a car. With such an engine, a car could actually fly, very fast. Or, if photovoltaics scaled like computers, a single postage-stamp-sized solar array could power the Empire State building. Similarly, if batteries scaled like computing, a battery the size of a book, costing less than a dime, could power an A380 to Asia.
Only in comic books does the physics of energy production work like that. In our universe, power scales the other way. The challenge in storing and processing information using the smallest possible amount of energy is distinct from the challenge of producing energy, or moving or reshaping physical objects. The two domains entail different laws of physics.
The energy needed to move a ton of people, heat a ton of steel or silicon, or grow a ton of food is determined by properties of nature whose boundaries are set by laws of gravity, inertia, friction, mass, and thermodynamics. In the world of people, cars, planes, and large-scale industrial systems, increasing speed or carrying capacity causes hardware to expand, not shrink.
Of course wind turbines, solar cells, and batteries will yet see useful improvements in cost and performance; so too will drilling rigs and combustion engines. And of course Silicon Valley information technology will bring important and commercially valuable efficiency gains in managing energy and physical goods. But the outcomes won’t be as miraculous as the invention of the integrated circuit, nor the discovery of petroleum or nuclear fission.
To be blunt: there is simply no possibility that more government funding for wind turbines, silicon solar cells or lithium batteries will lead to a “disruptive” 10-fold gain. All those technologies are approaching physics limits, just as aviation engines have.
That’s not to say we’re at the end of innovation or foundational discoveries in energy. We know from history that revolutionary discoveries happen. We also know they come from basic research that unveils entirely new phenomenologies and not from deploying R&D funds to improve or subsidize yesterday’s technologies. The Internet didn’t emerge from improving the rotary phone, nor the transistor from subsidizing vacuum tubes, nor the automobile from subsidizing railroads. An energy revolution requires we focus on basic science.
Congress is once again engaged in deliberations over the funding and mission for ARPA-E, the young agency within DOE created a mere decade ago with a mission to engage the “long-term energy challenges” and the “need for creative ‘out-of-the-box’ transformational” research. It’s instructive to illustrate the scale challenge in energy in order to frame what the government can usefully do, and whether a putative clean-tech revolution is imminent.
Traditional metrics are inadequate to visualize the magnitude of energy required by our digitally infused industrial society. Roughly 85% of global energy comes from oil, coal and natural gas. For perspective, consider that if global hydrocarbons were all produced in the form of oil and stacked up in a row of barrels, that row would stretch from Washington D.C. to Los Angeles, and would grow in height by a Washington monument every single week.
That’s today’s state of affairs, and that challenge is expanding. When, not if, the world’s poorest four billion people increase their energy use to a mere 15% of the per capita level of developed economies, global energy use will rise by an adding the equivalent of another America’s worth of demand. Meanwhile, in the developed nations, we can illuminate the scale challenge looking at just two fast-growing sectors: every $1 billion of commercial airlines put into service leads to some $5 billion in aviation fuel consumed over two decades. Similarly, every $1 billion spent building datacenters leads to $5 billion in electricity use over two decades. The world is buying both jets and datacenters at a rate north of $50 billion a year.
For evidence of just how hard it is to impact such an enormous market and make a “transformational” change: Over the past two decades, the world has spent more than $2 trillion on non-hydrocarbon energy alternatives, but hydrocarbon use has risen nearly 1.5-fold and hydrocarbon’s share of global energy supply has decreased by only a few percentage points. These realities are what likely motivated Bill Gates – who has given serious thought and significant capital to energy innovation -- to recently state that “there is no [energy] substitute for how the industrial economy runs today.”
But this scale challenge commonly elicits the proposition that a solution can be found by embracing the spirit of the Apollo program: “If we can put a man on the moon, surely we can [and we can fill in the blank with any aspirational goal].” This popular rhetorical analogy is in fact another profound category error. Transforming the energy economy is not like putting a dozen people on the moon a handful of times. It is like putting all of humanity on the moon —permanently. To do the latter would require science and engineering that doesn’t exist today.
Of course new and seemingly magical discoveries relevant to energy tech lay in the future. There is, for example, a serious deficit in support for research where ‘magic’ does happen, and that’s in the basic materials sciences. We already know that metamaterials and quantum-engineered catalysts or alloys – areas that will yet benefit from the emerging capabilities of artificial intelligence and exascale computing – hold the unrealized potential for “big bang” energy impacts ranging from the still chimerical pursuit of batteries as effective as fuel tanks to doubling combustion engine efficiencies, or to engineered bacteria that excrete diesel fuel.
Returning to the National Academy of Sciences, and its 2007 Gathering Storm report that recommended creating ARPA-E: that document provides a clear roadmap for what Congress should still do today in order to fulfill the “long-term” and “transformational” mission envisioned. It’s a roadmap that might even forge a bipartisan consensus, something almost as hard as a moon landing these days.
Fundamentally, APRA-E should have a clear focus on basic science and resist its drift towards the near-term, and projects that duplicate other agencies or the private sector. While it is often tempting and perhaps more politically comfortable to fund projects with obvious utility, that fails the “transformational” science challenge set out for ARPA-E. And it won’t bring about a revolution.
There can be no doubt that scientists will yet unveil, and engineers will yet commercialize an energy “miracle” – the specific word Bill Gates has used for this goal. As many a Nobelist has pointed out, miracles or magic seem to come when you “free your mind” in the pursuit of basic knowledge. They don’t come from government agencies helping private markets make yesterday’s tools better.
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P.S.
For history buffs, Beatles fans, or music lovers of a certain age, John Lennon and Paul McCartney captured the reality of revolutions in the lyrics to their iconic 1968 song You Say You Want A Revolution. The song of course was inspired by the political protests of that year not by debates over energy policy, though the latter has become highly political in our era.
You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it's evolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
But when you talk about destruction
Don't you know that you can count me out
Don't you know it's gonna be
All right, all right, all right
You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We'd all love to see the plan
You ask me for a contribution
Well, you know
We're doing what we can
But if you want money for people with minds that hate
All I can tell is brother you have to wait
Don't you know it's gonna be
All right, all right, all right
You say you'll change the constitution
Well, you know
We all want to change your head
You tell me it's the institution
Well, you know
You better free your mind instead
But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao
You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow
Don't you know it's gonna be
All right, all right, all right
All right, all right, all right
All right, all right, all right
All right, all right
This piece originally appeared at Forbes
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Mark P. Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a faculty fellow at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering. In 2016, he was named “Energy Writer of the Year” by the American Energy Society. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in Forbes