Rob’s comments below are in italics.Derek’s comments below are in normal font.
We were talking in the conversation last time about energy and how energy is generally misunderstood or misused. We left last week’s conversation by saying that, at some point in the future, we’re going to hit limits in how we generate energy at the moment. If it’s going to be a transformation, we might need to use less energy or be more strategic about it. So we thought we’d unpack that a bit today.
Yes. It seems that the mainstream commentary about this is, “Well, we can’t do without fossil fuels. They’re essential for maintaining the standard of living that we want and improving the lot of poor people.” I wanted to address some of the perhaps low-hanging fruit we could use to consume less energy without reverting to a medieval or Stone Age standard of living.
Without living a small, cold, dark existence, which seems to be the plan for us by those up top!
Yeah, it does seem so. Anyway, I was looking at the analysis in a very good book, written by the late Professor David McKay in the mid-90s, called Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, which is an interesting pun. It spawned quite a lot of ‘without the hot air’ books. Of course, he was making a sideways reference to climate change, as well as using the phrase ‘hot air’ in the usual rhetorical sense, because there’s a lot of talk on both sides of the debate that is disconnected from reality.
Now, according to his analysis, the average energy consumption in Europe, including the UK, is about 125 kilowatt-hours per person per day. It’s about twice that in the United States. He did a breakdown of what this is, the various ways that it’s used. I thought if we just look at each of those one by one and see what scope there is for making economies that are not particularly onerous for us.
The biggest contributors to that total, according to his analysis, were car and jet flights, heating and cooling, and what he called stuff —manufacturing and transporting stuff. So let’s look at those for a start.
The manufacturing of goods accounts for 48 kilowatt-hours per day per person. Now, we’ve discussed before that the planned obsolescence and the throwaway culture are really completely unnecessary. Over the course of an adult lifetime, most households buy perhaps somewhere between five and ten of every single one of their domestic appliances. So it’s technically not at all challenging to make these so that they’re A, durable and B, easy to maintain and repair when they’re needed.
It’s the absence of a more modular design, where you can’t repair a single element.
Yeah, exactly. Without getting into a detailed engineering conversation, it’s obvious to anybody. The mere fact that you very often can’t even get them open to examine anything. All of the bearings are not removable and replaceable when they wear out. There’s no supply chain for components, there’s no standardisation across one and another.
There’s a multiplicity of marginally different designs from different manufacturers, resulting in a huge duplication of labour in designing and developing them. We could, purely and simply by shifting from the planned obsolescence and non-repairability model to a far more sensible one, probably cut that 48 kilowatt hours per day per person by a factor of at least five. So that would bring it down to about 8 kilowatt-hours per day.
Transporting stuff is another 12 kilowatt hours per day; you could take that down by a similar factor. So the two of those together come to 60 kilowatt hours a day. It could easily come down to say 12 or 10 without any reduction in our standard of living, and possibly one could say an enhancement. At the same time, it would free us from the financial churn we’re all experiencing of having to earn money to replace all these things, which is entirely unnecessary.
The next thing is the car: 40 kilowatt-hours per day. Of course, these are averages. Averages are fairly misleading unless you’ve got a very symmetrical normal distribution, which you haven’t with any of these things. Probably the majority of people aren’t using anything like that amount of vehicle transport, and it’s a relatively small proportion of the population who use a lot more than that to bring the average up to that level.
It’s a power curve, isn’t it? 10% of people account for 90% of car journeys.
Yeah, probably. So not only is there scope for actually reducing the number of journeys that are done by car, we could probably take a serious look at the amount of time we’re all spending on travelling from one place to another and ask whether this is really necessary and whether it’s really enhancing our lives.
A great many people have horrendous commuter journeys to work and back, a colossal amount of time, stress, and money spent on that, and also disproportionate energy consumption. As we’ve said, if you’ve ever been anywhere near a main transport artery during rush hour, you’ll know that it’s an incredibly inefficient way of getting from one place to another. The majority of those cars have one occupant, sometimes two; very rarely are they full.
Definitely 90 per cent of that could be reduced either by doing far fewer journeys or by doing a lot more of them by efficient public transport. Even with public transport, there’s a lot of scope to improve how it’s done at the moment.
The public transport system is a mess. If you compare the infrastructure we had 70 years ago, compared to the one we have today, and consider the average price of a rail ticket, it’s not comparable.
Yeah. So once again, that could go down either with more efficient transport or with less of it. Very easily from 40 kilowatt hours per day per person to, around four or five.
To be clear, we’re not talking about mandating anything or about telling people they can’t do these things or travel. It’s just structuring things differently so that people don’t have to do these crazy commutes if they don’t want to.
Yeah. Then we’ve got jet flights at 30 kilowatt hours per day. I’ll do a more detailed analysis of what that works out to. Once again, we’re going to have a power-law distribution, where the average is skewed by a relatively small number of people taking many long-haul flights. We could look at what would be possible for the typical person not to be necessarily deprived of holidays and a reasonably different change of climate and culture.
Then there’s heating and cooling: 37 kilowatt-hours per day, on average. That could obviously be greatly reduced by the kinds of measures we all know about —better home insulation, more efficient heating, and, again, more solar harvesting. As I’ve mentioned before, in a climate like ours, the solar contribution is not so easy to do because the time when we need the heating is the time when there’s less sunlight available to provide the energy.
But as far as air conditioning, which is a massive expense in hotter climates, that could very easily be all solar powered, and it would be self-regulating by means of the fact that the time you have got the most demand for air conditioning is the time when you have the most available sunlight.
What do you make of the government initiative to introduce heat pumps and similar measures?
Well, we’ve got a heat pump and I’m very happy with it. It’s worth pointing out, though, that as they’re driven by electricity and the process of generating electricity has its own inefficiencies, so does the distribution. One thing that’s worth saying: all the defenders of the fossil fuel approach keep harping on how it’s not feasible to switch to renewable sources for all our energy because of the intermittency of wind and solar, and that you need baseload power stations.
This needs a serious debate, but a mix of arrangements so we get away from the simplistic idea that we need enormous battery storage to tie solar, wind, and water generation together when it’s not productive. Another point, a proposal Buckminster Fuller came up with as far back as the ‘50s, certainly the ‘60s, was that a worldwide energy grid would go a long way toward solving these problems.
There are parts of the world somewhere or other that are in sunlight at any given time, and there are parts that are in darkness. If it were all connected together, providing continuity of service would be quite easy worldwide.
I’ll just mention another factor that’s in there: 15 kilowatt hours per day for food, farming and fertiliser. I’m not sure how much of that total is for agricultural machinery, which I’m quite in favour of. It was an enormous release of humanity from the backbreaking labour that had been its historical lot when we used human and animal muscle power. But the energy input to fertilisers and pesticides is enormous, and that’s a whole thing that would be cut through.
I think we’re papering over the cracks of soil degradation by just caking on more fertiliser.
Exactly. Yeah.
There’s a whole regenerative farming practice where if you structure things differently, you don’t need anywhere near as much fertiliser.
Yeah, exactly. So in short, it would be quite easy to have a perfectly acceptable standard of living for perhaps no more than 20 per cent of the current energy consumption. One figure I found surprising is that he calculated the defence’s energy consumption at just three or four per cent of the total for European energy consumption.
A more detailed analysis of what goes into that is well worth looking at. We’ve mentioned before the colossal energy expenditure in manufacturing explosives and propellants. Then, of course, you’ve got all of the steel manufacturing that’s going into armoured vehicles and tanks and so forth. So if we had a world where the human race regains its sanity and abandons warfare, which I actually think is quite likely, we could abandon it because we destroy ourselves entirely or destroy our social and political structures.
We’ve commented recently that it’s futile. It doesn’t help. It just blows s**t up.
Yes, it doesn’t solve anything. So anyway, those were my thoughts on the low-hanging fruit for improving the quality of life and improving the viability of our energy consumption.
There are two angles we can take on this: the residential angle we’ve outlined on this call. But yeah, there’s surely the industrial angle, where the biggest industry for these things seems to be the military. That may be the biggest low-hanging fruit of all. But yeah, it’s like trying to turn around a battleship, isn’t it? Because there’s so much money and so many big interests invested in its continuation and expansion. It’s perhaps clear that if they don’t spend on the military, the entire financial system might collapse in itself even faster than it’s going to anyway?
Yep.
So is there anything individuals can do on a more hands-on level?
I would say that anybody thinking of starting up an enterprise of any sort is well worth being aware of these factors and creating something for the future rather than perpetuating the inefficient methods of the past.
I noticed that in the resort where we had a holiday in South Wales last month, all of the toiletries and cleaning products and things that were provided in the housing on the resort had all come from a local Welsh company which was committed to refilling bottles rather than simply following the standard practice of giving you not only a new bottle but a new spray head every time.
Once again, if we look at the economics of that, we’ll see that for many of the products lining supermarket shelves, the packaging might well account for more than half, perhaps more than three-quarters, of the cost of producing the item. In other words, it completely outweighs the cost of the product. So once again, there are opportunities there.
I think the future is going to involve far more return to local businesses, which is going to again reduce the costs and the energy consumption of transporting things from one end of the country to another when they could—
I think people generally want that as well. We want to buy local, we want to support local people. The answer to the energy question seems unlikely to come from the top down. It feels more likely to emerge as a bottom-up thing.
Yeah. I think so.
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