Light, heat, quick and convenient transport, power for industry: energy is a usually unnoticed but essential component of just about everything we do. In economically developed countries such as Australia, we use more energy to support our lifestyles than any other human beings in history. Without it, our daily lives would be impossible and our big cities would grind to a halt.
But every stage in the production of this essential resource has a cost that is usually as little noticed as the commodity itself. Our cities are shrouded in pollution, the northern hemisphere's forests are dying from acid rain, heavy metals poison our biosphere. Much was made possible by the shift from the wind, water, hand and animal power that drove the early stages of the industrial revolution, but now the costs are catching up with us, and unless we can develop non-polluting, renewable sources of energy, it seems we will destroy our planet. STEVE PAINTER looks at some of the issues.
There are problems with every stage of the energy cycle, from production to end use. Take electricity, just one form of energy: mining of fossil fuel for power stations damages local environments; the power stations themselves are one of the main sources of greenhouse gases and are serious contributors to some other types of pollution; the high-tension power lines that distribute the electricity are now believed to create electromagnetic fields that cause cancers in children and possibly adults; and when we do eventually flick a switch, it is costing us steadily more due to a combination of these and other problems.
The problems with oil are better known — most of us breathe them every day. It's well established that Australia's cities are among the world's worst for air pollution created by motor vehicles. Besides the respiratory illnesses and other ailments, it is also emerging that large numbers of young Australians are suffering intellectual damage because of airborne lead from motor vehicle exhausts.
Then there's the fact that the world's supply of this energy source is rapidly running out. Within 75 years, most of the easily accessible reserves of oil will be gone forever. If there's one issue more likely than any other to cause wars in the near future, it is oil. Many would argue that this process has already begun, that the Gulf War was in fact the first oil war.
But regardless of which military power dominates the world's dwindling oil reserves during the twilight of this industry, oil is already a fuel of the past rather than the future. The search for alternatives has begun, and it can only become more urgent. This is particularly important for Australia, which currently draws about 36% of its energy from oil-based sources, mainly for transportation.
At present, the overwhelming majority of our energy is drawn from sources that will eventually run out, though in the case of coal (about 40% of the total) this will take hundreds of years, not a few decades. After coal and oil, natural gas is our next largest fuel sources presently contribute only 6.7%.
Of these renewables, biomass (wood, sugar cane waste, etc) contributes 4.5%, hydro 1.4%, and wind and solar less than 1%. This is despite the fact that Australian research into solar power is as advanced as any in the world.
Solar power is already relatively efficient for water heating, but currently supplies less than 3% of hot water, largely due to electricity generators' heavy pushing of electric hot water systems and cheap off-peak water heating, and the lack of similar incentives for solar.
Just to take one example, Sydney Electricity is currently promoting its Big Blue hot water system, offering generous discounts on power rates. No similar subsidy is available for solar systems, not because of any technological problem, but simply because of what Greenpeace energy researcher Keith Tarlo calls "market failure": the inability of the market, left to its own resources, to promote the most efficient solution to a particular problem.
Energy efficiency
Keith Tarlo says using electricity to heat water is "not an efficient allocation of resources", and the push to install electric systems is driven by generating authorities' over-investment in inflexible coal-fired plants. Because these plants can't easily be turned up and down, off-peak power is supplied at artificially low prices, and this leads to "excessively large storage tanks with high heat losses".
One of the biggest problems in Australia is the energy authorities' fixation on maximising sales rather than minimising costs, argues Tarlo. This has led to the construction or planning of costly new coal-fired stations that aren't needed: Point Piper in NSW, Loy Yang B in Victoria and Collie in WA. The environmentally disastrous Tully-Millstream hydro proposal in Queensland is in the same category.
British Greenpeace energy expert Stewart Boyle says some interesting figures have emerged as a result of the recent involvement of private capital in Loy Yang B. "When Loy Yang B was going to be built and operated by the State Electricity Commission, it was estimated the power would cost about three cents per kilowatt-hour. Now, the projection is 6.2 cents. The corporatisation process brought the previously hidden state subsidy into the open, it flushed out the true costs and showed that Loy Yang B electricity is going to be a lot more expensive than putting money into electricity efficiency."
As a result of the preoccupation with sales rather than minimising costs, most Australian energy suppliers have hardly begun to take up international trends towards energy efficiency. An investigation by the television program A Question of Survival recently concluded that power use in an average home could be reduced by around 75% through better insulation and use of more energy-efficient appliances.
Stewart Boyle visited Australia in early July and spoke widely to energy industry managers and politicians. He says power generators, such as Pacific Power in NSW, are even slower to move than the distributors, though they realise that the era of rapid construction of new fossil fuel power stations is in the past. Demand is not rising quickly enough to justify new construction programs.
While some distributors, such as Sydney Electricity, appear interested in energy efficiency, and are likely to become even more interested as they realise they can make money out of it, the generators have no plans to set targets for reduction of carbon dioxide emissions even though the power industry is NSW's biggest CO2 producer (about 50% of the total). The power generators are simply waiting for government to come up with emissions targets in line with international standards. They also say it's not in their interests to promote energy efficiency, or demand-side management, as they call it.
The distributors, on the other hand, have done a few things. Sydney Electricity has distributed about 500,000 energy-efficient light globes at cheap prices. Stewart Boyle says 4-5 million of these in Sydney (four or five in every home) would dramatically reduce the city's energy consumption, as they use about a quarter of the power of standard globes. An executive for Florida Light and Power in the USA recently estimated that an energy efficiency drive over 12 years had enabled the company to defer building 8000 megawatts of generating capacity, around eight large fossil fuel power stations.
One drawback is that the globes cost $20-$25 each, as against $1-$1.50 for a standard globe. Boyle says energy distributors should be looking for solutions to this problem, such as buying the globes in bulk and allowing customers to pay for them at, for example, $2 per electricity bill.
According to Boyle, Australian distributors estimate that energy efficiency measures could reduce demand by 20-25%. Boyle thinks even this figure is low; in the USA, energy efficiency campaigns commonly reduce demand by 30-35%, quite cheaply. The most common measures are efficient light globes, low-flow shower heads and more efficient water heaters.
Renewable resources
Energy efficiency can make a big contribution by slowing the use of fossil fuels, thus pushing back the time when they'll be exhausted, as well as reducing greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution problems. But replacing the fossil fuel industries is a question humanity can't avoid in the long run.
Here, the outlook is increasingly hopeful, despite the fact that the international commitment to renewable technologies is still lukewarm. Britain, for example, still spends 12 times as much on nuclear research as it does on renewable technologies, despite the fact that the nuclear industry is in decline because of its inability to produce tes.
Nevertheless, renewable technologies have made big strides in recent years. California and Denmark now have large wind power industries, and Denmark has developed an export industry in wind technology. In California, wind power now generates enough electricity to supply the equivalent of a city the size of San Francisco.
According to Stewart Boyle, wind power costs in California have come down from 24 cents per kilowatt-hour (kw/hr) in 1985 to 8.5 cents at the present time. At most, this is 1.5 cents more expensive than power from other sources, and further developments in wind technology are expected to bring the cost down to about 6.5 cents — cheaper than gas or coal — in the next few years. By the time the California grid needs extra generating capacity, Pacific Gas and Electric research and development head Carl Weinberg expects wind power to be the price front-runner. Gas or other technologies will be struggling to get under the wind price. The trend in Denmark is similar; in a decade the price of wind power has come down by about two-thirds.
Wind power is on the move elsewhere as well. Britain's first wind park came on stream about two weeks ago, and another is to open in about a month. By the end of 1993 there could be more than 30 if all of the planned wind projects get funding, says Boyle. "With this technology, things can get rolling very quickly from a small start." Australia so far has two wind parks, one at remote Esperance in WA, and another near Perth.
"Denmark has about 3000 wind turbines producing about 3% of their electricity", says Boyle. "Their target is 10%, and they could get that just by replacing existing small turbines with larger, more advanced ones. This is no big problem, because unlike replacing a coal, let alone nuclear, station, it's just a matter of unbolting the old turbine from its concrete base and bolting down a new one."
Boyle says much of Australia is far better suited than Denmark for a wind power industry. Denmark is not especially well situated for wind power; "it's certainly not unique".
Solar power has also made big strides in recent years, despite minimal research funding. Australia is a world leader in some areas of solar technology, and an Australian innovation called thin film is on the verge of reducing the cost of solar panels dramatically.
Here, again, the nuclear monster raises its head, as billions that could have gone into renewables have been tossed down the nuclear black hole over the past 40 years. Even Australia, with no prospect of requiring a nuclear power station, spends around $50 million a year on nuclear research, money Stewart Boyle thinks could more usefully be directed to renewables technology or even a small renewables park.
Boyle says renewables can justify themselves economically if they are given the chance, though this can't be left to the blind forces of the market. If that happens, the existing technologies will probably strangle their younger rivals. While it's politically fashionable to be left for market forces to sort out, the market mainly measures short-term profit, not long-term social or environmental necessity.
Renewables are steadily becoming more competitive with traditional technologies, and this is even more the case when true environmental costs are added in. The cost of coal power is rising, and will continue to do so, as pollution controls improve. Coal can be burned more cleanly, but at a cost.
Necessary environmental controls have also been a major factor in the decline of the nuclear industry. The environmental problems were seriously underestimated in the industry's early stages, but they couldn't be ignored indefinitely.
As in the case of Loy Yang, it was privatisation that revealed the British nuclear industry's true costs. In six months, the estimated cost of nuclear power jumped from the official figure of 2.8 pence (about 6 cents) per kw/hr to 6.2 pence (about 14 cents), with the result that the government had to call off its privatisation plans for the nuclear stations. It emerged that every Briton was subsidising the nuclear power industry to the tune of around $40 per year (a total of about $2.6 billion). They pay around 25 cents each for renewables research.
Stewart Boyle thinks renewables can probably get an initial toehold in niches where the existing grids are weak. It makes far more sense, for example, to install wind or solar generators in remote communities rather than run power lines for hundreds of kilometres.
But no matter how it develops, the shift to renewables and energy efficiency is already on internationally. While the problems are long-term, the search for solutions must go on now.