[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hey there, it's Ramsay here. This is my deep dive on sustainable energy. As I write this, it's Earth day. I can hear birds chirping outside of my window, and the sun is coming out. I think it's going to be a beautiful day. It's easy to be optimistic on a day like this. Other days, maybe not so much. On other days, I might think about just how many big holes that people have dug in the earth through the forests atop the mountains to extract the fossil fuels and rare earth metals that we use to power and supply humanity's desire for more. More whoops. I guess now I'm thinking about that. I'd rather think about the sun and the wind. I like fresh air. Call me crazy, but I prefer oxygen to carbon dioxide or socks and nox or methane. I know that plants really love the carbon dioxide and they produce all the oxygen. So I'm a big fan of plants. Personally, I prefer great big giant trees and wood in general. I really like wood. We've got lots of wooden furniture, and I love building stuff out of wood. Know what I'm not a huge fan of? Plastic. Man. There is so much plastic in the world now, like everywhere. Alright, where am I going with this? In the natural world, everything is in balance. Everything moves in flows and cycles and circles. People today, are we thinking and living in balanced cycles or in the pursuit of energy and materials? Are we stuck in the linear view of extraction, use and disposal with oil and cold and natural gas, we dig it out of the ground, burn it, or turn it into plastic or chemicals, use it once and spew it back out. Waste it, dump it into the sky, or the wastewater, or the ground, or the ocean. Nature can hardly keep up with us and process or break down or cycle humanity's waste. I suggest we need to think differently about energy and material use. We need to think in flows and cycles and circles instead of in straight lines. Alright, let's get more specific. Let's start with transportation. Transportation has been based on oil for more than 100 years. American oil usage trended upwards steadily until 1976, crashed down about 25%, and then steadily climbed back upwards again. These days in America, we use about 20 million barrels of oil per day. That equates to about a gallon and a half of gasoline per person per day. If I did my math right, oil use has been smoothing out over the past ten years or so. Are we going to run out of oil on planet Earth? I mean, maybe, yeah, sort of. But probably not. There was this whole idea of peak oil and how oil production would need to peak and then drop off eventually. If you look at traditional oil production, that did actually happen around 2005 or 2006. But the production of fossil transportation fuels continued due to the use of unconventional sources like shale oil and tar sands, and unconventional techniques like drilling sideways. So humanity dodged the peak oil bullet, but were kind of working on borrowed time though. Because unconventional sources of fossil fuel are more expensive and more environmentally impactful and use more energy during the extraction and refining process, its ultimately going to be a losing game. What about electric cars? Are they the answer to reducing fossil fuel use? Since they dont use petroleum, they get their electricity off of the grid, that electrical energy is stored on board the car and the batteries and used up while you drive around. If the goal of driving electric cars is reducing fossil fuel usage, then the electricity they use would need to have been produced by renewable sources. Okay, so how much electricity do we generate and use in the US and where does it come from? Electricity production capacity is measured in watts, as is the amount of electricity it takes to power something. Remember those 100 watt light bulbs? Those suckers produced enough heat to bake a little cake in my easy bake oven when I was a kid. Right? So scale that way up. On the electricity grid in the US, we've got about 1100 gigawatts of production capacity. That's about 33 easy bake ovens per person. Again, math seems about right in terms of how all that energy is produced. Currently, about 43% is natural gas, 17% is coal, 29% is renewables like wind and solar, and 8% is nuclear, with the remainder being other sources. In other words, about two thirds of our energy generating capacity is based on non renewable fossil fuel energy. So this is where we bring in renewable energy sources. The two biggest ones are wind power and solar energy from photovoltaic or pv systems. The two technologies are actually quite well suited and complementary. Kind of go together like chocolate and peanut butter, because they are both weather dependent. But they depend on opposite kinds of weather. Wind turbines like nasty, stormy, windy weather, and pv systems like beautiful, clear sunshine. Both technologies have matured enormously in the past couple decades, with size and production capacities going way up, while cost per watt has gone way down. Again with the opposites. Solar pv systems need hardly any maintenance and have no moving parts, while wind turbines are enormous machines that require regular work and maintenance to keep them running efficiently. While they both are extremely effective at generating energy without emissions, there are still some drawbacks to the wind and solar combo. Wind turbines are now literally the size of skyscrapers they take up a large footprint on land, or they take up a large space in the ocean if they are offshore. Land space and ocean space have competitive uses and values. Plus, most people seem to think that wind turbines look cool, maybe when you're driving by one time, but don't exactly want to have them in their backyard or in their ocean view. Solar photovoltaic systems use a lot of square footage. Larger utility scale PV Solar farms are the most cost effective, especially in places with a lot of sun and high utility rates, but not everywhere. Smaller pv systems, like on commercial or industrial rooftops or on homes, have also sprung up across the nation. Lately, however, that industry has lost some momentum due to higher interest rates because the vast majority of private pv systems are financed and the payback economics are based on the energy savings being larger than the loan payments. Residential solar has gotten some seriously bad press recently, in part because the numbers don't pencil so well with these high interest rates. Of course, the biggest downside to renewable energy generation is the most obvious. The wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine. And we still need energy. There's going to be a gap there. Either the gap gets filled by burning fossil fuels, or we need to store massive amounts of energy using grid scale battery energy storage systems. Battery technology has certainly been getting better, and we do now have some significant energy storage on the grid. Remember we said that we have about 1100 gigawatts of production in the US? Well, we also have about 16 gigawatts of currently installed storage capacity, which is set to about double to 30 gigawatts by the end of 2024. So that storage capacity will be something like 3% of the total current production capacity. No, that is not nearly enough. Better keep working on that. Weve got batteries in all of these electric cars. Cant we just use them as little mobile battery packs for the grid? There are people working on that for sure, but batteries are optimized either for the demands of fast charge and discharge like you see on cars, or smooth and steady charge and discharge like you see in buildings. So that's not really a slam dunk. And batteries? They are currently made with rare earth metals like lithium, cobalt, manganese, and nickel. These are difficult to find, expensive and environmentally damaging to mine out of the ground. It's difficult to even imagine the amount of rare earth metals that would be required to manufacture enough batteries to power all of the vehicles now on the road, which have internal combustion engines. There just isn't that much of these metals available and we certainly cannot dispose of them. The battery packs on electric cars may last six or eight or ten years before they need to be replaced. Current replacement costs are eight or ten or $12,000, maybe more. Will those prices go up or down? We need to effectively recycle the rare earth metals in automotive battery packs. Or we can forget about electric cars being a viable long term transportation solution. Battery recycling is coming along. Currently, the largest recycler of lithium ion batteries in the US is a company called Redwood Materials. The company recycled enough lithium ion batteries in 2023 to produce roughly 44,000 tons of material to create batteries for about 100,000 cars. For comparison, around 1.2 million electric cars were sold in 2023 in the US. So redwood is a good start. But we're going to need to ramp up battery recycling fast, keep up with demand. I think recycling is great. I've been recycling my whole life. Paper, plastic, aluminum, steel, cardboard, glass. We've got well functioning, mature recycling material markets for these common materials. Back in the eighties and nineties, we were pushing recycling hard because we were worried about running out of landfill space. Ah, such simpler times. And let's talk about plastics for a minute. Even though many types of plastic are recyclable, there is much plastic that gets thrown away and gets away and hits a river and ends up in the ocean. Sure, many plastic bottles fill with water and sink to the bottom. But a lot of that plastic is buoyant and floats and gradually breaks down, literally for years and decades. Other sources of ocean plastic are fishing gear and now disposable face masks. Ocean currents take that plastic and concentrate it in specific areas. Have you heard of the great Pacific garbage patch? It's a zone of water in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and California. It's around the size of Texas. There's around 100 million plastic floating in the great Pacific garbage patch. It's like a thick stew of plastic pieces and microplastics. Wildlife there ingests these microplastics, which does them no good. And microplastics that fish eat can bioaccumulate, so that when people eat that fish, they ingest that microplastic next. Yuck. Fortunately, the idea of recycling has gotten all grown up. We're no longer just talking about shredding and repulping paper to make paperboard. Now we're talking about melting plastic bottles down to make fibers in clothing, mixing ash from smelters into concrete, and making adorable leather like purses out of old, uneaten mangoes. Now we can have a whole circular economy. In a circular economy, recycling is not an afterthought. Instead, products and services are designed to maximize the service length of assets manufactured with recycled content and built to allow for disassembly or deconstruction down to their component parts so that they can more easily be recycled or remanufactured. Again, this way of thinking and design approach is called circularity, which I think is a pretty cool sounding word. I think the phrase circular thinking was already taken. Or maybe that's circular reasoning doesn't matter. Circularity sounds way cooler. And yes, there is a conference called circularity. I haven't been yet, but maybe I'll get to go sometime in the circular economy, companies and planners can conduct industrial symbiosis. Again, awesome sounding phrase, right? Industrial symbiosis is when manufacturers team up and one company uses another company's waste stream as raw materials or to provide energy for their own processes. There are whole eco industrial parks where facilities are located near to each other and are connected by pipes or lines or roads so that materials or energy or heat can travel from one building to another. Industrial symbiosis works best when facilitators like government agencies or non profits actively play matchmaker and connect companies. So where does all that lead us in terms of sustainable energy and materials usage? Well, I think that this earth day and every day we should be thankful and appreciative for the sunshine and go out and plant a tree or tend the garden. Everything on earth uses energy and materials, especially people. Humanity has certainly been having a field day and a fire sale on fossil fuel for the last century or two, but we finally woken up and developed sustainable renewable energy sources and circular raw material flows. Are we there yet? Nope. There's a ton of work left to develop energy storage technologies and recycle the rare earth metals we need for them, but we're making progress. Curves are flattening and people are coming around. And for today, that is enough.
[00:12:57] Speaker B: Thank you for asking. What's worthwhile? Visit whatsworthwhile.net to learn more about me, Ramsey Zimmerman, and please provide your name and email to become a supporter. I'm asking for prayer, advice, feedback, and connections. The what's Worthwhile podcast is on Spotify, Apple, iHeart, and Amazon. You can also
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