Energy, Power, Productivity, Scale: The Continuing Quest for More Bang for the Buck

“It wouldn’t have dented a grape,” the sportswriter Jimmy Cannon wrote of Muhammad Ali’s anchor punch that dispatched Sonny Liston in the first round of Maine’s most famous sports event just a few miles up the road in Lewiston. That was nearly fifty years ago.

Today, the earth continues to spin nearly 1000 mph on its axis as it moves around the sun at nearly 70,000 mph, while the sun itself is pulling its system through the galaxy at 52,000 mph. Our Milky Way is moving through space at 515,000 mph. The second most amazing thing I know is that all of space and everything in it, today stretched to a diameter that would take light moving at 186, 000 mps 13.8 billion earth years to traverse, was, 13.8 billion years ago, trillions of times smaller than a grain of sand. Holy density.

Our species emerged around 175,000 years ago—and most of us are built out of seven billion billion billion atoms—that’s 7 followed by 27 zeros, two-thirds of which are hydrogen, 24% oxygen, a bit less than 10%, carbon. And the stuff from which atoms are built is many magnitudes smaller still. The range between the largest large and the smallest small is nearly incomprehensible.

Who knew? I present these details because, in a society so heavily dependent upon arcane knowledge, we take for granted the wonders around us and too often, for the sake of happy talk and a kumbaya sense of getting along, pretend to know what we don’t in ways that contribute to the coarsening of our cultural discourse and imperil our wellbeing.

Energy: The Master Resource

Take the case of energy. How often have you heard people say we need more energy? Or conversely, we need to use less energy. Or that we must achieve energy security. Or that we support renewable energy. The underlying assumption is that they know what energy means and more importantly how it relates to their quality of life.

What does energy mean? And how does it correspond to the notion of power, which also has its share of admirers who banter such terms as “windpower” around as if they understood it—and as if it were true.

The basic nature of energy is still not well understood. Aristotle used the term ergon millennia ago to describe basic activity. Today, physicists use the word to describe the capacity for movement or exertion between one state and another. We know energy exists in both potential and kinetic guises. We also know it can change into many forms while varying from the highly diffuse in the vacuum of empty space to incredibly dense neutron stars, their crusts ten billion times stronger than steel. Energy is intimately related to heat, which in turn is best understood as energy in motion; its behavior is described by the laws of thermo dynamics, beginning with the famous Three Laws, the last of which states that our universe can never achieve absolute zero; quantum jitters assures there will always be movement—and therefore heat energy—somewhere at all times.

The First Law of thermodynamics decrees that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, that it is omnipresent, never absent in even the smallest nook of space. In short, energy is the secular equivalent of the Biblical “I AM.” When Albert Einstein unleashed his intellectual thunderbolt, E=MC2, he made clear that everything was ultimately energy—a hangnail, a thought, an atomic nucleus, a black hole. All matter is just a form of energy in time.

Whatever energy intrinsically turns out to be, however, will complement our operational definition of it: energy is “fuel” enabling work to be accomplished. Although we can never add to nor subtract from the total amount of energy in the universe, we can account for it and make use of its ebb and flow through the Second Law of thermodynamics, which states that in any energy transaction, disorder increases over time, reducing the amount of available fuel. The Second Law ensures that whatever fuel we use will eventually run its course—and we’ll be running on empty because it has been transformed into another type of energy.

Wind energy is a form of solar energy, an artifact of a phenomenon known as convection, where heat, like time, moves in only one direction—from hot to cold, seeking to achieve a uniform temperature. The gusty nature of wind is the result of air warmed by the sun chasing cooler air around and around, up and down, swirling randomly throughout the atmosphere and over the surface of our seas. Like solar energy, there’s a lot of it. But it’s so spread out that it’s difficult to corral.

Solar energy is transferred into wind energy via the convection force, and wind energy is transferred into mechanical energy by huge turbines that then transform the mechanical energy into electricity; at each transfer point, there is a loss of useful fuel. Hurricanes, tornados, and of course Maine’s nor’easters, are phenomena that do concentrate wind energy and make it very potent for a relatively brief time—but in ways that would disable any machine seeking to convert that energy to power. In general, the convection forces of wind puff around aimlessly, skittering up and down minute by minute.

All physical systems are essentially machines that convert the energy in fuels to power, the rate at which work gets done. Machines are the bridge between energy and power. Power is, like interest, work done at a pace in time. All organic systems, from aardvarks to zinnias, from eyeballs to heart valves, must do work—eat, move, hide—to survive and perpetuate. Machines are a means of processing energy to produce power, enabling work over time. Indeed, all organisms, including ourselves, are at root machines that convert energy to power, starting from single celled creatures, with mitochondria making ATP from chemicals in their environment, to entities that have evolved, and continue to evolve, into ever more highly complex integrated and convergent machines. Their basic function is to consume just enough energy (fuel) to maintain their power requirements. Nature is continuously at work keeping this process efficient.

Those organisms that produce more work faster, in the process increasing their power, typically gain a survival advantage. Productivity is doing or making more things in the same or less time. A man and woman paired together could do more work than could be accomplished by one man working alone. A man, a woman, and a club could do even more. A man, a woman, a club, and a spear could do even more. With the passage of a few million years, humans could, with the machines they made, reliably feed and shelter hundreds of thousands of their kind, and still find time to build the great pyramids. As Stanley Kubrick showed so masterfully in his film, 2001, our spears have morphed into rockets on the moon. Our machines, animated with increasingly energy-dense fuels, have given us the ability to do more work faster and faster, begetting an appetitive feedback loop where more power unleashes more time to produce more power.

Why is this important?

Imagine life only nine generations ago with the cutting edge machines of 1814. For many, the most effective machine for transportation was still two legs walking, fueled by chemicals in the air and water, supplemented by more chemicals in meat and grain. They could, with a lot of exertion, cover 30 miles in a day. A few could afford to keep horses, teams of which could pull a coach maybe 60 miles in a day, requiring a lot of oats. Some could get on a boat fitted with sails and harness the hit or miss, tail-wagging-the-dog power of a machine fueled by highly attenuated wind energy, in the process moving across water with some protection from the elements while saving a lot of exertion over and above what was required to swim. Surely an improvement. Nonetheless, because of limitations imposed by energy-thin fuels and comparatively cumbersome machines, most people in 1814 lived close to where they worked. Those that ventured much beyond expended a great deal of their lives in such an effort, limiting the amount of time they had to do something else.

Contrast that situation with the modern world. An accountant may commute twice daily more than a hundred miles from her home in climate controlled comfort in a machine—built out of hundreds of other complementary, highly congruent and convergent machine systems (transmission, steering, braking, internal combustion, lighting, etc.) and fueled by energy dense gasoline, pound for pound vastly denser than wind, solar or even hydro energies—and still have time for a game of racquetball, a late dinner, emailing, showering, and reading several chapters before tucking in to sleep. This is modern power: the ability to predictably and in a controlled fashion shorten the distance in time necessary to perform work.

Such power allows people to move from pillar to post on their own schedules. They are no longer dependent upon lumbering, often unreliable machines using energy-thin fuels that typically make people wait upon them. This ability to command power, turning it on and off, up and back, is the hallmark of modern life, a precondition for coordinated economic and social convergence, much of it now instantaneous. Machines that are unreliable and uncontrollable, either because of their design or because of the nature of their fuel, typically adorn our recreational pursuits, our museums, or, increasingly, our junk piles. They are considered archaic, and have little or no commercial value.

Modern power is a time machine, not for moving back and forward in time, but rather expanding the time in which we can do other things. As the scale of power production gets larger, costs become less expensive, making the power more generally available. Modern power has lifted billions of people out of the grind of poverty, improving both quantity and quality of life. This is why productivity is related to scale, the concept of getting more bang for the buck while making what is produced more affordable. Making a lot of any one thing makes it less costly. This is the marvelous point made centuries ago by Scotland’s Adam Smith, who explained how The Wealth of Nations resides not in the king’s treasury but rather in the coat worn by the poorest beggar.

Nowhere is modern power performance more evident than in today’s home, where a battery of affordable machines, each with complementary functions, makes not only for convenience but also opens up much more time to do other things. Refrigerators work as desired 24/7; ovens and ranges work when asked for 20 years. As do vacuum cleaners, water heaters, furnaces, air conditioners, and a variety of other machines, fueled mainly by electricity. By contrast, what would you pay for a wind-powered chain saw or food blender on the free market?

Here’s a question: What was the best ever commercial application of wind technology? Clipper Ships. By the 1840s, they could get from New York to London in less three weeks, perhaps, maybe—so streamlined for speed, however, that they could only haul light cargo like spices, rum, tea, opium from China, maxing out at around 800 tons. Their very name came from the way they could “clip” days off the former travel times of conventional sailing ships, often reaching their destination in less than half the time. Compare this with today’s ocean freighters that can traverse the Atlantic in days hauling millions of tons of cargo. Steam power is the reason the Dutch, centuries ago, understandably moved beyond windmills to grind their grain, make their beer, and pump water to reclaim land from the sea. In the scheme of things today, wind power can’t dent a kumquat….

Also in the scheme of things, there’s no such thing as renewable energy. Even such massively concentrated energy sources like the sun will one day, around five billion years from now, burn out, its energy transformed into hot gasses that will seek temperature equilibrium with the cold of space. Even black holes will evaporate. The only faux renewable that’s functionally scalable is hydro, which has about the same energy density as wind and solar and today provides about six percent of the nation’s electricity. However, because of the large swath of sensitive ecosystem degradation involved and the dearth of new sites available for construction of the huge reservoirs necessary to impound a lake, there will be few if any new hydro dams built in the USA. To enable virtually any of today’s renewables, massive arrays of machinery are necessary to collect meaningful concentrations of energy. Wood, coal, natural gas, and various blends of petroleum have exponentially greater energy densities, volume for volume, than the renewables du jour. By contrast, nuclear energy has about two millions times more energy than the highest grade gasoline— another spinoff from E=MC2.

Humankind’s ability to invent sophisticated machines to exploit discoveries of increasingly higher energy densities is a central theme of history, for each discovery produced a chain reaction cascade of greater power densities, each generation of which lead to even greater energy/power densities.

For the last 150 years, we have briskly moved beyond wood and wind, fire and horses to harness the energy within the electro-magnetic force that, among other things, generates electricity and lasers. This development continues and will become crucially important as science hones in on advancing the potential of nanotechnologies and the capacity for quantum computing, making our digital world seem quaint.

But to obtain energy densities that will empower planetary and interplanetary work, which is what the future will demand, we must harness the energy of the greatest force we know, the strong nuclear force, the one that binds together the nucleus of atoms and sustains starshine like our sun’s for ten billion years.

Widespread misunderstanding about the difference between energy and power has given cover to charlatans like wind salesman who pretend their wares provide something they don’t. We’re all familiar with the Orwellian blackwhite PR jargon that characterizes wind projects as mills, farms, and parks, despite the looming industrial presence of 450-foot tall turbines propelling rotors at tip speeds of nearly 200-mph. But for sheer oxymoronic audacity, nothing beats the trickeration of the term windpower, since the technology is the very antithesis of modern power performance. In fact, wind provides only antediluvian power, the kind that predated Noah. No amount of research will result in wind machines that can generate modern power; their fuel will always be too diffuse, not sufficiently concentrated. For it’s only concentrated—dense —energy that machines can convert into modern power, which is why coal, natural gas, and nuclear fuels have dominated electricity production for much of the last fifty years. There is no fossil-fuel conspiracy at work.

Electricity is a form of energy converted into modern power by an ensemble of complementary machines that dispatch or retract precise amounts of supply to match demand perfectly at all times, maintaining a steady, predictable level of production throughout their operating time except when they are called upon to cycle up or back in response to demand changes. Like household appliances or instruments in a symphonic orchestra, each kind of generator has a role to play, some working around the clock, others only upon command. There is much behind-the-scenes tumult involved as many types of conventional generators—coal, nuclear, natural gas, hydro—converge at just the right time so that people and industries can be served without fuss or bother at the flip of a switch. By building systems of supply and transmission at large scale, contemporary society keeps costs affordable, allowing even the most economically impoverished to make use of their time-saving appliances.

Although all machines convert energy to power, they don’t do so equally. Not all machines convert energy to modern power, which is controllable, predictable, schedulable, creating what engineers call firm capacity. Electricity production is modern power at its best—highly reliable, secure, affordable. Not just power production but rather the quality of the power production, taking into account the frequency, voltage, and harmonics that must be congruent to achieve the convergence essential for proactive modern power performance. Stimulating electrons within the atoms that make up the transmission cable to dance at a specified rhythm, or frequency, in our case, 60 cycles per second, is daunting work. An electricity grid is a precision machine, vastly more complicated than a Maserati, spread out over thousands of miles, integrating and coordinating thousands of smaller machine components on a less than second-by-second basis—all so that we can have electricity any time and place we desire.

Wind machines, even massively tall and wide contemporary turbines, are wholly inimical to modern power quality. They are rarely reliable, by nature randomly intermittent, and, since their power is a function of the cube of the wind speed along a very narrow speed range, their output is always variable. No one can know what they will yield at any future time. They almost never produce their full capacity. In fact, they average over the course of a year about 25% of their full capacity. More than 60% of the time, they produce less than that. About 10-15% of the time, they produce nothing, often at peak demand times. They typically generate most at times of least demand. Whatever they do produce is changing one minute to the next—in the process destabilizing—from the supply side of all things– the necessary match between supply and demand, for blackouts occur when there is too little supply while appliances and transmission systems can be damaged if the supply is excessive. Unlike machines that produce modern power, wind is neither dispatchable nor controllable, except when shut down completely. They provide only spasmodic energy, not firm capacity.

To see the difference between archaic and modern power more clearly, imagine that gasoline pumps were wind “powered.” Your tank might eventually be filled, but when? How long would it take? How long would the line of cars waiting their turn at the pump be? Would time seem to drag for those drivers, reducing time to do other things? Now imagine government had mandated that gliders, powered only by fuel from the wind, handle, say, 20% of all air passenger transport. How long would a glider’s flight from New York to Los Angeles likely take? And at what cost, since any glider would first have to be towed with conventionally powered aircraft to get into the air, and then picked up where it eventually fluttered to the ground because of insufficient fuel, and then trucked to an air field where it could be towed back into the air, etc., etc.—until it reached its destination. THIS IS NO EXAGGERATION. With electricity, the diffuse nature of wind’s fuel requires continuous supplementation by reliable machines powered by more energy-dense fuels, as well as virtually dedicated new transmission lines and voltage regulation systems. This is the kind and scope of activity that must happen to make wind create modern power.

Don’t miss this crucial point: Wind generation cannot be allowed to stand alone. Because of it’s volatility, over 75% of any windplant’s rated capacity must be supplied by fossil fired generators in most areas of the world, each operating more inefficiently to compensate for wind’s constant volatility. Think of a pulsating yin yang symbol—25% white for wind; 75% black for, say, natural gas—where white could not exist without the black. Beyond this, what’s going to provide power when wind output is virtually zero? No wonder there’s not even a correlation between wind output and reductions in fossil fired generation—let alone a causal connection. There is not a shred of evidence in the real world that wind is responsible for reducing the use of coal or gas plants or of saving the CO2 emitted by them thought to be causing thermal Armageddon. Wind volatility appears not so much to reduce the output of fossil fueled plants as to redirect their use to insure system reliability.

Because wind flux increases grid flux by adding to the volatility of demand, it imposes increased inefficiencies on conventional generators, in the process increasing their heat rates. Consequently, there is greater need for more conventional capacity. The higher the wind production, the greater the inefficiencies for generators fueled by natural gas or even coal, causing them to use nearly as much or more fuel than if there were no wind at all. Which is why so many energy corporations—GE, BP, Chevron, Siemens, AES, Shell, Exxon Mobile, virtually all of them—are so heavily invested in wind, knowing that wind can only maintain, even increase, their conventional fuel market share, including those for coal and natural gas. The technology has not caused the closing of a single coal plant—and it never will. It can neither be an alternative nor functionally additive source of energy, let alone a source of modern power.

Since random wind-cube skitter and grid precision are so mismatched, why would anyone insist upon using wind technology? After all, the lynchpin of our modernity is electricity. Making electricity less reliable while pricing it higher and restricting its use in time and place jeopardizes our way of life needlessly, for we’ve long known how to make electricity secure, abundant, reliable, affordable, and healthful. Why mess with electricity?

For me, the answer lies in the way our “dollar is king” plutocracy encourages, even rewards, exploitative moneymaking. The push for renewables led by wind and solar is the legitimate heir to Ken Lay’s Enron, for it was Lay’s very creative insight, no doubt inspired by President Jimmy Carter’s sweater campaign, to target electricity, so essential to our wellbeing, and manipulate its supply to give the impression that supply was limited, knowing that scarce resources can be priced much higher and that all of us, in our consumption of it, are captives to its market–as rate and tax payers and, of course, citizens. Electricity, with its billions of ratepayer dollars that were at one time protected through regulation, is just one of the revenue troves that corporate buccaneers have raided for fun and profit over the last thirty years. Consider what they’ve done with savings and loan accounts, home mortgages, personal and union retirement accounts, and now health care and pharmaceuticals. Getting access to heretofore inaccessible revenues to increase return on investment is now a major financial industry. And, because so many of us are now mutual fund investors, we become complicit in this campaign.

Enron, which at the time of its demise owned the nation’s largest stash of wind machines, took this a step further by placing bets on whether there would be sufficient electricity supply available at certain key times while working to manipulate that supply to the point of making it unavailable. Recall the California blackouts that ensued.

The zeal by which “reformers” are using government to limit the production of machines that provide cheap, reliable, secure, electricity—coal, natural gas, nuclear, while concurrently hawking machines, particularly wind, that existentially make electricity less secure, much less reliable, and substantially more expensive, should be instructive. It’s happening right before our eyes. Even if one believes that “we must do something to mitigate the evils of fossil fuels” (accompanied by handwringing and with certain knowledge the world as we know it is coming to an end), deploying something as silly as wind to help achieve this end can only make the situation worse.

Wind is always at work subverting a grid’s prime directive: keeping supply continuously matched with demand. Simply because wind is now associated with such an arcane business as electricity should not be a reason to obscure the way its ancient power will inhibit production and inject dysfunction by requiring that everyone and everything around it work harder just to stand still. Think about those gliders in the transportation sector….

The reality is that all the wind machines extant and proposed for the mountains and waters of Maine can only be for electricity dysfunction. All the “sacrifice” of what people should hold most dear about where and why they live is merely for the purpose of income production through tax sheltering for a few Big Energy companies in search of an increased bottom line. A corporation like GE, which bought out Enron’s wind supply, can make a 30% return on investment in less than five years by partnering with a wind LLC, mainly by dodging its tax obligations, all made legal by the crony capitalism that infuses today’s politics.

Support for wind technology rests upon a set of faith-based beliefs. But those beliefs don’t reside in a long tradition of ritualized dogma. Rather, they harken to the nouveau patter of happy talk and are chatted up by a coterie of people who pretend to know what they don’t, either through sheer ignorance or ideological blinders or, of course, self-serving bluster.

What Should Informed Wind Opposition Do?

Truth telling about wind is difficult in large part because contemporary journalism seems to view conflicting representations about wind as a he-said-she-said stalemate that is, in principle, impossible to resolve. This is nonsense. That many news organizations restrict access to opposition voices and, in many regions of the country, those with vested interests in the technology control local news outlets—as is the case in Maine—is cause for grave concern.

So what to do in spite of this roadblock? Proclaim support for reliable, secure, affordable, firm electricity capacity. Decry anything that subverts this goal. This includes wind technology.

What else should people do?

What reasonable people should have been doing from the get-go (at least 15 years ago), asking in an incredulous gasp: “Windpower…?

WINDPOWER?! WINDPOWER??!! Why would anyone think that something as ineffectual as wind energy could do anything but make our electricity situation much worse? Instead, what we got was a fawning acceptance of a truly goofy idea put forward by the dim, dumb, and craven, an acceptance nurtured principally because so many people didn’t want to hurt their feelings and throw poo in happy hour. Why not pull a J. M. Barrie and ask engineers, economists, politicians, and regulators to clap for wind in order to rescue the technology from its mortal struggle against unbelief? In this, no one should arm wave and rant; the delivery should be calm and steady (even folksy) and made with a face as straight as Jon Stewart’s, in the best tradition of Twain and H.L. Mencken. Mencken’s quote nearly a century ago is instructive: “The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.”

Express contempt for anyone pushing wind. For all the reasons I’ve mentioned this morning, and more, wind is the dumbest idea imaginable for producing modern power, if only because it can’t. And you should say so. Aside from promoting expensive, dysfunctional electricity, wind enterprise harms virtually everything of value in a rural environment. People who push wind don’t merit respect. Their incivility is despicable. They deserve to be labeled as sWINDlers. When they say, wind “farm,” we should mention coal parks and nuclear farms. When they say wind “power,” we should say “pixie dust.” When they claim environmental benefit, we should retort, “environmental dystopia.” All this should be proactive, not reactive. Under no circumstances should anyone condone giving wind representatives a respectable place at any table.

Boycott businesses and organizations that profit from or endorse wind—and do so in a publically coordinated campaign complete with press releases/conferences and fact sheets.

Picket key so-called environmental organizations, and do so in a publicly coordinated campaign. Demand to meet with their leaders (don’t stop picketing until you do get such a meeting) and insist that they provide real world proof, not ginned up “projections” that wind is reducing fossil fuel use and saving CO2 emissions. This doesn’t take a lot of people.

Exhort Governor Paul LePage to appoint commissioners to the state’s Public Utility board who will take public service seriously—and insist the state provide electricity from capacity sources, not from junk energy.

Finally, get on the same page. I cringe when I hear people say they support renewable energy and wind—in someone else’s back yard. Knowledgeable wind opposition focuses upon wind’s electricity dysfunction, recognizing that all other issues, although real and important, are secondary. Increased electricity costs, unhealthful noise, lowered property values, wildlife mortality, loss of natural heritage views, community incivility—these are generally local and their impacts are not perceived or felt outside the locality. But everyone has a stake in thwarting bunko schemes of such enormity, since electricity is the very foundation of our way of life. Above all, we should demand that reliable electricity be abundant for all—for it’s the tide that raises all boats. Electricity may not assure happiness. But it’s the starting point for realizing potential.

In 1918, Mencken noted that “Civilization… grows more and more maudlin and hysterical… tend(ing) to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes. The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed … [and… clamor(ing) to be led to safety…by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” He could have been describing network news. We suffer hooligans like wind promoters as they dangle their hobgoblins to justify fraud at great expense to our wallets, our intellectual prospect, our natural heritage, and our personal and cultural legacies.