The Future of Energy Depends on Who's Paying
The Future of Energy Depends on Who's Paying
As the U.S. reels from gas price spikes that echo the early 1970s OPEC crisis, the transition away from fossil fuels to renewables is getting renewed attention. What type of energy future we’ll get is pretty easy to envision technologically: Sensors, middleware, machine learning, and more advances on a modernized, decarbonized electric grid, all taking advantage of region-specific generation mixes and policies. Integrated supply and demand would let us integrate mass quantities of renewable energy into the grid (Bihn, 2022). Microgrids could increase resiliency and make shelters self-powered during disasters. This energy future would put us on a path toward energy sovereignty, and away from a focus on energy security that has us working the phones with Venezuela, Iran, and other countries to secure oil supplies whenever prices soar.
It seems like we’re poised to make it all happen. State- and regional-level plans are in place to make the change. In 2020, Oregon’s governor ordered state agencies to reduce GHG by at least 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. The latest Northwest Power Plan was just approved in February. The Federal government, meanwhile, having passed a general infrastructure bill, seems unlikely to pass major new legislation focused on the energy transition. Apparently it will be leading by example instead.
Those looking to kick the transition from fossil fuels down the road are running out of options. Net-zero plans using the favored cleantech tool of carbon offsets are coming in for increasing scrutiny, with tree-planting sequestration schemes going up in wildfire. In Ukraine, we’re seeing that buildings can be razed, so even sequestration involving concrete isn’t final.
After the latest COP failure last November, climate scientist and Climate Ad Project co-founder Peter Kalmus delivered the kicker: We have about five years left to lock in 1.5C above pre-industrial levels (Kalmus, 2021). We’re at 1.2C. Pacific Northwesterners who experienced last summer’s heat dome or the flooding that cut Vancouver off from the rest of B.C. understand the implications (Sweet, 2021). Most current plans consider target dates of 2040 and 2050.
We know that we’re going to need pretty much all the renewable energy we can get. The main question is how quickly we can make it happen. Theories of energy systems change increasingly see a role for the social sciences, and suggest that they might help overcome shortcomings of the dominant Physical Technical-Economic Model and Total Resource Cost approaches (Lutzenhiser, 2014). Indeed, a social science perspective on carbon raises important questions about energy demand and usage; how might social mores and licenses change around the ethics of air travel, for instance? A consumer mindset has focused much attention on economics and psychology in climate policy, amounting to an ABC (Attitudes, Behavior, and Choice) model which has obscured other possible approaches at a time they’re desperately needed. (Shove, 2010).
Based on evidence such as the five-year timeline to lock in 1.5C, known spending requirements, and long-term sociopolitical trends, I argue that the future of energy through the mid-century will take one of two paths: The first is basically business-as-usual + renewables, with private investment paying for much of the needed materiel and expertise needed to reach our energy goals. The second looks radically different, and involves social revolution to break political stalemate and open the state spending coffers.
Either elected officials represent the will of the people and shift into funding and policy overdrive in the pursuit of climate justice—redesigning the “box” from the inside-out—or people will change it from the outside-in by altering the business model under which those officials operate.
An orderly energy transition is something of a technocratic ideal, using stakeholder engagement, policies, governance, and technologies to deliver energy justice. That path is increasingly difficult to imagine. Decades of underinvestment has created a backlog of work needed to modernize the electric grid. We’re facing a shortfall of hundreds of billions, at a time when we need the benefits that a modernized grid could provide (Yonker, 2022). There’s (expensive) work to be done, as Jeff Wilson detailed in The Manhattan Project of 2009. Merely leading by example but waiting for someone else to pay for it won’t accomplish the goal. Neither will replicating our current one-car-per-person system with EVs; entrusting the future to early adopter-driven market models is not a straightforward recipe for climate justice. Yet current constraints don’t leave room for much else.
The problem is that elected officials in the current duopoly (Democrats and Republicans) have increasingly served the interest of large donors first, making representative, procedural, and recognition justice theoretical for 80% of Americans (Massey, 2021). If nothing changes, private investment will rule: VCs, “cleantech” stock indexes, and ESG funds will seek the most profitable technologies. Considering that IOUs have pared investment lethally, the profit motive may be at fundamental odds with the need for laserlike focus on serving the public.
The second path to our energy future is already taking shape. When popular policies like the Green New Deal are thwarted, people take matters into their own hands. Extinction Rebellion-affiliated protesters have blocked fossil-fuel carrying trains in Portland by planting a garden on the tracks. The group has announced plans to block U.K. oil refineries in April, bringing civil resistance tactics used at Standing Rock to bear.
If civil resistance alone doesn’t get elected officials to deliver on popular energy policies, peaceful organizing and ballot-box revolution might. Creating alternatives to the 150-year duopoly would change the business model under which Ds and Rs work; if parties had to compete for voters and earn votes by delivering on campaign promises, it would help restore representative democracy. And we might finally get the energy transition Al Gore talked about in the early 1990s but never delivered. On this second path, the future of energy might just be decided in 2028.
Of possible interest: Energy Systems Change
References
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