Murray Grimwood assesses future energy options for New Zealand off the back of the Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment's energy transition consultation

Murray Grimwood*

The Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment (MBIE) is running a series of webinars, consulting on future energy options. It takes energy to build infrastructure, energy which will not come again, making it crucial that we get our next moves right. Unfortunately, most of the spectrum of submitters (and the host itself) belong to a culture steeped in a still-taught falsehood, thus threatening to render the exercise obsolete.

Salient points

 Most folk – MBIE included – use the Samuelson/Econ101 circular graphic of an ‘economy’. It is steeped into everything; politics, other academia, business. It is fatally flawed because there is no accounting for essential inputs (energy being one) or outputs. Put differently; it measures flows (albeit somewhat remotely) but not stocks. Much of the Green New Deal (GND) is flawed for the same reason. It is planetary stocks – of finite resources, of renewable and sink capacities, but crucially of the half-gone one-off bonanza of fossil energy – which are our predicament.

 Confusing matters more, words are used which convey incorrect meanings; oil is not ‘produced’, it is extracted. Electricity is not ‘generated’; kinetic energy is transformed into electrical energy (and we don’t ‘consume’ it, either; we dissipate it).

 The graphic to use – the one which does not lie – is the Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen one (below). The two in-arrows and the two out-arrows are the ALL of it, in terms of energy and the economic system. That simple diagram covers everything, Climate included. The one on the right – a version of which every economics-intake is taught…… does not.

 Flows and entropy. The flows are always from left to right, across that first diagram, every stage is dissipative, every stage one move towards entropy.

 Relativity. In that diagram, fossil energy is a one-off stock of historic sunlight being injected into the energy flow between the circle and the square. Fossil energy is orders of magnitude more potent that any alternative, but the remaining fossil energy is reducing exponentially both in potency and in volume. The potency ratio is generally reckoned as the energy in a barrel of oil being equal to 4.5 years of human labour; labour is therefore ‘noise’ statistically.

 Productivity. The above ratio – unaccounted in economics unless by default – means it is energy efficiencies, not human labour, which have increasingly driven productivity-gains for 200 years (it’s not the digger driver, it’s the digger, and that comes back to the diggers’ energy efficiency).

Energy efficiencies run into hard Thermodynamic limits after having run a course of diminishing returns, usually via an increase in technological complexity (the latter usually associated with diminished resilience).

 Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) is an important concept, an unavoidable constraint, and should appear in MBIE’s final report. All life- forms and all machines are energy-dissipative; they require more energy in than they expend (in muscles, pistons or thrust); the loss is always low- grade heat (ejected via sweat, radiators, exhausts, cooling-fans), of too low a grade to be re-usable. We are traversing ever-lower EROEI energy options, needing more energy to obtain energy, with implications for total work-doable in the future.

 It needs to be remembered that food is energy (energy cannot be created; the question needing asked of all lab-food is: where does the energy come from?) and currently we require several calories of fossil energy to produce one calorie of food. Where will the replacement energy come from?

Which sunlit acre (that is not already being used)?

 Surplus energy (energy over and above food-production) allowed specialisation. It is reasonable to presume that a reduction of surplus energy will curtail specialist activities, with knock-on societal implications.

Most folk make personal decisions at a remove - or many removes - from the energy-flow, yet their activity is almost certainly dependent on some level of surplus energy. This remoteness can make long-term appraisal difficult.

Where to from here?

We have an existing collection of physical infrastructure – roading, pipework, wiring, buildings, vehicles, tools – all reliant upon and built by/of fossil fuels (as energy and as feedstock). We passed peak energy-per-head (globally) in 1980, and seem to have passed peak energy all-in, yet the collection of existing infrastructure has never been bigger; never more cumulatively demanding of maintenance energy, and as time goes on, will demand ever-more. Atop that, we are attempting to replace much of it like-for-like (as in the GND promoting EVs).

The energy and resources for the change must come from somewhere, and there are two obvious curtailments; (1) we are already extracting energy and materials full-noise, using all we’ve got – meaning we will have to increasingly triage both.

(2) Our construct is already overshot, so we need to reduce anyway.

Accounting properly

Our accounting system (through whose lens we don’t see the above) is not designed to accommodate a permanent reduction of energy (and resource availability). Put differently, a growth-requiring system (profits, interest, return) cannot survive permanent energy reduction (permanent degrowth); who pays, how, by doing what, and who gets to buy the output of the ever-reducing production?

Submissions to MBIE suggesting ‘jobs’, therefore, might be correct in that folk will be busy, but not in the sense that they will represent buying-power, even at existing levels. This point is not on anyone’s radar – officially, at least - but an assessment of our energy future which fails to address the needed alterations/replacement of our valuation-mechanism, will be invalid by definition; nothing is produced (and therefore no money is underwritten) without the use of energy.

The yardstick

We will end up (whether we go there voluntarily or involuntarily) at a sustainable rate of resource consumption and running on renewable energy. Building - or even maintaining - anything which does not fit those parameters, is a waste of the remaining energy (and resources and time). That is a high bar; bitumen is out; hydro dams run their lifetime course, unfixable electronics gets junked, the current-form internet is moot (that ‘cloud’ is just server-farms, a significant percentage powered by coal). Yes, the knock-on societal-implication questions are hard; yes, they need to be asked.

Questions

Now we ask the energy-specific questions; is Onslow worth the effort (forget the myopic environmental implications, we all impact by being alive and there are always best-of-the-bad options)? Back one stage, can we actually maintain the Grid sans fossil energy (we won’t be making PV panels using PV energy, ever; with that in mind, how are we going to maintain substations; pylons; undersea cables?).

Before we advocate public transport, ask: Over what surface? To where? For what purpose? (Most folk think in terms of getting into a ‘city’ for ‘work’; firstly what they do mostly isn’t work in the physics sense; secondly, in a power-down world, what activities will be in demand?). Before fossil fuels there were no cities of over 1 million, so the GND types advocating urban crowding are almost certainly on the wrong track. We are likely to see an exodus from cities, and a massive increase in people per food-producing acre (living closer to the original – sun/photosynthesis - energy source); a logical reversal of the fossil-energised shift from rural to urban. That suggests a more-dispersed electricity – and overall energy - demand in the future. How do we accommodate that?

There will be a period – perhaps a century – where existing processed material (steel, copper, aluminium) can be adapted/used. Old-school mechanical windmills and micro-hydro (both physical and electric) are energy-collation systems we can reuse existing materials to create locally; what other options should be investigated?

Solar

Ultimately, all renewables are solar-originated. The rule of thumb is that the closer to source (to the left in the first diagram), the better the energy quality; the less it has been dissipated. Direct solar – food-production (the vegetarians have a point; plants are closer to the energy source than animals), passive-solar housing, direct water-heating, reflector/boiler systems – should therefore be priorities. A passive-solar house requires less eternally-supplied energy for the whole of its life; anathema to the Econ101-taught where’s-the-profit? brigade perhaps, but a physical reality. Direct solar/water is low-tech and locally buildable; heat- sink/storage will be important.

The existing fleet of PV panels will most likely decay over time; a transition format like gas.

Wind

Big wind is likely unmaintainable ex fossil support; as those carbon blades age and those gearboxes wear, they will likely be retired. MBIE – shades of Econ101 – are suggesting a bond to cover the retiring of offshore wind; they should be demanding the earmarking of a certain amount of energy and materials; bank- held historic digits cannot shift offshore tonnage, that forward betting works until it doesn’t.

Small wind – both old-school direct-drive and low-tech electric – are do-able; locally buildable and locally fixable. They are a ‘fit’ for the re-localisation of food-production and the exodus from urban cramming. We cold do worse than encouraging this industry ahead of time.

Gas

Initial ideas at MBIE seem to be that gas will be used as a ‘transition’, that electricity will be almost everything else. Gas already has infrastructure, and skills.

It is a lesser carbon criminal than oil and coal, and probably has a transition role to play. Unfortunately, this will be exploited by those standing to profit or lose; propaganda and spin can be expected.

Hydrogen

One expectable move, particularly globally, will be to continue the fossil burn, using it to separate hydrogen and tout the process as green. Carbon implications aside, hydrogen is a negative-EROEI proposition; we would be better using the electricity directly in every possible application. Hydrogen doesn’t have existing infrastructure, has containment issues and – like PV – will never be buildable/maintainable beyond the fossil-energy system. The idea of exporting energy for dollars is a prima facie example of that ‘steeped in a falsehood’ mantra mentioned earlier; at the low EROEI represented by shipped hydrogen, there is no longer an ‘economy’ as we have come to understand it.

Nuclear

Not covered by MBIE, but all things should be considered. Despite the Rickover-led application to submarines, nuclear really does best at grid-scale, transforming atomic energy into electrical, plus some local heat. The disposal issues have never been adequately addressed, and impact many yet-to-be-born generations, the resource source is also finite; thus nuclear is unsustainable, big-picture. If we find we cannot maintain the grid ex fossil energy, nuclear has eliminated itself as an option.

Geothermal

Geothermal works in some locations, within geology-limiting parameters. Grid-supplying in current form, we may well see local activities gravitating to locations where it is viable. As with all technologies, geothermal can be expected to struggle with maintenance, beyond fossil energy.

Hydro

The best big-hydro sites have been taken, and we can assume that lead-times and environmentalist opposition will preclude any more. Small and micro-hydro, though, fits ‘local’, and is locally buildable/do-able. We may even see direct hydro again (mill-wheels, Hayes workshop). Small hydro is 24/7, even, controllable, locally maintainable.

Wave/tide

Few NZ sites stack up, the environment is hostile, most academic investigations seem to be unfavorable.

Storage

Storage is a major question, rightly being tackled head-on. We owe those who went ahead – the Bardsley/Onslow initiative particularly. Water-at-height is the most benign battery possible, and long after supply-chains fail, water held uphill will still be potential energy waiting to be turned into useful work at a time of our choosing, smoothing (if not eliminating) intermittency.

Whether to proceed with Onslow, depends on grid-related questions; can it be upgraded? Can it be maintained? Smaller, more local water-at-height storage, should be explored, discussed and supported; no activity can claim zero environmental impact but local water is lesser-impacting than most.

Batteries, so far, rely on the fossil-energised economy; their potential cessation of supply is yet to be seriously contemplated. Few folk contemplate the energy required to recycle stuff – we will never separate the materials in the current crop of cell-phones for this reason – and that the majority of recycling energy, currently, is fossil-originated. Like PV, batteries could be a decaying-over-time technology.

Firewood is, of course, stored solar energy (just not for as long, or as compactly, as fossil energy), gathered close to source. The danger is that if fossil supplies curtail quickly – think: geopolitics/war, pandemic, financial collapse – there could be a rapid decimation of standing timber.

Environmental and carbon implications aside, burning forest faster than the rate of regrowth is a temporary arrangement. Locally-grown/coppiced firewood is essentially carbon-neutral and has incidental benefits (shade, water-retention, land stability, biodiversity). Given lead-times, we should be contemplating it now.

Resilience

It is reasonable to assume that ex fossil energy, we will experience longer, more frequent outages of energy-supply. It is also reasonable to anticipate moves to circumvent logistical supply-stages (each being a potential failure-point, and each being a source of energy dissipation (leakage) in the left-to-right entropy traverse.

We cannot move the sun closer but we can – and will - move our harvesting of energy as close to solar input as possible. The word defining close, is ‘local’, so we can predict local energy harvesting, local clusters, local food-production.

While the global internet is likely to falter, fragments may continue to function for years. That format points the way to resilience; multiple stand-alone hubs have more chance of continuance, than does a monolith. Put another way; resilience improves with multiple redundancies. The recent flood/weather events have taught us this lesson (cell communication down; power out; petrol and gas supplies not getting through), but energy-reduction will encourage corner-cutting rather than capacitance-building; the latter must be prioritised.

Displacement

For the last 200 years we have been spatially cheating by digging up compressed historical sunlit acres – the fossil energies. Falling back on real-time sunlit acreage, augmented by the minor reach-backs of firewood, hydro storage and prior-season food, will inevitably involve competition for acreage. We are seeing that already; tree-planting vs farming vs urban encroachment; aerial space in cities, offshore space being contemplated. The real-time energy-capture will be orders-of- magnitude short of our current expectations; apportioning such on the basis of ‘the market’ will not work; physical strategies - and social ones resulting from those – will require Churchillian leadership and a mature societal discussion.

Conclusion

Attending the first online ‘consultation’ (a question re the overarching Limits to Growth, was the first one they answered); one sensed that MBIE are less sure about the Samuelson/Econ101 version of the world, than they were. That parallels a growing portion of society trying to answer resource depletion and overshoot with virtue-signalling wokeness. As a personal comment (the writer has spent a main lifetime evaluating energy-efficiencies for the greater good), admirable sentiments don’t change the physics/chemistry/biology of our poly crisis; those are not solvable by redressing colonialism and/or emission- cessation alone – although both are part of the needed dialogue.

Admittedly the discussion has moved a long way in recent times, but obviously it has further to go given that MBIE’s stated goal is to ‘encourage productivity and economic growth’; dinosaur territory at this point in the human irruption-trajectory. If by productivity they mean efficiencies, fine, but say so; call it what it is. But the goal should be: To ascertain what energy infrastructure we are capable of maintaining beyond fossil energy. Throw in a desired capacitance/resilience factor, and that is it; that is the all of it, and we are late already; very, very late.

Let’s get on with it.

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/energy-transfer-ecosystems/

https://www.postcarbon.org/publications/the-future-is-rural/

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/

https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/

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*Murray Grimwood comments on interest.co.nz as powerdownkiwi.