The concept of EMERGY (no sic) was coined by the environmental scientist Howard Odum several decades ago, to figure in the WHOLE costs of using energy. A big thermodynamic factor that is seldom appreciated by non-scientists is that all energy flow depends upon most of it ending up, often literally, in the ground. It takes a energy sink to get a transfer of useful power, as both heat and electrical (and kinetic) power only flows "downhill." When people talk about efficiency they always leave out that at least half the energy goes into that heat sink before any of the rest does a damned thing! Why? See Odum's works, as it is kinda tricky to summarize. Emergy (spelled with a "m") evaluates the work previously done to make a product or service. Emergy is a measure of energy used in the past and thus is different from a measure of energy now. The unit of emergy (past available energy use) is the emjoule to distinguish it from joules used for available energy remaining now. There is a different kind of emergy for each kind of available energy. For example: solar emergy is in units of solar emjoules , coal emergy in units of coal emjoules , and electrical emergy in units ofelectrical emjoules . There is no emergy in degraded energy (energy without availability to do work). Like energy, emergy is measured in relation to a reference level. Usually, in a real evaluation of energy usage, one uses solar emergyto refer to, as except (and even this is indirectly so) for nuclear energy, and the trickle of geothermal, ALL the energy we use is in fact solar. I need to repeat that so it will sink in: (Nearly) ALL ENERGY WE USE IS SOLAR EMERGY . Fossil fuels are just stored solar emergy . Wind-power is solar emergy . Hydroelectric power is actually solar emergy . Wood and ethanol are just again stored solar energy – or rather solar emergy. Since even atomic energy is dependant upon hydrogen having been at least once through the life-cycle of a star, the only way to naturally create radioactive elements, and those radioactive materials also provide the heat that keeps the center of the Earth molten; thus nuclear energy and geothermal as well are in fact "stored" solar emergy as well. Real wealth (food, clothes, houses, materials, water, jewelry, knowledge, literature, art, etc.) is measured by its emergy . Money buys real wealth according to market prices. When one uses emery rather than the misleading ways that energy use is measured, it becomes clear that many activities cost far more emergy than the supposed gains. For example destroying a viable forest to put in a bunch of tract houses when figured in emergy use versus actual returns, it comes out that utilizing the natural products of a well managed forest brings in terms of real wealth over a thirty-year period, a ten-times greater return then that real-estate development! An area that combines wetlands and forest can be THIRTY times more rewarding. Ecological sanity is not only healthier but it seems more profitable! It is like the fussing at first about cleaning up smokestack emissions on powerplants. Fact is not only did it provide a lot of jobs to build and put in those scrubbers, not only did it reduce health costs downwind, but the products pulled out by the scrubbers more than paid for their installation within a few years, and was nearly pure profit afterwards. The owners of the plants woke up and realized they were sending up into the air valuable commodities! Using emergy also makes clear that the REAL COSTS for different kinds of energy, when figured as emergy, is vastly different. Petroleum takes more emergy per emjoule to get into a usable form than natural gas, as does coal require a lot of energy to process. But natural gas takes a lot more than hydroelectric. And hydroelectric more than wind-power, And wind-power more than most direct forms of solar energy power generation whatever the short-sighted cost estimates might seem to indicate. Most solar systems take far less maintenance, have lower operating costs, and take less emergy to get going. And the source of power, unlike any fossil fuel, is free and never ending and never failing (baring clouds reducing but not eliminating availability temporarily). Solar energy is also decentralized. Solar water heating works well even close to the Arctic Circle! Yet people have been carefully conditioned to dismiss it as expensive and impractical – like damming up huge rivers and building gigantic generators was considered any more practical a hundred years ago?
Even with the still far from maximized efficiency of solar cells and photovoltic conversion of water into hydrogen, if one was to cover half the roof of the typical Ivy League University, they could generate enough for heating and cooling, lighting the classrooms at night, and powering the university commuters! While the 300 plus square miles of solar collector space to fuel the vehicles of Los Angeles seems large at first glance, most of that could be done via the roofs of public and large commercial buildings, or covering an area the size of a large airport with solar collectors instead of asphalt. And, of course, California has itself lots of desert or inarable land (where the critters would appreciate some shade), not to mention bordering with Nevada with much of it already well lighted wasteland belonging to the government. We can also expect efficiency of solar cells to increase (as they have steadily even with pitiful funding), along with dual usage – producing heat/cooling as well as electricity or hydrogen-splitting. When I build my house I expect to get most of my heat via solar, and all my hot water. And so could nearly anyone building a house, imagine if we had been doing so the last thirty years as we should have been! Even today most buildings are not ten percent as energy efficient as they could be. Few do better than 25%. And of course there are the older buildings. Like with pre-1975 cars producing most car pollution, it is older buildings which really suck up emergy to heat and cool. Most can be renovated however. We need to approach building a sound energy system like building the interstate highway system. That took $100 billion and 34 years. But we did it because as a society we decided it was important. And we spend more than that now on a few aircraft carriers to fight enemies we no longer have. Americans go through roughly 18 million barrels of oil a day. ALL the really big oil fields have already been tapped into. We are simply running out. And snaking pipes sideways, pumping in hot water, and all the other tricks does not get around that we are running on empty almost. We have coal but costs of extracting that are going up as the easy veins have already been used up. Strip-mining is very expensive, and even with the best of reclamation, has serious ecological consequences. And even that will not last forever. As the quotation above shows, not only is all this hardly recent news, but even assuming breeders work nearly as well and as safely as the nuke-lovers claims, it would require a tremendously greater investment and risk to the biosphere to go the breeder route than using even current solar technology! Fact is uranium is already becoming expensive to get to. And breeders or not, you still have nuclear wastes, and ones even more radioactive after being through a breeder! It just postpones facing up to going solar. Fusion? Nice dream but it always seems to be fifty-to-a-hundred years a-coming. The projected hardware seems to make nuclear reactors look cheap and easy to run. And the actual cost of the fuel is nowhere near as small as it might appear, deuterium is but two hundreds of a percent of the regular hydrogen isotope. While it can be separated from water, it takes a lot of doing. And even the best projected fusion power planets will still waste a lot of power, need a tremendous input of power, and is no where near as efficient as they want to make out. Sure, it is a lot better than current reactors, but then they are terribly inefficient! We have lots of regular hydrogen easily available, it burns to produce water, which can be safely drunk, Fusion via the Rube Goldberg methods being worked upon will produce nuclear waste products... And the French Atomic Energy Commission, though no country is more dependent on nuclear power, has been quietly funding cold fusion research, even including setting up Pons and Fleischmann in a lab in France, and had independently verified those results the Scientific Establishment still denies and has NEVER fairly judged. Even NASA has had positive results – though you don't see that mentioned much. See In From the Heat . Let's face it folks, scientific research in America (and Western Europe and the Far East as well) is a whore. As Watergate's Deep Throat pointed out, "Follow the Money." And the money trail goes straight to big energy, the defense industry, and to conservative foundations. That is where 90 plus percent of scientific funding for research, including in universities, actually comes from. Even when it comes from more independent sources the competition is such that truly cutting edge and fringe-science research is lucky to get the crumbs. In a famous editorial in (of all places) Scientific American in "Why Only One Bang ?" Feb.1992, pg 120, the Yale Astronomer and head of the Kitt Peak National Observatory, Geoffrey Burbridge, pointed out that any astronomer, especially a young one, that dared not follow the official Party Line about the Big Bang Theory, do not get access to the telescopes to test their doubts. Thomas Kuhn was quite right in pointing out real scientific revolutions usually require the older generation of scientists to die off first. This is still true today. In at least two recent NOVA programs and numerous articles in SA, the New Scientist, Science and elsewhere, younger astronomers and cosmologists have mentioned that any of them not following the current "party-line" finds it next to impossible to score precious radio or optical telescope time. Funding affects what science gets done. And what doesn't. Though we know that fossil fuels are doomed to run out, and not too far in the future for oil, the US Government spends several HUNDRED times more on fossil fuel research than all the forms of alternative energy. And several times that for fission reactor research. (And several times that on nuclear weapons research!) And yet the enrgy companies are about the most profitable there are, so why is the taxpayer paying billions for research for THEM? Or megabucks in research in drug development, computers, and large aircraft design? I give you ONE guess... Fossil fuels, especially petroleum, are incredible valuable sources for complex hydro-carbons. They are unsurpassed as chemical feedstocks for polymers. But we burn them in inherently inefficient (even after a century and perhaps a trillion dollars in real money of research) internal combustion engines, and even then most of that energy is wasted in the generation, transmission and braking. We have to cool the engines with a complex system, and all that heat energy is wasted (and more in getting rid of it in the first place). That is why even the still primitive hybrids, combining a small gasoline engine and not very efficient batteries with regenerative braking, produces cars that get eighty miles to the gallon and can still burn rubber. Combine a flywheel with a fuel cell, and a small Stirling-cycle engine for instant surges of power, and we can have cars that get the equivalent of 200 miles to the gallon, burning a fuel (hydrogen) of which 99.9% of the cosmos consists off, and the "waste product" is distilled water. A vehicle has several varieties of needs. it needs a steady source of electricity for lights, electronics, and so forth. It needs a source capable of generating great torque for short bursts to accelerate. And it needs an efficient source to keep the wheels turning down the road. Even a big SUV, once it is moving down the highway at 55 mph, needs the equivalent of a small lawn-mover engine to keep moving! Instead of having sources tailored to these different needs we try to do all these with detuned racing motors whose excessive power is useful ONLY for a few seconds at a time! But with a flywheel and a small Stirling or rotary engine, that acceleration power is there when needed, and thanks to the flywheel and the the generator/motors on the wheels, much of that emergy can be reclaimed! Meanwhile the fuel cell provides power to keep the vehicle moving, and play the DVD. If this seems complicated take another look under the hood of your vehicle – you really know what half of all that does? Much of it is there to make up for the deficiencies of other mechanisms. We have to have an alternator and a battery, and on many vehicles a couple more of those. Plus electricial and temperature and air regulators, and miles of power wiring, hydraulics, and so forth, as well as timing mechanisms to spark the fuel. We have to have special equipment to control the flow, pump, filter, and atomize the fuel. We have to have special equipment to protect other equipment from surges of power. The engine itself needs a heavy flywheel to keep it turning in-between the powerful explosions that actually turn the power shaft. Then we have to have incredibly complex and prone to fail transmission to take that turning and make it turn at more useful rates. We have to have complex braking systems – we then have to duplicate to depend upon. We have to then lose power to clean up and muffle the exhaust! And on and on. In a hybrid we need no special alternator, or a transmission; power loss getting to the wheels is a fraction of even the best current racing vehicle. Braking is done by the same motors that push us, and we can store most of that emergy in a form we can access instantly. Instead of thousands of explosions we have a electrochemical reaction producing clean quiet power for everything but acceleration, and then a efficient heat engine, not an inefficient combustion engine, producing that extra power. With good enough fuel cells and using perhaps a semisolid flywheel capable of long term storage, we can get by without even that engine as well, acceleration provided by the flywheel, the power from which is replaced via breaking and excess production during normal driving. So when you wince at gasoline prices know that we are getting what we deserve. In truth those prices should be three or four times higher – like in Europe – but they are kept artificially down. It is not true that the era of cheap energy – or emergy – is over. Gasoline is actually, in real money, cheaper than it was decades ago! But it will be until we invest in a a real emergy PRODUCTION system, not a emergy EXTRACTION one. Or at least move the extraction process closer to the real source: solar energy. If both cold and hot fusion fizzle out, at least for the near future, then we got to go solar. Big time. Geothermal can contribute a lot more as well. We could be drilling for heat instead of oil. Use ocean thermal energy instead of polluting it with oil wells. Wind power is already providing a larger percentage of power to the Netherlands than nuclear power does to America, and we have a lot of places where the wind blows. That one is more than mature enough a technology – after all windmills have been powering industry for over a millennium. You want to get rid of nuclear wastes? There are TWO safe methods. Neither being used or even really explored. One is to dump the crap into a tectonic rift, so it goes down into the Earth's magma core , which is already very radioactive. Be right at home there. We are actually living on a giant nuclear fission reactor. That is what powers volcanoes and continental drift. The problem is of course getting the nasty stuff to the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The other is to use solar furnaces. We could use them to generate a temperature close to that of the sun itself, which would reduce the wastes to... [drumbeat please] Hydrogen and Helium. All for the cost of taking over a small desert valley or depression, doing some earth moving, then building and setting up a lot of mirrors. I guess that is too cheap and sensible. We'd rather bury it in a megabilion dollar landfill in Nevada.
We are living on the only "safe" nuclear reactor in existence and should use it. We can cut out the middlemen of fossil fuels and use solar directly. To produce electricity and hydrogen. Hydrogen, by the way, is much SAFER than gasoline – it was the hydrocarbon doped FABRIC of the dirigible body you see burning in those old newsreels of the Hindenberg . If the Germans had used non-flammable material few people would have been burned, if any, and very few would have been injured at all. It was the leaping down from the flames that got them hurt or killed. If we had put a significant fraction into developing hybrids and fuel cells as we do in any single year on fossil fuels, hybrids would today be a significant percentage of vehicles, air pollution would be down, and there would be plenty of fossil fuels for the power plants. Or even better as feedstocks. Instead of doing what we knew we should, we elected a series of Presidents, including Clinton, who at best gave the back of their hands to alternative power, or, like Reagan, who almost as soon as he moved in took down the solar collectors on the White House roof, then actively worked to kill off solar energy itself! Our representatives in Congress have been just as bad or worse. Working for Exxon , not Americans at large. (And then look who we put into the Oval office!!! ARG!) Yet we could get rid of ALL big power plants within a generation with current technology and have more and safer energy. A few fossil fuel companies have figured out that oil is running out. Shell is positioning itself to become a true energy company, and has committed itself to hydrogen as the main fuel of the future, produced by many so-called "alternative methods." Alas, the present administration is living decades in the past. Out to destroy protected areas just to extend our dependence on oil a single percentage point (and only if their estimates are right, and then only years down the road). But even they have finally had to admit hydrogen is the fuel of the future, though they want to put it off till they are in retirement living off their lobbying and rotating-door pay-offs. But hydrogen based vehicles, if simply hooked up to the electric grid, and especially if hooked into the lager and more efficient fuelcells of the homes or businesses, could while parked, easily generate all the electricity needed for the future! And produce distilled water waste. And the vehicle will always be fully refueled when you are ready to go, and maybe with a PROFIT! Paying one not to clog the roads. Imagine pulling up to a fuel pump and having the meter ring up money to you . We can even put solar panels in orbit, but the idea of using microwaves to transmit the power seems flawed. We could, however, set up a space elevator , and superconduct down from orbit thousands of times the power we use now, with no pollution (other than thermal in utilization, which we also need to watch out for), and probably in real money at a cost no greater than the total emergy "production" system we now have. Perhaps a lot less. We do not HAVE to depend on petroleum any more than we now depend upon whale-oil to light our homes. We found things (for a while) better, and easier to get, and managed (though certain countires seem determined otherwise)not to wipe out all the whales before we did so. (Star Trek IV certainly did a lot to point out the still existing threats to whales). We ultimately need to find ecologically safe means to produce both hydrogen and electricity. We have dozens of already existing technologies. Many, however, are decades behnd where they could and should have been by now. Instead of investing in that we spent money on stock in companies that never showed a profit; on sports teams and equipment and the marketing of same; we actually pay lots of money to wear company ads on our clothing we have been so brainwashed by the fashion pimps; we bought lots and lots and lots of stuff we had no good use for and ended up tossing away after a few uses; we bought fuel-hogs vehicles; we failed to build our houses with ninety-five percent of the potential fuel-saving techniques we could have; we gambled and fiddled away TRILLIONS that could have gone into sane energy development – yet have the gall to complain now that we haven't fixed anything!
One of the almost funny things is that after years of denying the reality of decreasing oil supplies, as well as pollutions effects, now energy company spin-doctors have reversed themselvesm using those very things to justify even more "tax incentives" for oil drilling and "recovery technology," direct research funded by the Enrgy Department, (as if economic survival and maintaining profits, and the huge amounts of savings and investments of energy corporations to draw upon, we not more than adequate already) and flag-waving appeals to "economic security" to justify wiping out even more of the remaining wild places. It is not we are running out of energy, or emergy either. It is we have not adapted to reality. We want our big SUVs and cheap gas prices as well. We want ecological balance, but not have to pay the full price. So we elect those that promise the impossible: "Energy Independence" by increasing our reliance on fossil fuesl for one truly absurb example, and not have to get real about where we live, what we wear, how we live, and especially how we get around. The point is we do NOT have to drill for oil in protected habitats for the literal drop in the bucket, or in sensitive martine ecom\logies with giant off-shore righs, or much of anywhere else. We could (we must) switch over to alternative fuels within less than a generation, and still have some fossil fuels left for better uses. Reduce greenhouses gases to not much above natural production if that. And have cheap power available to the world. We just have to want it enough.
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