Dr. Scott Tinker - The Switch Interview

- Energy is the most critical issue of our time. It affects the economy, the environment, transportation, agriculture, human health, hunger. All aspects of our lives are impacted by energy. In the last decade I have given over 250 invited or keynote lectures around the globe to industry, academia, as testimony and briefings to governments, clean cities, environmental groups, to everyone that I can engage with, to talk about the critical importance of energy on our world today. Those of us in this industry have a tremendous amount of capacity and talent and knowledge to offer to the world. It's actually kind of our duty to get out there. I've been on films and in television, done radio interviews, written op-ed's, make the complex world of energy understandable for the broad public. If we look at today, the foundational energies, the energies that built our modern economy are oil, transportation, and coal, electricity. What the plot shows is the higher the price goes, there's more oil. It's the reserve is dependent on price. There's another seven to eight trillion barrels of oil out there at the right price, or oil equivalents. So let's look at the alternatives, what are our options to oil and coal, these foundational energies. If we go back to our graph, now we've looked at solar, wind, geothermal. They're putting solar panels as coverings to parking lots. It's hot and there are no trees, let's use it, for alternatives scale is the big one, getting enough volume to begin to make a substantive replacement. How about hydro, Norway is phenomenal. Turbines under the mountain, you don't even know they're there, the water accelerates down the hill, flows out into the top of the fjord, it's perfect. Beautiful clean energy, and if we all had topography like Norway and renewable rainfall we'd be finished. So you're getting the picture here, that nothing's perfect. No energy source is without some challenges. So what does this mean for our energy future? If we combine our foundational fuels, oil and coal, those move up and slowly decline in the future. If you combine renewables with hydro, you see that they move up but not enough to be primary sources, the intermittency challenge is too great, and until that's solved they'll be great regional supplements. And finally if we combine nuclear and natural gas, they sit in the middle today, and are growing out in the future, and approaching the foundational energies. But we still don't see that crossover point, until we combine nuclear natural gas, with the renewables, and now we see some 50 years out the crossover between foundational energies, and energies of the future. It's not gonna be easy, natural gas will nearly have to double, and it can. Nuclear reactors will have to build nearly three times as many as exist today, and renewables go up five fold. Can we be certain that we can meet this challenge, and how can we do that? Well the easiest way, the best way, is the energy that we don't use. That will reduce these multiples, natural gas, nuclear, renewables will go down, it would mean 200 fewer nuclear reactors, it would mean 100,000 less wind turbines. If we could meet that 50 year crossover with less infrastructure required. As I've traveled the world, I've come to realize that in fact there's a tremendous role that each of us plays in efficiency, in changing our energy behavior. What you do, and what I do are the most important part of our energy future. As we transition from today's fossil energy economy to tomorrows alternate energy economy, we have to get it right. That's why it's so important to bring the scale and magnitude of the energy challenge to the broad public."