Jesse Ausubel - The Switch Interview

- Under Capitalism, conservation, efficiency, frugality is not necessarily a virtue. People don't want you to buy the minimum number of shirts that you might need. They don't want you to buy the minimum number of shoes that you might wear. Look at food, also, if you go to restaurants, about half of all the food that restaurants buy or serve is thrown away. So, energy is not so different, we're throwing away energy the same way we throw away food in a restaurant or in our refrigerators. So, some people estimate the the total efficiency of the system from my mining a hunk of coal to the illumination I use to read a book maybe still only in the range of five to 10%. I sometimes say technology must change because the human brain won't. One needs to be careful not to push people to do things they don't want to do. Carpooling, in principle, a nice idea is almost always slower. Now, it may only add 10 minutes, 15 minutes a day to your travel time but when you multiply that times 220 days a year that you work, in fact it becomes something that's really stealing from you. A lot of the ideas that people have proposed for behavioral changes don't work because finally people, they want convenience. If the manufactures of light bulbs, or of cables. or of turbines generating electricity can come up with a more efficient products that they sell that's better, often, than trying to convince people to buy fewer tomatoes at the grocery store. - Does it matter? I mean what I do individually if I have a compact florescent bulb over an incandescent or an LED even, does it really matter, in the bigger scheme of things? - Well the this is the question of wholesale versus retail. And, of course, both matter. Obviously if a big company like General Electric or Royals Royce can make a turbine that's more efficient that generates an enormous amount of power, it's good for a utility to buy that more efficient motor. At the same time, if I'm using 150 watt light bulbs where I could use 75 watts or if I'm using incandescent bulbs where I could be use LEDs I'm multiplying the demand. I'm multiplying what the system needs to create. So, if end users can, through efficiency and also through changes in behavior can divide the demand that's finally needed, then we need to generate less in the first place. Electrochemistry in some ways seams stuck. We really haven't had revolutionary ideas. Batteries, in order to store a lot of power are still very large and very heavy and thereby shoot themselves in the foot because if a battery is very heavy then you need to use a lot of the energy to transport the battery itself. - Right. - The genius of batteries in recent years has been for low power applications but we haven't come up with high power batteries that store large amounts of energy and can be recharged very quickly. This is another of the problems with the batteries for the electric cars, recharging them will take hours. So, it's fine if you're willing to plug them in over night. - Right. - At your home, but if you run out of energy at a gas station, you don't want to sit there for two hours. - Right. - Even though most people only typically travel, say 25 miles, 50 miles. Somewhere in people's primitive minds is this idea that they need to be able to go 200 miles. - Absolutely, if you didn't have to move a battery, why not, why can't we put giant batteries under every wind turbine and just store the electricity for when it's needed, what prevents that? - Well, that is one of the ideas. Obviously, the wind only blows part of the time, even in the windiest places on Earth and often it blows at night when the demand for electricity is low. So for the so-called renewables, like wind, to succeed, there needs to be energy storage. But if one has to add to the cost of every wind turbine also a large battery which will need to be replaced, then that lifts the cost of the system. - So there's an economic cost as well as, potentially, an environmental cost of disposal. - Yes, well and the materials that go into batteries are still not nice. We, of course, lead acid batteries that are in your automobile, we all know what tight systems exist for recycling those. You would never open up your lead acid battery on your suburban lawn and dump out the contents. Coal is doomed and if I were energy czar, in the US, China and of the few other countries that matter the most, I would simply shutdown the coal industry or introduce, say, a five year phase shutdown of the coal industry. Creating the requirement, thereby, that the generators replace that power. In fact, what would happen would be a massive substitution of natural gas because that's what can be built quickly and economically. I think it's time to face up to the need to put the coal industry to sleep. - Some people are concerned about particularly natural gas as a limited resource. Do you see that as a risk, Jesse? - Personally, I think we live in a world of methane abundance. In recent years, in the United States, there's been lots of news about vast amounts of natural gas in shales, so called shale gas. There've also been more and more discoveries of gas very deep. Most of the wells around the world, the oil and gas wells are, let's say, 5,000 feet deep. We can drill much deeper than that and people who are drilling to 10, 15, 20,000 feet on the continents are continuing to find very large deposits of gas. Equally important, offshore, particularly on the so-called continental margins or slopes that surround every continent between 600 feet deep and 10,000 feet deep, we're finding ribbons of natural gas, of methane, leaking out of the sediments and signaling to us that there are very, very large amounts of natural gas deep offshore. I think there, at least for the next 100 years, I think there's ample natural gas for Earth and for humanity. Natural gas is twice as good, twice as efficient, twice as clean, even more so, than coal and say 50% cleaner than oil. So, simply switching our electric power generation from coal to natural gas leads to big gains in cleanliness and efficiency. The great thing about coal and even better oil and even better, natural gas, is their compact and you can get a lot of kilowatts out of a small area. And then finally, of course, the revolution came in the 1930s with atomic power, the power of the nucleus which is 1,000 times more compact, maybe even 10,000 times more compact. You know, you need only an aspirin of raw material to power a community rather than immense wood piles or huge mines of coal. If you visit China or India, you see that the future of humanity on Earth is enormous, dense cities, hundreds of them, so how can you power these? Well, you can only power them with sources that, themselves are compact and that finally pushes for, I think for, methane and for nuclear energy. - But even nuclear can't last forever, forever, can it? It has to have a feed stock, is there enough? - Well, there's uranium in sea water. - Yeah. - You can filter uranium out of sea water and you'd have enough for 1,000 years. - Right. - Which is a long time. - Sure. - People have worried about is there enough uranium. First, the discoveries of uranium continue to be, the estimates of the resources of uranium continue to be large. Second, the use of the uranium, in power plants, has become more efficient. So, we're getting more kilowatts out of the same hunk uranium. And we can reprocess and recycle the uranium as well. There are concerns that that might be, that might lead to easier proliferation of nuclear weapons but it can also be handled in ways where we make proliferation very difficult and at the same time, allow the reuse. Also, there are ideas for different cycles for nuclear power. There's interest now in thorium, which is comparable to uranium but one can burn up, say 50% or even 80% of a hunk of thorium, whereas typically with uranium we might be burning up only, let's say 5% of it. - Okay. - But he real revolution in nuclear power, in my mind, will come when we use it to do something in addition to boil water. - [Interviewer] Right. - Basically we have these immensely sophisticated machines boiling wate