Richard Jones - The Switch Interview

- [Ambassador Richard Jones] When we look at competing fuels or competing energy sources, we try to judge them from several perspectives. We have what we call the three E's of balanced energy policy, which are energy security, economic development, and environmental sustainability. Oil is increasingly concentrated in a few countries. Many of those countries are members of OPEC. They have national oil companies, and they may decide to develop their oil resources on a different schedule than what we would like because they have their own political processes, they have their own constituents, and their own priorities. So if you're burning oil, and you're not producing oil, you put yourself at a disadvantage against a country that has its own resources. - [Interviewer] In terms of security. - - [Ambassador Richard Jones] In terms of security. - Right. - A lot of the OEC countries have exhausted their oil or - [Interviewer] Conventional? - Conventional oil. And so what we see is that existing oil fields declined almost 7% per year, that's an exponential decline. So if you don't do anything, in ten years, that oil field is gone. Alright? And more and more of those oil fields in Western developed countries are going. The North Sea is drying up We don't believe in peak oil, but for some countries, peak oil is real. If you burn fossil fuels, you emit carbon dioxide. It's pretty well accepted universally now that carbon dioxide in the air contributes to global warming. Between now and 2030, if we don't change our policies, we will be emitting enough carbon dioxide to reach 1000 parts per million in the atmosphere. That equates, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to six degrees centigrade increase in temperature by the end of this century. That's ten degrees fahrenheit. That's basically Miami Beach and Boston. We know how to transport carbon dioxide. We know how to push it underground. The hard thing about CCS is the capture technology. The bottom line is it takes work to separate the carbon dioxide out of the stream, and that work has to be powered somehow, and basically, it comes out of the efficiency of the power plant. And right now, with the existing technologies, a good CCS capture rate decreases the energy coming out of the plant by about 30%. - That's a big energy comparison. - That's a big burden, and that's why if you think about coal, if you tack an extra 30% on it or you reduce the output by 30%, then all of a sudden coal isn't so cost-effective. Nuclear is tremendously expensive upfront. If we assess it from the three E point-of-view, and you look at security, it's pretty good on the security standpoint, and from an economic point-of-view, the price doesn't fluctuate a lot. Oil price can go up and down. The price of generating electricity from nuclear isn't going to change. - You've talked about cost. What are the other big challenges? - For nuclear? Well, I think safety and the waste reprocessing. Now, some of the newer technologies sound very promising. The advanced third generation or even fourth generation. I think the big concern is the environmental sustainability, and that's because of the waste. We need to come up with a solution for the treatment of the waste. - [Interviewer] So what are some of the opportunities and challenges in solar? - Photovoltaic solar, PV, has a certain niche already that I think will expand over time. But, as you point out, there are drawbacks to it. The problem with solar cells is they're not very cost-effective per unit of electricity that you produce, but that doesn't mean they're not good for some purposes already. First of all, the technology is getting better, the costs are going down, it's making it more competitive every day for a wider range of activity. The other major way of converting solar power into electrical energy is concentrating or concentrated solar power. CSP, it's called. That's where you take a bunch of mirrors, you create a mirror field, and you kind of create an effect of a virtual parabolic mirror. And they track the sun, and they all focus the light on a central point, so they use the solar power to heat up some kind of a fluid. - [Interviewer] Where is that best in the world right now? - Oh, probably it will be in desert areas where you've got large amounts of land and lots of sunshine. - [Interviewer] How about hydroelectric? - [Ambassador Richard Jones] Hydro is very good. The problem with hydro is in developed countries, we've pretty much used up our hydro resources, and there's a lot of people that want to free the rivers. There's a little bit of a movement of that. There are too many dams on rivers and so on. So one of the areas that we might exploit potential in hydro in OECD countries is in river turbines. Obviously, it's smaller scale, but you can put a lot of these small turbines in there, and for certain applications, it makes sense. What we're trying to do, and what we prescribe, are technology-neutral policies because we don't know where the breakthroughs are going to come. Maybe tomorrow we wake up and we find out that somebody has really figured out a way through nanotechnology to make solar cells four times as efficient or something like that. - [Interviewer] The best battery in the world. - Yeah, or a new design of a turbine blade. I don't want to spend a lot of money to deploy today's technology because tomorrow's technology may be so much better that I save a lot of money in the deployment. 90% of the cost of introducing a new energy technology is in deployment, so you don't want to rush to commercialize technologies that aren't ready. If we're going to address the needs of hundreds of millions of people in the developing world, if we're going to be able to respond to the security needs and the economic development needs of our own countries, we have to change the way we produce and consume energy. We urge people to look at what's right for them. There's no one magic bullet, there's no one technology you need, because the world is different in different places. In some places, solar's great because the sun shines all of the time. In other places, like Paris, you get rain almost 200 days a year. That's not so great. Some places, it's very windy all the time. That's really good for wind. In other places, the wind's too variable, or the winds aren't strong enough. You've gotta do a real cradle-to-grave analysis. What we always tell people is the first thing you should look at is improving the efficiency with which you use energy. 54% reduction in emissions can be achieved through energy efficiency. - So over half of that just from efficiency? - Over half of the reduction - And we can do it today. - in emissions we can do with today's technology. We just have to apply it. So there's a lot of scope for improvement, particularly in the developed country world, where everybody has access to electricity, or most people have access to electricity. In the developing world where people need access. But if you invest in energy efficiency now, when they get that access, that electricity will go a lot farther. So any way you slice it, energy efficiency is good, and that's what we recommend any government focus on first."