“Green” economy requires more than swapping out parts
March 19th, 2009 by Jim JustThis insight from a post by Big Gav at Peak Energy deserves to be widely shared:
The single biggest delusion in North America today is that the interconnected planetary problems bearing down on us can be faced with slight alterations to the current order; that a model of delivery prosperity based on suburbs and big cars and consumerism and profligate energy use and the careless spewing of pollution in all directions can be fixed through the swapping out of some of its constituent parts for slightly greener parts — that green-built McMansions and hybrid cars and compact fluorescent light bulbs will prop the model up indefinitely. They won’t, because we are in a situation where incremental reform has already been made meaningless by a revolution in context.
Big Gav has another post taking a look at a new green “supergrid” employing high-voltage DC current rather than the AC that is now standard in the U.S. This type of grid would be essential to transmit power from renewable sources, tying the system together to provide ample, uninterrupted power over the vast and varied landscape that would be required for “spatial smoothing.” While expensive, it’s a fraction of the investment that would be required, anyhow, to provide needed power from dirty sources.
Energy consultant Dr. Gregor Czisch calculates the “green” system could deliver power for less than 4.7 Euro cents per kilowatt hour, roughly the price of German wholesale electricity in 2005 when the study was completed and competitive with electricity from current sources, even without factoring in a price for carbon.
Europe, of course, is far ahead of the U.S. in thinking about such things. Obama’s so-called “smart grid” proposal, rather than fundamentally re-thinking the U.S. electricity supply and distribution system, simply hands out billions to utility companies to continue business more-or-less as usual.