How To Use Energy Sustainably
Article by Hugh Saddler, Originally published in Canberra Times, February 11th, 2005
Most of us think of energy as the electricity and natural gas we use at home and at work, and the petrol we use to fuel our cars. We are also aware, if only vaguely, that most of this energy is derived, directly or indirectly, from burning fossil fuels. In Canberra, fossil fuels provide about 97% of the energy we use as individuals and at work. (The remaining 3% comes mainly from hydro-electricity, firewood and solar hot water.)
Fossil fuels, which include coal, crude oil (petroleum) and natural gas, were formed over a period of several hundred million years. The world as a whole is currently consuming them at a rate nearly a million times greater than the rate at which they were formed. What is more, the average world rate of consumption hides a great disparity between countries. Australians, including Canberrans, use fossil fuels at about five times the world average rate and more than ten times faster than the average person in India or China.
What makes fossil fuels so special is that they are a very concentrated source of energy and that they are relatively easy and cheap to extract from underground. These are the characteristics that over the past two centuries have allowed the people of Australia, and all the other developed countries, to achieve the levels of material consumption that we now enjoy. In doing so, we have created an economic system which cannot function without continued consumption of the capital asset that fossil fuels represent.
By definition, living off a capital asset is unsustainable, but if the asset is large enough, and there are no side effects it may not be a matter needing urgent attention. Unfortunately, in the case of the world’s dependence on fossil fuels, neither is true.
What we now know of oil and natural gas resources makes it obvious that they are simply not enough to allow the rest of the world to achieve our present levels of consumption, even if we stop increasing the amount we consume. So the inequality between developed and developing countries cannot be bridged. But we also now know that, even the gap could be bridged, it would have unpredictable and possibly dangerously disruptive effects on global climate, because of the rate at which carbon dioxide, originally removed from the atmosphere hundreds of millions of years ago, is being put back there. Thus our present patterns of energy use in Australia are not sustainable in terms the global environment, in terms of global social justice, and in terms of the ultimate resource availability.
How do we move towards a more sustainable energy system? This is not a quick or easy task, because of the enormous investments tied up in long lived energy supply infrastructure – power stations, oil refineries, oil and natural gas pipelines, electricity distribution systems and much more. The long life of these assets makes it all the more urgent to start changing decisively now, if we are to avoid massively disruptive changes in ten or twenty years’ time.
One way to answer the question is to ask another question. What will a more sustainable energy system in, say, forty years from now look like? That was the question two colleagues and I were asked to address in a report, called A clean energy future for Australia, which we completed about a year ago. Specifically, we were asked to see if it were possible by 2040 to reduce the greenhouse emissions from stationary energy use to half their level in 2001. Stationary energy means all energy use except transport; in Australia it is about 75% of energy use and produces nearly 80% of the greenhouse emissions from fossil fuel use.
We found that such emission reduction is quite compatible with continued economic growth. It will require widespread adoption of a variety of technologies that are all commercially available now, though not widely used. The changes result in a great reduction in the use of coal, the most greenhouse intensive of fossil fuels, partly offset by increased use of natural gas, the least greenhouse intensive fossil fuel. There is greater use of renewable energy, including energy from the wind, crop wastes, multi-purpose woodlots, and solar heat. Energy use efficiency increases in all sectors, including mining, manufacturing, commercial buildings and the residential sector, but in all cases does not exceed, on average, the best technology available today.
What will this sort of technology mix mean for the ACT? Most houses will be much more energy efficient than they are today – the equivalent of six star or better – and so will commercial buildings. Most large commercial buildings will have gas fired cogeneration plants which interact with the electricity grid but produce on-site most of the electricity, hot water and space heating they need. Houses will have solar water heaters and possibly micro-scale cogeneration systems. Many buildings will also have photovoltaic panels integrated into parts of the external cladding. Inside, lighting and appliances will be much more efficient than they are today. There will be wind farms at several sites close to the ACT, feeding electricity into the NSW grid, from which we will draw electricity as we do today, but in much smaller quantities because of increased energy efficiency and on-site generation.
This vision of our energy future is only one possibility among many. Another possibility, strongly backed by sections of industry and implicitly endorsed by the Australian governments June 2004 Energy White Paper, is so-called carbon capture and geosequestration. This involves building a new type of coal fired power station, at which it is easy to capture carbon dioxide instead of sending it up the chimney. The carbon dioxide is then piped to a suitable location where it is injected down wells drilled deep underground, into geological formations which prevent it from escaping back to the surface.
All these technologies have one feature in common: they will cost considerably more, in dollars per unit of energy supplied, than our present energy supply technologies. There is no energy alternative that is cheap, abundant, and environmentally benign, and there is no prospect of there being one for many decades, if ever. Our present energy system is so cheap precisely because it is unsustainable; the dollar cost is low because we are not paying for the resources we are depleting and nor are we paying for the future environmental damage that will result from global climate change.
Recognising that we will have to pay more is the first step on the road towards building a sustainable energy future.
Such recognition must lead on to the development and implementation of policies and programs that support adoption of the new technologies. A small sub-national jurisdiction like the ACT cannot do very much of this by itself, particularly when national policies are pointing in the opposite direction. It is much fairer, simpler and more efficient, as the December 2004 NSW Energy Directions Green Paper points out, for national policies to give the lead, with State and Territory policies complementing and supporting, rather than taking an independent approach.