Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

Chapter Fifteen: End-Use Efficiency: Most Resilience Per Dollar 259cost of thirty-odd dollars per barrel which is probably all recoverable—“probably”because the oil is not yet known to be stable for more than about sixyears 80 —plus a ten-year storage and carrying cost on the order of sixty or seventydollars per barrel, which is not recoverable. (If world oil prices rose duringstorage, the oil would appreciate in value; but so would the value ofdomestic oil which the two previous options left safely in the ground.)4. Spend the hundred thousand dollars building a small piece of a plant tomake synthetic fuels from coal or shale. Using a reasonable—and most likelyconservative—whole-system capital investment of forty thousand dollars perdaily barrel, the capacity bought will have the potential, if the technologyworks, to produce two and a half barrels per day—up to about nine thousandbarrels per decade—from the early 1990s to 2020. During the first decade,however, it will have produced nothing. The retail price of its future outputwill probably be upwards of seventy of today’s dollars per barrel. 815. Spend the hundred thousand dollars building a very small piece of theproposed Clinch River Breeder Reactor. After ten years it will have producednothing. It may thereafter deliver electricity at a price equivalent to buying theheat content of oil at upwards of three hundred seventy dollars per barrel.(The electricity price, twenty-three cents per kilowatt-hour, would be aboutthe same as from presently commercial but expensive solar cells with a cheapoptical concentrator—seven dollars a peak watt. The Clinch River BreederReactor technology stands no chance of competing even with the costliest conventionalalternative—light-water reactors—until well past the year 2050. 82It is perhaps superfluous to note that the official energy policy of theUnited States has lately been to pursue these options almost exactly in reverseorder, worst buys first. These inverted priorities have survived severalAdministrations and are largely bipartisan. They are worst buys in terms notonly of money but of ability to produce an immediate, continuing saving inoil imports. One is impelled to wonder whether we might not buy moreresilience by stockpiling, not oil, but Fiberglas ® , weatherstripping, and othermaterials for weatherizing buildings.National least-cost scenariosHow do these arguments apply to all forms of energy throughout thenational economy? Two detailed 1980–81 analyses have addressed this question.One was done by a group headed by Roger Sant—a senior energy officialunder the Ford Administration—at the Mellon Institute’s Energy ProductivityCenter, an industry-supported “think tank” in Arlington, Virginia. (In October1981 the group metamorphosed into a for-profit enterprise, Applied Energy