Solving Energy Crisis Demands a Sustained Effort

A number of participants in the energy debate have recently suggested that what America needs is a new federal project on the scale of the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Project that brought large scale teams together to achieve great things. My suggestion is that the better model to follow would be Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway project – or a much more ancient model.

As successful as Manhattan and Apollo were at achieving their stated goals, both share a common flaw as a model for attacking our energy supply challenges – they were sprints that left their respective teams panting and wiped out when the initial goal was achieved. In contrast, the Interstate Highway system was a more distributed, long-term effort whose accomplishment required a sustained, methodical approach lasting more than 50 years (so far). It was more of an endurance relay event than a sprint.

We did not achieve our current level of dependence on fossil fuels quickly or accidentally; transitioning to a new energy supply system will not be quick or easy. It would also be a mistake to favor solutions based on the speed with which they can be implemented instead of their long term durability and sustainability. Both Manhattan and Apollo operated under tight deadlines; great technological suggestions that required too much development were abandoned instead of being steadily worked for later implementation.

One of the key distinguishing characteristics of the Interstate Highway system was the development of a mechanism for funding large scale, interconnected projects that took local needs into account while directing the bill to the people that received the most benefit. Using fuel taxes was a brilliant move; the more companies and individuals used the roads, the more they paid in taxes to build more roads.

It is disheartening to me to hear people deride long-term actions like building a nuclear power plant construction and support infrastructure or continued exploration for new sources of hydrocarbons while cheering efforts to implement moderate energy savings programs immediately.

It is also disappointing to hear supposedly serious commentators expect that private, speculative investors will come to the rescue. High-risk capital investors will take big chances, but their time horizon is normally 7 years or less.

Lower risk investors will provide patient capital, but they need markets that are structured to support predictable income over long periods of time. One thing that scares long term investors away is regulatory uncertainty; today, some of the big energy related uncertainties are the rules associated with carbon dioxide emissions and the regulatory challenges associated with all large scale power plants, especially nuclear power plants.

Much has been said about the impact of commodity speculators in the energy markets, but if they have been important, the reason for their importance is a recognition that real solutions are not being aggressively pursued. Speculators try to predict the future and maneuver to prosper in whatever circumstances that the future brings; right now, the popular bet appears to be that we will be living in a constrained world beset by energy costs that eat up 6-15% of a family budget.

Of course, it should be no secret to anyone that there are some very powerful and even some not so powerful people who like the energy markets just the way that they are. The longer the rest of us dally and debate, the longer we will remain addicted to fossil fuels. The pushers like that and encourage us to keep on discussing. They also support short term thinking – it is in their long term financial interest to keep people focused on marginal improvements or on intermittent, unreliable power sources that require us to continue turning back to them for assistance when we really need power.

This weekend I played a bit with some numbers available from the U. S. Energy Information Agency’s Annual Energy Review (Table 1.3). I think that the resulting graph clearly shows what we have learned from the past forty years of trying to develop alternatives to fossil fuels.

According to one of the most virulent nuclear critics, the total subsidy to nuclear power from 1950-1990 (when all subsidies to our existing plants stopped) was $97 billion (1990s dollars). The annual return from that investment is more than 800 Terawatt-hours of electricity valued at approximately $40-80 billion depending on your assumption for the value of a kilowatt hour. Just think where we would be today if we had not quit building and had not abandoned much of the infrastructure that investment enabled.

Photo explanation – Last summer, my wife and I spent a week on the Rhine River. One of the more thought provoking sights was the Cologne Cathedral; a monument to faith and perseverance whose construction started in 1248 and lasted until 1880. It is a dramatic example of what can be accomplished by an endurance relay of visionaries and long term thinkers.
The haze, by the way, is partially caused by the large concentration of coal burning power plants in that section of Germany.

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