Alternative Energy Reality Check

Mr. Smil’s energy world:
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/52/25/36760950.pdf#search=%22worldwide%20consumption%20of%20energy%2013%20TW%20smil%22
He takes an aggressive, almost cynical tone in confronting some of the over-enthusiastic claims of alternative energy promoters. Then he proceeds to triturate them with a hammering rain of stone-hard facts. Personally, I think he too quickly dismisses the potential of wind power as a contributor to the energy transition—his dismissive tone conflicts with his own numbers: he admits wind can provide about 40% of the world’s current primary energy requirements. This is certainly a significant part of the solution, especially given that wind is the only alternative energy demonstrably capable of generating affordable power. Also, I believe his estimate on geothermal’s potential (what he calls “generous estimates of technically feasible maxima”) is instead quite conservative at less than 8% of current requirements. New technology may be developed in this area and alter the calculus completely—there is no meaningful limit to potential geothermal energy.
Other than those two areas of disagreement, I was generally pleased by the substance and the tone. He puts nuclear power in its proper place as a coddled and utterly dependent 60 year old child of governments and their continued largesse. Nuclear power does not exist without government subsidies. It never will exist without subsidies. This should understood. Whether it may be needful as an element of the strategy to reduce carbon dioxide emissions is a separate, though related, question. I happen to think it could function as a good hedge in the event that solar and wind are not scaled up as fast as necessary. New plant designs are much safer than past practice—and, remember, the Western world has never experienced a significant nuclear event even with the old designs. To my sense, a terrorist attack on a nuclear plant represents by far the gravest threat to our nuclear plants. The new designs ought to be fortified against such a contingency.
He also delivers himself of a goodly thwacking in countering the advocates of phyto-based energy. We already use too much of the biosphere’s total production, about 40% of it, severely diminishing biodiversity as well as imbalancing ecosystems and the biosphere itself. Most of the supporters of this sort of thing (ethanol, biodiesel and such) do not appear to understand that expanding such sources will not and cannot supply a large percentage of our energy demand. Additionally, it has direct negative environmental consequences. Growing our fuel in this way, even assuming significant efficiency improvements, would require too much of our arable land to be devoted to it at a time when world population and food demand continue to grow. One shocking figure indicates that all of the photosynthesis which occurs each year in the U.S. equals, in terms of energy production, only half the amount of U.S. fossil fuel consumption.
Smil puts forward solar as the only realistic long-term alternative to fossil fuels (barring a nuclear fusion breakthrough). He points out the insane disparity in government R&D expenditures between nuclear, which got 96% of them in the 47-98’ period, and all other sources of power, which received 4% combined. Though I fully understand the focus on nuclear as the energy of the future (especially in the early decades of this period), the government has been far too slow to recognize the necessity of diversifying its energy options, that is, of hedging its bets—any successful financier could have informed the decisionmakers that a diversified portfolio is the safest, smartest option for those without inside information—and nobody has inside information on technological developments several decades out. Despite our idiocratic government, the numbers support Smil’s contentions about the solar future and point up the gross misallocation of the Energy Department’s priorities. It should focus mainly on solar, hedging itself round with nuclear, wind, geothermal and anything else that looks promising. Several questions remain, however. First, what is the most efficient means of arriving at that endgame (ie, which other alternatives will contribute along the way, how much conservation can be achieved)? Second, how cheap will alternative energy actually be at that point and, given conservation advances, how much of it will we actually need? The characteristics of the path (esp, how well GHGs are controlled over the next few decades) will determine the magnitude of global warming and ecological destruction just as much as the length of the path (ie, how long it takes to shift to a mostly alternative energy system).