Energy Matters

  The Grid part IV So, where were we in our attempt to bring the inherent virtues of The Grid into focus for the near-sighted non-engineers-or-physicists among us? We had wrapped up our paean to the Transmission half of the grid, and promised to conclude with a stimulating stroll through the world of Distribution. Once again, remind me: who cares? It’s just a bunch of wires and poles, occasional snowshoe-looking thingies, aerial metal canisters and boxes, and occasional weird complicated gray-metal structures - stringing basically the whole of civilization together (minus a few off-grid eccentrics) and keeping us all alive. OK-- so yeah, maybe some of us feel we should know just a tiny bit about it? We learned in The Grid Part 3 about how power is transmitted over the high voltage lines, and why they have to be high voltage. These lines carry the bulk power from larger generating stations over long distances to where the power is to be used.  One of these circuits can carry th...

  Corny Subsidies We can’t shake the conviction that using actual quantitative analysis - THE NUMBERS - in making energy decisions would help the world along on the road toward making sense. Take for instance nearly everything that’s said about energy policy in opinion pieces in the media. It’s no place for opinion, this energy transition stuff.  The stakes are high, the impacts of policy are vast, the costs can be enormous, the benefits can be transformative.  Let’s do it right:  At least let’s make every attempt to base our opinions on quantitative analysis, not “intuition,” hearsay, and “common sense.” One tool that we’ve found instructive in analyzing the impacts of renewable alternatives to fossil fuels is an examination of the land area required for a net yield of energy from a given fuel.  Fossil fuels take up little surface area - they are underground, and moreover incomparably concentrated. (Of course, you need to keep in mind that they have taken hund...

  Why Does It Matter? We have been writing this column now for almost a year, but recently realized we’ve neglected to explain why.  First of all, the title:  Energy Matters.  You can read this as a short sentence, with “Energy” as the subject and “Matters” as the verb.  Or you can just see it as a noun phrase, a label: “matters having to do with energy.”  In brief, we write about the latter because we believe the former. To a physicist, pretty much everything boils down to energy. Energy is essential to our daily lives in every way, and more so all the time. Cumulatively, this results in the fact that human society’s energy demands are so immense now that they are substantially altering the energy dynamics of the planet itself. We make domestic energy-related decisions all the time, but how often are they well thought out? How often do we just follow assumptions or our “instincts” about what makes sense? Says the physicist, not often enough and altogether ...