America’s Big Charge Account

There’s a significant body of historians who will tell you that hydroelectric dams built in the Great Depression years as public works projects won World War II. The Tennessee Valley Authority was created in 1933, Hoover Dam (once known as Boulder Dam) in 1936, Bonneville Dam in 1937, Grand Coulee Dam in 1942, etc. Seems all that excess electrical power was what it took to manufacture with steel: planes, tanks, ships, etc. Without those vital supplies, the Allies would have crumpled under the Axis boot. But dams don’t have an unlimited life; they silt up, the infrastructure wears out, and building new hydroelectric projects has a profound impact on the rivers upon which they are built.

Where once the ability to gather masses of armies – under threat or promise of booty – determined the outcome of wars, perhaps in a modern world it has become access to energy and technology that creates the new “power.” And that takes money and know-how. As Dr. A.Q. Khan – the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program – distributed the technology to make bombs to at least North Korea and Iran, believe me, they followed suit. Technology leaks and gets reverse-engineered… filling ignorant dictators with abilities as long as the wallet is willing. But energy to make complex military hardware, well, now that’s really expensive.

As the BP debacle in the Gulf illustrates, the cost of seeking energy isn’t always the just cost of building the power plants and extracting raw fuel sources. Fossil fuels are limited, and the countries with the greatest remaining supplies seem to be, for the most part, not necessarily the most reliable sources of precious petroleum products. If you hadn’t noticed (you probably walk or take public transportation), prices at the pump are skyrocketing. In the slow process of running out of oil… and will take a very long time before we truly hit bottom… as the prices of fossil fuels reach untenable levels, exactly what does it cost to have a society running on alternative energy? Who seems to implement new systems effectively?

Through various conferences, most global leaders have their eye on 25% of national energy to be derived from new “alternative energy” sources – aside from nuclear power and dams. We’ve seen how geothermal, filled with so much promise, generally requires power generation in areas of geological instability, and building a plant often increases the area’s vulnerability to earthquakes. So we have tidal power, wind and solar and other comparable “clean and safe” systems. Do we have any examples of countries that have made huge inroads to building and operating with such alternative systems? Maybe we have to look at one small Western nation, one that is on the PIIGS list of over-borrowed fragile European Union economies: Portugal.

Likely to be the first major nation (maybe along with Norway) to have a reliable national network of automotive electrical charging stations (the system is expected to go online next year), Portugal is “light” years ahead of the United States in implementing a national power system that is no longer based on fossil fuels or nuclear power. Most of Portugal’s new programs were begun just five years ago, this tiny nation on the Iberian Peninsula is on the verge of generating 45% of the power on its electrical grid system from renewable sources, more than doubling its 2005 levels of sustainable power.

The U.S. is way, way behind: “Still, aggressive national policies to accelerate renewable energy use are succeeding in Portugal and some other countries, according to a recent report by IHS Emerging Energy Research of Cambridge, Mass., a leading energy consulting firm. By 2025, the report projected, Ireland, Denmark and Britain will also get 40 percent or more of their electricity from renewable sources; if power from large-scale hydroelectric dams, an older type of renewable energy, is included, countries like Canada and Brazil join the list… The United States, which last year generated less than 5 percent of its power from newer forms of renewable energy, will lag behind at 16 percent (or just over 20 percent, including hydroelectric power), according to IHS.” New York Times (August 9^th)

Portugal’s triumph wasn’t cheap, but at least they bit the bullet early in the game and will reap the benefits for the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, local consumers feel the cost very heavily, a burden that is particularly hard to carry in impaired economic times: “Portuguese households have long paid about twice what Americans pay for electricity, and prices have risen 15 percent in the last five years, probably partly because of the renewable energy program, the International Energy Agency says…To force Portugal’s energy transition, [the] government restructured and privatized former state energy utilities to create a grid better suited to renewable power sources. To lure private companies into Portugal’s new market, the government gave them contracts locking in a stable price for 15 years — a subsidy that varied by technology and was initially high but decreased with each new contract round.” The Times.

The U.S. has to deal with a hodge-podge of vast numbers of local utilities, state governments, private and public power companies, all with differing agendas and financial restrictions on what they can afford and, more importantly, what they are willing to invest when they can make more than enough money under existing, albeit archaic, systems and technologies. There are more barriers to progress in the United States than in most centrally-controlled power systems found elsewhere. Can we make the change or will “too late necessity” push us later in the game when the costs are higher and the stakes more desperate?

I’m Peter Dekom, and we either adapt and change… or, like old technologies, we are simply replaced.