An evening with Steven Chu
Last night I went to Indiana State University to see recent Secretary of Energy and Physics Nobel Laureate Steven Chu. He was a bit sore as last Wednesday he was in an accident on his bike, which meant he was seated during the reception as well as much of his talk.
The first part of his talk was really a primer on climate change, which took the most conservative position possible given the science. In commenting on temperature rise he described the past decade or so as a pause, and said our models aren't good enough to say with any confidence what will happen in the next few decades. This being Indiana, in the question period the first question jumped on the notion that our models are no good to push climate change denial, and Chu argued strongly that longer-term trends are much clearer and we know we'll be seeing significant warming over 50-100 year time spans.
Speaking of the questions, someone asked whether he thought, realistically, that we were going to stay under a 2 degree Celcius warming. Chu said that technologically we could, but we won't, and that CO2 could peak anywhere from 450 to 550 ppm, maybe even more.
A few predictions... we hear a lot about China and India, but he strongly criticized their growth as an excuse for US inaction. On one hand, Europe isn't taking that as an excuse, and their energy use is comparable to ours. More importantly, China's leaders are very concerned with climate, and are serious about getting emissions under control. He predicted they will put a price on carbon well before we do. Chu also depicted their concerns as very pragmatic. Northern China is running low on water, and climate change will put enormous stress on their economy. This is why he is confident they will act. Someone offered that China is building a coal plant per week, and Chu said that's wrong, it's more like one every month or two, and pointed out their huge growth in renewables and the 30 nuclear plants under construction as evidence of their seriousness about finding alternatives to fossil fuels.
In terms of our energy mix, by mid-century he advocates 50-60% wind/solar/hydro, with the remainder split between nuclear and fossil fuels with carbon capture. The main reason for the non-renewable component is the need to deal with weather, and he really didn't say much about why large-scale storage isn't a big part of his mix (though he did have one slide showing a humble windmill as a model of how to use use energy as it comes available (in this case, to pump water) and said we need to re-learn this way of thinking). His main idea on storage was the production of liquid hydrocarbons from captured carbon. Chu seemed to consider this superior to huge pumped storage schemes. He also thinks 80-100% renewables is simply not feasible, certainly not by mid-century and probably not for a long, long time.
Chu utterly rejected the notion that there is any important grid-related barrier to 50-60% renewables, pointing out the experiences of many European countries. He discussed Hawaii's electrical system in some detail and mocked officials there who suggested that 5% solar essentially saturates their grid's capacity to absorb renewables.
For Chu, the main issue is cost. The only way to get people to leave fossil fuels in the ground is to make the alternatives cheaper. He pointed out that the cost of the panels themselves is no longer the chief cost of solar, and that despite higher labor costs installation in Germany is much cheaper than in the US. There are two reasons we can fix. The first is that many units of government in the US are using the permit process to generate revenue. This cost is largely absent in Germany. The other is that most US installers don't operate with an assembly line philosophy. Installations are more of a craft affair, with one crew doing every part of the work. In Germany, there's a crew that just sets up the framework, another crew that just places the panels, another that does the electrical work... the result is that the total number of worker-hours spent on the roof for a US installation is about three times greater than for the same job in Germany.
He says subsidies for wind and solar can and should disappear over the next few years. Coal is dying because new plants are not cost-competitive with natural gas, unsubsidized wind is very close to being cost-competitive with natural gas, and solar is on its way (though that's clearly further off).
His own research is now more in biology, but he's also doing some battery research. His benchmark is that electric cars will become popular when you can get a 200-300-mile range on a full charge that takes 20 minutes (the time needed for a restroom stop and cup of coffee). The hope for his battery program is to develop a technology that increases energy density by a factor of 4 and charging speed by a factor of 10, but of course this is just basic research at this stage and there's no assurance their scheme will pan out.