 So good afternoon. My name is Maggie Kurth Baker. I am a science journalist. I'm the science editor at boing boing net And I just spent the last two years working on a book about the future of energy It's called before the lights go out conquering the energy crisis before it conquers us And it's really about the big picture what I'm trying to do here Is look at all these little projects people read about in the newspaper and then pull back so we can see where things are Actually headed, you know, what are the big trends that are going to be shaping what we can and can't do in the years to come? And as I researched this book, I noticed something really interesting The future of energy at least in the short term is probably going to be a little bit boring And that's probably something you've noticed today as well during this conference I'm sorry, and that's probably something you've noticed today as well during this conference So what I really want to talk about here today is why 2030 is likely to look a little less exciting than we probably Hope and why that's actually an okay thing To start off with that I want to look at what the future of energy could look like if we make no changes to the way we currently use and make energy This graph is based on data from IGSM, which is a model put together by MIT and IGSM looks at Making predictions about things like climate change and energy and how those two things interact with one another And what you see when you look at this chart is really a whole lot of more you see more consumption You see more use of fossil fuels and along with that you see more emissions and you see more risk Basically by the time you get to 2100 you have that sense of us. This is it. We're all going to die and That's exciting, but it's exciting in all of the wrong ways So what happens if we avoid that exciting future? What does this veritable hippie utopia that we all kind of want to build actually look like? IGSM that same model I told you about a minute ago has also been used to make predictions about what the future of energy could look like if We take action on climate change and limit atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions to 550 parts per million Now bear in mind. That's actually a somewhat stringent goal. We're currently at 390 parts per million We were at 330 parts per million 30 years ago and there are more countries Industrializing and adding to that burden all the time So the changes that we have to make to hit 550 parts per million are not small and you can see that by the time We get to 2100 massive changes have happened. We have a great big energy reduction I just said mispredicted. We're using a lot less oil and natural gas. We're using a lot more biofuels We're using a little bit more renewables and all of our coal has had the carbon emissions scrubbed out at the smokestack But what happens if you zoom in what happens if you look at 2030 in? The short term even if we do things right and we head towards these big goals You find the 2030 doesn't look all that different from the reality where we don't take action If you look there are some differences if you look side by side here at the 2030 where we've done nothing and the 2030 Where we have capped carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere You see that we're using a lot less coal and you see that we have an energy reduction Ultimately, we're using about 17% less energy in the future where we've taken action than the one where we've done nothing But when you look at what this means in the big picture, they're really kind of the same We're still relying primarily on fossil fuels our lives have not changed in any significant way This 2030 is not a future where everyone is driving around in electric cars with solar panels on their roofs This is kind of boring and it's boring because of the past The last time we made major changes to our energy infrastructure was in 1882 when the first electrical grids in the entire world were built They were both built in the US and you're probably familiar with the first one which was put together by Thomas Edison on Pearl Street in New York City This is a replica of the second Electric grid in the entire world and the first hydroelectric power plant in the entire world It was not anywhere near New York City. It is in Appleton, Wisconsin and it was also Not put together by Thomas Edison The people in Appleton were a consortium of business local businessmen and they bought technology from Thomas Edison But really put together the grid on the seat of their pants essentially They had none of the expertise that Edison had they could not invent their way out of problems and they also made some mistakes along the way There is an old engineering proverb that says you can have something done right You can have something done cheap or you can have something done fast and you get to pick two And the people in Appleton chose cheap and fast and it showed my favorite story about this is how they went about Monitoring voltage on this electricity grid Thomas Edison had invented a voltmeter and he used it at Pearl Street But the people who built the Appleton grid did not want to pay for that piece of technology So instead they had a guy a guy who sat in a shack very much like that one down by the river And he stared at a light bulb and if the light bulb got too dim or if the light bulb got too bright They knew that they had a voltage problem So you can see that the electric grid in Appleton did not work exactly the way that people had originally planned for it To it also did not make money like they had intended it to the Appleton electric company actually went bankrupt in fact it went bankrupt several times and So did many of the other first utility companies in the world Thomas Edison made a lot of money off of his patents But it would be decades before anyone else made significant amounts of money off of electricity In fact if you look at the history of electricity what you actually see is this history of failure You had 80 years of different inventors tinkering around with the incandescent light bulb trying to get to something That would be reliable and commercializable and then after Thomas Edison did that you had another 40 years of Different companies trying and failing to make a business out of electricity and there's a reason for that in 1882 There were only a few things that you could actually do with electricity You could light a light bulb you could burn your house down Or you could accidentally electrocute yourself and all three of those are really common but only one of them was popular and You could not make enough money on just light bulbs alone To actually make back the cost of building this brand-new infrastructure It wasn't until the 1920s After a concerted effort on the part of electric utilities to invent small electric appliances like the toaster oven and The curling iron and to find more things to do with electric motors that the business was actually able to take off So what I learned about the history of electricity prepared me for what I was going to learn about the future of electricity The truth is that this kind of massive change is really messy and it's also Kind of banal. It's not flying cars that shape the world. It's things like the invention of the toaster oven Today we are not trying to build a new electric infrastructure from scratch In fact, we are trying to do something a lot harder We are trying to take this old infrastructure and solder on all these new Technologies that are meant to solve problems that nobody even knew existed when the original infrastructure was built That's not easy We talk a lot about political willpower in these conversations about energy this idea that if we just got all the politicians on board If people could accept the science of climate change We could move forward and solve our problems very quickly and that's simply not true The truth is that politics matter, but there are things that matter besides politics and those get in our way Reality is messy and because reality is messy 2030 is boring Let's take a closer look at this. This is again that graph from IGSM showing you what 2030 is likely to look like if we take action on climate change and try to limit Atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions to 550 parts per million. You've got that reduction in energy use You've got less coal, but still a lot of natural gas You've got a little bit more renewables But not a great deal more and I want to talk about why this is the factors that make this 2030 kind of boring The first issue is the rebound effect and This really ties into that reduction in energy use because if we're going to get a 17% reduction in energy use We're going to need a lot more energy efficiency Energy efficiency is one of our greatest tools Conservation can help but energy efficiency does something conservation can't do it allows us to use less fossil fuels While simultaneously maintaining these comfortable clean and convenient lifestyles that we all enjoy and for good reason We need energy efficiency, but energy efficiency has a problem and that problem is the rebound effect This is an actual quote from a story about energy efficiency energy efficient appliances in my local newspaper from Southwest Minneapolis My husband is an energy efficiency analyst and I about became a widow when I he read this story in his head almost exploded This is an example of the rebound effect The rebound effect is what happens when as we reduce our energy use through energy efficiency We increase our energy use in other ways. Let me give you another example I work from home so because of that I don't have to drive every day on a commute And that's a form of efficiency because I still get my job done But I just don't have to spend fuel to do it and because I don't have to spend fuel I save money in fact I save about $1,200 a year that I would have otherwise spent on gas Coincidentally $1,200 is just about the right amount of money to fly my husband from and me from Minnesota to Florida during the dead of winter So you can see how The rebound effect can eat away in nibbles and big bites at the kind of energy efficiency that we really need And part of the problem with the rebound effect is that we don't actually have a good idea right now of how big it is Economists and researchers have really only been studying it empirically for maybe 15 years And while we do know some things about it from direct effects. We don't know what it does to the entire economy So the big lesson we need to learn about this energy efficiency Is that it's not going to be as easy as we'd like it to be and we need to start paying more attention to What we can do whether that's through a carbon price or whether that's through other factors to allow people to see when they are using fossil fuels and When they are depleting the energy efficiency gains that they've thought they've gotten The second thing I want to talk about is storage We've talked a lot here today about batteries and vehicles, but batteries on your electric grid are also kind of a big deal And we don't really have any the truth is that our electric grid is Not terribly stable at any given point in time We have to have almost exactly the same amount of electricity going into it as we have coming out and Maintaining that balance is a 24-hour seven-day-a-week job that never ever ever ends Why is it so precarious? As you saw in Appleton, nobody designed this grid this grid evolved and it evolved just to get the job done Not to do the absolute best job that possibly could no matter the cost And we're dealing with that now because wall the grid got the job done with fossil fuels It doesn't work quite as well with renewables and it can't work very well with them for long You've heard about brownouts, but what about whiteouts it turns out that too much electricity on the grid is just as bad as not enough and They've learned that in the Pacific Northwest in to October of 2009. They had a day that had Very sunny very nice Saturday afternoon when a lot of people were outdoors and energy Demand was low, but it was also a windy day and so energy production at all of the region's wind turbines were fairly high So you had a lot of electricity going into the grid and not enough electricity coming out of the grid and that could lead to a Really bad situation where essentially the grid fries itself and shuts down In that situation the only thing that people could do to solve the problem was to call up these wind farms and have them just shut off They had all of this Energy that they couldn't actually make use of all of the supply that just couldn't go anywhere that's not an isolated incident and it's not something we would have a problem with if we had more electrical storage on our utility grid the Experts tell me that we really only have a limit to the amount of Renewables that we can incorporate into our grid that it's about 20 to 30 percent wind and solar Before we're going to need to make some big changes changes that cost a lot of money and changes that take time Storage is one of those but we also need more smart grids that can help us balance supply and demand better And we also need more transmission that can carry power from places that have too much wind to places that don't have enough Until we make those changes We are going to be reliant on coal and we're going to be reliant on natural gas and that's what you see in that 2030 The third issue is Decentralization and this is really about where we get our power from today and how we can better take advantage of resources in the future Let me give you an example I grew up in Kansas and Kansas does not have a great deal of hydroelectric power In fact, the entire state has about one megawatt of hydroelectric capacity And when you think about that initially it seems to make a lot of sense because Kansas also does not have a great deal of water I was in Dolt before I ever saw a lake that wasn't built by human hands but the reality is that that situation has less to do with Kansas's resources than it has to do with how we have traditionally gone about harvesting those resources if Hydroelectric power has to be something big if it has to be something where you find the right site where you can build a Reservoir and you can build a dam and you can get hundreds of megawatts of capacity or thousands of megawatts of capacity Then Kansas is out of luck But if hydroelectric power can be something different if it can be something that's set into the run of the river if it can Be something that comes in capacities between 1 megawatt and 50 then Kansas has a lot of potential that it has not tapped into yet In fact, the Department of Energy thinks that Kansas has the potential of easily captureable hydroelectric capacity To get up to 300 megawatts of hydroelectric capacity. That's a big increase It's not enough to get rid of coal power in the state But it's enough to displace a lot of coal power in a state that's pretty coal dependent and that makes a difference better is better But this is not how we do energy today And there's a reason for that Historically it has been a lot better economically to build a great big power plants in the middle of nowhere and Ship that power to places far away Then it's been to build a lot of little power plants closer to the people that use it But there are some factors that are changing that I Told you earlier that it's expensive and it takes a long time to build transmission and that is true for coal Just like it's true for wind Experts have told me that it is more expensive today to build the transmission lines for a new power plant than it is to build the power plant itself and That is opening up some opportunities for us to build Energy at a smaller scale not the scale of you know Your rooftop but the scale of communities or regions or states rather than multi-state And when you do that you also get the ability to capture some resources that you could not otherwise capture as you can as I Told you about with Kansas's hydropower, but there's more than that It also enables us to better capture landfill gas It enables us to better capture more sustainable versions of biofuels and it enables us to use more Combined heat and power plants that make allow us to use natural gas in a way. That's a lot more energy efficient All three of these things Decentralization storage and the rebound effect add up to being what makes 2030 kind of boring These are the things that build our future that we're looking at today and that's okay 2030 can be boring That's because our goal today the goal that we have before us is not to create a utopia as fast as we possibly can That's simply not possible because all of these different technologies that are solutions to something have their own problems We're going to run into their side effects We're going to run into problems of integrating them with one another and you can't do that and build something that's sustainable Not just environmentally, but sustainable monetarily and sustainable technology wise in a very short amount of time Boring is good because boring is the first step that leads us towards something that is sustainable within the real-world constraints of time and money Boring is good. I don't know exactly what the future of energy is going to look like in 2030 But my hope is that it's going to be boring in all the right ways Thank you