Energy Conundrum - Political Fog

Last weekend I announced on Facebook that I was planning to write a few blog posts about energy and power plants to give people an idea of the issues involved in the debates over energy production over the next century. Great idea, right!? Everyone needs energy and has to pay for it, and with things like climate change and the burning of fossil fuels being considered such a big deal, understanding the costs to your wallet and the environment can only be a good thing...

But there’s a VERY big problem trying to put together a study like this. Politics!

I’m maybe half way done researching this stuff (power planets, cost of energy production, etc.), but thanks to the massive amount of politics and government interference (for better or worse) in the energy markets, this study has been an absolute nightmare to put together. None of the studies I’ve done so far (on my blog or otherwise, and I’ve done some seriously political studies in the past) have ever been so full of misdirection, dramatically different statistics and a huge amount of information “masking”. Pretty much everywhere you look the information is overflowing with politically motivated deception and bias. It’s very sad to see and very frustrating to try and get any sort of straight answers.

Government Subsidies, Fines And Taxes

One huge pain in trying to figure out the costs of various types of energy production (power plants) is that cost can change dramatically depending on how much and in what way the government has its fingers in the mix. “Green Alternative Energy”, instead of carbon fuel, is the supposed saviour of the planet because it severely reduces Carbon Dioxide emissions, as well as other expelled gas pollutants. Because of environmental lobbyists pushing hard for green energy to be the way of the future, there are MANY high subsidies on green energy and heavy fines and taxes (which seem to grow with each passing year) on fossil fuels.

Subsidies are massive government hand outs (from collected taxes) that are given to companies that promise to “go green”. It’s an incentive to push this technology forward, because otherwise this technology and source of energy production would be mostly ignored, being far too expensive. The extremely high cost of building such alternative energy power plants makes the business largely unviable, unless the government hands out money to push the industry along.

To give you an example of how this system works, imagine two different companies competing for business. Company A sells chocolate bars and Company B sells health bars. Now let’s imagine that chocolate bars are cheap to make and cheap to sell, and a ton of people gleefully buy and consume them (not caring much that they’re unhealthy). Health bars, on the other hand (in this hypothetical example), are quite expensive to make, and so Company B must charge a lot of money for the health bars or else they can’t make any kind of profit. Unfortunately, the taste comparison between the two bars (chocolate vs health) and the cost to buy either of the bars means that there is very little competition between the two since most people consider the chocolate bar to be a much better value for their money.

The government decides to step in and fix this disparity between the two companies because clearly basic consumer-based capitalism is going to crush the healthy bars into non-existence. To solve this problem the government enacts subsidies and tax incentives because it considers the continued sales of health bars by Company B to be very important (it’s healthy!).

The government gives Company B millions of dollars to help build up its business in any way it can (advertising, stores, production, expansion, research, tax write offs, expenses, etc.) in order to make the business more profitable to keep Company B running. The chocolate bar company, Company A, complains that this isn’t fair because it doesn’t get “hand outs” from the government. The government argues that Company A doesn’t need the hand outs because they make money fine without needing government assistance. Then, to make matters worse for Company A, and to further “level the playing field” between Company A and Company B, the government hits Company A (the chocolate bar company) with fines and extra taxes for selling unhealthy junk food.

Is this fair? No. The idea is that the government knows best (it might, or it might not) and is looking out for everyone’s best interest (in this case, our health). To get what it wants, the government and the people behind the government manipulate the playing field.

These sorts of practices are very common in financial, investment, and government circles. Government often tries to influence how business operates. Sometimes it’s through giving tax breaks to certain types of business. Sometimes it’s done by passing laws and regulations that make it more difficult for businesses to operate as they wish. And sometimes the government hands out loans or even gifts of money to help increase the incentive for people to get into a business that the government deems to be beneficial to society. This can be a bad thing, but it can also be a very good thing. The outcome really depends on what the reasons for these measures are all about.

For example, governments often give tax breaks and money to farmers because the farming industry is crucial to society (producing food). Without these incentives and tax breaks, many farms could not turn any kind of profit, and would thus shut down, depriving us of much needed food. The alternative is for farmers to charge huge sums of money for the food they produce, making the cost of food far too high for most of the population to afford. To prevent that from happening, the government subsidizes the farming industry to help make sure the cost of food stays down.

Because energy is such an essential need and because environmental studies and lobbyists speak of dire consequences if we keep burning fossil fuels for energy, governments all over the world are playing a very difficult balancing act. They want to encourage long term energy security, affordable energy, and environmental care, but it’s not at all a simple matter of black and white or good and bad. It’s a lot more complicated and the politics surrounding the topic makes it that much worse.

What’s The Reality?

When trying to calculate the costs energy, all of the political and government interference contaminates and dramatically alters the picture. The information that’s out there is all over the map and hard to pin down. You might find one place that says that energy provided by coal power plants costs $50 per Megawatt per hour and somewhere else you might find a study that says it costs $300 per Megawatt per hour. Who’s telling the truth?

In their own way, everyone is telling the truth, and no one is. Most of these studies seem to be heavily biased for or against fossil fuels depending on who put the studies together. The more accurate and helpful studies will explain their methodology for calculating costs and expenses, while others will often ignore or gloss over very serious issues so that they can push and promote their political stance at the cost of factual accuracy or clarity.

What’s the lesson in all this? Take all the information, the studies, the research, the projections, the cost analysis and everything else with a massive helping of bitter salt instead of sweet tasting sugar. Don’t just swallow it blindly. Don’t trust the information until you test and really examine it because chances are good that what’s being presented is not entirely honest. Everyone has bias and personal opinion and it very easily clouds a person’s viewpoint on debatable topics. Read between the lines, analyze the sources, compare arguments and data sets, and try to put together the most accurate truthful picture of reality that you can.

Hopefully this week I’ll have it figured out enough to write a helpful blog post or two about power plants and energy so that you (the reader) can have an accurate and truthful understanding of how fossil fuels and green energy compare against each other. This is a very important topic as the costs of energy continue to rise and the debates over man-made climate change and pollution continue to rage.

Energy In The 21st Century (Part 1): Carbon And Energy Are Life

Energy. We all need it. We use it to power our modern technology, our transportation, give us light and heat our homes. Without it we’d be back to horse drawn carriages, candles as light sources, and wood burning stoves. Without it, we’d be back to the dark ages. In fact, without energy, no life on our planet would even be possible.

With electricity being such a crucial aspect of modern life, it’s critically important to know where all this energy is coming from, what it costs to produce, and the consequences around using it. Whether or not you believe that mankind is drastically altering the planet’s climate by burning fossil fuels, pretty much everyone can agree that heavy pollution is not a good thing for any environment. But is there a way to produce energy without harming the environment?

Understanding what energy is, how it works, and how it is used must be at the start of all such discussions because without this foundation it is impossible to have a truthful and realistic perspective.

Energy In All Things

Energy is all about physics and chemistry. All matter is made up of and built by energy, but not all the energy contained within matter is easily accessed or unleashed. Essentially, if the cost of tapping a source of energy requires more energy and effort than is produced, then the effort is a waste because it creates an energy negative. There is no such thing as “creating energy”, only storing energy, releasing energy, and making use of the released energy.

The sun, a burning ball of gas far away in space, produces all kinds of energy in many different forms and sends that energy hurtling out into space. The intense gravity of the huge star crushes and rips apart various gas molecules, destroying and burning them up. This energy passes over our planet and gives us natural heat and light, allowing for the existence of life itself. All the excess "pollution" (unwanted "left overs") that also belches out of the sun disappears into space. This “pollution” in the form of harmful energy (gamma rays, x-rays, ultraviolet light, etc.) is mostly blocked from reaching us thanks to our planet’s atmosphere and magnetic field (think of them like our planet’s invisible shield).

Life itself (ALL life), is constantly harnessing, storing and using up energy in order to survive and power itself. Life uses sugar as its main energy source. You may have heard that carbon-based fuels are “evil” because they cause pollution, but the reality is that carbon-based energy is at the heart of all life on earth. Without it, nothing could live or survive. Plants suck in carbon dioxide and with it (as well as other materials) create glucose, a complex sugar (a carbon-based fuel/energy source). Plants then spit out the left over oxygen that was produced in the conversion. Humans breath in oxygen, to help chop apart glucose (sugar) that we digest by eating those plants, and this powers all the cells in our bodies. Then we breath out the left overs of the chemical reactions involved, carbon dioxide, which plants breath in to help them form glucose… And so on.

It is ESSENTIAL that you understand this simple fact. ALL life requires and uses energy! Most life uses a combination of carbon and oxygen to help harvest, store and utilize energy. Life then burns this energy (stored in sugars) to power itself. Life uses special enzymes (and acids) to split sugar, ripping it apart and burning it up to generate our required heat and electricity.

Energy is a result of a usually destructive chemical reaction. The easier it is to release that energy (as well as store it safely for later), the better and more effective the energy-use system will be.

Harnessing Energy For Technology

Our technology requires energy to function just like our bodies and all life requires energy to live. Because of this constant need for energy, mankind has to have a way of generating or harnessing vast amounts of energy to power our cities.

There are generally two main ways of producing electrical energy in large enough quantities for people to use.

Releasing Energy From Fossil Fuels: Ever since the industrial revolution, energy produced (released) by the burning of materials such as fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas, etc.) have been the mainstays of modern energy. This is how our cars run, our planes fly, and how most of our power plants/stations work. They burn up carbon-based fossil fuels because the vast amounts of easily accessible energy released when these materials are heated up is exactly what our technology needs to work. Note that these carbon-based fuels are usually made by life as a means of storing energy for later. When a living organism dies, the energy it stored up in its body gets left behind, to be used by other living organisms (such as us).

Harnessing Already Active Energy: More advanced methods of harnessing energy attempt to do away with the requirement of burning fossil fuels, since burning fossil fuels tend to cause a lot of pollution. Instead, these other methods try to capture and use some of the naturally occurring energy in the environment around us (heat, light, the sun, weather, wind, rivers, moving objects, etc.). For instance, wind turbines generate their electricity by strong winds turning propeller-like blades, hydro dams generate electricity by the movement of water, and solar panels collect the heat and light from the sun.

Carbon Dioxide Is Not A Pollutant

If you know anything at all about physics and chemistry, you’ll know that energy always costs something. Energy requires the destruction and ripping apart of molecules. There’s no way around that, no escaping that hard fact. This means that there will ALWAYS be left over by-products produced by such molecule-sized violence no matter what anyone does. It’s part of the very laws built into our universe, and part of life itself.

Carbon Dioxide is not an evil pollutant. Carbon dioxide is plant food, and it’s what humans and other creatures exhale from our lungs as a by-product of the energy we use in the form of sugar. Carbon dioxide is not only entirely natural, it’s essential! To label Carbon Dioxide a pollutant would by like labeling water a pollutant. However, too much of anything, even a good thing, can be harmful. THAT is what everyone needs to understand, and keep in mind.

The trick is to meet our energy needs without costing us an arm and a leg and without severely damaging the planet beyond repair in the process.

Conclusion

All energy is born of violent chemical reactions somewhere, whether way out in space (as is the case with our sun), within our own bodies (sugar), or the burning of fossil fuels in a power station or fireplace. Active energy can be generated by heating materials that easily and consistently release energy or it can be harnessed from the environment around us in the forms of heat, light, and motion (wind, rivers, tides, etc.). But no matter what your energy source, it always comes from the destruction of molecules somewhere. It’s simple physics and chemistry, the laws at the heart of our universe.

Energy is essential, and it’s messy. The trick is to use it as efficiently and make it as clean as possible, while also making it affordable and stable.

Stay tuned for my next article about…

Power Stations we use to generate heat and electricity for our modern civilization. The costs and energy output of these necessary services are crucial to the future of mankind and our technology as we push forward into the 21^st century.