Discovering Power’s Traps: a primer for electricity users

In magazines like Mother Jones and Sierra Club, environmentalists who aim to reduce harmful impacts to public health, wildlife habitats and climate systems propose “electrifying everything.”

I don’t get it.

Already, most of our food, shelter, communications and transportation systems depend on electricity. Replacing vehicles, stoves, heaters, water heaters and money (mining bitcoin) with electric ones would require massive expansion of the power grid. We’d have to manufacture lots of new appliances and vehicles (and discard old ones). We’d have to manufacture and operate more substations, generators, transformers, power lines, appliances, circuit boards and batteries. Their manufacturing would require more fossil fuels, more rare earth elements, more water, more smelting and refining, more hazardous chemicals and more international shipping. It would generate more toxic waste and more electromagnetic radiation.

So would adding artificial intelligence (AI), solar PV, wind and battery systems to our technosphere. Electrifying everything would also require expanding telecommunications: more satellites, cell sites, data storage centers and computers.

Given power outages’ increasing frequency, increasing our dependence on electricity now…makes no sense.  

What are our goals again?

To reduce harms to nature: to reduce harms to public health, wildlife habitats and climate systems. To keep power reliable and safe.  

Electrifying everything cannot accomplish these goals.

To reduce harms to nature, we need to manufacture less, consume less and significantly limit new infrastructure. We need liability-carrying subject-matter experts to evaluate every product’s ecological impacts from cradle-to-grave.

To keep power reliable and safe, we need engineers in charge of the grid.

To reduce demands

I understand that using fossil fuels increases global temperatures and severe weather conditions. Electricity, usually powered by natural gas or coal, accounts for roughly 20% of global energy consumption. Transportation (of people and goods), run largely on petroleum, accounts roughly for 25%.

AI and bitcoin increase demand for data storage centers. Data storage centers (currently consuming 2% of all global electricity) increase demand for electricity, mining, land, water and international shipping.

Ditto electric vehicles (EVs).

In 2022, the U.S. consumed about 3.9 trillion kWh of electricity—an increase of about 103 billion kWh from 2021.

So, how do we reduce demands?

To begin, we need a basic understanding of the power grid, utilities and power demand patterns.

Power grid history 

Around 1900, engineers designed an electric grid with power plants generated by coal or hydro to meet that era’s maximum power demands. Electricity flowed one-way—from generation to transmission, to distribution and finally to the customer.

Investors like JP Morgan funded many U.S. utilities. Investor-owned power companies became regulated, highly-profitable monopolies.

We humans began heating and cooling homes, preserving food, powering industries, hospitals and telecommunications…by electricity. We quickly lost know-how for surviving without it.

Mixing a 125-year-old grid with wind and solar systems and EVs

Technically and financially, electric utilities still operate with this 125-year-old grid. Today, 43% of electricity comes from natural gas; 16% comes from coal; nuclear power provides nearly 20%; hydroelectric provides about 6%. Wind provides 10%; solar provides almost 4%.

Changing weather patterns, annual extinctions of up to 2000 species and increasing public health challenges have many people advocating that we transition away from fossil fuels, toward power sourced from utility-scale wind and solar PV systems.

While I also advocate for reduced mining, fossil fuel consumption and toxic waste, I just don’t see that replacing appliances with electric ones and gas-powered vehicles with EVs can reduce electricity’s ecological impacts. I don’t see that utility-scale wind and solar PV systems can provide reliable power.

First, no manufacture can make appliances (their metal frames, circuit boards, cords), wind turbines (blades, gears, masts and concrete bases), solar PVs (silicon wafers, electrical wiring and concrete mounts) or batteries without fossil fuels, mined ores, chemicals and water. No manufacturer can transport raw materials from mining sites to refineries or a heat pump or solar panel or electric vehicle or 20,000-pound wind turbine blade to its final site…without fossil fuels.

Then, wind and solar generate only intermittent power. Wind cannot generate power without a breeze; solar cannot generate power on cloudy days or at night. People who get power from wind or solar and who expect electricity 24/7 therefore require backup from fossil-fuel-powered turbine generators or batteries.

Batteries cannot meet large-scale power demands. (If driving one 3000-pound vehicle 300 miles requires charging a 1000-pound battery, imagine how many batteries you’d need to power a city of 100,000 or one million people. Given the realities, batteries can’t do it.)

About 80% of rooftop solar PV customers do not have batteries. They keep connected to the grid, send their unused power to the utility and receive electricity from the utility at night and on cloudy days. What do utilities do with unused power? They dump it, sell it—or pay another utility to take it.

In North America, solar PV systems often generate more power than they can use from noon to 4pm. Power demands are usually greatest from about 5pm to 8pm—when people return home, cook, and turn on air conditioners and TVs.

Our grid was designed to send power to customers, not to receive it from them. Two-way (net-metering) systems challenge utilities to maintain safe frequency and voltage. Net-metering meters also require power. They complicate billing—and typically have non-net metering customers paying for rooftop solar customers’ infrastructure.

Then, all electrical equipment poses fire hazards. When batteries catch fire, their toxic emissions are extremely hazardous. A rooftop solar installation increases a home’s electrical connections—and thereby, its fire risks. If a solar PV system catches fire while the sun shines, you cannot de-energize its panels. Charging EVs overheats nearby transformers—and shortens their typical lifespan from 30 or 40 years to three. 

There’s also the question of available land. The U.S.’s total land mass encompasses 3,532,316 square miles. Engineers, please: is that enough land to power the country with solar PVs from November through January?

            When solar panels and wind turbines reach the end of their usable lives, they do not biodegrade. Dumping such hazardous waste is expensive. If an energy provider files for bankruptcy (and county commissioners did not require the corporation to post a bond), who will pay to dispose the facility’s waste?

            As far as I can see, adding new technologies to a 125-year-old electric grid makes it more complex—not more reliable.

When profit rules the bottom line

Two more items: 1) usually, minimizing ecological damage is not profitable; and 2) investor-owned utilities prioritize profits.

A utility’s largest expense comes from employing engineers who maintain proper frequency and voltage; meter readers and billing staff; and from purchasing and maintaining generators, transformers, transmission lines and meters.

Primarily, a utility profits by charging customers double-digit rate-of-return interest on new equipment. To increase profits, investors prefer large power generation plants (including large-scale solar PV and wind turbine facilities) and new transmission lines.

Utilities struggle to incorporate solar and wind-generated power into the grid. They might use a “virtual power plant” to aggregate multiple energy systems and EV chargers. Because of power sources’ variety (natural gas, coal, solar, etc.), ratepayers’ variety (residential, industrial, hospital) and tariff and billing issues, utilities face complex coordination challenges. Incorporating multiple energy resources into the grid could cost one trillion dollars or more—and still, it would be vulnerable to severe weather conditions.

Adding virtual power plants, increasing utility-scale solar PV and wind systems, electrifying all vehicles and adding data storage centers could require utilities to double their transmission systems, distribution wires and transformers. This would increase investors’ profits significantly.

Environmentally, it would mean bulldozing more wildlife habitats, cutting down forests for solar and wind facilities, extracting ores and water from complex ecosystems, polluting them with toxic chemicals—and manufacturing more products that do not biodegrade.

What options do we have?

We should acknowledge that electricity without ecological damage is not possible. Not if we evaluate power systems from their cradles to their graves.

So then, to decrease reliable electricity’s ecological damage, what options do we have?

Since large-scale solar or wind facilities (whose energy is distributed over long distance and backed up from batteries or fossil fuels) will not reduce energy use, greenhouse gas emissions or costs—or increase electricity’s reliability, several engineers I know advocate for small systems. Placed at or near the point of use and owned and controlled by users, small-solar or wind systems can reduce energy, waste and water—and increase reliability.

I have not advocated for any kind of solar or wind system because manufacturing either causes so much ecological damage; and neither provides sufficient power for industrial processes like smelting or running a hospital.

Then, a colleague asked me about a power system for post-conflict situations. For residential areas, I found myself suggesting small-scale solar PVs without net-metering, with battery storage and direct current (DC). DC eliminates inverters—which provide access to alternating current (AC), require energy, and generate harmful dirty power. This would use DC appliances like those made for boats and motor homes. It would keep power within local control.

Focus on reducing electricity demands  

In existing situations, we need to reduce ecological harms and increase safety:

1. Challenge every household, school, business, manufacturer and government office building to reduce energy consumption by 3% per month for at least three years. Provide youth-led forums about reducing production and consumption.

2. Create jobs that localize food production, compost kitchen scraps and build nutrient-dense soil. Build insulated raised beds and/or geothermally-heated greenhouses for four-season growing. At schools, have students grow at least 50% of their food—to reduce oil-and-Internet-dependent agriculture.  

3. Employ youth to build anaerobic biodigesters for households, schools and business cafeterias. Biodigesters turn kitchen scraps and human or animal manure into liquid fertilizer and methane gas. One household’s daily waste can generate enough methane to cook for two hours. While I question biodigesters’ methane emissions (does bio-digesting kitchen scraps and manure reduce overall methane emissions?), I think they’re worth exploring. See Environmental & Energy Study Institute’s fact sheet about converting waste to energy; How to make biogas at home with a biogas digester, Mother Earth News; Building a Biodigester with T.H. Culhane, and Food waste audit at the University of Florida.  

4. Redesign cities for walkability and bicycling. Increase public transportation. Expand libraries to include tool lending. Enact right-to-repair legislation. Celebrate repair-people who gives tools longer life.

5. Swap unused goods like food, medicine, electronics. Share traditional skills. Support elders to provide newborn-family care, hospice and ecological burials.

6. Make unused houses livable and affordable. Employ youth to insulate buildings and paint rooftops with reflective paint to reduce energy demands.

7. With new electrical or telecom service, require documentation from a professional engineer (PE) that overvoltage, fault current, accuracy and the effects of radiofrequency radiation (RF) have been evaluated and mitigated.

8. Educate students about mobile devices’ international supply chains, social media addiction, and health risks from radiation exposure. Prohibit mobile devices in schools. Use wired Internet access.

9. Challenge engineers to recognize electronics’ ecological damage from cradle-to-grave, design biodegradable computers, biodegradable solar modules, and design for devices’ second life.

10. Eliminate production of unnecessary goods such as private jets, fast fashion, children’s laptops, electric skateboards and _________ (fill in the blank).

11. Prohibit new data storage centers and power plants for AI and bitcoin.

12. Employ data curators to eliminate unused data.

As for industrial applications and civil infrastructure, a reader sent me to Langenburg Tech, a modular, globally compliant system headquartered in Eugene. I say: give it due diligence. Put it on the question/chopping block.

These practices might move us toward not taking from the Earth faster than It can replenish. We just need motivation.

Changing as I write

As I write, Congress and some state legislatures face bills like Colorado Senator John Hickenlooper’s BIG WIRES Act, which would likely impose large-scale power generators and storage on communities and give investors—not electrical engineers, not community members opposed to substations or transmission lines near schools or homes—control of electricity. The new, common message is that large-scale solar and wind facilities and EVs will resolve climate change—and therefore communities have no choice but to welcome them.

But what society can sustain lack of choice and lack of cradle-to-grave due diligence on new developments?

When a journalist who reports on solar PVs’ ecological harms learned I recommended small-scale solar for post-conflict situations, he raised red flags.

“Fair enough,” I replied. Then I asked him what he’d recommend.

He agreed to think about it.

Indeed, dear reader, we need forums for informing ourselves, youth, legislators and investors about electricity’s cradle-to-grave impacts—and for strategizing how to reduce them while we keep power and telecommunications within local control.  

Everyone who participates in this discussion is worthy of respect.

OTHER NEWS

Max Wilbert, How to Stop Worrying and Love the Bulldozer. A biocentric journalist looks at Mother Jones’/Bill McKibben’s push to electrify everything.

For Bodies Needing more than screens: doing these movements twice a day really helps me:

Toe tapping for headaches, insomnia, overthinking

Brain wave vibration

Plate balancing

Good News from Daisy Greenwell: “The Revolution Has Begun in the UK: 75,000 UK parents have come together to give their kids a smartphone-free childhood,” April 29, 2024.

According to the Reuters Institute, more than 75%  of America’s leading newspapers, magazines, and journals are behind online paywalls. Almost 80% of Americans search for a free option. Paywalls divide people who pay for information from everyone else. While an informed public makes democracy possible, paywalls keep the public uninformed.

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