Powering Humanity (eBook)

Prologue: Energy Interconnections

As classically defined from the early industrial era, energy is “the capacity to do work.” However, in the modern context, that definition seems very limited compared with what energy actually offers society. Taking a broader and updated view, energy could be defined as “the ability to do interesting and useful things.” Energy brings illumination, information, heat, clean water, abundant food, motion, comfort and much more to our homes and factories with the turn of a valve or the touch of a button. It is the potential to harvest a crop, refrigerate it, and fly it around the world. It is the ability to drive across the country or fly across the world in the fraction of the time it would take to walk, ride or row. And it also facilitates education, health and security. 

Energy’s importance was noted by late Nobel laureate Richard E. Smalley of Rice University in a lecture he gave in 2003 highlighting the “Top Ten Problems of Humanity for the Next 50 Years.” His list was organized in descending order of importance, with energy at the top. Developing plentiful sources of clean, reliable, affordable energy, he argued, enables us to tackle all the subsequent problems of humanity, related to water, food, democracy, war, and so forth. I agree. Energy is a vital part of our world.

Our civilization is founded on access to energy; the corollary is therefore that a lack of energy would lead to its collapse.

Energy cuts across all the sectors — water, food, health, security, the environment and the economy — that matter for a peaceful, prosperous life. It is complex, intertwined and dynamic. It is connected to all parts of our lives and societies and, arguably, we couldn’t live without it. In that way, energy itself has become one of our most basic needs. Energy is also part of every one of the five main human needs.

For that reason, I have organized this compendium of essays I’ve written over the past decade and a half according to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:

Physiological needs: Energy, food and water;
Garbage in and garbage out

Safety needs: Energy and education;
Energy and the environment

Connection needs: Energy and the global economy;
Energy and transportation

Esteem needs: Old versus new energy; Energy and innovation.

Self-Actualization needs: Energy and society;
Energy and culture; The folly of predictions.

For developing economies, energy is often still a wish. Energy, water, food, sanitation and waste disposal — they’re not givens. For modern economies with universal energy access, it is easy to take for granted that energy will always be there — that our physiological needs will be met. More than 99 percent of the time in the United States, we don’t think about these services: The water flows at the turn of a valve, the wastewater tidily drains away at the push of a button, the lights shine at the flick of a switch, and the gas warms our homes, heats our water or cooks our food with the twist of a knob. This is the way it should be.

When storms or other natural disasters strike though, and the power, water, gas or gasoline gets disrupted, then the value of ready access to energy becomes clear. This sentiment is captured by the adage that “we know the value of water when the well is dry.” Likewise, we know the value of energy when our lights are out or we can’t get fuel at the pump.

At major holidays, the water and wastewater treatment plants don’t shut down. When pandemics sweep across the world, when natural disasters hit or economic markets stumble, broken water and sewer pipes don’t wait for repair. Power outages don’t wait to be fixed next week. Usually, someone is away from their family taking care of those problems for us. Like doctors and nurses who work holidays, so, too, do energy workers. I would argue that the biggest threat to public health has everything to do with whether the water and wastewater systems are operating properly. If water systems fail, public health crises can escalate out of control quickly — as we see occurs frequently in developing economies in the wake of natural disasters, like when a cholera outbreak struck Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake. Or when the power went out for several days across Texas in 2021 due to a cold snap; that disaster ended up killing at least 246 people, but possibly several hundred more.

So when we think about thanking our frontline heroes, like doctors and nurses, we should also think about our energy workers, arguably, modern society’s most important people — invisible superheroes.1 But instead of capes and masks, they wear hardhats and steel-toed shoes.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, natural disasters and severe weather, energy workers have been hard at work in dangerous conditions, clearing debris, stringing lines and putting themselves at risk to make our lives more comfortable. This heroism is highlighted in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia’s attacks on energy infrastructure put Ukrainian people at risk beyond just the collateral damage of the bombs, bullets and missiles. Energy workers worked to bring systems back online, putting their own lives at risk.

Utility workers are invisible when they are doing their jobs well. In a modern society, the best utilities are the ones we don’t think about. If we think about a utility, it’s usually for negative reasons: The bills are too high; the service is unreliable; or its system sparked fires, spills, contaminations or explosions.

It is from that lens — the view that energy is essential — that I authored or co-authored some 200 essays, op-eds and contributions for newspapers, magazines and blogs from 2008 to 2022. There are some recurring themes: energy’s interconnections with everything we care about, a need for rational policies, geopolitical impacts from local events and persistent change. There are some predictions. Some of these essays in retrospect look prescient while others look overly simplistic or short-sighted. But even the ones that were flat-out wrong are useful because they reveal what I was thinking (or what conventional wisdom held to be true) at the time, even if the future eventually proved us wrong. The mistakes offer useful lessons about how we should not underestimate the potential for change, innovation and unforeseen events.

As someone engaged with the general public, policymakers and industry, I felt compelled to write those articles over the years to clarify for myself my own thoughts, but also to inject some more viewpoints into the public discourse. Hopefully those contributions were helpful.

Organizing such a vast body of words is no easy task. Fewer than half of the essays I wrote between 2008 and 2022 are included in this collection, and we updated numbers in those that are included.

Energy is a dynamic industry, so important events and trends unfolded during the time span that these essays cover. Oil prices spiked, collapsed, rose, collapsed again, then spiked again. Wind, solar and battery prices plunged as market adoptions soared. Disasters such as the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan that triggered a failure of the nuclear power plant in Fukushima, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, the 2017 near-complete dam collapse in Oroville, California, plus extreme weather events like droughts and hurricanes, significant geopolitical events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, civil unrest, refugee crises, and land wars all strained and pushed the energy system in ways that were hard to anticipate. The consequences of those events continue to cascade globally.

Market forces and policies are additional external factors that impose change on the energy industry, as consumers, investors and policymakers demand more from the system, pushing for greater cleanliness, reliability, affordability, and in some cases domestic sourcing.

Another major theme my essays dive into is energy transitions. Change is in fact one of the constants of the energy industry — it is always changing. New technologies improve the way we produce and move energy. New appliances change where and why we use energy. Evolving concerns about energy reliability, geopolitical risks and environmental legacies shift our priorities over time to cleaner and more secure forms of energy. Taken together, this collection of changes gives us an “energy transition.” The energy world has always been one of transitions: In the second half of the 1800s we moved from wood to coal and whale oil to kerosene for heat and lighting. For power generation, we started with falling water then added steam power (from coal, nuclear, gas, oil, geothermal or wood sources) before adding wind and solar power over the last century-plus. Now, we’re in the process of transitioning away from unscrubbed carbon-based energy that produces greenhouse gases we dump in the sky to cleaner forms and processes as we face the climate crisis that might displace hundreds of millions of people while affecting ecosystems, coastlines, aquifers and agriculture. Though climate change is driven by many factors including land use changes and agriculture, the way we produce, move and consume energy is responsible for about two-thirds of the overall effect.

Unfortunately, the energy industry has a reputation for being slow moving. So a question on the table is how this transition — which is a combination of changing forms of energy (for example from fossil fuels to other options) and changing technologies (such as the shift from combustion engines to electric vehicles) — can be...