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This is an expanded and updated version of
a talk given on January 25, 2006 to House and Senate staff, arranged by the
leadership in part to prepare discussion of the bill HR 4409 and in part to
provide inputs for the following week. I regret that I did not make time for
some of the most critical near-term points in these slides – because all of
the details really matter – but we are working on it…
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As I put these slides together, it really
came home to me how different my way of thinking about energy is from most
people’s. It became different long ago, when I left the university world to
work at the Energy Information Administration of DOE. My first job at EIA was
to analyze all the models of the long-term energy future – and the
assumptions about technology and economics and resources which go into them –
and try to figure out what we really know about the long-term future from all
of that. You may think of the DOE as a very large place, but really, there
were very few of us assigned to put it all together and see what it adds up
to in that way. There are lots of people assigned to fighting short-term
fires, to worrying about near-term tax breaks and subsidies, or managing
specialized areas. But by the time I left, there were really only two of us
in the whole department truly assigned to the long-term big picture.
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I learned a lot of lessons in that job. The
first was that no one starts out with an accurate understanding of how
the energy system really works, if they haven’t worked through the numbers.
The system is just too complex for that. It takes time to really learn it.
The next lesson was that there is a huge amount of inertia in the
energy system. There are lots of things people get very excited about in
Washington – like Anwar, like bicycles, like wind power, like Kyoto – which
really are important, and really are good things… but they really do hardly
anything at all to change the basic, powerful trends that control the overall
national numbers.
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As of now, these global trends look very
scary. That’s why I’m grateful to have a chance to talk to you. What I really
see is more like two very powerful trends about to come to a very nasty
collision in about 20 years. It’s all about to hit the fan…
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Why
did DOE hire me for such a job back then? Because I had developed some very
important new mathematical algorithms. New algorithms to tune the models to
fit reality better – and tools to find the key points of sensitivity in any
complex nonlinear dynamical system –
like the energy system. There are something like 20 key points of sensitivity
in the energy system which allow you to have maximum impact for minimum cost.
I really wish I could talk about all 20 today, because we will need to hit
all 20 accurately in order to survive what we’re facing. Instead, I will talk
about two or three of the most urgent points. I hope that some of you will be
able to go to the IEEE USA URL here, to follow up on some of the others.
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