Only in Comic Books do the physics of energy production work like that
By Mark P. Mills
Texas Insider Report: WASHINGTON D.C. While it might seem like everybody wants a revolution in energy tech the facts show that a digital-like transformation in how energy is produced or stored isnt just unlikely it cant happen with the physics we know today.
From Congresss Green New Deal proponents to Palo Altos pundits we hear that clean tech" is on the cusp of a 10x exponential process which will wipe fossil fuels off the market in about a decade."
Youd be excused for suspecting such a revolution might be just around the corner. After all we live in a time of technological marvels. It has become a clich to offer as an example Moores Law which brought us smartphones far cheaper and far more powerful than a room-sized IBM mainframe from 30 years ago and along the way disrupting" so many old industries. Even the staid International Monetary Fund invoked the digital analogy weighing in with its Riding the Energy Transition manifesto: Smartphone substitution seemed no more imminent in the early 2000s than large-scale energy substitution seems today."
But analogizing silicon and energy domains as seductive as it seems is based on a profound category error. A digital-like transformation in how energy is produced or stored isnt just unlikely it cant happen with the physics we know today.
We can illustrate how fantastical this kind of thinking is.
If combustion engines could achieve Moores Law scaling an engine could shrink to the size of an ant and then generate a thousand- fold more horsepower than a car. With such an engine a car could actually fly very fast.
Or if photovoltaics scaled like computers a single postage-stamp-sized solar array could power the Empire State building.
Similarly if batteries scaled like computing a battery the size of a book costing less than a dime could power an A380 to Asia.
Only in comic books does the physics of energy production work like that.
In our universe power scales the other way. The challenge in storing and processing information using the smallest possible amount of energy is distinct from the challenge of producing energy or moving or reshaping physical objects. The two domains entail different laws of physics.
The energy needed to move a ton of people heat a ton of steel or silicon or grow a ton of food is determined by properties of nature whose boundaries are set by laws of gravity inertia friction mass and thermodynamics. In the world of people cars planes and large-scale industrial systems increasing speed or carrying capacity causes hardware to expand not shrink.
Of course wind turbines solar cells and batteries will yet see useful improvements in cost and performance; so too will drilling rigs and combustion engines. And of course Silicon Valley information technology will bring important and commercially valuable efficiency gains in managing energy and physical goods.
But the outcomes wont be as miraculous as the invention of the integrated circuit nor the discovery of petroleum or nuclear fission.
To be blunt: there is simply no possibility that more government funding for wind turbines silicon solar cells or lithium batteries will lead to a disruptive" 10-fold gain. All those technologies are approaching physics limits just as aviation engines have.
Thats not to say were at the end of innovation or foundational discoveries in energy. We know from history that revolutionary discoveries happen. We also know they come from basic research that unveils entirely new phenomenologies and not from deploying R&D funds to improve or subsidize yesterdays technologies. The Internet didnt emerge from improving the rotary phone nor the transistor from subsidizing vacuum tubes nor the automobile from subsidizing railroads. An energy revolution requires we focus on basic science.
Congress is once again engaged in deliberations over the funding and mission for ARPA-E the young agency within DOE created a mere decade ago with a mission to engage the long-term energy challenges" and the need for creative out-of-the-box transformational" research. Its instructive to illustrate the scale challenge in energy in order to frame what the government can usefully do and whether a putative clean-tech revolution is imminent.
Traditional metrics are inadequate to visualize the magnitude of energy required by our digitally infused industrial society.
Roughly 85 of global energy comes from oil coal and natural gas. For perspective consider that if global hydrocarbons were all produced in the form of oil and stacked up in a row of barrels that row would stretch from Washington D.C. to Los Angeles and would grow in height by a Washington monument every single week.
Thats todays state of affairs and that challenge is expanding.
When not if the worlds poorest four billion people increase their energy use to a mere 15 of the per capita level of developed economies global energy use will rise by an adding the equivalent of another Americas worth of demand. Meanwhile in the developed nations we can illuminate the scale challenge looking at just two fast-growing sectors: every $1 billion of commercial airlines put into service leads to some $5 billion in aviation fuel consumed over two decades.
Similarly every $1 billion spent building datacenters leads to $5 billion in electricity use over two decades. The world is buying both jets and datacenters at a rate north of $50 billion a year.
For evidence of just how hard it is to impact such an enormous market and make a transformational" change: Over the past two decades the world has spent more than $2 trillion on non-hydrocarbon energy alternatives but hydrocarbon use has risen nearly 1.5-fold and hydrocarbons share of global energy supply has decreased by only a few percentage points. These realities are what likely motivated Bill Gates who has given serious thought and significant capital to energy innovation -- to recently state that there is no energy substitute for how the industrial economy runs today."
But this scale challenge commonly elicits the proposition that a solution can be found by embracing the spirit of the Apollo program: If we can put a man on the moon surely we can and we can fill in the blank with any aspirational goal."
This popular rhetorical analogy is in fact another profound category error. Transforming the energy economy is not like putting a dozen people on the moon a handful of times. It is like putting all of humanity on the moon permanently. To do the latter would require science and engineering that doesnt exist today.
Of course new and seemingly magical discoveries relevant to energy tech lay in the future. There is for example a serious deficit in support for research where magic does happen and thats in the basic materials sciences. We already know that metamaterials and quantum-engineered catalysts or alloys areas that will yet benefit from the emerging capabilities of artificial intelligence and exascale computing hold the unrealized potential for big bang" energy impacts ranging from the still chimerical pursuit of batteries as effective as fuel tanks to doubling combustion engine efficiencies or to engineered bacteria that excrete diesel fuel.
Returning to the National Academy of Sciences and its 2007 Gathering Storm report that recommended creating ARPA-E: that document provides a clear roadmap for what Congress should still do today in order to fulfill the long-term" and transformational" mission envisioned. Its a roadmap that might even forge a bipartisan consensus something almost as hard as a moon landing these days.
There can be no doubt that scientists will yet unveil and engineers will yet commercialize an energy miracle" the specific word Bill Gates has used for this goal. As many a Nobelist has pointed out miracles or magic seem to come when you free your mind" in the pursuit of basic knowledge.
They dont come from government agencies helping private markets make yesterdays tools better.
Mark P. Mills is a partner in Cottonwood Venture Partners focused on the digital oilfield a Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow a Faculty Fellow at Northwestern Universitys Engineering School and author of Work In The Age Of Robots.
