Sandra Postel: Wildfires in the Western U.S. Threaten Drinking Water

Posted on June 30, 2014 by

Sandra Postel. May 1, 2014. Wildfires in the Western U.S. Are on the Rise, Posing Threats to Drinking Water

When the Las Conchas Fire scorched some 151,000 acres of northern New Mexico in 2011, it wasn’t just the direct fire damage that was cause for worry.
Striking as it did in the midst of a persistent drought, but just before summer “monsoon” rains, the Las Conchas – the largest blaze in New Mexico’s recorded history – set in motion the one-two-three punch of drought, fire and flood that much of the western United States has seen all-too frequently in recent years.
As the intense rains pounded burned-out watersheds, peak floods poured through the Jemez Mountain canyons pushing tree trunks, boulders and tons of blackened soil down to the valleys below.   Soon after, to avoid the high costs of de-clogging equipment and treating sediment-laden river water, the Albuquerque drinking water utility cut its intake from the Rio Grande by half – and tapped more groundwater to make up the deficit.
With new research showing that fires in the western United States are getting larger and more frequent, water managers need to mitigate the impacts of fire in their source watersheds, as well as prepare for the consequences.
In a study published online in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Philip E. Dennison of the University of Utah and colleagues analyzed a database of large wildfires (those greater than 1,000 acres, or 405 hectares) in the western United States over the period 1984-2011 and found a significant increase in the number of large fires and/or the area covered by such fires.
Specifically, in the region stretching from Nebraska to California, the number of large wildfires increased by a rate of seven per year over the 28 years of study, and the total area burned by these fires increased at a rate of nearly 90,000 acres a year – an area the size of Las Vegas.
“We looked at the probability that increases of this magnitude could be random, and in each case it was less than one percent,” Dennison said.
For their analysis, Dennison and his team used satellite data from the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity Project, which is supported by the US Forest Service and the US Geological Survey.
The team also found a correlation between increased fire activity and increased drought severity.
Those regions expected to be most affected by climate changes, especially more intense droughts, showed the greatest increase in fire activity, including the Rocky Mountains, the Arizona-New Mexico mountains, the southwestern desert region, and western Texas.

A satellite image of the 2011 Las Conchas Fire in New Mexico

For water managers, the new research is a clarion call to begin action now to safeguard water supplies originating in watersheds prone to fire. 
Fires are natural and beneficial to forested watersheds.  But for many decades, firefighters focused on protecting people and property have squelched even small fires that would do the important work of cleansing the forest floor and thinning trees to healthy densities.
As a result, many forests have accumulated an excess of  “fuel,” so when a fire ignites– whether from a natural cause, such as a lightening strike or a human one, such as a campfire – the forest is primed to burn rapidly, increasing the potential for a mega-fire like Las Conchas.  Drought only adds to the favorable fire conditions.
Partly in response to the damage wildfires have inflicted downstream, a few pioneering water suppliers are taking a proactive approach to addressing wildfires’ costs and risks to drinking water sources.
After the 2002 Hayman Fire, Denver Water faced a reservoir cleanup and infrastructure repair bill upwards of $30 million. Rather than pay such a steep price over and over again, Denver Water is investing $16.5 million to match the Forest Service’s investment in thinning ponderosa pine stands, cutting trees killed by pine beetle infestations, and generally rehabilitating the watershed critical to Denver’s water supply.
Likewise, Santa Fe, New Mexico, has embarked on watershed protection measures to safeguard against wildfires in the Santa Fe National Forest (SFNF).  In partnership with the Nature Conservancy and the US Forest Service, Santa Fe has established a water fund to help pay for restoration efforts in the 17,520 acres of the forested watershed that supplies about 40 percent of the city’s drinking water. (Some 88% of that forestland is in the SFNF, and half of that is located in the Pecos Wilderness, where forest thinning is not allowed.)
Such partnerships between municipalities and the Forest Service would seem to offer great potential to mitigate the risks of fire to downstream water supplies while simultaneously reducing the costs of both fire-fighting and water treatment.
Collectively, the national forests are part of more than 3,000 municipal watersheds that supply 60 million Americans with drinking water.
The Nature Conservancy, building on its watershed protection work in Latin American, has also been instrumental in forming the Rio Grande Water Fund in New Mexico.  The fund aims to generate sustainable financing for a 10-30 year program of large-scale watershed restoration to avoid more impacts like those caused by the Las Conchas Fire.
Recognizing that adequate supplies of clean water are critical to the health of the local economy, a number of businesses – including Lowe’s, PNM (the state’s largest electricity provider) and Wells Fargo – are contributing to the water fund.
With wildfire activity increasing across the western United States, more partnerships like these to proactively improve watershed health are a crucial line of defense to safeguard our drinking water.

Originally published at National Geographic Newswatch.

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Richard Duncan : Olduvai Gorge – Civilization ends when Electric Grids Permanently Fail

Posted on June 26, 2014 by

The Olduvai Theory – Heading into the Gorge

By Richard C. Duncan, Ph.D. Volume 23, Number 2 (Winter 2013)

Summary: The Olduvai Theory is defined as the ratio of world energy production and population. It states that average energy production per capita will decline to its 1930 level by 2030. Collapse will be strongly correlated with an “epidemic” of blackouts around the globe. This warning has come from scientists for more than a century, but it is still disallowed in Washington, D.C. A back-to-the-land movement has emerged and is accelerating.1

In a previous paper for The Social Contract, I focused on the Olduvai Theory.

[See the articles:
The Olduvai Theory
The Olduvai Theory: Terminal Decline Imminent
The Olduvai Theory – Toward Re-Equalizing the World Standard of Living
America: A Frog in the Kettle Slowly Coming to a Boil.]

This raises the following question: Where will the Olduvai die-off occur? Answer: Everywhere.

Large cities will be the most dangerous places to reside when the electric grids permanently fail. Therein millions of people are packed in high-rise buildings, surrounded by acres and acres of blacktop and concrete: no electricity, no work, and no food.

The Olduvai Theory is defined by the ratio of world energy production and population ( e).… It states that energy production per capita will fall to its 1930 value by 2030, thus giving industrial civilization a lifetime of less than or equal to 100 years. The theory projects that the collapse will be strongly correlated with an epidemic of blackouts worldwide.

Urban areas will rapidly depopulate when the power grids die. In fact the danger zones are already mapped out. Specifically: The big cities stand out as brightly lighted areas on NASA’s satellite mosaic, The Earth at Night. These planetary lights blare out “beware,” “warning,” “danger.” The likes of Baltimore-to-Boston, London and Paris, Brussels-to-Berlin, Bombay and Hong Kong and Osaka-to-Tokyo are all unsustainable hot spots.2

Let there be light

All primary sources of energy are essential to modern civilization. The Olduvai Theory however focuses on a secondary source, namely electric power. And visible proof of its global importance is confirmed by NASA’s composite display of Earthlights at Night.2

tsc_23_2_duncan_1.gif

Figure 1. Earthlights at Night: Chicago, New York, etc.The above image shows the lights of Chicago near the upper left corner and those of New York City near the upper right, plus many cities to the south, including Baltimore and Washington, D.C.3

The solar basis

Electromagnetic energy was, is, and always will be fundamental to all life on this or any other planet. Many millions of years ago the incoming solar rays “nourished” microorganisms (protists) whose bodies ultimately morphed into the fossil fuels: coal, petroleum and natural gas. Then about 150 years ago we learned how to turn fossil fuels back into electromagnetic energy. Enter a boy named Tom.

Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931, USA)

In 1882 Thomas Edison’s Pearl Street Station in New York was the forerunner of global electrification. (3) An artist’s rendition of Edison’s station appears on the Web.4

… Thomas Edison was more responsible than any one else for creating the modern world… No one did more to shape the physical/cultural makeup of present day civilization… Accordingly, he was the most influential figure of the millennium.

The benefits of electric power were immediately obvious:

Electricity was good for more than just light and transit. Cheap, plentiful electricity would attract industries, jobs and prosperity. City Light isn’t just a utility; it’s a “city builder.”5

Henry Adams (1838-1918, USA)

Henry Adams was Chairman of the Department of History at Harvard University for six years and a celebrated resident of Washington, D.C. His lifelong goal was to discover a succinct law of history. It was at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 — the campus blazing with electric light — where he hypothesized, “Incandescent lighting and electric power will soon destroy industrial civilization.”

The new American — the child of incalculable coal power, electric power, and radiating energy, as well as of new forces yet undetermined — must be a sort of god compared with any former creation of nature.… The new forces would educate…. The law of acceleration was definite…. No scheme could be suggested to the new American, and no fault needed to be found, or complaint made; but the next great influx of new forces seemed near at hand, and its style of education promised to be violently coercive.… Forces totally new would accelerate society into chaos and ruin.6

Fred Hoyle (1915-2001, UK)Sir Fred Hoyle in 1963 gave a series of lectures wherein he stated:

It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on the Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing intelligence this is not correct. We have, or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as the planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned.… (p. 64)

If the world population is not stabilized… nothing but pain and grief will follow. The future will then indeed be based on our cries of agony. (p. 69)

Roberto Vacca (Italy)

Roberto Vacca is a member of the Club of Rome. His book, The Coming Dark Age, theorizes that industrial nations are increasingly at risk because of their dependence on complex and sensitive systems such as the electric power grids.

Such critical situations as I have described [e.g., blackouts] develop gradually, and are contributory prerequisites of graver crises that will come more precipitately. These are our real interest and concern, for they will be an integral part of that ultimate avalanche of a breakdown, which will initiate a new dark age. (p. 65)

And yet the probability that a crisis is on the way is strong and growing stronger in all great cities where people are densely congregated. … (p. 132)

Urban crisis will not be exclusive to New York; that particular megalopolis serves as our example of what will occur in every great metropolitan city. On the other hand, the vivid events here foreshadowed would not produce The Dark Age overnight; they would be, rather, the germinal beginning, disintegrating agent — of a profound breakdown of society and of civilization itself, as we know it.… (p. 137)7

Jay W. Forrester (USA)

Dr. Jay Forrester in 1971, at the request of The Club of Rome, built a world model “to understand the options available to mankind as societies enter the transition from growth to equilibrium.”

What happens when growth approaches fixed limits and is forced to give way to some form of equilibrium? We need have no fear that population will continue to rise forever.… If man does not take conscious action to limit population and capital investment, the forces inherent in the natural and social system will rise high enough to limit growth.… (p. 68)

Our greatest challenge now [i.e., in 1971] is how to handle the transition from growth into equilibrium. … The folklore and the success stories praise growth and expansion. But that is not the path to the future.… (p. 112)

Dr. Forrester didn’t include the possibility of urban blackouts in the standard run of his model. Nonetheless, even without blackouts, the world population peaked in year 2023 and then declined by 28 percent in 2100. (Fig. 4-1, p. 70). In contrast, with blackouts the world population would likely decline by considerably more than 28 percent in 2100.

Picture the Olduvai Theory

I graphed the Olduvai Theory in 2001 by a steep upside curve, followed by a bumpy “plateau,” then a brief “slide,” and finally a steep “cliff,” reproduced in Figure 3.

tsc_23_2_duncan_3.gif

The curve from 1920 to 1999 is historic data, so that still stands. But the forecast from 2001 to 2011 is wrong because the value of energy per capita rose to 12.83 in 2011. However the Olduvai cliff remains at year 2012 as overpopulation, global warming, national bankruptcies, blackouts, etc. strike wide and deep.8Dennis Meadows (USA)

Dr. Meadows in 1972 was one of the authors of The Limits to Growth. Therein he stated that there is still time for “the transition from growth to global equilibrium.” But now he sees things differently:

In so far as I can tell, people who use the term [sustainability] mean, essentially, that this would be a phase of development where they get to keep what they have but all the poor people can catch up. Or, they get to keep doing what they’ve been doing, but through the magic of technology they are going to cause less damage to the environment and use fewer resources. Either way you use the term, it is just a fantasy.

It has probably been only in the last four or five years that it has become really clear to me that we just haven’t got a chance of dealing with these issues in any kind of orderly way. … Limits to Growth is absolutely focusing on a bubble, a bubble in population and in material and energy consumption. …

Theoretically, resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb shocks and to continue functioning. … I am talking about coping with the permanent loss of cheap energy or the permanent change in our climate and what we can do at the individual, the household, the community, and the national level to ensure that … we will be able to pass through that period still taking care of our basic needs.

Walter Youngquist (USA)

Dr. Youngquist is a geologist who has worked abroad and traveled in more than 70 countries where he studied the vital relationship of Earth resources to nations and populations. In January 2012, he noted:

I think your view of the future of electricity is very prescient — in that the scale of things is beyond what can be coped with — and blackouts are increasingly the mode in the United States, but already evident elsewhere.

The use of electricity defines civilization, as we know it today almost as much as is the use of oil.

Things continue to come apart everywhere —famine in Africa because of too many people for a beaten-up environment to support, government debt rising in Europe and here as all the industrialized countries are living beyond their means. Frugality will arrive whether people like it or not. I see one statement saying that the U.S. standard of living has been in decline for several years. It can only get worse. Also we are making (and importing) people faster than we are making jobs. … The unemployment rate will never get back to the previous 5 percent. So what does government do to handle the unemployed? Spend more money it doesn’t have to support a standard of living that cannot be supported. Social upheavals are ahead for sure.

We just don’t have the resources on this finite Earth to sustain people in the lifestyles they have now — much less for those who would like to achieve that lifestyle.

Chaos is ahead as populations face a future of LESS.

And in May he continued:

Over history austerity has been the NORM. Recent prosperity for a few of us cannot last.

The world in general faces more austere times — a future of less!!! When the Greeks had to face it they rioted — to no avail. Many such social upheavals are to come as more and more people divide up declining and degrading resources. Roots of troubles are ahead as population rockets up to 10 billion—I cannot visualize that world!

Colin J. Campbell (Ireland)

Dr. Campbell is a petroleum geologist and in February he spoke on the past and the future.

We have now passed the first decade of the Twenty-First Century and may again face radical changes. The success of the last Century has severely depleted the resources of the Planet, especially its critical energy supplies, suggesting that the Industrial Age has passed its peak to face contraction…

Looking ahead, it is evident that we enter the Second Half of the Oil Age, when this critical energy supply that fuels the modern world, including its military engagements, declines from natural depletion. Today, some 60 billion barrels of petroleum a year…support a population of 7 billion people, but by 2050 the supply will be sufficient to support no more than about half that number in their present way of life. It speaks of a radical change, with the transition likely to be accompanied by much tension, signs of which have already been seen.

We may see a return to regionalism with the development of local markets, even local currencies, and a new community spirit, as the imperial constructions of the past pass into history. As always, there will be winners and losers, with the winners being those who adapt better to the changing circumstances. The Transition Town Movement had its origins in Kinsale, Ireland but has now spread around the world setting an example of the new strategies to be followed.

Transition towns and doomsday preppers

The World is in terrible shape—including the U.S. The Olduvai Gorge looms.

We are living beyond our means and the Earth’s natural resource credit card is maxxed out. Now what?

More and more people are quickly realizing that the Earth’s resources that we depend upon, such as arable land, potable water, nonrenewable resources, are rapidly decreasing while the human population is rapidly increasing. This predicament has fostered the Transition Movement, the Preppers Network, and others to prepare.

(a) The Transition Movement is bringing together people that now live in nations, provinces, cities, and towns that are readying for whatever the future holds.

The Transition Town [comprises] vibrant, grassroots community initiatives that seek to build community resilience in the face of such challenges as peak oil, climate change and the economic crisis. The Transition Movement differentiates itself from other sustainability and environmental groups by seeking to mitigate these converging crises by engaging their communities in homegrown, citizen-led education, action, and multi-stakeholder planning to increase local self-reliance and resilience.…

  • If we wait for governments, it’ll be too little, too late.
  • If we act as individuals, it’ll be too little.
  • But if we act as communities, it might just be enough, just in time.…

(b) The American Preppers Network is part of a fast-growing international movement organized by nations and regions.

It has formed alliances with independent affiliates such as Pioneer Living Survival Magazine, a homesteading and survival skills website which provides a range of advice for those who want to store extra food in case of a power cut, to those who want to embrace the “off-the-grid” lifestyle of America’s western pioneers….

Today you’re seeing average people taking smart moves and moving in intelligent directions to prepare for the worst. … Growing your own, self sustaining, doing as much as you can to make it as best as you can on your own… And it also means becoming more and more tightly committed to your neighbors, your neighborhood, working together and understanding that we’re all in this together….

The Golden Horde describes the anticipated large mixed horde of refugees and looters that will pour out of the metropolitan regions when a catastrophe strikes. Thus the following dilemma arises.

The Transition Dilemma (TD) states: The more successful a Transition Town, the more danger its inhabitants face from the robbing and looting by the starving people fleeing the urban chaos. Thus to protect itself each Transition Town must have (a) a large part-time police force, (b) communications within each town and between the towns, and (c) guns and ammunition for a long siege.9

Blackouts are increasing because electric power systems are aging and expensive to upgrade and maintain. And if one-city blackouts occur for an extended period of time, this will cause chaos within that city. However, as the news spreads it is likely to cause more blackouts and turmoil in other cities.10

Summary and conclusions

In 1882 Thomas Edison brought electricity and affordable lighting to the world. In 1893 historian Henry Adams theorized that electric power would drive industrial civilization into overshoot and collapse. In 1949 M. King Hubbert published an agrarian-to-industrial-to-agrarian ( A-I-A) scenario. In 1963 Fred Hoyle forewarned that overpopulation would cause “our cries of agony.” In 1971 Roberto Vacca foresaw “a new dark age” and used New York City as his example. In 1971 the standard run of Jay Forrester’s world model showed that growth “is not the path to the future.”

In 2012 three eminent scientists — Dennis Meadows, Walter Youngquist, and Colin Campbell — basically agree: “Chaos looms as the growing population faces a future of less.”

The Transition Movement and the Preppers Network recognize the need to balance the world’s population and the earth’s natural resources.

The transition dilemma ( TD) states that a successful transition town would also be a magnet for desperate and dangerous people. This problem could be solved in each town by a reliable communication network and a strong defense unit.

Several industrial nations are already over the cliff. Ultimately the world’s population will peak and decline.

Endnotes

1. Google has built a colorful [collection of images] about the Olduvai Theory; just google: “images for olduvai theory illustrated guide.” Then click the pictures, graphs, and cartoons to see how they explain the theory.

2. Could it be that the blackout in the Eastern U.S. in 2012 is a preview of things to come?

3. Envision the chaos that would erupt and rapidly spread if one of the world’s largest cities blacked out permanently.

4. Minute amounts of electricity were used in the early nineteenth century for power, e.g., telegraphy and carbon-arc lamps. However, Thomas Edison was the first to make the generation and distribution of electric power commercially viable.

5. If the coming of electricity is a “city builder,” then the going of electricity will be a city destroyer.

6. Henry Adams’ visit to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 resulted in the most remarkable forecast I’ve ever seen.

7. Is it a mere coincidence that Roberto Vacca in 1971 chose New York City as an example of ”the germinal beginning…of a profound breakdown of society and civilization itself”?

8. The duration of industrial civilization in the Olduvai Theory is about 100 years (Figure 3) versus M. King Hubbert’s A-I-A scenario of about 3,500 years (Figure 2).

9. A hand-powered telephone system is essential in each transition town to protect it from desperate outsiders.

10. The loss of electric power in an urban area causes many more problems than just the blackout itself. For example, it also causes the lack of food, potable water and fuel and stops sewage transport.

 

References

Duncan, R. C., 2001, World Energy Production, Population Growth, and the Road to the Olduvai Gorge, Population and Environment, v.2; n5, May.

NASA’s composite of earthlights appears on a Google Map. Study the globe and print it out, as desired.

Edison, T. A.

Edison’s Pearl Street Station, 1882;

Biography of Thomas Edison, The Heroes of the Age: Electricity and Man;

Ross. J. D., Superintendent of Seattle City Light, 1911;

The Devil in the White City, The Chicago World’s Fair in 1893;

Nye, D. E., 1990, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 479 pp.

Adams, H., 1907/1918, The Education of Henry Adams, Houghton Mifflin Co.;  Chapters 33 and 34.

Hubbert, M. K., 1949, Energy from Fossil Fuels, Science, v. 109, Fig. 8;

Hoyle, F., 1964, Of Men and Galaxies, Prometheus Books, Great Minds Series, 73 pp.

Vacca, R., 1971/1973, The Coming Dark Age, Doubleday & Company, Garden City, NY, 221 pp.

Forrester, J. W., 1971/1973, World Dynamics, Wright-Allen, 144 pp.

Meadows, D., 2012: Is It Too Late for Sustainable Development? Reported by Megan Gambino, The Smithsonian, April.

Youngquist, W., Letter to R.C.D., 1/23/12.

Youngquist, W., Letter to R.C.D., 5/3/12.

Campbell, C. J., 2012; www.localcampus.com Select: West Cork Previous Issues; Issue 16 – February; Scroll down to page 3, “Mapping The Past & Past & The Future.”

Youngquist, W., Letter to R.C.D., 4/12/12.

Transition USA.

APM.

More on Preppers.

See “G” at Golden Horde.

Richard Duncan is chief author of the Olduvai Theory, a prediction of rapidly declining world energy production. He has an M.S. in Electrical Engineering (1969) and a Ph.D. in Systems Engineering (1973) from the University of Washington. In 1992 he founded the Institute on Energy and Man.

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Earth’s Magnetic Flips May Have Triggered Mass Extinctions

Posted on June 13, 2014 by

Earth’s Magnetic Flips May Have Triggered Mass Extinctions

At several times in Earth’s history, mass extinctions have come close to wiping life out altogether. The reasons for these catastrophes are still unclear – they’ve been blamed on everything from asteroid impacts to cosmic ray blasts. But a new study has found that our planet itself could have a surprising hand in these disasters.

Research recently published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters suggests that reversals of the Earth’s magnetic field may have sparked mass extinctions in the past by stripping oxygen from the atmosphere.

Field Flips

607968main_geomagnetic-field-orig_fullThe Earth’s natural magnetic field, generated in the liquid outer core, spontaneously changes direction every 500,000 years or so. Known as geomagnetic reversals, these processes cause the field’s north and south poles to swap places.

Normally, the Earth’s magnetic field acts like a shield around the atmosphere, protecting it from the damaging effects of the solar wind (the supersonic stream of charged particles emitted by the sun​). During a geomagnetic reversal, however, the field weakens dramatically, exposing the atmosphere to the full force of the solar wind – and causing oxygen ions to be stripped off into space.

This much was already known. But in the recent study, a team led by Yong Wei of the Chinese Academy of Sciences set out to discover if the oxygen lost during geomagnetic reversals could bring about mass extinctions.

It had long been known that mass extinctions are often accompanied by both an increase in the rate of geomagnetic reversals and a decrease in atmospheric oxygen levels (one of the potential drivers of mass extinctions). The researchers’ goal was to determine if geomagnetic reversals could actually have caused such oxygen loss – and therefore potentially have caused mass extinctions, too.

Oxygen Depletion

Wei and colleagues focused on the “Triassic-Jurassic” mass extinction of 200m years ago, in which up to 84% of all species on Earth perished. Independent studies had already shown that, during this extinction, the geomagnetic reversal rate doubled, and the amount of atmospheric oxygen simultaneously dropped by 9 percent. This oxygen drop is one of the possible reasons for the extinction.

Using a computer model, Wei and his team concluded that geomagetic reversals stripped at least 218 trillion tons of oxygen from the Earth’s atmosphere during the Triassic-Jurassic extinction – or 4.5 percent of the total amount. This indicates that at least half of the 9 percent oxygen drop that occurred during the extinction could have been caused by geomagnetic reversals alone – more than enough, the study’s authors say, to have played a major role in the die-off.

This theory may explain even deadlier mass extinctions. Study coauthor Markus Fraenz of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research said that the oxygen loss caused by geomagnetic reversals could also have caused the end-Permian mass extinction (also known as the “Great Dying”), in which up to 97% of all species were wiped out.

Perhaps then, alongside the meteoric collisions, supernovae explosions and volcanic eruptions – which have variously been proposed to explain mass extinctions – it’s time to add another suspect. The invisible fluctuations of a physical field might not be as cinematic, but their consequences throughout history may have been just as dire.

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Biggest Waste of Wealth in All of history: America’s Interstate Highway system

Posted on June 9, 2014 by

A book review by Alice Friedemann of:

Swift, Earl. 2012. The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways.

Related articles

Much of what’s below are Swift’s exact or paraphrased words, my comments are italicized. The vast majority of the book is spent on who, what, why, when and where the interstate system was built, but I’ve mainly extracted the bits about energy and material resources, critiques of what the system did to our society, and life before cars. 

Introduction

At 47,000 miles long and four plus lanes wide, the Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways is the largest public works project in history, dwarfing Egypt’s pyramids, the Panama Canal, and China’s Great Wall.  To build it, forests were felled and mountains were leveled and overlaid with over three hundred million cubic yards of concrete.

Roads are essential and define the physical United States, and so taken for granted they’re almost invisible.

The interstates are just 1% of the nation’s road mileage but carry a trillion of the 4 trillion miles Americans travel each year. Many of the vehicles are heavy trucks, which hammer bridges and pavements, shortening road and bridge lifespans so much that to fix them, we’d need to spend  $225 billion a year for the next 50 years, and if we don’t, replacement will cost three times as much. One in four of the country’s nearly 600,000 bridges is structurally deficient or obsolete. Most were designed to last 50 years. In 2008, they averaged 43 years old (p 319).

Peak Oil Makes Roads and Vehicles Obsolete – Why Fix them?

Swift says that these roads represent “a spectacular investment in a mode of transport that will wither without new fuel sources” (page 6).

We don’t have new fuel sources and never will, so why repair the roads? That would only throw good money after bad. To avoid the hardest possible landing, we might want to keep a few key local and regional roads repaired, and let the thousands of miles of interstate between regions go.  Replace cars with buses, which are flexible, scalable, easily re-routable, and cheap compared to passenger trains since they can use existing roads.

What we have lost  

When horses were the main mode of transportation, American towns were compact, tightly settled, and roughly circular in layout. In the days of the horse and buggy the road served as company. As a cart joggled by, the farmer in the field or the housewife on her porch could hail it; the horse would stop almost of his own accord, and a chat would follow. But once the country road becomes a highway, filled with fast traffic with cars driven mostly by strangers, not neighbors, the whole situation is changed: the road ceases to be a symbol of sociability; it becomes very largely a curse.

As John Steinbeck observed in 1962’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America: “When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.”

A pilgrim of centuries past would have had much to report about the country he’d traversed—the details of flora and fauna, the land’s shape and character, the sounds and smells of village and field. He would have noticed the moss on tree bark, the fast-moving stream, the lacework of afternoon light on the forest floor. He might have startled deer and bear, unalerted by his soft approach, or reveled in bird song. A later traveler, riding horseback, might have spoken of the views he’d enjoyed, but they would have been limited views, next to the walker’s. He would have moved at a faster clip, and thus missed the tiny details of his surroundings that only a leisurely pace revealed. Further on, a stagecoach passenger had an even tighter range of experience; he beheld landscape not only from a road’s fixed path, but as a moving picture framed by his window, and his description of a long trip would likely dwell less on the scenery than on the discomforts of the stage, the bumps in the road, the passage itself. Trains erected a pane of glass between traveler and country, and further insulated him by boosting his speed. But with the modern car on the modern freeway, the modern traveler was left with practically nothing to celebrate but the ever-briefer time he had to devote to getting from one place to another. He was sequestered not only from his setting, but from fellow passengers, insulated from sound, smells, and climate. The details of all that surrounded him were blurred by speed, too distant to make out, or too distracting to enjoy. Scenery was held at arm’s length, beyond the well-manicured right of way.

Highways & Roads Ruined our Nation

The messy sprawl of U.S. cities

Destruction of neighborhoods. Clearing a path for the interstates required the taking of more than 750,000 properties.

Boring and predictable chains of fast-food, motels, outlet malls, drive-in banks

Gutting of tens of thousands of small-town shopping districts.  Kunstler describes downtown wastelands in his book The City in Mind: “I remember a spring afternoon I spent as the sole pedestrian in downtown Appleton, Wisconsin, its commercial activity had all been shifted to an asteroid belt of highway strips and architectural garbage five miles outside town.  He describes Atlanta as “a giant hairball of suburbs or ”edge cities,” connected by highways  that has become such a mess nothing can be done to redeem it as a human habitat.”

Shopping Malls. Cookie-cutter malls replaced downtown shopping districts, destroying civic life in exchange for ugly warehouses and vast parking lots. There are no public squares in malls, no public citizenship, just private and lonely consumption of goods from just a few very large corporations that channel wealth to the top one percent of society.

Death

  • In 1929, when a new automobile rolled off an assembly line every six seconds, a life was lost to one of the machines every sixteen minutes.
  • In “The American Way of Death,” Mumford wrote that Americans “are prepared to sacrifice some 59,000 lives every year, and to maim, often irreparably, some three million more.”

The enormous waste of resources for just a few decades of petroleum

  • Cars gobbled vast stores of steel, lead, zinc, rubber, corn, and beeswax; every year the auto industry consumed the wool of seventeen million sheep and the hides of a half-million cattle
  • In 1962 $1 billion was spent on: 16,000,000 barrels of cement, over 500,000 tons of steel, 18,000,000 pounds of explosives, 123,000,000 gallons of petroleum products, enough earth to bury New Jersy knee-deep, and 76,000,000 tons of aggregate– the United States could not mine enough rock to rebuild the interstates today.
  • America spent $130 billion on the interstate highway system. $22 billion of that was fixing Boston’s “Big Dig” array of tunnels and bridges. There are 55,000 bridges, many of them miles long. Maintaining 47,000 miles of highways will cost billions more.
  • Traffic jams cost New Yorkers more than $1 billion a year in fuel, engine wear, lost productivity, missed sales; a quarter of all the gasoline consumed in American cities was burned, it was said, while motorists sat in traffic.

Environmental destruction

  • By 1966 American highways occupied an area the size of West Virginia.
  • Each mile of interstate devoured 30 to 40 acres of farmland; in Iowa alone 710 miles of freeway devoured 26,000 acres of productive cropland–over 40 square miles.
  • Big roads played hell with drainage patterns and water quality. All that concrete encouraged flooding, and salts and oils carried in runoff poisoned nearby ponds and streams and fostered the growth of invasive weeds.
  • Rural interstates presented insurmountable barriers to small mammals, turtles, and amphibians, one study concluding that a 4-lane divided highway was as much a barrier to small creatures as a body of fresh water twice as wide.
  • The slaughter of game by auto approached, and would soon exceed, that by hunting.

We almost used 23 atomic bombs to speed up construction

In 1963, the Atomic Energy Commission and the California State Division of Highways started Project Carryall to determine if atomic bombs could be used to blow up the Bristol mountains near Barstow California, so the I-40 highway and railroad could be built faster and cheaper. The study group of engineers and scientists thought 22 carefully placed atomic bombs would do the trick in a flash with a 36% discount over years of going about it the old way. This would be 60 times as powerful as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined. Each bomb packed 20 to 200 kilotons of explosive punch and would vaporize 68 million cubic yards of mountain, creating a chain of connected craters more than two miles long, as much as 340 feet deep, and 330 feet wide at the bottom—plenty big enough for twin railroad tracks and a full-size interstate. A 23rd bomb would blast a reservoir into the desert to collect runoff during storms.

And the engineers promised that there was no need to worry about radioactivity, fallout, air blast, or ground shock because these would be “clean” nuclear explosions. Construction crews could return just 4 days after the explosions.

Lewis Mumford Detested Highways

Mumford was an American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a writer.

Cities “worked” not just when they balanced their books, or kept crime off the streets, or picked up the garbage in a timely fashion, but when they fulfilled their more important function of facilitating human interaction—which was, after all, the reason people gathered in cities in the first place. By extension, good architecture incorporated as much sociology as it did engineering or design. A building’s scale and orientation, its relationship to its neighbors, the mood it created in those who beheld it, could fuel a neighborhood’s vitality or hamper it. The width of streets, the presence of trees, the press of high-rises—all were important.

Mumford came to see expressways as wasteful, disruptive, and stupid, absorbing funds badly needed for schools, hospitals, libraries and other facilities.”

He berated highway engineers for behaving “as if motor transportation existed in a social vacuum” and “building more roads, bridges, and tunnels so that more motorcars may travel more quickly to more remote destinations in more chaotic communities, from which more roads will be built so that more motorists may escape from these newly soiled and clotted environments. Our transportation experts are only expert whittlers, and the proof of it is that their end product is not a new urban form but a scattered mass of human shavings. Instead of curing congestion, they widen chaos.”

Mumford passionately believed in the organic aspect of cities, and in their atmosphere, their personality, their feel. New superhighways pumped an ever-heavier flow of cars onto streets and avenues designed for a New York of 4-story buildings. Now “we have in effect piled from three to ten early Manhattans on top of each other. If the average height of these buildings was only twelve stories, the roadway and sidewalks flanking them should, according to the original ratio, be 200 feet wide, the entire width of the standard New York block.”

Mumford attacked the year-old interstate system in 1957, an opening salvo in what would come to be called the Freeway Revolt, making him a darling, to this day, of urban planners, anti-sprawl activists, and critics of the suburban lifestyle. He went straight for the jugular. The interstate program was bound to bring destruction, not salvation, to the nation’s cities. It had been founded “on a very insufficient study” of highways, rather than transportation—on “blunders of one-dimensional thinking”—and would benefit only the “fantastic and insolent chariots” that jammed the streets, “the second mistress that exists in every household right alongside the wife—the motor car.” Want to save the cities? Forget about roads. The solution, Mumford said, lay in restoring a human scale to urban life, in “making it possible for the pedestrian to exist.” A choice was looming, for “either the motor car will drive us all out of the cities, or the cities will have to drive out the motor car.” Americans should “apply our intelligence to the purposes of life,” he said, concluding: “That means eventually we will put the motor car in its place.”

“The wide swathes of land devoted to cloverleafs, and even more complicated multi-level interchanges, to expressways … butcher up precious urban space . They devoured not only open land, but real estate already occupied by people and homes. “Perhaps our age will be known to the future historian as the age of the bulldozer and the exterminator, and in many parts of the country the building of a highway has about the same result upon vegetation and human structures as the passage of a tornado or the blast of an atom bomb. The hell of it was, all that disruption did nothing to ease congestion. Here was a tool that “actually expands the evil it is meant to overcome, and which would continue doing so until that terminal point when all the business and industry that originally gave rise to the congestion move out of the city, to escape strangulation, leaving a waste of expressways and garages behind them.

Mumford concludes with this epitaph: “This is pyramid building with a vengeance: a tomb of concrete roads and ramps covering the dead corpse of a city”.

How did we get here? Don’t blame Detroit Fat Cats: Americans wanted cars

Americans loved everything about their cars, loved driving, loved impulsively going wherever they chose without a thought to routes or timetables. They loved lording over their surroundings while they did it; cocooned, protected from the world, even as they were free to explore it. They could ride in silence or with the radio blaring, need never surrender personal space to a sweaty, foul-smelling stranger or suffer inane chatter. They thrilled to the sensation and sound of movement, the buffet of air through an open window, a big engine’s growl and punch. They embraced the status reflected in chrome trim, the subtext each model offered as to income and station and sex appeal. Americans took to cars not only willingly, but with gusto. They did not have an automotive life foisted on them; they did not buy homes far from work, or forsake mass transit, or pave over their cities because they were manipulated into doing so by Detroit fat cats, or a government-industry conspiracy, or anyone else. No such subterfuge was necessary. The people chose their path. They wanted what they were getting.

Some Cities fought Highways

Too late, San Franciscans realized that they’d permitted a terrible blunder. In place of their waterfront—which, though partially blocked by low buildings, offered one of the most breathtaking urban vistas in the world, overlooking the shimmering bay and Alcatraz Island—they now saw an unadorned gray concrete barricade rising, at its peak, fifty-seven feet from the city’s historic Embarcadero. It cast its surroundings in all-day twilight, severed downtown from the docks that had birthed it, and ran smack across the face of a beloved landmark, the Ferry Building, a gathering spot for generations and a survivor of the 1906 earthquake. To tens of thousands of San Franciscans, the Embarcadero Freeway seemed less a highway than a vivisection. Petitions circulated. Protest groups bloomed. And the public’s outrage was shared by the city fathers: on January 27, 1959, citing “the demolition of homes, the destruction of residential areas, the forced uprooting and relocation of individuals, families and business enterprises,” the Board of Supervisors approved a resolution opposing 7 of the 10 freeways planned for the city, including the yet-unbuilt western two-thirds of I-480. This meant refusing $280 million in Federal Aid money, an unthinkable act in the eyes of most municipal officials. It was a vote heard around the country. Not only did it effectively kill the state’s ambitions for a lavish freeway grid through town, it reverberated with every American confronted by expressways he wasn’t sure he wanted.

Baltimore: Older cities around the country were beset with similar problems, and in each, as in Baltimore, that will was crumbling. A confluence of national trends was shifting the mood of the governed. Historic preservation was becoming a cause beyond the ranks of intelligentsia; Vietnam had created doubt that government knew what it was doing and had the people’s best interests at heart; the civil rights movement had encouraged them to take their grievances to the streets and courts. And perhaps most important, the environmental movement had gained footing among a widening swath of America.

Monotony

Motorists seeking relief from the monotony of the drive found that the system’s sameness wasn’t limited to its right of way, for it wasn’t but a handful of years before the mom-and-pop businesses that had moved out from Main Street were joined by national chains, and the mercantile knots at the exits soon seemed cut from a stencil.

Mom-and-pop businesses on superseded U.S. highways watched their customers vanish as the interstates continued their crawl across the continent. As Florida Trend magazine would cry in 1965, the interstate system “diverts traffic away from former arteries of travel, drains the life’s blood from established firms which are situated on the old highways and leaves them to die.”  Small-town shopping districts weren’t just losing business to the exits, but to bigger towns suddenly made closer by the new highways’ speed and convenience.

What was it about assembly-line food that drew customers by the millions? For starters, it was cheap. But more than that, it answered a growing demand for speed and simplicity. A motorist making good time on the interstate wasn’t inclined to spend time eating a sit-down meal. And the chains’ drive for efficient mass production mirrored a desire in the American public for predictable quality—for preferring the everyday but familiar to a surprise, good or bad.

By 1963, when the interstates were just making tentative inroads into most urban areas, the population of America’s suburbs surpassed that of the cities they ringed. The new houses came fast and cheap, thanks to mass-production techniques that had stamped out hundreds of Liberty ships and thousands of bombers during the war.  James W. Rouse, a Baltimore developer, described the process: “A farm is sold and begins raising houses instead of potatoes, then another farm; forests are cut; valleys are filled; streams are buried in storm sewers; kids overflow the schools; here a new school is built, there a church. Traffic grows; roads are widened; service stations and hamburger stands pockmark the highway. Relentlessly, the bits and pieces of a city are splattered across the landscape.”

In 1966, Americans owned 57% of the world’s passenger cars, drove 922 billion miles, made 92% of their intercity trips by road.

What a shame everyone was smitten with passenger railroads (and still are), when buses make much more sense

Frank Turner was the chief engineer of the interstate system. He was very keen on mass transit, as long as it was provided by bus.  He pointed out that  rail-based transit could not attract enough riders to justify the fortune it would cost to build, because it couldn’t be adapted to changing travel patterns. Cities were spread too far and wide for fixed-rail to take many people from where they were to where they wanted to go. Buses, on the other hand, were extremely flexible. Just 50 or 60 buses could move as many people as 3,000 cars, provide almost door-to-door service, and follow routes that could be adjusted as needed—and they piggybacked on roads already in place, requiring no costly new infrastructure. By boosting the number of buses on the highways, you could actually reduce the need for more highways. Like all his views, his enthusiasm for the bus was supported by research, by statistics. He could cite a 1962 study that showed that buses and subways moved people for about the same cost (3.2 cents per person per mile) but that buses were far, far cheaper to put into service. He could point to 1968 research that showed a single express lane devoted to buses could move the same number of commuters as four lanes of freeway.

Turner could not fathom why environmentalists, the press, and anti-highway activists didn’t embrace the bus, or why they were so smitten with rail-based transit. The “infinite combinations of routes and schedules required by today’s urban dwellers dictates that any transportation system must provide flexibility of route, destination and schedules. That’s why fixed-route systems which are basically spoke lines attached to a downtown hub have such a hard time financing themselves in the fare box.

His detested the Washington Metro, that initially covered 98 miles and cost about $3 billion ($4,000 per household), an amount equal to everything spent on the capital region’s roads since the beginning of  settlement there. “What a huge capital expenditure to provide for the movement of about 5% of the transportation load within Washington’s metropolitan area. Just the annual interest on the debt would buy about 5,000 new buses every year for the whole life of Metro”.

Roads started because of demands from bicyclists

In 1874, overland travel was done by train. Look at any state and you’d see tangles of thick black lines converging on the major cities. Most of the old maps don’t depict a single road. They were there, but hardly in the form we think of them. The routes out of most any town in America were “wholly unclassifiable, almost impassable, scarcely jackassable,” as folks said then—especially when spring and fall rains transformed the simple dirt tracks into a heavy muck, more glue than earth. People braved roads to the train and back, or to roll their harvest from their farms to the nearest grain elevator. For any trip beyond that, they went by rail.

Some of the first bicycles had enormous front and tiny rear wheels, with saddles perched as high as 5 feet off the ground. On steep downhills, the best a rider could do was brace his feet on the handlebars, so that if he crashed, the bike stopped cold, with calamitous results, if that big front wheel encountered an obstacle— he’d at least go flying right-side up.

At local bicycle ships and meetings of the national organization the League of American Wheelmen, there were always conversation’s about cycling’s most urgent need: roads on which to ride.  Bicycling was a jarring experience in the 1890s, even when city streets were paved with cobblestone, brick, or uneven granite block, and snarled with carts, buggies, and horsemen. Outside the business districts, roads dwindled to little more than wagon ruts. A sprinkling of rain could turn them to bogs; their mud lay deep and loose, could suck the boots off a farmer’s feet, prompting travelers to quit the established path for the open fields. Some muddy roads swallowed horses to their flanks; the unfortunate buggy that ventured down such a lane soon flailed past its axles in the ooze. Even on hard-packed roads, mud formed dark rooster tails behind surreys, spattered long skirts, caked shoes. American business was conducted in mud-soiled suits, as were law, medicine, and church services. And mixed with the mud was a liberal helping of manure, for city and country alike were dependent on the horse.

Cyclists thus found their hobby not as pleasant as it could be, and the League of American Wheelmen committed to doing something about it. Their magazine, Good Roads,  became an influential mouthpiece for road improvement. Its articles were widely reprinted, which attracted members who didn’t even own bikes; eventually there were 102,000 subscribers, and the Good Roads Movement was too big for politicians to ignore. The demand for roads was pedal-powered, and a national cause even before the first practical American car rolled out of a Chicopee, Massachusetts, shop in 1893.

A few months ahead of the Duryea Motor Wagon’s debut, Congress authorized the secretary of agriculture to “make inquiry regarding public roads” and to investigate how they might be improved. So it was that in October 1893, agriculture secretary J. Sterling Morton created the Office of Road Inquiry and appointed to head it one Gen. Roy Stone, a Civil War veteran, civil engineer, and vociferous good roads booster from New York. His appointment was the sort of circular affair—a lobbyist pushing for government action that he winds up leading. Stone considered it “settled” that Americans “have the worst roads in the civilized world,” and that their condition was “a crushing tax on the whole people, a tax the more intolerable in that it yields no revenue.” Spending nothing on bad roads cost more than spending money to make them better, he argued, in squandered productivity, spoiled crops, high food prices.

America’s first overland routes started out as game trails

America’s principal overland routes were descended from prehistory— they’d started as game trails, had been commandeered by Native American hunting parties, and later were widened into wagon roads by white settlers. Over decades of use, they’d been cleared of stumps—at least the big ones—but much of their engineering remained the work of buffalo and elk. Improving on that was no easy matter.

Most roads were bare-dirt scars flanked by deep and weedy ditches. The newer ones had high crowns, their edges sloping downhill from their centers to drain water, but it wasn’t long before they were mashed into concavity and diabolically rutted. Some highways were dragged, meaning that after a rain a neighboring landowner would hitch a horse to a rig of split logs and pull it over the ruts to flatten them out. Rebuilding a road consisted of shoveling dirt from its sides into the middle, then tamping it down. Grading with a horse-drawn blade was a cause for local celebration.

How the first roads were built (also see “Why is modern concrete falling apart?”)

A concentration of heavy freight wagons, or “horse trucks,” had forced cities to pave their business districts, but the stone used for the purpose was far too expensive for rural roads built and maintained by county and local governments, which had little income and could tax their citizens only so much. Rains turned rural roads into quagmires. Even the best country road of the early twentieth century was primitive. The most common “improvement” was simply to grade a dirt road’s surface, in an attempt to smooth its bumps and fill its ruts. A step up was sand-clay construction, for which a mix of the two soils would be imported and spread on an earthen bed; the result in theory, was a surface that drained well and with traffic achieved a smooth hardness, but it also broke down quickly under heavy loads.

A little better was the gravel road, on which river rock or broken stone was spread on a graded bed; it held up better than dirt, especially to horse traffic, but had to be dressed regularly to keep the gravel from scattering, and it was stripped bare by the skinny tires and higher speeds of cars and trucks.

The most popular solution to that dilemma was macadam. It pre-dated the automobile by nearly 80 years after it was noticed gravel highways didn’t become smooth and durable until a lot of traffic had compressed their stone into a unified, interlocking mass. In 1816 a smooth dirt bed was covered with a ten-inch layer of stone broken especially for the purpose by workers armed with small hammers, then passed over the rock with a heavy, horse-drawn roller. The sharp-edged stones knitted into a tight bond. American road builders refined his system by spreading a thick layer of large broken stone onto graded earth, rolling it, covering it with a second layer of much smaller stone, and rolling it again. The surface with rock dust, hosed down with water, and rolled it a third time. “Water-bound macadam,” this was called, and it performed well under normal loads and low speeds. To keep dust down, workers topped it with a thin layer of asphalt, a black, sticky, molasses-like petroleum goop or coal-derived tar, which also kept the rock in place. The roads of today are asphaltic concrete, a blend of asphalt or tar and an aggregate, or filler, most commonly broken rock or gravel.

Why people were eager to switch from horses to cars and trucks

Horses required stabling, feed, and health care, which nationally amounted to $2 billion a year, or as much as it cost to maintain all of America’s railroads. Feeding the typical horse consumed five acres of tillable land a year; devoted to food for people, the nation’s feed-producing cropland could support millions [more people]. Horses are slow and can’t keep going fast for long and need frequent rest, food, water. Horses had to work seven times as hard on a dirt road as on a hard, smooth rock surface, and asphalt and brick offered even easier going.

Eisenhower does not deserve the credit for the interstate system

These highways didn’t come from Eisenhower. Long before June 1956, most of its physical details were old news. Its routing had already been nailed down for18 years and design-specifics for 12. FDR had a greater hand in its creation than Eisenhower, and the system’s origins go back much further than even FDR. The true parents were anonymous career technocrats. If the system bore the name of the man most responsible for its existence, it would be called the Thomas H. MacDonald System of Interstate and Defense Highways, who conceived of the network and proposed its construction before World War II.

 

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Wind notes from government studies

Posted on June 7, 2014 by

[These are here to help me do research and find citations]

Notes from 96 page: EERE. August 2014. 2013 Wind technologies market report. Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy.

No commercial offshore turbines have been commissioned in the United States, but offshore project and policy developments continued in 2013. At the end of 2013, global offshore wind capacity stood at roughly 6.8 GW.

The United States also had the capability of producing approximately 7 GW of blades and 8 GW of towers annually. Despite the significant growth in the domestic supply chain over the last decade, prospects for further expansion have dimmed. More domestic wind manufacturing facilities closed in 2013 than opened. Additionally, the entire wind energy sector employed 50,500 full-time workers in the United States at the end of 2013, a deep reduction from the 80,700 jobs reported for 2012

Independent power producers own 95% of the new wind capacity installed in 2013. [My note: this is why it’s so hard to get true figures to come up with a realistic EROI, because this data is private and when data is shared with scientists, may be from the best performing windfarms, since this could lead to more investment money coming in].

Operations and maintenance costs varied by project age and commercial operations date Operations and maintenance costs are a significant component of the overall cost of wind energy and can vary substantially among projects. Anecdotal evidence and recent analysis (Lantz 2013) suggest that unscheduled maintenance and premature component failure in particular continue to be key challenges for the wind power industry. Given the scarcity, limited content, and varying quality of the data, the results that follow may not fully depict the industry’s challenges with O&M issues and expenditures.

Lack of transmission can be a barrier to new wind power development, and insufficient transmission capacity in areas where wind projects are already built can lead to curtailment, as illustrated earlier. New transmission is particularly important for wind energy because wind power projects are constrained to areas with adequate wind speeds, which are often located at a distance from load centers. There is also a mismatch between the relatively short timeframe often needed to develop a wind power project compared to the longer timeframe typically required to build new transmission. Uncertainty over transmission siting and cost allocation, particularly for multi-state transmission lines, further complicates transmission development.

Moreover, on a cumulative basis considering all wind installed in the United States by the end of 2013, independent power producers (IPPs) own 83% of wind power capacity, while utilities own 15%, with the final 2% owned by entities that are neither IPPs nor utilities (e.g., towns, schools, commercial customers, farmers). On a cumulative basis, utilities own (15%) or buy (54%) power from 69% of all wind power capacity in the United States, with merchant/quasi-merchant projects accounting for 23% and competitive power marketers 8%.

Technology Trends • Turbine nameplate capacity, hub height, and rotor diameter have all increased significantly over the long term. The average nameplate capacity of newly installed wind turbines in the United States in 2013 was 1.87 MW, up 162% since 1998–1999. The average hub height in 2013 was 80 meters, up 45% since 1998-1999, while the average rotor diameter was 97 meters, up 103% since 1998–1999.

Growth in rotor diameter has outpaced growth in nameplate capacity and hub height in recent years. Rotor scaling has been especially significant in recent years, and more so than increases in nameplate capacity and hub heights, both of which have seen a modest reversal of the long-term trend in the most recent years. In 2012, almost 50% of the turbines installed in the United States featured rotors of 100 meters in diameter or larger. Though 2013 was a slow year for wind additions, this figure jumped to 75% in that year.

Turbines originally designed for lower wind speed sites have rapidly gained market share. With growth in average swept rotor area outpacing growth in average nameplate capacity, there has been a decline in the average “specific power” i (in W/m2) among the U.S. turbine fleet over time, from 400 W/m2 among projects installed in 1998–1999 to 255 W/m2 among projects installed in 2013. In general, turbines with low specific power were originally designed for lower wind speed sites. Another indication of the increasing prevalence of lower wind speed turbines is that, in 2012, more than 50% of installations used IEC Class 3 and Class 2/3 turbines; in 2013, based on the small sample of projects installed that year, the percentage increased to 90%.

Trends in sample-wide capacity factors have been impacted by curtailment and inter-year wind resource variability. Wind project capacity factors have generally been higher on average in more recent years (e.g., 32.1% from 2006–2013 versus 30.3% from 2000–2005), but time-varying influences—such as inter-year variations in the strength of the wind resource or changes in the amount of wind power curtailment—have tended to mask the positive influence of turbine scaling on capacity factors in recent years.

Competing influences of lower specific power and lower quality wind project sites have left average capacity factors among newly built projects stagnant in recent years, averaging 31 to 34 percent nationwide. Even when controlling for time-varying influences by focusing only on capacity factors in 2013 (parsed by project vintage), it is difficult to discern any improvement in average capacity factors among projects built after 2005

The average quality of the wind resource in which new projects are located has declined; this decrease was particularly sharp—at 15%—from 2009 through 2012.

Regional variations in capacity factors reflect the strength of the wind resource and adoption of new turbine technology. Based on a sub-sample of wind projects built in 2012, average capacity factors in 2013 were the highest in the Interior (38%) and the lowest in the West (26%).

Not surprisingly, these regional rankings are roughly consistent with the relative quality of the wind resource in each region.

Recently announced turbine transactions have often been priced in the $900–$1,300/kW range. [My comment: So a typical 2 MW turbine (2,000 kW) would cost $1.8 to $2.6 million dollars, and so replacing a 500 MW fossil-powered plant would cost $450 million to $650 million dollars, and last 20 years rather than the 35 year lifespan of natural gas and coal plants]

Operations and maintenance costs varied by project age and commercial operations date. Despite limited data availability, it appears that projects installed over the past decade have, on average, incurred lower operations and maintenance (O&M) costs than older projects in their first several years of operation, and that O&M costs increase as projects age.

Policy and Market Drivers

Availability of Federal incentives for wind projects built in the near term has helped restart the domestic market, but policy uncertainty persists. In January 2013, the PTC was extended, as was the ability to take the 30% investment tax credit (ITC) in lieu of the PTC. Wind projects that had begun construction before the end of 2013 are eligible to receive the PTC or ITC. These provisions have helped restart the domestic wind market and are expected to spur capacity additions in 2014 and 2015. With the PTC now expired and its renewal uncertain, however, wind deployment beyond 2015 is also uncertain.

2013 Wind Technologies Market Report

State policies help direct the location and amount of wind power development, but current policies cannot support continued growth at recent levels. As of June 2014, RPS policies existed in 29 states and Washington D.C. From 1999 through 2013, 69% of the wind power capacity built in the United States was located in states with RPS policies; in 2013, this proportion was 93%. However, given renewable energy growth over the last decade, existing RPS programs are projected to require average annual renewable energy additions of just 3–4 GW/year through 2025 (only a portion of which will be from wind), which is well below the average growth rate in wind capacity in recent years, demonstrating the limitations of relying exclusively on RPS programs to drive future deployment.

[My comment: it appears that wind turbines depend on government subsidies, implying a low EROI]

Solid progress on overcoming transmission barriers continued. Over 3,500 miles of transmission lines came on-line in 2013, a significant increase from recent years. Four transmission projects of particular importance to wind, including the Competitive Renewable Energy Zones project in Texas, were completed in 2013. A decrease in transmission investment is anticipated in 2014 and 2015.

System operators are implementing methods to accommodate increased penetration of wind energy. Recent studies show that wind energy integration costs are almost always below $12/MWh—and often below $5/MWh—for wind power capacity penetrations of up to or even exceeding 40% of the peak load of the system in which the wind power is delivered.

Because federal tax incentives are available for projects that initiated construction by the end of 2013, significant new builds are anticipated in 2014 and 2015. Near-term wind additions will also be driven by the recent improvements in the cost and performance of wind power technologies, leading to the lowest power sales prices yet seen in the U.S. wind sector. Projections for 2016 and beyond are much less certain. Despite the lower price of wind energy and the potential for further technological improvements and cost reductions, federal policy uncertainty—in concert with continued low natural gas prices, modest electricity demand growth, and the aforementioned slack in existing state policies—may put a damper on growth.

The report concentrates on larger-scale wind turbines, defined here as individual turbines that exceed 100 kW in size.1 The U.S. wind power sector is multifaceted, however, and also includes smaller, customer-sited wind turbines used to power residences, farms, and businesses. Data on these smaller turbines are not the focus of this report, although a brief discussion on Smaller Wind Turbines is provided on page 4.

The U.S. wind power market slowed dramatically in 2013, with only 1,087 MW of new capacity added, bringing the cumulative total to 61,110 MW (Figure 1).3 This growth required $1.8 billion of investment in wind power project installations in 2013, for a cumulative investment total of $125 billion since the beginning of the 1980s (all cost and price data are reported in real 2013$).4

The table below summarizes sales of smaller (100-kW and smaller) wind turbines into the U.S. market from 2003 through 2013. As shown, 5.6 MW of small wind turbines were sold in the United States in 2013, with 88% of that capacity coming from U.S. suppliers (Orrell and Rhoads-Weaver 2014). These installation figures represent a very substantial decline in sales relative to recent years. The average installed cost of U.S. small wind turbines in 2013 was reportedly $6,940/kW

Annual Sales of Smaller Wind Turbines (= 100 kW) Year into the United States Capacity Additions Number of Turbines 2003 3.2 MW 3,200 2004 4.9 MW 4,700 2005 3.3 MW 4,300 2006 8.6 MW 8,300 2007 9.7 MW 9,100 2008 17.4 MW 10,400 2009 20.4 MW 9,800 2010 25.6 MW 7,800 2011 19.0 MW 7,300 2012 18.4 MW 3,700 2013 5.6 MW 2,700 Source: Orrell and Rhoads-Weaver (2014) Sales in this sector historically have been driven—at least in part—by a variety of state incentive programs. In addition, wind turbines of 100 kW or smaller are eligible for an uncapped 30% federal investment tax credit (ITC, in place through 2016). The Section 1603 Treasury Grant Program and programs administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture have also played a role in the sector. According to AWEA (2014a), competitive PV and natural gas prices, suspended state incentives, and a weak economy have all contributed to recent declines in sales.

With the drop-off in annual wind power capacity additions in 2013, wind power’s share of total U.S. electric generation capacity additions in that year shrank to 7% (Figure 2).5 Overall, wind power ranked fourth in 2013 as a source of new generation capacity, behind natural gas (48% of total U.S. capacity additions), solar (26%), and coal (10%). This diminished contribution stands in stark contrast to 2012 when wind power represented the largest source of new capacity in the United States, and it marks a notable divergence from the six years preceding 2013 during which it constituted between 25% and 43% of capacity additions in each year.

Led by the decline in the U.S. market, global wind additions contracted to approximately 36,000 MW in 2013, 20% below the record of roughly 45,000 MW added in 2012. Cumulative global capacity stood at approximately 321,000 MW at the end of the year (Navigant 2014; Table 1).6 The United States ended 2013 with 19% of total global wind power capacity, a distant second to China by this metric (Table 1).7 Annual growth in cumulative capacity in 2013 was 2% for the United States and 13% globally. After leading the world in annual wind power capacity additions from 2005 through 2008, and then losing the mantle to China from 2009 through 2011, the United States narrowly regained the global lead in 2012. In 2013, however, the United States dropped precipitously to 6th place in annual wind additions (Table 1).

The U.S. wind power market represented just 3% of global installed capacity in 2013. The top five countries in 2013 for annual capacity additions were China, Germany, India, the UK, and Canada. Table 1. International Annual Capacity (2013, MW) China 16,088 Germany 3,237 India 1,987 United Kingdom 1,833 Canada 1,599 United States 1,087 Brazil 948 Poland 894 Sweden 724 Romania 695 Rest of World 7,045 TOTAL 36,137 Cumulative Capacity (end of 2013, MW) China 91,460 United States 61,110 Germany 34,468 Spain 22,637 India 20,589 United Kingdom 10,946 Italy 8,448 France 8,128 Canada 7,813 Denmark 4,747 Rest of World 51,031 TOTAL 321,377

A number of countries have achieved relatively high levels of wind energy penetration in their electricity grids. Figure 4 presents data on end-of-2013 (and earlier years’) installed wind power capacity, translated into projected annual electricity supply based on assumed country-specific capacity factors and then divided by projected 2014 (and earlier years’) electricity consumption. Using this approximation for the contribution of wind power to electricity consumption, and focusing only on those countries with the greatest cumulative installed wind power capacity, end-of-2013 installed wind power is estimated to supply the equivalent of 34% of Denmark’s electricity demand and approximately 20% of Spain, Portugal and Ireland’s demand. In the United States, the cumulative wind power capacity installed at the end of 2013 is estimated, in an average year, to equate to almost 4.5% of the nation’s electricity demand. On a global basis, wind energy’s contribution is estimated to be 3.4%.

On a cumulative basis, Texas remained the clear leader among states, with 12,354 MW installed at the end of 2013—more than twice as much as the next-highest state (California, with 5,829 MW). In fact, Texas has more installed wind capacity than all but five countries (including the United States) worldwide. States (distantly) following Texas in cumulative installed capacity include California, Iowa, Illinois, Oregon, and Oklahoma—all with more than 3,000 MW. Thirty-four states, plus Puerto Rico, had more than 100 MW of wind capacity installed as of the end of 2013, with 23 of these topping 500 MW, 16 topping 1,000 MW, and 10 topping 2,000 MW. Although all commercial wind projects in the United States to date have been installed on land,

The right half of Table 2 lists the top 20 states based on actual wind electricity generation in 2013 divided by total in-state electricity generation in 2013.9 Iowa and South Dakota lead the list, each with more than 25% wind penetration. A total of nine states have achieved wind penetration levels of above 12% of in-state generation.

Wind energy penetration can either be expressed as a percentage of in-state load or in-state generation. In-state generation is used here, primarily because wind energy (like other energy resources) is often sold across state lines, which tends to distort penetration levels expressed as a percentage of in-state load.

Annual (2013) California 269 Kansas 254 Michigan 175 Texas 141 New York 84 Nebraska 75 Iowa 45 Colorado 32 Ohio 3 Massachusetts 3 Alaska 3 North Dakota 2 Indiana 1 Puerto Rico 1 Rest of U.S. 0 TOTAL 1,087 Table 2. U.S. wind power rankings: the top 20 states Percentage ofInstalled Capacity (MW)In-State Generation

Cumulative (end of 2013) Actual (2013)* Texas California Iowa Illinois Oregon Oklahoma Minnesota Kansas Washington Colorado New York North Dakota Indiana Wyoming Pennsylvania Michigan Idaho South Dakota New Mexico Montana Rest of U.S. TOTAL 12,354 Iowa 27.4% 5,829 South Dakota 26.0% 5,177 Kansas 19.4% 3,568 Idaho 16.2% 3,153 Minnesota 15.7% 3,134 North Dakota 15.6% 2,987 Oklahoma 14.8% 2,967 Colorado 13.8% 2,808 Oregon 12.4% 2,332 Wyoming 8.4% 1,722 Texas 8.3% 1,681 Maine 7.4% 1,544 California 6.6% 1,410 Washington 6.2% 1,340 New Mexico 6.1% 1,163 Montana 6.0%

One testament to the continued interest in land-based wind energy is the amount of wind power capacity currently working its way through the major transmission interconnection queues across the country. Figure 7 provides this information for wind power and other resources aggregated across 37 different interconnection queues administered by independent system operators (ISOs), regional transmission organizations (RTOs), and utilities.11 These data should be interpreted with caution: although placing a project in the interconnection queue is a necessary step in project development, being in the queue does not guarantee that a project actually will get built. Efforts have been made by FERC, ISOs, RTOs, and utilities to reduce the number of speculative projects that have—in recent years—clogged these queues. One consequence of those efforts, as well as perhaps the uncertain size of the future U.S. wind market, is that the total amount of wind power capacity in the nation’s interconnection queues has declined dramatically since 2009.

Much of the wind capacity in the interconnection queues is planned for Texas, the Midwest, Southwest Power Pool (SPP), PJM Interconnection, the Northwest, the Mountain region, and California; wind power projects in the interconnection queues in these regions at the end of 2013 accounted for 95% of the aggregate 114 GW of wind power in the selected queues (Figure 8). Smaller amounts of wind power capacity were represented in the interconnection queues of ISONew England (ISO-NE, 2.5%), the New York ISO (NYISO, 1.9%), and the Southeast (0.7%).

Manufacturing facilities that produce multiple components are included in multiple bars. “Other” includes facilities that produce items such as: Enclosures, composites, power converters, slip-rings, inverters, glass prepeg, electrical components, tower internals, climbing devices, couplings, castings, steel, rotor hubs, plates, walkways, doors, bearing cages, fasteners, bolts, magnetics, safety rings, struts, clamps, fiberglass, transmission housings, embed rings, electrical cable systems, yaw/pitch control systems, bases, generator plates, slew bearings, lubrication, resin, flanges, anemometers, template rings. Source: National Renewable Energy Laboratory Figure 11. Number of operating wind turbine and component manufacturing facilities in the United States Five of the ten wind turbine OEMs with the largest share of the U.S. market through 2013 (GE, Vestas, Siemens, Gamesa, Acciona) had one or more manufacturing facilities in the United States at the end of 2013. In contrast, nine years earlier (2004), there was only one active utility-scale wind energy OEM assembling nacelles in the United States (GE).15 In 2013, however, several of the OEMs’ manufacturing facilities were largely if not entirely dormant given the lack of turbine orders, and at least one of these facilities was subsequently closed in 2014. Another major OEM, Nordex, ceased U.S. manufacturing in 2013, while several others stopped U.S. manufacturing in past years (e.g., Clipper and Suzlon). In aggregate, domestic turbine nacelle assembly capability—defined here as the maximum nacelle assembly capability of U.S. plants if all were operating at maximum utilization—grew from less than 1.5 GW in 2006 to exceed 12 GW in 2012, before dropping to roughly 10 GW in 2013 (Figure 12;

Manufacturing facilities that produce multiple components are included in multiple bars. “Other” includes facilities that produce items such as: Enclosures, composites, power converters, slip-rings, inverters, glass prepeg, electrical components, tower internals, climbing devices, couplings, castings, steel, rotor hubs, plates, walkways, doors, bearing cages, fasteners, bolts, magnetics, safety rings, struts, clamps, fiberglass, transmission housings, embed rings, electrical cable systems, yaw/pitch control systems, bases, generator plates, slew bearings, lubrication, resin, flanges, anemometers, template rings.

Figure 14 presents calendar-year data on the dollar value of estimated imports to the United States of wind-related equipment that can be tracked through trade codes. Specifically, the figure shows imports of wind-powered generating sets (i.e., nacelles not surprisingly, taller towers have seen higher market share in the Great Lakes (56%) and Northeast (43%) than in the Interior (7%) and West (3%). This is largely due to the fact that such towers are most commonly used in lower wind speed sites, and presumably those with higher wind shear, to access the better wind speeds that are typically higher up.

Figure 31. Average cumulative sample-wide capacity factor by calendar year Table 5.

Inter-Year Wind Resource Variability. The strength of the wind resource varies from year to year, in part in response to significant persistent weather patterns such as El Niño/La

Competing influences of lower specific power and lower quality wind project sites have left average capacity factors among newly built projects stagnant in recent years, averaging 31 to 34 percent nationwide

Counterbalancing the decline in specific power, however, has been a tendency to build new wind projects in lower-quality wind resource areas; this is especially the case among projects installed from 2009 through 2012.

the average estimated quality of the wind resource at 80 meters among projects built in 2012 (i.e., the most recent project vintage in our capacity factor sample included in figure 32) is roughly 15% lower than it is among projects built back in 1998–1999 and that the decline has been particularly sharp since 2008.45 Although there was a bit of a rebound in 2013 (which will impact our sample in future years), this trend of building wind power projects in progressively lower-quality wind resource areas is a key reason why overall average capacity factors have not increased for projects installed in recent years. The trend may also come as a surprise, given that the United States still has an abundance of undeveloped high-quality wind resource areas.

Several factors could be driving this trend:

Technology Change. The increased availability of low-wind-speed turbines that feature higher hub heights and a lower specific power may have enabled the economic build-out of lower-wind-speed sites. Transmission and Other Siting Constraints. Developers may have reacted to increasing transmission constraints (or other siting constraints, or even just regionally differentiated wholesale electricity prices) by focusing on those projects in their pipeline that may not be located in the best wind resource areas but that do have access to transmission (or higher priced markets, or readily available sites without long permitting times).

Policy Influence. Projects built in the 4-year period from 2009 through 2012 were able to access a 30% cash grant (or ITC) in lieu of the PTC. Because the dollar amount of the grant (or ITC) was not dependent on how much electricity a project generates, it is possible that developers seized this limited opportunity to build out the less-energetic sites in their development pipelines. Additionally, state RPS requirements sometimes require or motivate in-state or in-region wind development in lower wind resource regimes.

Berkeley Lab has gathered price data for 112 U.S. wind turbine transactions totaling 29,250 MW announced from 1997 through the beginning of 2014, including ten transactions (2,082 MW) announced in 2013/14. Sources of turbine price data vary, including SEC and other regulatory filings, as well as press releases and news reports. Most of the transactions included in the Berkeley Lab dataset include turbines, towers, delivery to site, and limited warranty and service agreements.48 Nonetheless, wind turbine transactions differ in the services included (e.g., whether towers and installation are provided, the length of the service agreement, etc.), turbine characteristics (and therefore performance), and the timing of future turbine delivery, driving some of the observed intra-year variability in transaction prices.

 

Unfortunately, collecting data on U.S. wind turbine transaction prices is a challenge: only a fraction of the announced turbine transactions have publicly revealed pricing data. In part as a result, Figure 38—which depicts these U.S. wind turbine transaction prices—also presents data from: (1) Vestas on that company’s global average turbine pricing from 2005 through 2013, as reported in Vestas’ financial reports; and (2) a range of recent global average wind turbine prices for both older turbine models (smaller rotors) and newer models (larger rotors), as reported by Bloomberg NEF (2014b).

After hitting a low of roughly $750/kW from 2000 to 2002, average wind turbine prices increased by approximately $800/kW (more than 100%) through 2008, rising to an average of more than $1,500/kW. The increase in turbine prices over this period was caused by several factors, including a decline in the value of the U.S. dollar relative to the Euro; increased materials, energy, and labor input prices; a general increase in turbine manufacturer profitability due in part to strong demand growth and turbine and component supply shortages; increased costs for turbine warranty provisions; and an up-scaling of turbine size, including hub height and rotor diameter (Bolinger and Wiser 2011).

our limited sample of recently announced U.S. turbine transactions shows pricing in the $900–$1,300/kW range. Bloomberg NEF (2014b) reports global average pricing for the most-recent contracts of approximately $1,000/kW for older turbine models and $1,300/kW for newer turbine models that feature larger rotors.

In aggregate, the dataset (through 2013) includes 708 completed wind power projects in the continental United States totaling 50,210 MW and equaling roughly 82% of all wind power capacity installed in the United States at the end of 2013.

Operations and maintenance costs varied by project age and commercial operations date Operations and maintenance costs are a significant component of the overall cost of wind energy and can vary substantially among projects. Anecdotal evidence and recent analysis (Lantz 2013) suggest that unscheduled maintenance and premature component failure in particular continue to be key challenges for the wind power industry.

Figure 44 shows an upward trend in project-level O&M costs as projects age, although the sample size after year 5 is limited. In addition, the figure shows that projects installed more recently (from 2005–2008 and/or 2009-2012) have had, in general, lower O&M costs than those installed in earlier years (from 1998–2004), at least for the first 8 years of operation. Parsing the “recent project” cohort into two sub-periods, however, reveals that this trend towards lower costs has not necessarily continued with the most recent projects in the sample, those installed from 2009-2012 (though cost differences between the 2005-2008 and 2009-12 sample are small and sample size is limited).

 

Many of the projects installed more recently may still be within their turbine manufacturer warranty period, and/or may have capitalized O&M service contracts within their turbine supply agreement.

As indicated previously, the data presented in Figures 43 and 44 include only a subset of total operating expenses. In comparison, the financial statements of public companies with sizable U.S. wind project assets indicate markedly higher total operating costs. Specifically, two companies—Infigen and EDP Renováveis (EDPR), which together represented approximately 4,730 MW of installed capacity at the end of 2013 (nearly all of which has been installed since 2000)—report total operating expenses of $24.2/MWh and $23.6/MWh, respectively, for their U.S. wind project portfolios in 2013 (EDPR 2014, 2013, 2012; Infigen 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011).59 These total operating expenses are more than twice the $10/MWh average O&M cost reported above for the 85 projects in the Berkeley Lab data sample installed since 2000.

This disparity in operating costs between these two project owners and the Berkeley Lab data sample reflects, in large part, differences in the scope of expenses reported.

Important Note: Notwithstanding the comparisons made in this section, neither the wind nor wholesale electricity prices (nor fuel cost projections) reflect the full social costs of power generation and delivery. Specifically, the wind PPA prices are reduced by virtue of federal and, in some cases, state tax and financial incentives. Furthermore, these prices do not fully reflect integration, resource adequacy, or transmission costs.

Various policy drivers at both the federal and state levels have been important to the expansion of the wind power market in the United States, as have been federal investments wind energy research and development (R&D). In addition to R&D expenditure, at the federal level, the most important policy incentives in recent years have been the PTC (or, if elected, the ITC), accelerated tax depreciation, and an American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act) provision that enabled wind power projects to elect, for a limited time, a 30% cash grant in lieu of the PTC.

First established in 1992, the PTC provides a 10-year, inflation-adjusted credit that stood at 2.3¢/kWh in 2013.

The historical importance of the PTC to the U.S. wind power industry is illustrated by the pronounced lulls in wind power capacity additions in the 4 years (2000, 2002, 2004, 2013) in which the PTC lapsed as well as the increased development activity often seen during the year in which the PTC is otherwise scheduled to expire (see Figure 1); the spike in wind additions in 2012 is a clear example of this latter effect.

Accelerated tax depreciation enables wind project owners to depreciate the vast majority of their investments over a 5- to 6-year period for tax purposes. An even more attractive 50% 1st-year “bonus depreciation” schedule was in place during 2008–2010. Legislation in midDecember 2010 further increased 1st-year bonus depreciation to 100% for those projects placed in service between September 8, 2010 and the end of 2011, after which the 1st-year bonus reverted to 50% for projects placed in service during 2012. The American Taxpayer Relief Act then extended this 50% bonus depreciation for qualifying property placed in service in 2013 (and 2014 for certain long-lived property).

From 1999 through 2013, 69% of the wind power capacity built in the United States was located in states with RPS policies; in 2013, this proportion was 93%.66 As of June 2014, mandatory RPS programs existed in 29 states and Washington D.C. (Figure 50).67

In aggregate, existing state RPS policies require that by 2025 (at which point most state RPS requirements will have reached their maximum percentage targets) at least 9% of total U.S. generation supply will be met with RPS-eligible forms of renewable electricity, equivalent to roughly 106 GW of renewable generation capacity.68 Incremental growth in RPS requirements through 2025 represents 40% of projected growth in total U.S. electricity generation over that timeframe, although some portion of the growth in RPS requirements may be met with existing capacity (e.g., in regions that are currently over-supplied relative to their RPS targets).

Given the size of RPS targets and the amount of new renewable energy capacity that has been built since enactment of those policies, Berkeley Lab projects that existing state RPS programs require average annual renewable energy additions of roughly 3–4 GW/year through 2025, not all of which will be wind.69 This is below the average of 7 GW of wind power capacity added in each year over the 2007–2013 period, and even further below the 9 GW per year of total renewable generation capacity added during that time frame, demonstrating the limitations of relying exclusively on state RPS demand to drive future wind power development.

WA: 15% by 2020 MN: 26.5% by 2025ME: 40% by 2017MT: 15% by 2015 Xcel: 31.5% by 2020 NH: 24.8% by 2025 ND: 10% by 2015 MI: 10% by 2015 VT: 20% by 2017MA: 11.1% by 2009 +1%/yrOR: 25% by 2025 (large utilities) 5-10% by 2025 (smaller utilities) SD: 10% by 2015 WI: 10% by 2015 NY: 30% by 2015RI: 16% by 2019 PA: 8.5% by 2020 NV: 25% by 2025 IA: 105 MW by 1999 CT: 23% by 2020 NJ: 22.5% by 2020DE: 25% by 2025 OH: 12.5% by 2024 UT: 20% by 2025 KS: 20% of peak IL: 25% by 2025 demand by 2020 CO: 30% by 2020 (IOUs) MO: 15% by 2021CA: 33% by 2020 20% by 2020 (co-ops) 10% by 2020 (munis)OK: 15% by 2015 AZ: 15% by 2025 NM: 20% by 2020 (IOUs) 10% by 2020 (co-ops) AK: 50% by 2025 DC: 20% by 2020 MD: 20% by 2022 VA: 15% by 2025 NC: 12.5% by 2021 (IOUs) 10% by 2018 (co-ops and munis) TX: 5,880 MW by 2015 HI: 40% by 2030 Mandatory RPS Non-Binding Goal Source: Berkeley Lab

State renewable energy funds provide support for wind power projects (both financial and technical) in some jurisdictions, as do a variety of state tax incentives.

Transmission development has gained traction in recent years. FERC reports that over 3,500 miles of transmission lines came on-line in 2013, a significant increase from recent years (Figure 51). Another 15,000 miles of transmission lines are in various stages of development with a proposed on-line date of 2016 or earlier, with about one-third of those lines having a high probability completion (FERC 2014). According to the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), total transmission investment by investor-owned utilities reached $17.5 billion in 2013. EEI forecasts a decrease in investment in 2014 and 2015, primarily attributable to recent economic conditions and the continuance of low electric demand growth. Nonetheless, EEI identified over 170 transmission projects in development representing more than $60 billion in possible investment, 76% of which would—at least in part—support the integration of renewable energy (EEI 2014).

One of the most significant transmission undertakings devoted to wind power, the Competitive Renewable Energy Zones (CREZ) project in Texas, was largely finished by the end of 2013. The CREZ includes almost 3,600 circuit miles of transmission lines and was designed to accommodate up to 18,500 MW of total wind power capacity, 11,500 MW of which is additional to what existed when the lines were planned in 2008.70 The $6.8 billion cost of CREZ was $2 billion higher than first estimated, in part because over 600 circuit miles of additional transmission lines were needed to accommodate requested changes in routing from landowners. Because of CREZ, ERCOT reports that wind-related congestion between West Texas and other zones has largely disappeared. Moreover, ERCOT predicts that over 7,000 MW of new wind capacity will be installed in Texas by the end of 2015, with another 1,300 MW projected to come online in 2016. ERCOT recently issued a report stating that projected wind development in the Texas Panhandle is exceeding expectations, and additional transmission, reactive power and synchronous condensers will need to be added (ERCOT 2014). Partly in response, the Texas PUC has opened a staff investigation on whether any such costs should be assigned to renewable energy generators rather than to all customers, as is currently the case (Texas PUC 2014).

 

Elsewhere, NV Energy and Great Basin Transmission South, an affiliate of LS Power, completed the 236 mile, 500-kV, One Nevada transmission project that connects NV Energy and Sierra Pacific Power. LS Power is also developing two other transmission projects: the 500-kV Southern Nevada Intertie Project and the 500-kV Southwest Intertie Project North, both of which in combination with the ON Line could transmit over 2,000 MW. Two other transmission projects of importance to wind that were completed in 2013 include: (1) the Montana-Alberta Tie Line, a 230-kV merchant transmission line capable of transmitting 300 MW that connects Alberta to Northwestern Energy in Montana; and (2) the Pawnee-Smoky Hill double-circuit, 345-kV transmission line between the cities of Brush and Aurora in Colorado, which can transmit 300 to 500 MW of generation.

Due to the variable nature of wind, considerable attention is paid to the potential impacts of wind energy on power systems. Concerns about, and solutions to, these issues have affected, and continue to impact, the pace of wind power deployment in the United States. Experience in operating power systems with wind energy is also increasing worldwide, leading to an emerging set of best practices (Exeter and GE 2012, WGA 2012).

Figure 52 provides a selective listing of estimated wind integration costs associated with increased wind energy from integration studies completed from 2003 through 2013 at various levels of wind power capacity penetration. With one exception, wind integration costs estimated by the studies reviewed are below $12/MWh—and often below $5/MWh—for wind power capacity penetrations up to and even exceeding 40% of the peak load of the system in which the wind power is delivered. Variations in estimated costs across studies are due, in part, to differences in methodologies, definitions of integration costs, power system and market characteristics, wind energy penetration levels, fuel price assumptions, and the degree to which thermal power plant cycling costs are included.

Note also that the rigor with which the various studies have been conducted varies, as does the degree of peer review.

Finally, there has been some recent literature questioning the methods used to estimate wind integration costs and the ability to disentangle those costs explicitly, with up to 30% of PJM’s energy coming from wind and solar, given adequate transmission expansion and additional regulating reserves.

Posted in Wind | Comments Off on Wind notes from government studies

$46 Trillion Infrastructure in USA, $6 Trillion is Transportation

Posted on June 3, 2014 by

James Howard Kunstler has written that Suburbia will be the largest waste of money and physical assets in human history.

The end of the age of oil means that just about everything will be useless too.  Below is just the transportation component of private and government assets.

$6.1 Trillion dollars of Transportation equipment and structures.

Total private and public fixed assets were $46.4 trillion in 2011 (current U.S. dollars). Transportation equipment and structures (private and public) accounted for nearly 12% percent of the total.

The components of transportation fixed assets and their values are

  • private transportation equipment ($1.04 trillion)
  • private transportation structures ($680 billion)
  • government transportation structures ($3.77 trillion)

Fixed assets include both passenger and freight transportation. See the Bureau of Economic Analysis at www.bea.gov/national/FA2004/index.asp, tables 2.1, 3.1s, and 7.1b.

2011
Private Sector
Transportation Equipment1 1,037
Transportation Structures2 680
Public Sector
Highways 3,132
Transportation Structures2 635
Federal 15
State and Local 621

 

1 Includes trucks, truck trailers, buses, automobiles, aircraft, ships, boats, and railroad equipment.

2 Includes physical structures for all modes of transportation. Source: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis, National Economic Accounts, Fixed Assests Tables, tables 2.1, 3.1s, and 7.1b

Posted in Transportation Infrastructure | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Gail Tverberg: How this collapse differs from past collapses

Posted on June 1, 2014 by

Converging Energy Crises – And How our Current Situation Differs from the Past

 May 29, 2014 by

At the Age of Limits Conference, I gave a talk called Converging Crises (PDF), talking about the crises facing us as we reach energy limits. In this post, I discuss some highlights from a fairly long talk.

A related topic is how our current situation is different from past collapses.

The Nature of our Current Crisis

Figure 1

The first three crises are the basic ones: population growth, resource depletion, and environmental degradation. The other crises are not as basic, but still may act to bring the system down.

Figure 2

Humans have found a series of ways to keep deaths down, each adding more control of external energy.

  • Control of fire, starting over 1 million years ago. This allowed humans to cook their food, making it possible for more energy to go to develop the brain, and less to developing teeth and digestive apparatus. Humans could also extend their range into colder areas.
  • Agriculture, starting about 10,000 years ago. We grew desirable plants and animals and excluded other species, thus increasing the amount of food produced.
  • Coal, starting around 1800 C. E. With coal, we could make metals in quantity since we didn’t need to cut down trees for smelting. We could also make concrete and glass in quantity. With these, we could build hydroelectric power plants, and build electric transmission lines.
  • Oil, ramping up after World War II. Oil allowed the use of cars for personal transport, plus trucks to deliver goods precisely where they were needed. It also improved agricultural productivity through irrigation, refrigeration, herbicides, pesticides. The ability to use airplanes enabled globalization.

As humans’ control of energy improved, human population grew and the population of other species fell. According to Niles Eldredge, the Sixth Mass Extinction began 100,000 years ago, when there were fewer than 100,000 people on the planet, back in the days of hunter-gatherers. The extent of die-off of other species has grown as we added agriculture, and later added coal and oil use.

Humans are not doing anything “wrong.” Humans are reacting to the same instinct that all species have, namely to make use of available energy to allow more of the species to live to maturity. Population growth stops when a species reaches a limit of some sort–lack of food because the species eats too much of its would-be food supply; too much pollution; epidemics (related to crowding and poor nutrition); or limits associated with gathering external energy.

Individuals can change their personal actions, but built-in instincts tend to guide the direction of civilizations as a whole. Thus the population of civilizations tend to rise until bottlenecks are reached.

Resource Depletion is Particularly a Problem for Oil

We are seeing depletion in many areas right now, including fresh water aquifers, soil erosion, the number and size of fish in the ocean, the number of pollinators, and deforestation. The mineral concentration of ores we are mining keeps getting lower as well. For the purpose of the talk, I will concentrate on oil, however.

Right now, oil is suffering from depletion but prices don’t seem very high.

Figure 3.

The cost of extracting oil keeps rising, whether or not the prices consumers pay rise, because the cheapest to extract oil was pulled out first. The problem now is that oil prices are too low for producers, at the same time that they are very high for the consumer. The low prices for producers mean that oil companies must take extraordinary measures, such as adding more debt, or selling land they planned to develop, to have enough money to pay dividends. Companies extracting oil from shale formations are in particularly tough shape because they tend to be small and have poor credit ratings.

The low-price oil situation looks likely to reach a crisis stage in the near term. What has been holding the situation together is today’s low interest rates. With these low interest rates, investors who are desperate for higher yields will invest in “iffy” companies, like shale oil companies. In addition, oil producing companies can borrow at low rates, helping to keep costs down.

It is hard to see a fix for the problem oil producing companies are now having. If oil prices rise to help them, consumers will find that the higher oil prices “squeeze” their discretionary income. As a result, we will be pushed back into recession. So no oil price works.

How Decline in Oil Supply Can Be Expected to “Work”

Many people are of the view that if oil production declines, it will decline slowly, more or less over the same time-period it rose, in a symmetric “Hubbert” Curve. My expectation is that the downslope will be much steeper than the upslope. I also expect that all fuels will fall in use, more or less simultaneously. This pattern occurs because of the networked way the world economy is constructed and because of the role of debt, which I will describe later.

The Hubbert Curve was constructed in the special case where another fuel took over before fossil fuels started to decline (Figure 4), a situation which does not exist today.

Figure 4

In my view, a more realistic view of the expected downslope is shown in Figure 5, below.

Figure 5. Estimate of future energy production by author. Historical data based on BP adjusted to IEA groupings.

It is my expectation that the supply of all fuels will decrease in use, more or less together, because of credit related financial problems that will affect the economy as a whole.

Peter Turchin and Surgey Nefedov analyzed how eight agricultural civilizations collapsed  in the book Secular Cycles. First, there is a long period of growth and population expansion, as the group makes increasing use of a new resource available (such as land cleared for agriculture). This is followed by a “stagflation” period of 50 to 60 years after population reaches the carrying capacity of the new resource. Stagflation is followed by a crisis period of 20 to 50 years, when debt defaults became common, governments collapse, and population decreases. I show this pattern in Figure 6, below.

Figure 6

My forecast energy downslope in Figure 5 is  intended to follow roughly the shape of the curve of prior collapses, depicted in Figure 6. The sharpness of the points in Figure 6 occur because I plotted only 5-year points–annual points would have produced a smoother curve.

Environmental Degradation Takes Many Forms

Figure 7

The environmental degradation issue that gets the most “press” is climate change. If any one limit is modeled, whether it is soil problems, or the mass extinction of many species that seems to be currently taking place, or ocean acidification, it is likely to show that that particular problem is likely to take civilization down. To get a balanced view of what is ahead, a person would need to model all limits at once.

Climate change modelers are of course mainly interested in their limit. They have started to incorporate some information of the effect of other limits into the “low end” of their range (that is, the 2.6 degree scenario), but the “high estimate”–which gets much of the press–assumes no limits of any other sort. It includes far more carbon from fossil fuels than seems reasonable, in my view.

The Financial System is Terribly Important, and Debt Problems Can Bring it Down

Today’s economy is a network of interconnected businesses and consumers, regulated by governments. The financial system is extremely important to this network. In a way, the financial system is like the operating system of a computer. It telegraphs what products are needed, where, and what resources are available to meet these needs from one part of the economy to another. It allows businesses to profitably meet these needs.

Debt plays a surprisingly important role in our current economy. Increasing the amount of debt available increases the amount of goods a person can buy. For example, if a consumer has a job paying $40,000 a year, and gets a loan for $20,000 to buy a new car, the effect is similar to having $60,000 in income for that year. Similarly, if a business can borrow money for a new factory, it can add to jobs to the economy.

When the growth in debt turns to contraction (this happens if consumers default in large numbers, or if they buy fewer homes and cars), it has a huge impact on the economy. The shrinking debt tends to push the economy into contraction. Because there is less demand for commodities like oil, coal and natural gas, the prices of these commodities tend to fall. In fact, a credit contraction seems to be precisely what happened in July 2008, when oil prices took a steep drop. Prices of other fuels also dropped at the same time.

Figure 8

In fact, since 2008, the US economy is still struggling with inadequate growth in debt. The underlying reason is that consumers’ wages are lagging, so they cannot afford more debt. The government tries to make up for the lack of growth in consumer debt by borrowing more money itself and by keeping interest rates artificially low, through Quantitative Easing.

A basic underlying issue is the fact that our salaries don’t rise as oil prices rise. Similarly, our salaries don’t rise with rising interest rates. Both oil prices and interest rates very much affect what need to pay, however. Oil prices affect food and transportation costs, and interest rates affect mortgage and auto loan payments. If interest rates rise again, or if oil prices rise, many consumers will be forced to cut back on discretionary spending. As a result, the economy is likely to shift back into recession. Prices of commodities such as oil, gas, coal, and uranium are likely to fall again.  Ultimately production of these commodities can be expected to fall, because without debt, they become unaffordable for most consumers.

Government Funding Issues

One issue noted by Turchin and Nefedov is that in prior collapses, government funding is generally a problem. This occurs because the government is funded by surpluses of an economy. If an economy is reaching diminishing returns, citizens find it harder and harder to get good-paying jobs at the same time that the government needs more funding to handle the problems it is confronting, such as the need for a larger army. As a result, it becomes very hard to collect enough taxes. If tax rates are raised too high, citizens find themselves unable to afford an adequate diet. With poor nutrition, citizens become more vulnerable to epidemics–one of the major causes of die-offs in collapses.

We are seeing the issue of inadequate government funding now. US publicly held debt has been soaring since mid 2008 (Figure 9).

Figure 9

Inadequate High-Paying Jobs Go with Too Little Energy

Figure 10

An early sign of lack of adequate energy is a lack of good-paying jobs for young people. Also, the jobs that are available tend to be low-paying service jobs that don’t require much energy.

Of course, if we have to go back to growing food without today’s energy inputs, there will be a huge number of manual labor jobs available. But these are not the jobs most people are thinking about.

Electrical Grid Problems

Figure 11

There is a popular myth that electricity will save us. This view is based on the view that our problem is simply a liquid fuels problem. Our problem is really very much deeper–a systems problem that threatens to take down the financial system and the consumption of all types of fuels simultaneously. Thus, the same problems that bring down oil consumption threaten to bring down electricity consumption.

But even apart from the systems problem, it is clear that oil problems lead to electric grid  problems. The electric grid needs constant repairs. New parts must be transported using oil, and the supply lines of companies manufacturing these parts must continue to operate, again using oil. Trucks or helicopters using oil products are needed to put grid replacement parts in place. Workers need transportation for their work on the grid, as well.

The claim that wind and solar PV will save us is silly, if we have an unsolvable grid problem. The place for solar PV is off-grid. Wind also works off-grid, in uses such as pumping water. Of course, wind turbines used for this purpose are tiny compared to today’s electricity generating turbines.

Geopolitical Problems

Figure 12

As we become more resource constrained, we can expect more fighting among countries. Perhaps new alliances will  be formed, in an attempt to squeeze our current energy hogs–US, Europe, and Japan. It is possible that the US dollar will lose its status as reserve currency, leading to a lower standard of living for US citizens.

Solutions to Converging Crises

Figure 13

You may think I am kidding with respect to the last item, “We need help from a Higher Power,” but I am not. Our universe seems to have been created by a Big Bang. But big bangs don’t just happen. We live in a very orderly universe. According to Newton’s Laws of Motion, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. We also know that useful energy is balanced by friction. This, in fact, is a necessary balance, or the system would spin out of control. We also would not be able to drive down the road in a car without friction.

If a big bang happened, it seems likely to me that there was a major force behind the big bang. We can call this force Nature or a Higher Power. I am doubtful that the force behind the big bang would fix the world situation so that humans can continue along their current destructive path on earth. But the force might fix the situation in some other way–perhaps make the transition for humans easier to bear, or produce a new kind of big bang supporting an afterlife for humans as envisioned by various religions.

How This Time is Different

Greer, in his talk, mentioned several points about prior collapses:

  • Typically 95% of the population died off.
  • The time between civilizations tended to be about 500 years.
  • The 5% who survived were able to go about doing things, pretty much as had been done in the past.
  • The downslopes often had jogs and bumps in them, and could be slow.

The question arises as to how helpful this information is with respect to what is ahead. As I see the situation, civilizations that failed in the past were not fossil fuel dependent or electricity dependent. While there was specialization of labor, there was much less specialization than there is today. While there was some trade, the majority of food and clothing was locally produced. The biggest problems were

  • Growing population
  • Arable farmland that did not expand to meet growing population
  • Soil problems (loss of fertility, erosion, salinity)
  • Deforestation
  • Competition from neighboring civilizations
  • Government collapse
  • Debt problems

I view the 500 year gap between civilizations as including what I show as the “inter cycle” period between civilizations in Figure 6, above. This is the gap that took place before new growth could occur.

The big problem in the past with civilizations that collapsed was that humans were using renewable resources faster than they could renew. Population continued to expand as well. The combination of rising population and depleting soil and forest resources led to diminishing returns, lower wages for many workers, and difficulty funding governments. A 500 year gap between civilizations took the population pressure off an area. Forests were able to regrow, and soil was able to renew (at least partly through regeneration of soil by erosion of base rock).

Today, we sill have the problems we had in the past, but we have some new ones as well:

  • We are depleting aquifers much more rapidly than they regenerate. In many cases, the water table is far below what can be reached with simple tools. It will take thousands of years for these aquifers to regenerate.
  • We are depleting minerals of all kinds, so that we now need “high tech” methods to extract the low ore concentrations. These minerals will be out of reach, without the use of electricity and fossil fuels. In fact, the vast majority of fossil fuel energy supplies will also be out of reach, without today’s high tech methods. Eventually this may change, with new fossil fuel formation and with earthquakes, but the timeframe is likely to be millions of years.
  • Most people today do not know how to live without fossil fuels and electricity. If fossil fusel and electricity disappeared, most of us would not know how to produce our own food, water, and other basic necessities.
  • Most of us could not just “pick up and do as we did before,” with respect to our current jobs, if the government and 95% of the population disappeared. Our jobs are often supported by global supply chains that would disappear, as well as direct use of fossil fuels and electricity.
  • The world is sufficiently networked that most of it is likely to be drawn into a world-wide collapse. In the past, areas that did not collapse continued to function. These areas could act as a back-up, if functions were lost.

In the past, the 500 year gap was enough to allow regeneration of forests and soil, once population pressures were reduced. If that were our only problem now, we could expect the same pattern again. Such a regeneration would allow a reasonably large group of people (say 500 million people) to get back to a non-fossil fuel based civilization in 500 years, with new governments, roads and other services.

In such a new civilization, we would likely have difficulty using much metals, because ores are now quite depleted. Even reprocessing of existing metals is likely to require more heat energy than is easily available from renewables sources.

We are now so dependent on fossil fuels and electricity that any collapse that does take place seems likely to be faster than prior collapses. If the electric grid goes down in an area, and cannot be repaired, most business functions will be lost–practically immediately. If oil supply is interrupted, it also will bring a halt to most business in an area, because workers can’t get to work and raw materials cannot be transported.

We are bing told, “Renewables will save us,” but this is basically a lie. Wind and solar PV are just as much a part of our current fossil fuel system as any other source of electricity. They will only last as long as the weakest link–inverters that need replacing, batteries that need replacing, or the electric grid that needs fixing. We are being told that these are our salvation, because politicians need to have something to point to as a solution–not because they really will work.

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Exponential growth examples

Posted on May 30, 2014 by

Monbiot, George. 27 May 2014. It’s simple. If we can’t change our economic system, our number’s up It’s the great taboo of our age – and the inability to discuss the pursuit of perpetual growth will prove humanity’s undoing. The Guardian.

Imagine that in 3030 BC the total possessions of the people of Egypt filled one cubic meter, which grew 4.5% a year. How big would that stash have been 3,000 years later?   2.5 billion billion solar systems   (That’s 2.5 quadrillion, or 2,500,000,000,000,000,000).

Ignore if you must climate change, biodiversity collapse, the depletion of water, soil, minerals, oil; even if all these issues miraculously vanished, the mathematics of compound growth make continuity impossible.

Economic growth is an artifact of the use of fossil fuels. Before large amounts of coal were extracted, every upswing in industrial production would be met with a downswing in agricultural production, as the charcoal (from wood) or horse power required by industry reduced the land available for growing food. Every prior industrial revolution collapsed, as growth could not be sustained. But coal broke this cycle and enabled – for a few hundred years – the phenomenon we now call sustained growth.

It was neither capitalism nor communism that made possible the progress and pathologies (total war, the unprecedented concentration of global wealth, planetary destruction) of the modern age. It was coal, followed by oil and gas. The mother narrative, is carbon-fueled expansion. Our ideologies are mere subplots. Now, with the accessible reserves exhausted, we must ransack the hidden corners of the planet to sustain our impossible proposition. The scouring of the planet has only just begun–everywhere that contains something concentrated, unusual, precious, will be sought out and exploited, its resources extracted and dispersed, the world’s diverse and differentiated marvels reduced to the same grey stubble.

Some people try to solve the impossible equation with the claim that as processes become more efficient and gadgets are miniaturized, we use, in aggregate, fewer materials. There is no sign that this is happening. Iron ore production has risen 180% in 10 years. The trade body Forest Industries tells us that “global paper consumption is at a record high level and it will continue to grow”. If, in the digital age, we won’t reduce even our consumption of paper, what hope is there for other commodities?

Look at the lives of the super-rich, who set the pace for global consumption. Are their yachts getting smaller? Their houses? Their artworks? Their purchase of rare woods, rare fish, rare stone? Those with the means buy ever bigger houses to store the growing stash of stuff they will not live long enough to use. Ever more of the surface of the planet is used to extract, manufacture and store things we don’t need. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that fantasies about colonizing space – which tell us we can export our problems instead of solving them – have resurfaced.

The inescapable failure of a society built upon growth and its destruction of the Earth’s living systems are the overwhelming facts. As a result, they are mentioned almost nowhere. They are the 21st century’s great taboo, the subjects guaranteed to alienate your friends and neighbors. We live as if trapped inside a Sunday supplement: obsessed with fame, fashion and the three dreary staples of middle-class conversation: recipes, renovations and resorts. Anything but the topic that demands our attention.

Statements of the bleeding obvious, the outcomes of basic arithmetic, are treated as exotic and unpardonable distractions, while the impossible proposition by which we live is regarded as so sane and normal and unremarkable that it isn’t worthy of mention. That’s how you measure the depth of this problem: by our inability even to discuss it.

 

 

 

Posted in Exponential Growth, Limits To Growth | 2 Comments

Expressways & Interstates are only designed to last for 20 years

Posted on May 28, 2014 by
Figure 2-5. Tonnage on U.S. highways, railroads, and inland waterways (U.S. Department of Transportation FHWA FM&O 2007).

Figure 2-5. Tonnage on U.S. highways, railroads, and inland waterways (U.S. Department of Transportation FHWA FM&O 2007).

Preface. I make the case that civilization would end in a week if trucks stopped running in my first book, and though I had in mind that they would be running low on diesel fuel on the downside of world peak oil production, if roads fall apart as well, and can’t be maintained because of lack of energy, that’ll stop trucks as well.

Roads are Essential

There are 4,016,741 miles of roads in the United States.  The most critical roads are the almost 47,000 miles long with 55,000 bridges and 4 or more lanes wide Interstate Highways, the largest single investment the American people have made in public works.

Over eleven million trucks worth $1 Trillion dollars deliver goods over these roads. Trucks moved nearly 70% of all domestic freight — 9.4 billion tons of stuff. If you put all of these trucks in a line, it would stretch from the earth to the moon over 11 times.

According to the most recent information from the Commodity Flow Survey (CFS), on average, 42 tons of freight worth $39,000 was delivered to every person in the United States in 2007 transported an average of 11,000 ton-miles to every person in the country.

Since railroads are on average 4.5 to 6.5 times more energy efficient than trucks in ton miles of freight moved per gallon (Tolliver) it’s a shame, no, a crime, that there are only 140,000 miles of railroad tracks (down from 254,000 miles in 1916), just 3.5% of the 4 million road miles. Freight trains used 2% of our petroleum. Trucks burned 46% — 20% medium and heavy trucks (classes 3-8) burned 20% and 26% light trucks another (CTA).

Do you like to eat?  Here’s how grain is typically moved from point A to point B (bold represents diesel burning vehicles).  After harvesting the grain it’s trucked to on-farm storage, then trucked to a country elevator, then the grain moves by truck or train from the country elevator to the sub-terminal elevator,  then a train or barge delivers the grain to the export elevator, and the grain is loaded on a ship and taken to the destination country.

Roads are in Bad Shape

But they’re falling apart and need $930 billion of work. Driving on this poor pavement costs motorists an additional $67 billion in vehicle repairs and operating costs every year (ASCE). When you consider all the ways highways are assaulted, it’s not hard to see why.

Heavy Trucks

According to the AASHO Road Test, heavy trucks can do more than 10,000 times the damage of a car. The amount of damage varies by how fast the truck is going, how uneven the road is, and many other factors (Hjort).

Soil, weather, & exponential growth

The freeze-thaw cycle cracks, swells, and buckles pavement.  Roads fissure from heat, depressions grooved by wheels, abrasion of studded tires, water filling cracks and freezing, water and salt corroding steel rebar. Roads unravel from lost surface stones, potholes, and poor maintenance.

The amount of traffic today is often more than double what the road was originally designed for. No one thought freight would move from trains to roads given how much more fuel efficient trains are, and engineers can’t anticipate the new suburbs and shopping malls that flood highways with more vehicles.

Local materials affect longevity

Concrete is the most heavily used substance in the world after water (Sedgwick), which is why gravel, crushed stone, and sand are the leading items transported by weight – one in seven tons of freight. But they don’t go far, the average distance moved is 60 miles, because the shipping is so expensive and their value so low.

This means that often less than ideal local material is used to make concrete.

Roads are two to four foot thick cakes, with six layers (Subgrade, capping, sub-base, binder course, and the frosting is the surface course). Each layer is baked with local materials, and never with the same recipe — there are an infinite number of recipes. Adding to the limitless permutations is what kind of steel is used, since steel varies in what alloys were used, and how strong, resistant to corrosion, and easily welded it is. Asphaltic concrete only adds to the mystery, since it has an unknown chemistry brought in by the source of the crude oil it was derived from (Skinner).

Roads can last longer

They’re designed to last for 40 years in some European countries with thicker, more durable roadbeds using concrete rather than asphalt. Concrete lasts longer, but it costs more and takes longer to repair. Asphalt is cheap and fast, but falls apart quickly.

Longer Lasting Roads are Expensive

Long-lasting roads are much thicker and cost more, which need more money up front, and taxpayers tend to object to that. Look what it took to make Chicago’s 30-year Dan Ryan Expressway at a cost of $1 billion per 10 miles (Adams):

  • Old road: 27 inches thick. 12 inch aggregate., 10 inch concrete. 5 inch asphalt.
  • New road: 44 inches thick. 24 inch aggregate. 14 inch concrete. 6 inch asphalt.

The United States has numerous agencies who’ve come up with ways to build longer lasting roads, but this often requires new equipment, which small construction and paving companies can’t afford, and the majority of highway construction is done by small firms.

Highway agencies have fixed budgets, so even though it would cost far less in the long run to make a 50-year-road, they often don’t have the money at the outset to pay for a better road. Highway agencies also try to build and maintain the maximum number of miles possible and don’t want to blow their wad on relatively few miles of highway, even if that would be the best use of public funds.

There are no incentives to build long-lasting low maintenance roads. Politicians get no immediate political return from building long-lasting roads, low-bidders usually get the work so quality suffers, and financing is done by cost per mile, not durability per mile over time. On top of all that, the number of pavement design engineers is shrinking from downsizing, retirement, and young engineers not being attracted to this field.

Peak Oil – the End of Roads?

Peak oil is an awful lot like losing your job with no hope of new one ever again. It’s not a good time to buy a new car, you’ll need every penny of your savings to pay for food, housing, insurance, and utilities.

We’ve been at peak oil since 2005 and any day now could slide down the other side of Hubbert’s peak.  It’s an awful time to replace 11 million trucks worth $1 trillion dollars and millions of miles of underground pipelines that deliver diesel fuel across the nation with something else that doesn’t even exist yet.

And if you did that, then what?  The roads are falling apart.  Swift writes “Bringing the system into full repair, and keeping it there, will cost us $225 billion a year for the next 50 years to rehabilitate surface transportation. What’s at stake, ultimately, is a foundation of America’s safety, economy, and mobility since we do 96% of our traveling by car and truck. And not making the fixes will wind up costing more as needed repairs balloon into reconstruction. “If we can get this work done now,” said John Horsley, AASHTO’s executive director, “it will cost one-third of what it’ll cost if we put things off.”

Swift concludes that this highway system “represents a spectacular investment in a mode of transport that will wither without new fuel sources….Before long, we’ll be compelled to develop a wholesale replacement for gasoline. We’d better hope we do, anyway. Because without alternative fuels, we may see the interstates morph from the world’s biggest highway system into its biggest white elephant”.

A few more statistics

  • In 2008, 4.5 million people were employed in transportation and warehousing industries in the United States, a little over 3% of total U.S. employment.
  • Trucking was the largest employer within the for-hire transportation section with almost 1.4 million employed.
  • The railroad industry employed 231,000.  There are 94,942 miles of Class I freight railroad tracks, 46,474 miles of regional and shortline railroad tracks
  • water transportation employed 67,000.There are 26,000 miles of navigable inland waterways
  • Another key component of logistics services and supply chains, warehousing and storage, employed 672,000

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com Women in ecology  author of 2021 Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy best price here; 2015 When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Podcasts: Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity

References

ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers). 2013. Report Card: Roads.

Adams, C. Dec 31, 2010. Why don’t roads last longer? StraightDope.com

CTA. Center for Transportation Analysis. 2013. Transportation Energy Data book Edition 32. Chapter 2. Energy. Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Hjort, Mattias, et al. Road wear from Heavy Vehicles – an overview. Report nr. 08/2008 NVF committee Vehicles and Transports.

Preserving and Protecting Freight Infrastructure and Routes. 2012. National Academy of Sciences.

Sedgwick, J. 1991. Strong but sensitive. Atlantic Monthly, April 1991, pp. 70–82.

Skinner Jr., R.E. 2008. Highway Design and Construction: The Innovation Challenge. National Academy of Engineering.

Tolliver, D, et al. May 2013. Analysis of Railroad Energy Efficiency in the United States.

Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute, North Dakota State University

U.S. Department of Transportation RITA/BTS 2010, Table 3-19b

Additional reading

Gibbons, J. 1999. Pavements and Surface Materials. University of Connecticut Nonpoint education for municipal officials technical paper #8.

Keller, G et al. July 2003. Low-volume roads engineering. Chapter 12. Roadway Materials and Material Sources for Low Volume Roads. USDA Forest service.

Swift, Earl. The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways.

Posted in Infrastructure & Fast Crash, Roads, Trucks | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

My Favorite James Howard Kunstler podcasts

Posted on May 27, 2014 by

You can subscribe to these on iTunes, or go to http://kunstler.com/writings/podcast/

I haven’t listened to all of his podcasts yet, these are the ones I’ve best liked so far (I’ve left a lot of good ones out):

KunstlerCast 253 – Yakking with Alice Friedemann of EnergySkeptic.com

Alice Friedemann insists she is not an academic, but publishes on a wide variety of contemporary scientific issues bearing on the fate of industrial civilization. She subscribes to a scenario that she calls the “fast crash.” She worked for 25 years as a systems architect and engineer in the corporate world, or “Dilbert-Land” as she calls it, before dropping out to write full time. Her science and economic essays can be found at her website: Energyskeptic.com. Alice is also a cookbook writer and blogger at the website Wholegrainalice.com She lives in Berkeley, California.
Direct Download:  http://traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_253.mp3

KunstlerCast 241 — Snake Oil: Richard Heinberg on the Great Shale Snooker

JHK yaks with Richard Heinberg about his new book, Snake Oil: How Fracking’s False Promises of Plenty Imperils Our Future. Richard is also the author of the great peak oil primer, The Party’s Over, and many other books about the converging dilemma’s of our time, including Peak Everything and The End of Growth. He’s a founder and senior fellow of the Post Carbon Institute.  Direct Download: http://traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_241.mp3

KunstlerCast # 239 — Charlie Hall on Reality-Based Economics

JHK shoots the breeze with Charlie Hall, distinguished professor emeritus at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry at Syracuse, NY — just retired last month and founder of the Association for Biophysical Economics. We yak about reality-based economics and the relationship of energy to money. Direct Download: http://traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_239.mp3

KunstlerCast 235 — Talking to petroleum geologist Jeffrey Brown

JHK talks with Texas petroleum geologist Jeffrey Brown about the global oil export-import scene, the shale oil situation, and the public’s misunderstanding of oil realities. Jeff originated the model for understanding the decline of global oil exports and what it means for us, the importers on the other side of that trade. And what it means is that our total oil supply in the USA is much more fragile than the public imagines.   Direct Download: http://traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_235.mp3

KunstlerCast #234: George Mobus and Biophysical Economics  
Released: June 20, 2013  JHK jaws with George Mobus, systems scientist from the University of Washington, Tacoma. George is a member of the Biophysical Economics group — not you mother’s economists, shall we say. I’m pretty much on-board with their reality-based discipline, however listeners will probably notice that George is a bit more doomerish than I am usually labeled as. What i like about the Biophysical econ gang is that they pay attention to the importance of the energy side of the equation. George is smart and a real nice guy.

KunstlerCast #331: Conversation with Tad Patzek of the University of Texas
Released: May 30, 2013  JHK in conversation with Tad Patzek, chair of the Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering Department at the University of Texas. I’m twanging on the oil subject because the level of wishful thinking in the USA is shockingly high and we would benefit from facing reality and preparing for new arrangements in the ordering of everyday life.

KunstlerCast #330: A Conversation with Charles Hugh Smith
Released: May 23, 2013  JHK chats with Charles Hugh Smith of the blog OfTwoMinds.com. Charles is also the author of many books, most lately “Why Things Are Falling Apart — And What We Can Do About It.” Charles describes it: “…Things are falling apart–that is obvious. But why are they falling apart? The reasons are complex and global. Our economy and society have structural problems that cannot be solved by adding debt to debt. We are becoming poorer, not just from financial over-reach, but from fundamental forces that are not easy to identify or understand.”

KunstlerCast #228: Talking Shale Oil and Gas with Arthur Berman
Released: May 9, 2013  JHK talks with geologist and independent oil-and-gas analyst Arthur Berman of Houston Texas — emphasis on independent. Art Brings clarity to the muddle created by industry propaganda planted in the creduous and gullible mainstream media.

KunstlerCast #217: The God of Progress is Dead A Chat with John Michael Greer Released: Feb. 15, 2013 John Michael Greer, author of The Long Descent, The Wealth of Nature and Apocalypse Not, returns to the KunstlerCast to speak with JHK by phone.

KunstlerCast #215: JHK is back – Nicole Foss Interview Economic contraction and the fate of the nation
Released: January 31, 2013   This week I was fortunate to have Nicole Foss of TheAutomaticEarth.com swing by as an overnight houseguest and we got to sit down at the microphones for a chat. Nicole is a veteran of Canadian government’s electrical ministry and has worked in the nuclear energy ministries of the UK and the European Union. She has lectured all over Europe, the USA, Australia and New Zealand in recent years.

KunstlerCast #170: The End of Growth – Part 1 JHK Speaks to Richard Heinberg 

KunstlerCast #171: The End of Growth – Part 2

In part one of this one-hour conversation, Richard Heinberg, author of Peak Everything, The Party’s Over and the newly published The End of Growth joins James Howard Kunstler by phone to talk about peak oil, financial dysfunction, political convulsions and generational conflict.

KunstlerCast #151: Energy Delusions Fantasies About Our Oil Dependency

April 7, 2011  James Howard Kunstler believes Americans and their leaders are lying to themselves about our current energy predicament. There is a tremendous body of fantasy about how much energy Americans can harvest from shale gas, shale oil, tar sands, running the American truck fleet on natural gas and other forms of alternative fuel for motoring. There is even one fantasy that an endless supply of abiotic oil is located in the earth’s core. Kunstler runs down the list and gives us the score.

KunstlerCast #146: Geritopia Leisureville, by Andrew Blechman
March 3, 2011 Author Andrew Blechman discusses his book Leisureville, a tragicomic report on The Villages, America’s largest planned retirement community. In this version of suburbia, Blechman explains, everyone drives golf carts, last call is at 8:30, Fox News plays on the hour from the lampposts and children aren’t allowed.

KunstlerCast #141: Interstate 69 with Matt Dellinger The Last Great American Highway? 

Released: Jan. 20, 2011 James Howard Kunstler is joined in the studio by author Matt Dellinger to discuss his new book, Interstate 69. Also known as “The NAFTA Highway,” I-69 is a proposed 1,400-mile mega-highway linking Canada to Mexico via the American heartland. This special one-hour conversation covers the economic development schemes, history, culture, conspiracy theories and colorful characters behind the story of what might be the last great American highway. Matt Dellinger has written for The New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Oxford American, the Wall Street Journal magazine, and The New York Times. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and blogs for public radio’s TransportationNation.org. His website is http://www.mattdellinger.com.

KunstlerCast #233: A Conversation With Jim Quinn of The Burning Platform
Released: June 13, 2013  JHK chats with Jim Quinn, author of The Burning Platform dot com. Jim Quinn spent most of his career as a financial executive in the corporate world and now works on the business side of a major university (name of it omitted at JQ’s request). He’s a keen observer of the financial scene and the way it expresses itself in the decay of everyday life.

 

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