{"id":722,"date":"2011-02-18T12:34:19","date_gmt":"2011-02-18T17:34:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www3.law.harvard.edu\/journals\/hlpr\/?p=722"},"modified":"2015-10-02T15:58:31","modified_gmt":"2015-10-02T15:58:31","slug":"moores-law-and-the-future-of-renewable-energy-or-why-we-cant-get-to-80-percent-clean-energy-in-2035-part-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/2011\/02\/18\/moores-law-and-the-future-of-renewable-energy-or-why-we-cant-get-to-80-percent-clean-energy-in-2035-part-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Moore\u2019s Law and The Future of Renewable Energy, or Why We Can\u2019t Get to 80 Percent Clean Energy in 2035: Part 3"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jason Harrow<\/em><\/p>\n

3. Two Other Ways That Energy Doesn\u2019t Work Like Information<\/span><\/p>\n

This is the third post in a multi-part series. In\u00a0Part 1<\/a>, I explained the idea of Moore\u2019s Law, which states that computer technology gets about twice as good, for the same price, every two years.\u00a0 In\u00a0Part 2<\/a>, I argued that the goals President Obama set for clean energy in his State of the Union are overly optimistic, because energy technologies do not obey Moore\u2019s Law. In this Part, I give two other reasons why energy technology cannot be adopted as quickly as computer technology. Feedback is welcome to\u00a0<\/em>Jason.harrow@gmail.com<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

I do not mean to be overly pessimistic, but when you look at the energy industry, you see that things are even worse than I\u2019ve previously explained when it comes to the speed that we will be able to implement innovative, renewable technologies. Even if the rate of our technological development happens faster than most people are predicting, it still will be exceedingly difficult to transform our energy use in 25 years to conform with the President\u2019s goal. That\u2019s because there are at least two other ways that the Green Age does not work like the Information Age. I\u2019ll call the first the \u201cold stuff\u201d problem and the second the \u201cpermissions\u201d problem.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The \u201cold stuff\u201d problem arises because we already have an entire power grid working well, and the equipment is really, really expensive. So what do we do with this \u201cold stuff\u201d when we have a bunch of \u201cnew stuff\u201d ready to go? There\u2019s no easy\u00a0answer<\/a>\u00a0for this. Vaclav Smil, a Professor at the University of Manitoba and perhaps the leading historian of energy use, has described the scope of this problem in a 2008 article\u00a0here<\/a>. He notes that the current fossil-fuel and nuclear generation infrastructure has a replacement value of $1.5\u00a0trillion\u00a0<\/em>dollars. Who will pay to take much of that offline when, as the President hopes, we are generating 80% of our power from \u201cclean\u201d sources in 2035?<\/p>\n

<\/span>As Smil notes, though, there is still more \u201cold stuff\u201d we have to worry about than just the power plants themselves. For instance, we don\u2019t have the transmission infrastructure to move electricity from where the wind and the sun is\u2014the plains, and the Southwest\u2014to where most people are in the East. So we\u2019ll need to build, in Smil\u2019s estimation, \u201cat least 40,000 additional miles of new high-capacity lines\u201d at a cost of around $100 billion. Presumably, that will render some of the existing lines virtually useless. Where does all the old stuff go in 2035? The fact that we have lots of old stuff online means that the cost and difficulty of transitioning to renewables is higher than many people realize. You have to not only consider the cost of the new, which is what my prior post was about, but also the cost of getting rid of the old.<\/p>\n

This raises an interesting\u00a0question<\/a>: why isn\u2019t there the same kind of \u201cold stuff\u201d problem in the tech industry? The problem is there to some degree. We don\u2019t all rush out and get new laptops every month, even though the cost of components does keep falling. That\u2019s because the improvements in the new stuff isn\u2019t worth us chucking our old stuff in only a month. But the reason that it\u2019s not nearly as big of a problem in the tech space has, once again, to do with Moore\u2019s Law. Computer technology gets\u00a0so much better\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0so much cheaper\u00a0<\/em>so much more quickly than other sorts of technology. That means that it very quickly becomes far less efficient\u2014and therefore more expensive\u2014to keep operating the old, slow stuff than to buy the new, fast stuff.<\/p>\n

An example illustrates the point. Lots of people paid $1,000 fifteen years ago ($1,300 in today\u2019s dollars) to get a Motorola StarTac, the coolest, smallest, best cell phone on the market (see the picture below\u2014you\u2019ll remember it). But who is clinging to that investment today? In just a few years, the new stuff got too good and too cheap not to make the switch. Apparently, Motorola sold about 60 million StarTacs in the 90\u2019s. I would guess that almost every single one of them has been thrown away.<\/p>\n

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Two lines of LED text for $1,000!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But, of course, you can\u2019t justify throwing away a coal-fired power plant until solar or wind are so much cheaper and better than coal that it\u2019s easier just to throw the old power plant away and build a new one based on solar. We are not even close to that point, and because of the way energy technology changes, we will not be there soon. We need solar power to work like cell phones, where we can just chuck our StarTacs in the trash. But it doesn\u2019t work that way.<\/p>\n

Smil calls pretending that we can overcome this infrastructure problem easily \u201cMoore\u2019s Curse.\u201d He notes that such green-energy optimism not only ignores the pace of technological change, but it \u201cit completely ignores the massive infrastructural needs of new modes of electricity generation.\u201d I have not seen anyone propose any kind of solution to this problem that responds to its massive scale.<\/p>\n

That brings me to a final problem that demands mention. I\u2019ll call it the \u201cpermissions\u201d problem, in light of an\u00a0excellent article<\/a>\u00a0that Professor Larry Lessig wrote this fall about the movie\u00a0The Social Network<\/em>. In it, Lessig lamented that the film did not engage at all with the most incredible feature of the Internet: that \u201cZuckerberg\u2019s genius could be embraced by half-a-billion people within six years of its first being launched, without (and here is the critical bit) asking permission of anyone. The real story is not the invention. It is the platform that makes the invention sing.\u201d The information technology sector thus combines rapid technological change with a kind of radical democracy that lets anyone with a few good lines of code take over the world in a heartbeat. YouTube went from not existing to being valued at a\u00a0$1 billion<\/a>\u00a0in 12 months. We get used to hearing craziness like that, but the blinding speed of growth on the Internet should make our heads spin every time we hear that.\u00a0That speed is not normal<\/em>. But a key driver of this incredible speed is that online innovators don\u2019t need to ask permission. They just need to start running code.<\/p>\n

The opposite is true, of course, in the energy sector. No one has ever said that a feature of our energy grid or regulatory framework is that it makes \u201cinvention sing.\u201d It grinds invention to a halt.<\/p>\n

One of the wonderful things about being in law school is that you get to see how the sausage is made in lots of industries, and seeing how things work in the energy industry is not encouraging on this front. Reading a decision by the Georgia Power Commission that allowed a new nuclear generation plant to be built will make your head hurt. Though there apparently have been some small steps to allow new generation facilities to come online faster, companies still need permission from a whole lot of people if they want to enter the energy space. It\u2019s not just regulators\u2014there are also vendors, distributors, retailers, manufacturers, and partners that all need to be on board.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s tempting to think that the Mark Zuckerberg or the Bill Gates of the solar panel industry can just get hundreds of millions of people to use her \u201cinsanely great\u201d new product, because it\u2019s better and cheaper than everything else. That\u2019s what happens when Apple introduces a new product and tens of millions of people have it in their hands months later. But the Internet has skewed our thinking. In the energy sector, that innovator will need to ask a lot of people\u2019s permission first, and some people won\u2019t want to give her permission, perhaps because they don\u2019t grasp the technology, or perhaps because granting her permission is against their vested interests, or perhaps because they don\u2019t really care either way and just want to go home at five o\u2019clock. Change can happen, but it will necessarily be slower and more expensive when innovators have to keep asking permission from other people. That, too, cuts against the President\u2019s goal.<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s left? What should policymakers do once they stop deluding themselves into believing that the dizzying speed of innovation in the information technology sector will be replicated in the clean technology sector? That is what the next post in this series will explore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jason Harrow 3. Two Other Ways That Energy Doesn\u2019t Work Like Information This is the third post in a multi-part […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/peZQka-bE","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}