The culture of waste in fossil fuels

Looking at the world around us, it can be hard to imagine ever transitioning beyond fossil fuels. In a zero carbon world, every car and bus and train is electric. All heating is electric, all industry and aviation. It’s hard to believe that we can ever build enough renewable energy to meet all of those needs, or that the grid could handle it all.

The answer is that we don’t have to.

First of all, the change should include a modal shift rather than a straight swap in technology – so active and public transport, rather than electrifying the car-based transport system we have today. And since it’s possible to build homes and offices with close to zero heating needs, that should be the priority. (A reminder: there is a research station in Antarctica that is warmed only by the computers and the body heat of its occupants.)

Low traffic towns are healthier and safer. Homes with no heating needs are cheap to run. This is how we unlock the co-benefits of a low carbon future, taking the opportunity of the transition to make lasting improvements to the way we live.

Perhaps, like most politicians appear to be, you’re determined not to do that. You want to remove the carbon but otherwise leave everything exactly as it is. Even then there is no need to match our existing energy system with an equal amount of renewable energy, because fossil fuels has waste built in.

Combustion is an inefficient process. It always has been. When you burn coal for electricity, most of the energy is lost along the way. It’s lost to mining, transmission, and the process itself – burning the coal, heating the water for steam, running the steam through turbines. You’re lucky to get 40% of the original energy out the other side. Because coal has been cheap, this inefficiency is taken for granted and normal. But it’s ultimately waste.

Combustion engines are the same, as I’ve described before. A petrol car runs by capturing the energy of a small explosion in a steel box, multiple times a second, and turning it into forward motion. It’s an idea that dates from 1794, and while it has been magnificently refined along the way, it remains an inefficient process that wastes most of the energy in the fuel as heat and noise.

Again, oil has been cheap and this is the world we’ve grown up in. Most of us haven’t really noticed or cared that this is a irredeemably wasteful technology.

Renewable energy doesn’t have this waste problem. It is a fundamentally better way to generate electricity. No mining, no burning. It’s much more direct at putting energy to use, as this graph from the Rocky Mountain Institute shows:

This is an under-appreciated fact: low carbon technology isn’t just better because it’s low carbon. It’s cleaner, it’s more efficient. Wind and sunlight come free, and so in the long term it will be cheaper too.

That doesn’t make the clean energy transition easy. The challenge is immense. But when we view it through the lens of fossil fuels it can look impossible. It’s not, because the low carbon technologies are fundamentally different from an energy system based on burning stuff.

Fossil fuels have done remarkable things for the parts of the world that were able to exploit them. We can thank them as we wave them goodbye. But they are the energy source of the past, and the energy systems of the future are better.