Power Hungry (12 page)

In 2000, Alan Pasternak of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory did a systematic analysis of electricity use and wealth. He used the United Nations Human Development Index—which ranks countries based on measures such as life expectancy, nutrition, health, mortality, poverty, education, and access to safe water and sanitation—as his baseline ranking system. He then compared each country's rank in the Human Development Index with its electricity consumption. Pasternak's
conclusions were unequivocal: “Neither the Human Development Index nor the Gross Domestic Product of developing countries will increase without an increase in electricity use,” he wrote. Pasternak went on, saying: “The estimates of electricity use associated with high levels of human development presented in this analysis argue for substantially increased energy and electricity supplies in the developing countries and the formulation of supply scenarios that can deliver the needed energy within resource, capital, and environmental constraints.”
²⁸
In other words, if we want to help developing countries bring more people out of poverty, we need to help them increase the amount of electricity they generate and distribute.

Source
: Alan D. Pasternak, “Global Energy Futures and Human Development: A Framework for Analysis,” Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, October 2000,
https://e-reports-ext.llnl.gov/pdf/239193.pdf
, 5.

Pasternak's work has since been cited by many other researchers who have looked into the correlation between electricity and human development. Moreover, Pasternak found that providing modest amounts of
electricity per capita was not enough to assure good results. He determined that per-capita electricity consumption needed to be at least 4,000 kilowatt-hours per person per year to assure that countries had a Human Development Index of 0.9 or greater. That's an important distinction, because Pasternak found that only “14.6 percent of the sample global population enjoyed an HDI [Human Development Index score] of 0.9 or greater in 1997.”

The essentiality of electricity can be demonstrated by looking at Africa. In 2007, the entire continent of Africa, a region with a population of some 955 million people, representing about 14 percent of the world's population, used just 3 percent of the world's electric power. In 2007, the entire population of Africa consumed about 612.6 terawatt-hours of electricity.
²⁹
That's about as much power as was consumed by Canada, a country with 33.3 million residents.
³⁰
Put another way, the average Canadian uses about twenty-eight times as much electricity as the average African.

In fact, the “dark continent,” is just that—dark. Satellite photos of the Earth's surface at night show that the majority of the development in Africa has occurred on the continent's northernmost coastal areas and in South Africa. Meanwhile, there are only a handful of lighted areas on the southern coasts and in the interior of the continent.
³¹
Africa provides a case study in the correlation between electricity and economic development. Of the 1.6 billion people on the planet who live without electricity, about one-third of them, some 547 million people, live in Africa.
³²
And the paucity of electricity correlates with some truly awful quality-oflife statistics. Of the 15 countries with the highest death rates, 14 of them are in Africa. (The outlier on that list is Afghanistan.)
³³
Of the 22 countries with the highest infant mortality rates, 21 of them are in Africa. (Afghanistan, again, makes the list.)
³⁴

Addressing the lack of electricity in Africa will require billions of dollars in new investment. And the continent has shown some remarkable progress in recent years. Between 1990 and 2007, electricity generation in Africa nearly doubled.
³⁵
But much of that new power was generated with coal. South Africa, one of the continent's most prosperous countries, relies heavily on coal for its electric power, deriving some 76 percent of its primary energy from the black hydrocarbon.
³⁶

The paucity of electricity in the developing world and the absolute need for more electric power to help bring people out of poverty brings us to two key points: First, much of the new generation capacity that will be installed in the developing world is going to come from coal-fired power plants because that is often the most-affordable option. Second, the countries building these plants are far more concerned about raising the living standards of their citizens than they are about the amount of carbon dioxide they are producing.

Consider the world's two most populous countries: China and India. Both have huge deposits of coal, and both have made it clear that they will use their coal to make electricity. At the end of 2008, China had about 800,000 megawatts of electricity generation capacity.
³⁷
(For comparison, the United States has about 1 million megawatts of capacity.)
³⁸
About 80 percent of the electricity China generates comes from coal-fired power plants.
³⁹
With about 114 billion tons of reserves, China has enough coal to last about forty-one years at current levels of production.

India, with 1.1 billion people, sits atop 58 billion tons of coal reserves.
⁴⁰
Between 1990 and 2008, India's coal output jumped by 129 percent, to some 512 million tons. During that period, India had the third-largest increase in coal production among the world's major economies, trailing only Indonesia (2,038 percent increase) and China (157 percent increase).
⁴¹
That coal is fueling frenzied expansion of coal-fired generation capacity. Between 1990 and 2009, India's electricity production nearly tripled, reaching 834.3 terawatt-hours in 2008, and about 68 percent of that power generation now comes from the burning of coal.
⁴²
But even with the huge increases in power production, 40 percent of Indian homes still don't have electricity and 60 percent of Indian industrial firms rely on alternate forms of generation because the power grid isn't reliable.
⁴³

India is tired of lagging behind the rest of the world. That message was made clear by none other than Rajendra Pachauri, the Indian academic who chairs the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In July 2009, Pachauri asked reporters, “Can you imagine 400 million people who do not have a light bulb in their homes?” And he went on to explain where India was going to be getting its future power: “You cannot, in a democracy, ignore some of these realities and as it
happens with the resources of coal that India has, we really don't have any choice but to use coal.”
⁴⁴

The necessity of coal in developing countries was made clear in October 2009 by none other than U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. During a visit to Pakistan, Clinton advised the Pakistanis that they should be burning more coal in order to produce more electricity and attract more foreign investment. “Now, obviously, that is not the best thing for the climate, but everybody knows that,” she said during a meeting with business leaders in Lahore. “Many of your neighbors are producing coal faster than they can even talk about it. It's unfortunate, but it's a fact that coal is going to remain a part of the energy load until we can transition to cleaner forms of energy.” Then, speaking of Pakistan's coal deposits, she said, “You have these kinds of reserves, you should see the best and cleanest technology for their extraction and their use going forward.”
⁴⁵

Though India and Pakistan are burning more coal, it is unlikely that they will ever match the consumption of the United States, which now generates about 48 percent of its electricity with coal.
⁴⁶
The United States is the world's second-largest coal consumer, with daily consumption equal to about 11.3 million barrels of oil.

America's hunger for electricity—and therefore, for the coal needed to keep the lights on—can be illustrated by looking at the period from the beginning of 1994 to the end of 2008. During those fifteen years, the United States added three Spains to its electric grid.

Let me explain. During that time period, America's electric power generators increased their output from 3,247,000,000 megawatt-hours per year to 4,110,000,000 megawatt-hours. That's an increase of 863,000,000 megawatt-hours.
⁴⁷
The latest data shows that Spain generates about 294,000,000 megawatt-hours of electricity per year.
⁴⁸
Thus, the net increase in U.S. electricity generation over that decade and a half was nearly three times the annual electricity output of Spain. And one of the “Spains” that was added to the U.S. power grid was supplied by an increase in coal-fired generation. (The bulk of the remainder came from increases in natural gas and nuclear-fired production.)
⁴⁹

Or think of it this way: In 2008, the amount of energy America used in the form of coal nearly equaled the total energy consumption—from
all
sources, coal, oil, natural gas, hydro, and nuclear—of
all
of the countries of Central and South America
combined
.
⁵⁰

Source
: Energy Information Administration, “Net Generation by Other Renewables: Total (All Sectors),”
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table1_1_a.html
.

And the United States continues to add new coal-fired capacity at a rate that is far faster than the rates for new wind and solar capacity. Between 1995 and 2008, U.S. wind output increased dramatically, going from 3,164,000 megawatt-hours per year to 52,026,000 megawatt-hours per year, for a total increase of 48,862,000 megawatt-hours per year. That's an increase of about 1,500 percent. During that same time period, solar power production (which includes thermal solar and photovoltaics) increased by 69 percent, going from 497,000 megawatt-hours to 843,000 megawatt-hours, for an increase of 346,000 megawatt-hours.
⁵¹

Meanwhile, coal-fired generation increased by a much more modest percentage: just 16.7 percent. But, once again, it's all about scale. And
the amount of energy in that 16.7 percent increase is enormous. In 1995, coal-fired power plants delivered 1,709,426,000 megawatt-hours of electricity. By 2008, coal plants were delivering 1,994,385,000 megawatt-hours per year, an increase of 284,959,000 megawatt-hours.
⁵²

In other words, the absolute increase in total electricity produced by coal was about 5.8 times as great as the increase in output from wind and 823 times as great as the increase from solar. And yet, over the past decade, citizens in the United States have been bombarded with the notion that wind and solar power are the resources of the future.

The reality is that coal—even with its many negative attributes, continues to be the fuel of choice for creating electricity for a simple reason: cost. And though critics contend that coal imposes many costs that are not paid in the final price of electricity—such as air pollution, ecosystem destruction, miner deaths, and heavy metals contamination, to name just a few—the reality is that those “external” costs, large though they may be, have become an accepted part of the tradeoff. The always-on, superclean, super-abundant horsepower that electricity provides has so much value that citizens around the world are willing to ignore the heavy costs exacted by mining and burning coal. That was true for Edison on Pearl Street and it's still true today. And coal's persistence gives us a good indicator of what lies ahead with regard to oil.

Coal's reign as the most important source of primary energy in the United States lasted for seventy-five years. Oil's reign as the most important source of primary energy in the United States has—so far—lasted six decades. But oil is superior to coal in nearly every respect. It has higher energy density. It is also cleaner, easier to transport, and far more flexible than coal. Add all of those factors together, and it means that oil, like coal, is here to stay.