Suzanne Waldman
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Democracy and Energy: Case Study of the Energiewende

12/11/2014

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I had a fascinating exchange with Craig Morris yesterday, who runs the English communication arm of the Energiewende (Germany's energy transition). Morris brought my attention to an article he wrote recently about the reason why the nuclear phase-out has preceded the coal phaseout. In the narrative he offers, the reason was--surprisingly--not concern about nuclear radiation, nor nuclear fear post-Chernobyl.

Rather, what he says is the Energiewende began in the 70s as a protest against plans to build a new nuclear plant in southwest Germany by village folk who had no concern about radiation; in fact they mined uranium and were developing a "radioactive spa" for tourists. What they objected to was the intrusion of "ugly industrial complexes" upon their landscapes. On the other hand, these villagers didn't mind coal, which they associated with cheap
energy and progress. Further, "in an age when tobacco was smoked everywhere, who would mind smoke from coal?"

When renewables were developed, it was thus natural that the first policy priority would be to follow through on this brooding dislike and distrust southern Germans harboured towards nuclear structures that were foreign to their culture and sensibilities.

To take Morris at his word, then, Germany's current energy policy is not to be understood as a primarily rational policy but a cultural-aesthetic one with fifty year old roots. Craig Morris told me in a tweet the policy decisions are in this regard reflective of Germany's vital democracy.

But I must ask what sense of democracy entails basing a policy on ignorant intuitions, such as villagers' unconcern with smoke, especially as conditions change and we come to understand that the smoke from coal affects more than just the villagers themselves, but the world's collectively shared atmosphere?

The essential German political theorist Jurgen Habermas described democracy as "a rationalization of power" where state decisions are made for good, transparent reasons that can stand up to ongoing, reasoned public deliberation. The Energiewende, which seems to be accountable in perpetuity to the aesthetic and cultural sensibilities of a poorly-informed populace of a past age,
reflects in this regard a distinctly eccentric notion of democracy.

Indeed, this category struggle between aesthetics and rationality, which goes back to the 18th and 19th century division between Romanticism and Enlightenment reason, remains at the bottom of much policy paralysis--though the Germans foreground the struggle particularly distinctly, as they always have (see Schiller).

As societies, we remain confused about how to incorporate people's cultural feelings into policy decision making. We sense the rational procedures of technocrats can be used to mask an irrational will to domination.

But for Habermas the solution to this peril was not to incorporate unchallenged feeling and intuition into policy conversations. Rather, the democratic solution is to open the policy conversation to more voices. These voices must, however, still be accountable to fundamental standards of rationality (causality, math) and to incoming evidence, so new tyrannies and blockages don't set in.


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Behind the IPCC AR5 Models: The Need for Nuclear Power

12/7/2014

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What is the problem with leaning on renewable energy as a solution to climate change? All-RE scenarios show one thing in particular, which is they all depend on increasingly intensive demand reductions over time to avert climate change. (This will be a quick take; for much more detail, see Jesse Jenkins and Armond Cohn’s analysis.)

The most famous modelled scenario illustrating an all-RE plan is the 2010 one from ECOFYS/World Wildlife Federation (WWF). The WWF model sees “green” energy types on the bottom of the graph rising up and replacing the “dirty” energy types on the top: fossil fuels as well as nuclear power. In WWF’s model, though, green energy’s replacement capacity gets a lot of help from an envisioned overall downward slope of energy demand after about 2018, presumably brought about in part by increasing energy efficiency.

Yet that hoped-for pivot is now coming up in three years, and is there not any sign of such a global demand reduction on the horizon. Rather, global energy demand looks like this now (below).
The significant thickening up of the renewables lines are nowhere to be seen at the present time.
Now, it's true WWF sees most of the wind, earth, and sun action happening after 2020, and it is fair to assume given cost reductions there will be inroads into fossil fuel use by that point.

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 But more significantly, there are no signs of a spontaneous dropping off of fossil fuel use, nor of energy consumption in general, to support this global energy take-over by renewable power hoped for in the WWF model. As this BP graph shows, people are using more fossil fuels, not less, every year.

According to the US’s Energy Information Administration (EIA), ongoing energy demand is starting to look more like this, broken down by region:

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And like this, broken down by energy type:
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Thus the all-100% RE solution to climate change presented by WWF must start to be consigned to the realm of fantasy. What BPs and EIAs models show is global economies growing increasingly reliant on energy dense fuels like oil and natural gas, such that it will be increasingly hard to substitute these with renewable energies, with their lower densities. (For more on energy density see this article by Robert Bryce.)

We can see the same contradiction played out in the three modelled scenarios presented in the recent IPCC AR5 WG3 report (2014). Each of the scenarios were devised by a different group to envision a way to limit global warming to 2 degrees by 2100. The graphs on the left reflect how the modellers see the extension of current energy use without significant policy and technological changes. The graphs on the right describe how energy generation could be adjusted to meet the 2 degree limit.

One of the scenarios, GCAM, incorporates nuclear energy and a hefty dose of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) into their 2 degree solution. Reductions in coal, gas, biomass, and oil without CCS, seen under the line, are what allows the target to be met despite that increasing amounts of energy are being added to the global system in an ongoing way up to 2100, as can be seen by the upward curve on the right-hand graph. To a less significant degree, GCAM also achieves the 2 degree target though gradually increasing efficiency gains, indicated by the grey bar. These efficiency gains do not, however, counteract the generalized need reflected in GCAM for an increased amount of energy in the global system.

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The second scenario is called MESSAGE, and it envisions an energy future restricted to renewable energy technologies. Presumably in part because it excludes nuclear, MESSAGE foresees far more solar as well as gas generation than GCAM in the baseline case. 

The right-hand graph is, however, the most interesting one. MESSAGE includes a small amount of CCS but no nuclear, and as such must achieve its 2 degree solution almost entirely through efficiency and demand reductions from fossil fuels. Remarkably, solar and wind power contribute comparatively little to the envisioned climate mitigation achievement above baseline. Over time, energy is subtracted from the system at an increasingly greater rate than it is added.  

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The third IPCC scenario, REMIND, splits the difference between the two models. Like MESSAGE, it subtracts nuclear as well as fossil fuels. Meanwhile, to a far greater degree than MESSAGE it achieves the 2 degree solution through added renewables. Nonetheless, REMIND still requires a sloping off of energy increases over time, achieved through radically increasing efficiencies and demand reductions, to meet the target.

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It’s important to remember that none of these three IPCC models reflect especially-likely realities at the current moment. Most analysts currently see us sailing over the 2 degree increase target and think we are aiming more for a 3 or 4 increase at best. To that degree these IPCC scenarios are all, like the WWF models, fantasies.

Yet the IPCC models are instructive insofar as they illustrate how drastically higher the demands for efficiency and demand reduction become when we exclude nuclear power from the available palate of carbon-free energy choices. The powerful requirement of CCS seen by all modellers is another element of this story, but CCS is not yet ready for wide deployment. Nuclear power is already here, and is as such the signature thing we can work now on retaining and expanding if we don’t want to stake the fight against climate change on a bid for efficiencies and demand reductions that are likely unrealistic and, if executed on a global scale, very likely to be unjust.  

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    Suzanne Waldman

    I'm a PhD student at Carleton U. in Ottawa, Canada researching risk communication.

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