Wind Turbines Kill Birds – and abuse statistics

Wind turbines in the US kill 440,000 birds per year according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service. That’s appalling, say opponents of wind turbines. Maybe we should sue. This apparently green energy source is clearly bad for at least one part of the environment. Why, that’s about 1,000 birds per day. Imagine 1,000 birds piled up your  doorstep. Egad!

Well, before we get too upset, this is another misuse of data.  Don’t fall for it. 440,000 birds sounds like a lot, until we realize the following:

Cats kill 500,000,000 birds per year in the US.  That’s nearly 1,400,000 per day.  That pile on the doorstep is way bigger than the house.

Only by giving the context and the grounding for the numbers can the numbers really mean anything.  And these numbers say that we should sue cats!  They’re bad for the environment.

I’ve also seen awareness advertisements that say things like “AIDS kills one child every minute.”  That’s very sad. And it’s an attempt to make tragic AIDS deaths real to us.  I applaud the effort, but it misses the context.  We need one more piece of data to really be an informed consumer here.

And that data is that “20 children die every minute from all causes“.  That’s also sad.  In fact, half of those deaths are preventable malnutrition.  That’s one child every 6 seconds.

In our attempts to make human the ridiculous sizes of statistics, we have to also provide context.  Or as consumers of statistics, we must demand context.  For example, a stack of $100 bills to the moon represents the size of the US Debt.  That’s really useful if you are one of the 24 humans that have made that trip.  For me, the moon looks pretty darn close, especially when it’s on the horizon.

We’re still gonna need nuclear energy

The nuclear nightmare scenario in Japan might give nuclear energy a bigger black eye than BP gave drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

Nuclear energy is scarier.  Birds coated in thick black tar don’t bother us as much as the silent killer of radiation and subsequent thyroid cancer.  It’s an exotic experience, outside our normal life, and a gruesome end.  That’s the reason why more people are scared of guns than cars. (Even though cars kill twice as many Americans per year).

But whether you like it or not, we’re still going to need nuclear if we want to end global warming.  Here’s three reasons why:

1) Nuclear is safer than other energy options, surprisingly.  Despite the current crisis, nuclear accidents are isolated and less harmful.   Chernobyl killed 50 people immediately and perhaps 4,000 people over 20 years.  Japan is still in doubt but could be more.  Meanwhile, pollution kills about 3 million people per year.  Nuclear is even safer than rooftop solar, because people die while installing solar panels according to one estimate.

Deaths per Terawatt hour:

Coal – world average               161 (26% of world energy, 50% of electricity)
Coal – China                       278
Coal – USA                         15
Oil                                36  (36% of world energy)
Natural Gas                         4  (21% of world energy)
Biofuel/Biomass                    12
Peat                               12
Solar (rooftop)                     0.44 (less than 0.1% of world energy)
Wind                                0.15 (less than 1% of world energy)
Hydro                               0.10 (europe death rate, 2.2% of world energy)
Hydro - world including Banqiao)    1.4 (about 2500 TWh/yr and 171,000 Banqiao dead)
Nuclear                             0.04 (5.9% of world energy)

 

2) It fits in our space.  According to the substantially researched “Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air”, by David MacKay, our other options take up a lot of space.  We can’t meet our current energy demands even if we convert 75% of agriculture to biofuels, fill 5% of the land with solar panels, and install wind generators where the wind blows.  Nuclear is a very dense power supply.

3)  Nuclear is three to five times cheaper than other non-carbon producing options.

Energy is a huge component of our overall cost of living.  If we raise its price, we will have to lower our living standards.  Take a room off your house, you can’t afford it.  Sell your car, you can’t afford it.  Eat less food, you can’t afford it.  If you make those sacrifices, you can afford to replace fossil fuels with solar power.  Meanwhile, nuclear is the cheapest non-carbon producing option.

3 to 5 times more money?  That doesn’t sound too bad.  Well, imagine filling your Prius with $20/gallon gas.  That’s $240 a tank, or about $12,000 a year for the average commuter (who also makes just $33,000 a year)

 

Cheapening the pandemic brand

Pandemic sounds pretty scary.  But the definition of a pandemic is a disease that appears in 3 or more countries.  Basically, every year’s flu bug qualifies.

Each year, 36,000 to 40,000 people die from influenza.  The worldwide infection of the Swine Flu stands today at 150 new confirmed cases.  Now that every sniffle will be tested for the flu, it’s more likely that we’ll find it.  It’s going to sound scary, and it’s an important reminder of the fragility of our biological niche.

Each flu bug needs to be considered in terms of virulence and severity.  The SARS bug is very severe (it kills people) but it isn’t virulent (it doesn’t transfer between humans).  The Swine Flu appears to be virulent, although we don’t know how many people are exposed or infected yet.  On the severity level, it is significantly less severe than SARS, which has killed 20% of people it has infected.  Severity may be no worse, in the end, than a bad year of the flu.

Politically, it’s better to be careful than Katrina-ed, so it makes sense to overreact to these scares.  But I expect (and hope) that the death toll in the US will be less than the yearly deathtoll from influenza.

Seawalls and Respirators vs. Solar Power. The winner?

If we wanted to become 100% solar powered in our electricity grid, is the cost / benefit too high versus even outlandish alternatives?  It’s an important question, because electricity generation accounts for 40% of greenhouse gas emissions.

Some numbers for our back of the envelope calculation:

• The current production of electricity in the US is just over 1 Terawatt (yep, 1 * 10^12 Terawatts) according to the EIA
• The installed cost of a watt of solar power is $5 – $8 today according to my friends in the installation business and other sources

So the simple calculation:  it’s going to cost $5 to $8 Trillion dollars in capital costs for solar power.

We must put $8 trillion dollars in perspective.  It’s hard.  NPR just ran a story this morning about teaching grade school kids about big numbers.  The teacher, counting a single dollar bill a second, helps the students calculate that it would take over 32 years of counting to reach $1B (best quote:  “That’s older than my dad!”).  So, $8 trillion, also known as $8,000,000,000,000, would take 256,000 years of counting for that industrious teacher.

Rather than compare $8 trillion to a stack of dollar bills between here and the moon, I thought this might be better:

• It’s a 20’ seawall around the 12,000 mile coast of the US  at $100 million per mile (100x more than estimates), PLUS
• purchase of all the newly arid farmland in Canada ($1,000 per acre for 167m acres, about 50% of total U.S. cultivated farmland)  PLUS
• respirators for every American at $100 per respirator, PLUS
• a lifetime’s supply of sunscreen, PLUS
• We’ve still got some cash left over.

OR, it’s  360,000,000 Toyota Prius’s .  That’s nearly 5 per U.S. family.  Or it’s 130,000,000 Tesla S all electric cars, that’s 13 years of new car sales.

Regardless, let’s have the government pay for it.  After paying the Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security and other mandatory benefits, it’s 25 years of Federal discretionary income.  Of course, say goodbye to Defense, Education, National Parks, Transportation, and essentially every other government program that has a cabinet Secretary.

The bottom line on solar:  it’s expensive.  Let’s not jump too quickly.  No one would suggest that we build 12,000 miles of seawall, or buy Prius’s for every American driver.   These ridiculous programs, though, cost less, and save lives and property (in the case of the seawall) and the environment (electric cars) to a similar degree.

[Note: maybe instead we should be conserving.  That’s a different post, but briefly: conservation is also tricky.  In the same NPR broadcast this morning, manufacturers were talking about a 15% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.  Sadly, just to counteract the pollution impact of a rising global population, we must reduce total per capita emissions by more than 10% per decade.  The manufacturers basically announced they would do their bit to make it merely as bad as today.]

Solar technology: less a “technology” than a “manufactured good”

Solar costs don’t decline like computer costs.  They decline more like a combination of television screen costs and car horsepower costs, trends you probably don’t even notice.  Surprised?  You should be.  Because as a VC, let me say that we’ve tricked you.

We’ve tricked you because, along with the rest of the tech industry, we’ve convinced you that “technology” is something that doubles in price performance every 18 months.  And true, silicon-based performance has been following this trend line, also known as Moore’s Law (more aptly called Moore’s Theorem) for years.

The nature of Moore’s Law is based on the compression of tiny traces on silicon chips.  These traces are like racetracks for electrons, sending them around where we want them to go.  As the racetrack gets narrower and hairpins and curves back more and more on itself, we can get a longer racetrack on the same acreage.

More racetrack per acre means, on semiconductor chips, more transistors on the same size chip.  Computing performance goes up, chip cost stays the same (roughly, the equipment to make the chips gets more expensive, which takes away some of the gains).   It nets out to what we’ve been observing:  Moore’s Theorem, er, Law — 2x every 18 months or a 60% reduction in $ / performance each year.

Solar doesn’t work that way.  It’s different physics.  Electricity is generated from every solar substrate (usually silicon) by photons jarring electrons loose to run willy-nilly over the surface of the solar panel.  The electrons are captured by metal lines on the surface and channeled into wires connected to the panel.

The problem is, there is a theoretical limit to how much sunlight can dislodge how many electrons, and for a single crystal silicon substrate it’s about 33%.  Current lab designs are at about 22% (at SunPower, one of the efficiency leaders), with plans (depending on the company) to increase this to about 23 – 24% over the next 5 years.  This is clearly not 2x improvement in efficiency in 18 months, it’s less than 1% improvement per year.

So all the improvements in solar power/cost performance have to come from manufacturing improvements.   We’re investing hard in that area, and there are signs of improvement.  We’d be delighted with 5% per year cost reduction of the solar cell.  That’s a good start, but remember that solar panels still have to be installed, and installation accounts for 50% of total cost of an installed solar system.

Rosy forecasts from the last decade are that installed solar panels could reduce cost to reach “grid parity” (equal to the cost of our current power source prices), in just a few months.  But since I listen to businessmen trying to sell me product or raise venture capital for a living, I went somewhere more impartial:   the economists at the Energy Information Administration of the US Government and their March 2009 data.

It appears that the EIA’s optimistic scenarios for solar (the “Falling costs” columns) are still far from gas turbine costs TODAY on an installed basis, even in 30 years.  These numbers are in constant $ per Kw of base power.

So in the most aggressive “falling costs” case, Photovoltaics (that’s solar energy to you and me) experience a nearly 4% per year cost decline.  That reduction doesn’t compare to computer chip declines of 60% per year.  It’s somewhere between the cost decline of televisions per square inch 1980-2004 (9% per year) and $ per car horsepower decline (1%, my calculations) in the same period.  It’s a manufactured good, not a technology product.

It’s going to be more expensive for solar power for some time to come.  But starting today, according to the climate guys, is not soon enough.  We need more, sooner.  If we’re going to build it now, then it’s going to be expensive.