Decarbonization Requires Robust Decision Making Frameworks – CleanTechnica

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An accidental advantage I have with my somewhat ADHD career and interests is that I’ve established patterns and filters for how I view the world that have been tested in multiple domains, often to destruction. I’ve published on the set a few times, but it’s worth returning to them. Looking at the world with this lens will inoculate you against a good deal more hype with limited effort required on your part.

Pragmatic Techno-Optimism

The first filter I apply is pragmatic techno-optimism. Thirty years ago I decided to be optimistic, because the alternative was to be both useless and unhealthy. I recommend that everyone choose optimism combined with action. The tenets of pragmatic techno-optimism I put forward were fairly clear.

Accept reality. We are semi-rational intelligent apes living on a spinning ball orbiting a fusion reactor surrounded by vacuum in a very complex evolved ecosystem. The laws of nature including evolution, thermodynamics, mechanics, gravity, and the basics of supply and demand exist. Pretending that they don’t or that they can be circumvented is counter-productive. If you spot someone doing that, call them out, or at least ignore them.

Respect scientific research. Scientists are awesome. They are working to extend, usually very slightly, the Venn diagram of human knowledge. What they discover or invent in the lab may someday be something incredibly impactful. It may lead to things that extend the human lifespan or power flight beyond the orbit of Jupiter. Respect includes not pretending that what can be demonstrated in the lab can be scaled to be impactful in the global economy in the immediate future. Respect includes trying to understand what is actually being demonstrated, proven, or disproven, not promoting something merely scientifically interesting as important to climate change or the economy. Respect includes understanding the hierarchy of credibility of scientific publications, from opinion at the bottom to systemic reviews at the top, and not overstating any particular piece of research. Respect includes giving due to their specific area of depth, but not ascribing expertise to them outside of it unless they’ve demonstrated it.

Respect engineering. Engineers are awesome. They do the hard brainwork to figure out how to make bridges stay standing, minerals processing be efficient and clean, and electric cars get the most bang for the kilowatt-hour. Often they combine existing things in novel ways to create excellent new solutions. Scientists figured out that wind and sunshine could be harnessed. Engineers made it incredibly efficient and effective. Respect includes trusting engineers to have solid opinions about things in their technical domain, but not ascribing expertise outside of it unless they’ve demonstrated it.

Respect human nature. Back to that semi-rational thing. Kahneman and Tversky did a lot of heavy lifting as they figured out how messy our approach to interpreting reality and deciding what do to about it is. Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for economics for quantifying the really obvious insight that we fear potential loss more than we value an equal amount of potential gain. We are the animals that rationalize. Our system one thinking is rife with cognitive biases. Any solution which requires human beings to evolve or even change en masse is a non-solution. Respect that it’s much easier to appeal to human beings’ baser instincts than their higher ones. If the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs are threatened, don’t try to appeal to self-actualization or the needs of others.

Respect scale. A denominator is the number under something being divided. It’s important because it determines if something is meaningful or not. There are a lot of apparently big numbers thrown around in the transition that turn out to be meaningless. For example, Climeworks is going to be capturing 40 thousand tons of carbon dioxide a year with its expansion of its Iceland plant. That sounds like a lot until you realize that the problem is 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year — a million times bigger. Similarly, chemical plants in shipping containers can produce maybe hundreds of kilograms of output a day, but economically viable scaled chemical plants produce thousands of tons of output per day. Always try to figure out how big the domain is before accepting that something is a solution.

Respect economics. While classical economics deserves some derision for its obvious shortcomings, including the Spock-esque homo economicus it pretends represents a real human being, it has a bunch of stuff right. While human beings are bad at basic economic math, most companies aren’t, being spreadsheet-oriented. If one thing is more expensive than another thing which provides the same value, companies (and many humans) will buy the cheaper thing, When something is really easy to get and deliver, its price will go down, and when it isn’t readily available but still has utility that can’t be replaced, its price will go up. We’re going to see a lot of volatility in oil and gas prices over the next couple of decades as demand drops below supply, then supply drops below demand in a rinse and repeat cycle, as a key example. Lithium prices are going to have an interesting journey as well.

Embrace change. Technology and science are moving fast. Twenty years ago, it was commonly understood by people paying attention that batteries weren’t going to cut it for transportation and grid storage, and hydrogen, while expensive, was going to be required as a climate solution. Now we have had extraordinary reductions in battery prices and increases in battery energy densities, while hydrogen has been proven to be a leaky gas that is 13-37 times as bad as carbon dioxide at heating the atmosphere. Twenty years ago, it was commonly understood by people paying attention that nuclear energy was absolutely required as a plurality or even majority part of the energy ecosystem because wind and solar weren’t going to scale or be reliable. Now nuclear energy is declining as a percentage of electrical generation while wind and solar are rapidly increasing. When data changes, change your mind — don’t try to reject data.

Be pragmatic. The perfect is the enemy of the good. We will arrive at some semblance of utopia in increments, fits and starts, and with two steps forward and one step back, not arrive in a revolutionary spurt. Burning coal to make solar panels and batteries sucks, but it’s better than not having solar panels and batteries that last for two to three decades. Burning maritime fuel to deliver heat pumps to North America and Europe sucks, but it’s better than not having heat pumps. Cutting down a few trees in Germany to provide space for an electric car factory with solar panels coating its roof sucks, but it’s better than not having an electric car factory powered in large part by solar panels on its roof.

Electricity Is The Future Of All Energy

The second filter I apply is regarding electricity being the future of (almost) all energy. There are a few ways that are worth looking in this regard.

Fungibility and exergy rule. Something that’s fungible can be used in a bunch of different use cases and have the same value. Electricity is fungible in that it can power computers, cars, heat pumps, induction stovetops, and smartphones. Exergy is a more specific definition of this. Electricity can turn equally into both work and heat. That’s exergy. Heat can turn into heat, but much less so into work. Want to move a car down the road? That’s work. Want to toast a piece of bread? That’s heat. Electricity can do both, but heat is only efficient at making toast. Burning stuff creates heat, so it’s low exergy.

Think of it like money instead of the barter system. Everyone accepts money for goods and services and doesn’t haggle over what the money is worth. Money is fungible and precise. So is electricity.

Ubiquity means innovation. Everyone in the first and second world and most of the people in the third world have access to a plug. They might only use it for lights and their cellphones, but they have it. There are solar panels everywhere in the developing world now because they are so cheap, simple, easy to ship, and easy to use. Batteries are everywhere too, because they are cheap and in every cellphone. Electric motors are incredibly easy to make.

That means that all of the tinkerers, backyard engineers, and universities have easy access to an incredibly versatile form of energy that’s easy to manipulate. Scale up to electrochemistry, the alchemy of the chemical processing world, and remarkable things can be done. And what tinkerers, engineers, and academics have lots of access to, they will use to create new things.

Loose coupling. Think of a wine bottle cork and a corkscrew. You need a corkscrew to get a cork out of the bottle. The corkscrew is useless for anything except that one task. The cork and the corkscrew are tightly coupled. A cap that screws off, on the other hand, is loosely coupled. Anyone with working fingers can just twist it off. That’s why corks are relegated to being a marketing feature for more expensive wines while screw tops are on pretty much every other bottle on earth.

Things that are loosely coupled are simpler, more resilient, and usually systemically cheaper. As a result, they tend to outcompete solutions that are tightly coupled. Electricity can come through a grid tie, from a battery, from a generator, or by turning an electric generator with water or wind. It can power a motor, turn on lights, or operate a computer. There are lots of ways to combine sources of electricity with end uses of electricity. Trains can run on electricity from overhead wires, from diesel generators in the locomotive, or off of batteries. Electricity enables loose coupling of solutions.

Solid-state outperforms the mechanical. The fewer the moving parts something has, the better, and no moving parts is best of all. The drivetrain of an electric car has a battery with no moving parts, a power management system with no moving parts, and an electric motor with one moving part. That’s part of why electric cars have much better acceleration and traction control than internal combustion vehicles. Solar panels with battery systems have no moving parts either. There’s nothing to calibrate or adjust or tune or twiddle with. We’ve stopped shipping reels of thin plastic strips coated with chemicals to movie theaters because digitizing movies and displaying them from solid-state projectors is so much simpler, cheaper, and less failure prone.

Electricity is the great enabler of solid-state solutions, or things as close to solid-state as it’s possible to get, like electric cars. As a result, electrified solutions have a strong tendency to be the ones that outcompete non-electrified solutions. Outside of hipsters, who uses vinyl records anymore?

Negative externalities matter. Every form of energy has some form of downsides, but it’s a question of severity and likelihood. Burning anything produces air pollution where the thing is burned. Burning fossil fuels add greenhouse gas emissions to the mix. Lots of things we burn are toxic and have to be handled carefully. Stuff we burn for energy has to be transported, often long distances, which currently requires we burn more stuff to move it around, creating more emissions of all sorts. The best approximation we have is that about 11% of the world’s energy is currently used to extract, process, refine, and distribute fossil fuels. When the fossil fuel system fails, large pollution events usually occur.

Electricity has zero emissions in use. It can be made with zero emissions in operations. It produces zero emissions when it is transmitted long distances. It’s easy to make safe for domestic, commercial, transportation, and industrial applications. It doesn’t leak. If the electrical system fails, typically no pollution occurs as a result. Our global economy can be low-carbon if electricity is used.

The future is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed. As we look around the world, we can see the clear winning solutions. India is at 97% of its heavy rail being electrified with overhead wires, and the Trans Siberian Railway’s 9,500-kilometer length is electrified. The large majority of every country’s rail outside of North America is electrified. This year, 50% of the cars sold in China will have plugs, and it’s far more than that in Norway. There are 130 battery-powered ferries in operation already globally, and the number is climbing rapidly. BASF just started operations at a massive integrated chemical manufacturing facility in Shanghai that is fully electrified, and only has process emissions of carbon dioxide to address. The United States gets 71% of its steel from scrap metal put through electric arc furnaces. Heat pumps powered by electricity are expanding incredibly rapidly.

Burning stuff is a legacy play from the still big pockets of the past, not what’s happening in the rapidly expanding pockets of the future.

Red Flags Checklist

When looking at specific solutions, I apply a bunch of tests that pretty much anyone can perform with Google to see if red flags pop up. The more red flags, the more skepticism and due diligence is required.

For business models, I ask the following questions:

• Do the principals in the firm have any relevant qualifications or experience? My favorite for this was some wind ‘innovators’ whose previous company made artificial noses. The runner-up was Joi Scientific, the hydrogen perpetual energy scam, whose executives had backgrounds in music and software.
• Are they starting from a product as opposed to a market? Airborne wind energy — using kites to generate electricity — failed this test. EVTOLs fail this test. Almost everything related to hydrogen for energy fails this test.
• Do they claim that they are going to completely replace an existing cleantech solution? Perovskite solar panels aren’t going to replace incredibly cheap, durable, and ubiquitous silicon panels. Wind turbine blades on looping clotheslines — a Breakthrough Energy Venture investment — aren’t going to work well enough to be viable, never mind replace actual wind turbines. The Boring Company isn’t going to replace subways, and Hyperloop was never going to compete with rail, never mind high speed rail.
• Do they add major operational labor requirements, or are unaware of what that means to competition? Wind farms and solar farms just sit there, rarely even with security guards. They get some annual maintenance. Alternatives like nuclear energy require hundreds of mostly skilled people to operate. Subways carry tens of thousands of passengers per hour with a minimum of staff. EVTOL operations would carry potentially dozens of people per hour with likely more staff than a subway requires.
• Is the only current use of a solution in the military? The only vertical takeoff and landing aircraft that transition to horizontal flight that are in operation anywhere in the world are in military air forces.  The Osprey and the F35B are prime examples, with the former having a long history of falling out of the sky and killing all on board. An F35B fell off the end of an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea because ground crew forgot something really basic. EVTOLs fail this test. Small nuclear reactors are almost entirely on military submarines and aircraft carriers, with the exceptions being on Russian icebreakers, which are state-owned and operated. Using small nuclear reactors to generate electricity was tried first, and it failed because it was too expensive.
• Is the solution claiming to be for one market, but it’s obvious that its natural market is something else entirely? Carbon Engineering’s direct air capture was pretending to be for synthetic fuels, but it was clear that it was only good for enhanced oil recovery and greenwashing. That’s what Oxy bought it for and is using it to do. Lightsail Energy’s compressed air storage carbon fiber tanks were only good for natural gas storage, and not good enough for that to survive. Ocean geoengineering firms claiming to create alkaline substances like lithium hydroxide worth thousands of dollars per ton with low carbon emissions should be selling them to displace the high-carbon substances, not throwing them in the ocean.

Then there are the questions I ask to test the marketing of new solutions:

• Does the company’s public material spend much of its time disparaging other clean technologies? Differentiation is a good marketing approach, but if a website or brochure spends its time dissing something which exists and works just fine, that’s a bit concerning. Airborne wind energy and vertical axis wind turbine peddlers typically made a bunch of false statements about actual wind turbines that didn’t withstand scrutiny, often because the people peddling them didn’t know what they were talking about. The nuclear industry likes to pretend that wind and solar generation take up too much land and are unreliable, again, things which aren’t true.
• Is its website missing or clearly misleading? A website is the business card of the 21st Century. They are trivial to make. If a website is simply a static image of a website — something I actually found for one firm — that’s a problem. Web pages that don’t have contact information, that don’t have business locations or that don’t have product or service listings are all concerning. Websites with lovely little animations but no technical documentation or that claim patents without linking to patents are concerning.
• Is it being promoted heavily by the fossil fuel industry as a clean solution? Thankfully laws against greenwashing are gaining teeth, with US SEC requirements and EU and Canadian truth in advertising laws all having stiff penalties now. But that doesn’t stop the fossil fuel industry from promoting carbon capture, hydrogen for energy and geoengineering schemes, all promising that we don’t have to change anything, we can just keep burning their products.

For technologies, I ask the following question, most of which are trivially easy to answer without deep STEM chops:

• Does the solution exceed known physical limits? Anything which claims to get more energy out than is put into it is breaking the laws of thermodynamics. Joi Scientific’s hydrogen scam claimed that. Wind generation is capped by Betz’ Law, which says that no wind energy device can capture more than 59.3% of the energy in a volume of moving air. Sheerwind Invelox and many other devices claimed that they beat that.
• Is it old tech claiming to be new tech? A lot of things are recycled ideas. Every decade or so someone reinvents shrouded and ducted wind turbines that don’t work better than existing wind turbines. The wind turbine blades on a clothesline mentioned above has been reinvented twice. Ground effect airplanes make a comeback every ten to fifteen years. Blimps get headlines about that often. The iron air redox reaction is incredibly well understood and has been since it was first tried for energy storage in the 1950s. Supercritical CO2 turbines have been attempted since 1946 without success.
• Is it just a design concept? The number of proposed technologies which are just 3D renderings or even Photoshop is astounding. Some are just a concept. Unless it’s actually working in a lab, implemented as an operating quarter-scale prototype or in commercial production somewhere, it’s just a Powerpoint and not worth considering seriously. Venture capitalists fall for this constantly.
• Is there any independent verification of claims? A lot of firms make a lot of claims about their products’ performance. Don’t trust, verify. Look for third party assessments, preferably by professional organizations which do that kind of thing. For wind energy, Sandia Lab and the Atlantic Wind Test Site on Prince Edward Island do independent assessments, as an example. Look for certifications. Look for DNV’s seal of approval. Look for reproduction of scientific results by other scientists.
• Are any claimed patents for anything that they are actually doing and are the patents active? Anyone can write ‘patented’ on a website or a brochure. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve looked for patents and found only expired ones or ones that describe something completely different. There was a wind disk that wobbled to create electricity, but the patent described something much more like an old water pumping wind mill with lots of blades like those used in the USA on ranches in the past. Google Patents makes this trivial to figure out.
• Are the assessments being done following existing standards, such as ISO lifecycle approaches? Anyone can claim that they are ISO certified, but there are databases of such things that anyone can search. It takes minutes to check this. One scam product I looked at made the claim, but there was zero evidence backing it up.
• Are there really obvious technical challenges in the space? Some spaces are really hard. One underground pumped hydro storage solution I looked at took an hour for me to find the fatal flaw, and that required reading Chinese fracking peer reviewed case studies. Others are really obvious. Small aircraft and urban heat islands with turbulent air are a really bad mixture, so lightweight and complex origami EVTOLs are very unlikely to be approved to fly over schools and business districts. Fusion energy continues to Doppler into the future because it’s incredibly difficult, and recent ‘advancements’ just open up entire new cans of worms. Small modular reactors are still nuclear reactors, and so aren’t going to be popping up beside malls and industrial plants. Gravity storage that doesn’t use water and hills fails Grade 7 science and Grade 5 math. Compressing gases for energy storage loses a lot of energy as waste heat.
• Is novelty being added for no apparent reason? Putting solar panels on electric cars is a classic in this regard, as the surface area, alignment with the sun, and requirement to park it only in exposed places combines to give very few kilometers of travel daily. Blockchain was the candy sprinkles of the late 2010s. A rather large number of startups that have claimed to be using AI or machine learning since 2015 weren’t using either. Web 3.0 was big for a while, and now it’s disappeared.

Hopefully others will find the set of perspectives useful. It’s how I sort through the purported solutions quickly, figuring out what is wheat and what is chaff. With luck, sharing this in one place will inoculate a few more people so that we can accelerate decarbonization.