Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Encouraged by the response to my post on Adrian Bejan and the Constructal Law, which achieved what might be termed unprecedented levels of tepidity, I persevere. Here’s a lovely look at the energy use of the United States:
Figure 1. US 2002 Energy production and consumption by sector.
There are some interesting things which can be seen in this diagram.
1. Almost none of the power for electrical generation comes from oil. This means that even if the US could generate every Watt of electricity from solar/wind/whatever, it will not directly replace our consumption of oil.
2. Generation, transformation, and transmission losses eat up most of the energy used for electrical generation. Overall efficiency is 31%
3. Transportation is worse, with only 20% efficiency.
4. Nuclear is three times the size of hydro.
5. Wood, waste, alcohol, geothermal, solar, and wind electrical generation together are 3% of total energy use.
However, as interesting as I found those, that’s not the reason I started looking at energy use and GDP.
I was sucked into this subject by what I thought was an interesting quote from Adrian Bejan here (PDF, worth reading. My emphasis):
To summarize, all the high-temperature heating that comes from burning fuel (QH or the energy associated with QH and the high temperature of combustion; cf. Bejan 2006) is dissipated into the environment. The need for higher efficiencies in power generation (greater W/QH) is the same as the need to have more W, i.e. the need to move more weight over larger distances on the surface of the Earth, which is the natural phenomenon (tendency) summarized in the constructal law.
At the end of the day, when all the fuel has been burned, and all the food has been eaten, this is what animate flow systems have achieved. They have moved mass on the surface of the Earth (they have ‘mixed’ the Earth’s crust) more than in the absence of animate flow systems. The moving animal or vehicle is equivalent to an engine connected to a brake (figure 4), first proposed by Bejan & Paynter (1976) and Bejan (1982, 2006).
The power generated by muscles and motors is ultimately and necessarily dissipated by rubbing against the environment. There is no taker for the W produced by the animal and vehicle. This is why the GNP of a country should be roughly proportional to the amount of fuel burned in that country. (Bejan 2009).
I must confess, I had thought about GDP and energy before, but never from a thermodynamic standpoint. Here is a graph of per capita GDP and per capita energy consumption for a number of countries:
Figure 2. Per Capita Energy Consumption vs Per Capita GDP for Different Countries. PPP values are used. Image Source
OK, call me slow. I knew that depriving the developing world of affordable energy would impede development. But I had never realized that energy use is development, that there is a thermodynamic relationship between the two. I hadn’t noticed that if a country wishes to develop, it can only develop to the extent that it has energy, and no further. Lack of energy doesn’t merely hinder or slow or delay development of poor countries as I had thought.
It puts an absolute ceiling on development.
Given the number of people in the world living on a dollar a day or so, that’s a discouraging insight in the context of the current war on fossil fuel energy.
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Gday Willis
Very interesting, and pretty much intuitive. We will only develop through further efficiency. Britain led the Industrial Revolution powered by the steam engine. You need a hell of a lot of ox carts to power a modern society.
One quibble- GDP is not the same as GNP.
Ken
Energy use is approximately proportional to GDP. I would say that’s fairly obvious.
People from an engineering, physics background, or even economics background would just take it for granted. They wouldn’t usually bother mentioning it.
People on the socialist side probably wouldn’t conceive of such a thing. They think wealth comes from government initiatives, or is just there waiting for governments to redistribute.
An example of wealth and energy is a ship loading wheat. Once a hundred men (no women) would lift heavy bags of wheat onto their shoulders and run up a gangway into the ship. Eventually the men’s spines would distort and their ribs would compress together. Now one man, or woman, presses a button and electric motors feed the wheat along a conveyor belt and into the hold at the rate of tonnes per minute. More energy, more wealth.
Good post, good insight.
I’ve long suspected that economic activity can be described by thermodynamics, with money being a store of potential human energy.
Yes, energy consumption equals economic output.
For example. Imagine I grow a crop of apples. A certain amount of energy is consumed in producing them, harvesting, preparing for market, shipment to market, shipment to consumer and preparation for eating.
Now I want to double my apple production. I must now ship harvest, wash, and truck more apples to market. My energy consumption rises. The more the economy grows and factories open, the more energy is consumed as goods are manufacture and shipped.
Now look what happens when you tell the number 1 economic power on the planet that it is not allowed to build any more nuclear power and can not build any more coal plants and can not drill for any more oil. But other countries face no such restrictions. On top of that you add environmental regulations that make it impossible to build a steel mill or other heavy industrial plant but in the other countries you have no such regulations.
The result is that economic activity dies off in one country and explodes in the other. These regulations are designed to strangle our economy but having the people buy into it because they are fed a line of bull about “saving the planet” while the other countries are laughing all the way to the bank.
There is a way we could save a huge amount of oil. The railroad system is fairly easily electrified. Run an national electric rail system on nuclear power and we can still move goods even if the oil goes away.
I come to a very different conclusion. The case of Switzerland vs Canada shows that you can reduce energy consumption by more than a factor of 2 without affecting GDP per capita. Putting a cap on energy consumption does not result in a lower standard of living.
Note that for the same energy consumption per capita (4 TOE), then some countries have only ~$7K GDP/capita, while others have $28K – an astonishing factor of 4 difference, demonstrating the incredible power of efficiency.
Another lesson from the graph is that the United States is paying a high price in CO2 emission for its only slightly higher GDP per capita.
Hi Willis
What you say is most important.
It makes sense.
It is quite fundamental.
There has been a distict disconnect between production and wealth in recent decades.
And a disconnect between wealth creation and the ability to get a job.
(Many of those people who have lost the plot, have university degrees and so have “positions” rather than mere jobs).
Hence the rise of the inner city green voter, who cannot tell the wood for the trees.
You are completely correct.
Jobs (including high ranking positions) need wealth and wealth needs production and production needs energy.
Somehow this bit of conceptional algebra has been lost in sophisticated learning.
We need to educate the educated masses once more.
So many people now work in services industries, that they have completley lost the plot.
The size or scale of things is often difficult for some to grasp. Thus, the figure you provide is information rich but conceptually lacking. We need images in this era of the pixel. I’ve tried to explain about soil loss in tons per acre per year. Then I realized that most urban-living young people in the USA have no concept of a ton nor of an acre. Thus, communication in these terms is not possible. I had to use bags of sugar and flour – how many 5 pound bags in a ton? How many of our classrooms or football fields in an acre. Most students have seen a football field – none knew its relationship to an acre.
Regarding power, one needs a metric that a person can relate to. Perhaps show something, such as, watching chocolate drops (or Hershey’s Kisses, or M & Ms) flow from the product line. Figure out what part, say one inch on one side of the flow represented “nuclear power” and what part represented coal, and all the others. A good video overlaid with colored lines might help. The main thing would be to do this in a way that shows the magnitude and the relentless production.
Now take an image of a poor family cooking over a small fire of sticks that they have spent an hour or so collecting. What is their alternative? I return from some entertainment activity and I turn a knob on an electric range to cook dinner and miles away a power plant increases its output. My total power usage might be visually equivalent to adding one new chocolate drop or M & M to the daily production output. It would almost go unnoticed by the utility.
How can all the poor wood or dung burning families around the world reach the level of turning a knob on an electric range? Does my standard (GDP) have to go down for theirs to go up?
A terrific read on this subject is – ‘The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy’ by Peter Huber and Mark Mills which expands greatly on the information in this article.
Erik
Switzerland’s wealth did not come from restricting CO2 emissions.
What a strange idea!
It came from hundreds of years of careful accumulation of wealth by producing more than was consumed and wisely investing the surplus in wealth creating enterprises.
A very high level of education is also a major factor.
Erik Ramberg says:
November 16, 2010 at 10:18 pm
Thanks, Erik. The point I am making is that nobody has ever done it for less than about 0.75 TOE for each $10,000 of GDP. This puts an absolute limit at the bottom end. If you only have 1 TOE per person, and you are really efficient (think Swiss), you’ll get a per capita GDP of around $12,000 per person. Likely, it will be less than that, since global average is about $3,200 of GDP per TOE.
“the United States is paying a high price in CO2 emission ”
Exactly what does CO2 cost? That sentence right there says a lot. You apparently assume CO2 has some negative impact. Nobody has proved that to date.
Willis,
If you look at the relationship in the SRES between GDP and the warmth of the planet, you will see that the only way we get to a less warm planet is by impoverishing ourselves.
What the climate models prove is that a richer world is a warmer world. full stop. Which is why I can very easily accept models and say “the real question is not the science. the real question is the economics”
why fight their science when you can use their science to fight them?
Erik Ramberg says: at 10:18 pm
Switzerland is not Canada. Please think of the geography. Going from Geneva to Zürich (about 220 km) stretches most of the way across Switzerland. A similar distance for a Vancouverite would not get her across B.C.
I note three countries with about the same GDP, Switzerland, Australia and Canada, but these three have quite different consumption of energy.
Switzerland is a small country with a highly educated population, with the most emphasis on brain type economic activity (international banking & high precision light manufacture etc).
Australia has a much more diverse industry spread, much of which requires high levels of energy input (mining, farming etc). The country is very large with a small population and a less than extensive public transportation system, which means considerable private car and aeroplane transport, both being very energy intensive.
Canada I do not know, but it is probably much the same as Australia, with the added problem of the extreme cold, which would require much more use of energy.
You can’t just wave a magic wand, ban coal & oil use and expect that things will just go on as before.
Comparative economic advantage is the key to relative energy consumption per unit of GDP per head.
Erik Ramberg says:
November 16, 2010 at 10:18 pm
“I come to a very different conclusion. The case of Switzerland vs Canada shows that you can reduce energy consumption by more than a factor of 2 without affecting GDP per capita. Putting a cap on energy consumption does not result in a lower standard of living. ”
The point of this graph is not to compare two countries like you are doing but to demonstrate what was said in the abstract. Comparing two countries like you are is comparing apples and oranges. There is a number of things that determine energy usage per capita, most notably the climate. Then there is the issue of Canada being so big versus Switzerland being smaller. Its harder to transport goods when a country is larger.
I am not saying that graph may show some countries where they could lessen their energy usage without economic harm, but I don’t think you can make that case with two such vastly different countries.
Hey, Mosh, good to see you. Thanks as always for your input.
Steven Mosher says:
November 16, 2010 at 10:40 pm (Edit)
No. What the SRES shows is the only way to get to a less warm virtual planet is by impoverishing its virtual inhabitants.
I was actually unaware that models could “prove” anything, but if they can, all they prove is a richer virtual world is a warmer virtual world.
Because unlike far too many AGW supporting scientists, I’m absolutely unwilling to sign on to bad science in order to achieve my desired aims. Of course, YMMV.
Erik Ramberg;
I come to a very different conclusion. The case of Switzerland vs Canada shows that you can reduce energy consumption by more than a factor of 2 without affecting GDP per capita.>>
I think that is an over simplification. Willis’ observation is in general accurate (just ONCE I’d like to see him get it hopelessly wrong and prove he is a mere mortal like the rest of us). I don’t think you can start drawing any conclusions by drilling into a comparison of two specific countries without also understanding the underlying factors. Switzerland is a banking and financial centre for example, with considerable amounts of the population concentrated in urban centres. Canada has a widely dispersed population and an economy based on dry land farming, mining, lumber and mannufacturing. Cutting Canada’s per capita energy consumption to the same level as Switzerland would be devastating to the economy. You cannot compare the two in that manner and draw any meaningfull conclusion.
Boy, can I just say that when I look at the diagram, I am reminded of an automatic transmission? The lost energy is heat. That is strange given the fact that economy is the transmission of society, transforming raw materials into finished goods, with the lost energy being the heat lost to provide hot air to the political system. Change the fluid every 2 years…
Steven Mosher;
why fight their science when you can use their science to fight them?>>
Because winning an argument for the wrong reasons is just as dangerous in the end as losing it for the right ones.
Clearly, more carbon will be burned by poorer countries as they develope. There is a certain satisfaction in seeing all of this decarbonisation effort ultimately fail as it must since no one will tolerate impoverishment for nothing.
Here in Zimbabwe our GDP per head is lower than it was in 1951 and our electrical power usage for the entire country of 12 million people is 1500Mw. Consider also that our liquid fuel consumption is around 1m liters a day and you can see how far we have to go to improve lives.
The disastrous corollary to this is that deforestation is massive and accelerating because wood as a fuel is “free”. In the last 10 years approximately 60% of our forests have been burned to cook food and to provide poor light after dark.
Widespread rural electrification coupled with upgraded power generation ( we have billions of tons of coal and huge natural gas fields that have not been exploited) would improve lives and stop deforestation. Instead my government is disinvesting in power and starting to pass laws to combat global warming with particular reference to CO2.
It seems we have chosen poverty over development.
@erik Ramberg says:
November 16, 2010 at 10:18 pm
Swiss: Proven oil reserves= 0. Proven gas reserves= 0
Canada: Proven oil reserves= 175.2 billion bbl (#2 in world). Proven gas reserves= 1.754 trillion cu m (#21 in world).
Canada exports energy, while the Swiss are mostly dependent on imports. Energy costs are higher for the Swiss, so that might be the reason why.
Willis Eschenbach;
It puts an absolute ceiling on development.>>
Thank you for saying so Willis. I get into this tussle with promoters of “green jobs” over and over again. They seem to believe that somehow they can raise energy costs to the point that the economy “adapts” and starts recovering by producing “new” jobs that are based on less energy consumption.
Probably true as a technicality, but the number of jobs created can’t even come close to those lost. Further, the absolute cieling can be easily demonstrated by some very simple examples.
Consider a tractor trailer with 100,000 pounds of cargo run by a 500 horsepower diesel engine and run by a single driver. In theory, you could move that 100,000 pounds of cargo with 1,000 labourers each carrying 100 pounds. Oops. Each labourer weighs 200 pounds, and they have to move themselves too. Collectively they weigh more than the truck, and the amount of energy required to move the cargo that way is MORE than what the truck would use.
But it isn’t just about the efficiency that concentrated energy in the form of fuel provides. It is also practicality. If the cargo is bananas, they have a shelf life of perhaps a week if kept at cool temperatures. If already ripe and not kept cool, perhaps a day or two. The truck with a reefer unit can deliver 100,000 pounds of bananas perfectly fresh a thousand miles away. Not only would labourers require more total energy to deliver the load, they have no means to keep the bananas cool, nor can they travel fast enough to deliver them fresh. A million labourers would not make it any better.
The absolute efficiency of concentrated energy in the form of fuel makes possible all sorts of things that would not only be inneficient by others means, but actually impossible.
This is a simplistic way of looking at the energy flows between life (which includes humanity) and the earth,firstly life needs energy which is a flow from the earth to animals and plants,as life takes more energy from the earth then unless the sun increases its output the energy in the rest of the earth must fall.We also create energy from fossil fuels and nuclear power which does not drain energy from the rest of the earth.It is interesting to note that after the second world war when there was increasing agricultural production and increasing population world temperatures fell.As we approach the next ice age we need to remember that we need to take energy from the earth to live that can’t be provided by burning fossil fuels.
The case of Switzerland vs Canada shows that you can reduce energy consumption by more than a factor of 2
No – it shows the impact of transportation costs (a very large consumer of energy) in a vast and sparsely populated country as compared to a small and densely populated country. Your example also illustrates the problem of trying to argue based on obvious outliers from the population.