Maggie Koerth-Baker

Spectrum

Maggie Koerth-Baker, the science editor for boingboing.net, discusses her book "Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before it Conquers Us" and talks about the past, present, and future of energy infrastructure. www.maggiekb.com/books

Transcript

Speaker 1: Spectrum's next

Speaker 2: [inaudible].

Speaker 1: Welcome [00:00:30] to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists.

Speaker 3: Good afternoon. I'm Rick Karnofsky, Brad swift and I are the hosts of today's show. I'd like to thank past spectrum guests and director of the Bay Area Science Festival Kashara Hari for helping to coordinate this interview. We're speaking with Maggie, Chris Baker, science editor for the hugely [00:01:00] popular blog, [inaudible] dot net and the author of the recent book before the lights go out, conquering the energy crisis before it conquers us. Maggie, welcome to the spectrum.

Speaker 1: Thank you for having me. So why this book? This book came about because I'm married to a guy who actually works in the energy industry. My husband is an energy efficiency analyst, which means that he basically uses software algorithms to figure out how to make buildings as energy efficient as possible for the least amount of money. [00:01:30] And so when he got that job, he started coming home and talking to me a lot about how energy worked and how electricity worked. And it started to occur to me that there was this big disconnect between what the experts knew about our energy infrastructure and what everybody else, you know, not just lay people that government and business and you know, everybody actually has to make decisions about energy. What they knew, and there was all these details that were, you know, just basic information [00:02:00] to my husband to the point that he didn't even talk about them to people, but that void not basic information at all outside this niche. And so I really wanted to try to bridge that gap in education between the experts and everyone else. You cover

Speaker 3: both sort of energy infrastructure and energy generation in use as well as some of the environmental issues that are

Speaker 1: of concern to this. Yeah, I really wanted to have a book that kind of explains sort of a behind the scenes look at [00:02:30] w you know, where our electricity comes from and why it comes to us in the way that it comes to us and how this current infrastructure that we have affects what we can and can't do to solve our energy crisis problems over the next 30 or 40 years. People are familiar with gasoline in a way that they're not familiar with electricity. You know, I spill gas on my shoes on a monthly basis and it's right there at the pump every day. Electricity's different, you know, it's kind of has this [00:03:00] sort of feeling of like magical elves in the wall that make my lights turn on and I don't, I don't know what happens. It's a black box and that was really interesting to me is kind of going inside that black box and helping people understand what's going on behind is incredibly important part of their daily lives that they depend upon for everything.

Speaker 1: So what is going on and how do we get here? Yeah, so we have a really imperfect system. This is I think something that is hard for people [00:03:30] to understand sometimes that when we're talking about changing the energy system, we're not talking about going from something that works really well to something that's risky. We're talking about taking this thing that wasn't designed by anybody. It just evolved piecemeal, like a little patchwork quilt made up by 50 or 60 or 70 different quilters and trying to make it something that can work for the future. Right now we have a system that is surprisingly precarious. There are, you know, centers all over the u s where these people called grid controllers [00:04:00] have to manually balance electric supply and electric demand on a minute by minute basis, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You know that process have to be manual basically because we've never made it anything else.

Speaker 1: There are technologies. Some of the things that we talk about, we talk about smart grids that could make this more automated, but we've never bought those, so we just have these guys. It would also be a lot easier if we had more storage on our electric grid, but we don't really have any storage on our electric grid because [00:04:30] it's always been cheaper to just have these guys and that puts us at risk, not just in terms of how we integrate wind and solar onto our grid, but it also puts us at risk in terms of blackouts. There have been a lot of times, particularly as you get more extreme weather events where this old manual grid can't respond fast enough to changes that are happening and people lose power. I'm interested about the blackouts that have happened historically. [00:05:00] Did you find in your research that there lessons learned from all the blackouts that have happened?

Speaker 1: Some yes and some no. We have learned a lot more about interconnecting parts of the grid to kind of help people get past some of these blackouts. Up until the 1970s even a lot of our grids were just these completely separate islands where a town would be its own grid and another town would be its own grid and there'd be no connection between the two. But [00:05:30] there were a lot of rolling blackouts that happened because you had this constantly increasing electric demand that this small grid couldn't actually keep up with in terms of creating more generation. So one of the things that we found is that it made more sense to start connecting these things to one another and now we have this completely national system where places that don't have enough electricity can get it from somewhere else. And that's a really important thing.

Speaker 1: That's a important change that has happened and has made the system more reliable. [00:06:00] There are better things we could do with that interconnection. One of the things that would really help is to have a little bit more distributed generation. So you know, generation, instead of being on the scale of millions of homes being powered by one power plant, hundreds or thousands of homes being powered by one power plant, and those things can be scattered around in a lot more places and they can allow us to access natural resources like gas from landfills or hydroelectric power that we can't get to at [00:06:30] a really large scale right now. And would also then strengthen the system up. Because if you have your power coming from a lot of places, shutting down, one of them doesn't shut down power to millions of people. And that's a big deal. Kind of a resilience thing.

Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Is there any reason I shouldn't just build a solar farm in my backyard? There's not a reason why you shouldn't build a solar farm in your backyard, but there is a good reason to think [00:07:00] that you're not going to supply all the energy you need for yourself. You know, this isn't, when I talk about de-centralization, I'm not talking about everybody going off the grid and everybody becoming, you know, their own self-sufficient farm basically. That's not a really realistic way to think about the world. I could make this great garden in my backyard, but my chances of feeding my entire family for a full year based only in what's in that garden are pretty slim, but at the same time, I might not like the choices that I have at the giant supermarket in the suburbs. [00:07:30] So this is where I kind of like to talk about decentralization as being a lot like a farmer's market. It's kind of somewhere in the middle. It's got enough diversity of choices that it's better than the really large scale that way, but it also still enables you to share resources among multiple people and make use of these shared networks of energy use and energy, a production that we really need to have a reliable system. You're not going to have [00:08:00] a reliable system. You're not going to have a 21st century system if you're trying to have everybody be off the grid. It just won't work.

Speaker 2: [inaudible]

Speaker 3: you are listening to spectrum the science and technology show on k l x Berkeley. I'm Rick Karnofsky. Brad swift and I are interviewing Maggie. Chris Baker about our energy infrastructure

Speaker 2: [inaudible]

Speaker 1: [00:08:30] so how much energy do we produce and consume in this country? Here we used 98 quadrillion BTUs of energy in 2010 which is enough energy to take something decide is the great salt lake and boil it dry twice. So that's a lot of energy. It's, it's kind of hard to wrap your head around, it's just that massive. [00:09:00] But if you think about boiling away a lake, the size of the Great Salt Lake, twice in a year, you kind of get an idea of how much energy we're using and what's the trend of our energy usage. It generally goes up, it goes, it fluctuates a lot. We've had some dips in the past eight or nine, eight or seven years because of recession issues. But if you look at like the overall trend, what you see as it going up. So one of the things that would be really helpful is if we can kind [00:09:30] of find ways to stabilize energy use and not grow at this constant growth rate without having to be in a recession to do that.

Speaker 1: What are some of the surprising things you found when researching the book? One of the biggest surprises for me was that we don't have storage on the electric grid. I honestly thought just had not even ever considered that. That wasn't there until I found out that it wasn't, you know, batteries [00:10:00] are just such this huge part of our lives. They're in everything we use there in our cars. They're in laptops, they're, you know, just all over the place. It just made sense that there would be batteries on the grid and there really aren't not enough to actually make a difference. And that's because they're much bigger and much more expensive and we don't necessarily have battery technology worked out in a way that can make it cheap and make it big. And that's something that we really need a lot more r and D on.

Speaker 1: But [00:10:30] there are other ways to store energy and I just was really surprised to find out that we weren't using them. Can you give examples? One of the things is called compressed air energy storage, which is one of the most cost effective ways that we can store energy at a grid scale. And it basically involves how you bring electricity potentials from overnight when there's not a lot of demand for it into the day when there is on the great plains where get most of our wind power from wind [00:11:00] actually blows more at night in a lot of those places, but there's no demand for that electricity. So you just can't use it, which is a problem because we have, you know, these wind farms built and they're not getting us all of the power they could be giving us. So one of the things you can do is have your wind farm hooked up to an air compressor and at night when the wind is blowing and there's not demand, you use that wind power to power the air compressor, which pumps compressed air into porous rock underground.

Speaker 1: Basically use the earth as a giant battery [00:11:30] and then the next day you just run the system backwards and that compressed air comes out and helps to run a natural gas generator that produces electricity for far, far less energy than we'd otherwise need. So in addition to making our system smarter and putting storage on the grid, what other improvements can be made to the system? We need a lot more ways people to use energy efficiency better than we do today. There's a big difference between energy efficiency and conservation. [00:12:00] Conservation is great, but conservation is all about not doing something. Whereas energy efficiency is about finding ways to do it better. So you can get the services you need and want. You can get these things that make our lives clean and comfortable and convenient. But you can do that for less energy. And a lot of that has to do with making it easy for energy efficiency to happen.

Speaker 1: You do make the case that individual consumer contribution is great, but we do need to make these system level changes. How do we actually start to do that? [00:12:30] Yeah. So that's, that's a tough thing. One of the things that I've learned in the course of this research is that energy isn't just our choices. It's not just the sources we're using, it's the systems and the infrastructure that kind of control how we use energy. You know, I've been telling people that the average American uses twice as much energy as the average European, but that's not because they're better people than us. That's because they have infrastructures that allow them to do that without becoming energy experts or without agonizing over every single choice they make every day. And I think [00:13:00] a big part of it has to start with making the case for this. In terms of practicality.

Speaker 1: I think the places where I've seen that kind of top down infrastructure change happen, particularly the u s military or things where it started with the people who wanted to make individual changes, going to the people in charge and making a practical case for what benefits we're going to get if we make a couple of these changes and then those changes started influencing the way that everybody [00:13:30] else at the bottom of this chain of command thought about how they used energy and they became more aware of it in their lives and they became smarter about what they were doing. And then that led to pressure. That led to more changes at the top, which led to more cultural changes at the bottom. And you kind of get this nice feedback loop, but I think it has to start with what kind of pressures we put on our government, not just in terms of you need to do this because it's good for the environment, but here are these really good practical things we're going to get out [00:14:00] of making these changes.

Speaker 1: We're going to make our system more stable. We're going to make us better able to deal with weather, with terrorism, with all these different things that can affect the grid. And I think that that's a good place to start. How vulnerable is the grid to attack either physically or software wise? Software wise it's not very much right now. It will be more when we have a smart grid and I think this is something that worries people a lot and I think it's reasonable cause it's a reasonable risk, but we have [00:14:30] to kind of consider the balance between benefits and detriments. You know the analogy I ended up using in the book was my dad's typewriter from 1986 was a lot less vulnerable to cyber attack and identity theft than his internet enabled computer now. But I don't think he'd ever go back to that typewriter because their stuff he gets from that Internet enabled computer that he could never possibly get otherwise. And I think that we [00:15:00] need to be cautious in how we set things up. We need to be intelligent in how we set up our security systems and we need to know that we're not ever going to have anything set up perfectly and there's going to be failures, but that the benefits are going to outweigh the risks.

Speaker 2: [inaudible]

Speaker 1: you're listening to spectrum on k a l ex Maggie. Chris Baker is discussing [00:15:30] her recent book before the lights go out.

Speaker 1: Do you think dynamic pricing of energy has any role? Definitely does. This is another one of those aspects of how you reduce demand and reduce the need to build new power plants has to do a lot with reducing those peak loads. When we build power plants, we don't just build power plants for the amount of energy that is used. Most of the time we have to [00:16:00] build power plants for the theoretical peak in energy that we might hit at any given point, which means we have a lot of power plants in the u s that aren't actually producing much electricity and it just kind of sitting in idle for most of the year because we need them in the middle of summer, in the afternoon. And if we can cut those peak loads down, that means that we don't have to have as many of those things. They don't have to be on, they don't have to be idling because idling is not a really efficient way to use those fuels.

Speaker 1: [00:16:30] So that's where the dynamic pricing thing comes in because right now if you are a business, you are charged for electricity in a really different way than individuals are. As a business, your electricity costs more when people want more of it and costs less when people want less of it so that you're kind of incentivized to not use electricity during that peak time. We don't charge people in residential areas like that and [00:17:00] I think that there could be a big benefit. It would take also implementing systems so people know what's going on because if you don't know that the cost changes throughout the day, there's really nothing you can do about it. But there's some really cool technologies, like a, an orb that sits on your table and changes color based on the price of electricity or you know what demand for electricity is like. And so you can look at that and know, well, the orb is red.

Speaker 1: I shouldn't run the dishwasher right now, and that's the kind [00:17:30] of thing that you need built in if you're going to make dynamic pricing work, don't to swap out all of your appliances. Right. Which is a nice thing. Also, one of the things I found interesting about the book is that you get a lot of evidence for climate change, but then you also say even if you don't believe in climate change, energy efficiency is still very important. Yeah. This is one of those things that I was really surprised by when I was doing the research was the idea that I don't have to convince people that climate change is real in order to convince them that we need energy change. This [00:18:00] is something people are willing to sign on for for a whole host of reasons. There was a really great story that ended up opening the book with where a nonprofit in Kansas was doing these focus groups to kind of find out what people thought about climate and energy and kind of get a good idea of, you know, how they would develop their programs.

Speaker 1: And they kept running over and over into these situations where you'd have some guy talking about how climate change is a socialist plot. It's going to destroy us all. And then you'd ask him, you know, [00:18:30] what are you doing about energy? And the same guy would have switched out all of his light bulb to cfls and he'd owned a Prius and he was excited about wind power because he was excited about those things for different reasons. To save a lot of money. He gets to save money, he gets to be part of this Apollo project, kind of USA, USA kind of thing. And you know, there's lots of different reasons why people care about this stuff. There are opportunities we're missing to communicate with people in their language, their cultural language instead [00:19:00] of trying to convince them to be part of our cultural language. And I think that's a mistake that we make a lot as you know, communicators of sustainability and of environmentalism is that we don't make a big enough effort to talk to people in different cultural languages.

Speaker 3: I would like to say I really like your footnotes in the book. They're not only like useful links that were, you know, I was able to fall on my kindle. I don't know how useful they are in the hard backwards. I don't know about that either. The uh, [00:19:30] just the stories that are hitting back there are, are absolutely fantastic. So what sort of motivated you to put all that in?

Speaker 1: Not being able to cut out great stories that didn't quite have a place in the main text. You know, there's just so many cool things that I learned that didn't quite fit with the narrative of the story and I needed a place to put them. And then I had all these footnotes and now there's like 50 pages of footnotes, but one like one of my favorites was the [00:20:00] story of Thomas Edison when he was developing the grid system in New York City, which was the first grid system in the world. And they had this faulty junction box under a street corner that when it rained and the ground got saturated that you had kind of an electric connection up to the street. And that ended up leading to everybody in New York crowded around the street corner watching horses and buggies go by and then the horses hitting this electrified patch of ground and like rearing [00:20:30] and freaking out and kind of got to the point apparently where people sort of like urging them on like, no, no, there's no problem here and bring your horse through.

Speaker 1: Um, and so they finally called down Edison's staff bowsers. Yeah, exactly. Basically giant joy buzzer. And they finally down Edison staff to get this thing fixed. And so they get it fixed and everything's fine. But then the next day, this used horse salesman shows up at Edison's office asking him to install an intentionally faulty junction box under [00:21:00] his used horse paddock to make the horses look more energetic than they actually are. And that's really where the story ends in the Edison archives. There's no record of whether or not he took the guy up on that offer. Has the way you use energy actually changed at all? Definitely. It's changed not because of the book. It changed when my husband got the job that he has. Uh, we've done a lot to make our house more energy efficient. We have a 1920s bungalow in Minneapolis that, you know, it's, [00:21:30] it's not going to be something where we can like reorient it on the site and make it save energy.

Speaker 1: But there's a lot of things that were already done because of how they used to design buildings that involved that, you know, we have a 40 foot wide lot and our house is not right in the middle of it. Our House is set so that the north side of our lot is extremely small. Like is basically the smallest setback you can possibly have while the south side of our lot is much wider. And that was done in old Minneapolis neighborhoods [00:22:00] specifically. So you got more light coming in during the winter and more warmth and we're able to capture some of that energy that you wouldn't be able to capture otherwise if your house didn't have that kind of setback. So, I mean there's a lot of that kind of stuff that was built into how our house was built. And we've since gone through and my husband has like an expanding foam addiction and took it through the entire house and basically patched up everything that could possibly be construed as a, uh, leak in the house. [00:22:30] So we're, we're held up now with our, uh, with stucco and expanding foam. Oh, make it bigger. Thanks for joining. Yes, thank you so much.

Speaker 2: [inaudible].

Speaker 1: Now for some science news headlines, here's Brad swift and Lisa Katovich

Speaker 2: [inaudible].

Speaker 4: [00:23:00] The California condors returned to flying free in the wild after a close brush with extinction, maybe an illusory recovery. The hundred plus condors soaring over California swallow so much led shot as they scavenge carcasses that the population can't sustain itself without steady medical care and continual resupply from captive populations. Toxicologist Myra Finkelstein of UC Santa Cruz described analyses of lead [00:23:30] in blood and feathers in the June 25th proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Each year about 20% of the state's monitored birds flunk their lead tests badly enough to need detox. This grim paper supplies the data to confirm the toll of lead ammunition on condors in the wild, regional or species. Specific regulations do restrict ammunition in California and Arizona, the two states where condos live, but those rules don't seem to be solving the problem without a politically difficult nationwide ban [00:24:00] on lead ammunition. California condors will exist in the wild only due to costly extensive human intervention. Essentially in an outdoor zoo state

Speaker 5: science news reports that quantum information has leaped through the air about 100 kilometers in two new experiments further and with greater fidelity than ever before. The research brings truly long distance quantum communication networks in which satellites could beam encrypted information around the globe closer to reality. [00:24:30] Both studies involve quantum teleportation, which transports the quantum state of one particle to another. This star trek like feet is possible because of a phenomenon called entanglement in which pairs of particles become linked in such a way that measuring a certain property in one instantly determines the same property for the other, even if separated by large distances. In the first experiment, Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna and his colleagues used a pair of entangled photons [00:25:00] to transmit a piece of quantum information over 143 kilometers between two of the Canary Islands. In the second experiment, John Way Pawn of the University of Science and technology of China in Shanghai and his colleagues and tangled many protons together and teleported information 97 kilometers across the lake in China. These experiments are a milestone towards future satellite based quantum teleportation.

Speaker 4: In the July issue of [00:25:30] the Journal cell, researchers from Stanford University reported the world's first complete computer model of an organism, the bacteria, Mycoplasma genitalium, a humble parasitic bacterium known mainly for showing up uninvited in the human urogenital and respiratory tracks. Its distinction is that it contains the smallest genome of any free living organism, only 525 genes as opposed to the 4,288 genes of eco lie. [00:26:00] The final model made use of more than 1900 experimentally determined parameters to integrate these disparate data points into a unified machine. Researchers modeled individual biological processes at 28 separate modules each governed by its own algorithm. These modules communicated to each other after every step making for a unified whole that closely matched the bacteria as real world behavior models like this could bring rational design to biology, allowing for computer guided experimental regimes and wholesale [00:26:30] creation of new micro organisms.

Speaker 3: Irregular feature of spectrum is a calendar of science related events happening in the bay area over the next two weeks. Here's Lisa Katovich and Brad's swift,

Speaker 4: the coming century war against your computers. The title of the August long now foundation seminar, Tuesday, July 31st Cory Doctorow, the night Speaker contend set the war against computer freedom will just keep escalating. Copyright wars, net neutrality and stop [00:27:00] online piracy act. We're early samples of what's to come. Victories in those battles were temporary and conflict in the decades ahead. We'll feature even higher stakes, more convoluted issues, and far more powerful technology. The debate is how civilization decides to conduct itself and in whose interests. Cory Doctorow writes contemporary science fiction. Recent books include for the win makers and little brother. The seminar will be held Tuesday, July 31st seven 30 to 9:00 PM at the Yerba Buena Center, Novellus Theater [00:27:30] 700 Howard Street, San Francisco admission is $10 [inaudible]

Speaker 5: cosmos reconsidered. Alex Philapannco, UC Berkeley astronomy professor will present key video excerpts from Carl Sagans, legendary Cosmos Television series, offer uptodate commentary and invite audience questions. This event is presented by wonder fest and ask a scientist. The presentation will be held at the California Institute of Integral Studies. 1453 [00:28:00] mission street in San Francisco, July 31st 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM and mission is free.

Speaker 4: The Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft is nearing the end of its eight month voyage to Mars to deliver the newest Mars rover. August 5th there will be two events featuring live feeds of the attempt to land the rover called curiosity on the Martian surface at Ames research center in mountain view, a public gathering to view the landing will take place from five to midnight. For details go to the NASA Ames research [00:28:30] center site, nasa.gov/centers/ames this event is free. The Chabot science center in Oakland will also have a live feed from 6:00 PM to 11 o'clock along with other presentations about the mission and landing. These events are included in the general admission to the center

Speaker 2: [inaudible] the music you [00:29:00] heard during say show. We'll spend the Stein and David from his album book and Acoustic [inaudible]. It is released under a creative Commons license version 3.0 spectrum was recorded and edited by me, Rick [inaudible], and by Brad Swift. Thank you for listening to spectrum. We are happy to hear from listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum [00:29:30] dot k a l [e-mail] join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible] [inaudible].

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