The sheer inefficiency of today’s habits of electrical generation, distribution, and use is rarely recognized. Behind those wall sockets lies what is very probably the world’s largest single system of infrastructure, an immense network linking huge power plants and end users via a crazy spiderweb of transmission lines covering whole continents. To keep electricity in those lines, vast amounts of fuel are burnt every day to generate heat, which produces steam, which drives turbines, which turn generators, which put voltage onto the lines; at each of these transformations of energy from one form to another, the laws of thermodynamics take their toll, and as a result only about a third of the potential energy in the fuel finds its way to the wall socket. Losses to entropy of the same order of magnitude also take place when electricity is generated by other means – hydroelectricity, wind power or what have you – because of parallel limits hardwired into the laws of physics.

When the resulting current comes out of the wall sockets, in turn, equivalent losses take place on the other end. Most electricity in today’s industrial societies gets turned into light, heat, or mechanical motion at its end use, and each of these transformations involves unavoidable inefficiencies. Furthermore, a very large fraction of today’s end uses of electricity are things that could be done just as well without it, with the application of a little ordinary muscle power or some other readily available energy source. That’s not even counting the gigawatts that go into lighting, cooling and heating unoccupied rooms, keeping electronic devices on unnecessary standby, drowning out the stars with light pollution, and, well, let’s not even start talking about Wii.
Having an energy system geared to so grandiose a level of excess seemed to make sense in the days when fossil fuels were cheap and abundant. Quite a few absurd things seemed to make sense in those days, and even when they no longer make any sense at all, the habits of that brief interval continue to dominate contemporary thought to an embarrassing degree. Notice how our economic system, as well as nearly all economists, still act as though replacing human labor with fossil fuel-derived energy is always a good idea, even at a time when unemployment is pandemic and the cost of energy is a rising burden on economies around the world.

The same fixation on maintaining the extravagant habits of the recent past still holds most discussions of energy hostage. Every source of electrical power these days is measured against the yardstick of whether it could provide enough cheap, abundant, reliable, continuous power to keep our existing electrical grids running. Proponents of each of the various contenders trot out an assortment of canned studies insisting that their preferred energy technology can do just that, while challenging competing systems with equally canned studies that insist that no other option will work.

Given the billions of dollars that have already been paid out to the winners in these competitions, and the trillions more that will likely follow, this sort of propaganda dolled up in scientific drag will most likely continue to be standard practice until the money and other resources for grandiose projects simply aren’t there any more. Meanwhile, there’s really no way to be sure in advance that any of the options can keep the grids running, and if there is, the chance that the one that ends up clawing its way to the top of the heap in the political free-for-all now under way will just happen to be one that will do the trick is not exactly something on which I’d choose to bet.

The difficulty here is that most current conversations about the future of energy are trying to figure out an answer without first making sure that what’s being asked is the right question. “How can we keep an electrical grid designed around the unquestioned availability of cheap abundant energy?” is the obvious question, and it’s also the wrong one. The right question – the question that we should be asking – is something more like “How much electricity can we count on having in a future after fossil fuels, and what are the best ways to produce, distribute, and use it?” That question has hardly been asked at all. It’s high time to remedy that omission.