Suppose history had unfolded in a slightly different way, so that computers driven by huge steam engines had existed in Queen Victoria’s day, and giant helium-powered airships had been deployed in the American Civil War?
Speculations like these have given life to a science fiction genre and related graphical style called steampunk. It’s a style that creates its effects from the anachronistic mixing of different eras. The term was never intended to be used in connection with U.S. energy policy, but sometimes life imitates art.
In the steampunk America of the coming years, people will continue riding around in cars that use the same combustion engine technology that cars used more than a century ago, fueled by cheap Venezuelan oil.
Meanwhile, 96 percent of the new passenger cars sold in Norway last year were electric. There’s talk there of developing vehicle-to-grid technology, in which parked cars would put energy back into the electrical grid in a sophisticated balancing act. If that’s what they’re talking about now, where will they be in coming decades?
Steampunk America will be powered partly by “magic bullet” nuclear reactors — smaller and improved versions of late-20th-century reactors — but mostly by traditional fossil fuel plants. Leaving aside what impact this could have on the environment, can we afford this?
Every year, Lazard Bank releases a report on what it calls the Levelized Cost of Energy. According to this analysis, the total cost of producing solar and wind energy fell below that of coal, natural gas and nuclear in 2018 and has continued to be cheaper every year since.
There are at least a couple of websites devoted to refuting the yearly reports, arguing that renewables are in reality, much more expensive than the traditional sources of power. But realities have changed dramatically since energy experts began debating this question with some urgency back in the early 1970s, nowhere more so than China.
It’s an irony of planetary proportions that the nation that generates the most greenhouse gases is also the unrivaled leader in renewable energy production. This wasn’t the result of any kind of granular process. A couple of decades ago, the Chinese government made a commitment to developing this economic sector, and since then has poured billions every year into its development. But the results have been spectacular.
In a five-month period early last year, China added more solar and wind power to its system than the total electrical consumption of either Turkey or Indonesia. China’s electrical consumption is so great that fossil fuels make up an even greater portion of its grid, and in any case, we’ve grown accustomed to big numbers from China.
It’s the impact China’s having on the rest of the world that we’ve largely missed. Low-priced Chinese electric cars, solar panels and batteries are impacting the global economy at a pace that makes artificial intelligence look like a turtle.
A recent New York Times story about how people in South Africa are dealing with a faulty power grid illustrates what this could mean in the competition for global influence.
While steampunk America lobbed 19th-century-style tariffs at them, the Chinese slashed the prices on the solar panels and batteries it sells in Africa. This has caused solar to skyrocket to 10 percent of the country’s total electricity-generating capacity. Cheap solar units now power not only homes, but also factories and stores. As the Chinese push cheap electrification across the rest of the continent, they gain an invaluable tool in their quest to play a dominant role in Africa.
In steampunk America, meanwhile, a solar project that would have produced three times the generating capacity of the Hoover Dam was canceled in October by the Bureau of Land Management, just one of the solar and wind projects totaling billions of dollars in already invested money, which the Trump administration canceled last year.
For whatever it means, most experts seem to agree that the Chinese have already established such a lead in the production of solar panels and the other equipment that a developing world hungry for generating capacity wants, that we have no hope of catching up with them. But maybe we can sell them somebody else’s oil.
