7 World Crises

Tonight I attended a presentation by Hermann Scheer, the author of Energy Autonomy: The Economic, Social and Technological Case for Renewable Energy. It was held at Google and sponsored by the German American Business Association (GABA). The talk was called "Toward Energy Autonomy," and is described here.

Hermann Scheer is a member of the German Bundestag (Parliament) and President of EUROSOLAR, the European organization for renewable energies. In a career devoted to the replacement of nuclear and fossil fuels with environmentally sound energy sources, Dr. Scheer has received numerous awards, including the World Solar Prize and the Alternative Nobel Prize.

He says that the world faces 7 Crises:
1. Climate crisis
2. Availability crisis for fossil fuel and uranium
3. Social crisis (collision between first world and third world needs). He pointed out that 40 countries import more oil than the value of ALL their exports. In essence, they are completely bankrupting their national economies to feed their thirst for oil, just as a junkie will do anything to obtain heroin.
4. Nuclear crisis due to weapons proliferation. "A stable society should be a prerequisite for being a nuclear nation, but many nuclear nations (Iran, N. Korea, Pakistan) are far from stable.
5. Water crisis due to unsustainably high water consumption rate of the current infrastructure. In many countries we are mining "fossil water" by tapping into ancient aquifers just as we are mining fossil fuel.
6. Health crisis due to a variety of pollutants, such as smoke from coal fired power plants in China. For example, average life expectancy in Russia has fallen significantly in the past 15 years.
7. Food crisis, due to modern agriculture's addiction to chemical fertilizers, fossil fuel, and soil loss.

He then bridged to talking about how Germany has become a leader in the deployment of wind and solar energy. He said there were 3 keys:

1. Guaranteed access to the grid for all renewable producers, whether home rooftop or major producer.
2. Guaranteed payment at a fair rate to all producers
3. No limits on the quantity of renewables introduced.

(Home owners in PG&E territory experience 1 and 2 but not 3. The amount of power we can feed the grid (and get paid for) is no larger than the amount we consume (measured in $, not kilowatt hours).

He said that Germany has added 3,000 megawatts of power each of the last 6 years and created 150,000 new jobs. He said that Germany produces 20 times more wind energy than the UK, even though the UK is windier, and that German wind energy is 30% cheaper than in the UK.

I had to leave before he took questions. I did not leave feeling good about the future of the planet. :(