Early in the morning on Saturday, coordinated drone strikes on the world’s largest oil processing plants in Saudi Arabia shut down nearly half of that nation’s oil production, about 5% of global supply. Repair was expected to take “weeks, not days”. This sparked immediate fears that oil prices could spike $5-$10 per barrel on Monday, and analysts predicted crude might rise from the current price of about $60 per barrel to as much as $100 per barrel if Saudi Arabia is unable to compensate with alternative supply.
Yemen’s Houthi rebel group claimed responsibility for the drone attacks, but U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blamed Iran. (Houthi insurgents have been rebelling against the internationally recognized Yemeni government since 2015 in what is widely regarded as a proxy war between Saudi Arabia, which leads a coalition backing the government, and Iran, which backs the Houthi rebels.) Iranian officials dismissed the allegations and stated that Iran “was ready for ‘full-fledged’ war”, warning, “All American bases and their aircraft carriers in a distance of up to 2,000 kilometers around Iran are within the range of our missiles”. Thus, the threat to the world’s oil supply was further ratcheting up tensions in a region already embroiled in a simmering regional war.
Global Energy Economy 2.0, which we are building (though, I would argue, not quickly enough) will not be prone to such threats.
Our current energy economy features highly centralized and vulnerable operations:
- Concentrated oil production facilities, like the ones just attacked in Saudi Arabia, often located in parts of the world plagued by regional conflict.
- Coastal oil refineries vulnerable to our intensifying levels of catastrophic weather, like the ten refineries in the Houston and Corpus Christi areas damaged and shut down in 2017 following the landfall of hurricane Harvey.
- Offshore oil drilling platforms subject to all sorts of disasters, like the Deepwater Horizon, which dumped an estimated 210 gallons of oil into the gulf of Mexico over a 6-month period in 2010 amid a desperate international effort to contain it.
- Oil transport through vulnerable waterways, like multiple oil tankers that were attacked this summer in the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. blamed Iran, contributing to earlier escalation of global political tensions related to our current energy economy.
Moreover, our current energy economy exacerbates the very political instabilities that threaten it. It encourages concentration of wealth among the governing elites of resource-rich nations that lack the diversified economies necessary to adequately support their poorer populations. It supercharges the potential for both regional and global conflict among various groups for control of those centralized resources.
Energy Economy 2.0 will have none of these destabilizing vulnerabilities.
Our energy will be provided by a diffuse network of regionally distributed solar and wind installations with battery storage, like regional solar arrays and farm-based wind turbine networks, augmented by end-load installations, like rooftop solar panels on individual houses and businesses. Regionally connected by new electricity microgrids, the energy produced within these distributed networks will be efficiently utilized by new artificial intelligence technology, which will automatically adapt to changes in weather patterns and any localized disruptions in supply to send electricity efficiently where it’s needed.
Thanks to Xcel Energy’s Renewable*Connect program, my family’s home in western Wisconsin now receives the equivalent of 100% of its electricity from a renewable mixture of solar and wind installations nearby in Minnesota. In a future Energy Economy 2.0, in which 100% of energy will be so provided, someone would need to bomb multiple sites in Minnesota to disrupt my energy, and the damage would be highly localized in my area. Moreover, I might still have access to some energy provided by rooftop solar panels on my house.
In short, disrupting the entire world’s energy supply, as someone (Houthi rebels? Iran?) did this weekend will be a fool’s errand under Energy Economy 2.0.
Further, renewable energy is already raising the living standards of many of the world’s poor, by providing them locally produced electricity not reliant on centralized operations maintained by their governments.
More solar energy falls on the Earth’s surface each hour than is used by all of us on Earth every year. Energy Economy 2.0 will be capable of providing it more equitably and reliably to everyone on the planet, without the centralized operations that currently result in so much risk, conflict, and human oppression.
Oh, and it will also enable us to head off the looming climate catastrophe.
Price parity between renewables and fossil fuels has been reached in many regions. Thus, Energy Economy 2.0 will be built. The question is how quickly, and how much further climate-related suffering we will allow to be loaded into our future before we complete the transition. According to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we have just a little over a decade to make an unprecedented transition in our global energy infrastructure to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.
Reflecting on the events of this past weekend, it would seem that those of us who value national security and those of us who value the environment have common cause in the expeditious pursuit of this transition.
