The Big Fix

Seven Practical Steps to Save our Planet

Hal Harvey, Justin Gillis

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781982124007
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A "smart, honest, and down-to-earth" (Elizabeth Kolbert) citizen's guide to the seven urgent changes that will really make a difference for our climate. If you think the only thing you can do to combat climate change is to install a smart thermostat or cook plant-based meat, you're thinking too small.In The Big Fix, energy policy advisor Hal Harvey and longtime New York Times reporter Justin Gillis offer a new, hopeful way to engage with one of the greatest problems of our age. Writing in a lively, accessible style, the pair illuminate how the really big decisions that affect our climate get made — whether by the most obscure public utilities commissions or in the lofty halls of state capitols — and reveal how each of us can influence these decisions to deliver change. The pair focus on the seven areas of our political economy where ambitious but practical changes will have the greatest effect: from what kind of power plants to build to how much insulation new houses require to how efficient cars must be before they're allowed on the road.Equal parts pragmatic and inspiring — and "full of illustrative stories and compelling evidence" (Al Gore) —The Big Fix provides an action plan for anyone serious about holding our governments accountable and saving our threatened planet.

CHAPTER 1 The Learning Curve

A sturdy workboat called the Alliance cut swiftly through waters a few miles off the English coast, riding the calm seas with ease. In the stern of the ship stood a sprightly fellow named Julian Garnsey, a Briton who was narrating the journey to his passengers. As he spoke, he was peppered with questions by several men representing large Japanese utility companies. Big money, smelling opportunity, had come to see the world’s latest technological boom.

Not so many years earlier, Mr. Garnsey, an engineer, had launched his career building oil platforms in the sea. But he let himself do some hard thinking about the implications of burning oil. Now he builds wind farms in the sea. His company, called RWE Renewables, is in the forefront of a dynamic new industry.

When offshore wind farms started to pop up in European waters in the 1990s, they were derided as a harebrained scheme with little chance of becoming a part of the energy mix. New, specialized boats were needed to pound piles into the seabed. Workers had not been trained in the complex techniques required to install giant machines on the ocean floor; investors were wary, and so demanded high interest rates to make construction loans. The cost of putting turbines into the sea was so crippling that companies demanded huge subsidies from European governments just to install a handful of projects.

Those governments were tempted, nevertheless, by a compelling physical reality. Wind turbines on land had long proven themselves to be a useful way to generate electricity, but the breezes over land could be fickle. Over the ocean, the wind blows harder and it blows more steadily, which meant that offshore turbines could produce more power—if they could withstand the harsh marine environment. The early, costly projects proved the theory, and as the industry scaled up, costs began to fall.

These days, the offshore wind industry has become one of the world’s hotbeds of innovation and ambition. Americans have been touring Europe to see how the technology works; back home, legislatures and governors in the Northeastern United States are ordering up massive offshore wind projects. The Chinese are trying to seize a big share of the turbine market. The Danes, who more or less invented the industry, are fighting to hold on to their market share. The Germans, the French—everybody sees now that this is going to be a vital industry. The latest analyses show, in fact, that it may ultimately be capable of supplying a large fraction of the world’s electrical power. It could turn out to be the most important industry created entirely in Europe since the end of World War II.

How did this happen? The short answer is those falling costs. When European governments first began to commit to offshore wind farms, they ordered their utilities to spend four or five times the prevailing electricity cost to acquire power from this new industry, with the extra cost passed along to electricity customers. But lately, contracts have been signed for wind farms to come online in the early 2020s at costs roughly in line with market prices, meaning that the offshore wind industry has learned to build its projects with little or no need for subsidies.

Offshore wind is just one example of the drastic reductions in the cost of clean-energy technologies happening all over the world. Since 2010, the price of electricity from utility-scale solar farms has fallen almost 90 percent. Onshore wind fell 60 percent in the same time. Advanced batteries, which power electric cars and are increasingly finding a role in balancing fluctuations on the electric grid, fell more than 80 percent. When highly efficient light bulbs made with light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, first came out just over a decade ago, you could easily pay $50 for one; nowadays they sell at Home Depot for $1.24 apiece, a decline of 97 percent.

These technologies are all marching down a slope called a learning curve. As the market for them scales up, they keep getting cheaper. For most of the things you buy, like milk or a haircut, large price declines like these are not the norm. In fact, the day-to-day cost of living generally goes up, not down. Understanding the special economics that applies to certain energy technologies—both those mentioned above and, potentially, to new ones just being invented—is the key to saving the world from the ravages of climate change.

Every clean-energy technology, in its early stages, is costlier than the conventional alternatives. That makes the new ones a hard sell even in rich countries; all the more in the developing countries, like China and India and Indonesia, that will produce most of the world’s future greenhouse emissions. You sometimes see politicians argue for laboratory research as the way out of our emissions dilemma—and we certainly do need more of that. But inventing new technologies is not enough. Any new technology has to become affordable if it is to be used widely. And so we need savvy tactics, including stronger public policies, that will drive these alternative technologies to scale—and make them cheaper in the process.

Any aspiring green citizen needs to understand the purpose of the public policies and private actions we advocate in this book. We are trying to make low-emissions technologies so cheap they become the default choice nearly all the time. The costs need to fall to the point where poor countries striving toward the global middle class can skip fossil fuels and go straight to clean energy. That is our tactical goal: to make clean energy unbeatable in the marketplace, no matter how much political skullduggery the fossil companies might gin up. To understand exactly how to do that, we need to go back in time a bit—to figure out how certain technologies like wind and solar have become cheap over the past century. This historical tour may seem like a digression from the urgent task of advocating change today, but in truth, it’s the template for what we must achieve. We need to take these lessons from the past and apply them to the future.

Julian Garnsey, the engineer from RWE Renewables, has a special way of showing how much things have changed in offshore wind even in just the past decade. As the Alliance plowed through the gray waters off the Essex Coast on a summer’s day in 2019, moving into deeper seas, it entered the edge of a wind farm called Greater Gabbard. Greater Gabbard—built by a predecessor company of RWE and named, like many British wind farms, after a nearby sandbank—was one of the early offshore wind farms for which the British government had effectively guaranteed prices well above the market rate. The boat passed turbine after turbine, most of them motionless, although a few turned lazily as they caught the gentle summer breeze. People who see pictures of offshore wind turbines routinely misjudge their scale; it is easy to do with no trees or buildings on the horizon for contrast. In fact, the machines are as tall as skyscrapers. The Greater Gabbard turbines lined up in rows, like giant soldiers marching through the sea, stretching so far to the north and south that it was impossible to see all 140 of them from the boat at the same time. Yet they are but a fraction of the offshore turbines Britain has built, more than 2,000 of them—and the nation is just getting started.

Soon the vessel crossed an invisible line. It had left Greater Gabbard and entered a new wind park called Galloper, one that Mr. Garnsey and his team finished building in 2018. To the naked eye, nothing looked much different, but in fact the technology had changed markedly in a few years. These turbines were larger than the ones in the neighboring park just to the west. They were taller, the blades were longer, and they could capture more power from the wind—making each turbine capable of producing 75 percent more electricity than the older model. The newer of the two wind parks had only 56 turbines, which were faster and easier to install than the 140 older ones had been. And all of this meant cost savings that showed up in the price of electricity from the new park.

The boat slowed, and gradually approached one of the turbines that Mr. Garnsey’s team had installed in the seabed. The great machine was mounted on a shaft that rose from the sea, the first few feet above the waterline painted yellow as a warning to boats. Up, up, up it soared, as tall as a sixty-story building, terminating in a structure at the top that was the size of a small house. Inside that structure, called a nacelle, the electrical generator was hooked up to a hub in the front. Attached to that hub, in turn, were three long blades capable of catching the wind and turning the generator shaft. The blades were hollow, but made of advanced materials, including fiberglass and carbon fiber, to give them strength enough to withstand a North Sea gale. Mr. Garnsey explained that cables snaking across the seabed were collecting power from the turbines and carrying it to shore. The bodies of the turbines can withstand harsh winds, too, in part because the shafts on which they are mounted are hammered deep into the seafloor. As the boat hovered below the turbine, Mr. Garnsey chatted with his Japanese visitors, potential investors in future projects of this sort.

“The amount of interest you get talking to someone about offshore wind farms is just incredible,” he said a bit later. “They just get fascinated by the engineering. They start asking, ‘Well, we’re in the middle of the sea! How does this thing stand up? How did you drive it into the seabed? How big was the hammer?’ ” The answer to that last question tended to produce gasps: the hammer on this project was the size of a three-story building. You need a big boat to handle that hammer. One of the ways the industry has cut costs is by building its own specialized boats. The construction of a wind park can put a fleet of boats and a thousand people on the water at once. “If you have bad weather one day and nobody can work, that’s a million pounds gone,” Mr. Garnsey said; that sum is equivalent to $1.3 million.

Turbine H6F had caught the breeze and was turning lazily, operating at less than 10 percent of capacity. The low electrical output was not a problem, though: the pleasant summer climate in Britain requires little air-conditioning, and demand on the national grid was minimal. The output from these turbines would be needed most in the winter, when Britons strain the grid to heat their houses. Fortunately, the North Sea winds blow hardest in winter. As he stood under the turbine, Mr. Garnsey pointed out that a single rotation of the blades would produce enough power to run an electric car for thirty miles. In a year, that single turbine would supply enough power for more than six thousand British homes, keeping the lights on, the washing machines running, and the tea kettles humming. The British prime minister, Boris Johnson, recently vowed to keep building wind parks until every household in Britain can be supplied with clean electricity from the sea.

As the boat turned back to shore, Mr. Garnsey began to speak of his next project, Triton Knoll. The turbine size will jump another 50 percent, and the power will again get cheaper. The manufacturers of turbines—companies like Vestas in Denmark and General Electric in the United States—are racing to see how much bigger they can make these machines. Vestas has announced it will build a turbine capable of generating fifteen megawatts of power, twice the size of the massive turbines that were being installed only recently. The blades of the machine will trace a circle so immense that two Airbus A-380s, the largest passenger plane in the sky, could fly through the circle side-by-side—with room left between them for a half dozen American fighter jets.

While Britain has built nearly a third of the world’s offshore turbines, other European countries bordering the sea have also played major roles. The United States has not. It watched as this new industry developed abroad. But the plunging costs have finally awakened American interest. The United States has only seven turbines operating off its coasts now, five in Rhode Island and two at a test site in Virginia. But many new projects have lately gone to bid in the United States.

The earliest attempt at developing an offshore farm in the United States, in Massachusetts, was proposed more than twenty years ago. It was too close to shore and was thwarted by opposition from nearby property owners, but the technology has since developed to the point that turbines can be installed beyond the horizon, making them invisible from people’s beach houses. This technological development has also been a crucial political development. State governments, with federal help, are now aiming to put thousands of wind turbines in the shallow continental shelf off the coast of the Northeastern United States. These states have already planned enough offshore wind to generate as much electricity as five or six nuclear power stations would produce, and the Biden administration has called for multiplying that threefold by 2030. A national commitment to the technology is critical, because it is the federal government that controls the seabed beyond three miles from the coast, and so only it can grant leases to wind-farm operators.

The falling cost rippling through the offshore wind industry—and onshore wind, and solar power, and LED bulbs, and electric cars—may seem like some kind of magic trick. But in reality, certain economic rules are at work, and they are reasonably well understood by specialists. The cost declines in these industries were entirely predictable; indeed, they were predicted, in some cases, decades ago. To understand what is going on with these technologies—and, by extension, what society needs to do to develop and adopt those of the future—we need to go back in time by a century, to the early days of one of the modern world’s defining machines: the airplane.

Wright’s Law

Theodore P. Wright had a head for numbers. He had trained as an architectural engineer, but as a young man, he got pulled into the navy just as the United States was entering World War I. He was immediately put to work on problems involving primitive war planes, then a naval responsibility. Within months he was publishing technical papers and navy manuals stuffed with equations, solving arcane problems of aircraft design and construction while still in his early twenties. He had found his calling, and a newborn American industry had found one of its native geniuses.

At a time when trains dominated long-distance travel, Mr. Wright was one of the first people to envision a passenger airline industry operating on a large scale. He would go on to become a critical figure in helping the United States produce enough airplanes to win World War II, and after the war, he helped bring his early vision to life, serving as the director of the agency that would eventually become the Federal Aviation Administration.

For all those accomplishments, Ted Wright might well be a footnote in history, save for one brilliant insight. Early in his career, he was trying to understand changes in the cost of building airplanes. It was obvious that the costs fell as production scaled up and more and more units were produced, but was there any pattern that made that cost decline understandable or, better yet, predictable? He later wrote that he had found a pattern by the early 1920s, but for a time, the company he worked for, the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company, kept his discovery as a trade secret. All through the 1920s, the company used Mr. Wright’s method as it prepared bids to sell airplanes to the government and other buyers.

“Then, in 1936, I went to Germany and had my eyes opened; saw production of military aircraft in numbers many times the combined output of the United States and the United Kingdom, and very obviously, not intended for national defense, but for aggressive war,” he wrote years later. “I was regretfully forced to accept the fact that the democracies, having already lost the peace that followed the First World War, must, if they were to survive, prepare intensively for the second. Our potential enemies had selected the weapon; their strength was great and time was short.”

Just before he took that trip, perhaps already thinking hard about what the United States would need to do if war came, he decided to spill his company’s secret. The paper he finally published, “Factors Affecting the Cost of Airplanes,” ran in February of 1936 in the journal of a trade organization, the Institute for Aeronautical Sciences. Surely no more than a few hundred people read it at the time. But in the decades since, it has come to be viewed as one of the more important papers in the history of manufacturing.

By the early decades of the twentieth century, industrialists already understood that as they scaled up to make a new product, the cost of building it was likely to fall. The most famous example was Henry Ford and his Model T automobile, the first mass-market car in the United States. When the Ford Motor Co. first brought the car to market in 1909, it built just under eleven thousand of them, and the most popular variant cost $850 apiece. By the peak of the Model T in the mid-1920s, Ford was building nearly 2 million cars a year, and you could buy one for less than $300. As the Industrial Age brought more and more consumer goods to the public, that pattern—an initial scale-up accompanied by a sharp decline in the cost of each unit produced—was seen repeatedly.

A fundamental reason was the principle known as economies of scale, an idea rooted in eighteenth-century economics. Mr. Ford needed a factory and equipment and a minimum number of workers, no matter how many cars he was going to produce in a year. He would incur costs for design and testing and general company administration. As the business scaled up, he could spread these fixed costs over more and more cars; the cost of producing each car would thus be lower. Moreover, as production grew, his workers became faster and more skillful at their jobs. The company kept developing new tools and machinery to cut time and costs. Its most famous innovation was the moving assembly line, an idea Mr. Ford and his team got when they visited the Chicago stockyards. They had watched the way rows of laborers disassembled a carcass rolling by on a hook, each worker slicing off the same part over and over. In essence, Ford and his team turned that disassembly line into an assembly line, using a conveyor belt that enabled each worker to attach the same car part over and over. Monotonous it may have been, but it was fast and efficient, cutting the labor cost of making automobiles even as Mr. Ford offered his workers excellent pay for the era. The improvements at the Ford Motor Company showed up in the lo...