Costs and energy

I use the term “costs” a lot in my discussions of energy and other resource.? Those who know me have probably become accustomed to my “sensu-lato” usage of the word, but I thought it might be worth elaborating.? We default in a modern world to thinking about money when the word "cost" is mentioned, and that is not unjustified, but really when I use costs in these discussions, there are five fundamental things which I envisage drive the term.

1)????? The time and effort (i.e. energy) it takes us to obtain something of value.

2)????? The sacrifices we have to make and impacts we have to bear or mitigate (on top of time and effort) to obtain that thing of value.? That can include environmental, health, land-use, and social impacts.

3)????? How many others are willing to give more to have it OR the things involved in making it, than we are. We might have to pay to be first in the queue. Part of this aspect involves the costs of not having the thing of value delivered. Who wants it most. Who suffers most in not having it.

4)????? The “going wrong” risks that require some level of contingency planning and reserve – i.e. “insurance” in the looser sense of the word.?

5)????? The same as 2) & 4) but applied to others in the future we choose to care about (or not).

These five things drive cost. There are probably others, but most of them link back into one or more of these at root. ?If you are thinking I have left out costs of raw materials, not really, it links back into all these – including how much time and effort it takes to obtain them through whatever extraction & production process is involved. The same applies to various equipment, in a fractal-like subsidiary forest of costs for every item required.

Similarly when I use the words “expensive” or “cheaper”, I mean things involve more or less of those costs respectively.?

We use things as proxies to express those costs – money, currencies, metal products that are rare and hard to destroy (i.e. gold, silver, platinum etc.).? Or of late, various digital currency options.? But these are all proxies for expressions of the costs and values resulting from 1-5.?

It is this time and effort aspect which I think we often forget in considering energy options of the future.? It is not just about what can be done, it is about what it costs.? And not what it costs in some LCOE metric, but in the summation of these five things above.?? And rooted fundamentally in how much time and effort we devote to making that thing of value, and what we have to sacrifice to get it.?

Let’s not forget, that we do not want to spend our lives being slaves to making useable energy and doing nothing else.? There comes a point at which we derive more enjoyment from life by existing on less energy, than slaving our guts out to derive incrementally more for some perceived want of dubious merit. If you're thinking that you aren't directly involved in that generation of useable energy yourself, make no mistake you pay directly for those that are. And you use your own time and effort to do so.

Some may think I’m picking on nuclear energy by showing a picture of a French nuclear reactor to title this article (credit: Falco, Pixabay).? But I’m not.? I don’t want this discussion to descend into the same old same old roundabout of the merits of nuclear.? It’s just that it happens to capture the sense of 1-5 quite well.? Any other form of energy sourcing would illustrate just as well. ?I pick this one because the issues are perhaps more obvious.

There is the time and effort of exploration & extraction for the raw fuel.? There is the time and effort of processing to refine the isotope required – needing a lot of energy itself (at least in the dominant application of uranium based fission).? There is the R&D effort that goes into design, which could be either a relatively small or a huge part of the budget depending on the level of technological maturity involved.? There is the time and effort of constructing the plants and obtaining the relevant permissions to do so from states and communities. There is the time and effort of establishing the required infrastructure to distribute the energy to users, or any requirements to the site (e.g. water & power).? There is the time and effort of training a workforce.

There is the time and effort of dealing with any waste or by-products and site restoration at end of life decommissioning. At that point there is the time and effort of recycling anything it makes sense to recycle.? There is potentially the time and effort of building underground geological waste repositories and/or whole new different reactors to reprocess the products of the initial one (including associated R&D). ?There is the costs of safeguarding security of fissile materials that can be misused by those with agendas to want to, and ensuring an ability to deal with any accidents.? Safer as modern nuclear is becoming relative to the disasters mid 20th century designs brought, just like any large industrial complex it is not immune from accident even if the worst-case impacts are much improved from the historical.

None of that is impossible.? But it all costs.? Time and effort.? Time and effort.? Time and effort.? And at the same time, all those builders and designers and various other labourers are wanted by others for other things, and so there might be competition for that time and effort. And the materials involved.

Again, this is not a rant against nuclear, it is just using it as but one example of how energy projects involve time and effort every step of the way.? We can repeat this for any kind of energy project we care to mention.?

The point is that time and effort = cost.? And we are also giving up things and taking some risks, wherever we adopt energy projects of any kind.? Those things are all on a spectrum, but they are never absent.

So it simply isn’t enough to look at the future and think what might be technically possible to do, and that this is then problem solved.? That isn’t what makes or breaks an option.? It is the costs involved in getting there.? What a society can bear.?? That is not an infinite number.?? We can’t just decide to “make more”.? It all has big impact on our lives and what we have time to do.? Do we really want our society to just be one big energy mouse-wheel.

In the long term there are also things we can do to design cities and buildings and farms and infrastructures to use less energy.?? As others have made the point eloquently, that isn’t something that arrives overnight, and it takes costs of its own, in protracted efforts of many decades.? We don’t shut down everything one day and expect that to happen the next.? But there is a very real point at which existing on less energy becomes a far more cost attractive option than busting our guts in perpetuity to make ever more expensive and sophisticated machines and excavations that chew up more and more of our time and effort. ?It is never too early to start planning for that shift in emphasis.?? If we wait for it to become an absolute necessity we will have subjected ourselves to a whole lot of unnecessary pain and mayhem in the transformation.

That’s not to say those big expensive excavations and installations never have a place, whatever they are, but it does impose limits on how many of them are practical for a society to entertain having. ?Whether it is massive solar, massive offshore wind, new generation nuclear fission, big hydroelectric, all the various energy storage and distribution infrastructures required to support these, or whatever.?? There comes a point at which we’d rather have a few more hours in the day to spend with our families than making yet another thing to make more energy so somebody somewhere can have a luxury product they enjoy.

That, ultimately, is where balancing “costs” comes to the fore.

Costs and energy.? It’s not just about what can be done.? It’s about costs.? Sensu lato.? And what level of human energetic mouse-wheel we want. Energy, for sure, but not at all cost.