When I teach energy policy, one of the assignments I make to students to to bring to class each week a story about energy in the media and critique it for its incompetence, because about 90 percent of all news articles on energy are incompetent and ignorant. A typical story, irresistible to journalists, is a breathless, gung-ho report on some new energy breakthrough in a lab, like energy from banana peels or unicorn flop sweat. The stories seldom report on how much the energy source costs, whether it can be scaled up, and its total resource requirements—that is, the three key elements of any energy system: cost, scale, and density.
Cost, scale, and density are the three main points of any good energy analysis (I call these the “Energy Triumvirate”), and is what I drill students about from the first day of class to the last day of class. A lot of current energy enthusiasms, like solar and wind power—not to mention batteries for cars and the grid–are hugely resource intensive, which makes their tradeoffs over fossil fuels far from a slam dunk, as we have mentioned here many times in the past.
Our friends at Kite & Key Media have an excellent short new video out this week that reviews the problem very effectively. It’s worth six minutes of your time.
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