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Page added on November 11, 2015
Feeling the Elephant
Most people have heard the Indian tale about the blind men and the elephant. For those that have not, it goes something like this. A group of blind men come across an elephant and, perhaps puzzled by the noise it is making, set out one by one to investigate. The first one feels the elephant’s leg and rushes back to report to the others that it is some kind of pillar. The second one feels the beast’s tail and decides that the thing making the noises is some kind of rope. The third feels the trunk and decides that it must be some kind of tree. Another feels a flapping ear and thinks they must be dealing with a giant fan. The last one feels a tusk and concludes the bellowing noise is coming from some sort of pipe.
When the blind men get together again they cannot agree with one another at all about what they have encountered. Because each one of them had felt a different part of the elephant’s anatomy they all had a different subjective explanation for the phenomenon. Different traditions tell different versions of the story. In one, the king laughs at the blind men and tells them “You are all correct, and yet you are all wrong.” In another the blind men work this out for themselves and collaborate to build up a picture of the whole elephant based on the subjective experience of each one of them, thus obtaining an objective whole.
The story of the elephant works as a nice analogy for our understanding of the world. Each one of us is blind in so many ways and yet we all have to feel the elephant of reality. Our blindness is often educated into us, or sometimes it is because of a lack of experience. Some people see the world in terms of economics and finance. They are always talking about monetary policy and central banks and the value of currencies and commodities as if these things are the only aspects of any worth. Others see it primarily in terms of competition and threats. There are ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ and allies and enemies. To their mind the world is just a stage for conflict, where the victorious and the defeated dance a tango until the end of time.
Then there are the religiously blind. These are the people who feel that everything can be explained through their own ‘one true faith’ and that the people of other faiths have got it all wrong. They say that God created the elephant in a magical flash.
For the greater part, most people can’t even be bothered to feel the elephant. “Roaring noise, what roaring noise?” they say. They are too busy listening to the snake charmer playing his flute, and they walk towards the sweet music, unaware of the cobra coiled in the basket.
And perhaps it’s dangerous to stand there for too long feeling the elephant. If one blind man were to run his hands all over the elephant’s body he might suddenly realise he was dealing with an immense beast that had the power to put a tusk through him like a toothpick going through an olive. And even if the beast didn’t do that and he ran back to his blind friends, who were all arguing about whether it was a fan or a pipe or a pillar, shouting “It’s a giant beast and it’s going to trample us!” they might all assume he had been at the shisha pipe too much and tell him to shut up.
The elephant analogy is often used to illustrate the concept of systems thinking. Thinking in systems gives us a wider perspective and allows us to see things more clearly, and to make predictions based upon this. If more people thought about the important systems that sustain them there’s a good chance that our problems as a species would be lessened. They might, for example, realise that pouring pollutants into the biosphere in ever greater amounts would inevitably lead to the biosphere being degraded and unable to support them. Instead, and given that we tend to be ruled by short-term economic thinking, we are told that the economy has a greater value than the biosphere, even though it is a tiny subset of the latter. An intelligent species would reorganise human economic affairs so that they complemented the natural processes of the Earth. Instead we get fracking, nuclear power and excessive fossil fuel burning.
But systems thinking has its limits too. Because humans are not robots we tend to be irrational in our actions and thought patterns. The conceit of many an intelligent systems thinker is that the boundaries of their mental model are wide enough to incorporate ‘enough of reality’ so as to make the stuff that lies outside of their model irrelevant. This can be a fatal error in a world of chaos theory because what you don’t know or can’t see can hurt you.
That’s why the more intelligent branches of systems thinking recognise the limits of both knowledge and understanding. So, for example, someone practicing permaculture on a piece of land may have come up with what they consider to be the spiffiest design that incorporates natural cycles and organisms right down to the earth worms and the mychoorizal tendrils that transport nitrogen from plants’ root nodules to nearby trees. If they are a good permaculturist they will know that their model is not infallible, that they can never know about the millions of different microscopic organisms that make up the soil and how they will interact with one another. They will do their best to create some system resilience by piling on organic matter, by not using industrial poisons, and by encouraging a diversity of life to flourish. But at the forefront of their mind will be the thought that they are merely the baton-waving conductor of a vast orchestra in which most of the musicians don’t even have eyes. They know the boundary of their perception and they hope things will work out. They observe and they make adjustments, but they can never play God.
I was thinking about this recently in terms of renewable energy. Renewable energy, such as solar and wind, is abundant and free and relatively non-polluting. And yet, when you get down into the nitty gritty and feel the elephant, it looks a lot less feasible than its proponents claim. There are any number of grand claims that renewables can power an ever-expanding industrial civilisation in such a way that we don’t need to make any cutbacks in our usage. But, to me, these claims look highly dubious because they take little or no account of many of the major factors that make industrial civilisation – and therefore the production of these renewable energy systems – tick. Where would the investment capital come from to transform the world’s energy systems – which have taken over a hundred years to build and are eminently designed to burn fossil fuels and distribute the resultant energy from centralised generating plants? Where would the materials to do so come from? How will the political will to do such a thing be garnered in the face of such stiff opposition from powerful players? How would you convince the majority of people – most of whom either do not regard energy depletion or climate change as a problem – that the huge subsidies fossil fuels enjoy should be switched to renewables? There are plenty of parts to this elephant.
So, having felt the renewable energy elephant, the picture I get in my head is that barring some kind of miracle there will be – cannot possibly be – a worldwide rollout of renewable energy to replace the fossil fuelled infrastructure in any time frame that could realistically be achieved. It’s simply not going to happen.
But then …
But then I consider that whatever opinion I might have reached on the matter doesn’t feature at all in the calculations and daydreams of those who claim that it ispossible. And thus we get memes spreading around the internet like wild fire claiming things such as ‘Denmark produced 140% of its electricity from wind power in one day’ and ‘X square miles of solar panels in the Sahara could power the whole of Europe.’
So then I have to add in another factor to my mental elephant, namely that: even if I think, based on some pretty extensive feeling, that this beast is an elephant, everyone else is claiming that it’s a tiger. And what happens if something you think is an elephant is widely considered to be a long-nosed tiger? Will people be feeding it live chickens and admiring its imaginary stripes? Or will, on some metaphysical level, the elephant turn into a tiger?
Put more prosaically, will the fact that so many people believe a worldwide renewable energy grid could work – despite physical reality seeming to say otherwise – actually lead to its creation? Or will it lead to some kind of half-realised dream or, worse, will we end up with a tusk through our chest? When I pointed out the absurdity of Denmark’s claim to a friend he responded curtly “Yes, but at least they are trying.” It has a certain logic to it: trying is better than not trying.
So maybe that’s what will happen. Perhaps if we try hard enough we’ll produce enough renewable energy infrastructure to take the some of the sharp edges off the soon-to-be precipitous decline of fossil fuels (precipitous because we are can’t dig ’em up cheap enough for our growth-wired economies to function). Perhaps at that point people will realise that renewables are great for some things and lousy for others but that we don’t really have a choice any more because of the nature of entropy. What will happen then? No doubt some will still hold onto their dreams of limitless energy and flying cars and cities on Mars, but by that point they will be in the minority. Perhaps then – and not until then – our shared predicament will mean we can start to agree on a consensual version of reality once again.
20 Comments on "Feeling the Elephant"
Cloud9 on Wed, 11th Nov 2015 6:58 am
The simple fact is we are more vulnerable than any other empire in the history of man. We are all grid dependent. The grid from its infancy to its full growth is just a hundred years old. Nothing like it ever existed in the past. The grid is complex and ridged and susceptible to economic and social shocks.
Here in central Florida we had an opportunity to experience grid collapse for an extended period of time when three hurricanes took down portions of the system in 04. Food and fuel distribution briefly came to a halt. What kept everything together were the visible efforts of line crews from all over the nation working continuously to bring the system back on line.
When the grid goes down not to come back in any meaningful way, we will become a much younger population in very short order.
rockman on Wed, 11th Nov 2015 7:13 am
Not sure how significant alt expansion developed in other parts of the world but over the years I watched firsthand how Texas tied for the 4th largest alt producer on the planet: it happened as very aggressive cooperation between govt, the utility companies and the voters. Voters like those in Austin that approved some initial higher rates for cheaper long term costs. Now those folks have some of the cheapest electricity.
And it may have just gotten much cheaper: Texas is generating more wind power than utility companies know what to do with, so they’re handing it out for free.
“Over 50 companies in the state offer overnight plans that charge higher fees during the day, but nothing between the hours of 9 p.m. and 6 a.m., according to the New York Times. Texas is the largest generator of wind power in the United States, with about 10% of its generation coming from wind. Since it has its own electricity grid, any energy produced there has to also be used there. Since it produces so much wind power, especially at night, it leaves them with a hefty surplus.
Of course we’d all like to think that they’re giving it away for free out of the goodness of their hearts, but unfortunately that’s not the case. As it turns out, holding onto such a large excess comes with some burdens for the power grid, some of which are costly, so they need to unload. Encouraging consumers to use energy during off peak hours results in lower wholesale prices avoids the need to build more power plants, an expensive task. Omar Siddiqui, director of energy efficiency for the nonprofit group Electricity Power Research Institute calls this a win-win for consumers and the utility companies.”
As we say in Texas: you can be green AND make green. LOL. And this happening in the state with the most oil/NG production in the country. And the state that consumes much more coal than any other state. And the site of the largest CO2 sequestration on the planet under construction that will inject from the 2nd largest single source of CO2 in the country.
All of which might seem a tad conflicted. But perhaps that’s the secret: you can’t be all in on just one side of the fence: fossil fuels and the alts need to cooperate. IOW a balance until the alts can expand to a TOTAL meaningful level
farmlad on Wed, 11th Nov 2015 7:53 am
Solar will not be viable if the panel manufacturers can not pay their bills.
from Bloomberg Baoding Tianwei Yingli New Energy Resources Co., whose majority holder was until last year the world’s biggest solar panel company by shipments, failed to make a complete payment on a note due Oct. 13.
makati1 on Wed, 11th Nov 2015 8:04 am
The ‘tusk’ is already heading for our collective chests. I think that those bragging about current ‘renewable’ efforts are in for a shock when they screech to a halt in the near future. Profit drives today’s world economy, not desire. One current example:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-10/giant-utilities-try-kill-solar-power
If the giant utilities don’t own it or cannot make a profit off of it, it will either not happen or not last long. And if you try to be independent of them, at least in the Us, you will likely be fined or fee’d to death as the screws tighten.
ghung on Wed, 11th Nov 2015 8:17 am
Farmlad said; “Solar will not be viable if the panel manufacturers can not pay their bills.”
Sort of like saying oil or cars won’t be viable if this or that car company or oil company can’t pay their bills. We will still have cars, oil and solar panels for the foreseeable future. At some point, when none of these things remain ‘viable’, availability of solar panels will be the least of our worries. Meanwhile, PV panels and solar hot water systems are at/near all time low prices, and last for decades.
Got solar?
claman on Wed, 11th Nov 2015 8:30 am
cloud9: “When the grid goes down not to come back in any meaningful way, we will become a much younger population in very short order.”
You can dig down the powerlines, then you will need an excavator to destroy the grid.
GregT on Wed, 11th Nov 2015 9:05 am
“You can dig down the powerlines, then you will need an excavator to destroy the grid.”
Better start “digging down” quick then. With a concerted effort the grid should be un-destroyable by about 2070. At least the wires might be.
ghung on Wed, 11th Nov 2015 9:15 am
As we all know, it’s the wires that produce the power, just as food comes from the store and fuel from the pump.
apneaman on Wed, 11th Nov 2015 9:36 am
Disgruntled citizens
Bombings, closure of hydro plants curtail power supply in Mindanao
http://www.mb.com.ph/bombings-closure-of-hydro-plants-curtail-power-supply-in-mindanao/
Boat on Wed, 11th Nov 2015 9:41 am
mak.
As wind and solar become more prevalent these problems with finance will be worked out. In the case of Texas the utilities deliver the power. In Houston 10% of electricity comes from wind and that is expected to rise soon.
Think of oil. Drillers/frackers/transport/refinery/transport. All of these steps could have different companies. Same with wind or solar. They will figure out a way to get a share for the service they provide. Don’t worry about the utility companies.
rockman on Wed, 11th Nov 2015 9:52 am
mak – “…If the giant utilities don’t own it or cannot make a profit off of it, it will either not happen or not last long.” So true. And as my post shows the Texas utility companies are benefiting significantly FINANTIALY from our wind power build out. One key factor was the financial support the utility customers were willing (by public vote) to put up that allowed an intial small rate increase to help cover some of the investment costs for the utility companies. Likewise the state govt chipped in some financial support. And that’s why it worked.
You’re probably correct: if it’s left to the financial evaluations of the utility companies/investors alone it probably won’t happen. The same if it all hangs only on the customers or only all on the govt. If it’s mutually beneficial and all 3 players come out ahead then it has a good chance of working. And again I’ll emphasize that this has worked in a state where utilities burn a huge amount of cheap lignite. And where the state govt receives a significant amount of revenue from oil/NG production. And hundreds of thousands of Texas citizens depend on oil/NG production to make a living. But collectively they came together to produce as much alt energy as the entire country of Germany.
rockman on Wed, 11th Nov 2015 10:07 am
mak – More details about the state/tax payer support – grid infrastructure expansion:
According to the 2013 Report on Existing and Potential Electric Constraints and Needs, transmission providers in the ERCOT region expect to complete more than $3.6 billion in projects between 2014 and 2018. These include additions or upgrades to more than 3,300 miles of transmission lines and other equipment improvements to increase capacity and support reliability. And what is ERCOT? Essential they are the electricity czar of Texas:
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) manages the flow of electric power to nearly 24 million Texas customers, representing about 90 percent of the state’s electric load. As the independent system operator for the region, ERCOT schedules power on an electric grid that connects more than 43,000 miles of transmission lines and 550 generation units. ERCOT also performs financial settlement for the competitive wholesale bulk-power market and administers retail switching for more than 7 million premises in competitive choice areas. ERCOT is a membership-based 501(c)(4) nonprofit corporation, governed by a board of directors and subject to oversight by the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Texas Legislature.
And how does Texas rank nationally in grid improvement? In a new “Grid Modernization Index” compiled by the Washington, D.C-based GridWise Alliance: Texas ranks first out of 41 states for modernizing its electric grid, according to a new report.
So again it has to be a TEAM effort. Unfortunately in a lot of states the situation has devolved into an “us vs them” situation.
Kenz300 on Wed, 11th Nov 2015 10:12 am
Climate Change is real…. it will impact all of us……we need to move to clean energy production with wind and solar power and clean energy consumption with electric vehicles……… Fossil fuels are the cause of Climate Change….. we need to deal with the cause….
Half Of All Power Plants Built Last Year Were ‘Green’
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/renewable-power-plants_5641fd3fe4b0b24aee4bbd49
rockman on Wed, 11th Nov 2015 3:42 pm
“Half Of All Power Plants Built Last Year Were ‘Green’” And yet the vast majority of power is still produced by fossil fuel. Kenz – Ya gotta try harder…the message isn’t get thru.
apneaman on Wed, 11th Nov 2015 5:09 pm
A Glut of Coal-Fired Plants Raises Doubts About China’s Energy Priorities
“DONGXIANPO, China — Just outside the southwest border of Beijing, a new coal-fired power and heating plant is rising in Dongxianpo, a rural town in Hebei Province. Cement mixers roll onto the site. Cranes tower above a landscape of metal girders.
When finished, the plant, run by a company owned by the Beijing government, is expected to have a generating capacity of 700 megawatts of power, more than the total of similar plants in Ohio. But whether it will actually be used to its fullest is questionable, despite the investment of $580 million.
That is because the plant is scheduled to come online in three years amid a glut of coal-fired power plants — an astounding 155 planned projects received a permit this year alone, with total capacity equal to nearly 40 percent of that of operational coal power plants in the United States.”
more
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/12/world/asia/china-coal-power-energy-policy.html
apneaman on Wed, 11th Nov 2015 5:12 pm
“ACCORDING to the Ministry of Land and Resources 61.5 per cent of China’s groundwater is too dangerous even to touch.”
http://www.theland.com.au/story/3378612/chinas-water-woes-impact-food-supply/
makati1 on Wed, 11th Nov 2015 7:40 pm
Dream on all you ‘renewable/alternate’ unicorn huggers. You all seem to specialize too much when you argue that it will make a difference. You pick a small part of the total system to support your dreams. It is not just corporate profit, it is excess energy of any sort.
Some point out that the systems will last decades. Show me the facts to support that claim that do not come from the suppliers. The old systems built previously are already in need of repair or replacement at even higher costs than the originals. But the money to do so is also in short supply. And we all know that stuff made today is not a lasting as stuff made 10-20 years ago and is usually not repairable at a reasonable cost.
Besides that, what are you going to use that electric for if there is nothing left that uses electric? Do you think light bulbs will still be made in some factory, transported and sold to you? Machines? Cars? ‘Electric bikes’? LOL
We have all lived our whole lives in a one time, exceptional, fantastic part of history and some believe it is now the norm. We partied for ~200 years and now the party is over. The hangovers are yet to come. We are returning to the days when sweat produced the only power in our world. Where there are two classes. The lords/chiefs and you, serf-to-be. But, dream on if you like.
apneaman on Wed, 11th Nov 2015 7:51 pm
mak, there’s no hangover from a overdose. Gameover.
apneaman on Wed, 11th Nov 2015 8:05 pm
mak, an alt build out still requires the first build out to be functional to make it possible. The first build out, built with the cheapest energy ever, is crumbling. Talk of the next generations future is bullshit. What most care about is maintaining the lifestyle until death.
Crumbling infrastructure is costly, dangerous
http://capitolweekly.net/transportation-infrastructure-falling-apart-literally/
dooma on Wed, 11th Nov 2015 11:02 pm
Lucky none of the blind men grabbed the elephant on it’s wedding tackle. Otherwise they may have though that Donald Trump was hanging beneath the beast.