Tad Patzek, a professor of engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, is one of a handful of biofuel skeptics with the scientific chops required to take on the new orthodoxy that biofuels are environmentally more benign than fossil fuels. He was brought to Hawai`i by Life of the Land to testify in the December hearing before the Public Utilities Commission on Hawaiian Electric’s plan to build a new plant on O`ahu to meet anticipated peak demand in 2009. After the hearing began, HECO announced it would burn biofuels exclusively in the new plant, and with that agreement, the state Consumer Advocate (a party to the docket before the PUC) dropped its objections to HECO’s proposal, leaving Life of the Land as pretty much the only entity standing between O`ahu and a new HECO power plant.
Last month, Environment Hawai`i interviewed Patzek by phone. Here are excerpts from Patzek’s conversation with us.
On Conservation
My first preference is not to build the plant at all. That’s the very first preference. Energy-saving measures should be found so that this plant will not have to be built.
If I look at Hawaii in general and O`ahu in particular, you are so truly unsustainable and so dependent on imports of everything that it is really scary. So to pretend that you can put more people on a small island and build more high-rise hotels for more and more tourists who will use more and more electricity – it is bordering on insanity.
So within this insane environment, HECO is trying to do things that are also insane and are trying then to appeal to the most vocal group of people there, who happen to like biofuels. So HECO says, ‘we’re going to burn something; if you want us to burn ethanol, we’ll burn ethanol – biofuels, we’ll give you biofuels, because we’re required by law to give you more electricity.’
My main point is that not burning anything is the best solution. We take for granted that we always have to have more and more of everything. And for a tiny island burdened with huge monstrous development, this is a kick in the face. Waikiki eats energy day and night like there’s no tomorrow. The city is clogged with traffic at any hour of the day. It’s all out of proportion to what the land can support.
From this, you then draw a perfectly logical but insane conclusion that because there’s more need we’ll build more, until – until what? Till you’ve covered the whole island with concrete? What’s the stopping point? At what point do you say we’ll not build another power plant to provide more electricity for air conditioning?
There are other reasonable options which are not run-of-the-mill options, such as another diesel generator. But they’d take more courage and foresight to implement and have to be implemented within the context of understanding there are limits to how much energy you can consume on this tiny island.
At some point Hawai`i needs to declare that there will be no more increase in population. At some point, Hawai`i needs to declare a moratorium on population increases, because you are not able to support them.
Suppose there were a war and your supply routes were disrupted. How long could you survive in Hawai`i feeding people who were trapped there? A week?
On Local Biofuels
The idea at first was to have the plant sources for biofuels grown on land in Hawai`i. I say that’s insane. You have so little land, most of which lies fallow because of lack of water or expensive labor or environmental concerns. You can’t even produce a small fraction of the food you need here. If I had to choose between eating and drinking, or using more electricity for air conditioning, I’d rather eat first.
You are importing almost all your food, you are trying to import more of everything, instead of importing less and producing some of it where you live.
Remember Alice in Wonderland, where the Mad Hatter had to rush and rush and have more tea and more tea? More and more and more is the theme of how things are proceeding, with no one ever stopping to ask do we really need more? That’s the most important point I’d like to convey….
People discovered a long time ago that much as you get heat by burning wood, you can also get electricity by burning wood, but you burn so much you actually run out of it. You can replace it with bagasse, but you eventually run out of that, too. You can do it for a short time, but not for a long time. At the rate we are consuming, you run out of any resource that is green and grows.
Carbon Costs
If you want to burn biofuels, especially biodiesel, you’ll end up burning soybean or oil-palm-based biodiesel, which will be produced in Malaysia and Indonesia. The carbon costs of these fuels is remarkably high. In order to clear the land for plantations, they are actually burning and removing virgin forests. Those forests, especially in Indonesia, often stand on very thick layers of peat. The peat dries up and oxidizes, usually through burning, releasing vast quantities of carbon into the atmosphere. If you look at a single burning event – say, in fall 1997, which I’ve documented – emissions from that event equal half of all emissions from the entire global population
Even simpler, ethanol from corn is a one-to-one conversion of natural gas, or coal, or petroleum, into a liquid fuel. You convert one unit of fossil fuel to a unit of a different fuel, but this doesn’t begin to count the damage to the ecosystem and other additional costs, which we so nicely call externalities – as though we don’t inhabit the planet where these externalities must be paid.
HECO has no idea what burning biofuels entails. The purpose of my testimony was to enlighten commissioners and HECO on the consequences of doing this.
Silver Bullets
You have some really good people in Hawai`i and they have actually come up with good proposals for seawater air-conditioning and are proposing either wave-energy networks that generate electricity offshore or ocean-thermal energy conversion – OTEC – systems.
All of these technologies, though, no matter how sweet we think they are, even photovoltaics, incur extremely steep up-front costs, and all those are paid for in fossil-fuel energy. Photovoltaics, for example — you have to make steel, melt silicon and purify it. The energy in PV cells is all fossil energy. You hope it will work for 30 years, but for the first 10 to 12 years of that, it just pays back debt.
All options have enormously high thresholds. They are not silver bullets. So before we start talking about any of them, what we need to talk about is limiting current energy consumption.
It’s a very complicated picture. But simply put, we took a lot of energy drugs to feel high. Now we need to come down a little.
For further information on Patzek’s views on biofuels, see his web page:
[url=http://petroleum.berkeley.edu/papers/Biofuels/MyBiofuelPapersTop.htm]http://petroleum.berkeley.edu/papers/Biofuels/MyBiofuelPapersTop.htm[/url]
— Patricia Tummons
Volume 17, Number 8 — February 2007
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