From Dunstan Ramsay's Omnibudsman substack, September 4, 2022:
The world needs to use a lot more energy
A recent article in The New Yorker discusses the importance of refrigeration to the development of Rwanda, where cold storage is necessary to reduce rates of foodborne illness and secure more stable income for farmers. The piece demonstrates an inescapable fact about the future of the world: we need to use more energy — a lot more.
There's probably about 3 million households in Rwanda, and a vanishingly small number have a fridge. A refrigerator uses about 2 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy per day, so if we were able to get one into every household, that would add about 2 billion kWh (2 terawatt-hours, or tWh) to Rwanda's annual energy usage. That's about as much energy as there is contained in 1 million barrels of oil — and fully one-third of Rwanda's current primary energy consumption.
Primary energy describes the amount of energy not just in a barrel of oil but in a lump of coal, a gust of wind, a ray of sunshine, or a uranium fuel rod. Energy, in general, is a measurement that describes the capacity of any system—a cigar, a soccer player, a lightbulb—to perform work on its surroundings. A cigar converts chemical energy into heat via combustion; a soccer player transfers kinetic energy to a ball by kicking it; a lightbulb converts electricity into heat and light. The fundamental unit of energy is the joule: roughly, this is the amount of energy required to lift a pencil one foot into the air. Kilowatt-hours are just another measure of energy, in this case about the amount that a medium-sized person might use in running a 10k at an 8-minute pace.
Energy, put slightly more simply, is just a measure of how much stuff is done in the world. Access to more energy means the ability to do more stuff.
And the world needs to do a lot more stuff. Ten percent of people live in extreme poverty, and 85% live on less than $30 per day. In places like Somalia, Nigeria, and Chad, more than one in every ten children die before the age of five. In those countries, pneumonia, which is caused primarily by malnutrition, is among the top causes of death.
What does it take to end malnutrition? One thing that would help is, as the New Yorker notes, refrigeration: massive amounts of fresh food spoil in the developing world. Refrigerators are part of the solution: to fix malnutrition, you need to get food from where it's grown to where it's needed while it's still edible. And in order to get food between refrigerators, you also need refrigerated trucks, which are extremely energy intensive and of which Nigeria, a country of 200 million people, has fewer than 1000 (it needs 25 times as many).
Those trucks will be more useful (and longer-lived) with better roads to drive them on: only about 16% of Nigerian roads are paved. You need energy equivalent to 240 tons of coal to pave 1 kilometer of asphalt, and with the need to do so for 135,000 km of roadway, you're looking at an energy cost of roughly 2GwH — about as much as a full square kilometer of solar panels produces each day.
Suppose now that the world has done what it takes to address pneumonia as a cause of infant mortality. What next?
Well, then there's everything else. Just for starters, we need to set up and run the systems that distribute clean water in order to prevent diarrhea, the next-most-common cause of infant mortality across much of the world. This takes energy. It also takes energy to run dialysis machines, school buses, and incubators for preterm babies. It takes energy to boil a pot of water on the stove, to pasteurize milk, and to manufacture antibiotics. It takes energy to build universities, preschools, old folks' homes, affordable housing, bookstores and art museums, and yet more energy to provide the air conditioning that allows students to focus and the elderly to survive on hot days in a warming world. It takes energy just to grow food: most of the billions of people alive today — and, with any luck, the billions to come — owe their lives to the Haber-Bosch process, which quite literally turns energy into artificial fertilizer for the purposes of growing more food. That process is responsible for about 1% of global energy consumption.
It takes energy to do all this — and we haven't even gotten to Netflix.
Energy and poverty in a nutshell....
....MUCH MORE
