It is a pleasure to be in the front row of one of the greatest upheavals in human history. Switching energy sources with 8 billion people. Enjoy.
The funniest party on stage are the head-shaking experts, all grizzled engineers. They really take climate change seriously, they keep telling me. And they do worry sometimes. They are just realistic. They have decades of experience in the sector. If asked, they will draw out the production process on an A4 sheet. They are constantly improving me on details. It’s not yield, it’s power. It is not cooking gas factory, but ‘coke and gas factory’. They attach to language. This is how they recognize other people who understand.
But they are even more attached to sums. It’s nice, all those emotions and climate panic, but thermodynamics has laws and you can’t go beyond that. They suddenly look up from the paper, right into my eyes, looking for acknowledgment, for agreement, for an ounce of reality. “You also studied in Delft, didn’t you?”
The problem is that their truths are often not thermodynamic laws, but dogmas. In fact, as soon as thermodynamics is put on the table, all alarm bells ring for me. Usually they are wrong. Both the industrial veterans and the academics.
A few examples. In a debate at TU Delft, D66 Member of Parliament Raoul Boucke explained how the European Commission wanted to make a proposal to make cars emit less CO every year.2 to be emitted. With this measure you are killing the car industry, the experts said. Until the law was passed and the major electrification of the vehicle fleet reduced emissions much faster than European law prescribed. And that survived the auto industry.
For a long time it was also a kind of law that heavy trucks could never be electrified. They could only become greener through biofuel, for which you would have to cut down every tree in the area, or ferment or ferment every agricultural product. That too is outdated. The major electrification has now also started there.
And that electricity, ma’am? Where does that come from? You can fill the entire North Sea with wind turbines to generate all that power and then it is still not enough. The experts told Marjan Minnesma in 2012 that she could count on a maximum capacity of 3 megawatts for a wind turbine for Urgenda’s models in 2030. It is 2023 and there is already one on the Maasvlakte with 12 megawatts. The underestimation of the speed at which solar power became cheap is perhaps even more impressive, as Jesse Frederik recently showed in a piece The Correspondent.
And no, in the shallow part of the North Sea there may not be enough space for all those wind farms. But now the first floating wind farms built, which can float further out to sea on a platform with an anchor. They can even make hydrogen on site that comes to land via pipelines.
Hydrogen? How many times have I read in important articles by chemists that hydrogen was never going to be. That you can’t transport it without a dizzying loss of energy. That it was too expensive, too dangerous, the infrastructure is lacking, etcetera etcetera. Until it becomes one of the most important energy carriers for the chemical industry. How fast do you think it will become cheaper in the coming years?
I must admit that, as a spectator in the front row, I am most entertained by the surprise. The surprise for the fatalists that Homo sapiens manages to innovate itself once again out of trouble. But also the surprise for the experts. How all those truths and dogmas they clung to for decades were overtaken by reality. That it all turned out to be possible.
Rosanne Hertzberger is a microbiologist.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of May 27, 2023.