The Challenge of Power and the New Geography of Human Settlement

Yet another piece has emerged challenging what has become the conventional wisdom of green energy, and not without cause. Wired magazine, a favourite in my household, recently did a feature spread on how emerging technology might revolutionize the electrical grid - a grid which, it is important to emphasize, functions like much of our domestic tele-communications infrastructure, with degrading 19th and 20th century components waiting on catastrophe. Wired received marked criticism for its futuristic nearly science fictional take on how to solve America's (and to us Canadians that means North America's) electrical power grid problem.

The real concern, as I understand it, is that policy advocates aren't sufficiently aware of the actual science behind electrical power generation and - especially - the delivery of electricity. Electricity is the ultimate JIT (just-in-time) product. Once it's generated there is no effective way of storing it (even some of the best industrial batteries save only 50% of the charge put into them which degrades over time) with severe limitations on transportation (higher voltage transit may mean lower losses, but ultimately even those equations break down). The fact is the best way of producing electrical power is a relatively local generating station, meeting the capacity of the region. That is a problem.

And it means some interesting opportunities. I was reflecting with a room full of electrical engineers and contractors recently that perhaps as energy costs rise - which if we move from carbon based generation to "something else" and that cost is accurately reflected in market rates it most certainly will - perhaps human settlement patterns will reflect this new reality.

The old geography is one based on transportation and agriculture, focussed especially on rivers. But new technology has made travel - both of people and of consumables - easy and fast. I think there are two critical geographic factors that will begin to determine where and how people settle: 1) fresh water, and 2) electrical generation capability.

Already companies and corporations are yielding to the latter. Google may "do no evil" with its low-energy HQ in California but its 100-megawatt server farms are popping up in places like Lithuania and China, where power is cheap and plentiful (though not especially clean).

There are places in Canada that have massive hydroelectric capacity - for example - that have no market to deliver the power to. Is it possible that as generating power becomes more and more expensive (in $$) and costly (in environmental terms) that these places - with gluts of fresh water and clean, easy power generation - will become the new cornerstones for industrial and human settlement?

In the short term, at least, I doubt it.