(Robert Bryce Book Review by Gregg Easterbrook) USofA - A Question of Power

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‘A Question of Power’ Review: The Energy to Survive The modern age is one of struggle not for industrialization or political primacy but for electricity.

Green-only options won’t cut it.

By Gregg Easterbrook April 5, 2020 Growing up in Buffalo, N.Y., I took electricity for granted. Nearby was Niagara Falls, whose hydroelectric power stations, pulsing with kilowatts for the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, made Buffalo America’s City of Light—the nation’s first wholly electrified large metropolis. Statues of Nikola Tesla adorned our parks. In the place of my boyhood, electricity was dependable and low-priced. Isn’t that how it is for everyone?

Later I lived in Pakistan, where the government’s Water and Power Development Authority, or Wapda, staged regular rolling blackouts. In Pakistan, if the fans turned for a few hours, that was a good day.

A QUESTION OF POWER

By Robert Bryce (PublicAffairs, 322 pages, $28)

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Then I settled in Bethesda, Md. The Potomac Electric Power Co., or Pepco—once called “the most hated company in America” by Business Insider—made Wapda seem a model of proficiency by comparison. Since 2000, the utility has had six multiday outages in my neighborhood. For Pepco, rain and wind, it seems, are considered unanticipated circumstances.

Pakistan and Maryland caused my view of electricity to change. It is not something to be taken for granted, yet it is essential for work, comfort and safety. The need for reliable electricity is something all societies must grapple with and is the subject of “A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations,” a smart, important book by the energy analyst Robert Bryce.

Mr. Bryce sees the modern age as a struggle not for industrialization or political primacy but rather for electricity. “The vast disparity between the rich and the poor” in the world is defined, the author proposes, “by the disparity between those who have electricity and those who scrape by on small quantities of juice or none at all.”

There is a nearly direct relationship between reliable electricity and high living standards, Mr. Bryce tells us. About a billion people have little access to electricity; it’s no coincidence that they are also among the worst educated and the most impoverished.

Another very large cohort is held back by intermittent electricity that costs too much.

Universal, affordable kilowatts should be a cause for the 21st century in the same way that rural electrification was a cause of the young Lyndon Johnson. In China, international trade is widely and properly credited as an important factor in the fantastic reduction of poverty during the present generation; not to be overlooked, however, is the 10-fold increase in availability of electricity since about 1990. Much of the Indian subcontinent and Africa need a big jump in access to electricity next.

Animals, fire and steam, Mr. Bryce notes, have been the principal means of harnessing energy for hundreds of thousands of years, while electricity, first from hydropower, has been in common use for only 130 years. Electricity is clearly superior to other forms of energy in terms of clean operation, power density (lots of juice moving through skinny 2

wires makes the skyscraper possible), storage, and the ease of scaling up or down and switching on or off. It allows industry, homeowners and schoolchildren to employ energy in ways that steam or fire never could.

Electricity can be good for nature as well, Mr. Bryce contends. Dense, electricitydependent cities allow nature’s share of Earth’s surface to increase even as the human population keeps growing.

As Mr. Bryce tells us, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft not only could not exist without reliable electricity, they have themselves become producers of it as well. The server facilities run by these companies now produce several times the electrical output of Hoover Dam via a range of devices, from diesel generators to solar panels. As the world continues to expand its use of electrically powered products, from cars to ships to very large chemical and mechanical batteries, the advantages offered by electricity should spread to all companies and nations.

Mr. Bryce asserts that electricity generation must soar if we are to raise global living standards. For instance, 2.8 billion people live at hot-clime latitudes, but only 8% of them can enjoy air conditioning. Even Bernie Sanders backers in cool Vermont want air conditioning powered by generators. Why shouldn’t everyone, everywhere, want the same?

Mr. Bryce sees this as a moral imperative and has no patience for those who make piein-the-sky promises of green-only power. “Renewables aren’t going to be enough,” he writes. “Not by a long shot.” While green energy is falling in capital cost and rising in importance, to say that only non-fossil, non-nuclear power should be permitted is tantamount to condemning much of the world to perpetual immiseration. Mr. Bryce favors low-emission natural gas over coal and oil as electricity fuels, then goes on to show in persuasive detail that “there is simply no way to slash global carbon-dioxide emissions without big increases in our use of nuclear energy.”

The mathematics of the need for nuclear power is clear, but this is not what the American left, or German mainstream, want to hear. Politicians in many nations are 3

spinning fabulist tales of rapid transition to zero-emission power without the use of the atom. This, Mr. Bryce thinks, only diverts attention from the need for more electricity production using technology that’s practical now.

Not far into the future, Mr. Bryce concludes, electricity may be viewed as a human right—essential for a clean, comfortable, materially secure life. More statues of Tesla may be coming.

Mr. Easterbrook’s latest book is “It’s Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear.”

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