A Puerto Rico Power Authority worker walks between downed power lines in the aftermath of Hurricane ... [+]
Who would have predicted that the Fukushima earthquake would end America’s “nuclear renaissance,” that fracking would turn the United States into the world’s gas-and-oil power, that Germany and China would combine forces to slash solar prices, or that Pacific Gas & Electric Company would have to black out parts of California to keep them from bursting into flames?
Yet in the wake of each of these disruptions, someone said I told you so.
“I think a lot of the things we think of as unpredictable people did predict,” said John Weyant, director of Stanford University’s Energy Modeling Forum. “I do think we could spend a lot more time thinking more broadly about this and talking to futurists and so on.”
Weyant once gave a talk in which he praised Rand Corporation for predicting earth-orbiting satellites a decade before Sputnik, and then a colleague told him that Arthur C. Clark had predicted them a decade before Rand.
“I wouldn’t say go looking at science fiction, but looking at futurists I think we could do a lot more,” he said at a National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine forum yesterday on the challenges of modeling the nation’s changing energy system.
“I am a great believer in using decision theory and expert elicitation—it’s pretty controversial—alongside the more technical analyses of cost and learning curves and other types of inputs, particularly on technology but also on behavioral and institutional kinds of things.”
The National Academies convened the forum to find ways to improve energy modeling in a dramatically changing landscape: deregulation, renewables, energy storage, water use, climate change, greenhouse-gas limits, fire risks, smart meters, community choice aggregators, cyber threats.
“The world keeps changing, the technology and the institutions and the regulations and the business models, in a way that we feel like were struggling to keep up all the time,” Weyant said. “I think that’s probably pretty normal, but it’s useful once in a while to sit back and reflect on where we are and where we’re going.”
The changes reiterate questions about the best approaches to planning—experience or analysis, and what types of analysis?
“Current observations in a world that’s so rapidly changing are of little use,” Weyant said.
The ripples of change are felt across the economy.
Karen Palmer, an energy economist at Resources for the Future, said people often ask her where gasoline prices are going or “if they’re a little bit more on the green side,” when electric vehicles will reach cost parity with those powered by an internal combustion engine.
“Folks, when they ask that question, maybe they’re disappointed, but they shouldn’t be surprised that I can’t predict the future.”
The stakes are high for some industries.
Granger Morgan, co-director of Carnegie-Mellon University’s Center for Climate and Energy Decision Making, described an insurance workshop he attended in which executives from the insurance industry described the hurricanes afflicting the Gulf Coast as “black swan events.”
“Anybody who has looked at the time series of hurricanes in the Atlantic over the last hundred years or so knows they’re not black swan events. It’s just that these guys were operating over a couple of year time scale rather than a decadal time scale,” Morgan said.
“And it’s the same kind of issue as a lot of these other things. You can’t get it all. It’s really hard to imagine a priori all the things that could go wrong, but if you don’t sort of organize to get multiple perspectives to try to come up with alternatives that could happen, you’re almost certainly going to get messed up.”
