March 10, 1978
Page 6479
ALTERNATE ENERGIES, THE FURTHER AWAY, THE BETTER THEY LOOK
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, the energy crisis has brought home to all of us the danger inherent in our continued, growing reliance on dwindling petroleum resources. We have responded to that awareness by expanding our search for alternate energy sources and new conservation techniques. As we move to increase energy conservation and to develop alternate sources we confront hard realities about the limits to what we can accomplish and the major adjustments our society might face.
In Maine the debate over construction of the Dickey-Lincoln School Hydroelectric project is causing people to reflect seriously on the options available for energy production and conservation. Richard Hill, a professor at the University of Maine in Orono, has been an important contributor to that debate. Professor Hill has been a leader in the development of alternate energy technologies in Maine. He played a principal role in the design of Maine Audubon Society's solar heated headquarters in Falmouth, Maine, and is now engaged in a federally funded research project to design a clean burning wood stove.
He served as a member of Governor Longley's advisory committee on Dickey-Lincoln and after careful evaluation of the alternatives available he supported construction of the project. The thoroughness and intellectual integrity with which Professor Hill discusses the available alternatives is refreshing and merits the attention of my colleagues. I ask unanimous consent that an interview with Professor Hill, published in the Maine Times February 10, be printed in
the RECORD.
There being no objection, the interview was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
[From the Maine Times, Feb. 10, 1978]
ALTERNATIVE ENERGY ICONOCLAST
Ten years ago, Dick Hill, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of
Maine at Orono, warned a League of Women Voters meeting in Bangor of the impending shortfall of petroleum, and said that as long as oil was going for $1.80 a barrel, alternative technologies didn't have a chance. "But," he told them, "when oil gets to $3 a barrel, watch — all those alternative technologies will begin to happen."
Today, Hill is a bit less optimistic than he was that afternoon in Bangor. Oil is going for $15 a barrel, "and still nothing has happened."
During the years in between, Hill has become a bit of a paradox in the energy debate.
On the one hand, he has become one of the state's leading experts on energy in general, and on solar and wood energy technologies in particular. He played a fundamental role in the design of three solar heated buildings in Maine including Maine Audubon Society's headquarters in Falmouth. He was also responsible for the design of the wood-fueled backup furnace that heats the Audubon building during long cloudy spells, and he is currently working on a federally funded project to design a clean burning wood stove. With his 30-odd years experience in thermodynamics at the university, and a couple of years prior to that as an engineer with General Electric and Westinghouse, Hill's advice, opinion and eloquent lectures have been sought by legislative committees, Rotaries, college audiences and public utility commissioners.
But to those who hoped to hear some encouraging words about alternative technologies, about the role these alternatives might play in easing us out of the energy dilemma, Hill has been nothing but bad news. Shortly after the solar-heated Audubon building was completed, he was publicly skeptical about whether such technologies were viable in the near term. Hill has been alternative energy's iconoclast. Today he at least warns his audience of what is in store. He entitled one recent lecture, "Alternative Energies: the further away, the better they look.'
"As I look closely at all these alternative energies which seem to be on the horizon, whether we're talking about fusion, or breeder reactors ... tidal, ocean thermal ... wind or solar,' he said, "none of them looks good." That was the basic reasoning behind his vote, as a member of the governor's advisory committee on Dickey-Lincoln, in favor of the hydroelectric project.
"I supported Dickey-Lincoln exclusively on the grounds that everything else looked so bad," Hill said. "I was just convinced none of those options will meet the shortfall in petroleum." He concedes, however, that neither will Dickey. "It's almost a symbol."
Hill has made at least one encouraging statement, however: that a state with 17 million acres of trees should be able to solve its home heating problem. Air pollution would be the big problem if the entire state were to switch from oil burners to wood stoves. But with the help of a $40,000 grant from the federal department of energy, Hill thinks his wood stove project at the university has come up with an efficient, clean burning stove that would eliminate such problems. Yet he concedes that it may be difficult to produce one that will be economically competitive with other mid-priced wood stoves on the market.
Another note of optimism is the work of his colleague Norman Smith on the wood chip furnace. Although not economically feasible for small scale home heating use, it does appear to be economically competitive with oil furnaces in larger applications such as schools and shopping centers. A prototype commercial unit has been working for three months in a factory in Biddeford.
But Hill's tone is still one of pessimism.
"What I try to say every time anyone will give me a chance is that the future is not going to look like the past and no, that scheme or device is not going to bail us out. It's about time people face some of the hard decisions that are going to have to be made."
Virtually everyone participating in the energy debate agrees that there will have to be some fundamental changes made in the way people consume energy. But unlike the more optimistic voices of Amory Lovins, Dennis Hayes and others, Hill doubts those changes can be made without trauma.
The optimistic in the debate argue that half of America's current energy budget is waste, used to run inefficient appliances, to heat drafty and uninsulated buildings, to power gas guzzling autos. They point to the Scandinavian countries, which have achieved standards of living as high as this nation's with only half the per capita energy consumption, and argue that we should be able to cut energy consumption significantly without drastic changes in our lifestyles and standard of living. They cite the enormous potential for energy conservation, as Massachusetts Audubon did during the Dickey-Lincoln debate when it released a study which concluded that insulating existing buildings could save 41 times the energy that the hydroelectric project could produce. They argue that innovative electric rate structures could shift electric consumption away from periods of peak demand and greatly reduce the need for new peaking plants like Dickey. They also note the vast amount of energy savings that could be achieved if waste heat from industries were captured and used to heat buildings.
The possibilities are technically feasible, but Hill thinks the institutional barriers may prove insurmountable.
He doubts whether much of the Scandinavian energy model can be applied in this country, especially in Maine. "The big part of the story is that (the Scandinavians) never built suburbia. The energy intensiveness of our lifestyle is in being spread out all over the countryside."
Hill noted that it takes the University at Orono roughly the same amount of energy to serve the total needs of 5000 students as it would just to house those same 5000 students in 1000 Cape Cod cottages. "And that would mean no library, no gymnasium, no dining hall, no music building, no auditorium, no field house. The ability to stack people up is fantastically energy conserving." Stacking people up does not jibe well, however, with the rural lifestyles sought by many Mainers.
Hill agrees there is plenty of room for energy conservation. In the short term, he says, it is the only effective option. But there are significant institutional barriers which he thinks will prevent conservation from having the impact it could.
"The incentive [to conserve] isn't there. According to the polls, half the population doesn't feel there is any energy crisis. They just feel this is another scheme to squeeze more money out of the public."
Another major obstacle is the large segment of the population living in rented apartments where landlords pay the utility bills. The tenants "don't see any immediate returns on energy conserving efforts."
"In the whole energy conservation spectrum, the first 10 percent is a cinch. After that it gets harder and harder, Hill said. Some studies have indicated that roughly 80 percent of the insulating that could be done already has been.
There's another major institutional barrier to the conservation alternative.
"It's only going to be up to a handful of people to make the decision on Dickey-Lincoln. But to make Dickey unnecessary would require hundreds of thousands of decisions by hundreds of thousands of people day after day after day. But it's awful easy to say to the Corps of Engineers — get going."
Peak load pricing is one of several alternative electric rate designs aimed at making those "hundreds of thousands of decisions" more likely. By charging a consumer much less for electricity during off peak hours than during peak hours, such rates would induce the electric consumer to avoid turning on electric appliances during peak hours, thereby cutting the peak power demands and perhaps lessening the need for new peaking power plants. Central Maine Power Company plans to experiment on a limited basis with such rates. It will also be experimenting with metering devices which would signal the consumer at home when the peak prices were in effect.
But such things are unprecedented in this country, and Hill is not optimistic about their acceptance by the public.
Since metering systems cost around $240 per household, and since the power company would have to invest an additional $500,000 in equipment to send out the signals, Hill wonders whether "the monitoring system that would penalize peak consumption of electricity so that you wouldn't have to build Dickey-Lincoln, might cost more than Dickey-Lincoln.'
Co-generation — the use of waste heat from industries to heat buildings "requires a kind of institutional relationship that so far our society hasn't been able to muster.
"It means that out there at the St. Regis stud mill, there would have to be a vocational technical institute, a hospital, a University of Maine branch, so you could burn the fuel in the boiler, expand the steam through a turbine to generate electricity, then use the exhaust steam to heat the hospital buildings and so on. The problem would be matching the two loads. If the stud mill gets a bad batch of frozen logs, or the saw breaks down, they'll shut down. But if you have the school or the hospital there in a co-generation configuration, then you can't shut down.
"From an energy point of view, it certainly makes sense. But the institutional barriers are formidable. But, on the other hand, our energy situation is desperate. It's going to have to happen. But now the question is how do you get at these institutional barriers? How do you convince St. Regis to move its stud mills out here onto the campus mall so that we can use the waste steam to heat the university?"
The energy dilemma, Hill thinks, is wrapped up in what he and many consider to be the central problem of modern capitalism: what had been the expectations of a previous generation are now considered entitlements, from the teenager who claims a right to his own set of wheels, to the struggling blue collar who sweats for a shot at the energy intensive consumer lifestyle. And television constantly tells the teenager and worker this is what he wants more than anything else.
"We're going to be done in by this steamroller of entitlements,' Hill said. 'The question is, how do we back away from these entitlements without trauma."
"Perhaps," Hill added facetiously, "we should subsidize music lessons and tax the heck out of motorcycles, so that instead of buying a motorcycle, the 20-year-old decides to take up playing the recorder. Maybe there's some sort of public policy we can [implement] to get the consumption pattern moved over into less energy intensive areas, get people out of snowmobiles and onto cross country skis."
But Hill doubts that a national energy policy can provide those kind of answers.
"Unfortunately, you can't deal with energy without dealing with inflation, unemployment, recession, balance of payments, arms shipments to the Middle East, housing, transportation, the eroding value of the dollar ... I think it is absurd that the federal government is struggling with an energy policy as though it could have an energy policy unrelated to those things."
Hill has testified before the state legislature's energy committee on occasion, and as long as the questions were primarily technical, he said, "I could be very eloquent. But when they asked, 'what do we do?' I had no advice. I just don't know what policies to urge because you can't make energy policies without rattling the whole cage, and I don't have the wisdom to foresee how the whole cage will shake."
Hill does have some ideas. He admits none of them would be too popular. He suggested, for starters, that if consumers' electric consumption habits today will necessitate the construction of a new power plant tomorrow, then they should pay today for the cost of that next plant. The inflated electric rates would act as a disincentive to continue wasteful energy practices. "But, of course," he said, "we would never allow the power companies that kind of a windfall.'
The recent attempts of the Public Service Co. of New Hampshire to get the construction costs of the Seabrook nuclear power plant figured into current electric rates illustrates his last point.
Consumers, labor groups and industry have vigorously opposed the proposal; it would mean that during the next 10 years, before Seabrook even came on line, they'd be paying some $2.9 billion in higher electricity rates. Environmentalists claim that including costs of the next generation of power plants in today's rates will only act as an additional incentive for power companies to expand their generating capacity.
Hill had another idea. "We could easily cut our oil imports by simply going to $2-a-gallon gasoline. But with one person in six making their living related to automobiles, what would this do to inflation and unemployment?"
The kinds of political action that could reshape energy consumption patterns and help avoid the trauma of the impending shortfall of petroleum are, Hill believes, politically infeasible.
"This whole peak thing is that we haven't got the guts to clobber the public to flatten out their electric load. We haven't got the history, the tradition, of forcing people into energy consumption patterns that eliminate the necessity of Dickey."
Hill drew a slightly ironic analogy between energy planning and highway planning. If you are a highway planner, he said, "you get out there with traffic counters and say 'Where are they going?' You don't say, 'Where should they be going?' And if the load on this highway is heavy, you just put in another lane. Nobody ever says, 'Well, maybe they shouldn't be going, maybe they should be taking the trolley instead."
"Maybe our society is going to have to change. Maybe we're going to have to say, 'We'll let this two lane road remain choked and we'll make it awkward and inconvenient to drive it, and then put a trolley track alongside.' But our society doesn't work that way. The decisions for the many are made so the few don't have to change."
How would any of Hill's questions and skepticisms translate into policies that could help ease the energy crisis?
'If I had feelings on that," he said with a chuckle, "I'd be down in Washington sitting on [federal energy chief] Schlesinger's desk."
Until he comes up with a better answer, Hill had one suggestion that could help.
"One of the most energy effective things you can do right now," he said, "is to have your mother-in-law move in with you."