MR. REYNOLDS: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and we do appreciate your patience. We had a small snafu yesterday when Lawrence Lin, my colleague, was checking on the final arrangements for the east auditorium; they told us we had been bumped by the Secretary of State. So they moved us to this gigantic Acheson Auditorium, and we’d love to fill it, but we know there are hearty souls here today to hear this very interesting lecture.
Welcome, I am Andrew Reynolds. I am the deputy science and technology advisor to the Secretary of State. We are in the process of searching for a new chief scientist. Secretary Clinton has a few finalists in front of her, and we hope that that decision will be made relatively soon.
In the meantime, I and our merry band in STAS are doing some interesting broken field running. And with all of you out there, welcome. We are very, very happy, always, to have the Jefferson lectures, to benefit from these distinguished tenured professors who come to the State Department and USAID to spend a year working with us, embedded in an office, and hopefully, building, by that experience, a relationship with the office and the Department, or AID, that will last well into the future. Because when the Jefferson Fellows return to their campuses, to their chairs, we look to them to be subject matter experts in the future. And we look to them to also be provocateurs to the State Department and AID on areas where they see our efforts flagging in science and technology and engineering areas.
Moreover, Jeffersons represent us so well as ambassadors for science and engineering on their campuses to recruit new students, who may come as summer interns, or fall interns, or spring interns, and ultimately, may very well become foreign service officers, or civil servants in the service of the United States.
The program is now in its seventh year, and it began rather modestly under our second scientist of the modern era, that is, the Science Advisor George Atkinson from the University of Arizona in Tucson, when he saw the great strength that the American Association for the Advancement of Science program was bringing to the State Department and AID: this infusion of well-educated people in scientific and technical disciplines, coming to State for, usually, a two-year assignment, and many of them remaining. In fact, we have 34 AAAS fellows working in State Department this year in their first or second year of an assignment; the USAID has 24.
But underneath the tip of the iceberg is a large number of AAAS fellows who have stayed and made their careers. There are over 50 in the State Department, and an additional 50 in AID who have seen fit over the last 20 years to work in diplomacy, science diplomacy, for their careers. And that is an enormously powerful asset for us.
When George came aboard in 2003, he thought there should be a complementary program: and that was to reach more deeply into our universities to the tenured professor, an established person with not only the reputation as a Chair in his or her university, but with research networks that, no doubt, extend globally; and global is what this is all about.
So having transitioned through a pilot project, a pilot program for three years with the able assistance of the National Academy of Sciences, that serves as our operating agent, recruiting for candidates, helping us organize interviews for finalists, and helping us place these Jeffersons. We have, now, 41 alumni, and 12 active Jeffersons, 10 in the State Department, two in AID this year from 41 universities across the land. So do the numbers: 53 professors in our stables now, from 41 universities, which implies that some universities have already seen fit to send a second Jefferson. And we have that in many cases.
Today, you will be hearing from Dr. Suresh Garimella, who has, as you have seen in our materials sent to you as an invitation, a very distinguished career. Beginning his education in IT in Madras, he took his M.S. at Ohio State, and his Ph.D. from Berkeley in mechanical engineering. He is the Goodson Distinguished Professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue. And he’s joined here this year with another distinguished professor, Jay Gore, who is working at State Department as well, I am pleased to say.
And for those of you who haven’t heard this before, I like to do this introduction so you know the context of our program. For those of you who know us well, including our friends from OES, the Oceans Environment Science Bureau, who co-sponsored this lecture series, please bear with me. I won’t go into the details of Suresh Garimella’s distinguished career, but you know from this small bio that he is very widely published in his field. He is also currently the director of the National Science Foundation Cooling Technologies Research Center at Purdue, and I must say it’s very heartening when a man like Suresh and Jay, these people spend a year with us at great sacrifice because there is no better example of a public-private partnership. They are here, in essence, on a sabbatical. The universities have seen fit to invest in their time here, and we help them with their local per diem. But my goodness, what an enormous investment that is for us, and terrific leverage, one of the finest public-private partnerships we have.
Moreover, Purdue has become a very avant-garde university, with a number of fusion centers that are growing there in addressing development through science and engineering.
Most recently, adding to his great credentials and to his awards, Suresh was given the 2011 National Science Foundation Alexander Schwarzkopf Prize for Technological Innovation. And he’s serving this year, as one would hope, in an office that can use his talents greatly in State, in the Economic Bureau, in the Office of International Energy and Commodity Policy. Today, he’s going to give you a cross-section about this issue. And we talked about it, and Suresh has very good grounding and a touchstone in the developing world for this theme.
So I would like to say we are recording for the purposes of these lectures. We will ask Suresh to speak for 25 minutes, perhaps, and then open the floor to your questions. And please do take this opportunity to ask questions. We have live mics, and I would ask that people who wish to address Suresh go to the microphone and introduce yourself and your affiliation, so that our audio-visual captain there may know and may record.
So without further adieu, I welcome you all again, from inside the Department, AID, and outside. We thank you for coming, and I am very honored, and pleased, to introduce Suresh Garimella. Thank you.
[applause]
DR. GARIMELLA: I went up against the Secretary and she won. That’s why we’re in this room. I think that’s a good thing to do. Thank you very much, Andy. I would like to, I guess, start this by thanking the Science and Technology Advisors Office for, I guess, shepherding such an interesting program. It is true that those of us who come here sort of have to juggle quite a few things to do this, but it really is quite an out-of-the-world experience. As you all know, those of you who are here, crazy sometimes, but very educational. I’m just truly thankful and happy that I’ve had this opportunity to spend some time on this. And the kind of access we have to things, events that are unfolding hour-by-hour is just really intoxicating. It’s wonderful.
So I’m very happy to be part of the Jefferson Science Fellows program. I would acknowledge my fellow Jefferson Science Fellows. We meet often and are a band of brothers; I’d like to have some sisters in there, too, but -- so I thank them. I thank the -- Griff Thompson, and folks in OES that I interact with quite a bit, and certainly my colleagues in the Energy Bureau, EEB. But above all, I would like to say my thanks, my sincere and heartfelt thanks, to Peter Secor, who I work with, who is my boss. But I’d like to say that I’ve learned so much from him in this short time. I’ve only spent four or five months here, and I come from a very different background, where we don’t think like you do; sometimes thankfully.
Anyway, it’s nice to see the perspectives that you have. And Peter is truly such a wise man in the full sense of the word. I’m really blessed to be learning from him. We talk for hours on end every day, and it’s just the best learning I could possibly do. So I think every Jefferson Fellow should be posted with Peter, although that’s not likely.
So, again, just thanks to everyone who has made this happen. I’m also honored to kick off the series for this year. As Andy mentioned, some of my research back at Purdue, and Wisconsin before that, and Berkeley, and so on, sort of intersects with the issue of energy, although not so directly, and so it’s been quite a learning experience for me. I will say at the outset that my hope today is to really share with you some of the learning I’ve been through in the last few months, rather than to be telling you from something on high; I’m not coming here to tell you the way to think; I’m not sure that any of us is capable of doing that, certainly not me. I’d like to raise some questions, and hopefully you’ll all raise some issues afterwards that we all learn from. So, in other words, don’t expect any answers from me afterwards. Okay.
So this is particularly a rather -- for all the complicated issues you deal with, I think this is among the most complicated, this intersection between energy security, clean energy, and so on, versus climate change; and I’ve been seeing some of the mechanics of how that gets resolved, or not, whether there’s a State Department perspective, a U.S. Government perspective, or not, et cetera. And it’s been fascinating to use this as the vehicle for me to learn about policy, because, man, what a vehicle it is. It’s quite interesting. And so I’ll share some of my confusion with you. I think that’s my goal.
I apologize for some of the visuals. I think the way the room lighting is set up, they might not come out as well as I’d like them. But it almost makes the point for this particular slide, this particular picture. What you’re seeing here is a picture from the New York Times, and that’s Sarah Ruto; that’s her name, I’ve not met her, but they talked about her in the article back in late December, which is the time from which I’ve been thinking about this. I sent this article to Andy, and we started off a discussion, which led to this talk.
And the article says, “Far from the grid in Africa, hut glows with power” -- or something like that, is what it kicks off. What the story is about is that: Here’s a person who does some simple things with a cell phone, she, of course, keeps up with her relatives and things like that, but she can charge her cell phone with this one solar panel. And the solar panel is a slightly higher end version so she can also get four lights out of it. And, in fact, her children’s grades have gone up in school as a result of being able to study more, she checks spot-prices in the market, and so on. And money transfers: A large part of cell phone usage is for money transfers in Kenya. And so, this is possible.
Now, why is that so interesting? It’s interesting because Sarah is in a somewhat remote, quite remote part of Kenya. She has to walk for two miles, then take a motor taxi for a whole bunch of time, spend money on it, go to the nearest town, and pay like 30 cents to get the phone charged, but there’s such a long line waiting for the phone to be charged that she has to leave the phone there for three days, and go back and pick it up. So of course you don’t get to use the phone a lot if you’ve got to keep doing this.
And so the fact that she spent $80 on this Chinese-made solar panel has not only had all these salutary effects on herself and her children, but her neighbors now pay her 20 cents to charge their phones off of that. But they’ve gotten wise, and they want to buy their own solar panels, so there are more solar panels in town, now. There’s apparently a $12 model that lights one bulb. Okay, so that’s the story. It’s quite interesting; it’s a nice sort of vignette of this off-grid population.
And, as you know, renewable power, renewable sources like this, have had more and more resonance in less and less developed markets, where there’s not a grid to tap into, and things like that, so it’s a particularly interesting and apropos example of where such things can be used.
But that is one cell phone and a few lights. Is that -- have we solved the problem? Lots of people buy solar panels in all these places and we can go home declaring it a success? Well, no. I would like to identify, for this discussion, three different, say, population groups. And then you can parse this many ways, but I’ll do it this way; and I think it’s not particularly controversial.
So we can think of developed world populations, where by-and-large, people have a centralized grid, good distribution system, good capacity, good governance; we pay our bills, we get electricity, sometimes, or most of the time.
Then there are these large urban populations in the developing world without reliable, clean energy. So talking about large cities like Calcutta or Kinshasa, or places like this, where power cuts are routine, or in some places, in fact, getting a few hours of power a day is the best they can expect. And so, this is a large-scale access problem; these are millions and millions of people, suffering from this kind of lack of access. And providing them with electricity, with energy, is a large impact problem because here, now, we talked about large numbers, large emissions, and this makes a difference. If you can address this, deal with it, it speaks directly to development, factories, these kinds of things, stability. So this is the more pesky problem. This is the more difficult problem to deal with. And, of course, there are the remote and off-grid populations, and of course our USAID colleagues and such look at that as well. But I would like to submit that that sort of has boutique solutions which work, and they are relatively straightforward, but the large populations are the ones that are complicated.
And why do I think that that second blob is the -- that second bullet is the key for us to think about? Well, just looking at Africa, for example, or a map of Africa, what you see here are the bright reds that are essentially strong densities of populations, strong concentrations of people. And you see, obviously, that very large parts of African are light yellow. And these scales -- this is a logarithmic scale. That’s something to keep in mind. You know, that’s all zero to five, to a 100, and so on. So all these have very few -- even the light colors, light oranges and such don’t have a lot of people. And suddenly it jumps up to very large numbers in very small places.
And so we need to address the power needs, the energy needs of those -- and of course, you always see the Nile, whenever you see lots of light near the Nile, or there in Egypt, or whatever, you see the population along the Nile, and so on. And in particular, if you look at Kenya, the population in that color scheme is different, but the population density is the dark greens have the most population, down there as well, by the coast. And Sarah lives in that yellow region where there are very, very few people.
So I think we need to delineate which populations we’re talking about when we talk about the energy access problem. And so, given this kind of population clustering, let’s look at Kenya a little bit more. So again, that’s another picture, and like I said, the bad lighting is not so bad for this, because it makes the point; they don’t have a light, and that’s one of the things. This is a picture from that house again, where the kids are learning by a lamp that’s driven by the solar panel.
And so, first of all, keep in mind that Kenya has an install capacity of about one gigawatt: a thousand megawatts. One gigawatt compares to a thousand gigawatts of install capacity, give or take, in the U.S. So it’s a one-thousandth of the install capacity, is what they have.
It’s a small amount. Very few people in Kenya have access to electricity. Very few houses are powered, and not just in rural areas, but also in urban areas. And interesting enough, Kenya has about the highest cost of electricity costs in East Africa, and it’s much more than in Egypt, or China, or India, and so on, so this obviously has an impact on the growth of industry, and things like that. But look at that number. Assuming that there’s 40 hours in the week, 12 to 36 hours per week are lost due to power-rationing. So that’s obviously difficult to get a lot done with those kinds of numbers. And the difficulties, of course, are a lack of investment, bureaucracy, corruption; things like this, which are true the world-over, not just in Kenya. The other thing to keep in mind, because we try continually to kind of draw together this electricity, develop an emissions team, is that Kenya is not a big contributor to the world emissions picture. Its emissions are one percent of African emissions and four hundredth of a percent of the world’s emissions. So, just keep that in mind.
So, where can they go from there? What’s their future? Well, if you want growth, if you want stability, if you want poverty reduction, you need to have access to power. And the absence of affordable and reliable energy is a significant roadblock in this path to development. They have a plan -- actually Kenya is relatively ahead in the game. They have a plan to double their capacity through new green energy projects. Kenya also has the good fortune of having a lot of geothermal capability, hydro-electric capability and so on. And so they’re looking at updating their hydro base, expanding to their wind sources. They don’t have very much wind at all right now, but there are areas where you can benefit from that. And much of Kenya’s power already comes from renewable sources, assuming that you think of hydro-electricity as renewable as well. So hydro gives them more than half of their power. Sixteen percent comes from geothermal and the rest from imported oil. And they’re trying to sort of buttress the hydro base and so on. There’s seven gigawatts, remember their installed capacity is one gigawatt. There’s seven gigawatts of energy potential in the Rift Valley, but again development capital is difficult. The problem with even projects, well intentioned projects like from the U.N. and so on are that it’s easier to funnel projects into --dollars into big projects that are easier to track and so on. It’s more difficult just to manage a small project and so development capital has always been an issue in these kinds of situations.
Okay, so we’ve looked at Kenya briefly, hopefully you have a snapshot at least of the fact that okay, these are off-grid populations are interesting, but the -- you know, getting people power beyond a cell phone and things like that is critical because we want them to then get a refrigerator. We want them to get a car, maybe you think we shouldn’t but really, I mean this is what development means. They need to move on, graduate up to factories and have a lot of electricity that drives these. And so, so what I’d like to point out is sometimes in the discussions, access to energy is thought of as a light bulb. Right? Or this story in the New York Times, gee, this woman has access to power. Well, she has access to, you know, four lights and a cell phone charge, but that’s not enough. And in fact, those kinds of things do indeed have a small impact on emissions, that’s okay. But access means much more. It’s a natural progression. Once you give somebody a cell phone and a light, they expect more and why not? They should and we would want them to sort of move on. And in a very short time span, maybe in a few years’ time frame, we should expect them to want to build factories and so on, now that’s real power and solar panels aren’t going to do it for them, at least not the rooftop, little ones.
So the plan must be for large capacity clean energy generation. We have to plan for this and not just be satisfied with the one-off tack solutions. Of course we all agree that access to plentiful, clean electricity is key to development, true development of areas. And I think this is from David Goldwin, he uses this, I’ve tweaked it slightly, but energy security is the ability to access the energy needed to develop and maintain economic activity, political autonomy and environment integrity. So you want to get all of those things in a clean manner. That’s what energy security is, at least that’s the premise that I will be addressing.
So, and at that -- with that -- on that slide, I would also like to say, in my time here, I’ve been looking at some of the decisions that the State Department is faced with, such as whether to support a coal power plant in some African country, I can name one. But -- and the, sort of, immediate feeling is that we should not support coal, we shouldn’t let them build a coal plant, but if they have plentiful coal and the alternatives are not really scalably available, if it’s not possible to replace a five gigawatt coal plant with tens of thousands of square kilometers of solar panels or something, then I think we need to be aware of that kind of a balance and see how to make these coal plants cleaner, etcetera and provide them more technology to do that. We shouldn’t sort of, in my opinion, burden the developing, or the least developed countries according to the U.N., with the burden of sort of cleaning up the environment for us, or not building coal plants and so on. And you may disagree and I’ll respectfully sort of let you disagree and that’s okay. So, when you have your chance.
Okay so, let’s go back to Africa, right. So how are we doing with access in Africa? One of the difficulties is that the causes of, you know, lack of access, and you probably can’t read that so well. You can have natural causes, such as droughts. In fact Kenya had a lot of difficulty because it had a big reliance on hydro power but there were droughts for some time and so their level’s fallen and you know, that has a direct impact. And so there’s natural causes certainly. There’s an oil price shock. When oil prices go up, some of the -- like Madagascar that depends a lot on oil, is affected quite a bit. Of course you know that there are conflicts in these places and in fact that’s a slightly older map. I’m sure there are many more and there’s a rapidly changing conflict map as well. You know, as things going on up there. I don’t know what happened to Egypt up there. We’ve taken it off the map. Okay, there you go. It’s still there. I don’t know if you’ve seen the op alert, but there’s still an Egypt. High growth and low investment though, remember that is the issue which is, that a lot of those, that sort of pink shading implies. So you have a lot of growth but low investment and that’s an endemic problem. And you know, there are nice numbers you all know that Sub-Saharan Africa, which is a lot of Africa by the way, right, has very little access to power and excluding South Africa, you know the total capacity is 30 gigawatts, which is, in Sub-Saharan Africa, which is the same as what Argentina has, one country. So -- and so on. So this is not a continent with lots of access. So -- and I’ve liberally sort of drawn from various sources. I’ve tried to put the sources on these slides as I go along. If you see your slide on there, be happy I’m using it. You’ll see your name too.
Energy and equality has contributed regional inequalities. I think this, again, there is a direct link between these. This is North America. That’s per capital primary energy consumption. Don’t worry about the units, it’s scaled -- has that much, the world average, so that’s 276, the world average is 72 and Africa is 15.9, 16. So Africa is four and a half times less than the world average and 18 times less than the North American average right. So clearly, not a lot of access. And you can see that, how that translates into the inequalities that you have as well. So just another way to say this, look at all the red regions. These are all areas that have suffered from a power outage in a 30 day period that this study was looking at. And so Africa and South Asia -- actually Africa has a problem, but South Asia has even more. Thirty-three percent down time in electric power access. And so that’s quite problematic and I thought I’d throw some levity in there. It seems like we’re not all that immune to power outages as well if you’re being served by Pepco.
So emissions, right? We have the title of the talk is, “Electricity, Development and Emissions.” So what about emissions? Let’s look at the numbers a little bit. You all know perhaps, you all read the Washington Post. Just a little bit before the Cancun meeting, this graphic appeared on the front page of the Washington Post. And I like it because it’s a horizontal, you know sort of plot and it’s kind of easier to tell the numbers, or at least it makes the point more strongly. What it’s showing you is as the years go up -- right, that’s from 1950 all the way to 2007 -- they’re showing you how much each country is emitting and you can see the United States at 1.755, China at 1.965 and so on. This is for the country -- this is countrywide numbers. And India is down there, Russia, etcetera, etcetera. So the Washington Post concluded then, that while the populations of China and India dwarf that of the U.S., the per capita numbers are you know, very small. The average Chinese emits a lot less than the average American, for example. So that’s what the conclusion was. I will add to that conclusion on this slide. The per capita numbers, if you look at them, right, this is the same axis except this is per capita. This is not CO2 emission, it’s carbon emissions but anyway, the scale is what I’m interested in. This shows 1.49, that shows 5.73 for the United States, about a ratio of four.
All right, we are four times more than the average Chinese. But, let me make the point about those two numbers, that this graphic in December 2010 used 2007 numbers, just perhaps because that was the graphic that was available to them. But if you looked at 2009, just two years later, that ratio went from four to three. The per capita for China rose to 1.59, that -- for the U.S. fell to 4.82 and we’re only three times away per capita -- the difference between the Chinese average and the U.S. average. And the prediction is that if you have everything remaining the same, the rates are the same, then within a decade, the Chinese per capita will also, number will also have met, will become on par with the U.S. number. So the numbers aren’t all that, you know, reason for happiness. We cannot sort of get away with the fact that, oh China is a big country, lots of population but their per capita number is low. Well not so low actually. Okay? And in fact, another thing I would like to say is that -- people always say China and India, China and India all the time. But India is way down. India per capita is .43 compared to China. That’s growing too, but I think these numbers -- one of the difficulties I had in the process, and I can understand why people have difficulty too, is that it’s not easy to find numbers. They’re all different units; they’re from different years. So these kinds of things I’ve realized, and the uncertainty in these numbers, also lead to some of the difficulties and confusion with some of this.
So, okay what does that do, how do per capita emissions sort of relate to energy access? If you look at the GDP per capita, okay how people are making, at purchase parity, these are sort of normalized numbers. The number of households with electricity keeps going up, as the per capita income goes up. Right? To a point. So as numbers -- as the salary -- as the income increases, the households with electricity increase, so that’s a nice thing, you want that to happen. But notice how it saturates out. Right? You don’t need to keep, as in, even as low, at a fairly low GDP per capita, you can actually get to that 100 percent, almost 100 percent household electricity availability. The other story this is telling you is that the circles are scaled to the emissions from these places. So again, emissions track per capita income and so you can sort of see that picture here.
So given all these different vectors one has to keep in mind, the development issue, the emissions issue and so on. I find these energy related decisions extremely complex. I think we’d be fooling ourselves to ever simplify the thing and provide pat answers because they don’t exist. So one question that I had soon after I started looking this is, what is our goal? Do we want to reduce emissions or do we want to increase the use of renewables? And it seems to me that this is maybe somewhat at the heart of the question that we raise. This is why some are addressing the second half, some are addressing the first half and not necessarily sort of pulling them together. And I believe, in my own search for the truth, the competition between these two goals is critical to the policy decisions and actions right. The one or the other leads you in different directions. And so, what are the options to address these kinds of needs?
Well, so clearly on the energy availability options, we can have, and there are many, many wind pictures to choose from. This is from Vestas. Obviously wind is very exciting. There’s been a big sort of an explosion of wind energy in the states. The states -- it’s pretty much the largest -- I say pretty much just because, the U.S. was the largest -- had the largest installed capacity of wind until recently although I’ve seen some numbers that China has just exceeded us, 40 gigawatts for us, perhaps 41 for them, something like that. There’s a lot of wind and there’s a lot of wind potential. There’s a DOE study that says that you can, that there’s four times the total power that the U.S. needs is available just from wind if you go offshore as well, if you include offshore. Even if you sort of put a factor of one-fourth or something on that due to various reasons of sighting and getting permits and all that sort of stuff. They’re saying that this wind alone will get you all the power you need, the thousand gigawatts. So there’s 4,000 gigawatts of capacity in wind and so, there’s a lot there. Of course, there are problems too. There are issues. Of course there’s solar thermal, something that I personally care a lot about because I work in this area and it’s very attractive to me. What you’re seeing of course is a lots of reflectors that are heating a central tower and then you produce steam from it and drive a turbine and produce electricity. And I had to put up one of those pictures.
These are PV panels, so there’s solar thermal; there’s solar PV, right, there’s both kinds. And of course we saw one of these, a miniature version of this on Sarah Ruto’s hut. There’s hydro, which of course is a very, sort of -- it’s an easy decision to make to go hydro as long as you can sort of deal with ecological issues. If you have big rivers, sort of you know, gradient changes and things like that. But a lot of world’s hydro has been already exploited. There is more, but the other option is to go run of the river, hydro. And run of the river hydro essentially is not, is one where you don’t rely on a lot of gradients and you’re sort of putting the turbines. It’s fairly similar but with less, sort of, big Niagara type or Hoover Dam type structures. But these are not baby things. This particular one is on the Columbia River. That produces like more than two gigawatts of power, so it’s quite big. There’s bio-fuels of course, with all the issues that they, you know arise in people’s minds and so on, in terms of land use and energy in versus energy out and so on. There’s geothermal.
And then there’s the other low hanging fruit of efficiency right. So you can use more insulation in your houses. You can use you know, different kinds of light bulbs. There’s LED lighting on a bridge. And then you can use smart grids, which help people make the right decisions, help them sort of use energy more wisely. And then there’s also going back to our coal plants, and looking at combined cycles or IGCC type plants and improving the efficiency of these as well.
So, what I have next is a case study of Denmark. I’ll run through this a little more quickly because we’ll be running out of time otherwise. You’ve all heard presumably -- the reason I picked Denmark is this. We talked about Kenya. Let me give you an extreme other end of the spectrum example of Denmark where, presumably you’ve all heard by now that Denmark has a plan to go fossil free by 2050. Right? How are they going to do that? Well, Denmark was among the OECD countries, one of the most dependent on oil in 1973. They’ve switched to coal and by 1991, they were mostly coal, as in most of the electricity came from coal. Then they made another switch and by 2007, only 57 percent is coming from coal and the rest from wind and so on, so forth, and hydro from Norway and Sweden, et cetera.
So one of the things they have which most other countries in the world don’t is their reliance on district heating. They heat houses with the power, the excess power from power plants, so that’s a very efficient way to use heat. You can use coal gen plants and so on. There’s surplus wind that also can be stored in district heating. They’ve also had feed in tariffs and indirect subsidies and things that have actually given rise to energy giants being produced like Vestors. And they’ve also got significant R&D efforts. So in 2008, this is the picture, lots of coal, a good amount of wind, very little oil, right? Now their future that they’re looking for is a nice, you know, pleasant graphic with lots of, you know, there’s wind turbines offshore, there’s heat pumps, there’s photo-voltaics on houses. There’s electric cars going about, big trucks that are fed on bio-mass, et cetera, et cetera. So, it’s a very nice plan.
You can go to this -- you can actually Google it; you can go to the Climate Commission website and read about it. And so their plan is to do this and at the same time, they want to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent from their 1990 levels, even as energy demand doubles. This is quite a tall order. How are they doing it? How do they envision the greening of Denmark? Well they say that their electricity share and energy supply should go from 20 to, you know, triple or so. Their offshore wind needs to go from their three gigawatts today to about 10 gigawatts, three times, you know, tripling of that. Most cars should be electric vehicles. Large vehicles should run on bio-fuels. They’re capitalize, exploit wave power, et cetera. Increase home heating with direct district heating, and rely significantly on efficiency improvements, 50 percent reduction in energy use. Plus, they have these things that most other countries don’t have, Kenya certainly doesn’t, and that is links with neighbors, smart grids, these kind of things, biomass-fired power plants. Interestingly enough, nuclear energy is not in the picture for Denmark. They made this decision. So, they want to go from this primary energy use picture from 2008, to that.
And they -- okay, so this is good. It’s a nice plan except, there are challenges, and who knows, you know how quickly they’re going to get there and I’d like to watch. So there’s a heavy reliance on export/import balance. I say that with wind because what happens is, when there’s a lot of wind blowing they send power up to Norway and Sweden and store it in the hydro dams there. And when there’s less wind, then they import it from there and so on. Bio-mass -- they have a humungous chunk coming from bio-mass. That, as you can imagine, has a lot of potential issues. And then, there’s a complex whole-of-government approach which is kind of mind boggling to think about everything that needs to come together for this to actually happen. So does their example apply widely? Can we copy the Denmark example into other places?
Well first of all, it relies heavily on hydro-backup from Nord-pool. Denmark is in an enviable place where they’ve got Norway, Sweden, Finland and Germany next to them with very good trans-national cables and so on. And so when they say they import only a small amount of electricity, 1,200 terrajules, it actually comes from important 40,000 terrajules and exporting 39,000 terrajules because of this wind and hydro balance. Right, so their Nord-pool helps a lot. Danish industry is not particularly energy intensive, and so on. So we can -- and they of course have CCS storage capacity which most of countries don’t have, et cetera. So, my belief is that you cannot extrapolate from Denmark. You certainly learn from it, and it’s nice that they are trying it, but it’s not something that would broadly apply to any oil country.
So the difficulties then with implementing renewables are the following, as you all know. Renewable energy by definition is a very diffused source of energy, whereas you can get a lot of energy from a small amount of coal or a small amount of oil. When you’ve got -- when you talk about say solar energy, it’s very diffused so you need to collect it. And that poses a lot of issues except for nuclear of course, it’s even more dense that coal and oil. Intermittency is a big issue, so the sun shines for some time, but not for others. The wind blows for some time and not others and so on. And we can discuss each of these in great detail, which I won’t. Grid integration, when you’ve got these intermittent sources, how do you integrate that into the grid and feed the distribution system? Scalability, you know, how much of an area, land use do you need to use to put these solar panels on and such. Sighting and land use and so on, people don’t want wind offshore if there’s a nice view, et cetera, et cetera, Martha’s Vineyard. Ecological effects right, cost. Cost is obviously a big bear that’s there. And so, and then let me throw in this one other variable and that’s gas. You’ve all been hearing about gas and gas is a big unknown. Whereas it’s only being currently produced in the U.S. and Canada, many other countries are looking into shale gas, for example. And you probably saw this article just a week ago in the Wall Street Journal which says, where Exxon thinks that global natural gas consumption will exceed that of coal by 2020. Quite an interesting fact and so natural gas, as you know, emits less than coal does, or leads to lower emissions. So power generation is an important sector, anyways. So that’s a big unknown.
So what I want to do because I’m a researcher and so is to show you three slides of my research and conclude with some thoughts if we can afford that time. So, I’ll talk about an example in energy storage with solar thermal, one in waste heat recovery, and one in energy efficiency. And I’d like to point out briefly that none other than Thomas Edison, somebody that we all think was a great innovator, said that, “ I’d put my money in the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.” Well, we have, so, as in not tackled it, but waited. Okay, so you all know this but let me just put up a-- you know, just a visual. That’s the Northern African continent and part of Europe. You can get all of the world’s power from that much area in the Sahara. Okay, just not thinking about desert storms, I mean real storms in deserts. And, you know, cleaning of these things and all that, but just the insulation in there can power the world. That can power the E.U. and that can power Germany, for example. So one kilometer square right, produces that much, give or take. But also you can use this renewable source for desalination. You can get a humungous amount of water with a kilometer square of desert land. These are nice potential numbers. Of course you need to bring them about through some sort of technology, so here’s the work that we do, where you’ve got a solar tower.
And one of the issues, again, is the sun shines for half the day or less and therefore you need to store that heat. Solar thermal energy has the one advantage that no other renewable source does, and that is, it inherently allows for thermal storage. Electric storage in batteries is far more expensive and not all that advanced in some ways in terms of volumes as this is, and so that’s a storage tank. Essentially what you do is to heat a lot of oil, store it overnight, and then use it the next day. And so we’ve been doing a lot of work in looking at how to do that storage of oil. In fact, because oil is expensive -- or Morton salt, more likely -- you fill the whole thing with rocks actually, and sand, which is very cheap, and then you use the thermal capacity of that to store the heat. And there’s an example of such a tank in the Andasol power plant in Spain.
Another second example of the kinds of things you can do -- so there are technological innovations possible. One thing you can do for example is, if you have a power plant, a coal power plant that produces one gigawatt of electric power, dumps out gigawatts of waste heat. This isn’t the coal plant’s fault. Just from thermodynamic considerations and efficiency considerations, if you’re producing one gigawatt, you’re dumping two gigawatts into water, into warm water right. So went in to look at, “Gee, what can we do with that warm water?” The difficulty is, it’s 480,000 gallons per minute of warm water coming out of this coal plant. Warm being, 85 degrees Fahrenheit to about 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Nice to kind of wash your hands in, but not much you can do in terms of producing power from it.
So we’ve been looking at multiple things to do with that. We’ve been routing the water through the soil in -- they’ve also at this particular power soil, has 6,000 acres of land available, so there’s greenhouses are growing tomatoes in winter in Indiana, to use up some of the power. You can also -- there’s lots of interesting social issues and economics issues there as well. And so there’s other things you can do. You can actually use a solar updraft tower, where you heat up the bottom part and then the air flows up through this tower and you can actually put a wind turbine in there, a little turbine in there. And so we calculated that you can get about 300 megawatts of power generation by using solar updraft towers for example. And similarly, you can grow, you can use that warmth to grow algae in algae bio-reactors and get some of that power back. So, there’s multiple ways you can try to sort of get this back. And so we’ve been looking at those and finally, a lot of my time is spent looking the improvement of efficiency, energy efficiency in computers and electronics and data centers and things like that.
Just -- that’s a data center, a small one, just to give you an idea. A data center in Chicago that Microsoft has is 17 football fields in size. These are not baby computer desktop type things. These are humungous installations. Data center emissions are 0.2 whereas airlines emissions are 0.6. So data centers emit a third of what airplanes do. Data center emissions, different units and things like that, is 80 here. Argentina’s emissions are 142. So, you know, just all the data centers if you could deal with them, you could get a country’s worth of emissions reduction out of that. But that number is what’s worrisome, and that is -- in 2007 that number was 80 like I showed you, but in 2020, the number is going to be 340. This is not something we’re going to stop or want to stop. This is an inexorable growth and so data centers would be, in about 10 years, emitting more than all the airplanes that, which we think of, as fairly emitting dirty things. Similarly, you know, even the big plasma TVs and stuff we use, have a lot of power that they use. Internet users, you know, the use is growing up massively and so on so these are all important factors and it’s important to try to bring about efficiency measures in electronics and that’s quite true.
And my last, sort of, preachy slide is -- well, the next two slides may be preachy to, but, if you look at the so-called human development index which is defined like that. It’s what it sounds like. The annual per capital electricity use scales with the human development index so that the more the electricity use, the index goes up. The index being a good thing. But the thing I like about this graph is that this flattens out so that if you take this saturation that belong a certain electricity use, you don’t actually have a significant improvement in quality of life essentially. And so, if the U.S. and Canada use that much -- if Spain and Italy can get away with a quarter of our electricity use, well maybe that’s our target, that’s what we should try to do, and not sort of give up on a lot of things, but look for efficiencies which will get us to a more efficient way of doing things so that we can keep our human development index up and yet use much less electricity. And I believe one can do that through various innovations.
So to improve things, to address this problem, of course you’ve all seen this plot, if you’ve not, please stare at it, it’s quite a fun plot. It’s from EIA. It’s too much detail, I don’t want to, sort of, go through it. It shows the supply sources and the demand sectors in the U.S. But the point to note is 94 percent of transportation is fed by petroleum and 48 percent of electric power is fed by coal. So this is the picture we need to change through new technologies and policies because that’s the problem we’re facing. And so with a number of low hanging fruit, we can each come up, I could hand a little piece of paper and say, write down the technology you think will get us there fastest. I put a few down. First of all, end use efficiency that Secretary Chu has been talking about quite a bit as well. This is probably the cleanest, fastest, cheapest, safest, most reliable way to get to lower electricity use, energy use.
Conservation and efficiency measures, you know, we should look in at mini hydro better, we should look at nuclear. Yes, I will say that, I think nuclear is something we should have in the mix. We should substitute gas for coal and oil, which will reduce our emissions. We should look at power sector reform. Okay, I saw low-hanging fruit there, and I don’t think it’s all that low-hanging, but I think power sector reform in the world could get us part of the way there. And certainly we -- well, something we don’t do well is to educate our children better to understand these efficiency -- the need for efficiency, to turn off the lights and all this other stuff, and it seems like a silly little thing but it could go a long way.
And so I think the kinds of things we should invest our time and energy and efforts in are energy storage -- we need to think about that with all these renewables -- better grids, viable financing policy and business models. I don’t think we -- the government should be picking winners and losers but I think it can facilitate innovation in scalable clean energy solutions. I think public-private partnerships are critical, and we need to diversify our supply; I don’t think we can -- there’s a one sort of answer to these things. And many of the solutions are very region-specific and locality-specific; we need to be aware of that. So again, my closing thought is that we need to expand the reach and scope of our policy decisions beyond our pet technologies. I am a coal person, you are an oil person, you’re a wind person, you’re a green guy; well, we need to get beyond that, and I think that there’s this portfolio of solutions that’s what’s going to get there -- get us there, and it’s critical that we talk across the aisle, OES with EEB, et cetera. Anyway, I should not get into any more trouble in that, thank you very much for your attention.
[applause]
There any questions? We’d welcome them.
MR. REYNOLDS: We welcome -- and you know, we did have a late beginning in light of this dislocation for the room, but we aren’t on a hard stop for 3:00. If you do have a question, please come to the microphone, identify yourself, and pose the question, please.
DOMINIC TONDO: Yes, thank you for your talk, my name is Dominic Tondo with the Office of Real Property. I just had a question on your slide with the -- you had -- you showed the Sahara and you showed how the energy could meet all the world’s supply. How is that energy created there in that slide?
DR. GARIMELLA: So, that’s a very simple calculation. Let me bring up that slide; and the slide shows you that acquired area in square miles has a function of plant efficiency. So the plant efficiency is, you know, a reasonable number is between five and 10 percent, and so what you see with this one line that’s tagged 2,800 kilowatt hours per meter squared per year, which is essentially 320 watts per meter squared. This is a number that’s known, so around the globe, we know how much solar energy strikes the earth, and so when we use the 320 watts per meter squared number, we can calculate how much area is needed to capture enough power to satisfy current global electricity consumption. And so here we show that, you know, one percent of the Sahara, which is about 36,300 square miles, so 190 by 190 mile red square, which I’ve shown you on the map earlier, so this calculation, this slide then shows you that that’s the area required to satisfy the global electricity consumption. So it’s a relatively I guess easy way to show that this is true. Of course, there are a number of issues after -- about whether we can put enough collectors in this area, you know, how the sand affects this, and desert conditions and things like that.
ALBERTO DEVOTO: Sorry for being late, you know, as usual, I got lost, but that’s a problem from being Italian that I don’t know to navigate. Columbus got lost; he wanted to go to India, and ended up in this -- so we Italians always make mistakes. But I have a question to -- a very simple question. I know that a nuclear reactor lasts -- can last for 60 years. And maybe a wind turbine in the ocean maybe is going to last six years. Do we know -- or do we have any idea -- of what is the CO2 footprint of building a nuclear reactor and the CO2 footprint of building a wind turbine and putting it into the ocean, that is, and what I am also like to know is this, that, you know, in Italy, we have all sorts of old buildings that have been there for a long, long time, so I think their carbon footprint was set ages ago in their construction, in their cement, and so they are very -- is it a good idea to periodically tear apart something and to rebuild, or it is -- we should start thinking, “Well, maybe it’s good to build something that can last like the Coliseum”?
DR. GARIMELLA: Okay.
ALBERTO DEVOTO: And second question. I know that in Italy, electric rates are extremely high, but in Denmark, they’re higher. We are really very close to each other; we compete for which one’s the better, and -- in this competition, and I think one reason Denmark has done so well is simply because the electric rate is so high. Can we, somehow, fit in this idea into our -- in the building of our electric infrastructure? Thank you.
DR. GARIMELLA: Sure. So Alberto Devoto, the scientist of the Italian Embassy, that’s the question, the question’s from him, and he happens to be a nuclear physicist of course, so that he had to ask that question.
Alberto, I don’t have, you know, answers to these questions, but I would say that people have certainly tried doing the life cycle analysis type sort of estimates of greenhouse gas emissions, and I suspect that there are numbers for, I mean, I’m sure there are numbers for what the life cycle emissions from nuclear is and what it is from wind, and so on. Of course, part of the problem is offshore wind, I mean, going way offshore is that there’s not much experience with that yet, right? So, but it makes absolute sense to look at that, and I think one of the difficulties is just the assumptions that go into it, depending on who’s doing it and for what purpose. The answers turn out to be different which is kind of unfortunate, but I think that that’s definitely worth looking into, and there might be others in the audience who actually have numbers for that.
And your second question was about is it good to build, to pull down, you know, who would say pull down old buildings in Italy everyone comes to visit? So I would say no, don’t pull them down, improve their efficiency, you know, put in more insulation and things like that, but certainly I think that there has been -- let’s not look at buildings but at a coal plants, right? As you probably know, China has been actually surprisingly progressive about shutting down a lot of old coal plants that are quite inefficient, and I think we should definitely do that; that’s a very low-hanging fruit if you will, if you look at the worst coal plants and shut them down, and sort of build cleaner ones, we’ll get much of the way there. So it’s in the spirit of what you’re asking and I hope you accept that as an answer.
MR. REYNOLDS: Suresh, you had two very important factoids which I wrote down. The first, at the beginning of your presentation, you weren’t going to concentrate, of course, on large scale, central systems of the nature of OECD nations. You weren’t going to look at the rural distributed. You were going to look at large urban centers without disposable energy for a large portion of their population, so let’s, for the purposes of this question say, for the developing world megacities. And then you said that about midway through that Exxon has projected that natural gas will exceed coal by 2020. Have you or has the research community, have we in Washington, to your knowledge, the Department of Energy or anyone, mapped the world for the natural gas resources that may be contiguous to large megacities of the developing world? And then in that sweet spot, if we can use a case study if you have one, how do the technologies in the suite that you’ve recognized and exhibited here today, how do they fit into fill that gap in disposable energy for the large urban environment?
DR. GARIMELLA: Thank you, Andy. So, yes, I agree that I was focusing on the large megacities in the developing world, because I think that’s where there’s a lot of emissions gains to be had, plus a lot of development to be had and a lot of need. The article from Exxon was one week old, and I think it’s intriguing, it’s very interesting, and I think discoveries of gas, whether it be shale gas or regular sort of deposits of gas or supplies of gas, are accelerating rapidly, extremely rapidly. As I’m sure you know, Israel found some deposits just off the coast, and so that’s certainly a country that could use, you know, a source that’s nearby that it owns. So I don’t know that -- again, because it’s so new -- this contiguousness thing, the proximity to large urban centers. I know some of the fines are actually proximal, but there are others probably in Mongolia or something like that that are maybe harder to get at, or the Canadian oil sands or, you know, deposits and such.
So, I think that’s certainly the direction to look in and perhaps, you know, that’s what our office will be looking at more and more, or we’ll just wait for Exxon to tell us, and we’ll take their word for it, but it’s very recent, and I think that this is a very fast-developing picture. And I think if you had asked me to give this talk, say, three months from now, I suspect some of the numbers will already have been passé by then. So, gas is -- I think David Goldman called it a transitional fuel for this reason, but in fact, even before -- even when he started saying it, it was -- there wasn’t as much gas at that time even than there is now, so gas is a very fast-evolving piece of the puzzle that we need to watch carefully.
ALBERTO DEVOTO: Suresh, I’m sorry. I hate to return on my questions, but I actually -- I would like to add something else, something different. I don’t know if you have seen that recently there was some data on the emission per inhabitant, and you see that, for example, if you look at the average in the United States, and you take, for example, New York City, the emissions of New Yorkers is much lower than the average simply because megacities sometimes are convenient. Tokyo’s much better than the average of Japan, and unfortunately Rome is a little better than the average, but not much. But what I am saying is that sometimes large cities can be very efficient, and one of the problems is transportation. And in fact, I think that you said it yourself. Electric cars may be the one solution.
DR. GARIMELLA: Yeah, yeah. So, Alberto, certainly a point well taken, in fact, I was having that conversation about an hour ago with somebody in my office when we looked at the numbers for China, the emissions and so on. I think these large, you know, megacities and developing countries are not sort of culprits, right? In fact, they can be extremely efficient; highly dense populations are easier to make efficient with, you know, public transportation and things like that, than it is to do in Nebraska or something like that, and I think that we should definitely, you know, there’s very little good news in this picture, but that will be one that we should capitalize on the potential of the population density and concentration to benefit from the efficiencies that come with it. But the issue is that Calcutta or whatever, for example, has very little access to power today, and I think that we need to provide that, and hopefully provide it without, you know, using old technologies for coal and things like that, and helping such places with cleaner technologies and renewables where possible, et cetera, et cetera.
PETER REVESZ: Well, I’m one person from Nebraska. Actually, my name is Peter Revesz, and I’m also a Jefferson Science Fellow here, normally a professor at University of Nebraska. In your talk, you have given some interesting statistics about per capita use of carbon, and I just wonder how much is household use or emissions, and how much is industrial structural differences, you know? Are U.S. households consuming more than they -- compared to other countries? Okay, maybe more than they should, or some of these like data centers, you can try to make them efficient, but there’s only so much you can do, and in fact the whole world is using U.S. data centers very heavily, so in this case, per capita calculations don’t make much sense. I mean, Sarah Ruto, if she logs into the internet and looks up data, very likely will hit some data center in the U.S. as well.
DR. GARIMELLA: Right. Thank you, Peter, it’s great to have a question from a Fellow, a Jefferson Fellow. So data centers, certainly I can address that question quite readily, and in fact there’s a lot that can be done for data centers. So one thing, as you probably know already, is that data centers have in fact at times been cited, at places that are cooler, or have access to a river nearby, or so. So there’s actually been talk about putting a whole bunch of data centers in Alaska or something like that. So, it is possible to actually think about geographic location and such, but there’s only so much of that you can do. Data centers are extremely inefficient; in fact, because data centers grew out of people using one computer and two and three and four, data centers are thought of as really more of a warehouse of a whole bunch of computers. Okay, let’s add more air conditioning and more air conditioning and things like that. They’re extremely poorly designed, and I mean, it’s shameful how badly they’re designed, and you can get, you know, significant improvements if you actually went in with a picture of what you wanted and had all the ducting right, and the localized measurements, and sort of a dynamic addressing of overheating and basis and things like that.
So, there’s a huge amount that can be done, and it’s a pity that the world is using U.S. data center designs because we’ve not done particularly well with them that our companies that are quite advanced now. AT&T has been spending an enormous amount of effort in sort of improving these clusters of electronics. Hewlett-Packard, HP, has a lot of investment in this as does IBM, but I think it’s -- so 50 percent of the cost of a data center goes towards cooling it, right? So, when you look at the aerial view of a large data center, you see these enormous air conditioners; that’s the big thing that appears first. And so, they cost the same as the computers themselves, and I think there’s an enormous amount that can be gained there, and I think we’re -- we -- I think it just wasn’t on people’s horizons; people weren’t thinking about this issue when they started putting a lot of computers together, they just wanted more performance and so on, but increasing the standards that are being proposed for that, there’s actually standards, et cetera, so that’s one.
In terms of numbers, certainly the numbers you asked for exist, I think I remember them, but I’d rather not put a number out there that I don’t remember. David sitting next to you is a living encyclopedia of any of those numbers; he’ll tell you it’s 78 percent for this and 12 for that, so he can tell you that, but residential and commercial buildings are a very large culprit in greenhouse gas emissions. I won’t put a number on it, because I have it somewhere, but I don’t remember off -- but we could gain a lot by getting electricity efficiencies in residential and commercial buildings. And, you know, it’s okay to be from Nebraska.
[laughter]
MALE SPEAKER: Hi, my name is Shannon, I’m with the State Department; I just had a question about your slide with emissions and renewable energy. I was wondering -- you made it seem like they were mutually -- or that they weren’t, I guess, in contrast to each other, but aren’t they connected? I mean --
DR. GARIMELLA: Yeah. That’s a good question. I think that it’s actually not so much that emissions and renewables are not connected, it’s that -- it’s what’s driving the policy. If you simply want to put a lot of solar panels somewhere, then that -- then you may want to do that without reference to the much more complex picture that goes into making these kinds of decisions. On the other hand, if you want to sort of reduce emissions, then you may make different choices than you would -- so, for example, if you want to reduce emissions from coal, maybe the most obvious thing to do would be to switch to gas right now, right? Because it will give you a significant benefit right away, or to go to combined, you know, heating and CHP plants and so on. So, I think it’s more of a fervor to put in the renewables that I was sort of referring that it’s not something that should be an emotional issue, rather than something which looks at all of the possibilities and the regional capabilities, so you may want to put renewables in Africa because it sounds good and it has lower emissions, but if the Africans don’t have -- or wherever you’re thinking of putting them -- do not have a grid system, any grid right now, or grid that can handle these variable inputs, then that’s not the right answer. And so one needs to look for other ways to address the energy axis problem and so on, so I think it’s just a question of what’s driving your, you know, what’s driving your choice of different solutions? Is it to provide a lot of people, you know, with access to electricity so that they can develop and so on, while keeping emissions in check, or is it just to introduce renewables, and sometimes it’s been the latter, which I think is not a complete -- is not a good driver for a more comprehensive solution.
MALE SPEAKER: Thank you.
RYAN BOWLES: My name is Ryan Bowles, I’m from the Africa Bureau here, and I had a very similar question. What I was going to ask is, if in the African context, and I have served in Nigeria and also in East Africa, and there’s just not electricity in these places, you know, and are these more exotic but more environmentally-responsible power sources really practical in these situations? I just can’t imagine Nigeria pursuing some of these things. But on the other hand, the whole country is sitting on a coal mine in a lot of ways, and so is an energy-intensive source with a lot of emissions -- maybe the trade-off is worthwhile, given that there is no electricity at the moment.
DR. GARIMELLA: So absolutely, I think you’ve simply made, I mean, you’ve made the point that I’m -- so I agree with you, right? That is the issue that if -- and I’ll say it because I’m not really a State Department employee, I mean, for example, Kosovo, right, is sitting on a lot of coal, and should we not let Kosovo not use its coal when maybe it doesn’t have access to a lot of other things? Or back to the African context. So, I think mandating that these countries should use renewables is A, not fair, and B, not all that viable because they already, like you say, suffer from high electricity rates mostly because they don’t have very much power in their transmission lines, they’re horrible, and when there’s storm they all fall apart. Well, that happens here too, but -- so I think these have to be very regionally specific solutions. Every country even has very different answers. Kenya is an exception; it has a lot of hydro power, whereas many other countries in its neighborhood as well don’t. It has a good geothermal potential whereas many other countries don’t, so you cannot say that, “Hey, let’s come up with a plan for Kenya,” and then apply it to Sudan and Ethiopia, and all that sort of that stuff too. So, there are a number of Kenyan neighbors that are also looking at these kinds of mini-hydro solutions and some geothermal, et cetera, but that’s exactly the point that there is no -- there is absolutely no one-solution-fits-all in even a single continent or even in a subcontinent, or, you know, so you have to be very I guess -- if you’re going to it eyes wide open, sort of look at all aspects of it, including the financing, the development capital available, the ability to staff these things, the workforce that is available to actually run perhaps complex systems and smart grids and all that sort of stuff.
So, in a vacuum, you can think up these nice pictures, but, you know, when people don’t have a light bulb in their house or ready access to electricity, then it’s difficult to sort of go from that step. Of course, it’s also been said that some of these countries offer good potential for us to help them put in good systems in place because there are none today, as opposed to sort of improving systems that exist which there may be more resistance to. So, interesting question and I’m certainly neither an Africa expert nor really an energy expert, but there are a lot of complicated issues to study here. That was my main message. It sounded like a conclusion; I didn’t mean to preempt questions, but, yes.
MR. REYNOLDS: Any other questions? Excellent. Suresh, thank you once again, ladies and gentlemen.
[applause]
[end of transcript]
