Truly good alternative energy ideas come along about once a decade.
Photo:Mr G’s Travels, Creative Commons, Flickr
Many of them are ideas recycled from man’s past, like wind and solar. Windmills have been around since the 7th century, when Rashidun caliph Umar built vertical axis turbines to mill grain and draw water for irrigation. Solar was first invented in France, in 1860, by a mathematician named Auguste Mouchot, who even then questioned his country’s reliance on coal. The ancient Greeks used geothermal energy (from hot springs) for heating and cooking.
Newer, 20th (or 21st) century discoveries include zero-point energy (magnetic energy), hydrogen fuel cells, using carbon dioxide (CO2) to make fuel, and so on. Most of these technologies are in the early development stages and, while some hold great promise, they currently offer little benefit to the average consumer looking to reduce his, or her, carbon footprint. One closer to completion is the Mag-Wind turbine, small enough to put on a residential roof and supposedly powerful enough – at 2000 kilowatt hours a month – to energize the average home. Unfortunately, people who have ordered it report delays.
Some ideas, also in the development stage, look like a recipe for disaster, as ethanol from corn has proven to be. Take Kyaw Sinnt, of Myanmar, who is convinced that nut trees are the key to his country’s chronic energy shortage. Others disagree, arguing that turning the country into a physic nut plantation to produce biofuel is yet another example of poor planning and ill-conceived strategy.
The nut trees may be drought-resistant, and willing to grow on sub-par soil (so they won’t displace food crops), but tipping any ecological balance bodes nothing but trouble, as we in the U.S. learned by importing gypsy moths in the nineteenth century to replace silk moths.
Perhaps more important, Myanmar lacks the physical infrastructure to process the nuts into anything, let alone biofuel. This is a typical example of getting the cart before the horse, and in many countries this failure to anticipate the impacts of biofuel is also a cart-first situation, with some governments like the UK reconsidering previous biofuel targets and production.
In the U.S., some energy proposals revolve around Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle, or IGCC power plants, an experimental technology that would convert coal into a gas and store the subsequent carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions underground. This is known as CCS, or carbon capture and sequestration.
The government’s experimental IGCC plant proposal has since been restructured, and will focus on separating CO2 for use as a fuel in the plants. However, even with advanced technology, IGCC plants are dirtier than their nuclear cousins, and far more polluting than renewable energy. Also, IGCC technology will raise the cost of a megawatt-hour of energy from approximately $45 to $52, and this is just the generation side of the equation. The cost of the plants themselves, even amortized over 40 years, will likely raise consumer electricity prices almost as much as developing alternative energy resources.
The single advantage to IGCC technology is that the U.S. still has about 101 billion tons of coal reserves, which some experts suggest would last about 100 years at current usage rates. Unfortunately, new reports indicate that this reserve is not entirely extractable using current technology and the use of coal will likely rise as the population increases.
Equally important, emissions regulations still to be enforced may further limit the viability of planned IGCC plants – CO2 is only one of the emissions produced by burning fossil fuels. In fact, "clean" coal may prove to be pie in the sky. The more than $67 million spent by the Department of Energy in the 10 years between 1989-1999 alone (and the $4 billion spent since) to develop IGCC technology, is, according to a 2008 Brookings Institution report, destined to failure because "the technology remains elusive, the costs will be very high, and MIT recently released a report that poses serious unanswered questions about geological sequestration." Withdrawing sequestration from the equation doesn’t solve all of the problems.
Other proposals (and funding) include a novel biotechnology to convert cow manure to biogas, and a Marcell, MN project mobile biomass gasification system to convert sawdust waste from Valley Forest Wood Products, at a cost of about $1 million. Biogas, generated from many waste streams including landfills, is a burgeoning technology and worthy of expenditures.
Natural gas, on the other hand, is neither "green" nor renewable. It is a hydrocarbon produced by decay, like petroleum, and one which is becoming increasingly scarce (due to overuse) and prohibitively expensive. The conversion of coal plants to natural gas, as in the case of Xcel Energy, is a waste of money that will cost subscribers not only in immediate, rising electricity costs, but in the future when the absence of natural gas forces re-conversion to some other technology. Some experts predict that, by the middle of this century, natural gas supplies will either be exhausted or cost too much to extract.
Late in 2007, Google asked for RFPs (Request for Proposal) in a search for viable, clean, renewable energy to power vehicles. The initial prize is $10 million. The ultimate prize to the planet is non-polluting modes of transportation. Electric cars, often touted as the solution, present their own problems. They are expensive (about $30,000), you have to remember to recharge them, they only go so many miles on a charge, and the electricity they use comes from a power plant likely burning fossil fuels, so the carbon footprint still exists. Still, they are a step in the right direction.
More steps are needed and I’m convinced that, if we look long and hard enough, we will find that elusive energy source that is clean, renewable, affordable and persistent (unlike wind and solar, which are geographically sporadic). This new source is, in fact, one problem that may actually be resolved by throwing money at it, and the more the better.
My bet is on zero-point energy, and the Hadron collider – if it detects the Higgs field – will likely solve a large part of the equation (if it doesn’t destroy us first). The danger is that energy companies will oppose commercialization, since their profits depend almost solely on fossil fuel technology. This attitude may change, however, when extracting oil from the Athabascan Tar Sands, for example, costs companies more than consumers are able to pay, and cash-strapped governments refuse to subsidize the process.
Impossible situations trigger extraordinary events, and the next few decades are about to become inconceivably impossible in terms of energy.
Disclosure: I don’t own stock in any energy company.