g’nōō-bûr

There aren’t many clear paths toward energy independence. Every option has costs that must be considered.

We’re hoping to find a biofuel that doesn’t waste more energy than it produces, cause forests to be razed (some of which are better at removing CO2 than fuel crops, not to mention their other benefits), make food more expensive, require problematic fertilizers, or compete for scarce water. Biofuels present no lack of challenges.

The ‘hydrogen economy’ is looked to with misty, hopeful eyes. Yet it doesn’t anwer our problem. Hydrogen isn’t a source of energy, since we can’t very well go out into interstellar space and harvest it. We have to free it from water or hydrocarbons, requiring more energy than the raw hydrogen can give back. So, hydrogen is just like a battery or high voltage power lines, storing energy or moving it from place to place, but in many ways worse.

Nuclear and small-scale nuclear are promising fields, and should continue to be researched with considerable investment. But only the most arrogant deny the dangers of nuclear waste material and proliferation of even dirty, small-yield weapons material and know-how.

Consider the less-hyped renewables, wind, geothermal, and wave/tidal. There is potential here, as well. Wind power continues to grow in use, a mostly reliable source of power. Geothermal is promising but requires a great deal of research into placement and design of each plant. Wave and tidal power are being explored, with many different approaches being taken, and may one day be our top energy producers.

Finally, solar power is often vaunted. No wonder–it seems so natural to go to the ultimate source of most of our energy and skip the middle men. We found the photovoltaic effect, transmuting light straight into electricity. But we haven’t found inexpensive materials or processes with which to make photovoltaic cells.

Solar thermal seems to be less elegant than photovoltaics, yet it has advantages as a power plant technology. Heat can be concentrated on a large scale and stored in molten salt or other media for electricity production at night. The drawbacks are that plants should be located in high-light desert areas and power must be transmitted to usage areas. However, this need is met by current high-voltage transmission technologies. What is required is the investment to build new transmission lines to solar thermal sites. However, once one plant has been built and proves viable, more plants can be more or less duplicated right next to the first one, since desert areas are vast and often uniform

Please read the links in the paragraphs above and see if you agree with me that society’s investment should, at this moment in time, be concentrated on solar thermal.