More Scientific American on Energy
We ran across this showy little interactive feature from Scientific American recently. It’s part of their ongoing coverage of energy issues, and goes along with their November cover story (which is available by subscription only.)
I’m very curious to hear what you all think of the feature. Has anybody accessed and read the full story? Is the online feature useful on its own? I know some of our white paper authors will take issue with the conclusions! In any case, comments are welcome!
I subscribe to Scientific American, and I carefully read the article “A Path To Sustainable Energy By 2030″ in the November 2009 issue. I have already shared my negative comments with the editors.
The authors tout big physics as the solution to the problem. At least they don’t go overboard with concepts like mining helium-3 on the moon to fuel, non-existent fusion power plants. They also don’t discuss orbiting solar panels. They misstate the problem, and therefore find biofuels totally unacceptable. “To ensure that our system remains clean, we consider only technologies that have near-zero emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollutants over their entire life cycle, including construction, operation and decommissioning.” They then correctly disparaged ethanol. They reject nuclear power and carbon capture and sequestration technologies. Their solution is a massive switch to wind, water or sunlight (WWS). They do think big!
They propose constructing 500,000 tidal turbines, 5000 geothermal plants, 4 million wind turbines, and 700,000 wave converters. They also want a billion rooftop photovoltaic systems, 50,000 concentrated solar power plants, and 40,000 photovoltaic power plants. None of these are in place now.
The bottom line is hidden very well in the last paragraph on page 64 of the article. “Overall construction cost for a WWS system might be on the order of $100 trillion worldwide, over 20 years, not including transmission.
Let’s put that number in perspective. The 2008 financial bailout cost the U.S. taxpayer <$1 trillion. Conservatives screamed over that. If we divide the costs equally among the 6 billion inhabitants of the world, that comes out to $16,000 each. A family of four would have to fork over $64,000. In the United States, that’s two cars or one college education. Poor people of the third world who earn $200/year, would have to work 80 years and spend absolutely nothing on anything else other than this new investment to pay their share. Since the average life span of some countries in Africa is down to 40 years because of AIDS, they would never earn enough in their lifetime. Developed countries will have to pay even more.
Ain’t gonna happen.
The winning solution is going to be the one that makes the best use of existing investment and minimizes a new investment. There is nothing wrong with burning hydrocarbons in cars, planes and trucks as long as those fuels are grown sustainably. The same hydrocarbons could replace coal in providing electricity. You can read more here:
http://alum.mit.edu/news/WhatMatters/Archive/200111/
I and others have proposed that the algae Botryococcus braunii meets these criteria. Berkeley Nobel prize-winning chemist Melvin Calvin identified this algae 15 years ago. He reports the dry weight of the algae consists of 86% hydrocarbons. He determined the structures of many of the compounds in the mixture and the biochemical paths leading to them. He even found biological switches to change the mixture of hydrocarbons the algae produces. Here is the URL:
http://www.osti.gov/bridge/servlets/purl/7286_7lhJF6/webviewable/7286.pdf