Five new technologies article

The Wall Street Journal has an article today about 5 “new” energy technologies to pay attention to. Because our energy future is one of the major investment themes of human future, let’s take a look, shall we? They are as follows…

• space based solar power – Yes, you read that correctly. The idea here is to place massive solar panels in earth orbit and then beam a fraction of the energy back to earth. This idea has been around for decades. I think as a kid I remember reading about it in the New York Times magazine circa 1980-something. Why hasn’t this been developed, yet?

Primarily getting the panels in space is enormously expensive. Secondly, the earthbound station that would receive the transmitted microwaves from the solar panels would have to be enormous; about a mile in diameter. As envisioned this station would deliver power of about 1,000 megawatts. How much is that? That amount of power would serve approximately 240,000 to 300,000 homes. Note: the WSJ article itself says 1,000 households could be served. This is a gross understatement of the number of homes that could be served. Figure 2 people per household and this setup could provide electricity for around half a million people. So a city like Denver (go Broncos!) would need two such arrays of solar panels.

How feasible is it to have a massive array of solar panels 1.5 miles wide occupying space to provide power for everyone on the planet? To me this sounds massively unrealistic. At 6.6 billion people currently we would need 13,200 such arrays to power the earth. That translates into about 19,800 miles worth of solar panels up in space. Meanwhile we would be bombarding the earth with low-level microwaves. What are the long-term health effects of that?

Grade: D

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• advanced car batteries – The technology here is designed so that cars can run on electric power. That would absolutely necessitate a shift to clean electricity generating technologies that in turn power the automobiles. Otherwise you trade one greenhouse gas for another. The problem is that the current best technology of lithium-ion batteries can only send your average weight and average streamlined car about 40 miles on a full charge. Ugh! The big dream is a battery that substitutes for the power output of burning gasoline. That technology, likely lithium-air batteries, is likely a decade away.

Grade: B-

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• utility storage – The holy grail of energy technologies, though rarely discussed, is efficient storage of energy. After all there is plenty of energy around us from the atoms in everything, to sunlight, to wind, to the tides, etc. Most of the clean energy technologies require that the energy be used when generated and any excess is stored in bad battery technology or is just lost. Imagine living in Norway in the winter time and you don’t have an energy source other than solar. Now imagine that the sun shines barely at all in the winter and that any of the excess energy generated in the narrow band of daylight slowly dissipates in a battery or is simply lost. So you freeze to death. The question is how do you store energy once it is generated? We are back to the same issue as in #2 above.

Grade: B-

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• carbon capture and storage – The idea here is to keep coal fired power plants but to re-capture the carbon dioxide emissions of the plants and to pump the gases deep underground. Oil companies would use these gases to increase the flow of existing oil wells. This one just sounds so wrong intuitively it is even hard to discuss. How is this a long-term solution? What do we do once we have run out of underground storage for these gases? What do we do to prevent a massive seismic effect on the earth? What do we do if there is a massive accident and a huge CO2 storage facility leeches huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere all at once? How do we prevent terrorists from targeting such facilities? Etc. Etc.

While economically feasible, this to me does not sound like a long-term solution.

Grade: D-

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• next generation biofuels – Lots of alternatives have been discussed and for many years, but the current frontrunner is algae. Why? Because it grows fast, consumes CO2, and can generate 5,000 gallons of fuel per acre vs. ethanol’s 350 gallons.

Again, while this sounds interesting we have no idea of the long-term environmental effects of a massive switch to algae-based fuels. Pilot projects are moving ahead and look promising. Again, call me crazy but this looks like one of the issues I highlighted in my post about the absolute need for capitalism to price assets correctly. If algae’s long-term environmental effects are damaging, yet unrecognized right now then algae as a biofuel will be underpriced. Underpriced goods are overused and in the long-run the costs, in the form of environmental degradation, rear their ugly head.

Grade: B-

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So what’s a body to do? What about philosophical technologies? Huh? In other words, why not have an international dialogue about population control? If we enforced a birthrate of 1 baby per person on the planet the population would eventually stabilize or decline. The environmental degradation would taper and eventually decline, too. However, don’t expect to see this discussed anytime soon. Conservatives (and probably some liberals, too) would be in an outrage and sound the “that sounds like Communist China” bell. The point is that there are many solutions to the energy crisis that don’t require “magical” technologies, just changes in behavior. Duh!

Jason