Other than burning hydrocarbons in vehicles, the second biggest user of oil, coal, and natural gas is the production of electricity. Electricity is clean and efficient for the end user, but producers have a few problems. Hydroelectric power production is relatively clean but creates a host of down-streams problems as do the producers using hydrocarbon fuels. Both have a common problem: Trasmitting the electricity from the production site to the end user. Electric lines produce what is called “transmission loss”. Essentially, part of the electricity produced is lost in the resistance of the metals in the lines themselves in the form of heat. There isn’t anything miraculous in this, it is basic physics. How much electricity is lost? There are a number of variables, and I’m not enough of an electrical engineer to describe them all, but the end result is that as much as 30% of the electricity produced is lost during transmission from the generators to your toaster. That is the extreme, so probably 15-20% would be an average loss. With the costs and beginning scarcity of fossil fuels at our doorstep, can we really afford to continue producing electricity and distributing it with this sort of waste?
It seems to me that for the sake of efficiency, electricity needs to be produced on site or as close as possible to the end user. While we will find interim alternative energy sources to feed the grid, it is the grid itself that is outmoded. The paradigm of feeding a massive distribution network no longer fits our needs. What is needed is new technology that allows production on site.
So what sort of technology could that be? I have my own ideas, but I’d like to hear what others think would work in our near future. Soooo, put on the thunking caps and tell us what you think…
Houses and neigborhoods could have their own Solar and wind generators both are clean and fairly inexpensive to do and use. I would use both to have redundancy. When its not a sunny day you can just about bet that there will be wind.
As far as energy production is concerned, it just depends on your location. The main problem though has nothing to do with production . . . It’s all about storage.
Personally, I would recommend - compressed air - as a storage medium.
Well, compressed air is definitely low tech, but it seems to me that you end up having to produce the work twice. First, to compress the air, and then using the air to spin up a generator to produce electricity. Low tech, but not very efficient. Did you have some other way of efficient production that I’m missing?
I’d say that high efficiency battery packs are the way to go for storage. But even that might be supplanted by: features.csmonitor.com/environme … r-nirvana/ The future is going to be crunchy, but there are answers out there…
As well as storing it, I think the chief problem we face with ‘green’ sources of power is that though it is abundant, it is extremely dispersed. All methods so far are those of concentration, rather than generation.
I like wave power. As long as the moon doesn’t wander off, we’ll have waves.
The dispersed/concentrated issue: All energy sources we use are simply stored energy from the sun. Burning fossil fuels is just utilizing natural sources of concentrated energy stored millions of years ago. Even nuclear power is energy from materials “cooked” in the heart of a star at some point.
I’m all for direct conversion of sun power. How we store and use it is optional. I still think that high efficiency solar cells will be our best answer. It’s a passive collector and generates electricity that can be used directly or stored It offers greater simplicity than most of the other alternative energy sources.
