(If like me you're a geezer, you'll be seeing the fine hand and inspiration of a certain Jerry Pournelle in all of this--what hat tip could be big enough?)
Five years from now we will be spending prodigious sums of money on alternative ways of generating power. Today, most people think that means building more windmills and installing more solar panels--and that may end up being the case.
But if that is all it means, it will also mean we have missed the bus. If we don't look seriously at systems that produce serious amounts of energy, then this will have been an exercise in ego-stroking and vanity, the equivalent of using a butterfly fan to cool ourselves as we reach for a cocktail on a summer afternoon. Neither windmills nor solar panels will get us to where we need to be. We are apparently too stubborn to license expansion of nuclear power. So what's left on the table?
There are two robust systems that don't get talked about enough: One is OTEC (which when I heard about it was OTS, but times change). OTEC stands for Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, and it exploits the temperature differential between the surface of the ocean and the much colder water x number of feet below. (The bigger x is, the greater the differential and the more power is delivered). You could put thousands of them unobtrusively all over the world.
They've been in existence since, oh, 1930, and there was a pilot plant near Hawaii that produced 50,000 watts during a trial.
Someone will have to explain to me why we are not jumping all over this. It also provides free air conditioning, fish love it and it produces desalinated water. Join the org and see what's up.
The second source is solar power satellites that collect energy and beam it to Earth as microwaves at about 85% efficiency. Now it has an acronym, too SBSP or SSP, for Space Solar Power. Japan's looking at it, the Pentagon says they want to use it, and (finally) a company has been formed to provide it commercially. Again, this has been talked about since 1968, and although numerous engineering problems would need to be solved, nothing new would have to be invented to make this work. Where is the government contract for energy that would kick-start this thing?
If we are going to be serious about alternative energy, let's focus on schemes that will provide an adequate bang for our buck and do not require the invention of new ways of converting and storing energy. Just sayin'.
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