FOREWORD
This is what I have been working on for the past week. It is perhaps a little ambitious given the complexity of the subject, the rate at which all of these technologies change and improve, and the lack of an easy answer. My goal is to explain in brief the origins, interplay, and scope of each type of energy and how they stack up against each other in common units of cost. Obviously, lots of history and context is going to be left out, else this would be more the size of a textbook, but I did my best to include the high points in the stories.
I didn’t write this in one sitting, and frankly, I don’t expect you to read this in one sitting. I have included some section headers to make navigating easier. All in all, writing this one was a lot of fun, as it really gave me a sense of the history of science, technology, and the journey we humans have been trekking for millennia. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed putting it together, and if anything strikes your fancy or is still unclear do not hesitate to use use the Google!
INTRODUCTION
If you ask the average American voter what the second most important factor in this upcoming election is, odds are they will tell you it’s the rising gas prices we are feeling. That is in turn caused by multiple factors such as trade sanctions with Iran, increased demand from India and China, and a speculative futures market which is designed to keep prices stable albeit high. Solutions have ranged from the Keystone XL project to drastically redesigning the automobile, each with varying degrees of impact on the situation. But aside from the few policy wonks out there getting paid to do the research has any sense of America’s energy industry? Well, I’m a chemistry nerd with too much free time. Challenge accepted!
What follows is a brief history on renewable and non-renewable energies, their relative costs of production, a survey of current projects, and ways in which individual homes can meet their own energy needs. Before we have that discussion, we need to mention that people all around the world pay very different prices for electricity for a variety of reasons. The United States pays on average 11 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh), which is comparable to Russia, who pays 9.58 cents per kWh. We enjoy these low rates thanks to a first world infrastructure and plentiful reserves of coal and natural gas. Some nations in Europe have been passing legislation trying to tax energy use in an effort to curb consumption, resulting bills on the order of 30 U.S. cents per kWh. Great Britain and France are slightly lower, at about 20 cents, and China pays about 16 cents per kWh, a balance struck between large coal reserves and a growing middle class.
It is important to consider these factors when asking whether a nation is ready for redefining it’s energy market; currently solar cell technology looks very appealing to a smog-addled suburban China, yet America is still enjoying low prices and is not ready to commit to the more expensive juice. These numbers only serve to show that the cost of electricity generation runs a very large gamut, and the smaller scale the energy plan, the better it can be tailored to the readily available resources.
Much of this information was collected by the United States Energy Information Administration, which is a division of the Department of Energy. In today’s world, both technology and circumstances change rapidly, and our government keeps pace by constantly reviewing the information and occasionally releasing its findings (recently in 2009 and 2011). Unless otherwise noted, the information is cited from this source, with a full list of sources to be included at the end.
FOSSIL FUELS
Almost all of the electricity we generate comes from exploiting the same principle. Michael Faraday demonstrated the first electrical generator in 1831. The breakthrough came when he realized that moving magnetic fields can induce motion in the electrons of a conducting material, which we call a current. Fossil fuels current supply ninety-two percent of our electricity and they all function in the same way: by converting chemical energy into heat, then into mechanical energy, and then into electrical energy.
For example, a lump of coal is composed of chemical bonds that will burn rapidly once ignited, meaning all of it’s energy is stored in its chemistry. Once we burn the coal, it gets converted into heat energy which we direct at water. Once the water boils, it moves through a turbine and pushes a series of magnets around a length of copper. Thus turning the mechanical energy into electrical energy. The water then condenses and returns to the reservoir to be reboiled. This type of engine is called a Rankine cycle and it describes the power generated from coal, solar thermal, biomass, and nuclear reactors.
Alternatively, gaseous fuels are injected into an air breathing engine, which then ignites and heats the air within the engine. This hot air rushes out of the back of the turbine, spinning many little fan blades as it goes. This mechanical energy is then used to rotate magnets around a length of copper to generate electricity. This type of engine is known as the Brayton cycle and is what enables our natural gas fired power plants, as well as our airplane engines.
Both of these formats operate on the same principle; extract heat from chemically stored sources, and then use it to move a turbine. The cost of generating electricity is therefore largely dependent on the costs of fuel, which aren’t always direct.
Coal
A great example of this is, again, coal. Up to the 1830s, coal was a tremendous asset to the people of the time. Settlers would lug it across the world as a great source of heat and light. It could also be crushed up and refined into black powder for their weapons. The ash that results from burning coal can be used to smelt steel from iron. Eventually, with the invention of the steam engine, coal became a valuable asset. It was the fuel that allowed locomotives to drag tons of raw material over mountains. The expansion of the railways coincided with the explosion of the coal mining industry. In the late 19th century, Thomas Edison secured the patents to electrical generation and coal was then praised again as the bringer of electricity. For decades, we mined it out of the ground and burned it by the tons. The air became so clogged with soot, irritants, and acid rain that four thousand people died in the ‘Great Smog of 1952’ over London.
Since then, we have become more aware of the relationship between what we do and how it affects our environment. Many nations have passed Clean Air legislation, and those that haven’t inevitably do. Typical requirements include capturing the soot and pollutants before it gets added to the environment, or else paying a fine. The exact nature of the regulations vary by administration, but the essence of the fight is eternal; we must choose between an unfettered industry or air that is fit to breathe. Despite this, coal remains very competitive on the energy market, partially due to a re-branding effort towards ‘Clean Coal’. The Department of Energy estimates that a new coal-fired plant could provide electricity at between 9.48 and 13.62 cents per kWh, a nice price for Americans. Consequently, it provides twenty-one percent of America’s energy needs.
Natural Gas
Natural gas is often found mixed in with oil deposits. The gas was a common cause of explosions in the early oil industry and so it was important that this gas be burned off on site. By the 19th century, entrepreneurs had started harvesting this gas for use in streetlights giving us ‘gaslights’ in most major cities. Coal and oil were still the preferred fuels because of their ease of storage and shipping. Natural gas was just as good at generating power, but it had to be compressed and piped around and had a tendency to escape from leaks. It wasn’t for several decades after the coal-fired power stations came into operation that the necessary engineering expertise became available to use the gas fuel to generate power. Even then, it was considered inferior to coal.
When the fuss began over the environmental consequences of coal, natural gas was seen as a relatively cleaner fuel source while still providing plenty of cheap electricity. So, since it is cheaper and cleaner than coal, natural gas power saw an increase in use ever since the 1940s, peaking in the 70s and holding steady to today. The D.O.E. predicts that natural gas power would be sold between 6.61 and 10.35 cents per kWh. In order to meet the demand for the ‘fuel of tomorrow’, companies are using more experimental techniques to get the gas out of the ground. In order to free up the trapped gas reserves, they are pressurizing the bedrock with water, hydraulic fracturing fluid, radioactive tracers, and other chemicals. The rock networks crumble and all of the gas floats to the top where it can be collected. Unfortunately, it is also causing the collapse of the underground aquifers. Households across Pennsylvania and New York where the drilling is being done most are reporting that their tap water is putrid, gas-colored, and flammable. The negative attention has put ‘fracking’ on the political map, with many calling for an immediate ban on that specific technique.
Nuclear
The final “fossil fuel” that will be discussed is of the radioactive persuasion. Nuclear fission became theoretically possible in the first half of the 20th century, and was successfully weaponized by the United States prior to victory in the Pacific theater of war. The first and only two bombs to ever be purposefully used against humans were both dropped in 1945 on Japanese cities. The destruction was so impressive, it caused the capitulation of the Japanese forces, who were up to that point willing to fly directly into the enemy ships. Ten years after that, the first nuclear power plants came to life. The energy slowly dripping out of the reactors to heat water and perform the Rankine cycle. Nuclear warheads are typically enriched to over ninety percent U-235, which makes them very destructive, whereas nuclear fuel rods are enriched to about five percent for most reactors. As technology increases, this requirement is decreasing, and the fourth generation of nuclear reactors are being designed to use un-enriched fuel. It is the lower concentration of the unstable U-235 that allows the energy to slowly flow out of the fuel.
Technically, since Uranium is only produced in supernovae and the Earth is not being constantly showered with the remains of a supernova, it’s supply is finite. However, do a little math, and the problem shrinks away off into the distance. Consider that America uses each year about 97 ‘quads’ of energy, where each quad is equal to a quadrillion British Thermal Units (BTU) or 293 billion kWh. That corresponds to about 82,500 tons of Uranium fuel each year. Well, there is about 11 billion tons of Uranium dissolved in our oceans alone, or enough for over 1.3 million years of fuel at current electrical consumption. If we manage to deplete that store, there is 10,000 times as much in the top twenty-five kilometers of the Earth’s crush that will slowly dissolve and enter the oceans over time or can be mined as the raw ore, ‘yellowcake’. In fact, it has been estimated that half of all of the energy that makes lava hot comes from radioactive elements, of which Uranium is the primary culprit. All tolled, nuclear power makes up nine percent of America’s energy supply and can be provided at 11.39 cents per kWh; on par with both coal and natural gas.
ALTERNATIVE ENERGY SOURCES
Renewable energy sources differ from fossil fuels in one important aspect; the natural phenomena that are being exploited are being continuously generated and there is no way we could hope to run them dry. Starting with the most immediate source of energy on this planet, the sun, we receive 1,366 watts per square meter from the sun. This light is most concentrated at the equator due to our atmosphere and the curvature of the Earth. Therefore, the 9.4 million square kilometers of the Sahara desert receives more energy in a single day than the entire world consumes in a single year, which was 142.3 petawatt hours in 2008. The solar energy is in the form of photons radiated from the sun and striking our atmosphere causing wind, striking our oceans causing currents, and striking our land causing rain forests and deserts alike. It is this enormous sum of energy that makes the Earth a living thing; it powers the forests, it invigorates the animals, and it causes most weather events.
Photovoltaics and Concentrated Solar Power
It was discovered that light could be used to excite electrons in 1887 by Hertz, which then sparked interest in several other researchers including Aleksandre Stoletov, the Russian inventor, founder of electrical engineering, and creator of the first practical solar cell. In studying one of these early devices in 1902, it became clear to Hungarian physicist Philipp Lenard that there were flaws in our understanding of light. From Maxwell’s wave theory of light, it was assumed that the energy of the photons was expressed as an increased intensity. Higher energy photons would therefore be brighter. However, Lenard noticed that the energy of the electrons being excited increased with the frequency, or the color, and not the intensity. In one of Albert Einstein’s ‘Annus Mirabilis’ papers of 1905, he explained how light was more appropriately described as discrete photons; each photon moves at the same speed and vibrates at different frequencies which give us the electromagnetic spectrum. The energy was therefore expressed as the frequency, with the intensity describing the amount of photons present.
It wasn’t until Russel Ohl of Bell Laboratories discovered the benefits of certain impurities in semiconductors in 1939 that solar cells started taking on their modern forms. By 1946, he had a patent on ‘light sensitive devices’, and the first practical solar cells were created in 1954. At this point, most solar cells were novelties and failed to do anything more substantial than measure the intensity of light or power a child’s toys. When NASA started looking for convenient ways to power their machines in the vacuum of space, the solar cells started to appreciate into a viable energy supply. Costs were cut when engineers realized that the quality of circuit boards was vastly superior to what was needed, so by cutting back on materials they were able to drop the prices to rates that make them competitive with modern energy sources. Currently, photovoltaics and dye-sensitized cells produce electricity at about 21 cents per kWh.
Much more effective and brutish is the technique known as Concentrated Solar Power (CSP), where instead of dozens of solar panels are lined up to harness individual photons, mirrors are all focused on a tower with a tube of water usually collecting all of the energy in the form of heat. The water boils and turns a conventional turbine, generating electricity the old-fashioned way. When the concept was proved in Italy in 1968, the technology was further developed in America. At first, a test tower known as Solar One was built in the Mojave desert. When that turned out to be a winning idea, the Solar Energy Generating Systems (SEGS) were also built. Now, it costs about 31.18 cents per kWh to generate electricity using CSP. However, since the fuel for solar technologies is basically free, the best way to reduce cost is to reduce the cost of fabrication.
Both solar panels and concentrated solar power comprise only a tenth of a percent of our total energy market (shocking, right?), but by subsidizing the production and installation this is hoped to increase in the double digits within a few decades.
Wind
The rest of the sun’s energy gets absorbed by the air and seas, causing them to heat up and move around. The air tends to be hotter at the equator and then slowly spirals towards the poles, reducing the temperature gradient. It is this transfer of energy that enables trade winds and currents. We have been using this energy to fill our sails and travel across water for over five thousand years, to grind our grains and pump our water for over a thousand, and in 1887 it was first used to generate electricity for the home and laboratory of James Blyth, a Scottish electrical engineer. He had offered to share some of his excess power to light the larger town streets, but they turned down his offer fearing it was the work of the devil. For the next few decades, the technology was scaled up slowly to meet the needs of rural homes and communities. In 1931, a 100 kW tower was constructed in Balaklava, Crimea by the Soviets which lasted for two years. The American Smith-Putnam wind turbine attempted to one up that with its 1.25 megawatt (MW) capacity. However, due to war-time material shortages, the blades were improperly reinforced and the tower failed after a month and a half.
Modern wind turbines are all based off the prototype constructed by the Tvind school in Ulfborg, Denmark in 1974. The teachers and students built the turbine in response to the construction of a nuclear power plant in nearby Sweden. The goal was to meet the needs of the community, make a statement in the debate over nuclear power, prove the value of self-reliance, and to demonstrate that the wind cannot be monopolized like nuclear fuel or any other fuel could be. By 1978. the ‘Tvindkraft’, Danish for Tvind power, was putting out twice as much electricity as the town’s grid could support, and the excess energy was being used to heat the school. The design became an instant success and the entire wind industry took off with a handful of Danish companies. These days, wind farms can produce electricity for 9.7 cents per kWh if placed on-shore near the demand for electricity. Sadly, many people think the ‘wind farms’ are ugly, leading to a NIMBY mentality over their construction. It has been calculated that wind farms can be built in the ocean to capture the sea-breezes, but the increased cost of construction and power lost due to long-distance transfer make the cost at 24.3 cents per kWh. Consequently, the wind industry has only captured 2.3% of America’s energy market.
Hydroelectric
Rivers. With few exceptions, they flow in the same direction year round, are usually fresh water, and often they swell seasonally naturally irrigating the lands for farming. River valleys hosted some of the earliest civilizations, including Egypt (Nile), Mesopotamia (Tigris-Euphrates), two in India (Indus, Ganges), and China (Yellow). Besides providing food and water, rivers were also commonly used for transportation, waste removal, defense, fishing, and other uses. Many of the river valley civilizations had developed waterwheels which would convert the river’s momentum into grinding flour, sawing logs, and pumping water to farmlands. Waterwheels saw a resurgence by the time of the industrial revolution in England where they powered the textile looms for a time. The textile looms of England kept their knowledge a close secret and sold their mass-produced goods in the colonies where they drastically undercut the handmade American textiles. At the outset of America’s industrial revolution, these mills were recreated in Lowell, Massachusetts which greatly helped right the textile trade imbalance.
The first generation of hydroelectricity was in England in 1878, while the first commercial-scale version was Niagara power station number one built in 1881. This plant had a capacity of 37 MW, and set the stage for a massive growth in hydroelectricity. The designs were improved by Lester Pelton early on, and by 1920, forty percent of our electricity was generated by such plants. Drawing power from moving water was so valued, it became known as ‘white coal’. When the depression struck in the 1930s, the federal government attempted to curb unemployment with large public works projects. Enter the Hoover Dam, built in 1931 and boasting seventeen turbines. At the time there was no grid for the Dam to connect to so most turbines were dedicated to their own municipalities. The total capacity upon completion in 1936 was 1,345 MW, the largest in the world at the time. The title was subsequently passed to the Grand Coulee Dam (6,809 MW) in Washington state, the Itaipu Dam (14,000 MW) in Brazil, and finally by the Three Gorges Dam (22,500 MW) in China.
Hydroelectricity plants are the largest power producers in the world; the Three Gorges Dam has almost three times the capacity of the largest non-hydro plant, a Japanese nuclear power plant. However, the act of damming a river causes the formation of an artificial lake. If this isn’t well planned for, the damage to the environment can be devastating. The Three Gorges Dam has been plagued with such issues. Silt no longer flows downriver to its natural deposition site as the foundation for Shanghai, the dam flooded archaeological sites and displaced over a million people, and it was built five hundred meters from a fault line. The last one is potentially catastrophic, because the 320 million tons of water are weighing down on the Earth’s crust and it is causing landslides and earthquakes around the dam. Imagine if one of these snapped the dam, and the massive twenty-two cubic kilometer reservoir emptied out and flooded the communities downriver. On the flip-side, the dam has off-set the burning of 31 million tons of coal annually and the millions of tons of greenhouse gases, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitric oxide, and mercury that comes along with burning coal. Hydroelectricity currently provides 6% of America’s electrical needs at 8.6 cents per kWh.
Geothermal
At the turn of the 20th century, nations were interested in new ways to power their economies. Italians in 1904 were able to extract the thermal energy just under the ground that provided the heat for hot springs to power a few light bulbs. Tubes are drilled down into the rocks were hot water constantly percolates up to the surface. This energy is used to boil water in a closed circuit. The steam rises and works a turbine, then condenses and falls back into the bottom of the well. In the 20s, America and Japan experimented with the technology but declined to seriously commit. Italy had the only commercial geothermal plants until New Zealand built a 175 MW plant over one of its active hot springs in 1958. Today, the United States is the largest producer of geothermal power in the world, hosting 3,086 MW of the total 10,715 MW. Most of these are located in California, but anywhere the heat from the Earth comes to the surface is suitable for a power plant.
Starting in 1974, the United States worked to improve the design so that it was compatible with areas that were hot enough but lacked the percolating water to move around the heat. Undeterred, the Americans used the hydraulic fracturing technique for natural gas extraction to force water down into the dry, hot rocks. The water would then percolate up through the rocks, simulating the action of the hot springs and boosting the efficiency and applicability of geothermal power plants. Unfortunately, in a few rare cases this variation of fracking has been known to cause earthquakes and other geological instabilities. Notwithstanding, geothermal power provides 0.37% of America’s electricity at 10.1 cents per kWh.
Tidal
Related to the hydroelectric plants, the tidal plants operate by letting the tides naturally fill a reservoir, which is then closed off and allowed to filter through turbines generating electricity. This way the creation of a reservoir lake becomes unnecessary to generate electricity, thus avoiding many of the environmental impacts. However, finding suitable sites is tricky and often met with trans-national and engineering complications. For example, America and Canada considered building such a plant between Maine and New Brunswick in 1961, but it was considered only beneficial to the States and Canada declined to enter the project. The first large scale facility was completed in La Rance, France in 1966 with a capacity of 240 MW, and it remained the largest until South Korea completed a 254 MW version in 2011. South Korea is able to provide the power generated to its people at the equivalent of 8.8 U.S. cents per kWh. Currently, the United States has no tidal plants despite having done the preparatory research several times.
TRANSPORTATION FUELS
Now we change gears to a whole new sector of the economy; the transportation sector. Planes, trains, and automobiles all run on some form of petroleum product these days. Oil and all of the products derived therefrom constitute 37% of all of the energy used in the United States, hence the expression ‘Big Oil’. The story of how we came to live in a world where there are more cars than people by weight goes back before oil, to the origins of the internal combustion engine. For the sake of discussion, the ‘internal combustion engine’ is anything where the engine is included within the device itself, unlike a stationary power plant. Example, the Greeks were the first to experiment with enclosed steam engines. A Pythagorean named Archytas designed small, wooden birds that would propel themselves along wires. Hero’s aeolipile was a self-contained steam engine that rotated a rod, but it was never developed into anything more complicated than an automatic spit-turner. A better fuel was needed to get the machines moving on their own.
Rocketry
The story of rocketry is one of mysticism, fantasy, war, and perseverance. In 9th century China, alchemists searching for the elixir of life accidentally invented gunpowder. It was subsequently used in fireworks and then weaponized into rockets with an effective range of over three hundred yards. China used these bamboo rockets to repel the invading Mongols, but where muscle failed, money succeeded. Chinese alchemists were soon working for Genghis Khan and his horde when they invaded the Middle East, spreading the knowledge to there and on to Europe. Through a combination of brutal tactics and cutting edge weaponry, the Mongols created the largest contiguous land empire ever created, bested only in size by the British Empire. At the time of the Golden Horde, England was still fragmented into a half-dozen kingdoms and were unsuccessfully fending off the Normans. So when they saw the next incarnation of the rocket, it took them by surprise.
Knowledge of gunpowder and rockets eventually spread to India and was eventually improved and made into a staple of the Mysorean military. The paper or bamboo casing of the rockets was replaced with an iron tube that would withstand the heat and pressure of the burning gunpowder, giving the rockets an increased range of a thousand yards. Attached to the iron tube was fixed a length of wood which was then seated with a further weapon, often swords. That’s right. When the British tried to annex the Kingdom of Mysore in 1780, they were met with volley after volley of rocket propelled swords coming straight at them. One of these rockets managed to ignite the main cache of gunpowder the British had brought to the fight and the battle ended shortly after that. These rockets were so effective, and the British so psychologically and physically defeated, that they immediately set out to reverse engineer them. A version known as the Congreve rocket was used during the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812. They were never used without cannon as well, and they weren’t as effective as their Mysorean counterparts. Eventually, trench warfare tactics made their use, and the cannon, obsolete, and they fell out of usage.
The next steps in the evolution of the rocket involved increasing both it’s accuracy and range, which were influenced in part by the works of science-fiction authors (as previously testified on this blog). When Jules Verne proposed that humanity could visit the very depths of the sea using advanced technology, two things happened. First, we set about making it a reality, eventually leading to a weaponized form by World War I and a visit to the deepest part of the ocean by 1953. Second, we dreamed even bigger. H.G. Wells wrote the The War of the Worlds in 1898 about Martians invading Earth in the heart of ‘meteors’. Clearly a work of fiction, it was every bit as gripping as the 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne, where humans climbed into a massive bullet and fired themselves from a cannon to the moon. In 1903, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a Russian high-school mathematics teacher, published a book called ‘The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices’, or, in other words, “how to get off of Earth using rockets”. In it, some of the preliminary mathematics were stated for rocket travel, as well as the suggestion that hydrogen be used as the fuel source. The book generated so much attention within Russia that a Society for Studies of Interplanetary Travel in Russia was started, but did not get much notice outside of his country until later on.
Rockets were poised to get bigger and faster. An American physicist named Robert Goddard began experimenting with rocketry on his own budget. Goddard was able to increase the efficiency of rockets from two percent to over sixty percent. After running his funds dry and scaring the bejesus out of a janitor, Robert presented his results and was able to secure several sources of funding. Goddard envisioned that his rockets would have a variety of uses; photographing the moon during a fly-by, and sending messages to other planets on metal plates, and the use of solar energy and ion propulsion. He wrote as much in a letter to his largest sponsor, the Smithsonian Institute. The letter was immediately ridiculed by the press and public at large. His critics asserted that the thrust of an engine wouldn’t function in a vacuum, a consequence of Newton’s third law of action and reaction. However, Goddard had proved five years earlier that rockets not only work in a vacuum, but they work better without an atmosphere to resist. The fiasco caused him to withdraw from public attention, since he would rather work without any attention than to have to explain every step of his work to people who thought him crazy.
A German named Hermann Oberth got into the field of astronautics at the same time as Goddard, eventually firing his first liquid fueled rocket three years after Goddard launched his. Before that, he wrote a doctoral dissertation in 1922 titled By Rocket into Planetary Space, which was dismissed as being ‘utopian’. Undeterred, he launched his rocket in 1929 with the assistance of an eighteen year old Wernher von Braun. The Nazis didn’t fail to underestimate the value of such a device, and their investment yielded the V-2 rocket program. In 1944, their design could travel over two hundred miles and was used to terrorize the cities of Paris and especially London until Germany finally surrendered in 1945. The Americans carried out Operation: Paperclip where they smuggled as many of the Nazi scientists back into the States under fake identities so they could continue their research. The capturing of personnel and technology gave America its foundation for NASA and the space program. Von Braun himself would go on to create the Saturn V rockets, which first delivered man to the moon in 1969, almost fifty years after the nation spurned Goddard for his assertions. A day after the launch of the Apollo 11 rocket, the New York Times issued a correction, declaring that Newton’s third law does in fact apply to vacuums.
Still, commercial space transportation is still in the works. The cost to deliver something to Low Earth Orbit, just beyond our atmosphere, ranges between five and ten thousand dollars per kilogram. Therefore, a one way ticket to space would cost the average human $600,000 USD, a little too high even for the upwardly mobile American. In order to bring the costs down, President Obama has asked NASA to discontinue its shuttle program, and has redirected the agency to organize the private companies willing to help advance the space frontier.
Other forms of propulsion.
As previously mentioned, the ancient Greeks had both the power of steam and a dominant naval presence in the Mediterranean, but the idea of putting them together did not occur at the time. A few thousand years later, nations started undergoing industrial revolutions which generated much interest in engines more powerful than a team of horses or a river’s flow.
The first modern chemist Robert Boyle was working with experimentally created vacuums when he was struck with what is now known as Boyle’s law; pressure and volume are inversely related for gases. In 1679, a Frenchman and associate of Boyle named Denis Papin invented a ‘steam digester’ used to convert bones into bone meal, an important fertilizer. It was a metal device with a well-fitted lid to trap steam that was pumped into the container. After a contained exploded from the pressure, he replaced the lid with a piston that would release excess pressure. Papin watched his piston move up and down as the steam flowed into the chamber, and was inspired to draw up plans for the first piston steam engine.
Papin’s designs were helpful to a one Thomas Savery who did build the world’s first steam engine, which was very inefficient and prone to boiler explosions. Two decades later, Thomas Newcomen built a two-stroke water pump that enjoyed commercial success in mining and industry. This was followed by the addition of a second piston by Jacob Leupold a few years later. James Watt (namesake of the Watt unit) in 1763, added a separate condenser for the steam which was submersed in cold water. This difference in temperature increased the efficiency of the engine by four-fold. Up to this point, the engines created steam and then introduced it into a chamber where it condenses. As the gas cools the volume drops and the piston is sucked down into the cylinder, creating the mechanical force of the motor. Around 1800, two separate inventors reversed the process and used high pressure steam to force pistons up and out of the cylinder, drastically improving the power and making it feasible for transportation use. Shortly after that, Arthur Woolf built a high-pressure compound steam engine which dominated the market for over a hundred years.
Sadi Carnot, a young French engineer, started analyzing engines and how they functioned. In his 1824 treatise titled On the Motive Power of Fire, he proposed that the efficiency is greatest when the difference in temperature is greatest and also that steam isn’t the only fluid capable of doing work. His text also had two very important features. First, it was written for the novice; it featured very little math, preferring algebra and employing calculus only when necessary. Second, Carnot develops the concept of an ‘ideal heat engine’, where he can dissect the order of events within the machine and consider ways to improve the efficiency on paper. By doing so, he clearly laid out the goal posts of a perfect engine, something engineers up to that point were stumbling blindly towards. However, Carnot lacked an accurate account of the mechanics of ‘heat’, and due to his untimely death at age thirty-six he was unable to refine his work. This task was undertaken twenty years later by the great physicists Clapeyron, and then Clausius and Lord Kelvin, with their combined efforts establishing the field of thermodynamics.
In the latter half of that century, engines were starting to become mass produced in Germany. Nikolaus Otto, of the Otto cycle, tried to assert that his patents prevented others from getting into the business. The German courts denied him this protections and soon four-stroke cycles featuring in-cylinder compression became the standard for engines. Internal combustion engines were being manufactured in nations all over the world and being built in shapes and sizes that would fit into cars, planes, boats, and trains. It became a matter of national pride. Two world wars were fought where nations pitted their technical craftsmanship against each other by building tanks, fighter planes, and warships. Since then, planes were fitted with with jet turbines and broke Mach 3 in 1964, trains started hovering over magnets in 1971, and ships started using nuclear propulsion in 1955. Cars haven’t changed much since the early 1900s with the exceptions of government mandated improvements in safety and emissions.
Alternative Fuels
But that might change soon! The car is on the verge of being completely redesigned in an effort to move away from fossil fuels. Hydrogen gas burns hotter and faster than gasoline and has the potential to power traditional piston engines and electric motors via a fuel cell. Hydrogen has massive Achilles’ heel, sadly. When compressed, it has a the possibility to explode similar to a pipe bomb. Would you feel safe parking your car out of eyesight if some tampering turns your chariot into a coffin? Even if it isn’t pressurized, it is still very flammable; the hydrogen-floated Hindenburg’s accident utterly annihilated the airship industry at the time. To deal with this issue, scientists are currently working on ‘metal-organic frameworks’, which are essentially molecular sponges for hydrogen. When exposed to a highly pressurized quantity of hydrogen, the gas rushes into the network of hydrocarbon-linked copper or zinc atoms. When allowed to feed an engine, the hydrogen gas seeps out as needed to power the automobile. Thus the hydrogen can be stored within the car in a safe and efficient way.
We have taken to adding ethanol to our gasoline to cut our dependence on oil. Currently, America is using ten percent ethanol in its gasoline. One other nations has pushed the envelope even further, Brazil uses twenty-five percent ethanol in its gasoline. But let’s compare the two for a moment. They have roughly the same density, both are liquid at room temperature and burn readily, pound for pound the ethanol is three-fifths the power of gasoline, but ethanol evaporates at a lower temperature meaning engines need less time to warm up. Really, they are practically interchangeable. In fact, Henry Ford’s first factory produced car, the Model T, ran on either ethanol or gasoline or any mix of them. So why can’t we run our modern cars off of gasoline? How much modification to existing designs would it take to make a one-hundred percent ethanol car? If we grow tons and tons of corn and ferment the ears of corn into ethanol fuel, all of the excess plant material is all carbon fixed from the atmosphere. The more fuel we grow, the more of the damage we can reverse from burning all that coal and gasoline.
Finally, a point about public transportation and urban development. The middle class of America has owned cars for over half a century, and it has reshaped our entire nation. The suburbs, highway systems, city streets, gas stations, parking lots, driver’s licenses, and even car insurance are all consequences of such mass ownership of vehicles. It makes us who we are, and we shouldn’t change it. However, is the highway system really the best we can do? I mean, it’s crumbling, thirty to forty thousand people die annually on it, and it requires everyone involved to be on their game and happy campers which isn’t always the case. In Japan just after world war two, the nation was booming under western influences. The island nation was getting crowded and they had to find a way to move everyone around between the cities without importing all of their gasoline. The answer they came up with was a network of high speed railways, magnetic levitation. By the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo, the first intercity railway was opened, featuring a top speed of 160 miles an hour. Now imagine, from coast to coast and between every cities with population greater than a million people connected in a massive network of trains moving no less than 150 miles an hour. If we all insist it gets built and then actually use it as often as we drive across state borders, think of all the money, lives, time, and pollution we could spare.
CURRENT PROJECTS
Here’s a selection of revolutionary research projects underway in no particular order.
DESERTEC, a consortium of energy companies many of which are from Germany, is working on extending the existing renewable energy infrastructure to completely encircle the Mediterranean. By constructing solar energy farms across the Sahara desert, wind farms along the oceans, and transferring the power by high voltage direct current power lines, the group anticipates providing 15% of Europe’s energy upon completion of the ‘super-smart grid’.
Google is investing in concentrated solar power as well. Their goal is to cut the cost of producing the mirrors in half, effectively cutting the cost of electricity in half (since the fuel is free, remember?). If successful, the price should drop from 30 cents to 15 cents per kilowatt hour, bringing it that much closer to parity with fossil fuels.
General Electric and two other companies are constructing a large geothermal plant in Tawau, Malaysia to supplement their existing geothermal plant. This is expected to meet 100% of the cities electrical needs.
TerraPower, a nuclear reactor research company sponsored by Bill Gates, has done the homework to show that nuclear power plants do not need to enrich their fuel at all given the right designs. Rather than igniting the neutron cascade with enriched uranium and then feeding it non-enriched fuel, the plan is to ignite the reactor using smaller atoms such as boron to begin the cascade. Thus, the fuel never needs to be re-concentrated and the worry over nuclear proliferation drops drastically. There would be no ambiguity in Iran’s enrichment program because it would have no reason to exist.
Remember when the earthquake and subsequent tsunami caused a meltdown in Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant? Well, the plan is not to repair the long-lived reactor, but instead to drill the nation’s largest geothermal well which will make up the difference in the city’s power consumption. All eighteen geothermal plants Japan currently operates survived the earthquake and tsunami with minimal downtime.
And finally, the United States Army is investing seven billion dollars in renewable energy sources in its effort to produce twenty-five percent of its electricity in such ways by 2025. Besides setting a great precedent, the influx of government cash is expected to help boost the fledgling industries until the private sector is more willing to commit its own capital.
MARKET LIBERALIZATION
The goal of ‘market liberalization’ efforts is to encourage homeowners to maintain their own sources of electricity, similar to how we maintain our own cars or swimming pools already. Ideally, if everyone had a system of solar panels and battery storage on their rooftops, we wouldn’t need coal, nuclear materials, or even gasoline if you already have an electric car you can plug into your home, Since that isn’t likely to happen overnight, we are retrofitting our existing grid to accommodate the slow trickle of homes onto renewable sources This new grid is to be called a ‘smart grid’ which will turn the power line attached to your house into a two-way street; when you need more juice than your own means can provide your power company will supplement them, and when you are generating more power than you can consume the power company buys it back from you for the price it would have cost them to produce the same electricity.
It is said that the best power solutions are tailored to each site to best take advantage of the resources available, be they land, sea, or air. Currently, there are three options for small scale, renewable electricity generation.
The most obvious answer is solar power. Wholesale suppliers of panels will deliver and install a 692 kWh/month system that will meet your needs for just over eleven thousand dollars, not including the state by state subsidies and the federal subsidy available. If you live in California, fully half of your solar power system would be paid for by the government. These systems will work anywhere on Earth where there is regular sunshine, but work best closer towards the equator.
If your home is gifted with a continuous breeze, small wind turbines can be erected near your home. There are a variety of types and capacities available also over the internet. The most cost-effective one I could find is $750 a pop and provides 38 kWh/month and can be placed in multiples. For cost comparison purposes, using wind turbines to achieve the same electricity production as above would cost $13,657, and there are no government subsidies. The advantage of wind power is that it stays constant all day and night long.
The last option is for those with a creek or flowing water near the house that doesn’t dry up at any time during the year. It has been dubbed ‘small hydro’ and is currently for the hobbyist or mechanically-inclined individual. The idea is to use the momentum of the water to power your home just like larger hydroelectric dams or the classical waterwheel. One anecdote states that a small river that widens and narrows with the season (but never dries up) provides their home with 1,461 kWh/month year round at a cost of $11,000 dollars; most likely not going to be subsidized either.
As for other options, geothermal is still not scaled down small enough to supply just a single home. Frequently they are installed with public funds to power an entire, small community where there is no local power plant to provide for them. Tidal power is something that perhaps will only ever be on the scale of national interests, and why would you bother to install a gasoline generator given the choice? It’s noisy and expensive.
CONCLUSIONS
Electrical production and consumption is a relatively new thing, just over one hundred years old now. Our energy market undergone several changes in composition, scale, and infrastructure. Up until recently, most of this has been generated by fossil fuels which are potent and convenient, but come at a terrible cost to the environment if not properly offset with. Carl Sagan in his 1980 documentary, Cosmos, declared that “Our generation must choose, which do we value more: short-term profits or the long-term habitability of our planetary home? The world is divided politically, but ecologically it is tightly inter-woven. There are no useless threads in the fabric of the ecosystem. If you cut any one of them, you will unravel many others.”
That was thirty years ago. If anything has become clearer since his program, it is that those who have chosen short-term profits are also those who hold political influence. Carl himself suggest a four point plant to deal with our addiction to fossil fuels:
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“Much more efficient use of fossil fuels, such as cars that get seventy miles per gallon of gasoline.” Currently, hybrid cars can get upwards of fifty MPG the current ‘hyper miler’ record set in 2008 is a max fuel economy of 124 miles per gallon.
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“Research and development into safe, alternative energy sources, especially solar power.” Needs no further explanation.
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“Reforestation on a large scale.” Forests cover thirty percent of the Earth’s landmass, although historically they covered up to half of the landscape. Ever since the industrial revolution when lumber was sought as both a fuel and a building material, the rates of destruction spiked and it is now estimated that half of all rainforests are gone.
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“Helping to bring the billion poorest people on the planet to self-sufficiency, which is a key step towards curbing world population.” We recently marked the seven billionth living human’s birth, and estimates place our max population at about ten billion which we will achieve by 2050.
A generation has been born since he stated the problem and suggested a solution, and we have yet to tackle the problem in earnest. How much farther do we plan to kick this can down the road? I am about to celebrate my twenty-third birthday, I was not even born when Carl Sagan made stated his case, and yet I can understand the problem, can see the options laid before us. With the government subsidies in place for many Americans, solar power is already on parity with conventional sources of power. All that holds us back is our denial of the problem or our lethargy.
Ever since the days of Standard Oil and Rockefeller, ‘Big Oil’ has raked in piles and piles of money for organizing the energy markets of this country. Yet we now live in an era where one does not need to be a Scottish electrical engineer to power a house with the wind or the sun. Exxon Mobil and General Electric are counting on your inaction, on the human mind to make a mountain out of the molehill, so as to continue the trends forever. They have made the choice very decisively for short-term profits; it is their charge on behalf of shareholders. But the Earth has no shareholders, and at the same time we are all it’s shareholders.
Insist that things change! Upgrade your home and transportation to more sustainable options, plant a few more plants in your garden, vote for those who would use our nation’s treasure to improve the quality of life for its inhabitants through building our own DESERTEC-like programs or through high-speed rail networks. Challenge people when they say things such as “the Earth will never change, and human’s are certainly incapable of such a feat.” That is demonstrably false, and to prove it once and for all we can and should reverse this awful trend of pollution and indiscriminate burning of fossils. Communicate with your friends, family, and children about the matter; odds are they will be dealing with the problem in turn as well.
When humanity was much fewer in number and lived by gathering food and shelter from the forests, our impact is minimal. Yet, when we inevitably arrive at the big ten billion mark, it will become more important than ever that we become the guardians of our own planet. By experimenting to that end now on Earth, we might also learn something useful for the future when we are trying to find ways to make uninhabitable worlds like Mars or Venus into comfortable vacation homes away from our pale blue dot.
BIBLIOGRAPGHY
- U.S. Energy Information Administration of the U.S. Department of Energyhttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/USenergy2009.jpg
- U.S. Energy Information Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy.http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Levelized_energy_cost_chart_1%2C_2011_DOE_report.gif
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REUTERS, Google plans new mirror for cheaper solar power
http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/09/11/us-summit-google-idUSTRE58867I20090911
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Wikipedia – Renewable energy in the United States, Hydroelectricity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United_States#Hydroelectricity
- Solar Power Could Provide 10 Percent of U.S. Electricity by 2025http://www.motherearthnews.com/Renewable-Energy/Solar-Power-Potential.aspx
- Alternative Energy Korea: World’s Largest Tidal Power Planthttp://alt-e.blogspot.com/2004/10/alternative-energy-korea-worlds.html
- Working model glass steam engine. A must see video!http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73txXT21aZU
