Consider the long-term employment and economic boost from locally capturing, storing, and distributing all the energy needs of your community. Imagine a city with the outsides of all buildings made of windows, vegetative material, or photovoltaic (PV) surfaces (generating electricity from sunlight) that generate both the stationary and personal vehicle energy needs of the occupants. The location of the latitude and the number of sunny days per year will initially determine the need for additional power sources, but constantly improving the technological efficiency of PV systems and the mechanical efficiency of all power-driven devices will continually lower the cost of energy by increasing the percentage of energy provided by the sun.
2.8Other Sun-Powered Opportunities
The fusion nuclear reactor 93 million miles away gives us some additional opportunities for harnessing indirect solar energy in the form of wind, wave, and tidal forces at numerous locations around the globe. Our global wind patterns are powered by the sun’s differential heating of the atmospheric gasses, with coasts and interior flatlands generally providing the best prospects to harvest a reasonably strong and consistent wind supply. However, the intermittent and tumultuous nature of wind proves particularly challenging for the designers of durable and efficient wind power-generating equipment. Wind turbines are quite noticeable on the landscape or shoreline and can pose an aesthetic drawback to some communities. Nevertheless, using the wind to generate electricity may adequately satisfy the definition of sustainable energy — a technology that can meet our energy needs indefinitely without negative effects — and can provide the total power production for some wind-rich regions.
Generating electricity from ocean waves and tidal forces offers us some advantages and disadvantages as well. On the plus side, energy from the ocean offers densely populated coastal areas the opportunity to harness large amounts of sustainable energy where it is needed by many people. On the negative side, quite a few technological challenges remain to be solved before this energy choice is available to power large metropolitan groups. Fortunately, no matter which combination of sustainable energy choices a region selects, other design improvements currently underway, such as intelligent building design, improved mechanical efficiency, and resident-friendly community design, will lower the per-person demand for energy and will help the transition to durable, healthy, and locally run energy supplies.
2.9Envision a Sun-Powered Human Society
A fully transitioned sun-powered U.S. economy will offer quite a contrast from the fossil fuel- and nuclear-powered economic engines of today. Moving toward this nature-inspired ideal will require a mammoth national investment and several decades of infrastructure changeover, but the upside payoff implications are enormous. Gone will be the insidiously injurious air, water, and soil pollution from the extraction, transportation, processing, and combustion of fossil fuels. Our single nuclear power plant will be a safe 93 million miles away, along with all the accompanying dangerous radioactive materials. As the demand for crude oil, coal, and natural gas continually shrinks, greenhouse gas emissions will correspondingly decrease, and our atmosphere will begin to self-regulate its constituency again. Part of the climate change mitigation process will no doubt include massive carbon sequestration efforts from worldwide reforestation programs and site-appropriate solar technology transfers to communities inside developing nations. As we begin to recognize that a sustainable world requires the well-being of all members of all species (including humans), international political relationships will also purposefully evolve and be strengthened.
As the energy transformation continues around the world, the corresponding decrease in crude oil demand will dissolve any remnants of the previously influential Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). “The Age of Fossil Fuels” section in future world history books will be relatively brief with the period comprising less than 400 years. Major oil companies, the economic juggernauts of conventional energy, have the means to follow the early lead of global energy corporations such as British Petroleum (BP) and begin to diversify their operations to small-scale solar-powered energy production systems; these systems would deliver hydrogen from the process of “clean hydrolysis” (the passing of a sustainably generated electric current through water, yielding hydrogen and oxygen) that would be used to supply stationary and vehicle fuel cells and for hydrogen combustion turbines in a variety of regional markets. Rather than resisting the conversion to clean energy, these cash-flush oil corporations have the opportunity to position themselves as early providers of an intelligent energy infrastructure. If major oil companies do indeed reorganize and become sustainable energy providers, the metamorphosis will require considerable effort and capital investment but will prove to be advantageous for their businesses in the long term.
Opportunities also exist to research, develop, and market a plethora of plant-based materials that will replace petrochemicals in many manufacturing applications. Actually, this opportunity will be a resumption of an earlier research emphasis in this field that was started during the pre-World War II years. These plant-based production materials will be part of the products-of-consumption side of the materials equation. Some high-performance petroleum-based polymers will also be used initially for various components in the durable products of service cycle. Forward-thinking diversified energy companies will continue to meet the shrinking petroleum demand but will derive an ever-growing majority of revenues from the expanding demand for clean and healthy energy and material systems.
2.10Cutting Our Nuclear Power Losses
A broad-based commercial and residential commitment to the continued refinement of solar, wind, geothermal, and ocean power technology to generate electricity will help dissolve the lingering consideration for either commissioning new commercial nuclear power plants or refurbishing worn-out units. The current high consumer demand for electrical power in developed nations can be mitigated by significant mechanical efficiency improvements in all sectors of the market as well as stabilizing population growth rates. The savings in electric bills from a lowered demand can help finance the research and development needed for further efficiency gains. Even at the current PV and wind power technology levels and disregarding the serious and long-lasting public safety issues of high-level nuclear waste, the high cost of nuclear power production has effectively priced itself out of the western energy market. Further advances in PV and wind technology will provide even more economic, environmental, and social incentives for sun-powered sources of energy. Some state governments are furthering this effort by adapting aggressive energy portfolio standards that target a specific percentage of commercial energy to be generated by renewable sources, which does include solar and wind power.
Unfortunately, our 60-year ill-advised history of commercial nuclear power now requires an over $70 billion consumer outlay for high-level nuclear waste transportation and storage from our 110 commercial nuclear power plants to the permanent storage facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. At least four generations of Americans must also assume the considerable risk involved in moving the thousands of tons of this waste across the nation over the next 75 years. And after this monumental logistical task is completed, hundreds of future generations of U.S. citizens must monitor and guard the persistently dangerous radioactive material for tens of thousands of years.
Commercial nuclear power plants have always been a bad idea, particularly considering the risk and life cycle costs that are passed on to posterity. The argument that continued investment in nuclear power is now a necessary part of a climate change avoidance strategy is also flawed and shortsighted. This approach would reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the expense of transferring a large portion of the cost of nuclear power to future generations, as well as making us vulnerable to terrorism, sabotage, and accidents. Transportation and storage costs for the high-level nuclear waste, along with the inevitable decommissioning costs of the power plants themselves, are causing the nuclear power industry to collapse under its own weight. Citizens throughout time are much better served by moving away from commercial nuclear power and fossil fuels and turning to a safe, abundant, clean, durable, and reliable distributed energy. Our only affordable and safe nuclear reactor is the Sun, and its continuous fusion reaction provides more than ample opportunity to meet the energy needs for all
