PV Gap

Jeffrey Said:

what is the most effective means of supplying power for future needs?

We Answered:

What will be most effective is going to be highly dependent upon available resources. Unless there is some miracle way to make hydrogen that defies the law of conservation of energy it seems like a poor choice. Solar is going to work in many places but will be most effective where it is most available, in sunny areas. The same will be true of photochemical means. Wind generation is going to be most effective where there is available wind. If we use tethered wind generators that might be in very many places. Wind is derived from solar energy. Hydroelectric power is equally available in only certain locations unless we build huge biospheres in which case they may only have to be charged once. But would be most effective where the sun shines. Biomass is going to be dependent upon area, available sunlight and no matter how you work it it will be competing with potential food stocks.

This leaves nothing as a clear winner. We are entering into a different world order. Once clear winners were the way to go. Once it was all wood then all coal then all oil but the future will have to take better stock of our environment and adapt our power structures to the environment where we need them.

Esther Said:

Solar power/oil question?

We Answered:

Even if we move away from fossil oil which I hope we do, that doesn't mean that we won't have gasoline or diesel which is what our vehicles run on. We can synthesize gasoline and diesel via Fischer Tropsch synthesis from syngas which is a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide gases.

Indeed the Sandia Labs CR5 was originally intended as a more efficient way of disassociating hydrogen from water but they realized that it could also disassociate carbon monoxide from carbon dioxide and with both hydrogen and carbon monoxide they could synthesize fuels such as methane, gasoline and diesel, all from water, carbon dioxide and sunlight.

Better yet, hydrogen and carbon monoxide gas can be readily made from anything that burns via a 19th century technology called gasification. This was how our street lights were lit before we had natural gas, it was called town gas, coal gas or wood gas. This means that syngas could be made from any biomass (including sewage), not just the grain portion of a plant. Even algae is only up to 50% oil so gasification can convert far more biomass to fuel than any other bio-fuel technology.

Also, a byproduct of gasification is charcoal that when used as a soil amendment, not only makes for more fertile soil but sequesters the carbon into the soil. Other methods of getting carbon into the soil such as slash and burn and composting does not stabilize the carbon hence it is released to the atmosphere as CO2 but biochar is stable and has been known to sequester carbon for thousands of years and probably much longer.

This means that synthetic gasoline and diesel could effectively be carbon negative which hydrogen from electrolysis or electric vehicles can never claim to be. Together with the fact that synthetic gasoline and diesel would be distributed with the current infrastructure and would work with existing vehicles and it's clearly the most environmentally sensible fuel to use.

Consequently the best replacement for gasoline and diesel is gasoline and diesel just not from fossil reserves.

Of course the actual source of energy for synthetic fuels is still the sun whether it's via biomass or directly from the sun as with the CR5.

Concepts such as hydrogen fuel cell cars, and electric vehicles are all very neat and geeky but they just detract attention and funds away from the only approach that will be carbon negative. We already have millions of gasoline and diesel vehicles on the road, the gas stations pipelines and tankers to distribute gasoline and diesel so our efforts are best kept at making synthetic gasoline and diesel from biomass.

Note that both gasification and Fischer Tropsch are proven technologies and are technologies that have been deployed on commercial scales before (entire cities on town gas, entire countries like Nazi Germany and embargoed South Africa on FT fuels). It only takes investment to make it happen, investment that won't occur until investors are fairly certain gasoline would stay above $3 per gallon long enough for them to realize a healthy return on investment.

So we could stop using fossil fuels now if it wasn't for the fact that it's still cheap and we don't have to give up any of our modern vehicles except for sub $3 per gallon gasoline pricing. Solar power is nice, it's only carbon neutral but it doesn't preclude the use of gasoline and diesel, it's not necessary to switch to a hydrogen economy to carry energy from solar panels to the vehicles when the solar energy could also be stored in synthetic gasoline and diesel as easily as it could be stored in hydrogen and a synthetic gasoline and diesel from biomass could potentially remove carbon from the atmosphere while solar and hydrogen cannot.

P.S.
It takes nature millions of years to convert biomass to fossil reserves not thousands.

Bobby Said:

Are orbiting power plants in our future?

We Answered:

I really think that all our electricity will come from renewable sources sooner than you think. Our children's children will be amazed that we fought wars for control of energy resources. It will just be there, not even something we have to think about. Nikola Tesla dreamed of wireless energy transmission and worked on it for years before his funding was pulled, and people have been trying to do type of thing for years. With something like solar power plants, I have to ask who is funding it and what's in it for them. How will it be distributed? Does it have enough momentum to push out existing technologies? There's a lot of money invested in the infastructure to distribute electricity and politicians are in bed with the oil and coal industries. Would power lines become obsolete? I'd really like to read more about this report. Please add a link or source if you can!