Smarter Energy
Renewable energy! Carbon neutral! blah, blah.. We’re spoon fed these buzzwords in hopes of eliciting a reaction from our rawest of emotions. If the reporting can get those of us within the scientific community excited/angry/anxious, I can only imagine the perspective of policymakers, whose expertise in this area is precipitously dropping. While this article is not a rant about the scientific acumen of politicians, we could use a few more legislators with backgrounds in science and engineering. Meanwhile, their consitutents, mostly consuming the same incomplete, sensationalized “science”, are demanding they do something to either lower energy costs, or secure our energy and climate future.
By this rationale, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the quick fixes. Electric cars! Renewables! GREEN! Fusion is going online soon, right? While these each seem like small victories, and steps for each of us to “do our part”, there is a bigger picture that needs to come into focus, and soon. Our energy grid, mostly designed at the turn of the last century, needs to be adapted, and perhaps overhauled to handle new power sources as well as power consumption.
Take for instance solar panels, probably one of the hottest clean energy avenues. It’s no surprise they’re as sexy as they are… the technology has been known since the early 20th century, and I’m sure we have all heard about how the sun shines on one square meter all the energy we would need for a whole year (I may be paraphrasing). It’s cool, we get to turn our roofs into plants (figuratively) and soak up the sun during nice sunny days. That’s great and all (unless of course you live in Seattle) when you’re the only one on the block with solar panels, and the power grid chugs along as if the developer built only 1 fewer house. But Elon Musk has been taking every government-subsidized dollar from every hyped homeowner to turn their house into a mini power plant for a few hours a day. Is there a point when this could be too much?
Yes. And it’s approaching more rapidly than you might think. Take into consideration the power plant that is still operatonal for a region that’s now mostly solar-paneled houses. On a clear sunny day, the required load on that power plant may be negative. There may be more power out on the grid than is usable, even without the power plant. What do you do? Do you shut the power plant down? No, because you’re going to need it again in a few hours, when night falls. It’s a long and expensive process to shut downa a power plant. Instead, you’ll need to keep that power plant burning, and do something with that energy, even if that something is just flat-out wasting it. These plants are designed to operate at highest efficiencies near capacity, and to capitalize on this efficiency, power plants are designed to be large. So when a plant is “idle”, not only is it still burning something, it’s burning at a lower efficiency than it was designed. This scenario assumes your neighborhood power plant is of the fossil fuel-burning variety. I don’t think it takes too much imagination to conclude that the nuclear variety complicates this further.
Power storage seems like the best long-term solution, and it makes sense! There’s one problem though, battery technologies haven’t caught up yet and they’re not ready for the big time. There has been research incrementally advancing lithium-based batteries, with modest improvements. Flow batteries are still awaiting a breakthrough for commercial viability. In the meantime, we may need to think outside the box, or more accurately, open up the old bag of tricks. There are conventional, reliable ways of storing energy mechanically or thermally, which could provide interim relief.
So what do we do? We need to start designing more of the picture than just the sources of energy. Renewable technologies have developed enough to become viable on the production scales and it makes sense to continue to promote them. However, our methods of power distribution and power storage need to catch up. Perhaps more importantly, these three pieces need to be developed and deployed in tandem, if we are to bridge the gap to a purely sustainable energy future.
