In the past few months, along with job hunting and reading and keeping house, I've occasionally worked on a technical side project. I didn't write about it here because, without a workshop or money for components, I could only do a literature survey. I will be busy with my new job for a while, so I thought I may as well go back and explain what I'm trying to do.In our society, fossil fuels are the basis of our material well-being. We rely on them for transportation, heating, cooling, lighting, food, clothing and consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, and many other things. Other energy sources (besides hydropower and nuclear power, which are near their technical limit) make up a tiny fraction of our energy use. However, fossil fuels are being depleted much faster than they are regenerating--we've already consumed more than half of all crude oil on earth--and our demand is increasing exponentially. Even with strict energy efficiency measures, sooner or later we will have a sudden and painful scarcity of fossil fuels. In certain sectors it is better to move forward to a low-energy paradigm, such as organic agriculture or solar heating, or simply do without; in others, we must use alternative energy (electricity) to maintain our health and comfort while avoiding ecological damage. This last category is what this project is concerned with.
A major problem with the alternative energy industry is that units are manufactured almost entirely using fossil fuels. Alternative energy is currently more expensive per Watt than fossil fuels, so in a free-market system manufacturers will use fossil fuels. If and when there is a fossil fuel shortage, though, it will be difficult for society to switch to a non-fossil-fuel energy source. Moreover, in the long term the only way to have a sustainable energy supply is to manufacture energy sources entirely without fossil fuels. So the central question is this: how can alternative power sources such as solar panels, wind turbines, cellulosic alcohol, fuel cells, or geothermal power plants be manufactured and operated without fossil fuels? (Cost will be ignored for the time being because I assume that the prototype will not be widely adopted until fossil fuels are unavailable or much more expensive.)
2 comments:
My thought on the matter is relatively simple: using fossil fuels, create something that can generate the energy required to create more of itself.
Either a high efficiency solar system that is created and then mounted on the factory. Then adapted to be used on all methods and tools for extraction of materials to build more of the same and finally applied to the transportation technology used to move materials from creation to assembly and then to the market.
Once the transition is complete, the continual energy cost and dependence on fossil fuels drops to near zero.
If you could take the peak of current solar technology and increase its efficiency to double its current limit. You'd be close to a feasible means of powering most of the world once all arms of the solar manufacturing process were switched over to use stored solar energy.
We really need the science, r&d, government and manufacturing companies to step up and make this happen.
I am a solar nut though... :)
I hear for most applications, wind power has a better cost to efficiency potential currently and have seen some cool prototype wind turbines that use modeling from aquatic animals to adjust how the blade carves through the air. As well as no-noise concepts that actually have a higher efficiency than the current propeller based designs.
Yes, that's what I mean. The idea is simple, but the implementation is much less so.
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