All Energy Roads Lead to the Sun
By Andrew C. Revkin
dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com
Daniel G. Nocera, a professor of energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sees the sun as the only energy source that can replace fossil fuels. (Credit: Andrew C. Revkin/The New York Times)“It’s the sun, stupid,” is probably how James Carville would summarize the message of Daniel G. Nocera, a chemist and professor of energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, when he addressed a meeting on environmental issues that began in Aspen Wednesday night.
The event is the first Aspen Environmental Forum, a conclave of scientists, policy experts, industry executives, environmental campaigners and communicators (I probably left out a category or two) organized by the Aspen Institute and National Geographic Magazine.
A prime focus of Dr. Nocera’s lab is unraveling photosynthesis to find ways to turn sunlight efficiently into chemical fuels (hydrogen, for example).
“All scientists ultimately believe solar has to be the answer,” he said. On Thursday, he laid out his “big idea” as a formula: “If you take sunlight plus water, that equals oil plus coal plus methane.”
The night before, he described what he said was an achievable energy future — if the world engages seriously in pursuing scientific, technological and policy advances that are needed to make sunlight into usable energy cheaply.
“With the right investments in science and the right policy you’ll have a house with shingles generating your electricity during the day when the sun’s out,” he said. “You’ll take the extra electricity and, if battery technology works, you’ll put it in batteries. Or you’ll put it in chemical fuels like I want to do…. At night you drive your electric car in, you plug it in, the next morning you get up and leave again. So your whole little world of energy is going to be generated around where you live. In some little village in India they will be doing the same thing. That’s the world I see. That would be the unifying thing. It won’t be centralized. We’ll all be generating our energy. Energy is money, so the world will be more prosperous.”
But he added that, for the moment, the federal government and the public remain largely disengaged.
Dr. Nocera said human activities, in energy terms, right now are essentially a “12.8 trillion watt light bulb.” Our energy thirst will probably be 30 trillion watts, or 30 terrawatts, by 2050 with the human population heading toward 9 billion.
If that energy is supplied with coal and oil, an overheated planet is almost assured, he said.
Finding other options is a huge challenge, he added. To illustrate, he provided one hypothetical (and impossible) menu for getting those 18 additional terawatts without emissions from coal and oil:
- Cut down every plant on Earth and make it into a fuel. You get 7 terawatts, but you need 30. And you don’t eat.
- Build nuclear plants. Around 8 terawatts could be gotten from nuclear power if you built a new billion-watt plant every 1.6 days until 2050.
- Take all the wind energy available close to Earth’s surface and you get 2 terawatts.
- You get 1 more terawatt if you dam every other river on the planet and reach 30.
As he summed up, “So no more eating, nuclear power plants all over, dead birds everywhere, and I dam every other river and I just eke out what you’ll need in 40 years.”
Then he turned to the sun, his research focus, which bathes the planet in 800 terawatts of energy continually. “We only need 18 of those terawatts,” he said. But the current level of investment in pursuing that energy, he said, isn’t even close to sufficient.
“How committed to this are we?” he asked. The ratio of spending on health research and basic research and development on energy is 30 to 1, he added. “Right now the choice to fund science to solve this problem is pathetic.”
(We’ve chronicled this lack of energy research in some detail in the ongoing Energy Challenge series.)
“That’s how we’ve decided to invest your money, while there’s a chronic disease the Earth is experiencing,” he concluded. |
