In “Solving the World’s Energy Problem, Part 1,” I have argued that fossil fuels are essentially fossilized energy from the sun. Since fossil fuels take millions of years to create and their supply is finite, at some future time our fossil fuels resources will be exhausted (or the limited supply of fossil fuel that remains will become so hard to find and so expensive to recover that its use will become prohibitively costly). I further proposed that biofuels are a suitable substitute for fossil fuels, but our ability to produce biofuels will never be sufficient to replace the enormous amount of fossil fuels that the world is consuming.
Therefore, the world will need alternative renewable energy technologies. Without prejudging exactly what those new energy technologies will be, I believe the best types of alternative energy technologies will be those that allow us to capture and use more energy from the sun. In this way the world would have a sustainable energy supply for as long as the sun is shining.
What might some of those renewable energy technologies be? Based on what can be envisioned now, I can think of three technologies that are nearing the stage where wide commercialization will be possible, and a fourth technology that, with appropriate scientific advances, offers potential in the next decade.
The first is capturing and concentrating sunlight to produce energy in the form of heat. A large project has already been proposed for the California desert to produce electricity by concentrating sunlight using mirrors to heat water to produce steam, which can turn turbines to produce electricity. Continue reading “Solving the World’s Energy Problem – Part 2”
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