Present at the Future (18 page)
Read Present at the Future Online
Authors: Ira Flatow
Being remote, there is not much opposition to the farmland wind farms. And where opposition might mount closer to the major cities, the governor of Washington State pushed through a tax change bill to allow the cities and counties to take some of the tax revenue from these projects. Money talks. “And you’d be amazed at what happens to the opposition when it becomes time to fund schools and fire districts and local hospitals with the revenue from these projects. So it’s a real winner.”
And wind turbines are among the cheapest-to-build and cleanest-to-operate power sources. “There’s no fuel required, there’s no drilling, there’s no mining, there’s no emissions, there’s no hazardous waste to clean up,” says Steuerwalt. “That’s why it’s such an attractive option in many places where it can really compete.”
I’LL SEE YOUR GIGAWATT AND RAISE YOU A GIGAWATT
And that fact is becoming very obvious. Wind is the fastest-growing energy source in the world. In the United States alone, wind energy has increased 900-fold since the 1980s. So many cities, states, and countries are racing to reap the wind that the pace of wind-energy production is staggering. One city is trying to outdo the other. Saying that it wants to
be known as the nation’s—if not the world’s—biggest wind-energy producer, the state of Texas announced in May of 2006 that it will build the country’s largest offshore wind facility, off the coast of Padre Island in the Gulf of Mexico. (In West Texas alone, more than 2,000 wind turbines currently dot the countryside.)
Just weeks after Great Britain boasted, in December of 2006, that the world’s largest wind farm—441 turbines producing 1,000 megawatts (1 gigawatt) of power to provide a third of London’s homes with electricity—would be built in the Thames estuary, there came a press release from British Columbia, topping their brother Brits: The construction of the 3,000-megawatt (3-gigawatt) Banks Island Wind Farm, the biggest in the world, is slated to begin construction in 2009. Oh, Canada!
I’m sure that by the time you read this, someone someplace else will probably be announcing an even bigger wind farm.
Experts believe that through 2020 to 2030, wind energy might make up 20 percent of our world energy supply. Denmark claims to have already reached that goal, with an extensive range of wind turbines. Germany leads the world with 19,000 megawatts, or 19 gigawatts. (The Schleswig-Holstein region of Germany has the greatest density of wind turbines per person in the world.) The rapidly moving United States has just slid into second with a generating capacity of just over 10,000 megawatts (10 gigawatts), with Spain right there in the same ballpark.
Farmer Froetschner says he’d love the electric utility to build more towers on his farm—“they put up three or four a day”—but there is no place for all that electricity to go. “We produce more electricity out there than what we use. I think they could double it.”
The transmission lines, he says, are probably the factor that limits his capacity and distribution. They must be located within 5 to 10 miles of the electrical grid. “So we have to get it someplace where it’s needed. I’m not an electrician, but we have power lines that need more transmission lines to make this farm expand.”
THE SAUDI ARABIA OF ELECTRICITY
And there’s the rub: bringing electricity where the wind blows, to places where the demand is highest. If you look at the wind charts of the United States, remote areas such as North and South Dakota have winds that blow strong enough and long enough to produce enough electricity to supply almost half the power of the entire country. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, just three states—Texas, Kansas, and North Dakota—have enough wind power potential to supply energy to the entire United States. What Saudi Arabia is to oil, these states are to wind. The problem is that the electric grid that would get the juice back to the most populous states where electric consumption is highest doesn’t reach those remote areas.
One obvious solution is to extend those power lines out to the grid. That would cost tens of billions of dollars. But why not think bigger? As long as we’re going to think about spending the big bucks to modernize and extend the rickety old power grid, why not try something new? Why not convert the electricity into hydrogen, then pipe or truck it to service stations to be pumped into electric cars or power plants running on fuel cells?
In other words, don’t think of hydrogen as the energy. Think of hydrogen as the carrier of the energy—a universal storage system of electricity. And think of it not as a carrier just for electricity made by wind power but for electricity made by other alternative energy sources such as solar.
THE HYDROGEN SOCIETY
That way, says, John Turner, principal scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado, you could not only make the windy plains your home for wind turbines but you could also make the very sunny states of the Southwest your home for solar and photovoltaic generators.
Turner believes that given all the sources of sustainable energy
in the country—energy that never gets used up—we could in a matter of decades become totally energy independent in a hydrogen economy.
“I say, ‘Do we have enough energy to supply all the energy needs for a future society,’ say, you know, eight to ten billion people? And the answer is absolutely. There is no question.”
In fact, Turner says solar cells, by themselves, could supply the world’s demand for energy by the year 2050. But it would take a lot of solar cells. “It would take an array the size of Texas,” he says. Nevertheless, he points out, we have that resource available for use, “and we have the technologies today that can take advantage of that. That’s the whole beauty of solar. You know, from villages to buildings, you can have some large arrays in various places around the world.”
But because the wind and sun are intermittent—because the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow—“we need an energy carrier for transportation and other things like energy storage, and that’s where the hydrogen comes in.” Hydrogen would store the energy. “It’s a chemical carrier.” And we could make extra hydrogen at times of low electric demand, such as night hours.
“We’re far behind in solar cells,” he points out. The price of solar cells really needs to come down. “So some breakthroughs need to be done there in terms of getting our costs down, but the technology is there.”
WIND + WATER = HYDROGEN
Some small steps testing the feasibility of a hydrogen economy are slowly being taken. The U.S. Department of Energy’s NREL, in partnership with Xcel Energy (the same folks who built those wind turbines in Spearville, Kansas) recently unveiled a demonstration plant at NREL in Golden, Colorado, that uses wind-generated electricity to produce and store hydrogen, right there on the spot. “Converting wind energy to hydrogen means that it doesn’t matter when the wind blows, since its energy can be stored right there on-site in
the form of hydrogen,” said Richard C. Kelly, Xcel Energy president and CEO.
The electricity from two wind turbines is passed through water, which splits the H
2
O into its components, hydrogen and oxygen. (It’s the same demonstration you did in seventh-grade science class: Dip the wires from a battery into a glass of saltwater and out bubbles hydrogen from one wire and oxygen from the other.) The hydrogen is stored for use later in a fuel cell or a generator powered by an internal-combustion engine. Both Xcel Energy and NREL are chipping in to pay for the $2 million, two-year project.
It’s only an experiment to test the feasibility of such a system. But if alternative energies such as solar, wind, and hydrogen are to catch on and become mainstream, “I really think it has to be a national initiative,” says Dr. Amy Jaffe, associate director of the Rice Energy Program at Rice University in Houston, Texas. “There are groups of people who have called for an Apollo-style national initiative in science,” an effort that is going to take decades, as Dr. Turner
pointed out. “And so it’s really important to start focusing on the science today.”
For example, says Jaffe, when Turner talks about how much land the solar arrays will cover, the land itself becomes an issue, both for wind and solar. “People who are green don’t often mention that. But if we can invest in revolutionary science technologies that utilize nanotechnology, whether that’s to have better membranes or better solar panels or smaller this or smaller that, then I think the potential is larger.”
Some scientists have already created a nanosolar solution. They have found ways of creating spray-on, plastic solar cells, made with material that uses nanotechnology. Imagine spray-painting houses or barns with nanosolar paint or rolling out large sheets of plastic solar cells to cover arid parts of the desert.
A company called Nanosolar has found a way to coat sheets and strips of thin metal with photovoltaic plastic, akin to printing ink on paper, opening up the possibility that solar panels could be placed on any building surface exposed to the sun. Nanosolar recently announced it would build the world’s largest factory for producing solar cells in San Jose, California. Working at full steam, so to speak, it could turn out enough solar cells each year to produce more than 400 megawatts of electric power—three times the amount currently installed in the United States.
Producing wind power in some states and solar power in others is all fine and good. But Jaffe says we won’t see any real progress “until we have a real direction,” as we did in the early days of the space program, which turned all resources to getting to the moon. “You’re going to spend a billion dollars a year for ten years, just on fundamental science because the kinds of technologies that are here with us today are technologies that require huge breakthroughs, especially in storage technologies.”
In the space program, milestones were set and met. Technologies were developed to meet each target. The same thing needs to be
done in energy, says Jaffe. “We need to set goals and targets. We need to know where we need to be in what year. We need to lay these things down together so we understand the science that’s possible at which time in which fields, so we understand what fuels are going to provide us an escape from emissions and which ones aren’t, and that we have a coordinated national policy.”
A coordinated national energy policy is not what the United States has at the moment. And weaning a country off a coal-and oil-based economy won’t be easy, she points out, because so much money and politics are tied up in these industries.
“There isn’t anybody who makes a living off of the sun, and so nobody advocates for the kind of technologies that John [Turner] is talking about. But there are coal states in the United States that have great political power and there are certain states that make money from having traditional combustion engines stay on the road, so we have a problem in our political process in terms of going through the evaluation. Not just of what’s technically practical, financially practical, economical and commercially practical, but when you add a layer of the politics of trying to implement what’s best for the country as a whole, then it becomes much, much, much more difficult to do.”
One thing that is not in doubt is the cost of electricity generated by the wind. It has declined dramatically. With the advent of larger, more efficient wind turbines, wind-generated electricity is now competitive with other industries. Depending on the site, wind-power electricity is three to seven cents per kilowatt-hour, says Laurie Jodziewicz, communications and policy specialist at the American Wind Energy Association. “In these days of high costs for natural gas, wind energy is actually bringing down the costs of electricity to some consumers by offsetting that need for more natural gas use.”
It’s hard to argue against wind power, though some have. Some of the opposition comes from people who fear that the turbines may kill birds and bats. “Even if we got one hundred percent of our power
from wind power—which is probably not realistic—but even if we had one hundred percent of our power from wind, the bird impacts would be very minimal, compared to things like buildings, cats, vehicles, pesticides, and all of the other things that affect birds,” says Jodziewicz.
“With regard to bats, there was something that was unexpectedly discovered in 2003. And the industry immediately partnered with the Fish and Wildlife Service, with the NREL, and with the leading bat organization in the world, Bat Conservation International. We formed together, and we’ve been funding research to understand and hopefully solve the issue that we discovered by better understanding what might make our site risky for bats but also other ways to deter bats away from wind turbines. I think that overall our environmental impacts are minimal. But we certainly want to make sure that we take care of whatever we can.”
Others argue the windmills are unsightly. They’ll spoil the view. It’s a subjective opinion that can’t really be countered, except by those who live near them and find them majestic.
But if wind power contributes to our energy independence and helps counter global warming, finding enough homes for those wind turbines will be easy, once we view them not for their size but as symbols of our security.
If I were asked for an area of science and engineering that will most likely produce the breakthroughs of tomorrow, I would point to nanoscale science and engineering.
—NEAL LANE, FORMER PRESIDENTIAL SCIENCE ADVISOR
The prefix nano- has entered the lexicon, as in “I’ll be done in a nanosecond.” Or the brand name iPod nano. You get the general idea that a nanosecond goes by even more quickly than, say, a New York minute. But you may not know that nano- simply means “billionth,” from the Greek for dwarf. So a nanosecond is a billionth of a second, and a nanometer is a billionth of a meter, or about five to seven atoms in length. That’s tiny! (And that means that the new, smaller, slimmer iPod is not “nano” in the true sense at all.)