SmartEnergy Designline Blog
Why aren't we there yet?
Allan Yogasingam
6/9/2009 11:00 AM EDT
On a recent flight I was finally able to see the film, "The Watchmen". Many of you know that it's basically a look at the disturbed underbelly of the costumed superhero but one of the underlying themes of the film got me thinking.
In one of the film's many subplots, the main characters, a being of radioactive energy called Dr. Manhattan and the world's most powerful industrialist Adrian Veidt (him too, a former superhero) are combining their efforts in a furious attempt to create and harness a new source of power to combat the earth's energy crisis as it seems to be the root cause of the cold war in an alternate era 1985. The director Zack Snyder updated the original graphic novel's source story to be more "timely" with today. He felt that a global oil crisis would really be the origin of problems between nations.
As I watched the film and Dr. Manhattan work around the clock to create a new power source, the only thing that kept popping into my mind is why aren't we there yet? Granted, in our reality, there's no Dr. Manhattan walking around as a nuclear center but we're the people that managed to create the power of a nuclear explosion, we've put men, women and chimpanzees into space, and we've created a much smaller world because of computers and the internet. And yet here we are, in the year 2009, still dependent on fossil fuels - a finite source of energy. It seems laughable that we can't figure out a mass-marketable way of harnessing that giant globule of solar energy above us yet, or figured out something that doesn't require fossil fuels at its core, doesn't it?
I know I can't look at cartoons, science-fiction and comic books to give me an idea of the future. I mean, if I did, we'd be in flying cars that run on garbage like on the Jetsons and giant transforming robots would have been living amongst for almost a decade, but I honestly thought we'd be further along than where we are today with respect to energy harvesting. Don't get me wrong, I think in the last 5 to 10 years, we've made great steps, but in my opinion, we should have been taking those steps 20 years ago.
Fantasy has always been to writers a way of expressing desires through imagination. That's why Gene Roddenberry dreamed we'd be exploring space as a global initiative in April of 2063 because we'd have the energy technology to do it. According to my watch, that would make me 83 years old. Hopefully, between now and then, we go warp speed towards making that technology a reality. Til then, its back to my comic books.
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Bob Lacovara
6/9/2010 10:26 AM EDT
"Why aren't we there yet?" is a question that poses an inner question: "Where are we going?" I am not being cutsie, I'm going to pose a legitimate engineering question. That is, given estimates of fossil fuel supplies, nuclear fuel supplies, and reasonable conversion efficiencies between sunlight and wind conversion factors, how much energy can be consumed by one person on the planet? That is, what's the budget for energy per person?
Of course, the next question is, what is the actual per capita energy expenditure? Like Mr. Micawber, I note that: available energy 1000 joules per day, expenditure 999; result: happiness. Available energy 1000 joules per day, expenditure 1001; result: misery. Where are we?
Readers will note that the per capita calculation depends on a denominator: the number of people using energy. This value, reduced, makes things easier. Increased, harder. The truth of the matter is that the value is virtually uncontrolled, so we can just put down "7 billion" and forget it for the moment.
It boils down to this: what energy is available, how much of it do we demand to be from sustainable resources, can we get past the Luddite mentality towards nuclear power (the French have no problem with it, and the reactors are US designs) and what do we do if we are using too much?
Can you imagine the screaming from Marin County, CA, USA, and Alpine, NJ, USA, if told that their per capita energy consumption must be cut by 35%? Actually, there'd be no screaming, because it would never come to that, politically. Instead, the cost of energy will rise until supply and demand reach an equilibrium.
Still, I'd love to know what my share of the energy pool is "mine".
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