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10 Steps To End America’s Fossil-Fuel Addiction
Step 1: Harness the Wind
Tom Clynes
Atop a High plains plateau just south of Boulder, Colorado, four rows of test turbines stand against a backdrop of snow-covered Rockies, the 150-foot blades twirling slowly in a light breeze. "If you were siting a commercial wind farm, you wouldn’t put it here," says Sandy Butterfield, a chief engineer for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. "But it’s the perfect location for a test site, because we get gusts up to 100 mph. They tell us pretty quickly which designs can take a beating." In 1991 a government wind-resources inventory concluded that three states—Kansas, North Dakota and Texas—had enough available, harnessable wind energy to meet the entire country’s electricity needs. Today that finding looks like an underestimate. The price of wind energy has dropped by 85 percent over the past 20 years—in large part due to increased turbine efficiency, a result of work by labs like the one in Colorado. In many parts of the country, electricity consumers can opt to purchase wind-generated power. Their rate is often locked in for years, allowing residents to essentially make a long-term bet on the cost of wind verses traditional polluting sources like coal. Those bets are already starting to pay off, with wind buyers in Colorado and Texas, for example, seeing lower utility bills earlier this year. As fossil-fuel costs rise, the savings could become much greater.
For the past several decades, the development of stronger and more lightweight turbine blades has allowed for ever bigger and more powerful machines. The largest of them are taller than the Statue of Liberty (which, incidentally, is now powered by wind-generated electricity). More recently, turbine advances have been in matching the machines’ design to specific wind conditions. Turbines for the Plains states, for instance, are built differently than those designed for the hurricane-prone Gulf Coast.
One of the technology’s primary drawbacks—the variable nature of the wind—has been mostly overcome by more-precise forecasting, and the high-profile Nimby ("not in my backyard") fights that have cast doubt on whether industrial-scale wind development will be accepted in many areas are beginning to be answered by a growing Pimby—"put it in my backyard"—chorus. In the Midwest, farmers are clamoring for a chance to lease quarter-acre lots to electric companies paying annual fees of $2,000 to $4,000 per turbine.
Little wonder, then, that some wind-technology developers are reaching for the sky. Sky WindPower Corporation is developing a flying electric generator [above] that would autorotate at 15,000 feet, tethered to the ground with an electricity-conducting cable. The design will have to overcome challenges posed by anchoring and maintenance. But no one disputes that high-blowing breezes are the strongest, smoothest and most energy-rich on the planet.
Step 2: End Gridlock
Tom Clynes
Existing grids were designed to deliver a one-way flow of energy from a central source to all users. A better system is "distributed generation," in which power sources like wind and solar are located at or near homes and workplaces. Those sources are linked with sophisticated digital dispatch and control mechanisms that route energy traffic during peak and nonpeak hours for top efficiency.
Case Study
The self-powered factory
When Tony Ellsworth began planning a new San Diego home for his custom-bike company, Ellsworth Bikes, he aimed from the get-go to minimize the project’s impact on both his bank account and the environment. A geothermal system heats and cools the building, and electricity is provided by rooftop solar cells, which feed excess energy back into the local electricity grid to be credited at full retail value. "It’s such a no-brainer," Ellsworth says. "Far better than building power plants and importing foreign energy." He expects to recoup the cost of the solar system#&8212;$28,000 after rebates#&8212;in four years. And his green factory even helps him cope with the stress of running a small business. "I deal with the low moments by going out back and watching the electric meter run backward," he says. "That always puts a smile on my face."
Step 3: Rev Up Our Hybrid Rides
Tom Clynes
Never mind the movie stars pulling up to the Oscars in their Priuses. When the U.S. Army announces, as it did recently, that it is developing a new hybrid Humvee to save fuel and extend range, you can be sure that hybrid technology has arrived.
Hybrid vehicles improve efficiency by integrating a combustion engine with an electric drive train—a combo that recaptures braking energy, stores unused idle power, and reduces engine weight to increase mileage. But as today’s generation of hybrids flies out of showrooms, the stage is set for the next fleet, which will slash gas use and emissions much further. They’re called plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), and they recharge overnight in home garages to take advantage of low off-peak electric rates.
"The implications for our national oil addiction are profound," says Daniel Kammen, director of the University of California at Berkeley’s Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory. "If the current U.S. vehicle fleet were replaced overnight with PHEVs, oil consumption would decrease by 70 to 90 percent, eliminating the need for oil imports and leaving the U.S. self-sufficient in oil for many years to come." Even if the electrical power for those vehicles were drawn from coal-fired power plants, CO2 emissions would drop by more than half. If the power were produced by renewable energy sources, and the fuel in the tank were biodiesel or ethanol [facing page], the proposition gets exponentially better.
Clearly, though, it’s not going to happen overnight. With the exception of DaimlerChrysler, which has built a plug-in prototype based on its Dodge Sprinter cargo van, automakers have been slow to get into the plug-in hybrid market. Aftermarket conversion kits will hit the streets for the first time later this year [see "Can I Plug In My Prius?" on page 84], tempting mileage-obsessed Prius owners like David K. Garman, undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Energy. "Like most Americans," he says, "I drive less than 40 miles a day, back and forth to work. If I’m able to drive in all-electric mode, I won’t need to use the gas tank. That, to me, is a game changer."
It may not be the only agent of change. Whether cars are run by hybrid or conventional drive trains, the fuel-saving potential of reduced vehicle weight is often overlooked, says Amory Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a natural-resources think tank in Colorado. "By substituting high-strength, lightweight composite materials for steel," he says, "automakers could roughly double the efficiency of hybrids. In terms of fuel-efficiency, that’s by far the most effective and doable approach."
Moreover, sometimes the simplest tweaks can have big effects. A recent study by the federal National Renewable Energy Laboratory found that if every car and truck on America’s roads was equipped with ventilated seats, air-conditioning-related gasoline consumption could be reduced by 7.5 percent, dropping fuel intake by 522 million gallons a year. Now, there’s a cool idea.
Case Study
The 300mpg drag racer
In the late 1940s, Andrew Frank was a hot-rodding teenager who mounted a Cadillac V12 engine in his 1936 Ford. By the 1990s, he was a mechanical-engineering professor at the University of California at Davis who pulled big engines out of SUVs and swapped them for smaller ones boosted by plug-in electric motors. His first "plug-in hy-brid" got 68 mpg without sacrificing horsepower. Frank is now fielding a student team for the U.S. Department of Energy’s clean-vehicle competition, Challenge X. The group is building a 300- mpg plug-in hybrid with an ethanol-powered gasoline engine and a solar-powered electric motor. Sounds responsibly efficient. But the professor is still a hot-rodder at heart: "Last year we had a Ford Explorer that we converted into a plug-in hybrid, and it had so much torque that we couldn’t keep the axles from snapping. With six of my students in there, it could still burn rubber."
He is now fielding a student team for the U.S. Department of Energy’s clean-vehicle competition, Challenge X.
"We were getting 64 miles per gallon without sacrificing anything on the power side," Frank says. "But I saw that the most important thing is that energy for cars could be supplied by solar energy and wind using existing technology."
Step 4: Brew Better Ethanol
Tom Clynes
The appealing prospect of throwing money at American farmers rather than Middle Eastern sheiks is just one reason that ethanol—the 200-proof moonshine used in early versions of Ford’s Model T—has come back into favor. This year, U.S. automakers will churn out a million flexible-fuel vehicles, and the number of ethanol-stocking gas stations will increase by a third, to about 1,000. The catch? Most ethanol currently produced in the U.S. is made from corn kernels in a process that consumes significant amounts of fossil fuels, in everything from fertilizers to gasoline for farm equipment.
We can do better, says Berkeley’s Daniel Kammen, who sees corn-based ethanol as a "transition" fuel: "To have ethanol make a dent in gas consumption and global warming, we’ll need a wide-scale switch from corn to cellulosic ethanol," a fuel made from switchgrass, wood chips and agricultural waste such as corncobs and stocks.
Today the cost of the enzymes needed to manufacture the fuel is high, although the solution to that problem may be very, very small. "Termites have microbes in their hindguts that they put to work to convert plant cellulose into carbohydrates," says Eddy Rubin, director of the DOE’s Joint Genome Institute. "We’re sequencing the DNA of those microbes so that we can eventually consider bioengineering new organisms to secrete these enzymes." And, essentially, run our cars on bug juice.
Step 5: Switch on the Sun Lamp
Tom Clynes
Early next year, dozens of huge, concave mirrors will begin to sprout on a desert farm northeast of Los Angeles. Each 37-foot-diameter Stirling dish will electronically track the sun and reflect its rays onto a heat collector, where the concentrated sunlight will superheat hydrogen to 1,300°F, driving an electric generator by Stirling engine. Once the world’s largest solar-energy farm is completed, some 20,000 dishes will stretch over 4,500 acres of the Mojave Desert, producing power for up to 278,000 homes.
Enough sunlight reaches the Earth every hour to meet the world’s energy demand for an entire year. We have long known how to capture the sun’s dispersed energy for space and water heating, but turning sunlight into volts is a trickier proposition.
Stirling solar dishes can convert about 30 percent of the sun’s energy into electricity, making them today’s most efficient solar-electric technology. (The Mojave farm will generate more electricity than all of the existing solar farms in the U.S. combined.) But most of us equate solar power with photovoltaic cells, the flat panels mounted on roofs and in backyards. These cells convert only 15 percent of the sun’s energy into electricity, but their promise lies in their ability to produce power at points of consumption, relieving overstressed electric grids and turning any sunlit surface into an energy-collection device. Photovoltaic technology is already beginning to allow us to charge our cellphones and iPods through solar- collecting backpacks. In the not-so-distant future, we’ll charge such devices through our shirts and jackets. Eventually, we may power up our hybrid cars through solar-collecting painted surfaces, and someday we may even fly cross-country on solar-powered airplanes.
That kind of potential will be realized by research focused on capturing more energy per square inch and by lowering the cost of essential materials. Scientists at Pennsylvania State University are creating solar cells out of titania nanotubes and natural dyes. At the University of New South Wales in Australia, researchers are trying to capture a broader range of energy within the solar spectrum by embedding nanoscale quantum dots in a matrix of silicon oxide. By varying the quantum dots’ size, they hope to expand the solar cell’s absorption spectrum—and achieve efficiencies of up to 50 percent. Meanwhile, developers of so-called thin-film technology are aiming to replace today’s expensive silicon surfaces with layers of organic semiconducting materials only a few micrometers thick. These clear films could be added to rooftop shingles, sidings or even curtains, transforming them into devices that harvest energy and pay the electric bills.
Other energy entrepreneurs are thinking bigger. Much bigger. NASA scientists have long dreamed of harnessing the sun’s energy in space and beaming it down to our homes by microwaves [below]. Yes, it’s far-out, but dedicated microscale research may very well make it possible.
Step 6: Go H2
Tom Clynes
The potential is huge, but the transition to the much-ballyhooed hydrogen economy won’t be easy. Pure hydrogen isn’t a naturally occurring fuel, and today the cheapest way to make it is from oil or natural gas, which does nothing to offset CO2 emissions.
Still, hydrogen-powered fuel cells are already more than twice as efficient as internal combustion engines. In Iceland, renewable power sources make a hydrogen economy feasible. In the U.S., hydrogen may someday be produced with surplus wind power. Or researchers could even genetically engineer organisms to directly convert sunlight into hydrogen. Which just might deliver that sunny hydrogen-based future after all.
Step 7: Ride the Waves for Watts
Tom Clynes
The u.s. has some 2,100 terawatt-hours of near-shore wave power, about one eighth of which could be developed with minimal environmental impact, according to a recent marine-energy study for the electric industry. That amount of usable energy is equivalent to the output of all our existing hydroelectric dams.
As in most renewable-energy arenas, the Europeans are ahead of the game. In Portugal this summer, workers are installing an offshore wave-energy converter called Pelamis [above]. The snake-like chains of steel tubes will float semi-submerged, three miles out to sea. By 2008, the system of 400-foot tubes will power an estimated 15,000 homes.
Water power’s advantages over wind include its lower profile (aesthetic concerns have derailed wind projects in Vermont and Massachusetts) and the fact that currents are 10 to 40 times as energy-dense as wind. "In terms of technology, these new hydrokinetic systems are coming of age faster than wind did," says Roger Bedard of the nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute.
The technology for tidal turbines—essentially windmills operating in a much denser medium—is developing particularly quickly. Eight feet below New York City’s East River, six turbines driven by the channel’s tidal currents will begin producing electricity this summer. The slow-turning propellers will generate 525,000 kilowatt-hours their first year. Depending on the results of an 18-month trial, enough turbines could be added to produce 26 million kilowatt-hours and power 8,000 homes. That’s hardly a dent in Gotham’s energy consumption, but experts say it’s the technology, not the size of the project, that’s exciting. This will be the world’s first power-producing tidal turbine farm, a prototype that could lead to a steady, nonpolluting energy source.
"We call it lunar power," says Virginia Tech oceanographer George Hagerman, who points out that tides are far more predictable than the rain and snowmelt that feed dam-based hydroelectric generators. "The wind may or may not blow, but you can predict the moon and tide 1,000 years from now."
Step 8: Dig Deeper
Tom Clynes
"There are 5,000 megawatts of geothermal power in hot water coming up from abandoned oil wells in West Texas," says Karl Gawell, executive director of the Geothermal Energy Association, a trade consortium. "All that energy is just being wasted. Our ability to use the heat from the Earth is expanding far faster than the actual use of this technology."
Geothermal energy taps the Earth’s internal heat to produce electric power or to heat buildings. Hawaii, Alaska and the Western states have long been recognized as geothermal resources, but a new class of power plants will be capable of producing electricity from geothermal reservoirs with temperatures as low as 160°F. Companies exploiting the potential of lower-temperature hot springs in Texas, Arkansas, Georgia and West Virginia are expected to double geothermal’s U.S. electricity-generating capacity in the next four to five years alone.
The expansion might not stop there. Scientists are working to create artificial geo-thermal reservoirs using "hot dry rock" heat mining [above], which pumps water into superheated crystalline rock. The water is heated as it flows through open joints in the hot rock and then pumped back to the surface through production wells, where the heat is mined for energy before the same water is pumped down again.
Step 9: Make Gas from Trash
Tom Clynes
We’ve been burning “biomass” since the Paleolithic era, when wood fires warmed the cave and slow-roasted the leg of mastodon. Today most biomass energy still comes from wood, but we’re perfecting new ways to produce electri-city from agricultural waste, grassy plants—even sewage.
These materials, when burned, release carbon dioxide just like fossil fuels. But because coal and natural gas discharge carbon dioxide captured millions of years ago, they create an essentially new greenhouse gas, while biomass emissions are balanced by the CO2 captured during growth.
Among the new generation of technologies, “gasification” has perhaps the most potential, says Richard Bain of the DOE’s National Bioenergy Center. Gasification systems use extreme heat in a low- oxygen environment to convert agricultural waste or any biomass into a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide that can be burned in a boiler or can replace natural gas in a turbine. The conversion can increase efficiency by 10 percent, and exit gases can be harnessed to run a steam turbine for a second round of power generation. Waste heat from the entire process can be used to warm buildings or en- tire towns—and help garbage look a lot less like trash.
Case Study
The electric farmers
At the Audet family's Blue Spruce Farm in Vermont, 1,500 head of cattle drop thousands of cow pies a day—enough, it turns out, to produce 1.8 million kilowatt-hours of electricity a year. The nation's first direct farm-to-consumer renewable-energy program is supplying thousands of Vermonters with cow power, generated through a process called anaerobic digestion. The Audets feed their cow manure into an on-site oxygen-free closed-reaction tank, which uses bacteria to decompose waste into gas suitable for burning in electricity-producing turbines (manure naturally produces methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times as destructive as CO2). They use the excess generator heat to warm their water, and after the bacteria work their magic and destroy pathogens like E. coli, they get a rich compost that's safe to handle. Best of all, Marie Audet says, "it's less stinky. Our neighbors are happy about that."
Step 10: Use "Negawatts"
Tom Clynes
Back in the 1970s, efficiency was about turning out the lights. Today, says Paul Scheckel, author of The Home Energy Diet, "it's about taking advantage of technology to do the same things better." Largely as a result of technological advances, the U.S. now uses 47 percent less energy per dollar of economic output than it did 30 years ago. Unfortunately, because of supply-side inefficiences, a lot of the energy we make is wasted by the time it reaches our homes and offices. Consumers can't do much about that, but it's easy to make an effort at home—and to see it pay off in lower bills. "I call it ‘negawatts,' " says Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute. "There's no cheaper or cleaner power than the power you don't produce."
If we all do our part, we can, and will make a difference.
"It's time to stop the denial and make change"-Legalize Nature
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