Dave Cockayne’s personal blog

With the recent release of the IPCC’s final report, there has been a lot of doom and gloom about the environment so I started reading up on ‘renewable energy’ and learned a few surprising things.

There is usually a lot of press about individual people needing to do more for the environment and cut energy usage but it seems that the amount of energy we are using isn’t unsustainable, just how we generate that energy.

The world currently uses a tiny amount compared to the potential of renewable resources at our disposal with current technology.

A study done by Stanford University, shows a wind map of the globe. They estimate that exploitable wind sites round the globe could produce 72 Terrawatts of electricity if we only use the premium sites available to us. To put that in perspective, as a planet we currently consume less than 2 Terrawatts per year of electricity.

So wind is looking good so far, but there is also that big burning ball in the heavens that puts out a lot of energy. Solar power brings to mind those ’screw to your roof’ black photovoltaic panels but there is another way of utilising solar radiation, called Concentrated Solar Power, or CSP for short. (More info on CSP here)

CSP is very simple, it uses mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays and turn water into steam. The steam is then used to drive turbines and generate electricity. CSP plants can provide power at roughly two thirds the cost of building a nuclear power plant to generate the same amount of power.

CSP also has a couple of other advantages over other forms of power generation, it is safe, simple and cheap to maintain. you don’t need to worry about a bit of hot water going critical and killing lots of the population. (If you think nuclear power is all nice and safe, clean and good for us then look here for a list of civilian nuclear accidents and here for a list of military nuclear accidents. Changed your mind yet?)

The second advantage (as if being cheap and won’t kill anyone wasn’t enough) is that CSP plants can also be used to purify and desalinate water as a side effect, given that the world is apparently going to be facing a water crisis in a few decades time, this is quite handy.

CSP plants placed in the world’s hot desert areas could provide 200 times more energy than the world currently uses.

There is plenty of potential energy available for us to harness, it’s not a problem of scientific advancement or over consumption. It’s a problem of political will. There is no energy crisis or any inevitability for the impending dire apocalypse, we just need our governments to manage our energy policies sensibly.

Us using energy saving light bulbs, insulating our houses and recycling our rubbish counts for nothing if carbon is still coming out of the power stations that supply our energy.

Filed by dave at 7:58 pm under Uncategorized