Energy Resources of the Future

An accomplished author who happens to be a fine friend is writing a novel set in the future, and asked for my take on various forms of energy that may compete with solar and wind 50 years hence.  I thought I’d publish my responses to the prompts he gave me.

Let me begin by quoting a colleague who happens to be one of our “2GreenEnergy Associates,” Dr. Peter Lilienthal, who once told me, “If you don’t care how much you pay for it, I’ll find you all the clean energy you want.”   The point is that the comments I’m about to make are all rooted in dollars and cents.  The only thing we care about is how much it costs to push electrons through wires, and what if any premium we’re willing to pay to have that happen without ruining the environment and human health in the process.

Biomass:  I really don’t see it, or its cousin, biofuels.  The real problem is thermodynamics; plants didn’t evolve on this planet to store any more energy than they need to grow and reproduce.  The enterprise of planting, raising, harvesting and processing life forms is doomed to failure.  If there is any possibility here at all, it lies in algae, since it has 30 – 50 times more gravimetric energy density, i.e., Joules/kilogram, than any terrestrial plant.  But we’ve all seen the unmitigated disaster this has been over the last half-century, which seems to imply that it’s not going anywhere over the next half-century.  The oil companies themselves have sunken fortunes in this arena in what I believe is a sincere effort to get this done, and have by and large given up.

Geothermal:  This could go either way.  Of course, places that have huge geothermal resources and a poor choice of competitors (like Iceland) will probably be big geo consumers for a long time to come. But in the main, this technology is inherently risky and unpredictable.  The main issue is that there is currently no technology analogous to oil exploration to see what’s down there before drilling, and drilling is a real beast, because, unlike oil and gas, you’re going through the hardest parts of the Earth’s crust.  Needless to say, the potential is enormous; the amount of energy (caused largely by radioactive decay and the friction of materials moving past one another as the planet continues to coalesce due to its own gravity) is huge.

Hydrogen: Hydrogen is an energy storage medium, rather than an energy resource.  To the degree it has value in the energy equation of the future, it lies in its portability, i.e., it’s a replacement for oil and gas. But it has almost no chance of success, for a few different reasons, any one which by itself would be lethal to the so-called “hydrogen economy”–a term coined in the early 1970s that, for some reason, is still “a thing” today.  A) We’re not going to rebuild the fuel infrastructure.  B) Fuel cells are expensive and their price isn’t falling.  C) They’re fragile and don’t last long before requiring replacement.  D) The processes (methane reformation and the electrolysis of water) are very inefficient.  Toyota and Honda offer hydrogen fuel cell cars, but they’re expensive to the consumer, and the OEMs are clearly losing money on each one they sell; I believe we’ll see them give up when battery EV become mainstream over the next 10 years.

Hydropower: The term “hydropower” means several different things, but none of them is going to be important outside of niche applications.  Obviously, we have the hydro-electric dams that have been around for 80 years, but they have a huge eco-footprint, and we’re loathe to build more.  From the perspective of clean and sustainable energy, there is tidal, ocean current, wave, and run-of-river hydro, but none of these is even close to keeping pace with solar and wind.   Evidence of this is the fact that one of my favorite energy conferences, the “Ocean Energy Show,” no longer exists.

Likely Sites for All These:  As explained above, the likely sites for all these are places that have huge natural resources and poor competitors.  Places like rural Alaska have power at almost $1/KWh, and hydro resources coming out its ears. Equatorial islands ship in bunker diesel at great financial and environmental expense, and they can use OTEC (ocean thermal energy conversion). All lands near oceans at extreme latitudes have huge tidal resources.  The southeast part of the U.S. has relatively poor wind and solar resources, but they have huge forests, so I suppose biomass is a possible option, but for the reasons noted above, I’m betting against it.

You didn’t ask about it, but the real wild card in all this is advanced nuclear. There are a couple of different kinds of fusion that may work, notably TriAlpha, and the fission of thorium is another possibility. If you’re interested in more stuff on this, please ask.  If you happen to have my most recent book, Bullish on Renewable Energy, there’s a chapter on the subject.  I’ll send it to you when I get home later.

It’s also worth noting that all this evolution is not happening in a vacuum.  For instance, the presence of renewable energy makes the enterprise of electric transportation that much more appealing.  Once we get rid of coal as our go-to resource for meeting incremental and predictable loads, electric vehicles begin to have enormous ecological benefits.  EVs can also “soak up” generation that happens in excess of current loads, which is a very big deal in a world of variable sources like solar and wind.

And speaking of variable resources, we need to understand that this evolution is also occurring in the presence of energy storage that is steadily becoming more affordable.  Obviously, the value of intermittent sources increases dramatically in the face of cheap storage, e.g., utility-scale batteries, which seem to be right around the corner.  This is good for solar and wind, but it’s bad for geothermal and the others that produce baseload power.

I hope this has been helpful.  Please feel free to ask for more detail; I’m always happy to help.