GOLB: Is this Israel?

So how much oil and natural gas can there possibly be in this one and only Earth of ours?

I continue to be amused, bemused and generally incredulous about the stream of – if you’ll pardon the expression – “expert opinions” about the quantity of unexploited and as yet undiscovered reserves of oil and gas buried below the surface of Planet Earth. Add in the conspiracy theorists, whose estimates are far greater than those of the experts, who clearly (sic) are out to bamboozle us all as a means of keeping prices artificially high, and away goes all the panic about running out of the stuff which we burn so profligately.

OK, let’s try a look at the issue top-down instead of from the supposedly educated bottoms-up perspective. Simple really: assume that the earth is a hollow sphere completely full of high-grade petroleum and liquefied natural gas. Can even the oil barons and the conspiracy theorists assert that there could be more of the stuff than that? Hardly! So how long would that lot last? (Possibly longer than such life on earth, including homo-not-so-sapiens that can survive a death-dealing atmospheric crown of carbon dioxide.) At our current rate of usage, and the current rate of increase in that rate of usage, how long? Not very!

But we can agree, can’t we, that the earth is not a hollow sphere, but a molten core (too hot for organic fuels), a lot of rock, and zillions of gallons of water, mostly salty? In fact, our dear old sage, Sir Isaac the Newton, correctly ‘guessed’ that the average density of the earth would probably be “...between 5 and 6 times that of water”, and water is quite a bit denser than those desirable combustibles. 5-6 times? Not a bad guess, Sir Isaac: the currently accepted figure is 5.5 times (!!!). So the “Not very” above is not nearly as “very” as the brim-full hollow sphere would give us.

Let’s face it, fellow temporary occupants of this increasingly befouled planet of ours, we’ve got it backwards: what we now call “alternative energy” is actually “there-is-no-alternative energy”; it’s the stuff to which we’ve become habituated that is the alternative – to survival.

Technorati Tags: Planet Earth, energy survival

Solar Photovoltaics for Terrestrial Use - early days

(Now all the rage, but some of us in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, predicted that it would happen.)

This little vignette was triggered by seeing a re-run of On the Waterfront, starring the inimitable Marlon Brando.

Yes, we all know that it’s not what you know, but whom you know that counts: but what about the converse (sort of), namely who knows you?

Let’s set the scene, that actually began in a conversation conducted by two men, myself and a Dr. Roland Winston (of Argonne National Labs and the University of Chicago, I later discovered), engaged in the use of adjoining urinals. (Those of you in the process of leaping to conclusions can come to ground in a much duller reality.) The venue was a Solar Energy Conference, and the conversation started with me admiring a parabolic-shaped hunk of plastic that Roland had placed on the ceramic divider between us. I learned, a few minutes later, that it was a (truly) novel device, a ‘non-focusing collector’ for concentrating light, including sunlight. The more usual version of what came to be known as a “Winston Non Focusing Collector” was a sort of parabolic shell with an aperture at the rounded small end. I’ll spare you the technicalities, except to say that the elegant simplicity of the concept was matched by its amazingly effective performance.

Roland and I, both solar energy enthusiasts, soon became thoroughly engaged with each other, since our skills and interests in the field were complementary – his in optics, mine in solar cells. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t long before we had jointly invented a device that neatly used a two-stage version of his Collector to concentrate sunlight onto a solar cell. (Parenthetically, we found that we had created bureaucratic chaos as joint inventors, one from industry and the other from academia: the system had no rule book for such outré events.) Now back to Brando.

In the early days of Tyco (then literally) Labs, my secretary, by name Celia, was an extraordinarily demure, unruffleable and proper young(ish) woman. One otherwise quite normal day in the office, I heard a splutter followed by a clatter and a squeal, not noises one could expect to hear from Celia’s domain. It transpired that she had dropped the phone when the caller announced that he was Marlon Brando wanting to talk to Ed Mlavsky. When she had retrieved said phone and passed the call to me, I found that I was, indeed, talking to none other than the Brando. Wow! He even sounded likehimself.

The reason he was calling me was that he owned an island off  Tahiti, and being psychologically allergic, as it were, to fossil fuels, wanted to provide all the power and electricity for the island from solar energy. He’d read my name somewhere that described me as a solar-electricity expert. (In the Kingdom of the Blind....: actually I was pretty well known in the field, even appearing in the lead-off role in the three-minute solar photovoltaics opening puff piece to the BBC production of “Edward the King”, bought by Mobil Oil and shown on nationwide TV.)

As wonderful as it was talking to Brando, his questions reflected his understandable paucity of knowledge about the economic aspects of solar-generated electricity, in the early ‘70s  in its developmental infancy and hence still quite impractical for serious use. I found myself apologizing for the inchoate nature of the technology, and very gently tried to persuade him that his noble concept would, regrettably, remain unimplementable for many years to come. Nonetheless, we chatted on amiably for a while. He invited me to come visit him in Tahiti – mailing address: Brando, Tahiti – or in Beverly Hills, or both; he even gave me his unlisted phone number.

In a later conversation with Roland Winston, also a well-publicized solar personage, I learnt that he too had been approached by Brando, and had visited him at his home in California. Roland, an academe and basic researcher, recommended that, if Brando had in mind any practical solar-generated electricity applications, he should contact Ed Mlavsky.  Brando’s reaction? “I know Ed Mlavsky!”

Powered By Qumana

What Price Energy Security in the USA?

The usual way in which the cost per kilowatt-hour (KWh) of electric power produced by solar cells – devices that convert sunshine directly into electricity: no pollution; no nasty stuff to dispose; no harmful side-effects like global warming due to carbon dioxide, etc, etc, etc – is compared with that from conventional power stations, particularly those that burn oil or coal (ugh!), is to put the numbers side by side, and conclude that …the bigger, the worse. Well, my friends, if that’s deemed to be the whole answer, it would be challenging to find a way of being more myopic and remote from reality.

How so? For starters, do we really need to remind ourselves of where most of the oil comes from, and who, so to speak, has their greedy fingers on the tap? And how much does the U.S of A spend in an effort to protect itself from the constant threat of big-time blackmail (remember 1973?) from those – ironically mostly sun-drenched – tap-masters? In fact, of course, being armed to the teeth with every imaginable kind of weaponry is no protection at all: at the drop of a burnoose, the tap can slam shut.

Is there a remedy available? Well, how about this for a start? The cost of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier was about $5 billion back in 1973, and to arm it, staff it, and keep it operational is, as a guess, probably about another $5 billion over 5 years, not including putting aside a few pennies for the eventual and inevitably necessary decommissioning of those 2 nuclear reactors aboard.

OK, folks: here we open the door for those more rigorous than me in solar photovoltaic (PV) systems arithmetic, but I’ve got some pretty good back-up data for what follows. Currently, large PV systems that deliver AC cost about $8,500/KW, and deliver up to 2,000 KWh/year/peak KW of the solar panels – in sunny Arizona, for example. To get a feel for the numbers, a 2KW peak power system in the sunnier parts of the USA will deliver the approximately 4,000KWh/year used by the average household. If made from crystalline silicon, the solar cells themselves simply do not wear out; they last about 20 years or so. And most of them are based on silicon, the second most plentiful solid element in the earth’s crust. So, unlike fossil fuels, the supply of silicon will never ever run out.

Assuming an attainable reduction in PV systems cost to, say, $2,500/KW due to increased efficiency solar cells and a huge increase in the production thereof, the cost of building, owning and operating a single nuclear-powered aircraft carrier for 5 years could, instead, enable the construction and operation of enough solar PV systems to supply electricity to some 2,000,000 homes for 20 years or so. Not a bad start! (It’s left as an exercise for the reader to figure out how much less oil would need to be burned to supply that much electricity.) Somehow that would make me, at least, feel more secure than knowing that there’s one more dinosauric naval vessel afloat, who’s most successful function would be never to be called upon to get used in anger.

Please note that the US Department of Defense budget for 2005 was over $400 billion – plus a few more tens of $billions since then to ‘democratize’ Iraq: but Defense against what? Certainly not against the USA’s ever-increasing dependence on imported oil, and the ever-decreasing prospects that your grandchildren and mine will be able to ‘enjoy’ the lavish squandering of irreplaceable fossil fuels, the burgeoning air pollution, and goodness only knows the extent of the hardly beneficial effects of global warming.

Technorati Tags : solar energy, silicon solar cells, US energy independence, how to reduce oil consumption