Energy is mankind's greatest challenge and climate change our greatest threat. We are currently producing 26 billion tons of CO2 per year, and in the USA that's 20 tons per capita. The challenge boils down to the equation:
CO2 = PxSxExC
Where P is population, S are the services, E is energy and C is carbon intensity. One of these has to reduce to zero. The world's population is set to grow from 6.8 billion today to 9 billion by 2050. Improving medicines etc. may reduce the total by 10 – 15%, but that's it.
With services, it may be possible to increase efficiency by up to 50% to 13Mt, but with energy, E we need a miracle. A miracle in a tight time line & gimmicks won't help; we need solutions.
Five technologies are promising. They include clean fossil fuels, nuclear, wind, solar PV and thermal solar. Others not included such as biomass, tidal power may also help.
Problems exist with these five technologies such as CCS, which involves huge volumes of CO2 to be disposed of. Nuclear power entails high costs for regulation, safety issues and waste disposal problems.
Sustainable sources are harvested, meaning a lower density of energy than power plants. They are also intermittent sources. Other issues include cost, transmission and storage issues. Batteries are insufficient to store the energy we need as above a 20 – 30 % share of sustainable energy some form of storage is needed.
So a miracle is required. Bill Gross @ eSolar for example. Some good ideas are around such as
Terrapower.
So what needs to go on the report card? An 80% CO2 reduction by 2050 with zero emissions in rich countries, so a lot of work needed there. By 2020 a 20% reduction must be realized. There are many good books on this subject, such as Al Gore's ''Our choice'', or David McKay's ''Sustainable Energy - Without the hot air''.
What do we have to do? More research funding is needed along with an innovation agenda. Market mechanisms are also needed such as the CO2 trade cap and trade.
The scale of investment in Terrapower is 100's of millions of dollars , as well as needing to identifying the regulator & the location of such a project. The energy density of this technology is an advantage and waste fuel from conventional processes can be used as fuel. The technology is similar to that in fast breeder reactors.
The timescale and likelihood are 20 years to invent & 20 years to deploy. We must remember that, in the words of Bill Gates: “An energy breakthrough is the most important thing”.
What about taking emergency measures if that doesn't work? Geo-engineering (heart surgery for the obese analogy) may be required, but it is a risky measure. This must be seen as an insurance policy if all else fails.
But what would you say to so-called climate skeptics? How are they wrong? They have no scientific argument. A parallel is with AIDS. We must endure the pain now for gain later. Make it economical viable and the CO2 skeptics will accept it. Bjorn Lomborg, a famous sceptic talks about it being an R&D issue. Clearly solutions must be economically viable as although he rich can afford incresed energy costs, the poor cannot. That is why R&D, which is underfunded must be better supported.
Link to the video here
Here comes my version of a summary of Bill Gates speech about energy and climate:
ReplyDeleteFirst of all Bill Gates states that it is the poor people on earth that will be hit most severe by climate changes. This is because they are directly affected by changing weather. Furthermore they are also very much affected by changing energy prices.
The price of energy has dropt very much over the time. Thats why all people in industrialized countries can affort all the electric equipment that surrounds us everywhere.
For Gates it is very clear that CO2 emission means climate change and that climate changes will lead to negative effects. Therefore it is essential to get world wide CO2 emissions near to zero .
The simplyfied equation to calculate CO2 emission is made up of four main factors:
- number of people
- number of electric services
- energy per service
- CO2 per service
A closer look to these factors tells us that the population on earth hopefully won't decrease substantially. Also the number of electric services that each person uses will not decline because generally a higher number of electri services means a better dayly live.
Better energy efficiency can help us to reduce the CO2 equation but the overall reduction may only be a factor between three and six.
Therefore the key factor for Bill Gates is the CO2 output for each unit of each unit of energy. To reduce this output to 0 we will need a "energy miracle". Many different technologies can contribute somehow to create this miracle. The big numbers are CO2 storage, nuclear energy and renewable energy. But all them have big disadvantages as for example radioactive waste for nuclear energy or the problem of transmission losses and storage problems for renewable energy sources.
Bill Gates states out two deadlines. First a 20% reduction of CO2 emissions until 2020. This can be achieved with the technology we already have. Until that date we will need to have started a zero CO2 emission technology innovation progress to meet the second deadline of 80% world wide reduction in 2050 that can only be achieved when the "developed world" has zero emission technology in place and running until then.
What can be the solution? It can't be said yet. We need to work on different technological approaches. Among them solar energy, improvement of conventional nuclear power plants and something Bill Gates calls "Terrapower".
Terrapower is the idea to use the huge part of uranium (99%) that todays nuclear plants can't use to produce energy. Although this technology currently doesn't exist yet cientific theories and computer simulations seems to confirm that this process can become real.
One big advantage of Terrapower would be that it is a real zero CO2 emission technology. A so called "traveling wave" reactor could even use nuclear waste of the current nuclear power stations. Another advantage is that there is enough uranium on earth to provide mankind with energy until our solar system collapses.
No word so far of possible disadvantages.
Possible partners to developo this technology and build a prototype reactor might be the countries that are currently ahead in nuclear technology.
Kind regards,
Albert