Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
A brilliant illustration of this appeared on, of all places,
Saturday Night Live
a few years ago. The host
of the “Weekend Update” segment at the time, Jimmy Fallon, commented on a plan to use oil derived from
hazelnuts to power a car. I have no doubt that this could work technically—vegetable oil and petroleum oil
are extremely similar chemically. But I wasn't excited, and neither was Fallon:
New Scientist
magazine reported that in the future, cars could be powered by hazelnuts. That's encour-
aging, considering an eight-ounce jar of hazelnuts costs about nine dollars. Yeah, I've got an idea for a
car that runs on bald eagle heads and Fabergé eggs.
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I thought that was brilliant. But here's the question I wished Fallon, a member of Artists Against Frack-
ing and thus a public opponent of fossil fuels, had asked: Why are “renewable” hazelnuts so expensive?
After all, their energy comes from the sun, which is free, right?
He probably would have responded that while the sun is free, there were other factors in the
process
of
producing hazelnuts that make them expensive.
And there are.
Here's a key principle for understanding what makes energy, or anything else, cheap and plentiful.
For
something to be cheap and plentiful, every part of the process to produce it, including every input that
goes into it, must be cheap and plentiful.
With hazelnuts, not only do you have, as in any process, materi-
als, machines, and manpower, you have a huge limiting factor in that the
land
needed is far from plentiful.
Hazelnuts require land with a unique combination of rainfall or irrigation, mild summer climate and cold
winter climate, and fertile soil. This happens overwhelmingly in one place, Turkey, which dominates the
market, and this ideal hazelnut habitat generates only one crop a year.
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What we can call the hazelnut problem comes up over and over again with most of the alternatives to
fossil fuels. In some cases, they may be cheap and reliable in small quantities—some people use French
fry oil to power their cars—but making them cheap and reliable in large quantities, quantities sufficient to
power the lives of billions of people, is a major feat.
Just as it's a mistake to assume that because the sun is free, solar-powered hazelnuts will be cheap, so it
is a mistake to assume that solar-powered energy can or will be cheap. Whether that's true or not depends
on all the materials, manpower, and machines involved in the entire
process
of harnessing the sun's power.
Every energy process requires taking a form of raw energy—there is no ready-made machine en-
ergy—and
transforming
it into usable form so that it becomes the heat in our homes, the mechanical power
of our cars, and the electricity that powers the Internet. This is a process that takes time and resources,
and the key is to make it take as little time and as few resources as possible, so that it can be
workable
(including reliable), cheap, and plentiful.
Workable is a challenge. Cheap and plentiful are an incredible challenge.
Hazelnut energy is workable; it just isn't likely going to be cheap and plentiful.
Anotherrelated challenge isdealingwithrisksandby-products.Everytimeenergyistransformed,there
is the risk of something going wrong (explosion, electrocution), and there are by-products that can be
harmful (such as sulfur dioxide from coal or radioactive waste generated when mining the metals that go
into windmills).
Let'slookatwhichtechnologiesworkworstandbestatprovidingcheap,plentiful,reliableenergy—and
by plentiful I mean on the scale of
billions
of people. For each one, I'll give a brief summary of how it
works, how successful it has been at producing cheap, plentiful, reliable energy, and how it is positioned
for the future. I'll start with the most culturally popular energy technologies: solar and wind.
