A Question Of Power
Electricity and the Wealth of Nations
Robert Bryce 2020 | Beaverton Lib 333.7932
Robert Bryce ( website ) is a journalist with an MFA ... not a technical degree. The book points out that electricity is essential for modern life, and the developing world will need far more terawatts.
But as a not-technically-educated journalist, Bryce suffers from "20/20 hindsight", looking at combustion fuels and contemporary usage, and assuming the future will be more of the same. He pushes natural gas and nuclear for the long term. I agree with nuclear power, IF we make power plant fuel from nuclear warheads, and we reprocess and re-irradiate the waste until it is less radioactive and toxic than the uranium ore we started with. That's a difficult "if", in a fearful and angry world. I wouldn't bet on it.
But what if we do more with less, and generate that "less" more thoughtfully?
For example:
More wind turbines doesn't necessitate more birds struck by blades. Birds collide with wind turbine blades because their tiny brains don't perceive the blades as threats; what if we could scare the birds away from the blades, perhaps even shaping the bird's trajectory and timing so it passes through the blade zone in the gaps between the blades? A large turbine high in the sky interposes a blade about once per second. That is an opportunity to observe birds from a long distance, and learn far more about avian aerial behavior, perhaps with cameras on the blades and pivot and mast.
Cameras on the blades? Deconvolving a 3 second rotation is a cheap digital operation, and means that failed pixels, rows, or columns on an imager chip are "swapped" with others as the imager rotates. Thus a large, imperfect imager can produce the same results as a static perfect imager.
What do we do with a gazillion images, enabled by a small fraction of the energy produced by the turbine? Learn vastly more about birds, and invent new ways to guide them past turbines ... and aircraft and buildings and un-survivable weather events. Eagles are predators - we can guide them towards prey, especially prey that humans consider pests or invasive. Bye-bye, invasive european starlings.
The more important question is "what do we use electric power for?"
A growing use is air conditioning ... or more specifically, heat pumps. Geothermal (ground heat sink/source) heat pumps can be more efficient than air conditioning; better-insulated buildings can mitigate climate extremes. That will involve a lot of manufacturing, and a lot of refrigerant. Instead of fluorine-based refrigerants, greenfreeze isopentane can be used as a refrigerant (NFPA 1-4-0, very flammable), but other gases may be better.
A faster growing use is data centers; I propose we make them with solar-powered gossamer foils, and launch them into space.
Our machines use electricity to provide us with services. Humans use services, and do not directly consume electricity.