The future of energy is about looking up

There are two ways to look at how we are going to power our modern lifestyle. Look down or look up. I mean this quite literally. The fierce conversation revolving around clean coal, nuclear, solar, and wind can be better understood by where you look. When you use electrons, they may seem the same at the plug but can have a very different path they traveled to get there.

For the last 150 years we have been looking into the ground to source the power we need to energize our machines. We dig for coal, put it in a furnace and spin turbines for electrons. Natural gas does the same. Nuclear power came along and it promised abundant electrons as long as we looked past its pollution. Uranium from the ground is processed into a much more radioactive product that we can’t put back into the ground again. Hydropower has shown to be useful up to a point, but that point was realized decades ago.

The next decade will ask us if we are finally willing to look up. The sun has been a central topic about how to relieve ourselves from our current dirty power. Solar is a tricky force to negotiate with. Wind and sun comes and goes as they please, with some predictability but without consistency. We have used electricity for a few generations now to successfully sever our relationship with the lack of consistency of nature. Renegotiation with nature will be the only solution in the long run to keep our fires from changing the chemistry of our atmosphere into something that becomes much more unpredictable.

Looking down we see our past. What we are burning now is the fossilized and condensed form of solar power. Natural gas and coal result from plants capturing the sun and turning that energy into sugars. Those surgers over time have condensed and fossilized into hydrocarbons. Burning hydrocarbons is cheap but ridiculously inefficient from the point of view of energy expended and increasingly polluting. Most of our infrastructure has been build around this minable energy. (The exception is geothermal energy which comes from radioactive decay.)

This inefficiency in how we use our energy is easy to calculate. Take a regular light bulb and add all the energy it took to get coal from the ground to the actual percentage of electrons that made light for you to read. The amount of usable energy is 2.5 percent. This number is so low that there must be an error somewhere along the way, but the real culprit is that we did not build our systems with the idea of entropy in the equation. We made up the difference by putting more energy into the system, and moving the energy production further away so fewer people could see it.

Looking up we see the force that make all these electrons happen in the first place. We receive solar power in three immediate forms- thermal, radiation, and wind. Ways to turn these into viable energy sources require a host of technologies, not just one magic bullet. It is tricky to get this power to be usable when we want it and where we want it.

When you are looking up you may have to squint. It is not an easy prospect to renew our infrastructure and lifestyle to harness this truly infinite and extraordinary clean form of electrons. The electrons we produce will have to do more for us than they do now. Efficiency, distributed production, energy storage, smart grids and buildings are just the start of what our future looks like. We will need to integrate our transportation, food and housing with our new forms of energy production. Looking up is the only way to see our future.