I’m just curious what people see as the most promising or important energy research being done. That includes environmental stuff as well.
Is there a car that runs on cow farts?
Airplanes that run on baby diapers?
I’m just curious, with all the talk about helping the environment, what the most promising research is right now. Is it the hydrogen car?
Just curious…
That is very hard to say. The technology that in the next 10-20 years might help the most could come from this list:
Hybrid Cars becoming more common that traditional ICE engines would help a lot for air pollution.
Plug in and/or varieties that use Ethanol mix will also greatly reduce oil dependence.
Much Cheaper Solar Panels so they can be used as a standard roofing material.
They are working on a plastic sheet variety which offers much hope but who knows if it will pan out.
Fuel Cell Technology could be very big.
The Holy Grail of Energy research is probably Fusion. No estimate on making a commercial generator.
Making Ethanol Gas from a higher yielding plant than Corn.
Solar Chimneys are one of the more exotic. Aussie is looking at one of these.
Wind Farms but they won’t make a huge impact, just part of a package of solutions.
Fuel Cells that can run on Bio-Mass (vegetable waste and Grass clippings) May never pan out but pretty exciting concept.
These were all from memory, as we are in IMHO. I will provide links to any of the technologies you cannot find by Googling.
This should be a decent start.
One more: Cleaner, fuel efficient Breeder Reactors might be a promising source of power.
Jim
I was under the impression that Bio-fuels (biodiesel, ethanol etc) were extremely unlikely to be of any use at all, unless we were happy to starve. The reasoning being that the area of land required to grow the base crop to produce enough bio-fuel to replace oil would exceed the amount of useful farmland available.
Szlater: You could be right, I threw a list up to start the discussion, good start BTW. 
The Bio-Mass one wasn’t for gas though. It was a way to reuse vegetable matter that would just go to the dump otherwise. Again, not likely but exciting research.
The Ethanol from crops like Rape or Certain very tall grasses native to the US may not work out.
My understanding is that Ethanol has just finally reached the point that it uses less energy to make it than it is worth. I think Ethanol has a long way to go yet.
I have the most hope for Hybrid cars and Solar Roofing.
Fusion could change the world, but people once said that about Fission, so who knows.
Just for the most exotic one I have seen: the Solar Chimney.
Jim
First, about breeder reactors - Currently there are a number of plants in the US that could act as breeder reactors. Because of the current political and social climate, however, in the US there is no reprocessing of spent reactor fuel. I don’t think it’s the best decision, but it’s one I do understand. Simply put, the methods of reprocessing fuel will make getting access to the components of a “dirty” bomb much easier. Not easy, just easier.
I’d like to see something done with using the temperature difference between ocean water levels (Using the thermocline’s temperature differences.) to generate electricity.
The solar towers look interesting, too.
Just a couple days ago I heard someone on the radio from (IIRC) Alabama talking about research in raising switch grass for energy. From what he said they are currently able to recover four times as much energy as is used in farming and converting the stuff. It’s a native American grass, hardy and able to be raised in a very wide range of climates, does not require much fertilization or pesticide use, if any. Sounded to me like a kind of super crabgrass except you can make it into fuel for your car.
And today in the paper I read about some who are working on using the microbes that used to cause jungle rot in textiles in the tropics, to work on waste materials to digest them enough to extract ethanol.
Cool.
Even assuming that’s true, that doesn’t make it “useless.” It may not work in the UK but may still be viable in countries with warmer climate and/or lower population density. And even if one energy source cannot replace oil, it’s possible that several alternative energy sources, combined with conservation (higher efficiency), would meet the needs.
Another common argument against bio-fuels is that they take a lot of energy to produce, but I don’t see why that’s a big issue. Hydrogen definitely takes more energy to produce than you get out of them, but they are touted as a useful alternative automotive energy source (energy storage medium). Ethanol and biodiesel can serve the same purpose, and you don’t even need new cars to use them.
Personally I think the most important thing to do is not alternative/renewable energy research, but ways to reduce automobile usage. That may involve more effort into building new suburbs and cities around public transport. Also it wouldn’t hurt to encourage use of smaller vehicles; mopeds and ultra-compact cars are more efficient than full-size hybid cars.
The biggest thing to do, and the easiest in some ways, is still increasing efficiency.
I know someone who has a house in a cold climate and doesn’t need a firnace, simply because the house is works as a solar-heat collector during the winter, shades itself during the summer, and keeps its massive walls at room temperature year-round to even out daily temperature swings.
As for technical developments, I like the aerogel-insulated window I read of a couple of months ago. Better insulating value than the average unimproved wall, and you can see through it! The aerogel, however, is not totally transpatent–it looks like solid smoke–and I have heard that it is crumbles when exposed to water. The developers are supposedly working on that. I’m trying to find a reference to it–anyone know of one?
I like the idea of biofuels–one of my friends is really into biodiesel–but just remember that that organic material that goes into biodiesel is not going into compost. Some attention needs to be paid to the total cycle between field, fuel, and other usage, to make sure that enough nutrients return to the soil.
And biofuels may take a lot of fuel energy to produce only if you are using fuel-powered machinery instead of human or animal labour. But who is to say whether that will always obtain?
And what of the oil-bearing algae that that group from MIT were working on? Given what the Todds did with fish farming in greenhouses back in the eighties, I’m not so sure that you couldn’t get field-type yields using a larger initial capital outlay, but with lower ongoing labour costs…
Yeah, I just e-mailed them last night (I want to use some in the house I’m building). They were featured on ABC TV’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.
http://www.duo-gard.com/ (they actually make and sell the windows)
and
http://www.cabot-corp.com/ (they make the gel)
For other sources/info., search on “nanogel” and “polycarbonate”.
Wow! Thanks! This looks like what I<m looking for. R8/inch, eh? I sense skylight and studio-shadeside-wall possibilities.
Pyramid power used to power a truck. You can convert a flatbed truck to pyramid power by mounting the unit on the flatbed. The units are severly hampered by the reduced size, but I hope progress can be made by using modern composites instead of natural stone.
Now that’s just silly,
you need modern ceramics not composites.
Jim
I made one up, does that count?
If you could bio-engineer a tree to absorb more sunlight, and find a way to convert the cellular processes that occur into electricity, you could eventually have big ol black trees in your back yard that produce cheap electricity, and are much less fragile than solar panels.
I think something like this could prove to be as big as Fusion for some. Think about it, a self-renewable energy source that also works on creating a constant amount of Oxygen gas and using up all the excess CO2. Hell, we might even have to work at dumping C02 in the atmosphere at some point. 