Business Week reports that the X-Prize people are planning to offer $100mm in prizes to alternative energy inventors and entrepreneurs. If only they would exclude ethanol…

“The idea is to capture the sun’s heat. Heat, unlike electric current, is something that industry knows how to store cost-effectively. For example, a coffee thermos and a laptop computer’s battery store about the same amount of energy, said John S. O’Donnell, executive vice president of a company in the solar thermal business, Ausra. The thermos costs about $5 and the laptop battery $150, he said, and “that’s why solar thermal is going to be the dominant form.”

As oil prices skyrocket and technology makes breakthroughs, our ability to generate clean, sustainable energy becomes more and more viable. However the big roadblock to technologies like solar and wind is that they do not run 24/7 like water or nuclear, meaning they are an undependable source unless we can find ways to store the energy during those cloudy, windless days and dark nights. Battery tech has been a major stumbling point because of costs and inefficiency (much of the energy is lost during storage). As the above quote from today’s excellent NYTimes coverage of storage challenges notes, there are entirely new ways to look at storage that, in turn, have made new energy sources viable. One example is the focusing of solar heat by a field of hi-tech mirrors onto a tower full of water and heavy salts. During the day this heat powers steam turbines, during the night the stored heat in the tower keeps those turbines turning.

Read the article- it is easy to be a doomsayer during this rapidly expanding crisis but there are truly great things coming out of this scenario, great in the long term.

Solar thermal power is generated by building a field of concave mirrors that focus the sun’s heat onto a liquid encased in pipes. The liquid is superheated and used to generate steam that powers turbines, generating electricity. In the south west, where open desert land and sunlight are plentiful, they are building these facilities as fast as they can. They are completely unrelated to conventional solar panels that convert light into electricity but are very costly to build.

“On sunny afternoons, those 10 plants would produce as much electricity as three nuclear reactors, but they can be built in as little as two years, compared with a decade or longer for a nuclear plant. Some of the new plants will feature systems that allow them to store heat and generate electricity for hours after sunset.”

NYTimes.com (link above)

New designs that focus the heat onto towers will work in less sunny areas. With a lot of discussion about starting to build new nuclear plants which are very efficient but create an unsustainable stream of radioactive waste, it’s important to understand that we have very clean alternatives. There are environmental impacts of building these large facilities on open land but they are nothing compared to the impact of any conventional energy source such as coal, gas or nuclear.

During a press conference last week Bush asked what he thought about economists’ predictions that we would see $4+ gas prices by early spring. He was surprised and said he had not heard that. This is frightening to say the least. The President of the United States, who started a war over oil that is estimated to cost us $5 trillion dollars before it is over, doesn’t know how much gas costs. I wonder if he knows what a burden this is for the average family- prices have tripled during his administration. And it’s not just gas. Heating oil and energy prices have skyrocketed.

Today oil passed the inflation-adjusted high reached during the Arab Oil Crisis of the late seventies and early eighties. World stock markets are in a tailspin. The House of Representatives have passed a bill ending $17 billion in handouts to oil companies (who made $146 billion in profits last year) and moving that money into alternative energy tax credits. These credits are critical to encouraging rapid development of sustainable energy alternatives that can help us end our oil addiction. Yet Republicans in the Senate are blocking this bill and the President is threatening a veto. This partisan block voting is destroying our economy in exchange for short term gain by an industry sector intimately associated with this Administration.