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.

A team of US climate scientists using computer models has determined that there is no flexibility in how much greenhouse gas emissions we can continue to emit if we want to stop warming. The only viable goal is zero emissions. The value of this is that it gives us an unsullied goal, one that is easy to measure but very difficult to achieve. In fact I suspect the target we really have to shoot for is a negative emissions goal, one in which sequestration is an equally important part of the total number. This will be necessary to offset the growing demand for and use of energy worldwide by a rapidly growing global population. Those of us in the Western world have a responsibility to go beyond zero in our carbon emissions.

Apparently it’s not rocket science to do this but it would require a lot of power so they are proposing creating a nuclear-powered gasoline generation plant that would convert carbon dioxide into gas.

Just one more technology solution to throw into the mix. This one becomes viable when gas at the pump hits $4.60/gallon. The national average cost a year ago was $2.26, today its around $3.20 but oil closed above $100/barrel yesterday for the first time so that $4+ number could happen this year.

The economics of alternative energy sources get a lot more compelling as prices rise, just as do those of public transportation.