Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 (38 page)

This will have profound implications for the world economy. The rapid rise of modern civilization in the twentieth century has been fueled by two things: cheap oil and Moore’s law. With energy prices rising, this puts pressure on the world’s food supply as well as on the control of pollution. As novelist Jerry Pournelle has said, “Food and pollution are not primary problems: they are energy problems. Given sufficient energy we can produce as much food as we like, if need be, by high-intensity means such as hydroponics and greenhouses. Pollution is similar: given enough energy, pollutants can be transformed into manageable products; if need be, disassembled into their constituent products.”

We also face another issue: the rise of a middle class in China and India, one of the great demographic changes of the postwar era, which has created enormous pressure on oil and commodity prices. Seeing McDonald’s hamburgers and two-car garages in Hollywood movies, they also want to live the American dream of wasteful energy consumption.

SOLAR/HYDROGEN ECONOMY

In this regard, history seems to be repeating itself. Back in the 1900s, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, two longtime friends, made a bet as to which form of energy could fuel the future. Henry Ford bet on oil replacing coal, with the internal combustion engine replacing steam engines. Thomas Edison bet on the electric car. It was a fateful bet, whose outcome would have a profound effect on world history. For a while, it appeared that Edison would win the bet, since whale oil was extremely hard to get. But the rapid discovery of cheap oil deposits in the Middle East and elsewhere soon had Ford emerging victorious. The world has never been the same since. Batteries could not keep up with the phenomenal success of gasoline. (Even today, pound for pound, gasoline contains roughly forty times more energy than a battery.)

But now the tide is slowly turning. Perhaps Edison will win yet, a century after the bet was made.

The question being asked in the halls of government and industry is: What will replace oil? There is no clear answer. In the near term, there is no immediate replacement for fossil fuels, and there most likely will be an energy mix, with no one form of energy dominating the others.

But the most promising successor is solar/hydrogen power (based on renewable technologies like solar power, wind power, hydroelectric power, and hydrogen).

At the present time, the cost of electricity produced from solar cells is several times the price of electricity produced from coal. But the cost of solar/hydrogen keeps plunging due to steady technological advances, while the cost of fossil fuels continues its slow rise. It is estimated that within ten to fifteen years or so, the two curves will cross. Then market forces will do the rest.

In the short term, renewables like wind power are a big winner. Worldwide, generating capacity from wind grew from 17 billion watts in 2000 to 121 billion watts in 2008. Wind power, once considered a minor player, is becoming increasingly prominent. Recent advances in wind turbine technology have increased the efficiency and productivity of wind farms, which are one of the fastest-growing sectors of the energy market.

The wind farms of today are a far cry from the old windmills that used to power farms and mills in the late 1800s. Nonpolluting and safe, a single wind power generator can produce 5 megawatts of power, enough for a small village. A wind turbine has huge, sleek blades, about 100 feet long, that turn with almost no friction. Wind turbines create electricity in the same way as hydroelectric dams and bicycle generators. The rotating motion spins a magnet inside a coil. The spinning magnetic field pushes electrons inside the coil, creating a net current of electricity. A large wind farm, consisting of 100 windmills, can produce 500 megawatts, comparable to the 1,000 megawatts produced by a single coal-burning or nuclear power plant.

Over the past few decades, Europe has been the world’s leader in wind technology. But recently, the United States overtook Europe in generating electricity from wind. In 2009, the United States produced just 28 billion watts from wind power. But Texas alone produces 8 billion watts from wind power and has 1 billion watts in construction, and even more in development. If all goes as planned, Texas will generate 50 billion watts of electrical power from wind, more than enough to satisfy the state’s 24 million people.

China will soon surpass the United States in wind power. Its Wind Base program will create six wind farms with a generating capacity of 127 billion watts.

Although wind power looks increasingly attractive and will undoubtedly grow in the future, it cannot supply the bulk of energy for the world. At best, it will be an integral part of a larger energy mix. Wind power faces several problems. Wind power is generated only intermittently, when the wind blows, and only in a few key regions of the world. Also, because of losses in the transmission of electricity, wind farms have to be close to cities, which further limits their usefulness.

Ultimately, all energy comes from the sun. Even oil and coal are, in some sense, concentrated sunlight, representing the energy that fell on plants and animals millions of years ago. As a consequence, the amount of concentrated sunlight energy stored within a gallon of gasoline is much larger than the energy we can store in a battery. That was the fundamental problem facing Edison in the last century, and it is the same problem today.

Solar cells operate by converting sunlight directly into electricity. (This process was explained by Einstein in 1905. When a particle of light, or a photon, hits a metal, it kicks out an electron, thereby creating a current.)

Solar cells, however, are not efficient. Even after decades of hard work by engineers and scientists, solar cell efficiency hovers around 15 percent. So research has gone in two directions. The first is to increase the efficiency of solar cells, which is a very difficult technical problem. The other is to reduce the cost of the manufacture, installation, and construction of solar parks.

For example, one might be able to supply the electrical needs of the United States by covering the entire state of Arizona with solar cells, which is impractical. However, land rights to large chunks of Saharan real estate have suddenly become a hot topic, and investors are already creating massive solar parks in this desert to meet the needs of European consumers.

Or in cities, one might be able to reduce the cost of solar power by covering homes and buildings with solar cells. This has several advantages, including eliminating the losses that occur during the transmission of power from a central power plant. The problem is one of reducing costs. A quick calculation shows that you would have to squeeze every possible dollar to make these ventures profitable.

Although solar power still has not lived up to its promise, the recent instability in oil prices has spurred efforts to finally bring solar power to the marketplace. The tide could be turning. Records are being broken every few months. Solar voltaic production is growing by 45 percent per year, almost doubling every two years. Worldwide, photovoltaic installation is now 15 billion watts, growing by 5.6 billion watts in 2008 alone.

In 2008, Florida Power & Light announced the largest solar plant project in the United States. The contract was given by SunPower, which plans to generate 25 megawatts of power. (The current record holder in the United States is the Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, with a solar plant that generates 15 megawatts of solar power.)

In 2009, BrightSource Energy, based in Oakland, California, announced plans to beat that record by building fourteen solar plants, generating 2.6 billion watts, across California, Nevada, and Arizona.

One of BrightSource’s projects is the Ivanpah solar plant, consisting of three solar thermal plants to be based in Southern California, which will produce 440 megawatts of power. In a joint project with Pacific Gas and Electric, BrightSource plans to build a 1.3 billion watt plant in the Mojave Desert.

In 2009, First Solar, the world’s largest manufacturer of solar cells, announced that it will create the world’s largest solar plant just north of the Great Wall of China. The ten-year contract, whose details are still being hammered out, envisions a huge solar complex containing 27 million thin-film solar panels that will generate 2 billion watts of power, or the equivalent of two coal-fired plants, producing enough energy to supply 3 million homes. The plant, which will cover twenty-five square miles, will be built in Inner Mongolia and is actually part of a much larger energy park. Chinese officials state that solar power is just one component of this facility, which will eventually supply 12 billion watts of power from wind, solar, biomass, and hydroelectric.

It remains to be seen whether these ambitious projects will finally negotiate the gauntlet of environmental inspections and cost overruns, but the point is that solar economics are gradually undergoing a sea change, with large solar companies seriously viewing solar power as being competitive with fossil fuel plants.

Since about half the world’s oil is used in cars, trucks, trains, and planes, there is enormous interest in reforming that sector of the economy. There is now a race to see who will dominate the automotive future, as nations make the historic transition from fossil fuels to electricity. There are several stages in this transition. The first is the hybrid car, already on the market, which uses a combination of electricity from a battery and gasoline. This design uses a small internal combustion engine to solve the long-standing problems with batteries: it is difficult to create a battery that can operate for long distances as well as provide instantaneous acceleration.

But the hybrid is the first step. The plug-in hybrid car, for example, has a battery powerful enough to run the car on electrical power for the first fifty miles or so before the car has to switch to its gasoline engine. Since most people do their commuting and shopping within fifty miles, it means that these cars are powered only by electricity during that time.

One major entry into the plug-in hybrid race is the Chevy Volt, made by General Motors. It has a range of 40 miles (using only a lithium-ion battery) and a range of 300 miles using the small gasoline engine.

And then there is the Tesla Roadster, which has no gasoline engine at all. It is made by Tesla Motors, a Silicon Valley company that is the only one in North America selling fully electric cars in series production. The Roadster is a sleek sports car that can go head-to-head with any gasoline-fired car, putting to rest the idea that electric lithium-ion batteries cannot compete against gasoline engines.

I had a chance to drive a two-seat Tesla, owned by John Hendricks, founder of Discovery Communications, the parent company of the Discovery Channel. As I sat in the driver’s seat, Mr. Hendricks urged me to hit the accelerator with all my might to test his car. Taking his advice, I floored the accelerator. Immediately, I could feel the sudden surge in power. My body sank into the seat as I hit 60 miles per hour in just 3.9 seconds. It is one thing to hear an engineer boast about the performance of fully electric cars; it is another thing to hit the accelerator and feel it for yourself.

The successful marketing of the Tesla has forced mainstream automakers to play catch-up, after decades of putting down the electric car. Robert Lutz, when he was vice chairman of General Motors, said, “All the geniuses here at General Motors kept saying lithium-ion technology is ten years away, and Toyota agreed with us—and boom, along comes Tesla. So I said, ‘How come some tiny little California startup, run by guys who know nothing about the car business, can do this and we can’t?’ ”

Nissan Motors is leading the charge to introduce the fully electric car to the average consumer. It is called the Leaf, has a range of 100 miles, a top speed of up to ninety miles per hour, and is fully electric.

After the fully electric car, another car that will eventually hit the showrooms is the fuel cell car, sometimes called the car of the future. In June 2008, Honda Motor Company announced the debut of the world’s first commercially available fuel cell car, the FCX Clarity. It has a range of 240 miles, has a top speed of 100 miles per hour, and has all the amenities of a standard four-door sedan. Using only hydrogen as fuel, it needs no gasoline and no electric charge. However, because the infrastructure for hydrogen does not yet exist, it is available for leasing in the United States only in Southern California. Honda is also advertising a sports car version of its fuel cell car, called the FC Sport.

Then in 2009, GM, emerging from bankruptcy after its old management was summarily fired, announced that its fuel cell car, the Chevy Equinox, had passed the million-mile mark in terms of testing. For the past twenty-five months 5,000 people have been testing 100 of these fuel cell cars. Detroit, chronically lagging behind Japan in introducing small car technology and hybrids, is trying to get a foothold in the future.

On the surface, the fuel cell car is the perfect car. It runs by combining hydrogen and oxygen, which then turns into electrical energy, leaving only water as the waste product. It creates not an ounce of smog. It’s almost eerie looking at the tailpipe of a fuel cell car. Instead of choking on the toxic fumes billowing from the back, all you see are colorless, odorless droplets of water.