Is Renewable Energy Within Our Grasp?

First we need to grasp the nettle of reality if we expect to achieve a renewable future.

The whole point about renewable energy is that it derives from sources that do not deplete, so that sustainability is the aim. Right away, that definition points towards a number of sources that are available to us and always have been, except that we haven’t had the technology to capture and convert that energy into a usable form – namely electricity – until relatively recently. Now, we are getting there rapidly, learning how to hone those technologies to optimize the amount of energy we can generate. But, the problem is that we can never make enough!

Comparing energy sources pound for pound

This becomes self evident when we consider what fossil fuels are. Coal comprises layers of compressed and mineralized trees, while petroleum oil comprises the organic remains of animals. Each packs in an extraordinary number of organisms per given quantity and each organism represents a store of the energy sources that we now describe as renewable. In effect then, fossil fuels are highly condensed packages of the electromagnetic, thermal and kinetic energy that comes from the sun, which we think of as solar, wind, hydro and wave power.

Renewables can never meet requirements

As we implement ever more efficient ways of using those renewable energy sources we are still only ever using them in dilute or direct-feed form. The same is true if we grow crops for combustion. They will never provide the calories, the joules, the energy we have grown accustomed to producing and consuming from fossil fuels. That isn’t to say that developments with renewable energy sources are a waste of time, but that they will only ever be a way of supplementing our energy requirements, because we require far higher amounts of energy than it is practicable to generate by those means.

Nuclear energy is renewable

This takes us to the question: where do we go for our energy when supplies of fossil fuels begin to tail off? Well, there are those who feel that we should think of nuclear energy as a renewable energy. Since we already have vast stockpiles of fissile material at our disposal and it contains concentrations of energy far and beyond that of fossil fuels, then it is renewable to all intents and purposes. It would certainly keep us in energy for millennia, if not billennia, so long as we could work out a way of doing it more safely.

Energy efficiency versus population growth

There is, of course, another way of addressing the energy production versus demand equation: i.e. reduce the amount of energy we use. The trouble is that the problem really lies with the number of people who require energy, rather than the way they use it and, short of a human catastrophe, that number is set to grow – seven billion and counting! It is fair to say then, that advances in renewable energy technology and implementation are swimming against the tide of over population.

Intuitive but inconvenient truth

For renewable energy to suffice in the absence of fossil and nuclear energy sources, the human population would need to be a fraction of its current size and it would need to remain constant to be sustainable. So, yes, renewable energy is within our grasp, but we’d need a mass cull of humanity first – an epidemic, environmental disaster or world war perhaps - and then to impose a strict regime for controlling future fecundity.

Nature will intervene in the end

It seems unlikely that world leaders will convene to discuss such intuitive matters, so for now they will continue dressing the wound without removing the knife. Then again, population control will undoubtedly take care of itself in the end, one way or another. From a cosmological perspective, humans may be seen as rather similar to yeast cells in a demijohn, that ferment and breed away until they cause their own demise.

Published - Mon 21st Dec 2009 12:35:57