Future Energies (Term-paper)
The world is facing the scarcity of fossil energy! In the flip side, global warming is happening along with the extraction and consumption of fossil energy. Thus, there is a need for utilizing other energy sources. Who would have thought that the Sunlight could be used as an energy source? Hence, it took three decades to commercialize solar energy production.
So, this research will focus on what are the open opportunities in energy research and the challenges to overcome. And it is expected to cover, the combination of energy sources, researches on them, labs and facilities used, future advancements, possible drawbacks and bottlenecks, and the commercialization.
The future is going to require us to make some dramatic changes to the way we produce and consume electrical power. Climate change is happening whether we like it or not, and switching to cleaner sources of energy is the main way we’ll be able to keep it from getting worse. And we’ll run out of fossil fuels eventually anyway.
That’s why engineers are looking for ways to scale some of the existing sources of energy that don’t rely on fossil fuels and maybe even find sources that are entirely new. There are all kinds of promising candidates, from nuclear fusion to plain old hydrogen to human waste.
1.1. Hydrogen
The element hydrogen, by far the most abundant in the universe is very high in energy, but an engine that burns pure hydrogen produces almost no pollution. This is why NASA ‘s powered its space shuttles and parts of the International Space Station with the stuff for years. The only reason it is not powering the entire world with hydrogen is that it only exists on our planet in combination with other elements like oxygen.
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, which makes it pretty surprising that pure hydrogen is very rarely found on Earth. It consists of a single proton and electron, and if you can produce it, it’s the perfect source of fuel for the very aptly named hydrogen fuel cell.
Fuel cells of this kind use a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen to directly generate electrical power. And the only other byproduct of this reaction is water. Much better than carbon dioxide.
There’s a fairly big problem, though. If hydrogen isn’t naturally produced on Earth, how to get it? Human can use the process known as electrolysis to chemically separate water into hydrogen and oxygen, and just store the hydrogen. Except, performing electrolysis uses energy.
In fact, producing hydrogen fuel requires more energy to produce than you get from using it in a fuel cell. Efficiency-wise, that’s not great. But there are good arguments for having hydrogen fuel
cells in the power-producing arsenal. For starters, because hydrogen is the lightest element, hydrogen fuel is incredibly lightweight, which makes it great for transport, like on spacecraft.
And unlike solar-powered devices, if you have hydrogen fuel at the ready, fuel cells don’t require recharging like batteries. So, they’re great for indoor vehicles like forklifts, where releasing lots of fumes could be problematic, but you also need to use them pretty much continuously, which makes batteries less practical.
Russia even converted a passenger jet to run on hydrogen in the late ’80s and Boeing recently tested small planes that fly on hydrogen.
Honda says one of these fully-fueled cars could power an entire house for a whole week, or drive 300 miles without refueling. The main obstacle right now is the relatively high cost of these vehicles and the lack of hydrogen stations to refuel them, although California now has plans for seventy of these stations across the state, South Korea’s expected to have a total of forty-three soon and Germany’s aiming for hundred by 2017.
1.2. Nuclear Waste and Fission
Nuclear fission power plants are the traditional reactors that have been in use around the world for decades and provide the US with about 20% of electricity. The US uses something called light-water technology to surround the fuel rods with water, which slows the neutrons and allow for a sustained nuclear reaction.
But the system is really inefficient only 5 percentage of the uranium atoms in the rod get used up by the time it has to be removed. All that unused, highly radioactive uranium just gets added to a growing stockpile of nuclear waste.
In fission, an atom splits in two, releasing a lot of energy in the process. Nuclear power releases the same amount or even less of those greenhouse gases than most renewable energy sources. But, it’s a non-renewable source of energy!
The main fuel used in nuclear fission, uranium 2-3-5, is a limited resource that has to be mined and purified from the ground, much like fossil fuels.
The way to get power from uranium is by assembling rods of uranium parallel to one another and setting up a chain reaction. The nucleus, or core, of a uranium atom is made up of protons and neutrons. If a fast-moving neutron hits a uranium atom at just the right energy, it can split the uranium in two. The uranium splits into atoms of other elements, like krypton and barium. But three of the neutrons from the nucleus will fly off, carrying some energy with them. Those neutrons can then collide with another uranium atom, causing fission that releases even more neutrons, and so on.
Meanwhile, the cascade of splitting atoms gives off gamma radiation and heat, heating up the reactor. So, fission turns a nuclear reactor into a heat source for a power plant. Unfortunately, once used up all the useful uranium in the rods, the left over is the biggest setback of nuclear power: nuclear waste.
Nuclear waste consists of radioactive material that emits highly energetic particles that can be extremely dangerous for any living thing, including humans. Dealing with it safely is the sort of issue nuclear engineers can help with. They also design nuclear power plants to carefully control fission to stop it turning into a runaway process. If that happens, it can lead to disasters like the kind that happened in Chernobyl or Fukushima.
1.3. Space-Based Solar Power (SBSP)
Every hour, more energy from the sun reaches us than we earthlings use in an entire year. To try and save a lot more of it, one idea is to build giant solar farms in space that will collect some of the higher intensity, uninterrupted solar radiation. Giant mirrors would reflect huge amounts of solar rays onto smaller solar collectors. This energy would then be wirelessly beamed to Earth as either a microwave or laser beam.
One of the main reasons this amazing idea is still just an idea is because it’s, big surprise, very expensive. But it could become a reality in the not so distant future as our solar technology develops, and the cost of launching cargo into space comes way down.
Self-assembling satellites are launched into space, along with reflectors and a microwave or laser power transmitter. Reflectors or inflatable mirrors spread over a vast swath of space, directing solar radiation onto solar panels. These panels convert solar power into either a microwave or a laser and beam uninterrupted power down to Earth. On Earth, power-receiving stations collect the beam and add it to the electric grid. The two most commonly discussed designs for Space-Based
Solar Power (SBSP) are a large, deeper space microwave transmitting satellite and a smaller, nearer laser transmitting satellite.
1.4. Human Power
The presence of human-powered devices are already available, but scientists are working on harvesting power generated from normal human movement. It is about tiny electronics here, but the potential, when multiplied by billions of people, is big. And with developers making electronics that use less and less power, near sooner, the phone may charge when it rustles around the bag, pocket or moves in the hand, or the fingers move on the screen.
At Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, scientists have even demonstrated a device that uses viruses to translate pressure into electricity.
1.5. Tidal Power
Harnessing all the energy in the motion of the ocean could power the world several times over, which is why over thousands of companies are trying to figure out how.
Because of the focus on wind and solar, the tidal energy industry kind of got elbowed out of the early mix. But these systems are quickly becoming more efficient. For one, meet Oyster, a 2.4 megawatt producing, hinged flap that attaches to the ocean floor and - as it opens and closes - pumps high-pressure water onshore, where it drives a conventional hydroelectric turbine.
So, one of those could power a whole housing development or a couple of massive residential towers roughly two thousand five hundred homes.
1.6. Geothermal hear from Lava
The method of converting the heat rising from the depths of the molten core of the earth into energy also known as geothermal powers. Millions of homes around the world, including the electricity usage for 27% of the Philippines and 30% in Iceland.
But an Icelandic deep drilling project may have recently discovered the holy grail when it hit a pocket of magma, which had only happened once before in Hawaii. A team pumped water down into the hole, which the scorching magma instantly vaporized to a record-setting 842 degrees Fahrenheit.
This highly pressurized steam increased the power output of the system tenfold, an amazing success that should lead to a giant leap in the energy-generating capabilities of geothermal projects around the world.
1.7. Solar Windows
With production and installation costs getting cheaper by the day, solar power is taking off around the world. Europe is the best in photovoltaics and is driven by its leader, Germany. On an average sunny day in 2012, Deutschland got as much electricity from the sun as 20 nuclear power stations, enough to power 50% of the country. Spain is now generating more than 50% of its power from renewable resources like solar.
A California desert is home to the largest solar power station in the entire world, and the United States increased its solar capacity by nearly 500% in the last decade itself. Researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico just made a significant breakthrough in quantum dot solar cell technology that will allow highly efficient solar panels to double as transparent windows.
When this technology becomes cheap enough to hit the mass market in the next couple of years, every sun-exposed window in the world will have the potential to be converted into a mini power station.
1.8. Bio Fuels
Biomass energy is a form of energy that relies on burning biological matter, like plants, either directly or by processing them into a fuel. As it burns, the chemical energy stored in the plant’s matter is converted into heat.
Like with many of the other energy sources we’ve mentioned, the heat turns water into steam, which in turn does work on a turbine; in other words, it drives a heat engine. A generator then converts the turbine’s motion into electrical power.
About half of all biomass energy is delivered by burning plant matter directly, which humans have been doing long before the need for electrical power. A wood burning stove can keep your house warm in the winter, or it can be used as a heat source for something.
On a larger scale, scrap wood left over from wood processing or from waste produced by humans, along with food waste, can be burned in power plants more directly.
Most of the other half of biomass energy comes from processing biological matter into biogas or biofuel. By pulping and chemically treating biomass derived from crops and other plant matter, it becomes easier for special proteins called enzymes to chemically break it down into a more readily usable fuel source.
1.9. Alge
This brings us to the 3rd generation of biofuels, algae, which has all the right ingredients to replace oil once and for all. Algae’s natural oil content is greater than 50%, which means it can be easily extracted and processed. It is possible to convert the remaining part of the plant into electricity, natural gas and even fertilizer to grow even more algae without chemicals. Algae grow quickly and don’t need farmland or freshwater.
Just last month, Alabama became the world’s first algae biofuel system that can also effectively treat human wastewater, this actually resulted in a carbon-negative outcome.
The 40,000 a day demonstration plant basically floated giant bags on a bay, pumped wastewater water into them, added little algae, and then let the sunlight do its thing. Before long, algae had grown everywhere and cleaned the wastewater so well it could either be released back into the bay or reused by people as drinking water.
1.10. Flying Wind Farms
The world is already getting a lot of energy from the wind, but with the Buoyant Air Turbine or BAT, that floats 12,000 feet above the ground where winds are stronger and more consistent, humans could soon be getting that energy much more efficiently. The system is simple: a ringed blimp with a wind turbine in the middle is tethered securely to the ground.
It’ll produce twice as much power as similar sized tower-mounted turbines. It can even handle winds of more than 100 mph and can be fitted with additional devices like a wifi unit, which would help bring the Internet to parts of the world that don’t have it yet.
The buoyant air turbine was designed for bringing renewable wind energy to rural parts of the world where building a traditional wind turbine was impossible and will first be deployed in Alaska. It can even automatically detect and adjust its floating height to where the best wind speed is. When the wind speed is dangerously high, the thing will dock itself, eliminating the need for manual labour.
Flying wind turbines like this should soon replace all the less efficient tower-based systems and could allow for the construction of offshore wind farms that have until now been really expensive to build.
4. Conclusion
No matter what, we’ll need a new power infrastructure to support the cleaner energy world of the future. And that infrastructure, that future, will be built by engineers. Promoting renewable energy technologies to counter climate change and increase energy security is a complex endeavor. Difficulties abound due to technological reasons, longtime frames, misaligned national interests, the role of the business sector and final consumers, and the need to link research, innovation, deployment and rollout. In the European Union, the coordination of action at Member State and EU levels adds another layer of complexity for the advancements.
So, this research will focus on what are the open opportunities in energy research and the challenges to overcome. And it is expected to cover, the combination of energy sources, researches on them, labs and facilities used, future advancements, possible drawbacks and bottlenecks, and the commercialization.
The future is going to require us to make some dramatic changes to the way we produce and consume electrical power. Climate change is happening whether we like it or not, and switching to cleaner sources of energy is the main way we’ll be able to keep it from getting worse. And we’ll run out of fossil fuels eventually anyway.
That’s why engineers are looking for ways to scale some of the existing sources of energy that don’t rely on fossil fuels and maybe even find sources that are entirely new. There are all kinds of promising candidates, from nuclear fusion to plain old hydrogen to human waste.
1.1. Hydrogen
The element hydrogen, by far the most abundant in the universe is very high in energy, but an engine that burns pure hydrogen produces almost no pollution. This is why NASA ‘s powered its space shuttles and parts of the International Space Station with the stuff for years. The only reason it is not powering the entire world with hydrogen is that it only exists on our planet in combination with other elements like oxygen.
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, which makes it pretty surprising that pure hydrogen is very rarely found on Earth. It consists of a single proton and electron, and if you can produce it, it’s the perfect source of fuel for the very aptly named hydrogen fuel cell.
Fuel cells of this kind use a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen to directly generate electrical power. And the only other byproduct of this reaction is water. Much better than carbon dioxide.
There’s a fairly big problem, though. If hydrogen isn’t naturally produced on Earth, how to get it? Human can use the process known as electrolysis to chemically separate water into hydrogen and oxygen, and just store the hydrogen. Except, performing electrolysis uses energy.
In fact, producing hydrogen fuel requires more energy to produce than you get from using it in a fuel cell. Efficiency-wise, that’s not great. But there are good arguments for having hydrogen fuel
cells in the power-producing arsenal. For starters, because hydrogen is the lightest element, hydrogen fuel is incredibly lightweight, which makes it great for transport, like on spacecraft.
And unlike solar-powered devices, if you have hydrogen fuel at the ready, fuel cells don’t require recharging like batteries. So, they’re great for indoor vehicles like forklifts, where releasing lots of fumes could be problematic, but you also need to use them pretty much continuously, which makes batteries less practical.
Russia even converted a passenger jet to run on hydrogen in the late ’80s and Boeing recently tested small planes that fly on hydrogen.
Honda says one of these fully-fueled cars could power an entire house for a whole week, or drive 300 miles without refueling. The main obstacle right now is the relatively high cost of these vehicles and the lack of hydrogen stations to refuel them, although California now has plans for seventy of these stations across the state, South Korea’s expected to have a total of forty-three soon and Germany’s aiming for hundred by 2017.
1.2. Nuclear Waste and Fission
Nuclear fission power plants are the traditional reactors that have been in use around the world for decades and provide the US with about 20% of electricity. The US uses something called light-water technology to surround the fuel rods with water, which slows the neutrons and allow for a sustained nuclear reaction.
But the system is really inefficient only 5 percentage of the uranium atoms in the rod get used up by the time it has to be removed. All that unused, highly radioactive uranium just gets added to a growing stockpile of nuclear waste.
In fission, an atom splits in two, releasing a lot of energy in the process. Nuclear power releases the same amount or even less of those greenhouse gases than most renewable energy sources. But, it’s a non-renewable source of energy!
The main fuel used in nuclear fission, uranium 2-3-5, is a limited resource that has to be mined and purified from the ground, much like fossil fuels.
The way to get power from uranium is by assembling rods of uranium parallel to one another and setting up a chain reaction. The nucleus, or core, of a uranium atom is made up of protons and neutrons. If a fast-moving neutron hits a uranium atom at just the right energy, it can split the uranium in two. The uranium splits into atoms of other elements, like krypton and barium. But three of the neutrons from the nucleus will fly off, carrying some energy with them. Those neutrons can then collide with another uranium atom, causing fission that releases even more neutrons, and so on.
Meanwhile, the cascade of splitting atoms gives off gamma radiation and heat, heating up the reactor. So, fission turns a nuclear reactor into a heat source for a power plant. Unfortunately, once used up all the useful uranium in the rods, the left over is the biggest setback of nuclear power: nuclear waste.
Nuclear waste consists of radioactive material that emits highly energetic particles that can be extremely dangerous for any living thing, including humans. Dealing with it safely is the sort of issue nuclear engineers can help with. They also design nuclear power plants to carefully control fission to stop it turning into a runaway process. If that happens, it can lead to disasters like the kind that happened in Chernobyl or Fukushima.
1.3. Space-Based Solar Power (SBSP)
Every hour, more energy from the sun reaches us than we earthlings use in an entire year. To try and save a lot more of it, one idea is to build giant solar farms in space that will collect some of the higher intensity, uninterrupted solar radiation. Giant mirrors would reflect huge amounts of solar rays onto smaller solar collectors. This energy would then be wirelessly beamed to Earth as either a microwave or laser beam.
One of the main reasons this amazing idea is still just an idea is because it’s, big surprise, very expensive. But it could become a reality in the not so distant future as our solar technology develops, and the cost of launching cargo into space comes way down.
Self-assembling satellites are launched into space, along with reflectors and a microwave or laser power transmitter. Reflectors or inflatable mirrors spread over a vast swath of space, directing solar radiation onto solar panels. These panels convert solar power into either a microwave or a laser and beam uninterrupted power down to Earth. On Earth, power-receiving stations collect the beam and add it to the electric grid. The two most commonly discussed designs for Space-Based
Solar Power (SBSP) are a large, deeper space microwave transmitting satellite and a smaller, nearer laser transmitting satellite.
1.4. Human Power
The presence of human-powered devices are already available, but scientists are working on harvesting power generated from normal human movement. It is about tiny electronics here, but the potential, when multiplied by billions of people, is big. And with developers making electronics that use less and less power, near sooner, the phone may charge when it rustles around the bag, pocket or moves in the hand, or the fingers move on the screen.
At Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, scientists have even demonstrated a device that uses viruses to translate pressure into electricity.
1.5. Tidal Power
Harnessing all the energy in the motion of the ocean could power the world several times over, which is why over thousands of companies are trying to figure out how.
Because of the focus on wind and solar, the tidal energy industry kind of got elbowed out of the early mix. But these systems are quickly becoming more efficient. For one, meet Oyster, a 2.4 megawatt producing, hinged flap that attaches to the ocean floor and - as it opens and closes - pumps high-pressure water onshore, where it drives a conventional hydroelectric turbine.
So, one of those could power a whole housing development or a couple of massive residential towers roughly two thousand five hundred homes.
1.6. Geothermal hear from Lava
The method of converting the heat rising from the depths of the molten core of the earth into energy also known as geothermal powers. Millions of homes around the world, including the electricity usage for 27% of the Philippines and 30% in Iceland.
But an Icelandic deep drilling project may have recently discovered the holy grail when it hit a pocket of magma, which had only happened once before in Hawaii. A team pumped water down into the hole, which the scorching magma instantly vaporized to a record-setting 842 degrees Fahrenheit.
This highly pressurized steam increased the power output of the system tenfold, an amazing success that should lead to a giant leap in the energy-generating capabilities of geothermal projects around the world.
1.7. Solar Windows
With production and installation costs getting cheaper by the day, solar power is taking off around the world. Europe is the best in photovoltaics and is driven by its leader, Germany. On an average sunny day in 2012, Deutschland got as much electricity from the sun as 20 nuclear power stations, enough to power 50% of the country. Spain is now generating more than 50% of its power from renewable resources like solar.
A California desert is home to the largest solar power station in the entire world, and the United States increased its solar capacity by nearly 500% in the last decade itself. Researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico just made a significant breakthrough in quantum dot solar cell technology that will allow highly efficient solar panels to double as transparent windows.
When this technology becomes cheap enough to hit the mass market in the next couple of years, every sun-exposed window in the world will have the potential to be converted into a mini power station.
1.8. Bio Fuels
Biomass energy is a form of energy that relies on burning biological matter, like plants, either directly or by processing them into a fuel. As it burns, the chemical energy stored in the plant’s matter is converted into heat.
Like with many of the other energy sources we’ve mentioned, the heat turns water into steam, which in turn does work on a turbine; in other words, it drives a heat engine. A generator then converts the turbine’s motion into electrical power.
About half of all biomass energy is delivered by burning plant matter directly, which humans have been doing long before the need for electrical power. A wood burning stove can keep your house warm in the winter, or it can be used as a heat source for something.
On a larger scale, scrap wood left over from wood processing or from waste produced by humans, along with food waste, can be burned in power plants more directly.
Most of the other half of biomass energy comes from processing biological matter into biogas or biofuel. By pulping and chemically treating biomass derived from crops and other plant matter, it becomes easier for special proteins called enzymes to chemically break it down into a more readily usable fuel source.
1.9. Alge
This brings us to the 3rd generation of biofuels, algae, which has all the right ingredients to replace oil once and for all. Algae’s natural oil content is greater than 50%, which means it can be easily extracted and processed. It is possible to convert the remaining part of the plant into electricity, natural gas and even fertilizer to grow even more algae without chemicals. Algae grow quickly and don’t need farmland or freshwater.
Just last month, Alabama became the world’s first algae biofuel system that can also effectively treat human wastewater, this actually resulted in a carbon-negative outcome.
The 40,000 a day demonstration plant basically floated giant bags on a bay, pumped wastewater water into them, added little algae, and then let the sunlight do its thing. Before long, algae had grown everywhere and cleaned the wastewater so well it could either be released back into the bay or reused by people as drinking water.
1.10. Flying Wind Farms
The world is already getting a lot of energy from the wind, but with the Buoyant Air Turbine or BAT, that floats 12,000 feet above the ground where winds are stronger and more consistent, humans could soon be getting that energy much more efficiently. The system is simple: a ringed blimp with a wind turbine in the middle is tethered securely to the ground.
It’ll produce twice as much power as similar sized tower-mounted turbines. It can even handle winds of more than 100 mph and can be fitted with additional devices like a wifi unit, which would help bring the Internet to parts of the world that don’t have it yet.
The buoyant air turbine was designed for bringing renewable wind energy to rural parts of the world where building a traditional wind turbine was impossible and will first be deployed in Alaska. It can even automatically detect and adjust its floating height to where the best wind speed is. When the wind speed is dangerously high, the thing will dock itself, eliminating the need for manual labour.
Flying wind turbines like this should soon replace all the less efficient tower-based systems and could allow for the construction of offshore wind farms that have until now been really expensive to build.
4. Conclusion
No matter what, we’ll need a new power infrastructure to support the cleaner energy world of the future. And that infrastructure, that future, will be built by engineers. Promoting renewable energy technologies to counter climate change and increase energy security is a complex endeavor. Difficulties abound due to technological reasons, longtime frames, misaligned national interests, the role of the business sector and final consumers, and the need to link research, innovation, deployment and rollout. In the European Union, the coordination of action at Member State and EU levels adds another layer of complexity for the advancements.
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