Not Everyone Is Asleep at the Energy Wheel, Thankfully!

Edward J. Dodson

[Reprinted from Equal Rights, Summer, 2005]

The news from environmentalists and other scientists regarding the long-term continued availability of fossil fuels is not encouraging. And yet, in very few places around the globe is conservation a public policy priority. U.S. foreign policy seems to be driven by the national security concern that SUV and Hummer sales will fall off if gasoline prices rise much about $2 a gallon. Economists warn that the stability of the U.S. economy is at great risk if energy costs begin to rapidly escalate and we have not made major changes in the way we do what we do. To protect ourselves, those of us of modest means ought to be seriously developing a personal strategy for dealing with scarcer and most costly natural gas and oil.

As have many Equal Rights readers, I have seen the recent documentary, "End of Suburbia." While I live only twelve miles from Philadelphia and for many years used the train to travel to work and back to home each day, retirement is causing me to rethink my life choices and having to depend on the automobile to get wherever I need to go. The looming energy crisis and my personal well-being have me planning to move - relatively soon - to a "walking community." Now, all I need to do is find one where the housing is affordable without having to relocate to a place more people are moving from than to.

While politicians have been slow to make the hard decisions necessary to prepare our societies for a future in which burning oil, gas or coal are no longer economically viable, independent scientists and entrepreneurs have persevered. Wind, ocean tides, geothermal and solar energy are each experiencing limited success. Many scientists believe that solar power will eventually become a major source of energy. However, up to the present, the cost of constructing a power plant capable to generating huge quantities of electricity from the sun has been uneconomical. Moreover, the dependence on the photovoltaic cell requires a large amount of land while converting less than 20 percent of the sun's energy into electricity.

A recent news story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, by reporter Winn Rosch highlights a new development that could change everything. "Stirling Energy Systems in Phoenix and Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., are preparing an alternative technology that promises to make solar power competitive with conventional power generation," writes Rosch. "Their trick is to use mirrors." I will let Winn Rosch tell the rest of the story directly:

"Solar furnaces focus a vast field of mirrors on a tiny point to create temperatures of thousands of degrees, concentrating sunshine like a magnifying glass igniting paper. The Stirling/Sandia concept is similar. They concentrate power with big, dish-shaped mirrors, but they do it on a smaller scale, producing lower temperatures to drive a heat engine [which] … uses expanding gas to drive a piston, but rather than burning gasoline, it uses heat from the outside to power the process.

"Although using an engine with moving parts sounds like a disadvantage, it sidesteps one of the inefficiencies of solar cells. Solar cells produce only direct current, and they need an inverter to convert that into the alternating current used in homes and businesses.

"Overall, the conversion efficiency of the dish-and-engine system is about 30 percent, about double that of current commercial-scale photovoltaic systems. That means that the dish needs only half the area required by solar cells to produce the same amount of power.

"The multiple-dish approach has another advantage. Unlike more conventional power plants that don't begin to produce power (and pay their expenses) until the entire project gets completed, the dish array begins producing power once the first dish is installed.

"Although you could make many small power plants scattered across the country with all those dishes, Stirling envisions a single, massive installation somewhere in southern California or Arizona. They hope that by concentrating all the dishes in one place, they can reduce operating and maintenance costs.

"If the plan works as envisioned, the 20,000-dish system would produce power competitively at about six cents per kilowatt-hour. Although that's more expensive than coal-fired plants, it's about the same as natural gas-fired generators."

An additional advantage not commented on in the above report is that with solar energy there is no down the chain environmental or health costs. Whether power plants are burning coal or oil there is air pollution. And, when there is air pollution there are huge costs passed on to others. The other alternative - nuclear energy - generates waste that remains deadly to life forever. Clearly, this new solar technology ought to be nurtured and encouraged. In fact, purchasing a few shares of stock in Sterling Energy Systems might not be a bad idea. So, sell that SUV now.

See: Winn L. Rosch. "No Smoke, Just Mirrors Make Solar Engine Twice as Efficient," The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. November 22, 2004