What’s the most exciting part of clean energy? Maybe, as my colleague Shravya wrote, it’s about the race to the top or the role clean energy plays in energy security.
© 2011 SteFou/Flickr cc by 2.0
But at the same time, engineers and scientists are hard at work improving existing technology for renewable energy. Offshore wind farms are already iconic along Europe’s coasts, but a new kind of wind turbine could change the game entirely. Engineers are working on giant, floating wind turbines that could be towed out to the deep sea, tethered to the ocean floor and left to float as they generate clean electricity. These 2- to 7- Megawatt turbines could open up the deep sea for cheaper, more efficient wind power.
As interest in clean energy increases, developers are looking at increasingly innovative ways to harness the wind. Here’s just one example. Makani Power, based in California, is developing kite-like airborne wind turbines (AWT) that generate electricity from high-altitude winds. By taking advantage of the powerful and consistent winds, these kites can create electricity from just a strong breeze. AWTs also have lower capital costs than traditional wind turbines and can be used in non-traditional locations such as valleys or low wind speed regions. Combining seemingly space-age technology with the tried and true is essential as we race to remove fossil fuels from our electricity.
Beyond technological advancement, there are big changes coming to where and how we build wind farms. The U.S. Department of Energy recently launched an online program that will make it easier to build wind farms in locations that generate the most electricity. Making renewable energy more efficient will help bring down the cost for developers and lower our utility bills.
Advancements in clean energy technology can be seen throughout the sector. The work being done at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado and Advanced Research Programs Agency – Energy
But we cannot stop here. By showing your support for the amazing work already under way, you can help remind people that our clean energy future is too important to simply throw away.
Steven Earl Salmony
January 27th
Humankind could soon come face to face with an incredible and unprecedented situation. We are spectacularly successful at doing something potentially ruinous of all we claim to be protecting and preserving as we ever more rampantly increase our exploitation of natural resources and continually increase our food production and distribution capabilities. Stupidly we hold fast to a wicked idea that, if we do not do these things, a catastrophe will follow. This upside down, deluded thinking is leading us to risk the precipitation of a colossal disaster of some unimaginable sort. The continuous plunder of limited resources and conversion of biomass into human mass, including the continual increase of food production to feed a growing population, are precisely what is causing humanity to charge down a “primrose path’ toward an unfolding confrontation with a global, human-driven ecological wreckage.
Perhaps we need to invite one another to listen more, see farther on a clear day, and communicate better. Thanks to all in the Climate Reality Project, the Circle of Friends and the Royal Society’s People and the Planet Working Group for being now here just as you are. We are going to make a difference. Like all of you, I do not have answers, but not having answers cannot be used as a ‘justification’ by population professionals, demographers and economists on our watch for ceasing their explorations and denying extant scientific research. Scientists cannot consciously and deliberately deny evidence of what could somehow be real. All these unwitting experts must be called out. If foolhardy experts and their greedmongering benefactors are ultimately victorious in their elective mutism and willful denial of science, what is to keep silence from killing the world we inhabit? If ‘the ninety-nine percent’ are denying the human overpopulation of Earth, then 0.99% of the remaining 1% are in denial of the science of human population dynamics, I suppose. These circumstances are intolerable and cannot stand. As a growing number of scientists are making all of us aware, a way needs to be discovered and chosen that effectively communicates an adequate understanding of the profoundly dangerous situation in which the human community finds itself in our time. As Paul Ehrlich reported last year, “Everybody who understands the situation is scared witless.” That as it may be, experts need to gather their wits about them because they still have responsibilities to assume and duties to perform. After all, we live by our wits not witlessness; moral courage not fear; and by adapting to the requirements of reality rather than putting our heads in the sand. Somehow the vision, the honesty, the judgement, the pluck, the will and the means will be summoned by human beings with feet of clay to acknowledge, address and overcome the human-induced global challenges that are already dimly visible on the far horizon. Otherwise the greed of self-proclaimed masters of the universe and the witlessness of their minions, who together rule the world on our watch, will certainly bring about its ruin as a fit place for human habitation.
In all the seriousness and gravity of what could be true, never in a lifetime did I expect to see a situation like the global predicament looming ominously before humanity. Although my eyes were open during the first 50 years of life, I did not for a split second catch sight, even through a glass darkly, of the awesome big picture: the global predicament that is given its shape in the gigantic presence of seven billion, soon to become 9 billion human beings ravaging a finite planet with size, composition and frangible environs of Earth. The sight of something so awesome left me initially thunderstruck and later on incessantly compelled to speak out as I have for years. Perhaps speaking out about what is true to you as best it can be expressed and thereby raising awareness, is at least one distinctly human way to go forward.
Patricia Roycroft
January 27th
We have known for many years that global warming is happening. Our politicians remain silent, likely thinking that someone can fix it tomorrow. That tomorrow has arrived and you are probably the only one who is keenly aware of that fact.