The following is a short "essay" of my experiences and observations after returning from a 4 week roadtrip today.
I saw flooding across the nation, almost couldn't cross the Mississippi River, played it safe and drove north through Arkansas to cross. Rain followed me for most of the days, forcing me to stay at hotels more instead of camping. I didn't see any of the huge wildfires, and luckily the tornado warnings in a few of the states were just warnings. A few days ago I couldn't visit Yellowstone because of record snowfall (it's June!). I wanted to escape the AZ heat, but it stayed cool the whole month I was gone... While in DC I sat in the Senate Gallery for half an hour listening to 3 different Republican Senators (all old white men) discussing Energy Policy and lobbying for drilling more oil "to keep jobs and reduce oil imports" (Nebraska)
On my way into Wyoming I saw about 8 trains that were probably a mile long EACH, and 5 of them were full of coal, while the others were returning to be filled, and these were only deliveries eastward that I could see driving by in a few hours! (photos coming soon)
I'm going to bombard you with a bunch of facts now :I
I noticed it was very windy in Wyoming yesterday, and for the last decade power companies have been trying to decide whether to build giant transmission lines from Wyoming that would deliver electricity to CO, NM, AZ, and CA. I saw a few wind turbines on my trip, but they're contributing less than 1% of America's energy. China surpassed all countries in Wind Energy last year as their government tries to find ways to meet their rapidly increasing energy demand.
It's not likely that any new coal plants will be built in the U.S. according to an SRP spokesman that came to ASU, but China is producing a new 500MW coal plant every single month! That's insane... and scary.
If you're wondering, I just took a class on Renewable Energy Engineering so I had all these facts fresh in my mind as I roadtripped through America.
I know the recent incident in Japan has made people skeptical of Nuclear Power, but I see it differently. If that Fukushima plant survived an earthquake of that magnitude (plus flooding) without a catastrophic failure, I'd say the technology is quite stable. However, nuclear power is an "alternative resource" and arguably "clean", but it's not a "renewable resource" and therefore not a long term solution.
Regardless of whether you believe humans are effecting the climate, we need to find ways of harvesting incoming energy from the sun. The major difficulty is that the sun energy is dispersed over large areas in small amounts at intermittent times (quite different from our past perceptions of energy extraction). Currently we have a variety of mechanical methods for extracting the sun energy. If photovoltiac (PV) efficiency increases (predicted to reach 40-45% next year) then that would probably become the dominant method (as mechanical devices are having trouble getting much higher than 31%).
The challenges we face with sunlight intermittence issues can be overcome by developing methods for Energy Storage and Energy Transmission. We also need to accept that our current lifestyles consume vast amounts of energy, specifically transportation, and that we may need to give up some of the comforts we currently enjoy (i.e. driving individual cars). No one wants to give up luxuries, and we're quite spoiled by all the great things we have. In the last century we've hastily burned up the stored energy in fossil fuels that required millions of years to form, and we can only harvest so much power from the sun directly.
I'm interested to see how everything turns out, but this time around renewable energy won't die off like a the fads of the past.
