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EDN.COMMENT: Ten-year plans

The price of energy, or to be more exact, the recent trend in its price, has stimulated a lot of comment and appears to have done some focussing of minds. My colleague and EDN’s Editor-in-Chief Rick Nelson noted in a recent column that Intersolar North America, the American presentation of the exhibition on solar power, attracted at least as much attention as Semicon West, with which it was co-located. Rick noted the strong European presence at the event and speculated that the best opportunities for technology companies in the field may lie in selling to international markets rather than large-scale installation in the USA itself (www.edn.com/article/ CA6582857).

With each upward tick in the price of fossil fuels, solar-cell researchers and makers study the spreadsheets that compare their economics to those of conventional power generation, and look forward to achieving parity. Meanwhile, those who look first not at the price, but at the cost – the environmental cost – of carbon- based power generation continue to add (verbal) fuel to the fire of this discussion. Also in the States, former Vice-President Al Gore offered his echo of the late President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 “Challenge” speech that sent the USA to the moon.

If you missed the coverage, Gore proposed that the country should aim to replace all its electricity-generating capacity with zero-carbon technology in ten years. He is certainly not the only one who has thought that the time is right for a new version of that Kennedy speech – but he has cast his net a little wide, and slightly missed the point on the issue of achievability. Kennedy set a challenge that – at the outset – looked impossible in technological terms. However, you can accelerate the pace of research and development almost without limits, given the will and the money. In the case of the “space race” it was mostly development; not much fundamental technology went to the moon in 1969 that didn’t already exist in 1960.

However, although Apollo programme did call for a lot of technology to be developed in a short time, and though Saturn 5 rockets were big, not many of them were needed. The amount of physical “stuff” that had to be built was finite. Sadly, even if the R&D were done and ready today, from a standing start, it’s doubtful if you could build replacements for all of the USA’s electricity generation capacity in ten years. The industrial heavy-engineering infrastructure to manufacture to that time scale just doesn’t exist.

Is there a candidate project that Gore might have cited and that offers parallels to the Kennedy speech? One that is ambitious, that looks impossible in the timeframe but might just be achievable if we throw enough effort and resources at it? I think there is: power generation based on nuclear fusion. The timidity with which the world’s sci-tech community is currently approaching this concept is close to depressing. We need some alternative generation technology now; by analogy with the rockets that went to moon, the basic physics of fusion is done; all that’s left is engineering. It’s engineering, certainly, that we may not altogether know how to do yet, but engineering just the same; that is the point of pouring resources into “grand projects.” Conversely, most other alternative energy generation technologies are up against some fundamental physical limitations that will be hard to get around, no matter how much development effort we direct at them.

Today, however, the physicists talk cautiously of the year 2050 before we even have a prototype demonstration fusion generator. Here’s what the focussed version of the “ten-year” speech perhaps ought to say; “Before ten years has passed, we should have a working and economically viable, safe and practical, design for a power-generating fusion reactor. And it should not be an un-repeatable “extended prototype” in the manner of the Apollo programme, but a finished design, with bill-of-materials and ready for mass-manufacture.”

As a goal, this may not even be possible: it might be fundamentally beyond the capabilities of our engineering to achieve. Those who favour such projects say this almost doesn’t matter, that even if the basic programme were to fail, it would be an immense spur to industrial and economic progress. Some will also argue that we should not be seeking a “techno-fix” for our present energy dilemma, and that all our efforts should focus on renewable energy sources. While they seek to hold the moral high ground, those who hold that viewpoint ignore the reality that what the people really want is all of the energy as well as low environmental impact. They don’t want to be told, “You can’t have both.” A “grand project” might just deliver that goal – and it would be great fun trying.