Ecobella Blog

Seven grand challenges that the Congress and the Federal Government should take over the next five years so that we will be firmly on a path toward clean energy independence:

One: Make plug-in electric cars and trucks commonplace.

Second: Beginning in 2010 Nissan, Toyota, General Motors, and Ford will sell electric cars that can be plugged into wall sockets. Fed Ex based in Memphis is already using electric hybrid delivery trucks. TVA could offer — other utilities are — smart meters that would allow its nine million customers to plug in their vehicles at night to fill up “on electricity” for only a few dollars in exchange for the customer agreeing to pay more for electricity used between 4 o’clock and 10 o’clock when the grid is especially busy. Add to that that 60 percent of Americans drive less than 30 miles each day, those Americans could drive a plug-in electric car or truck without using a drop of gasoline. By some estimates there’s so much electric capacity in power plants at night that over time — and this would take a long time — we could replace three-fourths of our light vehicles with plug-ins. That could reduce our overseas oil bill from $500 billion to $250 billion and do it all without building one new power plant. In other words, we have the plugs, the cars are coming. All we need is the cord. Is this too good to be true?

Down the road is the prospect of a hydrogen fuel cell hybrid vehicle with two engines neither of which uses any gasoline. There are obstacles, true. Expensive batteries is a big one. Maybe they’ll add, David Sandalow says, eight to eleven thousand dollars per car, but I rode on the airplane today from Knoxville sitting next to the Director of the Materials Laboratory at Oak Ridge, who was at my speech on Friday. He says within five years with the appropriate amount of research we ought to have 150-watt-hour per kilogram battery that would produce 80 miles on a single electric charge.

Third: make solar power cost competitive with power from fossil fuels. This is the second of the National Institute of Engineering’s grand challenges. Solar power despite 50 years of trying produces 1/100th of one percent of our electricity. The cost of solar panels averages $25-to-$30,000, and the electricity produced for the most part can’t be stored back to the battery issue.

Four. Safely reprocess and store nuclear waste. Nuclear plants provide 20 percent of America’s electricity but 70 percent of our clean electricity: That is no carbon, no sulfur, no nitrogen, no sulfur. The most important breakthrough needed so that we can build more new nuclear power plants is to find a way to deal with the nuclear waste. A political stalemate has stopped nuclear waste from going to Yucca Mountain in Nevada. We got $15 billion already collected from ratepayers just sitting in a bank that was supposed to be for that purpose. Recycling could reduce the waste by 90 percent creating less stuff to store, but finding a way to deal with this is important. The Oak Ridge scientists told me on Friday that a reasonable goal for nuclear power would be to add five or six new plants a year over the next 40 years. That would get up to close to 200 more power plants, but would only get us to about 30 percent of all the electricity that our big economy needs. I think it’s very important in discussing clean energy independence that we realize we’re not on some desert island, and a single solar panel and a windmill are not going to cut it for the needs of this country. We need large amounts of clean energy. That’s one way to do it.

Five. Make advanced biofuels cost competitive with gasoline. There’s a big backlash right now toward ethanol from corn because of its effect on food prices, and that reminds us of the great law of unintended consequences when issuing all these grand challenges. But ethanol from cellulosic materials, which could be described as things we grow that we don’t eat, show great promise and within the next five years could make a bit difference. So the focus on advanced biofuels would be on crops we don’t eat instead of crops we do eat.

Two more grand challenges. Make new buildings green buildings. Japan believes it may miss its 2012 Kyoto goals for greenhouse gas reductions primarily because of energy wasted by inefficient buildings. We know most of the technologies to do this. Figuring out how to accelerate their use in a decentralized society is most of this grand challenge.

And then, finally, provide energy from fusion. Arguably, this doesn’t belong on a list that has anything to do with the next five years. This is the idea of recreating on earth the way the sun creates energy and using it for commercial power. It’s the third grand challenge of the National Institutes of Engineering, and it’s probably a long way away, but the promise of sustaining a controlled fusion reaction for commercial power generation is so fantastic that our five-year goal should be to do everything we can do in five years to reach the long-term goal.

To see his conference: