Renewable Energy

I'm officially in my first semester of my PhD at Wichita State studying power systems and am taking a class this semester on renewable energy integration. There is debate in some circles regarding the necessity of using these renewable energy sources; much of this debate tend to be centered around the urgency of regulating carbon emissions from traditional power sources.

Another perspective, the one that I think about often, considers the fact that non-renewable energy sources have a severe and obvious limitation: they are not renewable and will run out at some point. All of these fossil fuels are produced by geological processes that we cannot reproduce or replicate in an economically feasible way. These natural resources are a blessing in that we have found ways of relatively easily converting them into a variety of specific refined fuels. The raw resources will run out at some point, though. Unfortunately, the ease of extraction and refinement of fossil fuels have resulted in relatively low costs and promoted the expansion of the use of these fuels. The seemingly limitless supply of fossil fuels leads makes it easier and easier to continue to use them and harder and harder to try to look for alternatives. For decades now Presidents of the United States have got it right in saying that we as a nation are addicted to oil.

The reality, though, is that these fossil fuels will run out at some time in the future and we are so dependent on them that it is hard right now to even imagine our way of living without the pervasive and ready access to fossil fuels. Nearly 100% of our transportation infrastructure from cars to aircraft to cargo ships use only fossil fuels. Most of the electricity in the United States is produced by burning fossil fuels; even electric cars use fossil fuels, albeit in an indirect manner. Even as gasoline fuel prices continue to rise, we in the United States have not reached the point where we are ready to consider serious changes in our lifestyle. We complain; talk is cheap.

To those of you who think the day where we will reach critical levels in our fossil fuel supply is many decade (or even a century) away, well, you may be right. For all of our sake, let us hope that this is the case; we need the time to make these renewable energy sources viable alternatives to the existing system. This brings me to my first point: now is the time to invest (heavily) in these alternative systems. If we wait until the situation is urgent, until we are critically low on fossil fuels to start looking for alternatives, we'll be too late. Gradual change is almost always easier to manage than rapid change. A change this large cannot occur easily and there are many technical and operational challenges that still need to be overcome. As a self-declared representative of all technical professionals in this field I plead with you: give us this time to get this right. This means investing in the technology long before it is profitable and spending the money to research how we need to change our system to accommodate the coming reality.

And again to those of you who think that fossil fuels aren't running out soon I would add this: our society has mis-estimated the bounds of limitless resources in the past. The prevailing opinion for much of the time the Pacific Northwest was settled by white-folk was that both the forest and the fish were effectively infinite. These natural resources seemed so expansive and seemingly immeasurable that there was no effort to moderate their use. The trees and the fish were harvested for many decades until their numbers dwindled so severely that it was clear there were limits to what we thought of as limitless. Now, to preserve these resources for future generations, we try to limit their consumption, especially in the case of trees where it takes several decades to naturally replace what we use.

Considering the non-renewable nature of the fossil fuels we have become highly dependent on and our increasing appetite for them, the day is coming when they will become so expensive so as to be unaffordable. On that day, the lifestyle we in the United States have come to expect will come to a halt. The only way this can be avoided is to prepare now for this eventuality and rebuild our energy infrastructure to be re-orientated around alternative energy sources. The future we want is one where fossil fuels never become expensive because the demand has been radically reduced due to viable alternatives becoming better economic choices. Gasoline would never become prohibitively expensive because nobody will have a use for them; better alternatives will exist. The future we want is one we can create if we choose to start preparing for it now.