Clean energy The provinces

Citizens, through their political representatives, have become aware of the need to seriously look for energy production systems (CO2 and others) near or equal to zero. In this American area, despite the fact that your government is cautious with international similarities, the investigation encourages very high public financing. Let’s see what is being done.

On the one hand, there are efforts to reduce energy consumption, so that the systems that use it more efficiently. By means ofAnother side is production. One of the challenges is to increase the efficiency of current production methods that do not use fossil fuel. The other, fundamentally, is the search for new alternatives to the production of clean energy. The field is so wide that it requires an extensive number of disciplines and technologies. In a simplified way, we can say, without being exhausting, that the current alternatives are grouped in two or three categories. On the one hand we have the nuclear alternative. On the other hand, wind -related alternatives, tides, waves, etc. are finally related to the sun: sunscreen, photovoltaic cells, biofuels, plants thermosoles, etc. NASTYThe above must be added the technologies and scientific objectives that have to do with some or some of the previous topics: new materials, recording and storage of CO2, fuel cells, materials that must be used in extreme conditions, modeling, etc.

As an introduction, let’s look at the importance of the sun in this challenge. In 2000 the energy consumption on earth was 13.5 Teravatios (TW). A teravatio is a billion watt. Consumption models indicate that the consumption will be larger than 30 TW in 2050 and in 2100 larger than 50 TW. Can this consumption be tackled with the help of solar energy? If we take into account that the sun sends 120,000 TW annually, we only need efficient systems that can use to produce energy, 0.011% of the energy that the sun sends us. More or less the sun sends us the energy that we spend in a year in one hour. But there is a serious problem, both with current production systems that use solar energy as, with other systems that use waves, wind or tides, there are temporary periods in which there is no energy. There are two paths to solve it. One is to achieve efficient large -scale electrical or thermal storage. The thermal seems closer, but the electric seems unlikely in the short term. The other is to immediately produce ecological fuel that can be used, both in fixed systems and in mobile phones. As you can see, science and technology must solve the most important social, economic and environment that the earth has had throughout history. These challenges will be subject to upcoming articles.