Renewable and Green Energy in 2010

Energy costs change: with new technologies, renewable energy is always getting cheaper. So where are we in February 2010 ? Well, technologically and economically it is all over already: wind turbines in windy locations can be cheaper per unit than electricity from coal plants, and hydroelectric and geothermal have been working efficiently and cheaply for decades. Furthermore, the end of 2009 and the start of 2010 has seen a few additional optimistic announcements which are shown below. There are older and more general renewable energy links here. Of course, if the citizens of the United States of America (why don't they have a name for themselves?) were not so ignorant of the advantages of intelligently directed consumption taxes and so determined to teach China how to ignore the obvious consequences of their own actions, then maybe the USA would already have cars and cities like Europeans and not be sending all their money to (mostly dodgy) oil exporting countries. Ultimately, as Winston Churchill pointedly noted, "Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing...after they have exhausted all other possibilities." Wired magazine has their own review of 2010 renewable energy companies that they think could matter.

Renewable Energy Generation and Storage

• Photovoltaic panels are already below $1 per peak Watt to manufacture) and below USD 2 at one, or two retailers and therefore competitive with retail electricity in sunny places where peak demand is for air conditioning.
• Nuclear Power from traveling wave reactors - electricity from traveling wave and Thorium reactors can be safer than current designs and so help in places which are not reliably sunny, windy or wet.
• Electricity Storage - as hot and cold gravel is cheap and efficient and converting between hydrogen and water should get cheaper soon
• Biofuels - Cellulose digesting enzymes just got much cheaper and burning wood is still a global mainstay

Green Transport

• Amyris have just started making diesel fuel - commercially from sugar
• British Airways and virgin are getting aviation fuels from municpal and organic waste
• Clear Fuels is turning wood waste into jet fuel and diesel too.
• Biofuels without microbes - look increasingly possible via chemical catalysis
• Electric bikes are increasing in use for local transport and are so convenient.
• Electric cars - mainstream electric cars from Chevrolet and Nissan join the exotic Tesla later this year.

So, in conclusion, ecological economic solutions exist already or can be built now for energy generation, storage, transmission and mobility and they are still improving. If the pieces of the government of The USA could promise a floor to the price of fossil fuel oil at half the price it reached last year, ie. above $70 per barrel, then all the inventors and investors in the World could empty the USA energy market of coal and oil within two decades. Of course, that would make fossil fuel really cheap again globally and the USA would show its democratic weaknesses and China could exploit them and politics would get tricky and we would all get even more worried about ocean acidification and global warming. So even completely stopping fossil fuel use in the first world will not stop global warming. If the new technologies are going to work, then a little more global cooperation will be needed which is a shame because that almost never happens.