Energy crisis

It just happened to me that I was apparently quite free in these few days on my summer research at Aarhus University. To fill up all those empty slots, I’d been trying to engage in the local events such as scientific talks or seminars. There was one particularly worth-sharing talk that I happened to attend this morning.

The talk was delivered by the chairman of European Energy Research Alliance, Henrik Bindslev. He talked about the current status and challenges for EU to solve the energy crisis problems. I am certainly very impressed on the Europeans level of awareness towards the environmental issue and energy crisis and I really hope they would be a good example for the rest of world to follow. However, of course, those are not immune to problems and challenges and I would like to highlight some of his excellent points on that.

First, it was about the solar power plant which involved the use of various light-focusing mirrors and semiconductors. The problem here was that current solar-farms was not placed in an optimal positions where according to him, happened to be a few latitude above and below the equator, which were at places like northern Africa, Brazil regions, Southern California and Australia. Interestingly, the middle-east region provided the best, optimal solar energy input according to him. Thus, he stressed that we could look forward to the EU starting to build some serious friendship with the Middle-Easts.

Another problem was the material. “We want an economical power, thus we need to look into materials which are abundant” he said. It was pretty disappointing to see that all the semiconductors involved the use of rare metals whose price may sky-rocket if we were to use them. “Remember, don’t just try to talk about high efficiency in the lab, we are talking about couple of hundreds kilometre squares here in this business.” I guess he got a point there of avoiding putting ‘hundreds kilometre square’ of gold foil in the middle of Sahara.

Second, it was about the wind power. Taking example of Denmark, where 20% of its power production was from environmentally friendly wind energy. He mentioned that the problem here was of a long term issue. There is no such thing as a breezy, constant flow of wind anywhere in this world. What the turbine experience is always a turbulent wind where it could ALWAYS cause some serious structural damage. He also mentioned the interdisciplinary approach to design such turbine in order to tackle such problem. On the wind-blades, you would need some serious aerodynamics and aeroelasticity issue whereas on the ground, one would need some hydrodynamics. Why? Because for the land to be of value, the turbine must be built on the sea shores or optimally, in the middle of the sea.

Third, he mentioned the vision of sustainable energy system where power are ‘shared’ among countries. He shared his idea of building a network of power grid connecting from Africa to EU whereas along the grid, several power generators were in place be it a solar power plant in the middle of dessert or wind turbines along the sea shores. There were options of hydro plants in several area in EU too. The nice thing about this was that there was the need of an efficient heat/electric storage system. On a nice daytime where power consumption would be the lowest, energy would be stored by the grid system on some heat reservoir and during an evening where power consumption would reach its peak, the energy stored could be used to increase the power capacity.

This led us to the final point where he stressed about the uneven distribution of power consumption. He talked about an energy company which suffered a serious deficit because of this as they needed to purchase the power on supply-demand market scheme, it was revealed that during winter-time, electricity price could be as five time as high as its average and even more surprising, there was once during a day that the price was hundred times as high, leading to excessive loss and thus, deficit.

To stress his point further, he gave an example with nowadays-popular electric cars. If one assume a standard usage  as per family for instance driving kids to school, getting groceries and all those stuffs, we expected them to ‘charge’ their car during the evenings especially after the working hours. This gave the energy companies a nightmare because they would really observe a significant increase in energy consumption. “If a stretch of typical Danish residential streets consisting of let say, 50 families, only THREE of those beasts are allowed for them not to bust onto the power shortage.” This really surprised me as I though electric cars were a very good solution to reduce carbon emissions, but the downside showed that this demand more electricity than ever, leading to more carbon emission on the power generation.

His talk was indeed very inclined towards applicable technology and hypothetical societal awareness which was, of course, far from being realized. How many people do you think in this world are aware and care about the environmental issue and energy crisis? Unless they are severely affected, people are generally ignorant, in my opinion. Look at how the Europeans (or in Asian context, Singapore) strived for environmental movements as land value is of utmost importance to them. Just to add on, the idea of power grid network and system that Mr. Bindslev proposed was turned down by certain countries for the reason that energy sharing would increase their operational costs, which, I think, was perfectly valid for an economical reasons, but… something is just not right in the world today.

Everything, every aspects of life was too tied down to money, money, money, economy, economy and more economies. That’s sad, but that’s no longer an opinion, it’s a fact now.

There was a very sharp comment from a senior audience. He said that the major challenges were not just in the scientific advances, but it was also on how we could engineer our society, our politicians and our corporate stakeholders to aware of such problems and come together as one. And I think, he was absolutely making sense.

peace
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