Eliminate Fossil Fuels
Fossil fuels have three big problems:
1) Finite resource:
2) Damages the environment:
3) Damages Political Stability
All three problems are real but their costs are not reflected in the cost of fossil fuels. Alternative energy solutions are all currently more expensive than fossil fuels and need government support through subsidies, mandates and carbon taxes. Unfortunately transferring costs to government does not eliminate them, it simply transfers them to taxpayers as a whole.
The cost of significantly increasing alternative energy deployment at current costs would mean significantly increasing the percentage of GDP devoted to energy. Energy is one of the biggest components of GDP (about 8% worldwide) so this would severely damage economic growth, particularly in the developing world. Economic growth trumps the environment every time, as evidenced by limited objectives of every climate change conference since the first agreement at Kyoto in 1997 up to the most recent at Paris in 2015. As a result fossil fuel use in the developing world continues to grow rapidly. The only path around this fundamentally economic dilemma is to lower the cost of alternative energy to a point where it is competitive with fossil fuels and therefore its deployment does not damage economic growth.
To reiterate, the problem is not the availability of credible energy alternatives to fossil fuels. The problem is their high direct costs for generation and their high additional indirect costs for transmission, storage and backup. Proponents of current alternative energy solutions believe this high cost is a reasonable and acceptable cost to pay to reduce CO2 emissions. Based on this perception they support policies that pay this high cost through subsidies and carbon taxes. Proponents believe that perseverance will eventually succeed, but this approach has been pursued for decades and is clearly not working quickly enough. World CO2 emissions continue to increase every year with no sign of reducing out to 2050 and beyond.
1) Finite resource:
2) Damages the environment:
3) Damages Political Stability
All three problems are real but their costs are not reflected in the cost of fossil fuels. Alternative energy solutions are all currently more expensive than fossil fuels and need government support through subsidies, mandates and carbon taxes. Unfortunately transferring costs to government does not eliminate them, it simply transfers them to taxpayers as a whole.
The cost of significantly increasing alternative energy deployment at current costs would mean significantly increasing the percentage of GDP devoted to energy. Energy is one of the biggest components of GDP (about 8% worldwide) so this would severely damage economic growth, particularly in the developing world. Economic growth trumps the environment every time, as evidenced by limited objectives of every climate change conference since the first agreement at Kyoto in 1997 up to the most recent at Paris in 2015. As a result fossil fuel use in the developing world continues to grow rapidly. The only path around this fundamentally economic dilemma is to lower the cost of alternative energy to a point where it is competitive with fossil fuels and therefore its deployment does not damage economic growth.
To reiterate, the problem is not the availability of credible energy alternatives to fossil fuels. The problem is their high direct costs for generation and their high additional indirect costs for transmission, storage and backup. Proponents of current alternative energy solutions believe this high cost is a reasonable and acceptable cost to pay to reduce CO2 emissions. Based on this perception they support policies that pay this high cost through subsidies and carbon taxes. Proponents believe that perseverance will eventually succeed, but this approach has been pursued for decades and is clearly not working quickly enough. World CO2 emissions continue to increase every year with no sign of reducing out to 2050 and beyond.
The StratoSolar solution:
StratoSolar-PV with integrated gravity energy storage reduces the average cost of current photo-voltaic (PV) electricity by a factor of three, while providing around the clock 100% dispatch-able electricity. StratoSolar's tripling of average PV effectiveness, combined with gravity energy storage makes today’s PV technology an immediately viable, low cost, direct replacement for fossil fuel energy. At the current rate of PV cost reduction this is the equivalent of moving the date when ground PV electricity might become economically viable forward by ten to twenty years, while simultaneously removing the huge PV Achilles heel of intermittent and unpredictable electricity supply.
In addition, competitively priced PV electricity will rapidly increase installed PV cumulative volume, which will in turn rapidly drive PV costs down along the volume driven (not time driven) learning curve. This will further reduce the cost of PV electricity to well below today’s electricity cost and enable the manufacture of economically competitive synthetic liquid fuels which will allow for the complete replacement of fossil fuels.
Understanding the rationale of the StratoSolar solution:
Most approaches to lowering the cost of PV electricity focus on increasing PV conversion efficiency and reducing the cost of PV panels and other system costs (BOS). StratoSolar instead, is based on deploying existing PV technology in a more solar rich environment. A comparison with two other approaches that try to exploit more solar rich environments may better help in understanding StratoSolar. The two other approaches are to: 1) to exploit the sunshine in deserts and 2) exploit sunshine in outer space. Both have been investigated extensively and are sufficiently plausible to have received significant attention and funding. The most notable desert project is DESERTEC, which aims to exploit sunshine in North Africa and transmit the electricity to Europe. Space based solar power (SBSP) was researched heavily by the Department of Energy (DOE) in the seventies, and revisited by NASA in the late nineties and again recently. A SBSP startup company called Solaren obtained a PPA in 2012 from PG&E in California to deliver power in 2016.
StratoSolar can be viewed as an intermediate point between desert power and space power. Its average PV utilization or capacity factor is around 40%, and can exceed 50% with one axis tracking. This is higher than PV in the desert at 25%, but lower than PV in space at 130%. Its transmission costs are low, 20km of high voltage (HV) transmission lines straight down versus 2000km HV transmission from the desert or 35,786km via microwaves from geostationary orbit (GEO). Its equivalent of launch costs is low cost gas bags full of hydrogen to provide buoyancy. In the Stratosphere there is no weather or dust, very nearly like outer space, but there is still enough atmosphere to protect PV from cosmic rays and meteorites and to provide adequate buoyancy. Without ground based weathering degradation or space based radiation degradation, panels may have very long lives, exceeding thirty years.
StratoSolar, unlike the desert, does not need water for washing or cooling, which adds to its major benefit over the desert in that it can be situated near the demand for energy, eliminating the need for long distance HV transmission lines.
So when viewed against deserts and space, both of which have received considerable attention, despite significant problems, perhaps StratoSolar can be seen as a possible contender from science fact, and not something from science fiction.
StratoSolar-PV with integrated gravity energy storage reduces the average cost of current photo-voltaic (PV) electricity by a factor of three, while providing around the clock 100% dispatch-able electricity. StratoSolar's tripling of average PV effectiveness, combined with gravity energy storage makes today’s PV technology an immediately viable, low cost, direct replacement for fossil fuel energy. At the current rate of PV cost reduction this is the equivalent of moving the date when ground PV electricity might become economically viable forward by ten to twenty years, while simultaneously removing the huge PV Achilles heel of intermittent and unpredictable electricity supply.
In addition, competitively priced PV electricity will rapidly increase installed PV cumulative volume, which will in turn rapidly drive PV costs down along the volume driven (not time driven) learning curve. This will further reduce the cost of PV electricity to well below today’s electricity cost and enable the manufacture of economically competitive synthetic liquid fuels which will allow for the complete replacement of fossil fuels.
Understanding the rationale of the StratoSolar solution:
Most approaches to lowering the cost of PV electricity focus on increasing PV conversion efficiency and reducing the cost of PV panels and other system costs (BOS). StratoSolar instead, is based on deploying existing PV technology in a more solar rich environment. A comparison with two other approaches that try to exploit more solar rich environments may better help in understanding StratoSolar. The two other approaches are to: 1) to exploit the sunshine in deserts and 2) exploit sunshine in outer space. Both have been investigated extensively and are sufficiently plausible to have received significant attention and funding. The most notable desert project is DESERTEC, which aims to exploit sunshine in North Africa and transmit the electricity to Europe. Space based solar power (SBSP) was researched heavily by the Department of Energy (DOE) in the seventies, and revisited by NASA in the late nineties and again recently. A SBSP startup company called Solaren obtained a PPA in 2012 from PG&E in California to deliver power in 2016.
StratoSolar can be viewed as an intermediate point between desert power and space power. Its average PV utilization or capacity factor is around 40%, and can exceed 50% with one axis tracking. This is higher than PV in the desert at 25%, but lower than PV in space at 130%. Its transmission costs are low, 20km of high voltage (HV) transmission lines straight down versus 2000km HV transmission from the desert or 35,786km via microwaves from geostationary orbit (GEO). Its equivalent of launch costs is low cost gas bags full of hydrogen to provide buoyancy. In the Stratosphere there is no weather or dust, very nearly like outer space, but there is still enough atmosphere to protect PV from cosmic rays and meteorites and to provide adequate buoyancy. Without ground based weathering degradation or space based radiation degradation, panels may have very long lives, exceeding thirty years.
StratoSolar, unlike the desert, does not need water for washing or cooling, which adds to its major benefit over the desert in that it can be situated near the demand for energy, eliminating the need for long distance HV transmission lines.
So when viewed against deserts and space, both of which have received considerable attention, despite significant problems, perhaps StratoSolar can be seen as a possible contender from science fact, and not something from science fiction.
Scale of any solution that eliminates CO2 emissions by 2050
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The graph above on the left shows projected primary energy demand/supply out to 2050 (IEA 2013). The red is energy from fossil fuels, coal, gas and oil. The green is energy from hydro, nuclear, bio-fuels, wind and solar. The left axis is in units of TWy and the right in the IEA's unit of QBTU. Most of the projected 5 TWy growth in green is from wind and solar which are negligible in the 2005 starting year. After factoring for the IEA's methodology for defining primary energy for the green and the average capacity factor for wind/solar, this growth from 2005 to 2050 is about 5TW of nameplate generation capacity for wind and solar. Averaged over thirty years this would be about 170 GW of new nameplate wind/solar capacity a year. This is only about twice today's wind/solar yearly capacity addition, which makes this a fairly conservative estimate. The graph on the left shows a light green area that shows a sustainable ramp of wind/solar in the light green area.
Primary world yearly energy demand is projected to be 33 TWy by 2050. If this demand were met with wind/solar this would take about 100 TW of wind/solar nameplate generation capacity or 20 times the IEA's projected 5TW. Instead of an average 170 GW this is over 3000 GW new nameplate wind/solar capacity every year. Current manufacturing capacity for wind/solar is about 100 GW nameplate a year so that has to increase by about thirty times over a small number of years to enable the growth in new wind/solar installed generation capacity.
Even factoring in large cost reductions from an aggressive learning rate and ignoring costs for storage, backup and transmission, 3000 GW/y represents about a ten fold increase of the current yearly investment of $500 B/y in all electricity generation. The scale of the growth in investments required are substantial percentages of world GDP and would require substantially higher energy costs. These higher energy costs would more than counterbalance growth in total factor productivity and meaningful long term economic growth.
To reiterate, the problem is not the availability of credible energy alternatives to fossil fuels. The problem is their high direct costs for generation and their high additional indirect costs for transmission, storage and backup. The only path around this dilemma is to lower the cost of alternative energy to a point where it is lower cost than fossil fuels and therefore its deployment does not damage economic growth.
Primary world yearly energy demand is projected to be 33 TWy by 2050. If this demand were met with wind/solar this would take about 100 TW of wind/solar nameplate generation capacity or 20 times the IEA's projected 5TW. Instead of an average 170 GW this is over 3000 GW new nameplate wind/solar capacity every year. Current manufacturing capacity for wind/solar is about 100 GW nameplate a year so that has to increase by about thirty times over a small number of years to enable the growth in new wind/solar installed generation capacity.
Even factoring in large cost reductions from an aggressive learning rate and ignoring costs for storage, backup and transmission, 3000 GW/y represents about a ten fold increase of the current yearly investment of $500 B/y in all electricity generation. The scale of the growth in investments required are substantial percentages of world GDP and would require substantially higher energy costs. These higher energy costs would more than counterbalance growth in total factor productivity and meaningful long term economic growth.
To reiterate, the problem is not the availability of credible energy alternatives to fossil fuels. The problem is their high direct costs for generation and their high additional indirect costs for transmission, storage and backup. The only path around this dilemma is to lower the cost of alternative energy to a point where it is lower cost than fossil fuels and therefore its deployment does not damage economic growth.