Free Energy

Monday, October 28, 2024

Free Energy

The wind blows and the sun shines: these are renewable resources, we are told. They are produced by the planet for free.

The coal, crude oil, and methane below ground are what remains of solar energy stored up in carbohydrate molecules built by algae and plants that lived millions of years ago and were crushed by the weight of dirt and rock, compressing them until the were compacted into dense molecules of hydrocarbons that burn easily.

We didn’t have to pay to make those resources: the earth made them out of the raw materials used by all living things. They are as free as the wind and the sun. They just happen to contain a highly concentrated form of energy, making them much more efficient as a source of the heat used by machinery to do work.

The sun and wind are distributed. They are sparse in terms of the energy they represent. They are free—until we try to tap into them. The machinery to tap into them, to store the weak energy they offer, is expensive to build, install, and maintain. It requires digging up lots and lots of ores, refining fuels for the machinery to dig and process all that ore. That requires lots more energy. The windmill and solar farms have to be spread out over huge acreage to harvest energy comparable to that which has been naturally condensed by geologic processes into fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels are free, made by the biosphere and the geological magic of plate tectonics. We just have to dig them up, first. Then we have to build plants to convert their stored energy into power we can use, which costs money.

Renewable resources are free. Building the distributed power plants to convert their sparse output into power—much less store in efficiently in batteries to even out their intermittency—costs lots of money. The money involved represents the vast quantities of natural resources expended. These small power plants with low energy production potential have lifespans of only a couple decades before they have to be disposed of.

Fossil fuels produce waste byproducts that have to be cleaned up, mainly in the form of noxious chemicals left in high concentrations at a few local sites.

The raw material inputs that are hazardous needed for the solar and wind farms are as yet not easily recycled. At least so far, they cannot be separated and reused at costs that are less than the amount of energy it takes to separate them and make them “clean.” They are disposed of in toxic waste dumps that will have to be more numerous than the waste dumps for fossil fuels, since the energy in wind and sun isn’t as concentrated.

The most concentrated resource we have available for generating electricity are the radioactive ores, which have very toxic waste that is also easier to localize since it is the most concentrated of all.

There is no reason to believe any source of energy comes without costs and tradeoffs. Some are greater than others. Because of the geographic sparseness of the energy they contain, renewables require vast amounts of machinery to convert that energy into a useable form. The amount of toxic waste and hulking industrial relics they leave scarring the landscape over time are greater than their counterparts that use fossil fuels. And nuclear energy is even more efficient in the amount of resources it requires to operate cleanly and safely.

We should keep looking for better sources of energy that are cleaner and more efficient. But we should also acknowledge the ones we are pursuing to satisfy popular political obsessions should be given far less priority.