The Future is Green

After decades of environmental education, humans have become both more aware of the effects of their daily activities on their planet, and more hostile against organizations that fail to meet their social responsibility to the rest of mankind. As a result, “going green” has become a catch phrase amongst businesses, an ongoing, highly publicized trend that has companies competing to become the most environmentally friendly in the eyes and pockets of consumers. Money, resources, and intelligence are being funneled into these clean technology efforts. These new advancements are not only a trend, but a necessity for the continuation of humanity.

As I noted before, going green is an ongoing trend in business. For example, Ford is concentrating its efforts in manufacturing their EcoBoost engines, designed to improve fuel efficiency and reduce carbon dioxide emissions without sacrificing power, with the handy bonus of being manufactured in an economically struggling area. Designs have been crafted to install wind turbines into broken electrical towers, thereby turning the towers into wind energy powerhouses and providing an energy boost to a ready-made grid, as well as complementing newly built electrical towers. These designs also handily avoid the complaints that wind turbines mar the beauty of the scenery. It's not just obvious targets like cars that are being made environmentally healthy: products as mundane as media converters and LCD TVs have been "greened", substantially reducing the energy these products consume, thereby reducing their long term strain on energy supplies, the environment, and even the electricity bill.

The proliferation in solar technology is also proceeding at an impressive rate. Taiwan recently finished construction on a solar-powered stadium that generates all of its electricity from solar technology. The fifty-thousand seat arena is sheathed in 8,844 solar panels that fuels a system so powerful that it takes six minutes to power up the stadium’s entire lighting system, on top of powering thousands of lights and the two jumbo vision screens and feeding the majority of the local area's power needs. Israel, a nation forever vulnerable to military attack and energy supply disruption, is backing the efforts of a kibbutz to turn farmland into fields of solar panels, turning the desert into a power plant. A growing band of farmers in the south of France are putting up solar panels to supplement farm incomes as well as supply power to the area.

Just as solar technology is running the gamut from the massive corporate project to the entrepenuerial level, it is also receiving upgrades. Research is progressing on a way to manufacture solar cells as easily and cheaply as printing presses produce paper money. With each passing year, new cells are created that are ever more efficient, with companies pressing onward to create better cells. Even nanotechnology has been applied to produce more advanced, sophisticated, and efficient solar cells.

And those efforts are simply the ones focused on improving existing technology. Billions of gallons of gasoline are being targeted for replacement not only with ethanol from food crops, but with biofuels made from plants specifically for that purpose. Hydrogen gas pure enough to power a fuel cell has been created through combining enzymes with non-food cellulose like woodchips. Artificial photosynthesis is being explored, with some seeking to emulate the full process while others seek to stop at the step that releases hyrdrogen. There are plans to experiment with powering data centers with methane gas from landfills, and there is even a fantastic design to create what is called a traveling-wave nuclear reactor that would turn non-fissile material into the fuel it needs, permitting a reactor to run for centuries without needing fresh fuel.

That isn't to say that everything going on in the world of green technology is wonderful. In the same way that there was a real estate bubble that burst in the United States, Ireland, Britain, Spain, and elsewhere in the world, there is currently a biofuel bubble that is already nearing the bursting point. There are billions in cash invested into dozens of biofuel ventures, from start-ups funded by venture capitalists to energy company sponsored research efforts. The biofuel industry will be completely unable to meet the government mandates for biofuel consumption for decades, especially as meeting those standards would require only building hundreds of fuel factories, each with price tags at half a billion dollars, andeach surrounded by literal thousands of hectares of prime farmland, thereby reducing food-growing capacity.

Biofuel is a logistical nightmare, unsustainable by economies of scale or simple competitiveness. The billions being thrown into it is waste, as alternatives to both cheap oil and biofuels exist, the prime example being direct conversion into bioelectricity, which is more efficient and yield more energy than both. There's also the problem of opportunity cost; green jobs, or jobs derived from green technology, cost two and a half times more than jobs derived from cheap fuel like oil. With the billions of dollars the United States government is spending on green jobs, less jobs will result, a rather brutal indiction in a time of global unemployment.

However, despite the obvious drawbacks, there is plenty to support about green tech. We live on a planet of limited resources and limited viability. Green technology expands the uses of our resources, reduces the damage to our planet, and allows to sustain more people. Not only that, this green techonology increases the viability and reduces the cost of space colonies and space exploration. Green technology encourages us to think long term. In three generations of searching, we have yet to find another world like ours. Perhaps in the future we’ll find such a world, but for now, we have this one chance, one world, one home, and we must take care of it.


Sources
The Biofuel Bubble
Which Is Better—Biofuels or Bioelectricity?
Ford To Build Cleaner Engine At Ohio Plant
Allied Telesis Upgrades its Media Converters to Ship with Energy Star-Compliant Power Supplies
JVC LCD TVs Beat New Energy Star Standards
Wind Turbine Towers Win Metropolis Next Generation Prize!
Green Jobs, Ole: Is the Spanish Clean-Energy Push a Cautionary Tale?
Hydrogen Fuel From Woodchips And Other Non-food Sources
Next-Gen Green Data Centers: Powered by Methane?
Storing solar energy by turning over a new leaf
Taiwan’s Solar Stadium is 100% Powered by the Sun
Biggest Solar Deal Ever Announced — We’re Talking Gigawatts
A Solar Dream from Israeli Kibbutzim
French farmer is new sun king
New technology enables solar cells to be printed like money
TR10: Traveling-Wave Reactor
Sanyo hits world record for solar cell efficiency
Nanotechnology Researchers Make Solar Energy Advance