The Future of Energy Generation

How does energy generation affect our lives?

The ability to use electricity nearly anywhere in the world has revolutionized our entire way of life, with the use of mobile generators and batteries allowing the use of the most sophisticated technology ever designed to be used in the most remote reaches of civilization. For example, I used a small solar-powered battery pack to charge my phone while writing this paragraph in my local park. These types of mobile generators work well for small-scale uses, but larger, more permanent forms of electrical generation are required to support the heavy reliance on electricity of large population centers. The implementation of these larger electrical plants has a direct effect on the populations around them. From the effects on local ecosystems like bird deaths to wind turbines and dams preventing fish from traveling upstream to spawn, to the larger effects of greenhouse gas emissions from combustion plants that contribute to climate change.

Every form of electrical generation has some drawbacks to its implementation such that relying solely on one form of generator throughout society would cause a collapse of the electrical grid at some point. Solar power goes offline at night, combustion and nuclear power rely on finite resources, and hydropower relies on full reservoirs. The balance of these different sources of energy is an important part of planning for the future of electricity. Some generators even make other generators less efficient when run in excess, like smog produced by combustion plants lowering the efficiency of solar panels, or nuclear plants siphoning water from lakes and rivers that lead to hydroelectric dams. These many issues with the current state of electrical power can be rectified going forward in the development of the electric grid through careful planning of the balance of types of generators and their locations.

Why is the current state of electrical production unsustainable?

There are many problems with the current state of power generation, such as the huge amount of greenhouse gas emissions from combustion power, the rapidly depleting stores of petrochemicals and other fossil fuels, and the ecological impacts of the various renewable energy sources being quite prominent. Excessive amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from the widespread use of various combustion generators have already permanently altered the Earth’s climate and every day that current production methods continue to push humanity further toward extinction. The issue has progressed so far that wide-scale carbon reclamation efforts need to be started for humanity to have any chance of continuing to live on Earth for any length of time beyond the twenty-first century.

Multiple forms of energy production rely on finite resources, such as coal, oil, and uranium. According to British Petroleum’s Statistical Overview of World Energy 2021, the Earth has an estimated 1.73 trillion barrels of oil in its reserves. According to the same report, the world consumed just over 93 million barrels of oil each day in 2020. (This rate was higher in previous years.) Assuming that this current rate stagnates and no new reserves of oil are discovered, the world has just shy of 51 years of oil consumption left before the wells dry up. That time frame is well within most of our lifetimes, and the world superpowers would not quietly run out of such an essential resource. Personally, I would prefer my grandchildren not to be soldiers of World War III, fighting a war that could have been prevented decades prior.

Even renewable resources in their current state are unsustainable, due to their impacts on the wildlife around them. Habitats being cleared for solar farms, fish migration cycles being interrupted by dams, and migrating birds being killed by wind turbines being some of the more prominent impacts. On top of these individual issues, every source has some amount of impact from production, transport, and installation of the generators. These impacts, however, can largely be reduced by altering current supply chains and infrastructure.

What actions can be taken to improve the long-term stability of the global electrical sector?

The reduction of greenhouse gas-producing energy sources is the most pressing issue, as its impact on climate change is the most urgent change toward sustainability. Without the global reduction in greenhouse gases, the Earth will continue to heat up until humanity is eradicated like a virus being killed by a fever. This change is relatively simple to implement, though difficult to impose. The fastest way to remove a major source of greenhouse gases is to require all methods of transport to be running on electricity rather than combustion engines. This change is already being moved towards with many countries requiring new personal vehicles (cars, trucks, etc.) to be hybrids or all-electric. However, the aviation industry is barely starting to acquire planes that are all-electric, and the shipping industry is almost entirely run on the dirtiest forms of fuel they can use. These industries lagging behind their competitors are largely because of cost, where it is very expensive to replace fleets that companies have had for decades that run on petrochemicals with ones that are brand new and are using emerging technology. This same reason is why it took so long for electric cars to become common, as they were very expensive to produce for years until battery technology had progressed far enough.

Next, the replacement of as many coal, oil, and natural gas plants with nuclear, biomass, and non-combustion plants as possible. These generators are the next highest greenhouse gas emitting sector after transportation, by a very small margin. Many of these plants simply need to convert their fuel source to something more sustainable than the fossil fuels they were designed for and can keep the steam turbines they already have, assuming that was the style of combustion power they initially used. By building the new, more sustainable power plants on the sites of the older ones, we reduce the physical footprint that we have on Earth, taking less natural habitats from the rest of the plants and animals on this planet. These different types of generators could even be combined, implementing solar panels or small wind turbines on the roofs of the buildings of nuclear plants or along the top of hydroelectric dams.

Next, we need to address short-term stability of the new electrical grid. Each day there are wild fluctuations in the demand of electricity in any given area. Many areas have two primary peaks in electricity demand (depending on the season and location), one in the morning as people wake up and turn on lights, run water heaters, etc. and one in the evening as people return home from work and cook dinner, watch TV, etc. Accounting for these peaks in demand is incredibly important for the energy sector, and using solely reusable energy makes this difficult. Reusable energy sources are good to use as a baseline for energy production, but can’t be scaled up or down to match demand. On top of that, solar power relies on sunlight, wind power on strong winds, and hydropower on high enough water levels. If any of these sources are too low, the generators that rely on them are unable to output at their full efficiency. For example, during the 2021 droughts in the American southwest, the water level of Lake Mead fell below 35% capacity, which led to the output of electricity from the Hoover Dam to fall to 66%. With large areas of Nevada, California, and Arizona relying on the power from the Hoover Dam, other power stations in the area have had to pick up the slack that the drought has caused. These renewable power generators need to be supplemented by a manually variable power source, such as biomass or nuclear power, that can have their electrical output changed to coincide with demand and to compensate for low points of renewable power.

In order to implement nuclear power on a wider scale, the current nuclear plants need to be overhauled and modernized, as well as the implementation of nuclear waste recycling infrastructure. As uranium fuel is a finite resource, we need to use as much of the usable power stored within it before storing the leftovers, which the majority of nuclear power sectors are not doing. Current practices involve sealing up large amounts of usable nuclear fuel that is lumped in with waste products because there is no current infrastructure to recover the useful from the useless. The technology to recycle nuclear waste has existed for over forty years, but was banned in the US shortly after its invention. France, however has been recycling its nuclear waste for decades, recovering upwards of 90% of the useful fuel still in the waste with only a 6% increase in running costs. The country’s entire supply of nuclear waste is processed at a single facility in La Hague, withthe facility also processing other countries’ supplies of waste. If the US were to implement this system and run through the stored waste from 50+ years of operation of nuclear power, enough viable fuel would be recovered to power the entire country for fourteen years.

What new technologies could change the landscape of future energy generation?

There are many technologies that can bring new forms of generators to the general market, such as new fuels for nuclear power, use of hydrogen as an alternative to fossil fuel combustion, or the implementation of fusion technology. These new forms of energy are relatively high in energy density for their fuels while producing no greenhouse gases through their use. In the case of fusion technology and hydrogen cells, the fuel stores are practically infinite due to the ease of producing hydrogen from either seawater or freshwater sources through electrolysis. Alternative nuclear fission fuels are gaining popularity due to needing less material to run at the same output, as well as being more difficult to repurpose the fuel into weaponry.

Hydrogen power has already begun implementation into the transportation industry, with models of cars and trucks being designed to use hydrogen in place of gasoline. This effort is fairly small scale, however, as the implementation of the support infrastructure proves to be an expensive transition. The amount of refueling stations in the US is incredibly low, with 43 being in operation across the country in mid-2020, primarily concentrated in southern California. Since diatomic hydrogen is not a liquid at normal atmospheric conditions, the fuel tanks and refueling connections are kept at pressure in order to maximize number of particles within the confines of the tank. However, this pressure can become dangerous if a part of the fuel line or refueling connection becomes damaged and could result in explosive decompression of the tank. This seems to be an intermediate step in the evolution of transport technology, but is leagues better than the old systems.

Fusion technology is in its infancy for electrical generation, with the first rounds of real world testing being done at a few select labs around the world, but have yet to produce a design that produces more energy than it consumes. Should this technology eventually be refined enough to use as a proper source of power, it could revolutionize the energy production of the entire world. With cheap, abundant fuels, a drastic improvement to worker safety over fission plants, and a total lack of greenhouse gas emissions and heavy metals as opposed to any other non-renewable source of power, it would be a vast improvement to the energy sector.

Thorium based nuclear plants are a potential alternative to the current Uranium based plants, with a list of reasons that it is superior. Thorium fuel cannot be directly converted into weapons grade fuel, as the specific isotope Thorium-232 (which is 99.98% of natural Thorium on Earth) is not able to undergo fission on its own. Instead it is bombarded with neutrons to become Thorium-233 which decays to Uranium-233 in a very short time frame. This isotope of Uranium is much more fuel efficient for fission than The current fuels, being more likely to undergo fission instead of absorbing the neutron, which means less fuel will be destroyed instead of producing power.

What does this mean for the future?

The important things to take away from this paper are fairly simple. The reduction of fossil fuel use in the near future is crucial to the continuation of humanity as the greenhouse effect continues to strengthen and the stores of fuels dwindle. However, we as a planet currently rely heavily on these limited fuels for use in various industries, including power generation. The replacement of these fuel sources is a major issue for the future, with the best ideas being unknown. Renewables are great as a baseline, but lack the manual variability to be the primary source of power. Current nuclear power is largely outdated and inefficient, with better technology not being utilized for commercial power. Fusion technology is not currently viable without a major breakthrough, but in the future could be a powerful generator with few drawbacks.

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