July/August 2000
Vol. 56, No. 4, pp. 28-38
Energy 2050
By Steve Fetter http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/2000/ja00/ja00fetter.html
Only five energy sources are capable of providing a substantial fraction of the carbon-free energy required to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at an equivalent doubling: biomass, fission, solar, wind, and "decarbonized" fossil fuels.
Unfortunately, each of the five major alternatives has significant technical, economic, political, and/or environmental handicaps.
Nuclear fission, which is the only technology widely deployed on a large scale today, suffers from public-acceptance problems related to the perceived risk of accidents, the still- unsolved matter of waste disposal, and the link between civilian nuclear power and the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Biomass has the potential to supply low-cost portable fuels, but large-scale use of energy crops could compete with food production and the preservation of natural ecosystems.
Solar is benign but currently very expensive, and it would require massive energy storage or intercontinental transmission to supply a large fraction of the world's energy.
Wind is economically competitive in certain areas today, but most high-wind areas are far from cities and would, like solar, require expensive storage or long-distance transmission to achieve a large fraction of the energy market.
Fossil fuels are cheap and abundant, but the cost of capturing, transporting, and disposing of the carbon dioxide contained within them could be high, and the environmental impacts are largely unknown.
A global, broad-based program of energy research and development is needed to address these issues and to ensure that abundant, affordable, and acceptable substitutes for traditional fossil fuels will be available worldwide in the coming decades.
Whether or not there will be the will to conduct such intensive global research and development in an increasingly fractious world is another question. But it may become the question of the century.
Steve Fetter is a professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland, College Park. A more detailed, technical, and fully annotated version of this essay can be found at www.puaf.umd.edu/papers/fetter.htm.