Green Engineering

Alternative energy sources are the holy grail of what I like to call Popular Science Environmentalism. For years, photovoltaic electricity has been the main game in town. But it only works in the daytime, batteries are extremely expensive, and most people in the industry agree that it could never produce more than about 5% of the electricity we need.

Wind power, fuel cells, geothermal, ocean-based hydroelectric, methane and municipal waste have all been the focus of intense experimentation, but all of them run up against barriers of either efficiency or cost. So the environmental media are always packed with articles speculating about the next great green invention.

One of the more convincing candidates is the US company, Ausra, which has developed a simple and extremely efficient system for generating electricity by capturing the sun’s hear with mirrors. Ausra claims that a solar thermal electric park covering about 8 percent of the land area of Nevada could generate all of the electricity used in the US.

The easy response is to say that powerful multinational energy corporations and utilities will never allow an upstart like Ausra to steal their market. The last seven years of Bush and Big Oil show what they’re up against.

Still it’s very possible that real progress will be made. But one thing we know for sure is that under capitalism any progress will be driven by the bottom line of shareholder profits. And under capitalism, no one outside a corporate boardroom will get to vote on whether the energy economy goes solar or nuclear.