The inconvenient truth–to borrow Al Gore’s phrase–for renewable energy sources is that the science is easy but the engineering is nigh impossible to make wind and solar viable.
Germany has taken a decades-long task to transition to renewable and to divorce itself from coal. That experiment has become a failure. Germany’s Green Energy Dream remains a fantasy–one that the Ukraine conflict has exposed as jeopardizing Germany’s economic future.
The Green Energy Dream remains an unrealized fantasy. Image by Gazi Jamal Uddin from Pixabay.
As Nevada has learned, the energy results from solar rarely match the promise. Hope from science that is not grounded in practical engineering is destined for failure.
Sometimes the engineering necessary to realize the science is impossible.
Fusion energy is one example. The joke among engineers about fusion energy is that it is always 20 years away. Each of the past decades has promised, “We will have fusion power stations soon, in 20 years.”
As with solar and wind, the challenge of fusion is the engineering required to scale it up to commercial viability. Grand challenges remain for engineering commercial systems for solar and wind. A recent Nature Communications article also highlights practical environmental challenges, too.
Rather than investing in hopes and dreams, we should perhaps instead look at solutions with proven science and engineering supporting their commercial scale-up–nuclear energy. In particular, we should invest in small modular reactors (SMRs).
U.S. Government Accountability Office from Washington, DC, United States, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
SMR benefits are ripe for commercial operations with both the science and engineering to support their deployment over both green energy and more traditional nuclear power options.