Wind, water, sun pitted against biofuel, nuclear, coal

Seema Singh — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 11:47:00 GMT

In the battle for clean energy it's the bounties of nature -- wind, water and sun -- that beat biofuel, nuclear and coal hands down. At least a new scientific evaluation says so. And this comes at a time when the Detroit majors are betting on biofuels and touting their efforts in this field, Stanford University civil and environmental engineering professor Mark Z Jacobson says that's not the area to spend dollars on.

In the first ever-quantitative evaluation of the proposed energy-related solutions, Jacobson busts many myths, pricks many egos!

Even clean coal, which is supposed to capture carbon emissions, is not clean at all, he argues. Jacobson has assessed energy sources by their potential for delivering energy for electricity and vehicles and their impacts on global warming, human health, energy security, water supply, space requirements, wildlife, water pollution, reliability and sustainability.

His findings indicate that the options that are getting the most attention are between 25 to 1,000 times more polluting than the best available options. "Ethanol-based biofuels will actually cause more harm to human health, wildlife, water supply and land use than current fossil fuels".

In a paper to be published in the forthcoming issue of the journal Energy and Environmental Science, he lists the most promising ones: in order, wind, concentrated solar (the use of mirrors to heat a fluid), geothermal, tidal, solar photovoltaics (rooftop solar panels), wave and hydroelectric.

He, however, recommends against nuclear, coal with carbon capture and sequestration, corn ethanol and cellulosic ethanol, which is made of prairie grass.

So, should we be blowing in the wind and rippling in the water to improve our energy security? It's never been an easy calculation; but now it seems we need to do number crunching some more. However, a new report released ths week at the UN Climate Change Conference at Poznan, lists some existing low-cost technologies that can help avert climate change.

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Wind, water, sun pitted against biofuel, nuclear, coal