London Times: Europe should scrap its support for wind energy as soon as possible to focus on far more efficient emerging forms of clean power generation including solar thermal energy, says Jack Steinberger, a physicist at CERN and a former Nobel Prize winner.
Steinberger said that wind represented an illusory technology — a cul-de-sac that would prove uneconomic and a waste of resources in the battle against climate change.
“Wind is not the future,” he told the symposium of Nobel laureates at the Royal Society. Instead, he said, technologies such as solar thermal power—for which parabolic mirrors reflect the Sun’s rays to generate heat and electricity—represent a more promising way of supplanting fossil fuels. “I am certain that the energy of the future is going to be thermal solar,” he told The Times. “There is nothing comparable. The sooner we focus on it the better.”
Solar Thermal has a beautifully simple and elegant form.
We do not need expansive PV materials, highly efficient PV materials, and other somewhat complex hardware to utilize solar energy.
I champion the simplicity of solar thermal since I have done inventive research and development in some aspects of this field albiet at a simple and fundamental level.
As long as we have solar energy, we will have the option of solar thermal. The Sun will continue to shine with essentially the same power for another 5 billion years before starting to swell up as a red giant star. By then we ought to have figured out how to relocate to one or more additional star systems, perhaps red dwarf systems. Red dwarfs have lifetimes, in theory, as great as 10 EXP 13.5 years.
The fact is that solar energy, and more broadly stellar energy, is too great of a resource not to utilize.
I watched the ABC 2 hour special last night on a 21st century scenario of the collapse of modern civilization as a result of potential climate change, and I must say, the program captivated my attention and I was drawn to watch it entirely, anxiety provoked and half out of morbid curiosity. In the end, the picture painted was not pretty and highly disturbing.
We must act to go green, carbon neutral, and sustainable very quickly or else we will probably face dire consequences.
Steinberger's proposal is so beautiful it's shocking. I agree with him that solar energy is the best option.
You must ask yourself, does Europe have enough friendly and secure space to contain solar panels to significantly offset energy demands. Read David McKay's book Energy Without the Hot Air and other lectures on his website. His presentations are well thought out and not prone to optimistic impulses.