GREEN ENERGY ON THE CHEAP

 

Back about 1981 one of my fellow engineers and I got the urge to try to get a little 'free' energy from the sun. He found a source of glass panes at a good price, so together we purchased about 2 1/2 tons of glass panes. At the time I owned a brick Cape Cod in Maryland. It faced a little west of south with minimal shading on the front side, so I built a removable set of large glass panels that basically covered the front of the house. I could remove them in the summer months and enjoy some free solar energy in the winter. I learned later that my abode became known locally as the 'glass house'.

When the sun was shining in the winter the panels gave me a 'low tech' solar collector of about 250 square feet, with the brick walls acting as the absorber. The temperature behind the panels would climb into the 70s even for outside temps in the 20s, which meant that about 30% of my exterior walls thought it was summer. In fact, if I was home I would open the windows behind the panels and enjoy the warm air heating the front rooms.

Of course, even though I got an encouraging return on my fairly low cost investment, I only gained when the sun was shining. To be useful as a primary source of heat, it would be necessary to store the energy for retrieval during nights and cloudy days. So before expanding my system, I did a little research on energy storage systems.

My crude low cost system used the low tech approach of storing the energy in the thermal mass of the masonry walls of the house. If the sun was not shining some of the energy from a sunny day was still warming the front wall, but most was lost. To make such a system a primary heat source it is necessary to transfer the energy during sunshine to a large thermal mass such as a basement full of rocks or a large water tank. This is usually not too practical an approach because of the amount of material needed as the thermal mass.

The next better idea is to use a material that has a phase change (solid to liquid, usually) to store a much higher amount of energy for the same mass. Water has a great latent heat of the water to ice phase change, but it occurs at much too low a temperature. Fortunately some salts have a solid to liquid phase change at temps of about 70 degrees, so a basement full of salt would work better than a basement full of rocks. But you still have to get the energy in and out. When melted salt solidifies in the basement, the heat would warm the house from below, but transferring the energy from the solar panels to melt the salt is a challenge.

The best way to store energy (short of nuclear processes) is in chemical bonds. This is why fossil fuels are such a great source of energy. So I wondered what would be a good way to store the solar energy in chemical bonds to be retrieved later. It dawned on me that the simplest way to do that is to grow trees. You don't even have to build solar panels. Just cut down the trees and burn them in a stove.

At this point I lost interest in the whole affair. I realized that I had re-invented the wood stove.

Although growing trees for low cost - low tech solar energy collection may be a more reasonable alternative to high cost - high tech solar collection, there are other reasons why tree farms are to be preferred over large areas of solar panels. Trees not only efficiently harvest sunshine, but also absorb the dreaded carbon dioxide gas that climate change doomsayers fear will destroy the planet. In addition, in the process of cleaning the atmosphere of carbon dioxide, trees produce the oxygen that we air-breathing critters need to function. Cheap fuel, carbon dioxide removal and oxygen to breath - what's not to like about that. And growing trees is minimal effort farming - just plant seedlings and forget about them for a few decades.

There is at least one more important reason to grow more trees. Whether forests are clear cut for roads, parking lots, or other building development including solar panel farms, the solar energy falling on such cleared areas is absorbed during the day and heats the atmosphere before finally being radiated to space. If you fly a small plane over West Virginia where I live, the fact that the majority of the area of the state is wooded means that there are few thermal updrafts and your flight is smooth. Over urban areas, desert areas, and even to a lesser degree agricultural land, there are significant thermals in sunny weather and a low level flight gets very bumpy. Furthermore, such thermal atmospheric activity creates violent storms such as thunderstorms and tornadoes. The relatively tree-barren midwest is a hot bed of tornado activity, but they rarely maintain their organization into West Virginia. The fact that West Virginia is so wooded is the main reason why tornadoes and t-storms tend to dissipate over the state. The trees absorb almost all the solar energy and there is little left to fuel the storms.

Forbidden Planet Syndrome

 

In 1956 we were between two milestones that the human species had fantasized over, probably for most of its existence as an abstract thinking animal. We were about a decade past the mastery of physics that had culminated in exploiting potentially unlimited nuclear energy, although unfortunately initially as a destructive device. We were also less than a decade away from man's initial leap into space (a year from Sputnik) and less than one and a half decades from actually venturing to another world, although one near home.

1956 was also the year of one of the best science fiction movies to that date. Forbidden Planet not only had some great special effects for that time, it had a plot that was centered around the two physics subjects mentioned above. Cast a couple of centuries in the future, the remains of an advanced civilization had been discovered on a distant planet. The aliens of the planet, the Krell, had engineered an infrastructure that provided virtually unlimited energy (nuclear, obviously). They had also developed the ability to control all that energy by just thinking about it. The plot twist was that their subconscious also had access to the energy, and they unwittingly destroyed each other in an apparent orgy of subconscious rage.

Now any intelligent species anywhere in the universe would have to have evolved to the level of intellectual sophistication that permits the development of nuclear energy, including the human species here on Earth. But on the way up, so to speak, the species must survive through a continuum of ancestors that had to fight and defend their existence in a harsh and unforgiving world. The primitive emotions that allowed that survival are still resident in the brainstem of the human species, and can be reactivated any time there is a threat or other such stimulus to an otherwise civilized being.

With more and more nations on Earth having an arsenal of nuclear weapons, it would not take subconscious control of them to submit the human population to an extinction event. All it takes is the reactivation of the brainstem emotions of one or more hotheads with access to the launch buttons. The fate of the Krell is now within the reach of humanity and may indeed be unavoidable because of the role of the brainstem in evolution.

The relevant question of the day is whether mankind has in fact reached the point in evolution that cannot be passed by any species in the universe. The kill or be killed past in such evolution will still be lurking in the brains of any such advanced species. It may be inevitable that we succumb to the ultimate self-extinction that nuclear energy provides. In fact, maybe the lack of concrete evidence of alien UFOs visiting the Earth is because no species can make it past the Forbidden Planet Syndrome.