The Energy Crisis
by

Grumpy Old Dude
Summer of 2006

A discussion of some of the facts and problems of energy supply and what might be done about them.

The term "Energy Crisis" is well known. What is rarely known is just what it is. There are a lot of misconceptions out there about just what the energy crisis is. The term has been around for some time among scientists and has even cropped up in science fiction. Briefly, what it amounts to is this: Will it be possible to obtain additional neccessary supplies of energy before current supplies run out leaving our technology without the ability to develop them? You can open a new coal mine and actually get out some coal using manual labor and rather primitive tools, albeit there are few possibilities left and you wouldn't get much coal, but there is no way you are going to build a fusion reactor with such. Also pretty well out of the question would be much of solar, wind, geothermal, methane hydrates, etc. It will take a high technology and the availability of a good supply of energy to develop these.

If we don't have them (or at least one) developed when we run short we will never have the ability to develop them. That is the crisis.

Back in the '70's, when the Arabs slapped an embargo on oil and sent the world economy into a tailspin and resulted in long lines at the gas pumps and people running out of gas and being unable to get more for a while, people called that the energy crisis. It was no such thing, and its end did not mean the energy crisis was over, although many people got that idea. No, the energy crisis is still very much with us and it is still not clear whether we will win out or go down the tubes.

The situation is by no means bleak; the main problem is that very little is being done to seriously address it, and some of these things will take a great deal of time. Free enterprise will, as usual, solve the problems. The only question is, will it get around to it in time?

A disclaimer is in order here: it is hard to get accurate and dependable figures, mainly because the problem is vast and there are a lot of things to take into account. For example: if you read the U.S. has enough recoverable coal to last 250 years, that immediately brings up some questions: is that for the current rate of consumption?, does it take into account the increase in population that will increase the rate?, how about shifts in usage that will replace coal, or that go the other way? About the best that can be done is to try to cover the bases and give something useful to think about.

At least a little science is in order and neccessary. One must distinguish between energy and power. Power is the rate at which energy is being produced or used. In everyday usage people get sloppy and say such things as they buy power from the local electric company. With the possible exception of paying to have heavier lines ran to your place, you never buy power: you buy energy. The two are related and often you have to consider the other, but it is important to keep them straight.

We are concerned about power in that it is neccessary to be able to produce the energy as rapidly as it is needed, therefore you may need to build additional power plants to make enough power available as usage increases, but without sources of energy, the power plants are useless.
Actually we need to look at three kinds of energy: grid, home heating, and transportation. Grid energy is placed into the grid of transmission lines that covers the country and makes it available practically everywhere. It has the tremendous advantage over transportation energy in that it is basically stationary, therefore all manner of energy sources can be used, and conversion of it to a useful form can make use of very large and heavy machinery. It also has the advantage of scale, and efficency is usually higher for large scale production.

Home heating is fuel based. It is also stationary allowing the use of distribution pipelines for natural gas, but a lot of it is distributed as liquid, either as propane or oil. Heat pumps can allow use of grid energy, but they are not widely used.

Some grid energy can be used for home heating or transportation by using electricty from the grid to power such things as street cars and trains and to recharge batteries on vehicles. There is a limited use of such fuels as natural gas and some day it may be possible to use hydrogen for transportation energy, but for now, transportation energy will require a liquid fuel. This is pretty well forced by power and energy density considerations and will be discussed further. The choice pretty well comes down to gasoline or diesel (nearly ideal, but limited in quantity) or ethanol (not so ideal, but it will do and is replaceable).

The really important energy is grid energy because it is needed to operate much of our technology and can provide a bit of transportation. Transportation energy could, in a pinch, perhaps, be provided to some extent by some other means or do without to some extent. The grid energy we have to have. On the other hand, transportation energy is perhaps more of a problem as it must be portable and options are more limited. One of the big problems of grid energy is to provide for air conditioning. This adds a considerable and changing load, and people have come to depend upon it. There were an estimated 30,000 deaths in Europe one hot summer. The normally cooler climate has allowed less air conditioning there, so it was not available. That shows what could happen here with a failure to provide enough grid energy during a heat wave.

Actually, each type has a sort of sub-type that can be called local or supplemental. On the whole, what a person does to supply household energy without drawing it off the grid, and perhaps even adding to the grid, cannot meet the needs of the rest of the grid, for industry and so forth. Yet it can be important to individuals and collectively can take some strain off the larger supply.
It is perhaps easier to be long on information and short on organization, which is why I haven't figured out a way to properly organize this subject of energy. I'll approach it by considering each type of energy in turn.

MAIN ENERGY

GRID
Practically all of it is produced in large power plants by operating boilers to produce steam to drive turbines that drive dynamos. This makes all manner of burnable fuels possible candidates, as well as such other sources of heat as nuclear (fission now, maybe fusion some day), or geothermal.

Most grid energy now and in the immediate future is coal. Fortunately we have a lot of it. Unfortunately it is dangerous and messy to obtain. Mining it results in a significant rate of deaths, and often messes up the countryside. Burning it pollutes the air and probably leads to more deaths. A large amount of CO2 is added to the atmosphere. We will be stuck with it for quite awhile and must accept that and make a commitment to keep it coming as fast as it will be needed for a time. The sooner we develop alternatives, the sooner we can get away from this rather unpleasant source of energy.

A significant amount of it comes from natural gas. This can be easily piped from oil fields and is a cleaner burning and far safer fuel. Much preferable to coal. Unfortunately the supply is limited and much is needed for home heating. There is a good bit yet to be recovered, but only methane hydrates has much potential. Natural gas can also be imported, but if by ship, this is rather dangerous. If an LNG (liquified natural gas) ship blows up it will be an explosion you wouldn't believe. You can bet the terrorists are racking their brains for a way to do just that, and take out the port and much of a nearby city along with it.

There is a small amount of fission power in this country, but its future is probably limited by bad public relations. There is a vast amount of misinformation, mainly because science education and knowledge in this country are so woefully inadequate. No new reactors have been built for decades and probably never will be because of the fear people have. A significant amount of the grid energy in some countries is fission, but it is probably a dead duck in this country. Even trying to dispose of radioactive wastes is such a political hot potato that present reactors may have to be shut down before their time.

Fission does have potential. It is clean, producing no air polution. Mining and refining uranium causes little problem as the quantity involved is quite small. There is not a whole lot of uranium available, so the future is limited, yet the energy yield is so great, it is a significant source for many years to come. The radioactive wastes are dangerous for a long time, but are not produced in huge quantities and can be stuck away in an underground repository for the centuries needed for the activity to die down.

There is a small amount of wind and geothermal and perhaps other, but currently, not enough to really matter.

HEATING
Currently it is fuel based. Natural gas can be distributed by pipeline clear up to the user. Propane can be distributed as a pressurized liquid and has a limited use, mainly rural beyond the gas mains. Oil is distributed in bulk in the northeast. Electricty from the grid is little used as it is more expensive than fuel, except for heat pumps.

TRANSPORTATION
Oil, and that is about all. Gasoline is a quite good fuel, as is petro-diesel, and that is about it. There is a little pressurized gas, and a few people playing around with electric, but it is oil based, and that leads to the most pressing problem. Oil is nearly ideal for fuel and for chemical feedstocks. Unfortunately the supply is limited and demand is pushing it hard. We will not "run out of oil"; that is not how it works. The large and easily obtained deposits are already exploited. It is getting harder and harder to find, in smaller and smaller quantities, harder and harder to obtain. World production can no long be ever increased to meet demand. This is something that has finally hit the tipping point just in the last few years. It will get worse. As demand keeps rising and supply falls, the price will just keep going up and up. This will discourage demand and drive development of alternatives. It will also increase worldwide political instability, so it behooves us to get away from oil. Already much of Islamic terrorism is being financed by oil.
Oil can be burned for grid enery, but is too valuable for transportation and usually too expensive to be used for grid energy. It is also needed for chemical feedstocks.

Actually, there is something else to be considered and that is to convert coal. Coal contains many things, but mainly carbon. Depending upon the coal, it can be from a bit over half to nearly 90% carbon. After everything else has been removed, coke remains and it is esentially pure carbon. It is used in the synthesis of other things. The actual processes involve chemical engineering, but the actual reactions are simple and straight forward, requiring nothing as complex as enzymes. About all that is needed is the proper catalyst, temperature, and pressure. The only reactants are coke, water, and air, and the only products are the desired product and CO2. The CO2 is so pure it can be used for fire extinguisher and dry ice.

About all that is needed is to react C with H2O to remove the oxygen to produce the H2 needed, C + H2O -> CO + H2 (this is sometimes called sythesis gas as it is used as the starting point for synthesisizing various things, and is the reaction for a fuel reformer to produce hydrogen from common fuels for a fuel cell car), or with O2 to give additional energy to drive some endothermic reactions, C + O2 -> CO2, or with H2 to give (CH2) groups, C + H2 -> (CH2).

Then by adjusting proportions and conditions, desired reactions will occur, such as: CO + 2H2 -> CH3OH which is methanol, wood alcohol, a usable fuel. CH3OH + (CH2) -> C2H5OH, which is ethanol, a well known fuel. String the CH2 groups together in a chain of proper length, terminate with hydrogen, and you have an alkane, thus synthetic gasoline or oil.
n(CH2) + H2 -> CnH2n+2. The first one, methane, is esentially synthetic natural gas, which sounds like an oxymoron, but is feasible.

The Germans were doing this in WWII, but with oil prices around $3/barrel, it was too expensive for us. Now with $70-$100/barrel oil, it makes sense. We have lots of coal, but it would be nice to get away from using coal. However, we need fuel and probably should be doing this.

SUPPLEMENTAL ENERGY
There are other sources of energy, but they are of limited use and usually of limited potential. The problem with activists, besides their little elevators not quite making it to the top floor, is that they don't think things out. They look at things in too limited a manner and come to incorrect conclusions. They think of fossil fuels as limited and renewable energy as limtless. Actually it is only true of the total available. The SUPPLY is the other way around: fossil fuels have been limitless in that you could always increase the supply as demand increased. Except for oil that is still true. Renewable energy, on the other hand, generally is quite limited in supply, something they don't consider when enthusiastically promoting them. Consider:
Hydro-electric is great. It will always rain and after building the dams, the energy is basically free and will be for an unlimited time. However, you can't get more power as all the useful streams have already been dammed, and the total is nowhere near enough. Wind is also free once you put up the generator and the wind will always blow. But there is only so much wind available and it is not always available. There is only so much geo-thermal. And biomass, there is only so much land in this country and a good part of it is needed to feed us. There is not enough land to grow enough biomass for the total energy needs of this country even if we didn't need to eat. The current corn crop could only produce 6-7% if ALL was used for ethanol. Much the same for soybeans if all used for bio-diesel.

Most of these alternatives are only going to be supplemental, but they could be important. Cutting energy usage could be important too.

The big problem is the large and growing population. Any solution that just gets us ahead of the curve will fail as soon as the population catches up. that is, grows enough more, so we will need to push for a big supply, and use all these supplementals for getting by until then.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
Hard to say, but here are some things to consider.

SOLAR
Photocells have been around for some time and are widely used, but the current ones are too expensive and too inefficient (15-20% at best) to provide serious amounts. A little more science: A photon of light is absorbed by an electron, setting it free to produce current. Only a photon with enough energy will free an electron, so right away, much of the sunlight may not be usable. Generally, the electron has a good deal of excess energy and could theoretically knock several more loose. In practice, the excess energy is lost, degrading as heat. Recently, something called quantum dots has shown a good deal of promise to push the efficiency up to about 40%. A simplistic explanation is that the dots are so small an electron does not get a chance to waste its energy and goes ahead and frees more. At any rate, if this pans out and the price can be kept down, this can be an important source of supplemental energy.

Large arrays could be placed in the desert, if the environmentalist don't throw a tantrum and block them. This could amount to a useful fraction of total grid energy. They could be used in place of shingles on houses producing more than the house needs when the sun is shining. The excess could be stored in batteries, if the battery technology can be improved enough, or what would probably be more practical, feed the excess to the grid, draw from the grid when the sun is not shining. Technology exists to convert the DC to AC, get the voltage and phase right to do that. It would take about a 100 mile square of desert to provide all our electricity at 30-40% efficiency. Of course it has the problem of availability. What do you do when the sun is not shining?

Note one very important feature of a solar panel covered house: just when you need air conditioning the most, the sun is likely to be shining the brightest, making available the energy to drive the air conditioning, and at the same time, reducing the heat entering the house, thus reducing the AC needed. This could reduce and perhaps avoid the serious peaking problem air conditioning creates for the grid, making it a triple win situation. Enough houses could produce several percent of total grid energy.

Since there is only about a kilowatt per square meter (or a horse power per square yard) of power in direct sunlight, there is no way you can power a practical car with solar cells, but a commuter, that runs on a battery charged over night in the garage, could probably get most of its charge from solar panels on it, while it is parked in the sun all day at work. Once again reducing grid energy needed.

WIND
This is a good one as good generator rigs are available at reasonable cost. The technology and production are mature. There are still lots of places where more can be added. Again technology has to be used to convert their output to match voltage and phase on the grid to put their energy onto the grid. Their output varies capricously, but that is the reason for the grid; energy can be shifted around as needed. When the wind is blowing, some coal fired plant may be able to shut down. When the wind dies, more coal is burned. This is no problem up to a few percent of the total as electric utilities are constantly juggling loads and generating capacity, but if wind ever gets about say 25% of the total, it can get to be a real problem. If a utility has to provide enough base plants to handle a calm day, why put in big wind farms?

North Dakota alone could perhaps supply 20-25% of our electricity. Add a few more states and you could get all of it. A big problem is the grid. North Dakota does not have much of a transmission and distribution system now as there is very little industry and very little population there. These would have to be built up to distribute the energy elsewhere. It would be desireable to build wind farms all over the country to make it more likely the wind would be blowing somewhere where it could be used.

They could wind up providing several percent of total grid energy and should be pursued vigorously. Again we have a problem with environmentalists objecting to them as unsightly and a danger to birds. A very good place to build is along the sea coast or just offshore in shallow water as the most consistent winds are found there. People owning houses along the coast object vigorously to the idea. Frankly I think their houses have already fouled up the view so I am not sympathetic. Unfortunately, when it is a Kennedy complaining, they are not likely to get built.

BIOMASS
Grow your energy. Good idea if you have the land. For all the hype, this is probably the least likely of the renewable energy sources, unless..

It is probably better to consider ethanol and biodiesel seperately. There is also combustion, rather simple and useful where you have a waste product such as wood chips or sawdust. This can simply be burned in a power plant boiler. Growing biomass for combustion probably does not make sense. The main use for biomass is probably to produce fuel for transportation.

ETHANOL
First a little more science is need to understand this. There is a class of chemicals known as alkanes. They are characterized as one or more carbons chained together, with hydrogen on all other bonds. This means each C will have an H on each side and there will be another H on each end. The simplest one has a single C with 4 Hs, one on each side and one on each end. The next has 2 C and 6 H and so on. The first, methane, is a gas hard to liquefy. The second, ethane, is a gas easier to liquefy. The third, propane, is a gas fairly easily liquefied and usually sold and distributed as a liquid. The fourth, butane, is a liquid that easily evaoprates. Each one as it gets longer gets to be more of a liquid or even a solid. Gasoline is about octane (10 carbon chain), after that there are also; #1 (kerosene), #2 (diesel), #4 (bunker oil), lubricating oil, grease, wax and so on.

Petroleum is basically alkanes with a bunch of other things. The first four often separate as natural gas, which is usually about 80% methane, about 10% ethane, and so on. It may be present above a pool of crude oil, or off by itself and the crude oil may be by itself.
The alkanes burn producing cabon dioxide and water and a good deal of energy.

There is another class called alcohols. They are just like the alkanes except one of the hydrogens at the end of the chain is replaced with a hydroxal group (OH). They are named same as the corresponding alkane, except the final e is replaced with ol. So methanol, ethanol, propanol, butanol, etc. These four are about the only ones you will encounter though others are used in the chemical industry. These are all liquids, which makes them useful as fuel. Methanol (wood alcohol) can be used as a fuel and sometimes is. Butanol makes an even better fuel, but practically all the interest is on ethanol, as it is readily produced by the fementation of simple sugars, making it comparitively easy and cheap to make. C6H12O6 -> 2 C2H5(OH) + 2 CO2
Alcohols also burn producing carbon dioxide and water, but note that they are already partially oxidized as each contain one oxygen atom. As a result, they do not produce as much energy as the alkanes. Specifically, ethanol only produces about 2/3 as much as gasoline. Something to think about when people are bragging about buying E85 for less than you pay for gasoline.

Sugars are another class, and it gets a bit more complicated. They basically are C with H on one side and OH on the other. The Cs are chained together, but generally in a ring. The basic simple sugar has the formula C6H12O6 and is referred to as a monosaccharide. There are about a dozen isomers of it, that is, the same atoms, but put together in different arrangements. Among these are glucose, fructose, and beta glucose. Pairs of these monosaccharide isomers form disaccharide sugars such as sucrose (table sugar), which is found in sugar cane and sugar beets. Starches are made from them and cellulose is a polymer of beta glucose, being just a great long string of them hooked together end to end as a sort of chain.

Glucose is widely used by animals to produce ATP (adenosine triphosphate) which is used at the cellular level to power practically everything.

If you are starting with sugar, as they do in Brazil, it is a one step operation. An enzyme from yeast or bacteria breaks down sugars into carbon dioxide and ethanol. Starting from corn, you are working with starch. Starches are widely used by plants to store energy in seeds and tubers. During germination naturally occuring enzymes break down the starch into sugars. Brewers use a malting step to take advantage of this to get the sugars needed for fermentation. Brewers just let yeast work on the sugars in fermentation vats. For commercial production, the enzyme may be prepared separately and added as a reagent. A big advantage of that is that ethanol above about 25% kills the yeast. If you are making 2-5% beer, that is no problem, but trying for straight (neat) ethanol, it is. Also, by obtaining the enzymes from another party opens up the possibility of competition lowering the price of the enzyme and perhaps leading to the production of synthetic enzymes.

Starting with cellulose is much like starting with starch only harder. Cellulose is widely used by plants for structure. Often the fibers of cellulose are cemented togethr by lignin, another polymer. Cellulose is quite durable and strong, and very few critters can digest it. Humans can't and cellulose is the indigestable "fiber" that adds bulk to our food. The only use we make of it is to keep thing moving in our digestive tracts. Ruminants, such as cattle, can' t digest cellulose either, but they have ruminant bacteria that break it down for them. They then digest what is left, as well as the bacteria, which provides them with protein.

A pretreatment breaks down the plant material exposing the cellulose, then, as might be expected, an enzyme from bacteria, yeast, or mold, breaks it down into the beta glucose, which can then be fermented. There are even enzymes that can do cellulose to ethanol in one step, and as might be expected, there is a lot of reseach into finding or developing efficient, cheap enzymes.
After the fermentation has pretty much finished, the ethanol is separated from the other stuff by filtration and fractional distillation. This takes a lot of energy and is part of the problem of the poor yield of corn to ethanol. Also, since the allotropic point of ethanol and water is about 96%, that is as far as you can go with distillation. The final water removal can be done with rock salt, which will absorb water but not ethanol. The salt can then be recovered and dried, using more energy, to be used again.

That is pretty much the ethanol process, complicated, needing a lot of energy, definitely not the sort of thing you would want to try at home.

Ethanol is a liquid with good energy content and characteristics that make it a pretty good fuel, but it has a bunch of problems. First off, it only has 2/3 the energy content of gasoline. Secondly, it is hydrophilic meaning it readily absorbs water. This is caused by the OH group making that end of the molecule polar, so it attaches to water molecules. Water in gasoline separates out and can be fairly easily removed. In ethanol, it goes into solution and you are pretty well stuck with it. If in high enough concentration it can cut the energy content and cause problems with combustion. In practically any concentrarion it makes for corrosion of anything water will corrode. Specifically, ethanol cannot be distributed in pipelines as gasoline can, because of corrosion problems. The user must be careful with it to avoid water problems. The fuel system needs to use materials that are non corrosive. Ethanol willl also attack some materials that gasoline doesn't, so the fuel system needs to use only materials that will handle ethanol. This could be a problem in old vehicles, but not in any built for years now.

The biggest problem is supply. So what if it is "unlimited" in the sense that you can keep on making it decade after decade if you can never make more that a percent of what is needed during the time it is needed?

Brazil was able to become energy independant (at least for transportation energy) by using sugar cane grown for ethanol production. Sugar cane grows rapidly in a semi-tropical climate and produces a lot of sucrose. Sucrose is easily fermented into ethanol and the leftover material can be burned to provide the energy for distilling the ethanol. This leads to about a 6 to 1 gain in energy, and Brazil has a smaller population. Give them a few years and see if ethanol production can keep up with population growth. Sugar cane needs a lot of water and fertilizer. I wonder if Brazil is keeping up or depleting their soil.

Here, we have a large population and a great demand for energy. Sugar cane can be grown in Florida and Hawaii, and that is about it. Sugar beets can be grown in several states and give about a 3-4 to 1 gain, but they are an annual, need a lot of water, and need a lot of fertilizer. You also have to dig them up, leading to soil erosion.

Corn is an annual crop meaning it must be planted each year, so each year there is plowing and planting, fertilizer, cultivating, herbicides, harvesting, and then hauling the grain. All of this uses energy and only the starch is used. The yield is somewhere around 1 to 1. Maybe a slight gain, maybe a net loss. Now that it has been used to develop the process, the only use for corn to ethanol is to provide a market for surplus corn. It helps corn farmers and especially helps politicians who can claim they are helping provide the means of ending our dependency on foreign oil and they are helping everyone. Simply subsidizing corn growing would alienate voters, who though stupid, usually have sense enough to realize their tax money is footing the bill and they are not getting anything out of it, while claiming it is solving our energy problem, gains the support of an awful lot of stupid voters. It is a win-win situation for the poiticians and is a national disgrace.

Corn is also very hard on the soil. The plowing and the widely spaced small clusters of roots lead to a lot of soil erosion. Corn needs quite a bit of water and a heck of a lot of nutrients. Few crops are harder on the soil, and for all that and the subsidy on ethanol, we get a net loss of energy. The corn farmers get better prices and the politicians get votes. And there is no way we could ever get enough energy by this route. Only 6-7% for the whole crop, and of course most of it will always be needed for something else.

Corn to ethanol is stupid!

Now if you just had a plant that was perennial so you only need to plow and plant it once and then do not disturb the soil. And if it had a good root system to hold the soil. and if it didn't need much water or fertilizer and the whole plant above ground could be harvested with equipment already available. And if the yeild were high, now wouldn't that be great? Could such a plant be engineered?

It turns out there is already a plant that fits better than anything that could probably be engineered: switch grass. A lot of people heard of it in Bush's last State of the Union address, but he did not explain and there are probably few people who have any idea about it.

It is a native longstem prairie grass. It has evovled on this continent in this climate and is well adapted. It fed the millions of buffalo with only their manure for fertilizer and being adapted for the plains it not only needs very little water, it has an extensive root system that can go down about 10 feet. Not only does it cause no problems with erosion, it solves them. As a matter of fact it is currently planted and grown mainly for erosion control.

Being already routinely planted, there is ample experience with it and the acreage could be quickly expanded. Marginal land and land out of production can be used as it needs little. Just get it started and maybe scatter a little fertilizer on it every few years. Within three years it can become established and grow up to 10 feet tall. It can be harvested with standard hay making equipment and a single cutting each year gives a good yield, So there is very little expenditure of energy getting it to the ethanol plant.

Much work remains to be done to build plants and find the best enzymes and so forth, but demonstration plots have already produced 1,500 gallons of ethanol per acre per year. That is nothing to sneeze at and treats the soil much better than corn does. Typical yields of half to 2/3 of that could be expected. There probably would not be too much uproar from environmentalists for returning lots of land to the way it was before people took over. The only estimate I have seen of the energy gain is 20 to1. Also saw an estimate that if all the land available, that is, capable of growing switch grass and not already needed for something else, were to be put into switch grass, it could produce upwards of 30% of our needs. Again that is nothing to sneeze at. This actually makes sense.

Note that while developing the market, bales of switch grass could be simply burned in power plant boilers. This would put energy on the grid, so there is no waste, though the price paid for it would probably be less than the ethanol plants would be willing to pay once they got going. It would give farmers a market for all they could produce and would make it less risky for them to plant and raise a new crop. Especially one that takes about 3 years to get established.

Other biomass for ethanol would probably be more for disposing of unwanted material, such as newspapers, yard waste or corn cobs, than for any real value for the tiny amount of ethanol that could be produced, often with a good bit of trouble.

BIO-DIESEL
Methyesters make up the liquid commonly called bio-diesel. Esters can be obtained by knocking a glycerol group off vegetable oil or animal fat. Ethanol can be used to methylate it. Now if you are not a chemist, about all you need to know is the preparation. Start with vegetable oil or animal fat, and used cooking oil is fine though you will have to strain it. Probably would want to strain it anyway. Carefully add the right amount of ethanol and of sodium hydroxide (lye). The incorrect amount really wont hurt; you will just have unreacted reagent left over. Stir it thoroughly and give it about 24 hours to react and for the glycerin to settle to the bottom. Pour off the bio-diesel: you probably should strain it. The glycerin left on the bottom can be used for making a number of things such as soap, so it has commercial value.

That is all there is to it. It is actually that simple. It can be and often is made at home. Remarkably, it is nontoxic. Even the government considers it nontoxic. Now I don't know if you can drink it or just wallow in it, but it sure does beat gasoline fumes. It has other nice, even desireable features. It has lubricating qualities that help with fuel pumps and injectors. It helps keep the fuel system clean. It will work in a diesel engine with no modifications and can be mixed in any proportion with petro-diesel, the percentage of bio-diesel indicated by B followed by the percentage. For example B20 would be 20% bio-diesel. It has just about as much energy content as petro-diesel. It is clean burning and produces little of the carbon particles of petro-diesel that are of concern for the trouble they can cause if inhaled into the lungs. As a matter of fact, bio-diesel is often used as an additive to petro-diesel, just for these desireable features.

It does have some bad features, but not really bad. Like ethanol it is hydrophillic. Keeping it dry is a real problem. Obviously if it is diluted 25% with water you will only get about 75% as much energy out of it as you expect. The biggest problem with water, same as ethanol, is the corrosion the water causes.

Bio-diesel also has a higher gel point. At about 40 degrees Fahrenheit it starts clouding up. All diesels have a problem in cold weather and bio-diesel just needs the solutions applied a little sooner. Of course the additives probably will make it toxic.

It also has a problem by supporting the growth of micro-organisms, especially if a heater is used. If something is nontoxic and has a high energy content, you can expect something to want to eat it. Add some water and it can probably make a good living.

Bio-diesel has already become established. It is a going concern, commercially produced and distributed, and sought after. Its current prospects are limited in that there is no adequate supply of oil available. Much of it is made from soybeans, and like corn it provides a good market for surplus soybeans, but the entire supply could only produce 6-7% of the fuel needs, and soybeans are needed for other things. Much of the vegetable oil is needed for the food industry, and even the used cooking oil already has a market for glycerin production. Bio-diesel will remain in demand, but can never be expanded, unless.....

Some algae have a high oil content. At least one species is about 50% oil. It takes little to grow algae, just water, air, sunlight (for the oil) and a bit of other nutrients for the algae itself. The nutrients could be from a sewer plant, allowing use of a waste product instead of a desireable one such as soybeans, (as well as helping get rid of the waste). As a matter of fact, some private concern seems to be developing a strain that can make use of pollutants from smoke stack gases. Algae grow very fast. Harvesting can be easy, just slurp up what you need, being sure to leave enough to keep on growing.

Algae farms could be set up here and there, ponds placed in out of the way places such as next to sewage lagoons, maybe swamps and other undesireable ground. Except for evaporation problems, putting them out in the desert could result in lots of production because of all that sunlight, though the environmentalist would probably have a cow about the desert being covered with pond scum.

At any rate, calculations show there is enough land not yet covered with something else, to raise enough of this oil algae to produce all the bio-diesel we currently could use. There would probably then be a need to figure out what to do with all that glycerin, and you would need some of the ethanol production. Sodium hydroxide is no problem as long as you have energy, as it can be made from sea water.

So there are 2 good possibilities for biomass that might actually amount to something. Most of the activists who get all enthused about growing our own energy simply have not done their homework. Most schemes simply will not work because we do not have enough land to grow enough biomass. We will need something else: fossil or exotic, but switch grass and oil algae do show promise of helping out a lot.

Speaking of fossil. In recent years an interesting discovery has been made: methane hydrates. Large deposits are found under permafrost and under the ocean bottom. A few calculations, assuming they are all over (actually under) the ocean bottom leads to tremendous amounts of methane. Enough to supply all the energy needs of the entire world far into the future. More recently they have been found to occur only on the contenential shelves, in a range of depths, so as some cynic has pointed out, the estimates of the total methane available has been going down by an order of magnitude every few years. The latest estimate I have seen is only enough for about 350-3500 years. That illustrates both the possible potential and how little we actually know.

A simple way to look at this strange substance is to remember that water is a really unusual substance: it is just about the only thing on the planet that expands upon freezing. This has all sorts of interesting consequences, but it comes about as a result of ice being a sort of open lattice work of water molecules, with spaces between that are large enough for other small molecules such as methane (CH4). Under low temperature and enough pressure, about all the spaces can become occupied by methane, packing in far more than could be present as a gas. It is almost as good as a deposit of liquid methane without the extreme pressure and low temperature needed for that.

The actual physics and chemistry is a tad more complicated, and what is formed is technically know as a clathrate. The substance is strange enough that it would be studied anyway, just for the surprises still being found. For example, a lump of it does not even feel cold as it is such a poor conductor of heat.

Getting a good sample to the surface is a bit of a problem, but by now they are confident they can produce valid samples in the lab, and a lot of people are eagerly studying it. They are also studying how to obtain it. Recently there was a consortium that tried two ways, somewhere in Canada. One was to simply pump out methane. As the pressure drops, the hydrate breaks down releasing more methane to be pumped out. The other was to pump warm water into it to warm it, causing it to break down and release the methane. I have been unable to find out the results.
Japan is especially interested in methane hydrates as they have practically no other fossil fuels, and the methane hydrates in the continental shelf around the islands could be a big boon.

There is also a good deal of thinking about consequences of messing with it. Oil drills that hit it can be blown out by methane, destroying the rig. There are large slumps on the bottom that may have been caused by a deposit that broke down. A glacial period that lowers the sea level by tying up water as ice on land, may come to an abrupt end once the water pressure from the lowered sea level drops enough to cause deposits to break down, releasing large amounts of methane, that would lead to a lot of atmospheric heating (it is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, about 2 dozen times). It could even explain some ship losses in the Burmuda Triangle. A ship unfortunate unough to be passing over just as a big mass of methane is belched out would be doomed. The methane bubbles would reduce the average density of the water and the ship would abruptly drop below the surface with no time for a distress message.

At any rate, it could put off the energy crisis for generations to come. Gas could be simply piped to power plants and to the home distribution system. As transportation energy, there would be a need for something like the methane hydrate to put inside a fuel tank to sop up lots of methane and then release it as needed, to avoid the need for a lot of pressure. It could then simply be burned instead of gasoline or ethanol. Alternatively, it would not be hard to turn methane into methanol, or perhaps even into ethanol. It could also be sent through a reformer to produce hydrogen for a fuel cell to power an electric car.

And speaking of exotic. Fusion is about as exotic as you need to think of. Four hydrogen atoms fuse to form one helium atom, plus two nutrinos and and two gamma rays. This is about as good as it gets. There is so much hydrogen, readily available everywhere, fuel is no problem. The energy yield is immense, and all the energy for the entire world for centuries would not even begin to make a dent in the hydrogen.

Helium is not only chemically inert, it is radioactively inert. It is about the most harmless waste product imaginable, and the total produced would be rather trivial. Otherwise, it would actually be useful as it has a bit of commercial value.

Nutrinos are notorious for not interacting with matter. Only the gamma rays would be a problem. They are the energy and you want them. It is just they are too energetic and need to be degraded way down to heat to be used. They are rather penetrating and would probably preclude ever making a small fusion reactor. That is OK, as the limitless energy could be put onto the grid, either as electricity or hydrogen, which then can easily be used at whatever scale needed.

Energy would be so plentiful and probably so cheap, it would be heavily wasted, and that might lead to a problem getting rid of the waste heat. That could be enough to amount to global warming and is about the only downside to fusion. There is no radioactive waste as with fission, and the fuel is overly abundant and available everywhere.

So why aren't we using it? Well, the only way known to get it to occur is at high temperature and pressure, and by high, I mean really high. Like the interior of a star. It occurs readily there, but that is probably the only place in the universe where it routinely occurs. Pons and Fleischman created quite a stir when they announced they had achieved it with what was basically electrolysis of water. That didn't pan out so high temperature and pressure remains the only way.

On earth, the only way to get the temperature and pressure needed, over a great enough volumn to do a serious amount of fusion, is the A-bomb. H-bombs (fusion) use an A-bomb (fission) as a detonator. That is not very useful unless you want to tear up things, and I mean really tear up a lot of things. Otherwise you are faced with a real problem of getting such high temperature and pressure, AND how do you confine it, since the temperature is so high any material will be a very hot plasma.

Currently there are two means being tried: magnetic field and inertial containment. The first is called Tokomak from a Russian word and takes advantage of the interaction of charged particles and magnetic fields. The fuel will be a plasma, so hot the electrons are stripped from the nuclei and all those charged particles are zipping around. With an intense magnetic field, properly shaped to form a magnetic bottle, they can be curved back and kept more or less in place. Of course magnetic bottles leak particles and energy, and you have to put in lots of energy, not only for the magnetic bottle, but to heat the fuel to a plasma. Nevertheless, Tokomaks have actually gotten up around break even, but that is all they have to show for decades of work. Such an exotic, cantankerous device is probably unlikely to ever be sucessful.

The other way uses inertia to confine fuel if only briefly. It makes use of an inwardly traveling shock wave. The usual means is to drop a tiny spherical pellet of fuel and zap it simultaneously from all sides with very powerful lasers. This boils off material so vigorously that it comes off as a rapidly expanding shell, The recoil from that sets up a shock wave traveling inward. Since it is spherical, it all arrives at the center simultaneously, driving up the pressure and temperature very sharply if only for a moment in a very small volumn. This is enough to achieve fusion briefly before the pellet expands. The left over unreacted material is collected and formed into a pellet again. Each cycle causes a little of it to fuse.

Again, a lot of energy is needed to drive it and so far very little is produced. I don't know if they have ever approached break even, but again, they don't seem to be getting anywhere after decades of research.

So there is where fusion stands, probably forever out of our reach. On the other hand....
For some time it has been known that ultrsound can make water sparkle. It is believed to be caused by local uneven heating creating tiny bubbles of steam that promptly collapse as the steam gives up its heat and condenses. Since the bubbles are so tiny, gravity is of no importance and they are pretty perfect spheres. As a result, when they collapse, the walls meet in the center in one smack, just like the pellets being zapped by lasers. The pressure and temperature soars causing a tiny bit of water to become incandescent, emitting the flash of light before it cools.
The explanation seems plausable as this has been used to study exotic chemical reactions that only happen at temperatures and pressures hard to create and hold.

Apparently someone got to wondering just how high the temperature and pressure became, looked for, and according to a recent report, found evidence of fusion occuring. After the Pons and Fleischman fiasco, no one is going to get excited about this unless and until it can be shown to have actually occured and is repeatable.

It would be neat if it turns out all that is needed is intense ultrasound and water, but it is too soon to get any hopes up. It also has to produce more energy than that needed for ultrasound to produce it. Fusion may be forever out of our grasp except for harvesting energy from that big fusion reactor in the sky known as the sun.

Without fusion, our descendants are going to have trouble. Once the fossil fuel runs out, there will probably not be enough energy available. Biomass can't feed and provide enough energy for the present population, let alone the larger population then, unless they eat yeast and grow lots of algae.. Solar and wind can provide a good bit, but eventually the population will overwhelm it. Oh well, maybe AIDS, ebola, and the Islamic millitants will take care of the population.

CONSERVATION
Forget about telling people to make themselves uncomfortable by turning down their thermostat, or conserving by not doing something they want to do. There is no point saving a few pecent of energy as it will quickly be wiped out by population growth anyway. What you need are actual changes that lead somewhere. Some of these could be large enough to be important in the long run, or at least help give us some slack in the short term while developing possible solutions.
Some of these are already happening: more and more often, information or data is moved, not physical objects. People work at home and communicate rather than commute. E-mail uses very little energy, snail-mail requires the production of paper and ink (or pencil), then the movement of the letter by vehicle, using up transportation energy. Lots of fuel can be saved by avoiding all that mail being shipped around. It is already happening.

Many businesses are requiring or rewarding the use of online bill paying. It makes sense as it saves them a lot of snail-mail going out for billing, then a lot of clerical labor working the mail coming in, to post the accounts and cash the checks. It saves them a good deal of cost and many are willing to pass along part of that. What is often overlooked is the energy saving if some information is sent over the line instead of all that paper being hauled around, then discarded.
However, there is a very serious problem. Because of some dumb choices made by Microsoft allowing people to indulge in fancy messages, as well as Microsoft's desire to be able to reach your computer to check to see if you need updates and automatically send them, etc., the internet is a jungle filled with all manner of vermin. Viruses, spyware, things you don't want to know about. People ranging all the way from local jerks to international criminals can and do cause mischief. Information from your favorite recipe to bank accounts to national security are exposed. The internet is simply too insecure for the essential transfer of information. And it will never be possible to clean it up.

In order to get closer to the ideal of sending information only, not physical objects, it is going to be necessary to create a second net. It should be kept simple and secure with lots of call back and white list protection. Nothing would EVER be allowed to excute automatically or on line. Any program that needs to be sent for whatever reason would be sent as data into a directory from which it could not execute. Someone locally would have to move it and make it executable. The current wild net can be retained to allow for all the fancy and useful features it now provides.
Or it may be possible to get people to switch to linux and run as a user with everything executable being owned by root, with only execute privileges by the users. This way malware could not make any significant changes to anything in the computer, and much of this nonesense would dry up. The problem is that right now, since Windows computers greately outnumber linux computers, software is developed almost exclusivly for Windows.

This would avoid someone taking over a computer remotely and using it to relay activity making it impossible to know where something originated. It would be very desireable to always make sure every message is correctly tagged with the address originating it. The local "on ramp" should probably check the phone number of the land line making sure it matched the one registered for that user so no one could pretend to be someone else. If you want to pay a bill using a public wireless, or from some other phone while you are out of town, use the wild net.
Businesses that need access to unexpected contacts could still handle ones not on their white lists, for example they could receive a "check" transfer from any bank, but for the most part. interchanges would only take place from something in the white list. A white list of banks should be maintained and any not on the list should be run past a human for verification and then added to the list, or investigated if suspicious. Note that banks would immediately send electronic checks on to the receiving bank, thus bypassing the banking clearing house and speeding their access to funds. The account information returned to the bank by the business to allow the deposit of the electronic check would be for an incoming only account. Only the bank receiving the transfer would know the outgoing account associated with it. Thus a business would not be vulnerable by revealing to the sending bank their account information for the deposit. It could not be used for a withdrawal.

Activity would start with a greeting that contains an ID and of course the originating address. The receiver would then call back with a query. Only then would a request for action be sent. A bank would not act on a transfer request, even with all the validation information being correct, unless it has just gotten a reply from a message it sent to the registered address of that user. It would then send what amounts to a canceled check to the registered address, so the account holder will be immediately informed of what went on. This would keep someone in India from emptying accounts simply by getting sensitive information, then ordering transfers, and the account holders not even knowing about it until later.

No one would be given your bank information to make periodic wire transfers from your bank to make such things as regular premium payments. Instead they would send you a bill electronically, and you would pay it electronically by sending an order to your bank to transfer the amount to them, a sort of electronic check. You would recieve the "canceled check" from your bank, and a "receipt" from the busines. And it could all be done with a single click on your screen, and no one could get at your account, even if you are foolish enough to give your account information to a phisher.

It may seem this would add up to a lot of activity on the secure net, but keep in mind that e-mail by white list only will eliminate spam, which amounts to most of the traffic on the wild net. The secure net would be comparitively light on traffic.

This may seem a bit extreme, but if you want people to stop using snail-mail and rely upon electronic transfers, they need have no worrys. This could lead to sizable energy savings.
I have more ideas about this secure net and protection against identity theft and tending to the problem of illegal aliens, but that is another topic to be coverd elsewhere.

More sizable saving can be obtained by significant changes in automobiles. Not just pushing milage up say from 25 to 27, but real changes, and these will require changes in attitude. Hard to say how this can come about. The big thing to keep in mind is that the internal combustion engine (ICE) is typically operated at about 1/3 of its maximum efficiency. Thus there is a potential to triple the mileage and cut fuel usage to 1/3, and without much change in driving habits. That is, you do not have to try to talk people into using public transportation or some such. Public transportation would be a good idea, but often it is downright dangerous because thugs often prey upon riders and little is done about it. It is also inconvenient and you cannot get good and frequent scheduling without riders and you cannot get riders without good and frequent scheduling. Also, in a large part of the country the population is too spread out.

The big problem with an ICE is that its efficiency varies with power output and for a car, the speed and power must vary. To have enough power to give good performance when a lot is needed, the engine must be a lot bigger and more powerful than is needed for cruising. An engine usually is operated at about 10%, while it is capable of about 30-35%. Modern electric motors can operate at different power output and speed without much change. This brings up the notion of an ICE - electric hybrid.

One of the simplest hybrids simply uses a thin motor-generator between the engine and the transmission, and a rather small battery. All it does is use electric assist to give more power when it is needed, thus allowing a smaller engine that will operate normally in a higher power and efficiency range. The generator uses excess power when available to recharge the battery. Much of the cost of the motor-generator can be recovered in the cost of the smaller engine, so for just a battery, you get improved mileage.

One of the most complicated is the parallel hybrid which uses an engine and a motor-generator in tandem (parallel), with the engine running at full efficiency or not running at all, the motor making up the difference. Their output is run through a "power splitter" (more like a power merger), which is basically a differential run backward. The engine is on one axle, the motor on the other, and the drive shaft is the output and goes to the transmission. There is a sizable battery and also another generator on the engine to recharge the battery. That is a lot of extra hardware, much of it precision machined, so expensive and always will be. The entire arrangement is rather complicated and expensive. With regenerative braking and the ability to shut off the engine at a traffic light, it does get better mileage, but not impressively so: maybe a quarter or third more. This arragement does have the advantage of direct drive from the engine to the wheels when cruising, thus avoiding the conversion losses of a serial hybrid.

A simpler arrangement is serial. The engine drives a motor-generator to keep the battery charged, and another motor-generator drives the transmission. Again there is a battery. This arrangement is fairly easy to implement and again has the advantages of regenerative braking and shutdown at lights. It has the disadvantage of an extra motor-generator and energy losses converting mechanical to electical and back. It generally beats the parallel hybrid in city driving, while the parallel beats it in cruising.

A much better serial arrangment would seem to be to eliminate the second motor-generator, transmission, and differential, and simply put a motor-generator in each drive wheel. Its bearings could serve as the wheel bearings. Now you have a simpler lighter vehicle that has about all you need. It still suffers from the conversion losses, but would seem to be better in all other respects to any of the other designs. And if it is kept light enough and not driven too hard, it could be recharged overnight in the garage. This could result in a cost savings for the user, but more importantly it would mean grid energy instead of fuel. Right now, fuel is our big problem.
Originally, a family bought one car and made do with it. Now the typical family has a small fleet. Mama has her SUV, papa his pickup, and junior has a muscle car to impress the chicks. Then they probably have a Belchfire 8 for the occasions when the whole family goes somewhere together. It would not seem too much to ask for them to replace one or more of those with a 5 place serial hybrid that could be used for anything from interstate cruising down to commuting, being recharged overnight so as to avoid the use of fuel all week. Such a large powerful car if driven very far to work, would probably have to be recharged with service for a dryer, 230 volts and 30 amps.

It would make sense, but you may have trouble convincing people, to have a small, light, cheap commuter. Say a 2 place with a sort of back seat like a sports car. performance like most any other car. A modest battery that could take it about 50 miles, which is plenty for commuting, and could then be recharged on standard service, 115 volts and 15 amps. Throw in a recharging plant similar to the emergency generator sets, just a 1 or 2 cylinder engine, a motor generator, and a 1 or 2 gallon fuel tank. This would add little cost and weight and would have the important effect of extending the range so no one would need worry about the battery running down if they wanted to run an errand. You could even drive it intercity, though you would have to gas up more often, much as you do with many motorcycles, and you would probably want a button you could push to start the recharging plant early to allow you to drive quite a while before the battery could get low.

Right now it seems the only interest in electric cars is to produce a hot rod that can go 0 to 100 in 4 seconds flat, and then probably needs the rest of the day to recharge.

A word or two about batteries might be in order here. There is a lot of research and development going on, but the best that can be done right now is quite low on energy density compared to fuel. A battery would have to be about 30 times as large and heavy for ethanol, 50 for gasoline, to contain the same energy as the liquid fuel. Obviously you are not going to cruise down the interstate for 5 or 6 hours on a battery alone; it would have to be huge. Even if one of about 100 times the energy density was available, the tyranny of time would do you in. To use lots of power for 6 hours, then expect to recharge in 6 minutes means 60 times as much power to recharge. You would need megawatts. You would have to pull into a power plant and have a lineman hook up busbars the size of your arms or maybe your legs. The commuter allows time to go the other way and work for you. Recharge takes 10 times as long so only one tenth the power.

A lot of our fuel is used in commuting. If a lot of people switched to grid energy for commuting, it would make a big savings on national fuel. Note also, that regenerative braking and no energy use while sitting still in a traffic jam or at a light, means a lot of energy savings.
There is no large investment as cars are regularly replaced anyway, and these could simply be phased in.

WHAT TO DO
Hard to say, but here are some observations.

First off, the government is the elephant in the room. It can squash anything. It will be very important that the government help, not hinder. When you hear a report of billions of dollars profit, remember profits will be huge because the undertaking is huge. We are talking about a nation's energy and that is huge, immense, humongous, down right big, whatever you want to call it. There will be impressive amounts of money involved. While a profit of $1 billion is actually a lot of money, it is chump change if it was on revenues of $100 billion. It is chicken feed if a $10 billion power planet or series of transmission lines need to be built. It is going to take lots of money to develop these new sources. Politicians can be expected to call for "100% tax on excess profits" and fools can be expected to listen to them and unfortunately perhaps allow them to do that, for no other reason than they want to see the bigs guys punished for having more money than they have. Can anyone explain how taking money from the energy companies and giving it to the government is going to increase the supply of energy?

If they are making big profits, buy their stock and get some of it yourself.

Keep in mind that if the nose of the camel is allowed to enter the tent, the rest of the camel soon follows. Be very careful about government involvment. California is awash in legislation, proposed legislation, subsidies, regulations, and all manner of things having to do with energy. After former govenor Grayout Davis made some bad decisions about energy policy and caused chaos, you would think people would have had enough, instead they are asking for more.

What the government neeeds to do is enable. There has not been a single refinery built in this country for 3 decades: no oil company can get permission to build one. No one is going to want to invest a billion in a cellulose to ethanol process and then be unable to get a permit to build their plant. When Union Electric started building the Callaway nuclear plant, they were tied up in court by so many lawsuits they eventually had to cancel the second unit. No one wants to sink a lot of money getting something going, then being put out of business by lawsuits. Can someone explain how destroying something and giving much of its assets to lawyers is going to help produce more energy?

The government can also encourage with subsidies and tax breaks, but beware of that nose. We will probably never get rid of the corn - ethanol subsidy because it buys too many votes, and the tax laws are way too complicated already. Also the government can provide protection from foreign mischief. Protectionism is not desireable, but foreign governments have the power to put our synthetic fuel plants out of business by simply dropping the price of crude low enough. This has already been done: following the embargo, there was a great deal of interest in coal to fuel and it was calculated that at $1.25 per gallon gas, it would be profitable. The price of crude dropped, gas stayed around a dollar, and interest evaporated as it was obvious they could do that in the future also.

Now it may no longer be possible for foreign governments to do it. After China went from an exporter to the worlds second largest inporter in a single decade, oil consumption has become so high production has about maxed out and it is hard to simply increase it to drop the price of crude. Nevertheless, the government should probably set a benchmark price and charge a duty on foreign crude below that price, using the money collected to hold the price down when it was above. This would have the desireable effect of easing the wild swings of crude prices that are not good for the economy, and would ensure synthetic fuel was not forced out of busines, followed by a rise in crude to make up for it. The big problem is keeping politicians from using the fund and power for other purposes, and getting rid of the support when it is no longer needed after synthetic fuels are established and strong and the price of crude is permanently high enough. Beware the nose!

Next off, oil is the big problem as it gets scarcer and finances terrorism. It should get the top priority. Vigorously go after the remaining oil. That means the artic wildlife preserve and the Gulf of Mexico. We've got to keep it coming for a bit until we can get weaned off. Push the promising biomass - ethanol options. That mean switch grass, not corn; oil algae, not soybeans. Also try to get people using commuter cars that run off the grid. Get the secure net going and stop moving so much mail.

Third, we need to get cracking on wind. That is a mature technology, can easily be expanded, and seems to be the easiest, cheapest, way to get a large amount of new energy on line soon. Any reduction of coal is welcome. It is also highly desireable that we get experience with a sizable fraction of a utility's energy coming from wind so they can learn how to handle it allowing us to up the fraction. That is going to be a real scramble to handle it, and someday we may want most of our grid energy to come from wind. We need to know if we can handle it. It will probably take government help to get the wind farms in, especially off shore as there is a lot of opposition to the "unsightly" wind generators. They probably should not be put up in Yellowstone, but for the most part, people just need to go ahead and get used to them.

Fourth, push solar panels, especially for roofs to reduce the need for air conditioning and to supply the energy for the AC, taking the peak load off the grid. This will be especially desireable if the new quantum dot panels can reach 40% at reasonable cost, but probably will be desireable even with the current 15% ones. The cost means there may be need for some government encouragement or coercion, but beware of the nose.

Fifth, keep the research going on long term things like methane hydrates and fusion, batteries, and upon use of hydrogen as a fuel, along with fuel cells and such for cars.
I have tried to be informative and accurate as much as possible. I freely admit allowing my own opinion to intrude, but hopefully, this will help clarify the situation.