Ep. 654: Side Effects of Clean Energy (2)
Dr. Pamela Gay: Right.
Fraser Cain: Now, what about the amount of wind? Like, as you put more and more wind farms out there, are you actually starting to change weather patterns?
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yes. There are some really interesting research papers on this, looking at if you reduce the wind, you reduce the planet's ability to redistribute heat, and how does that overall affect the climate? And it's looking like right now, with the best models they have, this has the potential to increase the planet's temperature by 0.28 degrees. So, the question becomes is that increase from wind greater than the increase that would come from burning fossil fuels, from all the other mechanisms that we're currently using?
It's hard to balance out, and there needs to be discussion. And wind turbines themselves aren't entirely innocent in how they treat the environment. There have been a lot of problems with – it's hard to tell how fast something that big is turning. It looks slow, and it's not. And birds are called bird-brained for a reason, and they will try and fly through these turning turbines, and it's not good.
Fraser Cain: Yes, and there's been a lot of bird kills. Like, they're killing millions of birds.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yes. Yes.
Fraser Cain: Yes. And then like again, I mean, hopefully there's some kind of solution in terms of sound or in some kind of site, or maybe magnetism that will shift them away, or smells, who knows what it is. But there's got to be some solution to that.
Dr. Pamela Gay: What they're saying to a certain degree is birds that have certain migratory paths are surviving better than ones that don't, and so we just need to figure out how to grow the birds on the healthier migration paths.
Fraser Cain: Right, right. Let's talk about solar.
Dr. Pamela Gay: All right. Solar is fun. So, with solar, there's so many different forms of solar. I clearly am going to describe a lot of things based on how you see them from airplanes. If you're flying into LA on just the right flight, you will go over a solar – I'm trying to figure out – they're heating up sodium.
Fraser Cain: Right. It's a solar concentration plant.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yes. And so they have these rings of mirrors that are all shining their light up into this collector, and the heat from this is heating up sodium, and this is generating electricity. So, there's that form of solar that we don't talk about because it's still experimental, but it's super cool looking. It looks like a flower of mirrors from overheard. So, you get pretty energy this way.
But the most common way that we're seeing solar electricity is your good old-fashioned generic solar panel. There are companies that are currently working on technology to make windows that can be seen through from one side but not the other, that at a low level are capable of collecting solar energy. There are companies working on creating tiles for roofs so instead of having a slate roof, you now have a solar-paneled roof. I love this idea. The technology is not quite there, but the next time we reroof our house, I suspect we're gonna do it with solar tiles.
Fraser Cain: Now, the side effects, like you're dealing with obviously the amount of – I mean, they're electronics.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yes.
Fraser Cain: They're e-waste in the same way that you are throwing away your computer, you're throwing away all of that e-waste. When you get rid of your phone, you're getting – you know, and they've got heavy metals in them, they've got – they are essentially electronics.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yes, and they also change the albedo of the planet.
Fraser Cain: Well, and that's what I was gonna ask, is do they actually change –
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yes.
Fraser Cain: Because I guess having regions that are dark and absorbing sunlight will change the heat absorptivity? Absorption? Of the planet.
Dr. Pamela Gay: So, I'm just gonna go with albedo.
Fraser Cain: Yes, fine, use a science term.
Dr. Pamela Gay: But it's not quite the right word. So, normally you look at a highway, you have this nice black asphalt. The nice black asphalt absorbs all of this heat, and then it re-radiates it as thermal energy, adding to the greenhouse effect. You put solar panels along the center of the highway and put bike trails under it, where they are nicely shaded and protected from the cars. Please do more of this. This is happening in Korea.
These black solar panels, however, are absorbing all of this heat and going, “Ha ha! I shall create energy instead of re-radiating it as infrared!” And I love the fact that you have this black thing that instead of re-radiating and adding to the energy crisis, is generating electricity.
So, a lot of folks are trying to figure out – and solar panels are still so fragile, and this is the problem with them. They're trying to figure out how to create solar walkways, solar roads, and there's been some really interesting trials in Scandinavia where they have actually created roads that light up different things to tell you the weather conditions.
Fraser Cain: I'm gonna call bogus on that. That tech is not –
Dr. Pamela Gay: It doesn't work yet. Consistently.
Fraser Cain: Doesn't work. It is not even ever.
Dr. Pamela Gay: It is an experiment.
Fraser Cain: I wouldn't even go so far as to call it an experiment. It is pretty half-baked at this point. Like there's nothing better than just a great big solar panel that is gathering the heat. Those will – I know what you're talking about, and –
Dr. Pamela Gay: I want smart roads. I want smart roads.
Fraser Cain: Yes. Well, hey, we all do. Who wouldn't love smart roads? The technology that I'm super into is perovskite. So, I don't know if you've ever heard of the term. Perovskite is another –
Dr. Pamela Gay: I have.
Fraser Cain: Yes. It's another kind of solar film technology. It is a fraction of the price, way cheaper. You can paint it. You can just take any surface you want and just paint perovskite onto that surface, and it will turn into a big solar panel.
The downside of it is that it is highly reactive with the oxygen in the atmosphere, and it ruins it.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yes, I was gonna say, it works great in space.
Fraser Cain: It works great in space. Well, they're still testing this out. They think it's gonna work great in space, that you could paint the Moon and have a giant solar panel, or you could paint your space station, or whatever. But in the atmosphere, you've got to protect it from the atmosphere or it's ruined almost instantaneously. But people are figuring out ways to do that.
But then you can imagine, it's gonna have chemicals. It's gonna produce chemicals into the atmosphere. Maybe it's gonna make microplastics, who knows. But I'm really excited by having a kind of technology that you can just easily paint onto anything. Your car, your road. It may be less efficient than the really fancy glass panels, but you will just cover more stuff with this perovskite solar panels. And so I feel like we're just this side of a revolution as well.
All right, let's talk about the two other renewable technologies that I want to talk about. The first is geothermal.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yes. Geothermal is super cool, and there's been some really weird experiments in Iceland where they have done very careful basically tunneling down to essentially magma, to create systems where they can heat water this way and they cycle water. And some of the experiments have generated a whole lot of earthquakes, but Iceland is kinda used to that, so they move on, it's all good.
Most of the experiments with geothermal are more along the lines of anyone who's ever gone down into a mine has experienced it. It gets colder, colder, oh my God it's getting hotter, hotter, hotter. And this is that transition from – and getting colder because the Sun hasn't heated up the soil. This is why basements in houses are often cool. To getting deep enough that you're starting to experience the added heat of our planet that comes from not just the heat of the core, but also from all of the radioactive decays that are taking place within our planet. And so it gets kind of warm, and it's really – I'm gonna understate it.
Fraser Cain: Yes, yes, kind of.
Dr. Pamela Gay: There are some really cool things done where like I once visited a high school that was focused on training people for technical jobs that don't require a university, and this high school had a full geothermal setup powering the entire high school, where they were essentially just cycling water down to great depths and then bringing it back up.
Fraser Cain: Right.
Dr. Pamela Gay: And that heat was able to drive power. It was really cool.
Fraser Cain: Now, the other idea – I mean, you're talking about like the geothermal power that's in Iceland, where the water is relatively close to the surface.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yes.
Fraser Cain: But this idea of deep rock geothermal, that you can run your geothermal down to 10 kilometers down, you could run a geothermal plant anywhere, taking advantage of that heat that you mentioned. But you only get to use that mine for a little while until you've extracted all of the heat from that area. So, are we gonna cool down planet Earth by using geothermal energy?
Dr. Pamela Gay: I think it's a reversible kind of situation because the world that we're on is going to continue generating new geothermal. So, if we cool off a volume, the volume around it on all sides is still doing the whole generating heat, generating heat, generating heat thing at a constant rate, ish. And so if we cool off a specific volume because we're able to extract heat from it faster than it is producing heat or gaining heat from the volumes around it, once we stop extracting heat, it will over time warm back up.
Understanding the thermodynamics of how quickly that's able to happen, how quickly we're able to return to an equilibrium once we stop extracting heat – this isn't a permanent solution. It's the kind of thing where in Iceland, perhaps you're going to remove energy that would otherwise go into an erupting volcano, and that's a good thing.
Fraser Cain: Right. Yes.
Dr. Pamela Gay: But outside of like Italy and Japan and Iceland and these hyper-volcanic places –
Fraser Cain: Pacific Northwest.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yes. You're going to run into this what is your equilibrium time. How fast can the area return back to where it was before you started extracting the energy.
Fraser Cain: All right, let's talk about one last type of clean energy, and that is nuclear.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Oh. The giant elephant in the room.
Fraser Cain: Yes. What are the side effects of nuclear energy?
Dr. Pamela Gay: Well, if your plant loses power because the area is getting bombed by Russia, you run the risk of exploding and taking out a large section, through your meltdown, of Europe.
Fraser Cain: Yes.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Not that that might not be something that could possibly happen right now in Ukraine. So, nuclear is one of those things where it is entirely safe if you do it right, and human beings are fallible. And so technology today makes it so that we can create really, really safe power plants. Really safe nuclear power plants, as long as they're using state-of-the-art technology to control the safety systems.
