Nobel Prize Winner Says Wind is Not the Future

June 02, 2009

This week on Discovery Tech, we're talking about wind power and it's potential to supplant fossil fuels. I've read over and over -- and also have spoken with experts who say -- that there's so much wind out there, we could power the United States five times over. But one of the biggest challenge is storage. Right now, when you generate wind energy, you have to use it or lose it. Or you have to store it, perhaps in batteries. But that technology isn't available yet. Sure, we have batteries, but not ones that can store megawatts of energy being generated on wind farms.

That's part of the reason that 1968 Nobel Prize winner in physics Jack Steinberger said the United States (i.e. Obama) shouldn't be focusing so much on wind power. They should be focusing on solar thermal power, Steinberger said. You may immediately think about solar panels, that is photovoltaics, that convert solar energy directly into electricity. But that's not what Steinberger was talking about. He was talking about solar collectors that concentrate the sun's energy to heat water to very high temps. That hot water is turned into steam, which is used to turn a turbine and produce electricity. Spain just built a huge facility to do this -- the PS10 Solar Tower (image).

Recently, Greenpeace released a report saying that solar-thermal power farms could provide 25 percent of the world's electricity needs by 2050.

Personally, I think we need both solutions, since the sun is not shining consistently in all places and there are plenty of people against the idea of blanketing sunny locations with solar collectors.