Our booked speaker having succumbed to Covid, today’s replacement was Paul Adey, giving us a talk entitled “The Story of Energy”.
Fire was discovered some 1.4m years ago, and is now universally used, in one form or another, to release energy, usually by heating water to produce steam which in turn is used to generate electricity.
Lightening was first harnessed by Benjamin Franklin in 1752, and in 1860 Piezo electricity was produced by exciting quartz crystals. This has developed to such an extent that in parts of the USA pedestrians walking around cities where Piezo crystals are buried in pavements actually produce electricity by simply going about their everyday business!
Faraday used magnets to produce the first electric motor in 1831.
Power stations now use various ways to produce steam to drive electric generators, some examples being coal, biomass, nuclear fuel, but all are deemed to have their drawbacks.
Some are readily capable of being solved, but only by investing sufficient time for development, a commodity which politicians do not seem to readily appreciate, often setting difficult if not impossible time goals to achieve completion.
Renewables are the latest “in” thing, but again, the world has concentrated on wind power, which is the least effective of all renewables, when the availability of solar and tidal power is much more predictable and constant!
Energy storage encompasses a host of opportunities, battery development being of special importance. Regrettably, however, lithium takes pride of place in battery construction, despite its relative scarcity and high cost of extraction, when vanadium, another rare earth metal is much more widely available and cheaper to extract. It does require time to develop such technology, again a commodity not favoured by politicians, who tend to require things to develop yesterday!
Hydrogen and solar powered vehicles of all kinds are possible, but they all need time to develop, and in the meantime, existing fossil fuel powered energy is advancing at a much cleaner rate than ever before! Is there such a need for the rush we see in today’s world political discussions?
WHO KNOWS!!