Energy Matters

  Energy Transition –The Wright Thing As usual, there’s bad news and there’s good news. The bad news is, there is no Moore’s Law for carbon-free energy production. The good news is, there IS a Wright’s Law for carbon-free energy production! A recent study points out that traditional economic models have consistently over-estimated the cost of renewables over time, and that a transition to carbon free energy will happen with a net positive impact on the economy. Some of our tech-savvy readers may have heard of Moore’s Law. This is a phenomenon in the progress of computer development where the number of transistors on a microchip doubles roughly every two years, thus doubling their computation ability - so the cost to do the same computation gets halved.This law has held true since the late 1960s when it was predicted by Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel Corporation. Since then, computing power has doubled about 23 times, a 10 million-fold increase. Your typical smartphone i...

  Geothermal or “Geothermal”? To the average non-scientist, especially those of us who grew up on cartoons and oversimplified grade-school graphics of the earth’s layers, “geothermal” heat seems like the logical answer to everyone’s energy needs. Why not just send a pipe down to that molten layer, pull up that lava, and get the geothermal rebate down to Augusta? OK, good news and bad news. True geothermal is really hot, but not really available. False geothermal is really available but not real hot! Here, we want to try to remove some confusion between ground source heat pumps (often misleadingly referred to as “geothermal”) and true geothermal, where heat is extracted from extremely hot ground and used for heat or electricity.  True geothermal heat is a combination of radioactivity in the earth's crust (80%) and heat flowing up from the core and mantle of the earth (20%). Over most of the earth, in order to reach rock that is warm enough to directly heat our homes, we need to...