Devil's advocate: Let's ditch these energy technologies

In a perfect world, we’d pursue any technological advancement and scientific achievement worth pursuing, no matter what the cost. But we can’t afford that attitude in today’s far-less-than-perfect society.

The US Fed and the Bank of England, among other institutions practicing quantitative easing, can’t continue to create money out of thin air forever. With a finite amount of money available to tackle such weighty and open-ended risks like climate change and depleting supplies of conventional oil, we need to invest in solutions that promise the biggest bang for the buck … and starting not 20 or 30 years from now, but now.

And so, unfortunately, some promising energy technologies need to take a back seat to others. Under current circumstances, here are the ones we suggest as unnecessary nice-to-haves, the energy equivalents of, say, manned travel to Mars — exciting goals that are hard to justify considering the most pressing problems facing us Earthlings now:

• CCS – Yes, carbon capture and sequestration — nabbing the carbon dioxide out of fossil-fuel emissions and burying them away so they can’t keep heating up the atmosphere — is already possible. But it remains so far away from economically feasible and commercially scalable that it’s not wise for us to assume it’ll be ready to “save us” anytime soon.
• Clean coal – Basically the other side of the CCS coin, “clean coal” technologies promise to let us keep burning that most polluting of fossil fuels without environmental or social consequences. But before we even get around to burning the stuff, coal already creates enormous environmental and social consequences. Just ask the people of West Virginia or the families of miners who worked at Heilongjiang. The faster we can transition away from this dirty fuel, the better.
• Fusion energy – Always just over the horizon and always over budget.
• Food-to-fuel – Fine, let’s keeping investigating crop-waste-to-energy strategies. But anything that leads to a price rise in food commodities, or removes fertile agricultural land from food production, should be beyond the pale. We’re sure the more-than 1.3 billion people in the world who have to feed and support their families on less than $1.25 a day would agree.
• Hydrogen-powered cars – Hybrid and electric vehicle technologies are far more advanced than hydrogen-powered transport, and we’re having enough difficulty building the needed infrastructure to support plug-ins.

Instead, in addition to wind and solar power, the following strategies should be getting the bulk of our attention (and investment) at the moment:

• Unsexy efficiency … you know, “dumb” technology like decent insulation in buildings.
• Policies that, at last, really reward the good and discourage the bad. As yet another study has just shown, the right enabling policies are critical to a renewable energy future.
• A new economic vision. How many times do we have to be told that, “without burning more oil, there is no economic growth,” before the message finally sinks in?
• And, yes, smart-grid technologies. Smart meters, demand management, distributed generation and storage, etc. … the more you consider all these, the more you realise what huge potential there is for managing — and micromanaging — our way to a more automated, responsive and resilient energy future.