A rchive Date
[ 06-07-2006 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Ecology ]
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[http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=070606C
The Silver Bullet Fallacy
By Glenn Harlan Reynolds: 06 Jul 2006
Regular readers of this column know that I'm a big fan of nanotechnology, and expect it to produce dramatic progress in coming years. So I was pretty excited to read this in PhysOrg.com:
"Energy is one of the greatest challenges of the century," Claude Canizares, MIT's Bruno Rossi Professor of Physics, told attendees of the conference produced by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers' (ASME's) Nanotechnology Institute. "We need significant breakthroughs in science and technology. The promise of nanotechnology provides fertile ground for such breakthroughs." . . .
MIT's Vladimir Bulovic said that nanotechnologies such as nanodots and nanorods are potentially "disruptive" technologies in the solar field. That means they could cause a major switch in a primary energy source, potentially proving more efficient than the silicon used in most solar energy devices today. Bulovic is fabricating quantum dot photovoltaics using a microcontact printing process.
Bring it on! On the other hand, a bit later in the same news story I ran across something that seems a bit like oversell, once you crunch the numbers:
"If 2 percent of the continental United States were covered with photovoltaic systems with a net efficiency of 10 percent, we would be able to supply all the U.S. energy needs," said Bulovic, the KDD Associate Professor of Communications and Technology in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Only two percent of the continental United States! Er, in other words, an area slightly larger than Georgia. That seems like rather a lot, and I'm pretty sure that the environmental impact statement for such a project would be, um, daunting.
If you covered all the rooftops, roads, parking lots, etc., with solar collectors, you'd get an area the size of Ohio, which might do the trick, but solar power cells would have to be awfully cheap, and awfully durable, for anything like this to work, and I don't see it happening any time soon.
But this actually illustrates a problem with these sorts of scenarios. Bulovic's example is a bit over the top, and from this it's easy to make fun of the potential for cheap solar energy. But, of course, solar energy doesn't have to actually "supply all the U.S. energy needs" to make a big difference. Even relatively minor contributions - say 5-10 percent - would make a substantial difference in pollution, and in pricing of other energy sources, which is influenced by demand at the margin.
What's more, if you couple cheap solar power with other things that nanotechnology is likely to bring to the market in the next decade or so - like stronger, lighter materials, better computing, and maybe even better batteries - the result may be additional energy coupled with cars and other devices that use energy much more efficiently. And the effects of producing even 10 percent of our electricity consumption (not even 10 percent of our total energy consumption) via rooftop solar would be quite dramatic. That point's likely to be lost when the overhyped example is deflated.
The truth is that substantial improvements in the efficiency of solar power will be very beneficial, even if they don't provide a silver bullet that solves all of our energy problems. You can say the same for a lot of other alternative energy proposals: Hydrogen, hybrids, biofuels, wind power, etc. None of these alternative technologies live up to the hype, but all offer some contribution to the problem. So does conservation, which doesn't solve the problem by itself - and whose luddite boosters often render unappealing by their obvious enthusiasm for making others do without - but which helps, too.
Technologies don't have to provide a silver bullet to be worthwhile, or even revolutionary. Silver-bullet claims can lead to unnecessary disappointment, while silver-bullet expectations may cause us to under-appreciate technologies that are truly revolutionary.
Glenn Reynolds is a TCS Daily contributing editor.
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