There are many paths for cheap zero CO2-free energy. What we need to do is fund the wild scientists who are looking at the early stages of these problems.
Nate Lewis is a scientist at Caltech doing some amazing research. He's trying to turn solar energy into liquid fuel.
Recently, I got a chance to visit his lab to learn more about his progress. More energy from the sun hits the Earth in one hour than all of the energy consumed on our planet in an entire year.
The solution is to find a way to store the energy in the sun when it's available. Photosynthesis takes sunlight and stores solar energy in chemical bonds.
We should do the same thing just better, faster, and cheaper than nature ever figured out how to do in order to make a sustainable solar driven energy system. Making solar fuels would allow you to serve the transportation sectors, aircraft, heavy duty trucks, and ships; would allow you to get energy to wherever people need it whenever they want it.
What we envision is football field sized areas. You roll out artificial grass that has this bilayer or multilayer high performance material and then there's drainage pipes that wick out the fuel and you store that, or more likely, bring it to a solar fuel refinery.
There are many fuels that we could make from the sun, but we don't have the materials in hand to do it. So we need to discover those materials, design them in the computer, bring them to reality by synthesizing them in a laboratory.
And if we do all of that, we'll have gotten off the ground. Humans are very, very good at innovation, once someone has invented the idea.
A lot of people are coming together to care about this issue. As they focus on the need for innovation, I think we will get the increased investments both government and private.
I know that the scientific possibilities are pretty incredible.
