Research Plan

One of the most pressing topics that is around today is that of energy. Even if we solve all the problems of pollutants from manufacturing goods, and building efficient homes and such, we still must face the fact that generating energy is always going to be necessary. Whatever we do, unless our society completely collapses and we go back to living in small nomadic hunter-gatherer type groups (which is fairly unlikely), we will need to generate some significant amounts of energy.

This is a problem that cannot be solved with traditional top-down solutions like those currently in place. We should be looking for unconventional, ingenious methods for supplying the needs of our population. Anyone who is familiar with current technology has heard of peer-to-peer file-sharing systems. Many have probably also heard of programs like BitTorrent, Democracy, SETI@home, or BOINC. These are all examples of distributed systems. They have a number of distinct advantages over more common delivery systems, primary of these is built-in fault tolerance. They also distribute the cost of maintenance more equally and allow availability to scale more in sync with demand. Anyone who has downloaded a BitTorrent file knows that it is just about the only way to use the eight megabits per second that cable providers are so fond of touting.

This presents a revolutionary idea for the generating of power; instead of having a central power provider that is vulnerable to all sorts of attacks and malfunctions, we could have a power system that is set up as a grid with every node producing power and utilizing it. There would be a marketplace for surplus power, so that anyone who needed more power than they were or could currently generate, could buy it off of the grid, and the money would go directly to the people producing the power, possibly less some percentage for maintenance of the system. There would be almost no blackouts, and no worries about corporations getting greedy and taking their customers for a ride (price gouging, etc.).

I would like to determine whether current technologies such as wind and photovoltaics can economically supply the power needs of the average U.S. home. The technologies that are required to do this may be around already, or they may be on their way, as evidenced by Loutfy and Sharp (2006) and I believe that this will be a good indicator as to the feasibility of my vision because the United States is the largest consumer of energy in the world per-capita, to my knowledge. There is also the question of storage, I would like to find out whether the technologies for storing energy are sufficiently advanced that they can smooth out the fluctuations in power output probable in such renewable energy solutions. This is highly relevant to the themes of the class because a large part of the environmental damage that is being done is a direct result of energy generation, for example, China burning huge amounts of coal to generate the requisite energy for most of its industries.

References

Photovoltaic properties of metal-free phthalocyanines. I. Al/H[sub 2]Pc Schottky barrier solar cells

Rafik O. Loutfy and James H. Sharp, J. Chem. Phys. 71, 1211 (1979)