Many Types of Clean Energy Are Dangerous to Wildlife A device which is partially made of coconut shells and seawater can charge like a battery and absorb CO2. It is the size of a coin. It is called a supercapacitor which is a device able to charge and release its load quickly. When the CO2 is saved, it can then be used or gotten rid of as they say, responsibly. It was developed by scientists at the university of Cambridge. The device is said to use less energy than the processes being used by industry now. The device will have to be scaled up. Here is something you are almost never told. Carbon dioxide is necessary for life on the planet. In removing the excess, we better be sure we leave the necessary amount we need to live. The carbon problem is too much of a good thing. A new plant was launched in Iceland, it is one of the largest CO2 capture and storage plants in the world. It is amazing to me one of the least populated countries in the world would have the means of doing this, but they did. The carbon captured is then put underground and it becomes mineralized, in other words it is turned to stone. The race toward fusion power if perfected, would provide us with a carbon free power source, that is one of the reasons we want it so badly. The other is it is far safer than fission nuclear power which can cause severe damage if something goes wrong and produces waste which stay dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years. One of the problems we face is as we travel toward other energy sources which are less polluting is, we still need oil. We shouldn’t just turn off the spigot as we are trying to do in the United States. The irony is the administration knows this and that is why it is trying to get oil from other countries even though we have the most right here. We need to supplement our renewal energy with fossil fuel and then reduce fossil fuel use as we get more renewal sources. It is far too soon to try and get everyone to drive electric cars, the power grids in this country could never support that. As carbon removal technologies improve, the impact of using fossil fuel decreases. Perhaps there will come a time when carbon removal will become so efficient it could even eliminate the fossil fuel impact. There are many stories of fossil fuel companies buying advanced batter technology and taking it off the market along with systems for alternate fuels. The time has come however when it is getting too hard for them to do that anymore since they are being watched more closely. There are actually quite a few alternate sources of energy. So far none of them are capable of supplying enough electricity to eliminate fossil fuel. They not only have to be cheap enough to make sense, they also have to supply long term storage and we haven’t reached that point yet. We will know when this happens, because it will enable us to store energy for very long durations of time. Think of a flashlight battery. It can sit around for years and still work when needed. This is what we need but on an industrial scale. If we look at current electric cars, they have become throwaways mostly, that is unless you want to expend a huge amount of money for the next battery pack. I have been reading stories which quote a new battery pack at 21,000 dollars and Electrek had quoted a price of 22,500. This could be the value of the car by the time the battery pack is needed and who would give you anything for it if they had to replace that battery pack? There is one thing for sure, energy is all around us begging to be used. Nature has supplied an abundance of it. The problem is we are not utilizing all we can. Hydroelectric is really the best, or at least one of the best. With all the dams around the world, one would think it would have been utilized more. Once you get water flowing, you have energy. If it falls from a height, you get even more energy, that is why dams at places like Niagara Falls in New York are such good generators of electricity. There is no pollution connected with hydroelectric power. I have to wonder if we put all our energy into one source of alternate power instead of many different ones, would we make much faster progress in getting that source to supply our needs? It might be a hard choice to choose one. We have wind power, ocean power, solar power, developing fusion power and each form of power has several sub-forms. It seems if I wanted to power just one home with alternate power it could be done. The big problem arises when we need to power towns, cities and even large industrial areas. As we know some home owners are selling back their excess electricity to the companies. These are usually those who have solar cells. The problem is solar cells don’t pay for the elderly unless they can get them installed for free. The other problem is if too many people get them, it will hurt the utility and thus hurt those who don’t have them. We seem to be nearing our goal of clean energy use, but we still have a long way to go. There are problems with some of the methods for generating clean energy. Those big wind mills are killing many of the birds in the area they are in. The electric generators which use ocean currents to produce electricity are dangerous to some animals who bump into the blades. There is also another problem scientists think might occur; the noise they make might interfere with animals which use sound for communication. We know that nuclear fission plants have had some effect on fish which have been found near the plant. This has been a subject of controversy for many years. It seems even the best planned clean energy source can have an effect on the environment. What could be safer than solar power? It seems it too has an effect on the environment. This is a type of solar power where huge towers containing thousands of mirrors send concentrated solar beams at a boiler to heat water to be used for power. This is sure death for any bird, bat or bug which flies through the beam. The beams are said to be 800 to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Even solar panels are dangerous to birds. The big solar panel farms produce a lake effect making the birds think it is water they are seeing and they crash into the panels.
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