It is the ultimate answer. And you can guess what one of the first things Newt Gingrich & Co. did back when they took over Congress in the '90s.
Yup, they dragged federal money for
nuclear fusion research out behind the woodshed and shot it deader than King Tut. Another thing the Europeans or Japanese will develop first, up there with stem-cell research.
So what is the current solution?
Well, one answer is wind-powered ethanol plants. Ethanol plants currently burn either natural gas or coal to distill the alcohol formed by the fermentation process. Which, of course, releases greenhouse gases. However, if ethanol plants were build in windy states like North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, and the like, the plants could have a couple of dedicated wind turbines and use the electricity generated by the turbines to boil off the alcohol with high-powered heating elements. This would export the wind energy of the prairie in liquid form. While it would be more pollution-controlling to simply directly replace coal-fired power plants, such an electrical grid does not exist in these windy, rural states, and building one to export the power to more populated areas would be very expensive. Plus, it directly reduces our dependence on foreign oil.
In other places where wind is plentiful, the wind turbine power should be utilized whenever possible instead of the older coal-fired plants. Older plants should only be fired up when demand is high and the wind is light. Last to turn on, first to turn off.
In places where there is a lot of wave action, like on the East and West coasts, the Gulf Coast, and the shores of the Great Lakes, wave-action generators can be used, entire fields of them at anchor, bobbing up and down and creating energy. There are some technical problems that might make it expensive at first to start, mostly because the power output of each generator would have to sycronized to a common standard, but mass production of such systems will drive down costs.
Solar power can also be used, in two ways: solar cells and focused mirrors. In the former, roof-mounted solar cells can add to the power system, reducing the drain on the power grid. In the latter, vast arrays of computer-controlled mirrors focus their solar energy on a single point, superheating water into steam to drive a turbine, which in turn operates a generator that makes electricity. This would obviously only work during the daytime, but while it was operating would make emission-free power.
If the federal or state governments make enough guarenteed loans and other regulatory changes, we could have a lot of domestic-rooftop solar panels kicking around. Thom Hartmann (Air America Radio) described how the Germans did it a few years ago. It was, IIRC, a guaranteed long-term loan program to the homeowner combined with a law stating that any power that flowed to the grid from your solar-cell array was bought by the power company at nine times the rate they sell it at for a set number of years. So, if, while you were work and your house was turned off, your solar array pumped a few kilowatts into the grid, you got money on your bill for it. If you array was big enough, your power bill could be virtually zero, or possibly negative, because for every kilowatt-hour you pumped into the grid you could draw out 9 kWh before you started owing money.
However, the building of more power plants that burn fuels is both necessary and inevitable. What should be done is make no more natural-gas-buring power plants, as most of that is imported from foreign countries, but instead only licence clean-coal technology, also called coal gasification. They emit very little besides carbon dioxide, and the carbon dioxide is pure enough to be
captured and liquified for commercial use, such as welding gases, as aerosol propellents, and carbonated beverages.
Another possibility is of storing the carbon dioxide underground, sealed up in played-out oil fields or old mine shafts. A third possibility is converting the carbon dioxide into some form of carbonate solid, like limestone.
The problem we are going to have is the increase of electric vehicles over the next couple of decades. While these will reduce emissions overall, it will strain the electric grid somewhat. Much of this can be mitigated by having your home charger for your electric car on a timer, so that it only starts charging after 7pm or so, after peak power consumption passes, but the power plants will have to run at full capacity 24/7, powering businesses in the day, homes in the evening, and recharging cars at night.
If we ever get our priorities straight, we would build a
space elevator. Not only could we launch nuclear and other toxic waste into the Sun, but we could cheaply and quickly build massive arrays of solar cells in orbit and beam that power to a collection grid.
Once we have nuclear fusion, we are good to go. It's fuel is filtered from everyday water, and is no more dangerous to store than propane. It's only pollution is helium. And once we have it, not only can we power the entire electrical grid off of it, we can also recharge our electric cars AND split water into hydrogen and oxygen. This would allow us to go over to a hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered transportation system. With no batteries to recharge and the only emission water vapor, a fuel-cell car has all the advantages of a battery-powered car with the quick-refueling capacity of a conventional automobile and thus unlimited range.
Is making hydrogen from water efficient? No, not really. But with ultraclean and plentiful nuclear fusion power, it no longer matters.