Wind, Water and Sun superior to Biofuels, Nuclear and Coal for Clean Energy

From: ScienceDaily  - December 11, 2008

Read Full Article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081210171908.htm

The best ways to improve energy security, mitigate global warming and reduce the number of deaths caused by air pollution are blowing in the wind and rippling in the water, not growing on prairies or glowing inside nuclear power plants, says Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford. And "clean coal", which involves capturing emissions and sequestering them in the Earth, is not clean at all, he asserts.

 

Jacobson has conducted the first quantitative, scientific evaluation of the proposed, major, energy-related solutions by assessing not only their potential for delivering energy for electricity and vehicles, but also their impacts on global warming, human health, energy security, water supply, space requirements, wildlife, water pollution, reliability and sustainability. His findings indicate that the options that are getting the most attention are between 25 to 1,000 times more polluting than the best available options.

 

"The energy alternatives that are good are not the ones that people have been talking about the most. And some options that have been proposed are just downright awful", Jacobson said. "Ethanol-based biofuels will actually cause more harm to human health, wildlife, water supply and land use than current fossil fuels". He added that ethanol may also emit more global-warming pollutants than fossil fuels, according to the latest scientific studies.

 

The raw energy sources that Jacobson found to be the most promising are, in order, wind, concentrated solar (the use of mirrors to heat a fluid), geothermal, tidal, solar photovoltaics (rooftop solar panels), wave and hydroelectric. He recommends against nuclear, coal with carbon capture and sequestration, corn ethanol and cellulosic acid, which is made of prairie grass. In fact, he found cellulosic acid was worse than corn ethanol because it results in more air pollution, requires more land to produce and causes more damage to wildlife.