Artificial Leaf Harnesses Sunlight for Efficient Fuel Production
September 20th, 2015Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand.
—
I like reading the artificial leaf news, even though there are always tall hurdles ahead of the technology becoming practical. In this iteration of the artificial leaf, for example, the system only works for about 40 hours.
I wondered how much money was being spent on this potentially game changing research. Here you go:
On Monday, April 27, the Department of Energy (DOE) announced a five-year, $75 million renewal of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP).
That’s a lot of money, right?
In alternative energy research, that’s a decent chunk of change over five years. But relative to other programs, you don’t want to prioritize research into technologies that lead to ubiquitous, clean, cheap energy. Oh hell no. That’s just crazy.
There are much more important programs out there! Take the F-35, for example, where I doubt that $75 million down the gurgler would even register anywhere in the annals of that disaster:
The F-35 has come to symbolize all that’s wrong with American defense spending: uncontrolled bloat, unaccountable manufacturers (in this case, Lockheed Martin), and an internal Pentagon culture that cannot adequately track taxpayer dollars.
…
It’s no small irony that on the same day the change in Air Force strategy was revealed, Winslow Wheeler, a staff member at the Project On Government Oversight and a long-time critic of the F-35 program, reported that American taxpayers will pay between will pay between $148 million and $337 million per jet in 2015, depending on the model.
“A single Air Force F-35A costs a whopping $148 million. One Marine Corps F-35B costs an unbelievable $251 million. A lone Navy F-35C costs a mind-boggling $337 million. Average the three models together, and a ‘generic’ F-35 costs $178 million,” Wheeler wrote.
“It gets worse. These are just the production costs. Additional expenses for research, development, test and evaluation are not included,” he added.
And don’t believe the hype about Air Force contracts changing because of the F-35 debacle, either.
See: Long Range Strike Bomber:
The Air Force plans to purchase 80–100 LRS-B aircraft at a cost of $550 million each, at 2010 prices.
And if those things only wind up costing $550 million each, I’m Santa Claus.
Yep, clean energy is expensive.
Via: Caltech:
Generating and storing renewable energy, such as solar or wind power, is a key barrier to a clean-energy economy. When the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) was established at Caltech and its partnering institutions in 2010, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Innovation Hub had one main goal: a cost-effective method of producing fuels using only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide, mimicking the natural process of photosynthesis in plants and storing energy in the form of chemical fuels for use on demand. Over the past five years, researchers at JCAP have made major advances toward this goal, and they now report the development of the first complete, efficient, safe, integrated solar-driven system for splitting water to create hydrogen fuels.
