BECAUSE THE SUN IS WHERE THE ENERGY IS

Professor Nate Lewis, one of solar energy’s leading advocates and researchers, says he belongs to the "Willie Sutton school of energy management." Sutton famously said he robbed banks because that was where the money was. Lewis: "More solar energy hits the earth in one hour than all the energy the world consumes in a year…So if you want to solve the energy crisis, go to the bank where the energy is kept – the sun.”

Lewis’ ultimate goal is to make solar energy cheaply and abundantly enough to use it to make hydrogen fuel. He admits he is nowhere near his goal yet. But he is driven by a vision: "Energy is the single most important technological challenge facing humanity today. Nothing else in science or technology comes close…we are in the middle of doing the biggest experiment that humans will have ever done. And there is no tomorrow, because in 20 years that experiment will be cast in stone…"

A Solution to the Global Energy Crisis? A Noted Scientist Says It’s the Sun
Lee Dye, November 14, 2007 (ABC News)

WHO
Nate Lewis, George L. Argyros Professor of Chemistry, California Institute of Technology

WHAT
Professor Lewis is among the leading researchers seeking to find a way to make solar energy accessible and affordable enough to use it to make turn water into hydrogen fuel on a scale large enough to supply world transportation.



WHEN
- Lewis regards the matters of climate change and solar energy development as urgent. One of a growing number of scientists who see the factors behind climate change snowballing, he sees “disaster” by 2050 if the problems are not solved.
- Current solar energy technology has solved the problem of making electricity from sunlight but not cheaply, not on a scale large enough to fuel society.

WHERE
Lewis work is at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

WHY
- Lewis has long argued solar energy will only really be viable when it comes in a something as easy and ubiquitous as a paint for buildings.
- On the other hand, nuclear energy cannot supply what the world will need in the way of electricity without building a 1 gigawatt (gynormous) reactor everyday for 50 years. And there isn’t enough uranium, making plutonium (weapons fuel) necessary.
- Carbon capture and sequestration is not safe. A small leak would undo the value of sequestration entirely.
- Hydropower, Lewis says, is “maxed out.”
- Lewis approves of wind and biomass but does not think they are available in adequate scale to solve the world’s needs.
- Conservation is important but inadequate.

The sun is adequate. Only the human inspiration is lacking. (click to enlarge)

QUOTES
- Lewis, on the goal of solar energy research: "We need to find a better way to make fuel from sunlight directly so that we can bring energy to whoever wants it whenever they want it - day or night, summer or winter…"
- Lewis, on carbon capture and sequestration: "We know that CO2 migrates underground…It bubbled up in Lake Nyos, Cameron, on Aug. 26, 1986, and killed some 1,700 people. So we're going to have to demonstrate within the next 10 years that it will leak less than 0.1 percent, globally averaged, for the next millennium in thousands of different aquifers around the world."
- Lewis, on the melting of permafrost and the snowballing of climate change factors: "As the ice crystals in it melt, it reflects less light and turns darker, absorbing more light, and that melts more permafrost. Helium dating of trapped bubbles in the permafrost shows that we're melting permafrost now that hasn't been melted in 40,000 years. And there's enough CO2 and methane trapped in the permafrost to have the greenhouse gas levels not go up by a factor of two, but by a factor of 10."