It’s 2023, we are witnessing a huge shift towards clean energy and tons of money and research is being poured into renewables.
But it’s got me thinking, if we did this 20-30 years ago would all the new technology we see today be pretty standard by 2023? Or has there been some big innovations in recent years that would’ve only had been possible in recent times?
A couple examples
Batteries, we are still yet to fully utilise these for energy grid storage and electric vehicles are only now just getting up to the range that a petrol car can do. Would that have been possible in the past considering the first commercial lithium ion battery was released in the 90s?Solid state batteries seem to be like a real boost for renewables yet they are still to be properly used.
Solar panels, wind turbines and other power generation technology. Would they be stock standard or was their efficiency and cost just not possible to overcome until recent times?
Airplanes and other long haul transport, biofuels are what seems to the most likely alternative unless batteries get much better. But these seem to be much later down the track.
In: 403
Yes. We tried.
In the 1940s and 50s we have found out how to use nuclear power on a large scale. Nuclear fission power, to be exact. It was invented around 80 years ago and was said to solve all energy problems.
It can create unbelievable amounts of energy from small amounts of minerals that are quite abundant. All the while, not producing anything that contributes global warming.
The only problem with them is, they create very very dangerous waste that we currently have no way of getting rid off for good. We can only lock the waste away as safe and as far away as possible.
Also, a bad accident happened in the 80s where many people lost their homes and lives. In fact, a part of a country was so badly damaged, that no human or animal will be able to safely live there anymore for thousands of years.
The accident was not caused because the energy was bad or the machines broke, but because a human who worked there made a big mistake when operating the machines.
There was a lot of research going on about how to safely dispose of the waste and avoid such accidents in the future. If the research continued intensively to this day, we would probably have already found solutions for these problems.
But because if the whole world relied on this energy, the big oil and coal companies would not make nearly as much money as they did before and they would lose their political power.
So the big companies used the argument of the dangerous waste and the bad accident that happened to make the people dislike this energy.
It worked on the people. For many years now no one really wants to use this energy, because the people are very afraid of it.
Because most people dislike this energy now, the research into solving the problems has nearly ceased. No one is really interested in it anymore. Some researchers still work hard on it, but they get very little support compared to when the technology was invented.
Now people are looking for new ways of making energy that doesn’t destroy the environment. And while they do, we have to mostly rely on oil and coal.
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