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. In the 1950s, humanity developed a revolutionary form of energy production. It emitted no CO2 and no other greenhouse gases, it used a fuel that was already used in massive quantities in weapons research, and while expensive to build it could last for decades with minimal upkeep. Some countries did invest massively in this form of generator, and those that did are today some of the world’s least CO2-polluting countries.
However, because the general public doesn’t understand how power is produced or what is dangerous and what isn’t, it was really easy for fossil fuel companies to fear-monger this new type of reactor. They exploited some mismanaged plant failures to create an image of these types of power plants as dangerous weapons, ready to destroy entire countries at a minute’s notice. This was of course not true, but people didn’t know that. So they turned against this type of energy production, and research and construction of them collapsed in the 80s and 90s. Had this not happened, had we kept building them and researching ways to make them safer and more efficient – at the same scales that we did in the 50s, 60s, and 70s – we might not have the looming climate catastrophe we today fear. We could be entirely off fossil fuels, but people were more scared of this clean form of electricity than they were of coal in the atmosphere.
I am of course talking about nuclear power.
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