Gas is $3 a gallon, your heating bill is $300, and the coal burned to light your bulbs belches greenhouse gases above an ever-hotter planet.
Yet many of the solutions to these expensive, guilt-generating problems are at hand.
Ethanol made from corn kernels already flows into your gas tank. The next step — ethanol made from more plentiful corn cobs and stalks and wood chips from beetle-eaten lodgepole pines — will arrive in just a couple of years.
Light bulbs will be powered by an intriguing marriage of solar and sodium in the San Luis Valley. Coloradans will get their electricity from sun and molten salt sooner than they’ll get it from a revival in nuclear power plants.
A decade from now, home solar panels and windmills will produce hydrogen that can run your DVD player or your minivan.
Politicians and environmentalists are calling for a U.S.-sponsored mad-science project on alternative energy: Put the best American minds and big piles of money in one place to fight global warming and $100 a barrel foreign oil.
Yet we already have that alternative-energy Manhattan Project, right here in Colorado.
Golden’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory is primed with a huge infusion of government cash and an unprecedented public mandate to soothe the savage carbon-fuels monster.
Scientists at the Golden lab are now racing to meet even more stringent demands for new energy sources set down in the groundbreaking U.S. energy bill signed in December. That bill requires rapid production of actual energy alternatives, not just pie-in-the-sky proposals.
As one Golden scientist sums up where we are and where we want to be, “You can’t get there with corn.”
If “there” is the alternative-energy future, here’s how Golden is taking us there:
• Corn kernels make fine fuel, but we can’t keep stealing the plant’s prime parts from cattle and Captain Crunch in order to fuel our vehicles. The corn by-products fuels are already in hand, but NREL researchers must cut the cost in half within four years to make it a feasible alternative.
• Mass-scale solar power plants will soon be under construction in the U.S. and are already online throughout Spain, using molten-salt storage technology developed in Golden. The plants replace coal or gas-fired utilities with zero-pollution solar reflectors and tanks that can store enough power for an entire city for hours or days at a time.
• Your next new car in 2010 may well be a plug-in hybrid, a key to meeting steep gas mileage improvements required by the energy bill. Golden scientists are halving the size of current batteries to cram more power into cars, and testing new paints and window coatings that reduce the need for the air conditioning that can suck 10 percent of a vehicle’s power.
• Buildings burn 40 percent of U.S. energy needs, but greening them up takes a thousand small changes in technology. In air conditioning, NREL is attacking not just the heat but the energy-draining humidity. They also craft skylight lenses that look like multi-faceted insect eyes, to disperse sunlight throughout a room.
• Golden studies other exotic technologies that work beautifully but may take years or even decades to reach homes and cars. Hydrogen can power fuel-cell cars. Renewable, non-polluting wind and solar power can separate hydrogen from water. The trick is to overhaul America’s cars, pipelines and gas stations so the fuel can actually reach the cars. So NREL designs new tanks that are small enough and safe enough to power a car with a radical new fuel.
“Between a concept and a product, there’s a lot of territory,” said one Golden scientist.
Michael Booth can be reached at 303-954-1686 or mbooth@denverpost.com.
