Page 37 - Environmental Nanotechnology Applications and Impacts of Nanomaterials

Nanotechnology and Our Energy Challenge 23

electricity is storing it. Approaches that entail production and storage
of electricity on a vast scale are daunting, but technologies could be
developed to attack the energy storage problem locally, at the scale of a
house or small business. A local storage based system would allow users
to buy energy supplies off the grid when supplies are cheapest, unlike
the current centralized plant system where almost twice as much gen-
eration capacity is needed to fulfill peak time demand.
One vision of such a distributed storage/generation grid for 2050
includes a vast electrical continental power grid with over 100 million
asynchronous local storage units and generation sites, including private
households and businesses. This system would be continually innovated
by free enterprise, with local generation buying low and selling high to
the grid network. Optimized local storage systems would be based on
improved batteries, hydrogen conversion systems, and flywheels, while
mass primary power input to the grid could come from remote locations
with large-scale access to cleaner energy resources (solar farms,
stranded natural gas, closed-system clean coal plants, and wave power)
to the common grid via carbon nanotubes, high-voltage wires that min-
imize loss. Excess hydrogen produced in the system could be used in the
transportation sector, and excess residential electricity could be used to
recharge plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. Innovative technological
improvements in long distance, continental power grids that could trans-
port hundreds of gigawatts over a thousand miles instead of a hundred
megawatts over the same distance would permit access to very remote
sources, including large solar farms in the deserts, where local storage
can be used as a buffer. Remote nuclear power sources could be located
far from populated areas and behind military fences, to address prolif-
eration concerns. Clean coal plants could be located wherever it is
convenient and economical to strip out and sequester the CO 2 .
To Richard Smalley, breaking down the electricity issue to the local-
ized level was a critical part of creating new energy solutions. He noted
in his energy lecture.
When we are trying to find a way to store electrical energy on a vast scale,
as we generally need energy in gigawatt power plants, there are very few
options that one can imagine on that large scale for energy storage. But if
you imagine attacking the energy storage problem locally, at the scale of a
house or a small business, the problem becomes vastly more solvable
because there must be many more technologies that are accessible at the
smaller scale. As a scientist, I would rather fight the battle of energy stor-
age locally than on huge centralized scales.
Under a change of approach toward distributed energy and localized
residential storage, reliability of the electrical grid becomes less impor-
tant. The local residential and business sites can determine what period
of time they want to be buffered by the grid and when to rely on storage.