Focus 580; Sustainable Energy Sources

Good morning and welcome to focus 580. This is our telephone talk program My name's David Inge and we're glad to have you listening in this first hour of the show. We'll be talking about sustainable energy and its place in the energy mix here in the United States. When President Bush unveiled his energy plan all we guess about a month ago some people were critical because of its continued reliance on fossil fuels coal oil natural gas and the fact that such so little importance was put on the potential for renewable sources of energy things like solar and wind and biomass and so forth. So this morning we thought we'd spend some time talking about where that we stand with these kinds of energy sources and what we're doing to try and as a country as a matter of policy what we're doing to try to develop them and the potential that they have for supplying some of our energy needs. And we'll be talking this morning with a fellow who's been involved in energy the energy field on a policy level for quite a number of years now his name is Dan Reicher. He is currently

a visiting fellow at the World Resources Institute in Washington DC. Before that he worked in the U.S. Department of Energy for a number of years from 1997 until this year he was assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy and the Department of Energy and before that he had other posts as well. Before that he was a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. He also served as a staff member of President Carter's commission on the accident at Three Mile Island and as Massachusetts assistant attorney general for environmental protection. He's talking with us by telephone as we talk. Questions are welcome anyone who's listening we want to call in make a comment ask question that certainly welcome. The only thing we ask is that people just try to be brief and we ask that so we can get in as many people as possible and keep things moving along. Anyone's welcome to call here in Champaign Urbana 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. We also have a toll free line that means no matter where you are listening

around Illinois Indiana anywhere. The signal will travel through the air over the Internet. You can call in and the toll free line is 800 to 2 2 9 4. 5 5 again 3 3 3 W I L L and toll free 800 to 2 to WY Hello Mr Riker Hello. Hi how are you. I'm fine thanks and thank you for talking with us. It's good to be with you David. I am assuming that that you had this organization that you're still seated with would be among those who would fault the Bush administration for four not in four in their energy planning and proposals for not giving more attention to renewables. Yeah I was concerned about the the president's plan issued about a month ago. It lacked the kind of balance that I think we need in this country between. Supply and demand. Not enough stress. On efficient ways to use energy and not enough stress on

cleaner approaches to producing energy in the first place. We need a we need a good diversity of sources in this country. But it didn't give the kind of. Emphasis that I think's important to renewable energy sources which ultimately I think not only from someone coming from government but many energy companies as well believe that's that's the long term answer to to a good chunk of our energy challenge. Well let me ask you this and I think that some people would also have some criticism for the Clinton administration they would say that that administration they would have reason to be disappointed with its energy policy. They might even go as far as to say there wasn't much of an energy policy and that the Clinton administration also didn't do very much to try to promote renewable sources for all of its talking about that being important. Now here you were this was the position that you were in during that administration. I expect you'd want to say Well in fact the administration was active in that field.

What do you think was accomplished or was anything accomplish. Well let me tell you there has been this sort of drumbeat. I've heard that the Clinton administration didn't have an energy plan. In fact if you if you based the existence of an energy plan on a document like this the Bush administration issued a month ago we actually put out two energy plans during the Clinton administration. They they I think advocated quite a balanced approach one of them was in fact called a sustainable energy strategy but much more than the document itself the words on paper is what we advocated both nationally and internationally as a part of this plan we went to Capitol Hill and we said we need to provide greater funding to develop renewable energy sources increase the R&D spending on the federal side match it with industry money and we're going to be able to accelerate wind solar biomass geothermal hydrogen

fuel cells all sorts of things much more rapidly and fortunately the Congress turned down those requests and. And when the Bush administration took over they actually made dramatic cuts. To that R&D funding at least to propose major cuts hopefully Congress will resist those. Secondly the Clinton administration went to Capitol Hill and said one of the ways you can help move relatively immature technologies into the market is with tax credits and we proposed a very broad ranging set of tax credits for both renewable energy and energy efficiency. And again virtually all of those were turned down by the Congress. We proposed some federal legislation that would have much more rapidly move the country towards the use of renewables by setting a national standard for the use of renewable energy. It would have would have reached a percentage of our electricity by 2010 from renewables that are that would have been about triple of what

it is today. And we have of course advocated internationally for such a resolution or at least some initial steps to address climate change and in addressing climate change want to mediately gets obviously to a cleaner energy technologies. So I think we have a pretty good record from the Clinton administration unfortunately. We had a Congress that resisted virtually everything we proposed. How what role now in the energy mix in this country do renewables play with. Well there's a couple ways to look at it and I will not shower you with too many statistics but if you look at how we make electricity in this country today about 2 to 3 percent of our electricity comes from solar wind. Geothermal energy that's energy from heat in the earth and from biomass from organic materials that we burn or we turn into ethanol and do other things with about 8 or

9 percent. Beyond that comes from hydro power another source of renewable energy. So that's on the electricity side. If you look at the larger beyond electricity that the all the inputs into the U.S. economy for energy. One interesting statistic is that about 3 percent today already comes from from biomass. We make ethanol fuels we people heat their homes with wood. The forest products industry powers itself on biomass. So a small percentage comes from the non hydro renewables and we do get some of our overall primary energy from biomass. We're going back to the figure that you gave before and I should have noted this down that one of the things you had proposed is that within something like the next decade you'd like to you would have like to see a doubling of the of the contribution of renewables.

The Clinton administration proposal was that the non hydro power renewables solar wind geothermal and biomass as a as a matter of electricity production right up to seven and a half broken. So that's that yeah that's what that's what I thought it was so we would be talking we'd still though be only talking about in the total energy mix for electricity generation. Only seven percent that seems like that's still not very much how. If you think about long term potential say again we just talk here about generating electricity What do you think that it could be. Well one of the interesting pieces of work that's been done over the last few years has been done by one of the major oil companies by Shell and in one of their scenarios. And in fact in in a variety of scenarios we've seen recently from energy companies renewables figure very prominently as we move into the you know the that. That 2030 2040 2050 time frame we could be looking worldwide at 30

40 50 percent of world energy coming from renewables. The thing I need to stress about these renewable energy sources is that they are relatively young technologies. You look back at 19 18 80 not too long ago there was virtually no wind power in the world. Just that tiny tiny set of turbans spinning across the United States and the world generally fast forward to today. The price is now 90 percent less than it was in 1980 and it's now the fastest growing source of electricity in the world. Wind power providing electricity now for for many millions of homes across across the planet. Compare that to nuclear power for example we've been at nuclear for 50 years in this country. Compare it to hydro power we the modern era of hydro power with the modern dams extends back almost to 900.

So it takes time it takes money to move these kinds of energy technologies forward. Similarly with natural gas which is one of the newer sources of electricity in this country it's at 15 percent of U.S. electricity now go back 20 or 30 years ago and it was a tiny tiny fraction. So these things do take time. I would for example let's just talk a little bit a book a bit more about wind power. I would guess that to set up a wind farm put up a bunch of wind turbines to generate electricity would be cheaper than building a power plant. Call for our fired or natural gas or nuclear or whatever. What what is it that over this period of time has changed is it is it that we just learned better how to make better wind turbines or what really has made the difference as it seems to me as a as a mechanical engineering challenge that it wouldn't be all that complicated. Well when we started out in the in the 70s and early 80s we had we had

very primitive versions of when turbans compared to what we have today. They were quite small. They frankly were quite unreliable and they the electricity they produced was quite expensive. You go for two today and they be a single modern wind turbine can produce enough electricity for 300 homes. It. Can operate for 20 30. Maybe even more years than that. And it can produce electricity at a cost that is now competitive in several parts of the country with the predominant new source of electricity in the United States and that's from natural gas. So it is a combination of investment in the engineering side much of that coming from government and uptake in the market which obviously lowers costs as well as your build thousands and thousands of wind turbines every year and deploy them around the globe. Prices come down.

This seems to be this part of the country the Midwest and also the West seems to be prime candidate because we have a lot. Of open space where there is reliable wind where the wind blows all the time and what do you think about. With the Wind and where it is that. It seems likely if it's going to be an emerging innings energy source where it's going to be. Well the the the heartland of the country extending from the Dakotas south to Texas and going somewhat east and going somewhat west is really a huge huge opportunity for wind. We We sometimes joke that. North Dakota is the Saudi Arabia of wind and Texas is the Kuwait. Those two states together have a vast vast wind potential enough in fact to power a good chunk of the country. So there's plenty of wind. We are blessed with it

ironically it was it is cursed by many farmers but there they're suddenly discovering that they can not only plant crops but they can plant when turbans and make a nice profit. A single turban takes up a very small amount of ground you can plant right up to the base of it and farmers are today being paid two to $3000 per year per turban for the use of their land. Thousand Acres. Farm you could have 30 or 40 turbans and still farm quite nicely. So it's a big opportunity I have to say. One of the issues with it is of course transmitting the power. You've got to obviously have transmission lines in order to to get access to this big big wind resource in Texas. They've been developing wind very rapidly they have been able to tap into good transmission in North Dakota and the other areas South Dakota Minnesota Montana other states.

Transmission is sometimes an issue so in order to exploit this resource we're going to have to potentially build new transmission lines. I should did to do so again. Our guest We're talking with Dan Reicher. He's a visiting fellow with the World Resources Institute in Washington D.C. And before that for a number of years worked in the U.S. Department of Energy most recently from 97 until this year he was assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy. And if you have questions you can pick up the telephone give us a call 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 4 Champaign Urbana. We also have toll free line good anywhere that you can hear. 800 to 2 2 9 4 5. Indeed we are talking this morning about sustainable energy sources and the place that they may have in the energy mix here in this country. We do have somebody here ready to go to talk with in Champaign. Line 1 Hello. Yes good morning. Just as an aside when we consider sustainable sources there's the storage problem which is always kind of an issue it's

difficult to store the wind which is something that fossil fuels bring us. But anyhow I did want to get too heavily into that. How does the cost of conventionally generated power in conventional fuels affect and drives the development than the implementation of sustainable sources of. Good question. Let me first respond to your issue of storage that's an important one. You know how do you how do you when the wind is not blowing or when the wind is blowing you don't need the power what do you do. One of the nice things about wind for example is that in fact you could in an electricity system overall you can blend it as it were with fossil sources. So for example the problem with wind is that it doesn't blow all the time. The fossil sources like natural gas obviously are always available the problem of the fossil sources are that you have you can have serious

price volatility. So by blending a source like wind where the fuel is free but you've got intermittency problems with a source like natural gas where you can have the resource all the time but you've got price problems you can get the best of both worlds. I know your issue of of how the the cost of traditional sources affects the cost of other sources. The sustainable sources you know there's a healthy marketplace out there for energy. And the challenge for renewables has been to bring down their price so they can compete with sources of electricity particularly the new sources like like natural gas and some of the more traditional sources like coal and nuclear. And as for example we've seen price spikes with natural gas over the last couple of years the price of natural gas going up. That has meant that sources of energy like wind and geothermal and biomass have been far more competitive. And so I think as as people

look at investments in new energy sources they obviously try to project out in the future what people think the price of the traditional sources are going to be. The other element of that of course is is trying to make predictions about the cost that new environmental requirements will impose on traditional sources if in fact we we move to regulate emissions of global warming gases that obviously can have some impact on the price of fossil sources making renewables all the more competitive. So you've got a look at where the technology is going you've got to look at supply. You've got to look at environmental. It's a very complicated subject much more complicated than the treatment it receives in the media. I suspect we have a little more than really frustrating things is it would be better for alternative energy if fossil fuels and you know whatever you're trying to get rid of if those costs skyrocketed. Because it would really stimulate the development and the implementation of alternative sources. On

the other hand the people who provide these fuels and I'm thinking of our friends in the Mideast are kind of deliberately manipulate the supply and demand situation to keep the price at an advantageous location for them. So if they see somebody conserving too much and they're not selling enough what would they do. Well there is there is a sense that. At a certain. Point where a traditional fuel like oil for example gets too high in price obviously alternatives kick in much more readily and so I think it's fairly clear that the folks who control oil supplies are very very cognizant of of the development of alternative fuels where they're headed what their price points are and do pay attention to that as they as they said oil prices. Interestingly I would also add that some of the oil companies themselves see some big opportunities with renewable power and renewable fuels.

British Petroleum now for example is the large has the largest solar company in the world. Shell is investing heavily in bio mass. They know that to compete in this new century and to be able to deal with supply issues price volatility they've got to have a mix of energy sources as well. So I think that's that's probably a pretty good development. I think the whole idea of having a mix is a thoroughly delightful approach. Just to return to the subject we started on the person who invents a good battery so that you can store energy in small area is going to be a zillionaire. You have battery storage that's also the beauty of. The push that is being made which I'm very supportive of right now towards fuel cells which run on hydrogen. Ultimately being able to both transmit and store

energy in the form of hydrogen and use it in in the form of fuel cells safely. That's right. OK thanks for the call. And again in that here we're getting pretty close to the midpoint of the program. Our guest is Dan Reicher He's now a visiting fellow at the World Resources Institute and before that for a number of years worked in the U.S. Department of Energy we're talking about sustainable energy and its potential here in the country and around the world. Questions welcome. Three three three. W I L L or 9 4 5 5. Toll free 800 to 2 2. 9 4 5 5 just to underscore something you were talking about here with the caller where we would expect even if today we started very aggressively to develop sustainable energy and we could get it and we maybe can could get it to the point where it'd be half perhaps of the energy mix that we would still expect for the foreseeable future that we would continue to burn oil and coal and natural gas.

Yes fossil fuels coal oil coal oil natural gas today make up more than 80 percent of our energy. That sort of leads you to two very important points first is making vastly more efficient use of these traditional sources. We for example in generating electricity from fossil and and nuclear sources today we. We threw our way two out of every three units of energy we put into those plants that is there only one third efficient and we throw that away as waste heat goes up cooling towers and down rivers. We know how to generate electricity much more efficiently than 30 plus percent. And we need to be doing it and we are in many cases with some of the newer technologies. Secondly we need to use it more efficiently. The energy we produce whether it's in our homes our businesses our cars and we got vast potential there. So making more efficient generation in

use of traditional sources as we develop these new more sustainable sources I think is really the key to going forward. And I think while there are we're looking at relatively small percentages that renewables represent today we are seeing fantastic growth. Just since 1997 for example 100000 new solar systems have gone on people's homes and businesses around the country. That's a technology that's really coming into its own still has to improve on the price side it's still a relatively costly way to produce electricity. The solar hot water systems are more cost effective but we're making great progress there. And I think if we continue to invest in the R&D we we provide some incentives as we do with traditional fuels and we take some other smart

policy actions we can really move this forward. Is there what sort of potential do you see for is solar on the large scale. So it's a it's a large solar farm the way that we're talking about large wind farms so we would have a large space having all these solar collectors and then they could just soak up as much sun as they possibly can. There is potential for that. There are so many different kinds of solar technologies. Some of them. Work well best in small distributed applications you know on people's roofs. There's others the so-called solar dishes and solar Trott's which can collect large amounts of solar energy and produce electricity quite well particularly in the southwestern part of the United States for example. So solar is got a lot of very broad potential. Very small applications to rather larger applications more at the scale of you know a small to medium sized main power plant.

I have solar panels on my roof in Washington D.C. that produce electricity put up a couple of years ago on many days. I'm making more power than I'm using and I actually run my electricity meter backwards and sell the excess power to the local utility. I get paid at a retail rate. I also made some investments in energy efficiency in my home a better air conditioner a better refrigerator better lights windows and I'm down to a dollar a day for electricity now so it can work. The technologies are here. If we continue to push them I think they're going to they're going to gather steam but we do need help from Washington and we do need help from the States and and we need the public to better understand the potential. We have several callers. We'll take them in the order they came in starting with Terre Haute there line number four. Hello. Hello. Yes several years ago there was two guys I

think you would Stanford University published a book on energy crisis. Do you recall ladder remember. I think it was 1970 or so around there. DANIEL YERGIN I don't know I even have. But what I was trying to get to as they did probably the most liberal study of the energy crisis coming to our country and even compensating with unheard of technology right. There was only one solution and that was nuclear fusion. We should instead waste our time on all these older renewable things. We should have been poor. We should start a 1950 Wolf a crash program a nuclear fusion and we wouldn't have had this problem. You have the ideal fuel and nuclear

fusion in fact that would be the one way we can eliminate our huge stockpile of. Nuclear fusion. You know waste now. Which is which is a tremendous problem. You know let me let me say that there is there are two different kinds of nuclear technologies out there that there is the technology we used today all over the country to make electricity right electricity that's Asian. Nuclear fusion is essentially trying to replicate on earth the process of that we see up in the sun. Right. And lots and lots of money has been spent. On it it's still decades off work continues. But I do think it doesn't have the. Practical opportunities that many of the other traditional and alternative fuels have today. I will confess that we do need some energy until the time comes. But I don't hear that

much any research beyond. Yeah there's still research going on for example at Princeton funded by the government but it's been turning more and more into a pure research program less into a program of for practical application just because there's been so many problems in actually harnessing this for every day energy use so I frankly don't see this as as as the sort of direction that makes sense and I don't see a lot of support for it in Congress for example compared to the other sources. The order is one source of energy that's available and I thought the me ever heard though of the Bay of Fundy. Yeah there's there's also the tidal energy use of the tide. Yeah that's another source that's been explored there are countries that use it and there are some some new concepts that are that are being being looked at both here in the US for example by the Navy and other research institutes and then also internationally.

I think there is some opportunity there. I don't see it though in the next decade or two. You know cause the amount of money it would pay you know instead of wastes money on. If you when you saw quantities in one generator know around San Francisco up on a hill they had those big one mills there then and we were talking in the city 40 years ago and probably easily but they like you said they just can't complain. Money wise. Oh they compete. Those old ones. Well it all it's the new ones that are going in very very large quantities all across the country and in fact even more quickly in many other countries around the world they do compete quite well in fact that's why. Just a couple of months ago out in the West Coast where they're desperate for power that the biggest order ever for wind energy a thousand

megawatts enough for three hundred thousand homes was was placed by the Bonneville Power Administration unit of the Department of Energy because they realize there's very cost effective power with with very few environmental problems and the other thing that's great about wind is that you can cite the turbans very quickly you can you can put up a wind farm that generates a lot of power in any year whereas more traditional plants take a lot longer. Another source that's gaining a lot of favor is geothermal energy. This is energy where you extract the heat from the earth and boil water make steam in turn turn a turban California today already get 6 percent of its electricity from geothermal. It doesn't have the challenge that wind and solar does which is that the sun doesn't always shine in the wind doesn't always blow geothermal can be is available can. Almost 100 percent of the time in most plants and so that's another great source the other one that I think is particularly

important for the Midwest is of course bio mass. We today can quite cost effectively make electricity using agricultural and forest crops and ways we can make chemicals to replace the petroleum that's normally used to make chemicals so that's a good way of reducing our dependence on oil and of course we know how to make ethanol as you do in the Midwest from biomass to the great step beyond corn based ethanol that has a lot of people excited right now is being able to make it from all sorts of other organic materials for example the rest of the corn plants or municipal solid waste and there are plants now being built in the United States that will demonstrate that technology. I'm going to jump in here I appreciate the comments of the caller we're really getting short on time or at least we're getting into about the last 15 minutes and I have a number of other folks. I'd like to get in on the conversation so I want to give them a chance and weld and go next to a caller in the Belgian

line number one. Trouble. Yes. You mentioned the efficiency it seems to me the most important aspect of our power problem is if we improve our efficiency. If you look right out your window no matter where you're sitting you'll see enormous quantities of transmission lines that you said were such a problem because we can't transmit it from different places. But one of the substantial losses. Of electricity is in the transmission. If you can come up with a much better way of transmitting power from point A to Point B we would save an enormous amount of money. And I completely agree with the caller. We lose roughly somewhere on the order of 4 or 5 percent up to sometimes 10 percent of the electricity that starts at a power plant before it gets to the end user. And that is a big loss especially when you're talking about the power plant only generates 30 third of the energy exactly in the energy. So we've already lost 10 percent there of that little bit. So it becomes very substantial very quickly.

Yep in an old plant you're you first lose two thirds of the energy and then you lose another 5 or 10 percent you're way down so that's the bad news. The good news is there are some technologies that are wires for example that are. Being developed and some actually being used today that will allow you to send more power more efficiently and then down the road. A lot of work is going into superconductivity. This is essentially technologies that would allow you to have almost no. Electricity losses over wire through a through superconducting technologies and that is down the road but in Detroit for example they're installing the first underground power cable using superconducting technology to demonstrate that that would work. The other point I want to point out is when there there is a cost to wind especially when you're when you're NISH wish right if you must you must watch for birds because. When power plays

real havoc on migration right and different things like that because birds run into something like that and it just destroys them by the branches. Very good very good point. The unfortunate thing is that a couple of the early wind farms in California were incorrectly cited they were actually cited in bird migration routes in one case cited where there were hawks and eagles that spent a good deal of their time. The good news is that the modern sighting of when turbans. Takes bird migration very much into account. And there have been almost no bird problems at the more recent wind farms cited all across the United States because essentially they keep them out of the migration route so the bird mortality has been extremely extremely low in the modern installations. I'm glad to hear they improved on them. Thank you very much. Let's go to Peoria for someone else right here line two.

Hello good morning. When Carter was president he had panels put on the White House. When Reagan got to be president he had ripped out. You were there. Absolutely. That's what happened. President Carter was making hot water using the sun and President Reagan decided in one to do that. What's wrong with the garbage. There are millions of terms of garbage that can be used to make gas. Why don't we do that. In fact we're beginning to do some of that. We've obviously been using garbage for a couple of decades to burn it and make electricity that way. But there are in fact more advanced technologies as the college indicating which allows you to actually turn the or the garbage into something like natural gas that you can run a turban and make electricity a more efficient cleaner way of using garbage. And as I mentioned earlier we also now are beginning to see plants being built that can turn the

organic part of garbage into ethanol. So we have a an opportunity to take something that we normally have to pay to get rid of garbage and turn it into a useful fuel. So. The technologies are developing and I think the markets are developing the decision in California. The decision yesterday regarding California to require the use of ethanol there I think is going to mean that we're going to see a significant new development of not only corn based ethanol plants but I think we're finally going to see new development of ethanol from all sorts of waste materials and that's a big important step. My son there is a new home and he had to move them and put in a book three years ago and it's quite expensive it cost 15 cars and that time a seven and a half years. Yeah. There's another kind of geothermal that is catching on I think there are 100000 systems installed in the U.S. over the last year or two and that is. That simple. This is

not digging deep down into the earth to get at hot geologic formations but simply going down six or eight feet where you have a constant temperature year round of 55 or 60 degrees so it helps you heat the winter and cool in the summer and I think this is a this is a rapidly growing technology and the costs are coming down. Thank you. Thank you. Let's see where we go next. Talk with someone in Bloomington Indiana. Line 3. Hello. Hi. Hi when alternative energy takes over isn't going to be the existing energy companies like the oil companies the electric utilities. Are these existing energy companies going to evolve into alternative energy companies or or is it even going to be brand new companies we never heard of that are going to develop these new technologies for instance. You you mentioned Detroit and Detroit they're installing superconducting transmission lines. Yes. Is it the established power companies that are installing those lines or who is installing those lines.

It's Detroit Edison I think Perelli the Italian company is involved there's a variety and a very small not so small anymore a company called American Superconductor from Boston. So there are some new companies and the old established companies are just them. The coalition with him I think they're kind of cooperating together are absolutely you have a you have what I think is a is a fairly healthy mix of of the biggest stablish companies that are reaching out to the smaller innovative entrepreneurial companies there are now I read the smarting actually seven hundred fifty companies directly or indirectly involved in in fuel cell work in the United States. So you have all sorts of small companies jumping into this. You have a real explosion in venture capital that's been made available to these advanced energy technology just over the last couple years as venture capital has tanked in the you know the Internet world. It has picked up mightily in the energy technology side. When I you mention American Superconductor and Perelli would you buy stock in those firms.

I don't know enough about either of them. I was prevented from doing so in the government so I've not looked. Come From that perspective what I would say is that these energy companies whether they're in solar or in fuel cells or they're in superconductivity I think they offer some very interesting investment opportunities and the proof is in the putting these people in the venture capital world as I said are pumping big big money in there and beginning to see some nice returns. Well thanks a lot and I know we have about eight minutes or so left in the program let me introduce Again our guest. We're speaking with Dan Reicher He is currently a visiting fellow at the World Resources Institute in Washington DC from 1997 until 2001 he served as assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy and the U.S. Department of Energy and had some other posts in the way before that. Before that he worked as a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. He also served as a staff member of President Carter's had Commission on the accident at Three Mile Island. And we're talking this morning about

renewable sustainable energy. And we have some other folks and we'll try to get at least a couple of people in before we run out of time in this first hour going next to a caller on the campus and line one. Hell I had to get away from the radio for about 10 minutes from my church to talk about this. But last night on the news they were talking about how beauty is requiring telephone intercepts and all. Yes and I was wondering I have another question on this but came down on that issue. Well you know that's a decision that EPA made the other day and that is to require ethanol as a so-called oxygenate in gasoline. I'm not going to. Get into the back and forth on the policy side of that. I would say that the decision having been made now what I said earlier on the call is that I think you're going to see some big growth in not only corn based ethanol in the Midwest but actually out

of California I think you're in other western states you're you're finally going to see the emergence of ethanol being produced from all sorts of waste products as well and I think that's a that's a good step forward. There's a hot debate about whether ethanol is the right thing to be blending into gasoline as a way to clean it up. It gets very complicated and I don't think I'll get into it here very well. The question harkens back to my reading of science fiction as a kid and I remember too much about it lately but maybe you've got an insight into it but I recall people saying Be it be possible to cover the moon for example with solar plates collectors. Some sort of microwave energy down to the earth and. With that big. Is that even plausible for the far future. There's certainly been work done. I don't know how much recently but but years ago

looking at orbiting solar collectors that could could beam the energy down to earth. I don't I don't believe that. That's the direction that we will go any time soon I think we've got vast vast resources here on Earth that are easier to get at. And you know the renewable ones in particular are endless and just that renewable so I don't think we While it may be worthwhile to spend a little bit of money on that kind of work I don't think in the long haul that's where we're going to head. I would say though and this is very important. One of the reasons we have made advances in solar technology and in fuel cells is because of the space program. Fuel cells got their real modern push in the Gemini program and as everybody knows virtually all the satellites that are sent to send a lot these days have big solar panel arm sticking out that power them.

And it was now along with other government agencies in the private sector that really moved both of these technologies forward. Thanks thanks we're almost out of time. Real quick though. Maybe you can say a little bit more about the fuel cell. Now people perhaps have heard about the idea we've been talking about this potential for powering vehicles buses and cars and also some people suggested maybe that would be you could have a power plant for your house essentially and that this is a technology that takes hydrogen oxygen but together we get energy byproduct is water. It's a clean fuel and something that I know a lot of people a lot of places around the world are really excited about. What potential do you see for the fuel cell. I see a vast potential David. It is a very simple technology and you explained it well. No moving parts. The issue is. How do you bring the cost down. And the second

issue is where you get the hydrogen there. Sometimes people have a misconception that somehow that you just put the hydrogen and oxygen together and you get you get this result what you do but the question is what's the source of the hydrogen for the near term. Most of the applications that people are talking about the source of the hydrogen will in fact be fossil fuels in your house it might be pulling the hydrogen out of natural gas that comes in your house in your car it might be gasoline it might be other fossil fuels over the medium and longer term. The real promise the real opportunity of fuel cells is to is to derive the hydrogen from renewable sources. So for example literally getting the hydrogen out of water running electricity and to the water and splitting it into hydrogen and oxygen the electricity itself being made from wind and solar and hydro power. When people talk from time to time about the so-called hydrogen economy you know

decades down the road that's ultimately what they're talking about being able to produce hydrogen in a renewable fashion. Pumping that hydrogen into a fuel cell letting it mix with oxygen and making electricity to run a vehicle or to run a home or business. Lots of money is being put into this fuel cell technology and into the hydrogen production and storage. The automobile companies are betting. Betting some money on this. The power companies are as well. So I think it's I'm very bullish about this but it it will happen along with the other renewable technologies efficiency and of course continued reliance on the fossil fuels. There we have to leave it for this moment but I'm sure on future programs we'll get back to some of these topics. And certainly if there are certain things that folks who are listening would like to hear us discuss we are open to those suggestions. For the moment we want to say thanks to our guest Dan Reicher He's a visiting fellow at the World Resources Institute. Mr. Gregory thanks very much. Thank you David.