SECOND AND THIRD THOUGHTS

SERI's aquatic species program is worth watching. It is not as harebrained as many other solar-energy schemes, and it may find some application under special circumstances: But I do not believe it can ever become a major, or even important, contributor to large-scale energy production.

The reason is again the unalterably dilute 1 kW/m^2 input power from the sun, with the necessarily uneconomical attempt to engage in the collecting of solar energy instead of just tapping what nature has collected. The algae are collecting solar energy only to the degree that it is collected in any type of agriculture; it is still man who must invest his efforts in the adaptation and maintenance of vast land areas if energy in significant amounts is to be harvested. Just how large areas are involved is evident from the artist's impression above, with a small section in the right foreground (containing parked cars) blown up to give an idea of the size. This vast area of water beds with algae cultures has to be built and maintained: how can you do that in competition with nature, which has done it (fossils) and is doing it (hydropower) for free, with man paying only for the cost of extraction?

Apart from the economic obstacles, there is one just as great: social. The large-scale algae scheme would make sense in a severe shortage of energy. But there is, and never has been, any shortage of energy: only the access to it is blocked, largely by a social stratum with political clout misleadingly named "environmentalists." What they oppose is not "depletable" energy, but the concentrated, efficient production of energy by an industrial system that threatens to make it cheap for the riff-raff; what they promote is not "renewable" energy, but rich men's toys that will make electric power available only to the better people -- the coercive redistributors. If anyone thinks this is putting things too harshly, he need only ask Amory Lovins, David Brower or other solar-energy gurus what they think of solar power sources producing 20 MW or more in a single facility, or of developing more hydropower in the US.

If therefore the cost of large-scale algal facilities were paid, as it has been in other such cases, by confiscating taxpayers' money, the scheme would probably still not fly: The "environmentalists" would scream about the irreparable atrocity of laying the desert waste, and the media would manufacture another "crisis" until the desert returned to its blessed state of being unproductive.