Overview Of This New Book Powering The Future

Overview Of This New Book Powering The Future

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The book Powering The Future is a "vision of Christmas yet to come" for the energy world. Dr. Robert Laughlin projects what he sees from a physicist's standpoint as to where we will be 200 years from now in terms of what sources of energy we will be using and how it will be stored.

Prof. Robert Laughlin is a professor at Stanford University and a Nobel Prize winner. In 1997 he was the co-winner in the area of quantum physics.

Right off the bat Dr. Laughlin dispels the myth that we will be riding around in Jetson-like vehicles. He says that our internal combustion means of transportation will remain essentially intact. In other words, we will be flying airplanes and driving cars but the fuel they run on will be different.

That is because we will be running out of fossil fuels to power them. In Powering The Future, he predicts that we will lurch from one source of energy to the other, as we run out of the current substance that we are burning to light our lights and get where we want to go.

The thing that makes this book different than other energy books I have read lately is that there are no presumptions made about a world running on wind turbines and solar power. Most of the current prognosticators assume that our trajectory will take us to a future with the landscape covered with renewable energy systems.

Dr. Laughlin says that, in a few generations, as we run out of fossil fuels - coal being the last one - we will shift most likely to nuclear energy and much of the heated debate over spent fuel rods and where they can be stored will go away and that we will rationalize in favor of the more compelling economics of using plutonium to produce electricity.

Powering The Future also extensively explores energy storage, which is probably the most scientifically vexing topics on the electricity agenda today. Of course, natural gas is stored in caverns under the ground and can be left there for almost indefinite periods of time with very little leakage. Electricity, on the other hand, cannot be stored very long and we are relegated to using batteries that are quite expensive and inefficient.

That inability to store electrical energy forces us to use electricity fairly soon after it has been generated. This makes renewables in particular very difficult to justify because the sun is not always out and the wind is not always blowing.

Dr. Laughlin suggests that a holistic understanding of energy transfer from one extreme temperatures source to the other may be the direction energy storage is going. For example, using the extreme cold at the bottom of the ocean as an environment in which energy can be stored is a topic that he spends a lot of time airing out.

I highly recommend that you buy and thoroughly read this book. It is not a simple read, but then it is only 122 pages, when you don't take into account his copious background documentation in the back.

All in all, Powering The Future is an outstanding book and a terrific insight into the likely future our great- great grandchildren will find themselves in. There is no pie-in-the-sky one-size-fits-all solution according to Dr. Laughlin. Unfortunately, the laws of physics just limit our ability to come up with a simple fuel that will work to power everything at the prices we have come to expect.

It is not often that we get a glimpse inside the mind of someone that understands the physics of energy and the implications for the future. What we get in Powering The Future is a peek inside the mind of a brilliant physicist who's spent his career probing this subject on a quantum level.

About the Author:
Roger G. Brown has saved myriad companies money on their power bills. Test drive Roger's tips on how to save money And also find out more on Residential Wind Powered Generator Kit



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