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Wave of the future Charles Thangaraj, adjunct professor of engineering, champ-ioned oceanic wave energy. It is estimated that ocean waves pack 1,000 times the energy density of wind, meaning a single wave-energy farm could be a fraction of the size of a wind farm in order to generate a comparable amount of electricity. Thangaraj remarked that HMC students have been working on a prototype system to harness wave energy. (see page 12) He also described another approach currently being tried off the coast of Portugal, “basically a big tube, hinged at certain points” so that it can oscillate with the cresting and falling of each wave rolling past; an internal mechanism translates the oscillation into linear motion which then turns a generator. Wave-harnessing technology might someday prove more cost- effective to implement and operate than other alternative energy sources owing to its simplicity, he added.


Joining the air force Wind is the least-expensive renewable energy source, physics Professor Peter Saeta asserted. It also is the nation’s fastest-growing: Saeta cited figures that show wind-energy production increasing at an annual rate of about 45 percent. Recent updates to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s


maps of U.S. wind capacity reveal that some of the best places to situate wind farms are in the Plains states and the Midwest, while many of the poorest are along the eastern seaboard. The problem with this, as Saeta pointed out, is that wind-


generated electricity must travel potentially very long distances before it reaches the locales where the biggest demand for it exists.


Rays of hope Hal Van Ryswyk, professor of chemistry, took a stand for solar energy. “More [energy in the form of] sunlight strikes this planet in an hour than humankind uses in a year,” he said. Unfortunately, conventional silicon-based photovoltaic cells are not a particularly cost-efficient mechanism for converting solar radiance to electricity, he lamented. Better might be solar cell-infused paint, Ryswyk said.


Solar paint, he said, utilizes dye-sensitized cells configured in inorganic arrays of non-sunlight-absorbing semi-conductors which then serve as a template for absorbing-dyes capable of creating electricity. Solar paints at this stage of development yield a photon-


to-electron conversion that is only about 10 percent efficient. However, “there is real hope that they’ll become a disruptive technology once they reach about 20 percent efficiency,” he said, adding that the cost should be in the vicinity of a dollar- plus-change per square meter of coverage. The renewable energy winner? As Van Ryswyk put it, “There


is enormous potential in solar, wind, waves and in nuclear energy, and I think they all have a place in our energy future.”


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