Did you know that the U.S. Energy Information Administration published this year a forecast of a 73% increase in world power consumption between 1999 and 2020 to 22 trillion kWh! The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) predicted that worldwide power demand will see a quadruple increase by 2050. To give us a better feeling of what that means EPRI also said that it will require an effort equivalent to opening a 1,000 MW power plant every two days somewhere in the world for the next 50 years!
"Under these conditions, a portfolio of clean, reliable, affordable, and highly efficient energy options becomes imperative for sustaining economic growth and protecting the environment" (EPRI - Electricity Technology Roadmap). How would the job get done when the Global Coal Initiative takes most of EPRI's Advanced Clean Generation R&D, remains an open question to me.
Probably the economic growth (especially in the developing countries and the poorest unelectrified parts of the world) can wait and the environment will find a way to protect itself (of course it will205by killing us). But it doesn't have to be like that if all of us, responsible citizens of the world, would demand from our governments to examine the existing evidence of possible amazing breakthroughs in clean, abundant power generation systems. Let's see an official report where all these devices were properly and honestly tested and discarded as scams or non-significant anomalies, etc. But if the "gem" is there, we give us and the future another chance!
