Bio building blocks

It seems I'm studying the wrong thing.
Well, kinda.

My interests lie in energy and trying to shift to green energy. I'm finding more and more that the solution for green energy is much more green than I thought. Biology and bio-mimicry.

I've been looking for a solution to our energy problems for a while. After listening to a talk by Prof. Peter Berg on resource scarcity, I began to believe that this is the beginning of the end of modern civilization. We'd need nothing short of another energy revolution to get past this. Well, I say modern man has one more revolution left to go through.

The Biological Revolution.

I'll offer a few interesting examples first:

The simplest example I have is greenhouses connected to power plants. Power plants normally don't have a use for heat at 80C. They simply reject it to the environment in their giant ubiquitous cooling towers. There are a few options that some places incorporate: district heating, or greenhouses.

Pond biofuels is hooking up with St. Mary's Cement to take their exhaust gasses and produce fuel for their kiln in the calcination process. There are cost savings here and CO2 reductions.

You'd think this was huge. Except...

Calera developed another process where they use CO2 as a building block for making cement. WTF. Normally making cement creates more CO2 than coal power plants do. Now, you're using CO2 as a building block for cement? Albeit this doesn't use calcification; it uses bio-mimicry from... coral reefs.

Shimon Steinberg suggests throwing away all pesticides and insecticides. His solution? Natural "good bugs." You simply have places where you promote natural good bugs to reproduce much faster than in nature, and you don't need any pesticide. I'm not sure if you realize how many birds he just shot down with one stone.

Now, I don't want to bash my own research, but we are all allowed to be ignorant before we know better. The copper chlorine cycle for hydrogen production sounds pretty awesome: making a nuclear power plant more robust and making hydrogen at the same time. Except: it turns out that bio-reactors for making hydrogen are, well, just more efficient.

The last example is of New York City's inner harbour. Kate Orff suggests using oysters as a natural filter for water in the harbour. This will translate into huge savings for water filtering, and sewage treatment (both energy and efficiency wise).

I am not disputing Peter Berg when He says that (in not so few words) making ethanol from corn is stupid. Algae is so much more efficient at this. The numbers are just for measure; the exact ones depend on who's patents you are using, of course.

I was asked by a non-engineering friend why the government is subsidizing rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) installations. Wouldn't a new technology come around in a few years rendering this one pointless? Well here's my answer. No and Yes. No, I don't think we can go that much further with PV. right now commercial pannels are 15-22% efficient at turning solar energy into electricity. The world record right now stands at 42.3%, using mirrors and nanotechnology, and changing the name to "concentrated solar panels." Another company is literally stacking three different solar cells on top of each other. This way, they capture the whole solar electromagnetic spectrum. If both technologies could be used in tandem, I see the state of the art being at 65%, at a higher cost than today's panels. Commercialization of such a beastie would take a few years yet.

The reason why I liked the question was because it was open-ended. The only task we are given is to make our rooftops work for us in the most efficient manner possible. I'm not sure of the answer right now, partially due to my ignorance in biology.

I think Michale Pawlyn said it best. We have to turn to nature for our inspiration. We only have resource scarcity if we continue to define resources in the same way. We are now only entering the biological frontier. Let's see where it will take us.