I was hoping the U.S. PV industry would hold a 1 Gigawatt birthday party for our U.S. grid-tied market later this year. Picture big progress and celebrate big milestones!

See “Climate Change Recalculated,” where Dr. Saul Griffith explains to generate 2TW of power from PV you’d need to install 100 m2 per second for twenty five years. That get’s your heart pumping! See the talk here: http://fora.tv/2009/01/16/Saul_Griffith_Climate_Change_Recalculated

Great work GigatonThrowDown team!

We need to quickly find a technology that represents a “breakthrough”, the benefits of which are such are so obvious that a that everyone will want to invest in it.

IMO, that technology is the Atmospheric Vortex Engine–humanity’s “escape hatch” from its current climate-change/economic conundrum.

It’s nothing short of shameful that the current “green elite” continue to ignore the potential inherent in “inverting the troposphere” with vortices.

Ref: http://vortexengine.ca Toot-toot–all aboard for “Plan B”.

1) How does this work sync up with Princeton’s Stabilization wedges?
2) The heading on your site targets “investors, entrepreneurs, business leaders, and policy makers” Doesn’t it also make sense to target the public; especially CC skeptics? I was talking to a conservative colleague, and he commented that even if CC were human-induced, there was nothing we could realistically do about it without huge cost. I think Paul’s message that there are realistic, feasible options is important, and should be used in public ed. campaigns.

The most urgent challenge is not to change society and technology but rather to administer planetary first aid to the single most important patient, mother nature. She lies on our fossil fuel highway crushed and perhaps mortally wounded. Leaving her unattended and dying will see us in possession of new technology to power a dead planet. What is most important and urgent is to restore the SEAS and TREES which alone can compete with ocean acidifying climate changing effects of CO2 and convert billions of tonnes of CO2 into life each year instead of death.

The loss of net primary productivity in the oceans since the early eighties when our new satellites starting providing global data show the sub-tropical tropical oceans have lost 50% of thier plants, the phytoplankton. The North Pacific is down by 26%, the North Atlantic by 17%, and the Southern Ocean by 10%. As the ocean pastures become ocean deserts we are losing fish and all manner of higher sealife and watching the bacteria rise to restore the ocean realm to the realm of slime from which life evolved.

Restoring the SEAS an TREES to levels of productivity can be accomplished in a few years not decades or centuries… If we restore the oceans to the state of healthy producitivity of 1980 they will convert 4-5 gigatonnes more CO2 into ocean life each year that is takin place today. In the bargain these restored ocean pastures will fill and sustain all manner of life in the oceans. If we do not do this the oceans will suffer from the chemical shock treatment and revert to the bacterial sea. This is the very real and personal Blue Screen of Death…

To accomplish ocean restoration will cost a few billion per year… it is technology that is proven from 20 years and a quarter of a billion dollars in international research and development. Read more on this at Planktos Science at http://www.planktos-science.com or in the June 09 issue of MAKE Magazine…

Algae are somewhat better in that they theoretically require neither arable land nor fresh water. However, they need carbon; and the way carbon is delivered to them is by adding CO2 in the ponds or fermentors. In the quantity required, this CO2 has to be obtained either by burning coal or by scrubbing from the air. The latter is a very expensive technology to scale up. And the former puts algae into direct competition with all other coal-to-liquid (CTL) approaches, - and algae yields less liquid fuel per ton of coal than the old Fischer-Tropsch Synthesis (FTS). Aside from that, algae biofuels grown from coal-derived CO2 actually add more carbon to the atmosphere when burned.

In my opinion, current investment practices in biofuels investing may be driving us to a biofuels bubble. Investing in deployment of the technologies that are not ready for prime time, or those that are tailored to a feedstock that cannot be scaled up, is premature. More deals, of smaller size, and at an earlier stage, would be preferable.

What I think is needed, instead of megadeals, is a careful analysis of carbon-neutral or carbon negative, scaleable feedstock options, and a focused R&D program to develop those. It should be funded largely by DOE, preferably in partnership with private sector. DOE will have to remove the 20% matching funds requirement: in current economic circumstances, it has become a selection criterion, and what we need is just the best ideas competing on the level playing field. Maybe the matching funds should come from the private partners of DOE, with a special fund set up for this purpose.

What approaches should be considered? Admittedly, I am biased, since I am working on marine plankton biomass myself. But there is only one other scalable and carbon-negative biomass source that I know, and that’s seasonal foliage - which presents tremendous logistical problems in collection.