As the chaotic impacts of climate change become increasingly palpable, clean tech engineers and entrepreneurs have pitched myriad technologies to decarbonize the electrical grid. Indeed, green, renewable solar and wind are now cheaper and faster to install than fossil fuel power plants. Yet, questions remain about their predictability, profitability, and workability. Geothermal and hydroelectric dams offer reliable baseload power—if the local geography happens to be suitable. Interest is high in carbon-free nuclear energy, but many harbor grave concerns about safety and the disposal of radioactive waste. Fusion power startups promise abundant energy in just a few years while critics call this timeline a wild fantasy. How feasible, scalable, and beneficial are these technologies? How do they actually work?
In this course, we will survey the major contenders for grid-scale clean energy, aiming to understand their physical principles and material constraints. What physics is common across coal, geothermal, and nuclear power? What justifies the extra cost of putting wind turbines offshore? What makes thin-film solar cells an attractive prospect? Do small modular nuclear reactors solve any meaningful problems? How do these technologies compare to fossil fuels with respect to lifetime costs and risks to the atmosphere, to the natural environment, or to society? Which ones have an honest claim to being renewable, sustainable, or carbon-free and which are mere aids to greenwashing? What else needs to change—infrastructurally, economically, politically—for these solutions to have positive impacts? Will nuclear fusion save the day? Or could ecofeminist and indigenous perspectives offer other ways out? Readings will include technical primers as well as works by Mark Z. Jacobson, M. V. Ramana, Daniel Jassby, Deb Chachra, Langdon Winner, Heather Douglas, and others.
