Many experts believe that nonrenewable fuels, in particular oil and gas, will eventually become so scarce and therefore so expensive that they will no longer be practical large-scale energy sources. Moreover, the use of coal and other fossil fuels imposes major environmental burdens. Therefore, it is prudent to develop energy technologies based on renewable energy sources and introduce them commercially if and when they become economically competitive.

There are many renewable energy technologies to consider. First are those that rely on natural terrestrial forces: wind, geothermal, hydropower, and tidal power. Second, there are technologies that rely directly on solar energy. These include solar hot water heating, solar thermal electric conversion (either in solar “power towers” or in the more exotic form of solar power satellites), and photovoltaics. Some terrestrial energy sources can be regarded as indirect forms of solar energy. For example, solar ponds and ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) rely on solar-heating-induced temperature gradients. Similarly, solar heating of the atmosphere drives the winds. Biomass, another important renewable energy source, can also be regarded as an indirect form of solar energy.

We shall not analyze all these technologies in this chapter. Rather our purpose is to describe a process for evaluating and comparing competing technologies. We consider three important renewable energy technologies in some detail: solar hot water heating, wind energy, and photovoltaics. In each case the task is to evaluate the technical and economic feasibility of substituting the renewable technology for traditional energy sources.

The acid rain case considered in this chapter is an example of good government decision making. The history of federal acid rain control legislation demonstrates that it is possible for the government to arrive at an environmental control strategy that minimizes the costs of bringing about reductions, and that is at least consistent with analyses of the costs and benefits of alternative courses of action. The rational approach to decision making in this case is very different from the story of the federal gasohol program presented in chapter 2.

The public is greatly concerned about the environmental impact of emissions from coal-fired electric power plants. An important question is how much of society's resources should be spent on reducing the environmental impact of electricity generated from coal. As discussed in the preceding chapter, there are many different consequential emissions that must be considered, including carbon dioxide (CO2), sulfur dioxide (SO2), oxides of nitrogen (NOx), particulates, heat, and solid and liquid wastes.

In this chapter we consider the gaseous emissions of SO2 and NOx. These emissions form acids when combined with moisture in the atmosphere. The possible result is the phenomenon of “acid rain,” in which rain falling at a considerable distance from the originating plant (perhaps across a national border) has high acidity. This high acidity rain can harm forests, vegetation, lakes, and the fish the lakes contain; indeed, acid rain impacts the entire ecology.

The discussion in the previous two chapters vividly illustrates the complexity of real world applications of nuclear reactor technology and its associated fuel cycle systems. We considered several issues that have brought this once promising technology to its knees: Economics, safety, and the environmental concerns surrounding waste management and disposal. In this chapter, we discuss the proliferation of nuclear weapons, another important problem related to the civilian use of nuclear power. Simply stated, commercial nuclear power carries with it a risk that technologies and materials from the nuclear fuel cycle will be misused for making nuclear bombs. There has been significant opposition to nuclear power on these grounds, and especially to nuclear exports to countries thought to be interested in acquiring nuclear weapons capability. In this chapter, we discuss the origin of these concerns, the history of how the proliferation issue arose, and the steps that have been taken by the international community to reduce the proliferation risks of nuclear power and, hence, to remove this obstacle to the peaceful application of nuclear technology.

Making Bombs

Nuclear fission weapons are made from either plutonium or highly enriched uranium (HEU). When a relatively small quantity of either of these materials (on the order of 10kg) is compressed by a modest amount of chemical explosives, an uncontrolled fission chain reaction can occur, releasing tremendous amounts of energy.

This chapter considers the question: Should national energy policy encourage the growing of corn to produce gasohol? Gasohol is the product of the conversion of corn or sugar to ethanol (ethyl alcohol), which is employed as a gasoline additive. Ordinarily, the term gasohol refers to a mixture of 10% ethanol and 90% gasoline. The idea of gasohol in current U.S. policy is simple: Use ethanol from corn to displace a portion of the gasoline for motor vehicles, thereby substituting a renewable energy source (corn) for a depletable energy source (petroleum). Because the purpose of government support for gasohol is to substitute for petroleum, we focus on the petroleum fuel and undertake a careful energy balance comparing the petroleum needed to produce gasohol with the petroleum that the gasohol displaces. The point is to identify the net petroleum displaced by gasohol.

TECHNICAL ASPECTS OF GASOHOL

The production of ethanol from corn requires several steps. First, the corn must be grown; then the starch (long-chain macromolecules made up of six-carbon sugars) must be separated from the corn. The starch is then hydrolyzed to glucose, which in turn is fermented to form ethanol. Finally, the ethanol is separated from the fermentation liquor by distillation.

Each of these steps requires energy. Much of the energy required for growing the corn comes from sunlight. But the intensive form of agriculture practiced in the United States, which results in high crop yields, requires a considerable amount of expensive premium fuels for fertilizers, farming, and harvesting.

Since the beginning of the industrial age, growing quantities of gases have been released into the atmosphere with the ability to trap sunlight and thus with the potential to cause an increase in the mean global temperature. A temperature increase of just a few degrees will lead to climate changes that have the potential to cause irreversible ecological impacts with enormous accompanying economic and social dislocations. The purpose of this chapter is to describe how the United States and other nations are dealing with this complex issue.

The quantity of gases for which human activity is responsible is small relative to both the total atmospheric inventory and the fluxes from natural sources such as plant growth and decay. As Figure 6.1 shows, the flux of carbon released today by the burning of fossil fuels is a very modest fraction of the carbon fluxes that are naturally exchanged between the atmosphere and the upper layers of the ocean and between the atmosphere and the terrestrial biosphere. But those natural flows had previously been in close balance, and the human contribution is growing rapidly (see Figure 6.2). This anthropogenic perturbation has the potential to destroy the delicate radiative balance that maintains the Earth's surface temperature.

Global warming is perhaps the most complex technology issue on the public policy agenda. The tasks of understanding the underlying science, predicting the climate impact of greenhouse gas emissions, and verifying these predictions all present extraordinary challenges.

Coal is by far the most plentiful of conventional fossil fuels. The world's total coal resources have been estimated to be as much as 10,000 billion tons – enough, in principle, to meet all of the world's energy needs for 1000 years at current rates of consumption. Coal, moreover, is widely distributed. The largest known resources are in Russia and other nations of the former Soviet Union, the United States, and China, but many other countries in every continent have sizeable deposits.

In the United States, coal is the largest energy-producing industry, accounting for nearly a third of all domestic energy production and almost a quarter of all energy consumed. The industry is a net exporter, and employs about 80,000 miners in 26 states.

The most important use of coal today in the United States and around the world is for electricity generation (see Figure 4.1). Of the billion tons of coal consumed annually in the United States, 90% is used in electric power stations, and these coal-fired plants generate more than half of the nation's electricity (see Table 4.1).

These figures make clear that coal will be an important fuel source and industry for many decades. However, there is growing awareness of the health and, especially, the environmental problems associated with its use. In this chapter we examine the technical and economic aspects of coal-fired electricity generation.

The application of almost all new technologies involves some degree of risk to public health and safety and the environment, and these risks must be systematically considered. For some technologies the risks are primarily confined to the manufacturing process. In other cases, it is the users who incur the main risks. In still other cases, the risks are externalized – that is, they are borne by people who are not direct beneficiaries of the technology either as suppliers or users. Where the new technology is displacing an existing product or process, the net risk to society may be either increased or reduced. A few technologies have the potential to cause harm on a large scale as a result of a single event. The probability of such events may be extremely low, but they cannot be ruled out entirely. Special methods have been developed to evaluate these low-probability, high-consequence risks. This chapter briefly introduces these methods, using nuclear power plants and liquefied natural gas facilities as examples. We also consider the question of public attitudes toward health and safety risks. Innovators and safety regulators alike need to understand how the public perceives risks, how these perceptions are formed, and what causes them to change.

LIQUEFIED NATURAL GAS

There are many areas of the world where gas exists in great abundance, either in free deposits, for example, in New Zealand, Indonesia, and Algeria, or associated with oil reserves, for example, in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia.

For the foreseeable future the world will rely on oil and gas to meet much of its energy requirements, especially for transportation. Many countries will need to import much, and in some cases, all of the oil they consume. This dependence on oil and on oil imports prompts an interest in exploring technologies that can produce gas and liquid fuels from more plentiful and accessible raw materials.

Conventional liquid petroleum products such as gasoline, diesel fuel, and kerosene are easily obtained by upgrading crude oil in petroleum refineries. Synthetic fuels (often also referred to as synfuels) are oil and gas substitutes that are produced from more plentiful hydrocarbon resources by complex chemical processing. The raw materials for synthetic fuels are tar sands, shale, and coal. The cost of producing synthetic fuels from these resources defines a “shadow price” for oil and gas products obtained from conventional oil and gas resources. If the price of fuel from conventional sources were to rise above the cost of producing synthetic fuels, the market would be expected to switch to producing synthetic fuels in quantity. The price increase might occur either because of cartel action by oil exporting countries, or because of the progressive depletion of oil and gas resources.

This chapter introduces the technical aspects of some of the principal synthetic fuel production processes. The cost of producing synthetic fuels is also discussed.

This book grows out of a multidisciplinary course we have taught to MIT graduate and undergraduate students for over a decade. The course, “Application of Technology,” is designed to introduce our students to the complex task of applying new technologies for economic, social or environmental purposes. Our goal in the course – and in this book – is to present insights, approaches, and analytical tools that are useful in such situations. This is an especially important subject for students educated in the sciences or engineering disciplines. Although most of these students will encounter complex problems of technology application in the course of their professional careers, their education today is focused on problems within their particular technical discipline. The solution of such problems may be crucial to technology invention and development but only a small part of what is required for successful technology application.

A central theme of this book is that students in the sciences and engineering should recognize the importance of moving away from thinking solely about the creation of new technology to thinking also about its responsible and effective application. Finding the right balance between these two ways of thinking is a fundamental challenge for technology practitioners – and for educators in science and engineering as well.

A second and related challenge is to move from working within the boundaries of a single discipline to integrating across disciplines.

No technological system more dramatically illustrates the central themes of this book – the complexity of real world applications of technology and the pitfalls of ignoring the social, political, and environmental dimensions of innovation – than nuclear power. Once widely seen as an energy source of almost unlimited potential, nuclear power is today expanding in just a handful of countries. In most countries with operating nuclear power stations there are no plans to build additional nuclear plants, and some countries have made formal decisions to phase out their existing reactors as quickly as possible.

Despite its limited growth prospects, nuclear power is today playing an important role around the world with nearly 440 plants supplying 17% of the world's electricity. In some countries, the level of dependence is much higher. France derives 76% of its electricity from nuclear power, and other heavily nuclear-reliant countries include Belgium, Japan, and South Korea (see Table 7.1). The world's largest nuclear power program is in the United States, where more than 100 plants provide 20% of the nation's electricity. Keeping these plants operating safely, reliably, and economically is a vital task for private firms and governments around the world. But with few new nuclear plants being built, almost every energy forecast projects a gradual decline in the nuclear share of world electricity supplies.

The management and disposal of radioactive waste from the nuclear fuel cycle is one of the most intractable problems facing the nuclear power industry around the world. Today, more than forty years after the first nuclear power plant entered service, no country has yet succeeded in disposing of high-level nuclear waste – the longest-lived, most highly radioactive, and most technologically challenging of the waste streams generated by the nuclear industry. Most countries have stated their intention to dispose of the waste in repositories constructed in rock formations hundreds of meters below the earth's surface. But no country has actually put a geological repository for high-level waste into service, and all have encountered difficulties with their programs. The problems are partly technological and partly political, and it is impossible to draw a sharp line between them.

The basic policy questions in the field of high-level nuclear waste – What is to be done? Who should decide? Who should pay? Who will implement the solution? – are questions encountered in many other fields of technology. In this case, however, their resolution is made more difficult by several factors, including the very hazardous nature of the waste itself, the extremely long time for which it must be contained, and the special fear that it evokes among many people as a result of these characteristics and the disturbing presence of nuclear radiation.

In this chapter we discuss fuel cells, an exciting energy technology that many hope will become the (environmentally benign) successor to the internal combustion engine for automobile propulsion. Our study of fuel cells illustrates once again a recurring theme of this book – the importance of properly specifying the system boundary when making technology comparisons. The fuel cell case also reveals several important issues that arise in R&D project management.

As societies around the world become increasingly aware of the environmental consequences of energy supply, distribution and use, there is an understandable wish to invent and deploy new technologies that avoid the costs, both environmental and economic, of the technologies in use today. The desire to find something “new,” that does not have the drawbacks of what is here now and familiar, is invaluable because it is the fundamental driving force of innovation. But good intentions are not the same as successful outcomes, and it is important to insist on disciplined analysis of the technical, economic, and environmental aspects of a new technology before launching expensive new initiatives. This is true for entrepreneurs thinking about starting a new company around a new technology, for an established company considering an expensive new R&D program, or for a government agency considering adopting a new tax, regulatory, or technology development program.

One of the biggest targets in the search for a qualitatively more attractive energy technology is the automobile.

Sensible energy planning by governments and corporations requires assumptions about future energy prices and the amounts of energy that will be produced and consumed. This planning also requires accurate and comprehensive data on current and previous energy activities, so that decisions will be as informed as possible. Good historical data and comprehensive energy models that forecast the future are critical for both private industry and government. In this chapter, we first discuss the kinds of statistics that are available, most of them collected by the federal government, and then the efforts to project the characteristics of future energy activity, both in the United States and in the world as a whole.

Of course, the historical data contain a good deal of random error and are not necessarily accurate. Analysts must use statistical tools to determine what can be inferred from the data. We discuss some of these tools in the second part of the chapter. Statistical analysis is an important specialized field and here we do little more than to illustrate the kind of analysis that can be undertaken and the types of questions that it raises.

An energy forecast seeks to generate a projection of future quantities and prices of various types of energy – both on the supply side and the demand side – based on mathematical models of energy markets and historical data.

Applying new technology in our society is invariably a challenge, and those who try do not always succeed. New technologies are frequently of large scale, involve significant environmental or social consequences and must adhere to a complex framework of governmental rules and regulations whose economic impact may be far-reaching. Issues such as opposition to nuclear power, concern over the environmental effects of burning coal, the ethical dilemmas of stem cell research, and the threats to privacy, intellectual property, and even national security associated with the growing use of the Internet fill the daily newspapers. Learning how to manage the often-competing interests that come into play when new technologies are deployed in society will be increasingly important, especially for scientists and engineers whose professional lives are dedicated to the task of harnessing technology for economic and social ends.

Today the education of scientists and engineers in U.S. universities is still strongly influenced by the conventional view of technological innovation as a linear process. In this view, innovation proceeds through distinct stages: (1) research – the first step of knowledge creation, usually by scientists in a laboratory; (2) development – the step of reducing the knowledge to practice, normally the responsibility of the engineer; and (3) application – the crucial step of implementing a technology, mainly the province of nontechnical professionals, such as managers, financiers, lawyers, politicians, or public-interest advocates. Scientific and engineering education is organized according to this linear perspective.

Introduction

In the 1990s many firms turned to software packages when they replaced the older, often home-built systems in their application portfolios. They chose to buy, rather than build, their new systems. Broadly, they followed the prevailing wisdom to downsize themselves so as to focus on their ‘core competencies’ and to outsource other tasks to the market. Many found no compelling logic for continued in-house development of their application software. Some, with their staffs already reorganized and reduced through reengineering, were simply no longer in a position to undertake major development tasks.

Replacement of systems had in the 1990s become a priority for many firms. These organizations felt increasingly burdened by their ‘legacy systems’. Their support staff were often committed to a maintenance task for which the costs were all too apparent and the benefits appeared to be marginal and remedial. Their home-built software also often resided on expensive mainframes widely viewed as heading rapidly toward obsolescence. Further, users found this software increasingly cumbersome to work with in comparison to their newer PC-based tools with their graphical user interfaces.

It was in this context that the 1990s gave rise to ERP (enterprise resource planning), a significant innovation in the packaged software market. The vision for ERP was first articulated by the Gartner Group (Wylie, 1990). It took an ‘enterprise-wide view’ of traditional application software, allowing for internal integration of the technical and business core, as well as external integration with business customers.