The Gigaton Throwdown Initiative was launched to educate and inspire investors, entrepreneurs, business leaders, and policy makers to “think big” and understand what it would take to scale up clean energy massively over the next 10 years. A unique group from the business community — investors, entrepreneurs, and executives — teamed up with leading academics for the throwdown. The team investigated what it would take to reach gigaton scale for 9 technologies currently attractive to investors.
To attain gigaton scale, a single technology must reduce annual emissions of carbon dioxide and equivalent greenhouse gases (CO2e) by at least 1 billion metric tons — a gigaton — by 2020.
Their site details nine ways to do it; biofuels, building efficiency, concentrating solar power, construction materials, geothermal, nuclear, plug-in vehicles, solar photovoltaics, and wind
I’m a bit of a sci fi fan and somewhat of an idealist, so I prefer the nuclear fusion approach. No pollution, no radiation and endless clean energy…sounds ideal to me.
But while farcical concepts like clean coal are hitting the funding headlines, what of good old nuclear fusion?
That’s a darned good question. TRW had a functioning (in the lab) fusion reactor back in the 1980s– until the Reagan administration pulled the plug on their funding. It was in one of those top secret labs where no one knows what’s going on except the people who work there (and their friends, and their vendors, and their drinking buddies…). Haven’t heard much about fusion since that one got shut down.