Alternative Solar-Hydrogen-Steam Energy Platform

In the long run, neither nuclear, coal-based, nor petroleum based economies of global scale can survive effectively. The challenge is in the development of a viable solar-based hydrogen economy of sufficient scale to offset the other conventional energy platforms. Solar power includes a variety of alternative organic energy sources, including solar-heating, wind-turbine power, gravity based hydroelectric power and more exotic closed Rankin-cycle heat sumps. Electrical generation from a variety of inter-linked sources can be used directly for the production of hydrogen and oxygen gas and steam in sufficient quantities that they high-energy sources can be effectively and safely stored and utilized to power the machinery of the 21st Century. Only the combustion of hydrogen and oxygen can provide the high-energy power needed to drive the machines of the future, and only these forms of fuel do not provide the carbon contaminants that result in air pollution and in global warming. This entails in turn that turbine and steam-turbine engines based on hydrogen-oxygen combustion be effectively prototyped and developed in the next decade, and can achieve efficiencies far above that now possible with conventional propulsion systems. This alternative solar-hydrogen based energy platform is not intended to completely substitute for the conventional energy technologies, but merely to complement these technologies and to circumscribe their utilization to more ecologically manageable proportions.

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