It is the basis for so many magic shows, to appear to draw things from thin air. How much of a miracle is it in our everyday lives, if we can make what we need from the invisible ether around us, instead of hacking into rocks or cutting down trees? What crazy, futuristic world is this, when we can draw our needs from the air itself? Well, the future is now, and we’re drawing our power from the very air around us, with wind and solar energy.
Wind power, used to power the milling of grains, is a fairly old technology dating back to approximately the 13th century. Coal usage is older, dating to the 11th century. Both the use of fossil fuels and drawing power from the movement of air around us have been with us for nearly a millennium, and these technologies used to depend on the resources of the community using this power. A windmill in a region where the wind doesn’t blow wouldn’t have been very effective, nor would coal usage in a community that didn’t have access to coal.
Modern supply chains and transmission lines have changed the formulas completely. If you want coal, you can get coal, whether it comes from a local mountaintop or the underground mines in another country over the sea. If you want to run your data center on renewable energy, transmission lines can be set up to bring that power from areas with large amounts of wind and sun. Both options have a cost- burning fuel for power means you are constantly buying new fuel, for every bit of power you need to burn something. With renewables, adding new transmission capacity to areas with high concentrations of wind and solar has a cost also.
Maybe the wind isn’t blowing in one community at all times, but the wind is blowing *somewhere* or the sun is shining, and drawing renewable power from different regions into a grid can give a fairly reliable source of power. For example, with offshore wind, the wind blows over water 95% of the time. Drawing power from these renewable methods means no fuel is burned to produce each watt; we’ve unlinked ourselves from the requirement to constantly buy fuel as a society.
The technology gets better every year. More power can be drawn from the air, and more transmission capacity can be developed. These are simply engineering problems, and we have many very intelligent engineers around the world developing better and better solutions to these challenges. Wind and Solar can provide more power than we could ever use in our growing population. Coal can also, until we run out of easily accessible coal, but it will always require coal purchases, and the resulting pollution from burning that coal.
Our future is in the air. We can see it, and we can achieve it, and we can breathe better for it.