Chasing the best Power Generation Mix
The world is facing industrial challenges many of which are about climate change and how we will produce the high volume of power that we need without negatively impacting the environment. To achieve this cornerstone goal many countries and organizations are drafting energetic plans that will satisfy their needs for energy like electricity while respecting the legal and ethical constraints raised by the many climate-related problems. For example, Germany has taken the hard path of closing all its nuclear power plants while investing heavily in zero-emission power facilities like hydraulic power plants. France is trying to regain the nuclear power production leadership it had mainly due to recent energy stress caused by the war between Ukraine and Russia and to some extent because some of the political actors of this country believe that the fastest way to reduce emissions is to take the path of nuclear power production. Between France and Germany, we could see two different political paths for managing the coming growing need for power production with regard to climate change. I am very interested in the nuclear power production path because it’s a path that is very constraining and exciting in terms of engineering but I think that it’s a path that kills the engineering creativity of a country because very few highly specialized engineering skills are involved in the design, build, and exploitation of nuclear power plants what in turn could have the negative side effect of killing many other engineering activities and skills when taking the more slow path of achieving zero emission through power production techniques like solar, hydraulic and others lead to an engineering diversity that could result in many other engineering applications that could impact positively other fields of interest other than power generation. But this is an engineering opinion that is personal what is sure is that the quest for innovative power generation solutions is actually one of the world's most pressing needs because the demand for electricity is about to grow exponentially with consumer products like electric cars and the growing adoption of IoT devices that will all require to be plugged to an electrical grid.
Between hydraulic power, wind power, solar power, nuclear power, and other alternative power generation techniques each country is trying to adopt a power production mix that fits the expected growth of its future economy with climate change in mind (I hope) and with the goal of being free from external power supply. My opinion is that since the dotcom revolution, entrepreneurs have been focused on the digital economy forgetting other sectors like the production of energy that is a sector on which the digital economy relies on and since the last decade we have come to see the impact of our industrial economy on the world environment what should make entrepreneurs deploy more effort on bringing innovative solutions that will help us get the greenest form of energy. I myself was ignoring the pressing need for green power generation and the many interesting engineering challenges that go with it but I am a little piece of the part compared to what a whole community can do. I am confident that we will find innovative solutions that will help us get away from all these problems about climate but we should start to more work on it now like how many other devoted entrepreneurs have been doing since because as concerning is the problem of climate I have seen interesting solutions that need to be supported for them to get to the scale that will make their impact bigger. This for sure requires effort from politics and this effort will be deployed faster if each of us starts from his own self by finding and implementing micro solutions that work locally while always talking more about climate change around us even if we are not an expert about climate.
There is not actually a best power generation mix that fits all country. Each country will adopt a power generation mix according to the resources that is more accessible to it as we have seen with the example of France and Germany, two countries whose power production strategy I am very interested in following because as I have highlighted they have each chosen a different power generation path, one investing heavily again on nuclear power while the other is digging mountains, tunneling water and deploying wind turbines around in other to get clean power from natural resources like water and wind.
