Nanotechnology and Our Energy Challenge

I’ve increasingly begun to believe that a grand challenge before us—the world and humanity—is what I call “the terawatt challenge.” I’ve been looking into the energy issue and I’ve been on a quest for terawatts, or trillions of watts of electricity. What I’m looking for is to solve what I believe is the most important problem facing humanity, the problem of generating energy of the magnitude that we will need in this century for what could very well turn out to be ten billion people on the planet.

Energy is the single most important challenge facing humanity today. As we peak in oil production and worry about how long natural gas will last, life must go on. Somehow we must find the basis for energy prosperity for the twenty-first century. We should assume that by the middle of this century we will need to at least double world energy production from its current level, with most of this coming from some clean, sustainable, carbon dioxide–free source. For worldwide peace and prosperity, it must be cheap.

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