By 2020 more than half of the world will be living in cities as compared with 30% in 1950. Most of this urbanization is occurring in developing countries led by China and India where urbanization is growing five times faster than in industrial Europe, Japan and North America. China will have to provide energy services for 300 million more city dwellers in the next 20 years; three quarters of them will be new arrivals from rural areas. To exacerbate the problem cities in the developing world are already faced with enormous shortfalls in housing and urban infrastructure which results in massive urban poverty. Slums and squatter settlements are growing twice as fast as legitimate housing. On top of this, urban family sizes are shrinking, multiplying the need for new housing units still further. In the next decade developing countries will have to provide accommodation for 21 million additional households each year, growing to 25 million annually in the next decade. If those now living in shacks were also to be given housing the annual additions would increase to 35 and 39 million, respectively. That amounts to over 100,000 new housing units to be built each and every day!

As a consequence, world demand for electricity will double in the first two decades of the new millennium to 22,000 billion kW-hrs; an increase of 11,000 billion kW-hrs which is equivalent to tripling U.S. power generation capacity by the year 2020!

This increase in world demand will require the net addition of at least 3,000 Gigawatts of installed generating capacity. Half of it will be added in China, India, Latin America and other developing countries. OECD countries will add about a third of it. Demand in the Asian countries will be increasing at a rate of close to 5% annually as against 1.8% in the industrialized world.

These are staggering numbers and make it essential that energy be used much more efficiently in future. Current electrical power systems waste two calories out of every three calories consumed. Practicable methods have existed for a long time to reduce this loss to only one calorie out of the three. However, these methods require that electricity to be generated on-site where the heat rejected by the generating process can be harnessed directly for heating and cooling purposes. This path of distributed generation is diametrically opposed to the concept of centralized power systems which is deeply ingrained in the psyche of industrial nations, including that of the U.S., which in overall energy terms is only half as efficient as the EU countries and Japan. Even they too remain woefully inefficient because of their continued predominant use of centralized electricity systems.

This raises the specter of the world running out of energy resources. Coal is the most abundant and widely available fossil fuel and is also most commonly used for power generation. However, coal is highly carbon-intensive and emits large amounts of carbon dioxide during combustion. Since the correlation between greenhouse gas concentrations, of which carbon dioxide is the most offensive, and global atmospheric temperatures has universally been acknowledged, political pressures are rising to discourage their continued release. A transition to cleaner and less carbon-intensive energy systems is fast becoming one of the most critical issues for society to face.

Focusing on the less carbon-intensive fossil fuels, conventional wisdom is that oil reserves are sufficient to last for another 25-40 years; natural gas reserves for perhaps 25-50 years. Hence, the immediate emphasis has to be on how to use hydrocarbons more efficiently while other forms of energy are developed. Fortunately, there are well-established commercial systems available to strip the carbon from coal and turn it into clean-burning synthesis gas which can extend the availability of acceptable fossil fuels by many decades. An interesting aspect of stripping carbon from coal is that it produces hydrogen as a by-product and hydrogen is the perfect fuel for gas turbine generators and fuel cells since besides electricity, their only other product is water.

Nonetheless, it is more likely that the use of fossil fuels will be phased out before the world reserves are fully depleted. Part of this will be due to the commercial development of renewable energy sources and part will be due to the growing cost of retrieving the remaining reserves.

CEC’ energy sector strategy is to concentrate on the creation of gas turbine cycles that are uniquely suited to use in distributed energy systems and in concentrated solar heat systems, while also pursuing opportunities to enhance the performance of fuel cells through pressurization and power recovery from higher temperature types of fuel cell.

These are seen as economically viable applications in the immediate future with very substantial growth potentials over the long term.