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Shrinking fossil fuel supplies require new energy-efficient technologies

Speaking about ’Technologies That Fit a Different Future,’ aviation pioneer Paul B. MacCready told an INEEL audience the dominance of human activities and man’s ever-increasing need for energy will cause difficult times during the next 100 years. New technologies and lifestyles that use less energy must be employed, he warned.

"Fossil fuel production will peak about 2010," MacCready said. "As production declines and energy prices increase, technologies that use less energy will become more important." In particular, he touted the use of today’s highly efficient batteries in producing new all-electric cars, and the use of electric-assisted bicycles to enable mankind to stretch its resources farther.

MacCready’s visit was part of the INEEL Seminar Series, in which nationally known scientists, engineers and other experts share their successes and ideas with the Laboratory’s employees. This idea-sharing promotes scientific interaction and collaboration in support of the U.S. Department of Energy’s four missions of energy security, national security, environmental quality and scientific research.

MacCready, who has degrees from Yale and Caltech, is a champion glider pilot and noted explorer of new horizons in aviation, energy conservation and the environment. Earlier in the day, he met with five area junior high school students to answer their science and aviation career questions.

In 1977, his Dupont-sponsored Gossamer Condor won the $95,000 award offered by British industrialist Henry Kremer for the first sustained, controlled human-powered flight.

Two years later, its successor, the Gossamer Albatross, won aviation’s largest prize for a human-powered flight from England to France.

In 1981, his DuPont-sponsored Solar Challenger carried a pilot 163 miles from Paris to England, powered solely by sunbeams.

MacCready received the 1979 Collier Trophy from the National Aeronautics Association, the 1980 Ingenieur of the Century Gold Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the 1982 Lindbergh Award, the 1987 Guggenheim Medal, the 2002 Aerospace Award and the 2003 Heinz Award for Technology, the Economy and Employment.

MacCready said that personal debt was a key motivator in the development of the world’s first human-powered aircraft, resulting in a pedal-powered ultra-light aircraft that flew from France to England and captured the imagination of the world.

"I guaranteed a loan for $100,000 for a business and that business failed. Suddenly, the bank wanted $100,000 and I didn’t have it," MacCready recalled. "About that time, I noticed the Kremer Prize for human-powered flight. Suddenly, the matter had great interest for me."

Although his Gossamer Condor won a prize of $95,000 offered by British industrialist Henry Kremer, the production cost used most of the prize money, he said. However, by that time, Kremer offered a second prize of nearly $200,000 for successful human-powered flight across the English Channel.

The Gossamer Albatross took that prize, enabling him to pay his debt.