This new approach to mitigating global warming arose in 2015 when Dr. Alan K. Miller noticed that the cold water upwelling that would decrease the Earth’s Surface Atmospheric Temperature (SAT) by about 1.1°C is almost exactly the same as the upwelling required if Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) were deployed at the environmentally acceptable level of 7 TW. After doing some preliminary physical and financial modeling which indicated the potential for this discovery to help with the mitigation of global warming, he organized a team of eleven other world experts to pursue it, and they have now started examining and refining the first of many key elements. If successful, 2.6 TW of storable, dispatchable, liquid-fueled, CO2-free renewable energy could become available wherever needed, and its production would also directly reduce the Earth’s SAT by over 1°C in addition to the fossil-fuel replacement benefits. With some added wind and solar power, the approach could (uniquely) hold global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures, at CO2 emission reduction levels close to the 2015 Paris INDC commitments.
Previously, Dr. Miller was a Senior Staff Materials Engineer at Lockheed Martin Corporation (1990-2014). For his last 6 years there he led the Cold Water Pipe team for Lockheed’s venture into OTEC. Responsibilities concerning this huge 1000m long x 10m diameter structure included configuration design and optimization, materials selection, and fabrication process development. His team successfully validated (at a 4m diameter Pilot Plant scale) the three most challenging elements of the step-wise VARTM process, one that they invented to manufacture this fiber composite pipe directly down into the ocean from a floating OTEC platform. See for details: http://www.otecnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Lockheed-Martin-OTEC-Cold-Water-pipe-SAMPE-2012-paper.pdf
Prior to joining Lockheed as a fiber composites subject matter expert, he was a Professor (Research) of Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford, helping to pioneer the new field of unified constitutive equations, and serving as the principal dissertation supervisor for 17 completed Ph.D. students.
His education was at Cornell and Stanford (where he held a Fannie and John Hertz Foundation graduate fellowship) earning BS, MS, and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering.
