TELLURIDE – What if you could take the power of the sun, store it away, and use it to fuel your car one night later that week?

This is the dream of Michael Wasielewski, a chemistry professor at Northwestern University and director of the Argonne-Northwestern Energy Research Center. Wasielewski and his colleagues have been developing methods to store the power harvested from the sun.

In Tuesday night’s Pinhead Town Talk, Wasielewski will present “Fuels from Sunlight: Storing solar energy to meet global energy needs,” 6-7:15 p.m. at the Palm Theatre.j

“The major problem with solar energy is what you do when the sun goes down or when it's a cloudy day,” Wasielewski says. With the easy way out blocked, Wasielewski turns to more unorthodox methods of storage. Energy harvested from the sun can be stored in the form of hydrogen. Hydrogen fuel cells have been the focus of many researchers in the alternative energy field for some time. But Wasielewski points out that our current dependency on gas and coal has led us into a trap. Our present infrastructure is not compatible with hydrogen. “All the systems we have in place now are dependant on fossil fuels,” he says.

Wasielewski proposes another solution. Our reliance on fossil fuels over the centuries has resulted in high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So why not develop processes to turn this compound, which causes harm in our atmosphere, into an artificially produced fossil fuel? Using energy from the sun, this would be an environmentally benign process which exhibits zero net carbon emissions. The gas stays in our cars, the coal in our trains, but without an environmental threat.

Wasielewski's Pinhead Town Talk is this year's Stephen Berry Lecture, an event celebrating the founder of the Telluride Science Research Center. This event is sponsored by TSRC in collaboration with Pinhead Institute, and will take place on Tuesday, July 27, from 6 to 7:15 in the Palm Theatre. Donations are encouraged.