The rise of solar energy, in one form or another
Illustration by Ian Whadcock
WIND power works, and will work better in the future. But wind is only an interim stop on the way to a world where electricity no longer relies on fossil fuels. The ultimate goal is to harvest the sun’s energy directly by intercepting sunlight, rather than by waiting for that sunlight to stir up the atmosphere and sticking turbines in the resulting airstreams.
Fortunately, inventors love that sort of problem. Ideas they have come up with range from using the sun to run simple heating systems for buildings, deploying “reverse radiators” painted black, to the sharpest cutting edge of that trendiest of fields, nanotechnology, to ensure that every last photon is captured and converted into electricity. The most iconic form of solar power, the photovoltaic cell, is currently the fastest-growing type of alternative energy, increasing by 50% a year. The price of the electricity it produces is falling, too. According to Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), an American consultancy run by Daniel Yergin, a kWh of photovoltaic electricity cost 50 cents in 1995. That had fallen to 20 cents in 2005 and is still dropping. but heading in the right direction.
Photovoltaic cells (or solar cells, as they are known colloquially) convert sunlight directly into electricity. But that is not the only way to use the sun to make electrical power. It is also possible to concentrate the sun’s rays, use them to boil water and employ the resulting steam to drive a turbine. These two very different approaches illustrate an unresolved question about the future of energy: whether it will be generated centrally and transported over long distances to the consumer, as it has been in recent decades, or generated and consumed in more or less the same place, as it was a century ago.
A hot tin roof
The idea of solar cells is to keep things local. They are like wind turbines, only more so, in that even a single solar panel can produce power immediately. Put a few on your roof and, if you live in a reasonably sunny place, you can cut your electricity bill. Indeed, you may be able to sell electricity back to your own power company. The problem is that at the moment you may need to take out an overdraft to pay for the solar panels, and you will not get your money back for a long time.
Many engineers, however, are working to change that. One of them is Emanuel Sachs of MIT. Some engineers look for big, exciting technological improvements in the way solar cells work, but Dr Sachs prefers incremental change. As he sees it, it is such change that drives Moore’s law, that well-established description of the rapid improvement in the power of computer processors.
Moreover, the analogy is appropriate. Traditional solar cells are made of silicon, like computer chips, and for the same reason. They rely on that element’s properties as a semiconductor, in which negatively charged electrons and positively charged “holes” move around and carry a current as they do so. In the case of a solar cell, the current is created by sunlight knocking electrons out of place and thus creating holes. Dr Sachs’s first contribution to the incremental improvement was a technique called the string ribbon, which halved the amount of silicon needed to make a solar cell by drawing the element (in liquid form) out of a vat between two strings. That invention was marketed by a firm called Evergreen Solar.
His latest venture, a firm called 1366 Technologies (after the number of watts of solar power that strike an average square metre of the Earth’s surface), aims to follow this up with three new ideas that should, in combination, bring about a 27% improvement in efficiency. He and his colleagues have redesigned the surfaces of the silicon crystals on a nanoscale in order to keep reflected light bouncing around inside a cell until it is eventually absorbed. They have also managed to do something similar to the silver wires that collect the current. And they have made the wires themselves thinner as well so that they do not block so much light in the first place.
Dr Sachs says that these innovations will bring the capital cost of solar cells below $2 a watt. That is closing in on the cost of a coal-fired power station: a gigawatt (one billion watt) plant costs about $1 billion to build. The price, of course, is a different matter. As Paula Mints of Navigant Consulting, a firm based in Palo Alto, California, points out, price is set by market conditions. These—particularly the generous subsidies given to solar power in some European countries—have kept prices well above costs in recent years. Nevertheless, as chart 4 shows, the price of solar cells has fallen significantly, too.
Other researchers back a newer technology known as thin-film photovoltaics. Thin-film cells can be made with silicon, but most progress is being made with ones that use mixtures of metals, sometimes exotic ones, as the semiconductor. These mixtures are not as efficient as traditional bulk-silicon cells (meaning that they do not convert as much sunlight to electricity per square metre of cell). But they use far less material, which makes them cheaper, and they can be laid down on flexible surfaces such as sheets of steel the thickness of a human hair, which gives them wider applications.
At the moment, the commercial leader in this area is a firm called First Solar, which uses cadmium telluride as the film. But First Solar is about to be given a run for its money by companies such as Miasolé, a small Californian firm, that have gone for a mixture of copper, indium, gallium and selenium, known as CIGS. This mixture is reckoned to be more efficient than cadmium telluride, though still not as good as traditional silicon. And it has the public-relations advantage of not containing cadmium, a notorious poison—though First Solar’s films carefully lock the cadmium up in a way that renders it harmless.
At the moment thin-film solar cells are being packaged and sold as standard solar panels, but that could easily change. First Solar applies its films to glass, but Miasolé’s boss, Joseph Laia, points out that his steel-based products are flexible and lightweight enough to be used as building materials in their own right. Greener-than-thou Californians who wish to fall in with their governor’s plan for a million solar roofs, announced in 2006, currently have to bolt panels onto their houses—an ugly, if visible, show of their credentials. If Mr Laia has his way, they will soon be able to use sheets of his company’s CIGS-covered steel as the roofing material itself.
Supporters of solar-thermal energy tend to look askance at solar panels. Cadmium telluride and CIGS may be cheaper than silicon, but glass and steel, on which solar-thermal relies, are cheaper still. The technology’s proponents think big: square-kilometres big. They want to fill the deserts with steel and glass mirrors and use the reflected sunlight to boil water and generate electricity, then plug into the long-distance DC networks developed for wind power to carry the juice to the cities.
Desert song
Those who worry about the political side of the world’s dependence on oil will be less than delighted to find that one country thinking seriously about such systems is Algeria. With the power-hungry markets of Europe to its north, across the Mediterranean, and a lot of sunshine going to waste in the Sahara desert to its south, Algeria’s government is looking for ways to connect the two. It is now building an experimental solar-thermal power station at Hassi R’mel, about 400km south of Algiers, which if all goes well will open next year. In April work started on a similar project at Aïn Béni Mathar, in Morocco, and others are in the pipeline elsewhere in north Africa. Fortunately for people like Mr Woolsey, the ex-CIA man, America has deserts of it own which are about to bloom with mirror-farms too.
There are four competing designs: parabolic-trough mirrors, parabolic-dish mirrors, “power towers” which use an array of mirrors to focus the sun’s rays on to an elevated platform, and Fresnel systems, which mimic a parabolic trough using (cheaper) flat mirrors. All either heat up water to make steam, which drives a generator, or heat and liquefy a salt with a low melting point such as sodium nitrate that is used to make steam.
All four of these designs are now either operating commercially in the deserts of south-west America or are undergoing pre-commercial trials. Although the total capacity at the moment, according to CERA, is a mere 400 megawatts, this will grow tenfold over the next four years if all projects now scheduled come to fruition, and probably a lot more after that. Moreover, those plants that melt a salt are able to divert part of the heat they collect into a thermal reservoir that can keep the generators turning at night. The main objection to solar power—that it goes off after sunset—is thus overcome.
From little acorns
The engineers clearly think they can deliver the technology. But can the technology deliver the power? A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that it can. Two years ago a task force put together by the governors of America’s western states identified 200 gigawatts-worth of prime sites for solar-thermal power within their territory (meaning places that had enough reliable sunshine, were close to transmission lines and were not environmentally or politically sensitive). That is equivalent to 20% of America’s existing electricity-generation capacity: not a bad start.
Robert Fishman, the boss of Ausra, an Australian-American company based in Palo Alto, California, reckons that his firm’s Fresnel arrays combined with its proprietary heat-storage system can produce electricity for 8 cents a kWh. That matches GE’s wind turbines, and mass production should bring it down further. It is not cheaper than “naked” coal (Ausra will benefit from various state governments’ requirements that their power utilities buy renewable power)—but if there were a carbon tax of $30 a tonne, or a requirement to capture and bury CO2, Ausra would be able to match the coal-fired stations’ prices.
The most intriguing technology of all, though, belongs to SUNRGI, a firm based in Los Angeles. This uses mirrors to concentrate sunlight, but focuses it on a solar cell rather than a boiler. The system is said to turn 37% of the light into electricity. In April the firm claimed it would be able to produce electricity for the magic figure of 5 cents a kWh.
That claim has yet to be put to the test, and should be viewed with some scepticism until it has been. But it is a good indication of the way the field is going. Solar power now seems to be roughly where wind was a decade ago. At the moment it contributes a mere 0.01% to the world’s output of electricity, but just over a decade of 50% annual growth would bring that to 1%, which is where wind is at the moment. If SUNRGI is to be believed, and the point where RE is is close, the rise to 1% might happen even faster. After that, the sky is the limit.
THE FUTURE OF ENERGY
Beneath your feet
Jun 19th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Geothermal could be hot
THE Philippines are not generally associated with the cutting edge of technological change. In one respect, though, the country is ahead of its time: around a quarter of its electricity is generated from underground heat. Such heat is free, inexhaustible and available day and night.
It is also part of a geology that sees parts of the country devastated by volcanic eruptions from time to time. The geysers that turn the generators are merely the gentlest manifestations of this volcanism. The question that exercises Jefferson Tester, a researcher at MIT, is whether it is possible to have the one without the other. The Earth’s depths are, after all, hot everywhere. So if there is no natural volcanism around to bring this heat to the surface, his answer is to create controlled, artificial volcanism—what is known as an engineered geothermal system (EGS). Instead of relying on natural hot springs, you make your own.
In principle, this is easy. Drill two parallel holes in the ground, a few hundred metres apart, and carry on drilling until the rock is hot enough (say 200ºC). Then pump cold water down one hole and wait for it to come back up the other at a suitably elevated temperature. The superheated water turns to steam which you use to power a generator. In Dr Tester’s view, the reason this source of power is neglected is that it is invisible. Everybody feels the wind and the sun, but only miners notice that the Earth’s interior is hot, so no one thinks of drilling for that heat.
Dr Tester reckons that spending about $1 billion on demonstration projects over the next 15 years would change that. It would provide enough information to allow 100 gigawatts-worth of EGSs to be created in America by 2050, at a commercially acceptable price.
In principle, much more could be done. The recoverable heat in rock under the United States is the equivalent of 2,000 years-worth of the country’s current energy consumption, according to a report he and his colleagues published two years ago. A similar assessment of Europe’s heat resources from the Earth suggests that they could be used to generate as much electricity as all of the continent’s nuclear power stations produce now.
Rock-hard
Extracting this subterranean energy is not as easy as it sounds. Until the term EGS was coined, the field was known as hot-dry-rock geothermal energy, a name that encapsulates the problem precisely. A century of data collected by oil companies suggest it is impermeable rocks such as granite that are the most effective reservoirs of heat. Their very dryness increases their heat capacity. But to get the heat out you have to make them permeable. Hence the “engineered” in the new name.
Some of Dr Tester’s $1 billion would be spent working out how to drill cheaply and effectively through this sort of rock—something that oil companies tend to avoid because impermeable rocks do not contain petroleum. A lot of the money would go on finding ways to force open fissures in the granite to let the water flow from the injection hole to the exit.
The Cooper Basin in South Australia has the hottest non-volcanic rocks of any known place in the world, and Australia leads the field in exploiting subterranean heat, with seven firms snooping around the area. One of them, Geodynamics, recently completed what it claims is a commercial-scale well. And the turbines will also turn soon at an experimental non-commercial project at Soultz, in France.
If it can be made to work, EGS has got the lot. No unsightly turbines. No need to cover square kilometres of land with vast mirrors. And it is always on. Anybody got a billion dollars handy?
Grow your own
Jun 19th 2008
From The Economist print edition
The biofuels of the future will be tailor-made
BURIED in the news a few weeks ago was an announcement by a small Californian firm called Amyris. It was, perhaps, a parable for the future of biotechnology. Amyris is famous in the world of tropical medicine for applying the latest biotechnological tools to the manufacture of artemisinin, an antimalarial drug that is normally extracted from a Chinese vine. The vines cannot produce enough of the stuff, though, so Amyris’s researchers have taken a few genes here and there, tweaked them and stitched them together into a biochemical pathway enabling bacteria to make a chemical precursor that can easily be converted into the drug.
But that is not what the announcement was about. Instead, it was that Amyris was going into partnership with Crystalsev, a Brazilian firm, to make car fuel out of cane sugar. Not ethanol (though Brazil already has a thriving market for ethanol-powered cars), but a hydrocarbon that has the characteristics of diesel fuel. Technically, it is not ordinary diesel, either: in chemist-speak, it is an isoprenoid rather than a mixture of alkanes and aromatics. But the driver will not notice the difference.
The point of the parable is this: biotechnology may have cut its teeth on medicines, but the big bucks are likely to be in bulk chemicals. And few chemicals are bulkier than fuels. Where Amyris is leading, many are following. Some small firms with new and interesting technologies are trying to go it alone. Others are teaming up with big energy firms, in much the same way that biotech companies with a promising drug are often taken under the wing of a large pharmaceutical company. The big firms themselves are involved, too, both through in-house laboratories and by giving money to universities. Biofuels, once seen as a cross between eccentric greenwash and a politically acceptable way of subsidising farmers, are now poised to become big business.
Grassed up
The list of things that need to be done to create a proper biofuel industry is a long one. New crops, tailored to fuel rather than food production, have to be created. Ways of converting those crops into feedstock have to be developed. That feedstock has then to be turned into something that people want to buy, at a price they can afford.
All parts of this chain are currently the subjects of avid research and development. Some biofuels were already competitive with oil products even at 2006 oil prices (see table 5). The R&D effort will bring more of them into line, as will any long-term rise in the price of crude oil.
As far as the crops themselves are concerned, there are three runners at the starting gate: grasses, trees and algae. Grasses and trees are grown on dry land, but need a lot of processing. The idea is to take the whole biomass of the plant (particularly the cellulose of which a plant-cell’s walls are made) and turn it into fuel. At the moment, that fuel is often ethanol. Hence the term “cellulosic ethanol” that has gained recent currency. Algae, being aquatic, are more fiddly to grow, but promise a high-quality product, oil, that will not need much treatment to become biodiesel.
One of the leading proponents of better grasses is Ceres, a firm based in Thousand Oaks, California. The species it has chosen to examine—switchgrass, miscanthus, sugarcane and sorghum—are so-called C4 grasses. These are favourites with the biofuel industry because they share a particularly efficient form of photosynthesis that enables them to grow fast. Ceres proposes to make them grow faster still, using a mixture of “smart” breeding techniques (in which desirable genes are identified scientifically but assembled into plants by traditional hybridisation) and straightforward genetic engineering.
The chosen grasses also thrive in a range of climates. Switchgrass and miscanthus are temperate. Sugarcane and sorghum are tropical. Ceres proposes to extend their ranges still further by creating strains that will tolerate heat or cold or drought or salt, allowing them to be grown on land that cannot be used for food crops. That will make them cheaper, as well as reducing the competition between foods and biofuels.
Trees, meanwhile, are the province of firms such as ArborGen, of Summerville, South Carolina. Like Ceres, ArborGen is working on four species: eucalyptus, poplar, and the loblolly and radiata pines. It is applying similar techniques to those used by Ceres to speed up the growth of these trees and to increase their tolerance of cold. Although creating raw materials for biofuels is not this company’s only objective (paper pulp and timber are others), it sees such fuels as a big market.
Algae, too, are up for modification. One problem with them is harvesting the oil they produce. That means extracting them from their ponds, drying them out and breaking open their cells. This process is so tedious that some companies are considering the idea of burning the dried algae in power stations instead.
One firm that is not is Synthetic Genomics, the latest venture of Craig Venter (the man who led the privately funded version of the Human Genome Project). Dr Venter hopes to overcome the oil-collection problem by genetic engineering. Synthetic Genomics’s algae have been fitted with genes that create new secretion pathways through their outer membranes. These cause the algal cells to expel the oil almost as soon as they have manufactured it. It then floats to the surface of the pond, allowing it to be skimmed off like cream and turned into biodiesel. The algae are also engineered to make more oil than their wild counterparts.
Harvesting useful fuels from vascular plants, as grasses, trees and their kind are known collectively, is a trickier business. These plants are composed mainly of three types of large molecule. Besides cellulose, there are hemicellulose and lignin. Each is made of chains of smaller molecules, and all three are often bound together in a complex called lignocellulose, particularly in wood. There are many ways these long-chain molecules might be turned into fuel, but all of these processes are more complex than for algae.
As chart 6 shows, turning sunlight into biofuel involves three steps, though different methods may miss out some of these steps. Algae can make the leap from start to finish directly, whereas vascular plants cannot. One way of dealing with them is to dry them and then heat them with little or no oxygen present. This is called pyrolysis and, if done correctly, results in a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen called “syngas” (short for synthesis gas). With suitable catalysts, syngas can be turned into fuel.
This is the approach taken by Choren Industries in Freiburg, Germany, and Range Fuels in Treutlen County, Georgia. In both cases the feedstock is chippings and other leftovers from forestry and timber-mills. Choren is making hydrocarbon diesel and Range ethanol. Both factories, therefore, are steps on the road to making fuel from trees. Syngas can also be turned into ethanol by bacteria of the genus Clostridium (a group better known for the chemical used in botox treatment). That is being done by Coskata, a firm based in Warrenville, Illinois. General Motors (GM) likes this idea so much it has bought a share of the company.
An alternative to the syngas method is to break the cellulose and hemicellulose up into their component “monomer” molecules. That is easier said than done, particularly if lignin is involved, since lignin is resistant to such conversion. The amount of coal in the world is proof of its resilience. Coal is composed mainly of lignin from plants that failed to decompose completely and were fossilised as a result.
Many firms, however, have developed enzymes that break down biomass in this way. Iogen, of Ottawa, Canada, was one of the first. Its enzymes decompose cellulose and hemicellulose into sugar monomers. (The lignin is burned to generate heat for the process.) Abengoa, a Spanish firm that is also involved in solar energy, uses this approach as well.
Sugar and spice
Once you have your sugar, you can ferment it. These days that need not mean using yeast to make ethanol. A whole range of bugs, some natural, some engineered, can now be deployed to make a whole range of products. Amyris’s souped-up micro-organisms (some are bacteria, some yeasts) turn sugar not into ethanol but into isoprenoids, at a cost competitive with petroleum-based diesel. LS9, based near San Francisco, uses a similar method but is turning out alkanes (for petrol) and fatty acids (for biodiesel). It, too, is starting to scale up production. Synthetic Genomics is doing something similar, though the firm is cagey about which fuel is being produced. In each case, however, what is made is a chemical precisely tailored to its purpose, rather than the ad hoc mixture that comes out of a refinery. The rival companies thus argue that their products are actually better than oil-based ones.
Illustration by Ian WhadcockAt least one firm, Mascoma, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, employs a single species of bug, Thermoanaerobacterium saccharolyticum, both to break down the biomass and to digest the resulting sugar. Mascoma will use both grass and wood as feedstocks. In May it signed deals with GM and Marathon Oil.
It is also possible to use purified enzymes to do the conversion from sugar to fuel, as well as from biomass to sugar, and at least two firms are working on applying them to the whole process. Codexis, based in Redwood City, California, has created a range of enzymes by a method akin to sexual reproduction and natural selection. Last year it signed a deal with Shell to use this technique to produce biofuels of various types. And a Danish firm, Danisco, has teamed up with DuPont to do the same thing with its own proprietary enzymes.
Shell is also involved in a project to turn sugar into hydrocarbons, this time by straight chemical processing. It is putting up the money. The technology (the most important part of which is a set of proprietary non-biological catalysts) is provided by Virent Energy systems, of Madison, Wisconsin.
Which of these approaches will work best is anybody’s guess. But their sheer number is proof that the most radical thinking in the field of renewable energy is going on in biofuels. It is in this area that the most unexpected breakthroughs are likely to come, says Steven Koonin, BP’s chief scientist. BP is backing one of the biggest academic projects intended to look into biofuels, the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI), to the tune of $500m, which suggests that the company’s board agrees with him. The EBI is a partnership of the University of California, Berkeley, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Illinois.
One of the people involved, Steven Chu, the head of the Lawrence Berkeley laboratory, is a man with a grand vision. This vision is of a “glucose economy” that will replace the existing oil economy. Glucose, the most common monomer sugar, would be turned into fuels and maybe even the bio-equivalents of petrochemicals—bioplastics, for example—in local factories and then shipped around the world. That would be a boon to tropical countries, where photosynthesis is at its most rampant, though it might not play so well to James Woolsey’s security fears, since it risks replacing one set of unreliable suppliers with another.
However, there is plenty of biomass to go around. A study by America’s Departments of Energy and Agriculture suggests that even with only small changes to existing practice, 1.3 billion tonnes of plant matter could be collected from American soil without affecting food production. If this were converted into ethanol using the best technology available today, it would add up to the equivalent of 350 billion litres of petrol, or 65% of the country’s current petrol consumption. And that is before specially bred energy crops and other technological advances are taken into account. If America wants it, biofuel autarky looks more achievable than the oil-based sort. And if it does not, then the world’s hitherto impoverished tropics may find themselves in the middle of an unexpected and welcome industrial revolution.
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THE FUTURE OF ENERGY
The end of the petrolhead
Jun 19th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Tomorrow’s cars may just plug in
Illustration by Ian WhadcockNOTHING ages faster than the future. A few years ago there was general agreement that if the internal-combustion engine ever was replaced by something clean, that something would be the fuel cell. A fuel cell is a way of reacting hydrogen and oxygen together in a controlled way and extracting electricity from the process. It was to be the precursor of what was known as the hydrogen economy, in which that gas would replace fossil fuels and power almost everything.
Leaving aside the problems of transporting and storing a light and leaky gas, what no one was very clear about was where the hydrogen itself would come from. You would have to make it from something else. That something would either be a mixture of fossil fuel and water (fuels can be reacted with steam to make hydrogen and carbon dioxide, but you still have to get rid of the carbon dioxide), or just water itself, via electrolysis.
But why bother? Why not cut out the middleman and plug your car directly into the electricity mains instead? And that, it seems, is what may happen. You don’t hear much about the hydrogen economy these days. Nor fuel cells. The buzz-phrase now is “plug-in hybrid”.
Plug-ins should not be confused with existing hybrid vehicles, such as Toyota’s Prius, which contains an internal-combustion engine as well as two electric ones. Either sort may drive the wheels. The electric motors kick in when they can do a more efficient job than the petrol engine, but even then the electricity comes ultimately, via batteries, from burning petrol.
In a plug-in, the electricity comes from the mains, via an ordinary electrical socket. Some intermediate designs retain the idea of two sorts of engine, but the goal is that the car should be powered by electric motors alone. If the batteries run down, a petrol-powered generator will take over. (Existing batteries are too expensive to give such a car the range of a standard petrol-driven machine.) But most cars, most of the time, are used for short journeys. Gerbrand Ceder, a battery scientist at MIT, reckons that if the first 50km of an average car’s daily range were provided by batteries rather than petrol, annual petrol consumption would be halved. Given that the electrical equivalent of a litre of petrol costs about 25 cents, that is an attractive reduction.
The widespread adoption of plug-ins might also reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, depending on what sort of power station made the electricity in the first place. Even energy from a coal-fired station is less polluting than the serial explosions that drive an internal-combustion engine. If the energy comes from a source such as wind or nuclear, the gain is enormous.
Beyond that, the rise of plug-ins has implications for the electricity industry itself. If they succeed, they will put an unanticipated load on the system. In fact, they may remake electricity as well as transport.
Don’t all recharge at once
That is certainly the view of Peter Corsell of Gridpoint, a company based in Arlington, Virginia. His firm hopes to make its living selling the load-management technology required for “smart grids”. There are several reasons why such technology is desirable (see article). Mr Corsell goes one further: he reckons it will become essential if plug-ins arrive in force. At the moment, the grid would be unable to cope if a large number of commuters arriving home plugged in their cars more or less simultaneously to recharge them. Yet if those same cars were recharged at three o’clock in the morning, when demand is low, it would benefit both consumer (who would get cheap power) and producer (who would be able to sell otherwise wasted electricity). Such cars might even act as micro-peakers—reservoirs of electrical energy that a power company could draw on if a car were not on the road. Managing plug-ins, Mr Corsell thinks, will be the smart grid’s killer application.
In sunny climes, plug-ins might also provide another use for solar cells. Google is already experimenting with photovoltaic car parks. These have awnings covered in solar cells which will shade its employees’ cars and simultaneously recharge them. That is an idea which could spread. Supermarkets, for example, might find that car parks with plugs would attract customers who wanted to top up their cars. And the more opportunities there are for stationary cars to be recharged, the more likely they are to be bought.
Plug-ins are moving from idea to reality with amazing speed. General production of the Tesla, Elon Musk’s new sports car, began in March (the firm is Californian, but the cars are built in Britain). The Tesla is not even a hybrid. It draws all of its power from lithium-ion batteries (the sort that power laptop computers), and it has a range of 350km. It can manage that because its price of $109,000 buys a lot of batteries; Tesla owners are not the sort who count their pennies.
Nor is the Tesla the only sports car to go down this road. Electric motors may lack a throaty roar, but they actually do a better job than petrol engines in high-performance vehicles. They have higher torque at low revs which makes them accelerate faster. In Britain a new firm called the Lightning Car Company plans to revive the country’s sports-car tradition with the Lightning GT. Mr Musk also faces competition in California, from Fisker Automotive, whose eponymous founder Henrik Fisker helped design the Tesla. (Tesla Motors is now suing Fisker for infringing its intellectual property.)
Mass-production plug-ins are not far away either, and the rising price of petrol makes them look more attractive by the day. General Motors intends to launch a plug-in hybrid called the Volt by 2010, and Toyota plans a plug-in version of the Prius. Most of the other big car firms are making me-too noises. Only Honda and Mercedes seem to be sticking enthusiastically to fuel cells. It is all very encouraging. But what would really make a difference would be a breakthrough in battery technology.
At the moment, lithium-ion batteries are the favoured variety. This kind of battery uses lithium in its ionic form (ie, with the atoms stripped of an electron to make them positive). When the battery is fully charged, these ions hang around one of its electrodes, the anode, which is usually made of graphite. During operation, the ions migrate within the battery from this electrode to the other one, the cathode, and electrons (which are negatively charged) pass between the electrodes through an external circuit. It is that current of electrons which drives the motor. The cathode may be made of a variety of materials. Cobalt oxide is traditional but expensive. Manganese oxide is becoming popular. But the future probably lies with iron phosphate, which has less of a tendency to overheat, a problem that has resulted in battery recalls in the past.
Iron phosphate certainly will be the future if General Motors has anything to do with it. GM is collaborating with A123Systems, a firm started by Dr Ceder’s colleague Yet-Ming Chiang, to develop batteries with iron-phosphate cathodes for the Volt. A123’s particular trick is that the iron phosphate in its cathodes comes in the form of precisely engineered nanoparticles. This increases the surface area available for the lithium ions to react with when the current is flowing, so such batteries can be charged and discharged rapidly.
The Lightning, too, is making use of nanotechnology. Its batteries, developed by Altairnano of Reno, Nevada, replace the graphite anode with one made of lithium titanate nanoparticles. The firm claims that its batteries are not only safer (graphite can burn; lithium titanate cannot), but can also be recharged more rapidly. Using a 480-volt outlet, such as might be found in a roadside service station, the job should be done in ten minutes.
Dr Ceder reckons he may be able to do even better than this. His version of an iron-phosphate battery can charge or discharge in ten seconds. It, too, could be recharged rapidly at a roadside filling station. He reckons the process would have to be controlled to stop overheating, but a safe refill would take only five minutes. And he thinks batteries might get better still.
The 30,000-compound question
At the moment the process of finding better electrode materials is haphazard, but Dr Ceder proposes to make it systematic. Over the centuries, chemists have discovered about 30,000 inorganic chemical compounds (those that are not based around carbon skeletons), almost any of which might theoretically be suitable material for an electrode. Examining the relevant properties of all of them in the laboratory is out of the question, but Dr Ceder thinks he has found a short cut. He is involved in something called the materials genome project, which takes the known properties of inorganic compounds and turns them into extremely sophisticated computer models. These models are able to calculate the quantum-mechanical properties of the chemicals they are mimicking—and they seem to get it right. When Dr Ceder has checked the predictions for hitherto untested materials by conducting real experiments, he has found that the results coincide.
The materials genome project obviously has much wider applications than battery electrodes, but that is where Dr Ceder has started. His computer is now chewing its way through the chemical encyclopedia, looking for the likeliest candidates. Watch this space.
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Life after death
Jun 19th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Nuclear power is clean, but can it overcome its image problem?
Illustration by Ian WhadcockIF YOU want to make an environmentalist squirm, mention nuclear power. Atomic energy was the green movement’s darkest nightmare: the child of mass destruction, the spawner of waste that will remain dangerous for millennia, the ultimate victory of pitiless technology over frail humanity. And not even cheap. Well, times change. The followers of Rachel Carson and the Club of Rome in the 1960s and 1970s had not heard of the greenhouse effect, but today’s greens have. And they know that nuclear reactors are the one proven way to make carbon-dioxide-free electricity in large and reliable quantities that does not depend (as hydroelectric and geothermal energy do) on the luck of the geographical draw. What a dilemma for a thoughtful tree-hugger.
Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace, faces no such dilemma, though. He is such a convert to the nuclear cause that he now chooses to consult for it. Cynics take him to task for that, but he makes no apology. His view of the world, shared by James Lovelock, the inventor of Gaia (the idea that the Earth itself has some of the characteristics of a living organism), is that nuclear power—which already provides 15% of the world’s electricity—is the only possible way out of climate change. Mr Lovelock thinks it is probably too late anyway, and that Gaia will shake herself and be rid of the plague of humans that now infest her skin. Mr Moore thinks she can be persuaded not to, if nuclear power is applied in even larger doses.
Given the widespread concern about nuclear energy, how can that be done? Partly, the answer comes, by shifting priorities (for today’s youth, climate change is what global nuclear warfare was for the baby-boomers). Partly by the fading of memories: the accident at Three Mile Island, which ended America’s nuclear dreams, took place nearly three decades ago, and even the Soviet disaster at Chernobyl is more than two decades past. And partly by redefining “cheap”. The Electric Power Research Institute, an American industry body, puts the cost of nuclear electricity at 6.5 cents a kWh. Not cheaper than coal’s 5 cents, but cheaper than coal that has had a price put on its carbon emissions. The time, then, is ripe for a rethink.
Ernest Moniz, MIT’s leading energy guru and himself a nuclear physicist, agrees. He thinks that, on the technical side at least, the key to a nuclear revival is to go from a craft-based approach, in which each reactor is a bespoke thing of beauty, to a manufacturing approach, in which modules of components are made in factories and simply bolted together on site.
The other modern desideratum, he believes, is “passive safety”. This seems to be the same as what engineers used to call “fail-safe”, but perhaps the marketing department no longer approves of the word “fail” getting anywhere near a reactor. What it means is that safety measures kick in automatically in an emergency rather than having to be activated. That can be something as simple as configuring the control rods that regulate the speed of a reaction so that they drop by gravity rather than having to be inserted.
Both Dr Moniz’s preconditions are beginning to be met. The world’s three largest nuclear-reactor firms are hoping for sales of reactors whose designs have been upgraded to be more “bolt-together” and passively safe than their predecessors. According to CERA there are plans in America alone to build 14 AP1000 Westinghouse reactors, six General Electric economic simplified boiling-water reactors, two or more GE advanced boiling-water reactors and seven of the French firm Areva’s latest design, the European pressurised reactor.
New generation
Indeed, the idea of modularity can be taken even further. Toshiba, a large Japanese engineering firm, is planning something known as nuclear batteries: factory-made sealed units with an output of 10 megawatts and a lifetime of 15-30 years. When they stop working, you simply send them back to the factory for disposal.
The acme of modular, factory-built, passively safe reactor design, however, is found in South Africa. People there have been experimenting with so-called pebble-bed reactors for decades. They hope to start building one for real in 2010. A pebble-bed reactor is fuelled by small spheres that are, in essence, tiny reactors in their own right. They are made of uranium oxide (the fuel) and graphite (a substance that slows down the flying neutrons that cause nuclear fission). Pile enough pebbles together and a chain reaction will start. Nor is any complicated pipework required to extract the heat. All you need do is run an inert gas such as helium through the pebbles and it will collect the heat for you.
The design also looks like the ultimate in passive safety because a phenomenon called Doppler broadening, which changes the speeds of the neutrons and makes them less likely to cause fission, shuts it down automatically if it overheats—though critics argue that the graphite in the pebbles is a fire hazard, and that helium is so leaky that there is a risk of air getting into the system and starting a fire.
None of these ideas deals with the question of nuclear waste. But that is largely a political problem, not a technical one. Though it sounds like a cop-out, the best answer really is to bury the stuff for the time being. That should be done in places where it can easily be recovered for reprocessing one day when technology has caught up. But it is also worth noting that buried, unprocessed waste cannot be used to make bombs.
THE FUTURE OF ENERGY
Flights of fancy
Jun 19th 2008
From The Economist print edition
The world of energy must change if things are to continue as before
Illustration by Ian Whadcock
AS SAMUEL GOLDWYN wisely observed, you should never make predictions, especially about the future. As far as predicting the technological future is concerned, people almost always either overshoot or undershoot. Holidays on the moon by 2000, as forecast in the 1960s? Not exactly. A quick hop out of the atmosphere, courtesy of Virgin Galactic, is the limit of that vision for the moment. On the other hand, a seemingly boring way of linking computer files full of data on subatomic physics can turn into a world wide web of information in half a decade.
In retrospect, this special report will no doubt be proved to have been guilty of both over- and undershooting. It has begun from the premise that big changes are afoot in the energy field, and has tried to pick the technologies most likely to be important. Some outcomes are mutually exclusive. A truly electric car would eliminate the need for biofuels, except, perhaps, in aircraft. Truly cheap biofuels might price electric cars out of the market. A breakthrough in the capture and storage of carbon dioxide would bring coal back into play with a vengeance. Geothermal may be better than solar. Solar may be better than wind.
The report has ignored some technologies because they will not get anywhere. Fusion, that favourite of fantasists, is 30 years away, as it always has been and probably always will be. Giant satellites collecting sunlight and beaming the energy to Earth as microwaves are an idea of heroic proportions, but enough sunlight gets through the atmosphere to make them irrelevant. Other technologies may make a contribution, but only on a small scale. The idea of floating platforms that capture wave energy is technically feasible, but it seems more trouble than building wind turbines. Tidal power works but, even more than hydro, it depends on geography. And the idea of liberating hydro from geography with small, free-standing turbines may have local applications, but maintaining such turbines is far more trouble than taking a spanner to a windmill.
All sorts of wacky but intriguing ideas are being looked into, such as flying turbines that would exploit the high winds of the jetstream. And so are perfectly sensible ones, such as ultracapacitors for storing electricity, that are now niche products but might suddenly blossom, to the embarrassment of prophets. Maybe, too, the hydrogen economy will rear its head again—but only if a way can be found of storing the gas easily and at high density. That would require a material that can absorb large volumes of it. One for Dr Gerber’s materials genome project, perhaps.
This report has also ignored the question of efficiency, except in the special context of smart grids. The idea of “negawatts”, as improvements in efficiency are sometimes known, has always been a favourite of greens. But there is too often a gleeful hairshirtedness to their pronouncements, which helps to explain why high-profile changes such as the introduction of energy-efficient light bulbs are viewed cynically by so many people.
In any case, a lot of efficiency improvements just happen in the background, as part of most businesses’ continuous search for cost savings. Car engines, for example, are much more efficient than they used to be, and are likely to become still more so. The reason that American cars are such gas-guzzlers is not that their engines have got worse but that the cars themselves have got heavier.
Besides, as Robert Metcalfe, the networking guru, said at a recent conference: “You are not going to conserve your way out of the problem.” The need to keep doing the same thing—consuming energy in ever larger quantities—is a force for change. Price, political security and environmental pressures are all pushing in the same direction. How quickly that change will happen is hard to tell, but it is wise to remember the power of compound interest.
Sunlit uplands
In some fields, such as information technology, change happens suddenly or not at all. In others, such as energy, it can happen gradually to start with, but as the curve accelerates upward there comes a point where things move very fast. Ten years ago wind turbines were marginal. Now they are taken seriously, and in another decade they may contribute as much as a fifth of the world’s electricity.
The same could happen to solar energy, which is ten years behind wind, and geothermal, with a 20-year lag. Whether it would happen faster if carbon emissions were charged for at an honest price is a moot point. Certainly, that is the only way to bring about the widespread adoption of carbon-dioxide capture and storage. But for the rest, the best way might, paradoxically, be what exists now: a threat that is real enough for electricity generators to price it into their future calculations without affecting their existing plants.
The lack of new coal-fired capacity creates a real opportunity for alternatives, among them renewables. But the lack of an actual carbon price still keeps the cost of existing electricity down, and thus the necessary incentives in place to make Google’s cheaper-than-coal equation a reality.
If and when such cheaper alternatives arrive, the markets of Asia will open and Mr Khosla, an Indian-born American, will see the fruits of his adopted homeland roll out into his native country. It will be a long time before King Coal and Queen Oil are dethroned completely, but their reigns as absolute monarchs of all they survey are coming slowly to an end.
Illustration by Ian Whadcock
WIND power works, and will work better in the future. But wind is only an interim stop on the way to a world where electricity no longer relies on fossil fuels. The ultimate goal is to harvest the sun’s energy directly by intercepting sunlight, rather than by waiting for that sunlight to stir up the atmosphere and sticking turbines in the resulting airstreams.
Fortunately, inventors love that sort of problem. Ideas they have come up with range from using the sun to run simple heating systems for buildings, deploying “reverse radiators” painted black, to the sharpest cutting edge of that trendiest of fields, nanotechnology, to ensure that every last photon is captured and converted into electricity. The most iconic form of solar power, the photovoltaic cell, is currently the fastest-growing type of alternative energy, increasing by 50% a year. The price of the electricity it produces is falling, too. According to Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), an American consultancy run by Daniel Yergin, a kWh of photovoltaic electricity cost 50 cents in 1995. That had fallen to 20 cents in 2005 and is still dropping. but heading in the right direction.
Photovoltaic cells (or solar cells, as they are known colloquially) convert sunlight directly into electricity. But that is not the only way to use the sun to make electrical power. It is also possible to concentrate the sun’s rays, use them to boil water and employ the resulting steam to drive a turbine. These two very different approaches illustrate an unresolved question about the future of energy: whether it will be generated centrally and transported over long distances to the consumer, as it has been in recent decades, or generated and consumed in more or less the same place, as it was a century ago.
A hot tin roof
The idea of solar cells is to keep things local. They are like wind turbines, only more so, in that even a single solar panel can produce power immediately. Put a few on your roof and, if you live in a reasonably sunny place, you can cut your electricity bill. Indeed, you may be able to sell electricity back to your own power company. The problem is that at the moment you may need to take out an overdraft to pay for the solar panels, and you will not get your money back for a long time.
Many engineers, however, are working to change that. One of them is Emanuel Sachs of MIT. Some engineers look for big, exciting technological improvements in the way solar cells work, but Dr Sachs prefers incremental change. As he sees it, it is such change that drives Moore’s law, that well-established description of the rapid improvement in the power of computer processors.
Moreover, the analogy is appropriate. Traditional solar cells are made of silicon, like computer chips, and for the same reason. They rely on that element’s properties as a semiconductor, in which negatively charged electrons and positively charged “holes” move around and carry a current as they do so. In the case of a solar cell, the current is created by sunlight knocking electrons out of place and thus creating holes. Dr Sachs’s first contribution to the incremental improvement was a technique called the string ribbon, which halved the amount of silicon needed to make a solar cell by drawing the element (in liquid form) out of a vat between two strings. That invention was marketed by a firm called Evergreen Solar.
His latest venture, a firm called 1366 Technologies (after the number of watts of solar power that strike an average square metre of the Earth’s surface), aims to follow this up with three new ideas that should, in combination, bring about a 27% improvement in efficiency. He and his colleagues have redesigned the surfaces of the silicon crystals on a nanoscale in order to keep reflected light bouncing around inside a cell until it is eventually absorbed. They have also managed to do something similar to the silver wires that collect the current. And they have made the wires themselves thinner as well so that they do not block so much light in the first place.
Dr Sachs says that these innovations will bring the capital cost of solar cells below $2 a watt. That is closing in on the cost of a coal-fired power station: a gigawatt (one billion watt) plant costs about $1 billion to build. The price, of course, is a different matter. As Paula Mints of Navigant Consulting, a firm based in Palo Alto, California, points out, price is set by market conditions. These—particularly the generous subsidies given to solar power in some European countries—have kept prices well above costs in recent years. Nevertheless, as chart 4 shows, the price of solar cells has fallen significantly, too.
Other researchers back a newer technology known as thin-film photovoltaics. Thin-film cells can be made with silicon, but most progress is being made with ones that use mixtures of metals, sometimes exotic ones, as the semiconductor. These mixtures are not as efficient as traditional bulk-silicon cells (meaning that they do not convert as much sunlight to electricity per square metre of cell). But they use far less material, which makes them cheaper, and they can be laid down on flexible surfaces such as sheets of steel the thickness of a human hair, which gives them wider applications.
At the moment, the commercial leader in this area is a firm called First Solar, which uses cadmium telluride as the film. But First Solar is about to be given a run for its money by companies such as Miasolé, a small Californian firm, that have gone for a mixture of copper, indium, gallium and selenium, known as CIGS. This mixture is reckoned to be more efficient than cadmium telluride, though still not as good as traditional silicon. And it has the public-relations advantage of not containing cadmium, a notorious poison—though First Solar’s films carefully lock the cadmium up in a way that renders it harmless.
At the moment thin-film solar cells are being packaged and sold as standard solar panels, but that could easily change. First Solar applies its films to glass, but Miasolé’s boss, Joseph Laia, points out that his steel-based products are flexible and lightweight enough to be used as building materials in their own right. Greener-than-thou Californians who wish to fall in with their governor’s plan for a million solar roofs, announced in 2006, currently have to bolt panels onto their houses—an ugly, if visible, show of their credentials. If Mr Laia has his way, they will soon be able to use sheets of his company’s CIGS-covered steel as the roofing material itself.
Supporters of solar-thermal energy tend to look askance at solar panels. Cadmium telluride and CIGS may be cheaper than silicon, but glass and steel, on which solar-thermal relies, are cheaper still. The technology’s proponents think big: square-kilometres big. They want to fill the deserts with steel and glass mirrors and use the reflected sunlight to boil water and generate electricity, then plug into the long-distance DC networks developed for wind power to carry the juice to the cities.
Desert song
Those who worry about the political side of the world’s dependence on oil will be less than delighted to find that one country thinking seriously about such systems is Algeria. With the power-hungry markets of Europe to its north, across the Mediterranean, and a lot of sunshine going to waste in the Sahara desert to its south, Algeria’s government is looking for ways to connect the two. It is now building an experimental solar-thermal power station at Hassi R’mel, about 400km south of Algiers, which if all goes well will open next year. In April work started on a similar project at Aïn Béni Mathar, in Morocco, and others are in the pipeline elsewhere in north Africa. Fortunately for people like Mr Woolsey, the ex-CIA man, America has deserts of it own which are about to bloom with mirror-farms too.
There are four competing designs: parabolic-trough mirrors, parabolic-dish mirrors, “power towers” which use an array of mirrors to focus the sun’s rays on to an elevated platform, and Fresnel systems, which mimic a parabolic trough using (cheaper) flat mirrors. All either heat up water to make steam, which drives a generator, or heat and liquefy a salt with a low melting point such as sodium nitrate that is used to make steam.
All four of these designs are now either operating commercially in the deserts of south-west America or are undergoing pre-commercial trials. Although the total capacity at the moment, according to CERA, is a mere 400 megawatts, this will grow tenfold over the next four years if all projects now scheduled come to fruition, and probably a lot more after that. Moreover, those plants that melt a salt are able to divert part of the heat they collect into a thermal reservoir that can keep the generators turning at night. The main objection to solar power—that it goes off after sunset—is thus overcome.
From little acorns
The engineers clearly think they can deliver the technology. But can the technology deliver the power? A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that it can. Two years ago a task force put together by the governors of America’s western states identified 200 gigawatts-worth of prime sites for solar-thermal power within their territory (meaning places that had enough reliable sunshine, were close to transmission lines and were not environmentally or politically sensitive). That is equivalent to 20% of America’s existing electricity-generation capacity: not a bad start.
Robert Fishman, the boss of Ausra, an Australian-American company based in Palo Alto, California, reckons that his firm’s Fresnel arrays combined with its proprietary heat-storage system can produce electricity for 8 cents a kWh. That matches GE’s wind turbines, and mass production should bring it down further. It is not cheaper than “naked” coal (Ausra will benefit from various state governments’ requirements that their power utilities buy renewable power)—but if there were a carbon tax of $30 a tonne, or a requirement to capture and bury CO2, Ausra would be able to match the coal-fired stations’ prices.
The most intriguing technology of all, though, belongs to SUNRGI, a firm based in Los Angeles. This uses mirrors to concentrate sunlight, but focuses it on a solar cell rather than a boiler. The system is said to turn 37% of the light into electricity. In April the firm claimed it would be able to produce electricity for the magic figure of 5 cents a kWh.
That claim has yet to be put to the test, and should be viewed with some scepticism until it has been. But it is a good indication of the way the field is going. Solar power now seems to be roughly where wind was a decade ago. At the moment it contributes a mere 0.01% to the world’s output of electricity, but just over a decade of 50% annual growth would bring that to 1%, which is where wind is at the moment. If SUNRGI is to be believed, and the point where RE is is close, the rise to 1% might happen even faster. After that, the sky is the limit.
THE FUTURE OF ENERGY
Beneath your feet
Jun 19th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Geothermal could be hot
THE Philippines are not generally associated with the cutting edge of technological change. In one respect, though, the country is ahead of its time: around a quarter of its electricity is generated from underground heat. Such heat is free, inexhaustible and available day and night.
It is also part of a geology that sees parts of the country devastated by volcanic eruptions from time to time. The geysers that turn the generators are merely the gentlest manifestations of this volcanism. The question that exercises Jefferson Tester, a researcher at MIT, is whether it is possible to have the one without the other. The Earth’s depths are, after all, hot everywhere. So if there is no natural volcanism around to bring this heat to the surface, his answer is to create controlled, artificial volcanism—what is known as an engineered geothermal system (EGS). Instead of relying on natural hot springs, you make your own.
In principle, this is easy. Drill two parallel holes in the ground, a few hundred metres apart, and carry on drilling until the rock is hot enough (say 200ºC). Then pump cold water down one hole and wait for it to come back up the other at a suitably elevated temperature. The superheated water turns to steam which you use to power a generator. In Dr Tester’s view, the reason this source of power is neglected is that it is invisible. Everybody feels the wind and the sun, but only miners notice that the Earth’s interior is hot, so no one thinks of drilling for that heat.
Dr Tester reckons that spending about $1 billion on demonstration projects over the next 15 years would change that. It would provide enough information to allow 100 gigawatts-worth of EGSs to be created in America by 2050, at a commercially acceptable price.
In principle, much more could be done. The recoverable heat in rock under the United States is the equivalent of 2,000 years-worth of the country’s current energy consumption, according to a report he and his colleagues published two years ago. A similar assessment of Europe’s heat resources from the Earth suggests that they could be used to generate as much electricity as all of the continent’s nuclear power stations produce now.
Rock-hard
Extracting this subterranean energy is not as easy as it sounds. Until the term EGS was coined, the field was known as hot-dry-rock geothermal energy, a name that encapsulates the problem precisely. A century of data collected by oil companies suggest it is impermeable rocks such as granite that are the most effective reservoirs of heat. Their very dryness increases their heat capacity. But to get the heat out you have to make them permeable. Hence the “engineered” in the new name.
Some of Dr Tester’s $1 billion would be spent working out how to drill cheaply and effectively through this sort of rock—something that oil companies tend to avoid because impermeable rocks do not contain petroleum. A lot of the money would go on finding ways to force open fissures in the granite to let the water flow from the injection hole to the exit.
The Cooper Basin in South Australia has the hottest non-volcanic rocks of any known place in the world, and Australia leads the field in exploiting subterranean heat, with seven firms snooping around the area. One of them, Geodynamics, recently completed what it claims is a commercial-scale well. And the turbines will also turn soon at an experimental non-commercial project at Soultz, in France.
If it can be made to work, EGS has got the lot. No unsightly turbines. No need to cover square kilometres of land with vast mirrors. And it is always on. Anybody got a billion dollars handy?
Grow your own
Jun 19th 2008
From The Economist print edition
The biofuels of the future will be tailor-made
BURIED in the news a few weeks ago was an announcement by a small Californian firm called Amyris. It was, perhaps, a parable for the future of biotechnology. Amyris is famous in the world of tropical medicine for applying the latest biotechnological tools to the manufacture of artemisinin, an antimalarial drug that is normally extracted from a Chinese vine. The vines cannot produce enough of the stuff, though, so Amyris’s researchers have taken a few genes here and there, tweaked them and stitched them together into a biochemical pathway enabling bacteria to make a chemical precursor that can easily be converted into the drug.
But that is not what the announcement was about. Instead, it was that Amyris was going into partnership with Crystalsev, a Brazilian firm, to make car fuel out of cane sugar. Not ethanol (though Brazil already has a thriving market for ethanol-powered cars), but a hydrocarbon that has the characteristics of diesel fuel. Technically, it is not ordinary diesel, either: in chemist-speak, it is an isoprenoid rather than a mixture of alkanes and aromatics. But the driver will not notice the difference.
The point of the parable is this: biotechnology may have cut its teeth on medicines, but the big bucks are likely to be in bulk chemicals. And few chemicals are bulkier than fuels. Where Amyris is leading, many are following. Some small firms with new and interesting technologies are trying to go it alone. Others are teaming up with big energy firms, in much the same way that biotech companies with a promising drug are often taken under the wing of a large pharmaceutical company. The big firms themselves are involved, too, both through in-house laboratories and by giving money to universities. Biofuels, once seen as a cross between eccentric greenwash and a politically acceptable way of subsidising farmers, are now poised to become big business.
Grassed up
The list of things that need to be done to create a proper biofuel industry is a long one. New crops, tailored to fuel rather than food production, have to be created. Ways of converting those crops into feedstock have to be developed. That feedstock has then to be turned into something that people want to buy, at a price they can afford.
All parts of this chain are currently the subjects of avid research and development. Some biofuels were already competitive with oil products even at 2006 oil prices (see table 5). The R&D effort will bring more of them into line, as will any long-term rise in the price of crude oil.
As far as the crops themselves are concerned, there are three runners at the starting gate: grasses, trees and algae. Grasses and trees are grown on dry land, but need a lot of processing. The idea is to take the whole biomass of the plant (particularly the cellulose of which a plant-cell’s walls are made) and turn it into fuel. At the moment, that fuel is often ethanol. Hence the term “cellulosic ethanol” that has gained recent currency. Algae, being aquatic, are more fiddly to grow, but promise a high-quality product, oil, that will not need much treatment to become biodiesel.
One of the leading proponents of better grasses is Ceres, a firm based in Thousand Oaks, California. The species it has chosen to examine—switchgrass, miscanthus, sugarcane and sorghum—are so-called C4 grasses. These are favourites with the biofuel industry because they share a particularly efficient form of photosynthesis that enables them to grow fast. Ceres proposes to make them grow faster still, using a mixture of “smart” breeding techniques (in which desirable genes are identified scientifically but assembled into plants by traditional hybridisation) and straightforward genetic engineering.
The chosen grasses also thrive in a range of climates. Switchgrass and miscanthus are temperate. Sugarcane and sorghum are tropical. Ceres proposes to extend their ranges still further by creating strains that will tolerate heat or cold or drought or salt, allowing them to be grown on land that cannot be used for food crops. That will make them cheaper, as well as reducing the competition between foods and biofuels.
Trees, meanwhile, are the province of firms such as ArborGen, of Summerville, South Carolina. Like Ceres, ArborGen is working on four species: eucalyptus, poplar, and the loblolly and radiata pines. It is applying similar techniques to those used by Ceres to speed up the growth of these trees and to increase their tolerance of cold. Although creating raw materials for biofuels is not this company’s only objective (paper pulp and timber are others), it sees such fuels as a big market.
Algae, too, are up for modification. One problem with them is harvesting the oil they produce. That means extracting them from their ponds, drying them out and breaking open their cells. This process is so tedious that some companies are considering the idea of burning the dried algae in power stations instead.
One firm that is not is Synthetic Genomics, the latest venture of Craig Venter (the man who led the privately funded version of the Human Genome Project). Dr Venter hopes to overcome the oil-collection problem by genetic engineering. Synthetic Genomics’s algae have been fitted with genes that create new secretion pathways through their outer membranes. These cause the algal cells to expel the oil almost as soon as they have manufactured it. It then floats to the surface of the pond, allowing it to be skimmed off like cream and turned into biodiesel. The algae are also engineered to make more oil than their wild counterparts.
Harvesting useful fuels from vascular plants, as grasses, trees and their kind are known collectively, is a trickier business. These plants are composed mainly of three types of large molecule. Besides cellulose, there are hemicellulose and lignin. Each is made of chains of smaller molecules, and all three are often bound together in a complex called lignocellulose, particularly in wood. There are many ways these long-chain molecules might be turned into fuel, but all of these processes are more complex than for algae.
As chart 6 shows, turning sunlight into biofuel involves three steps, though different methods may miss out some of these steps. Algae can make the leap from start to finish directly, whereas vascular plants cannot. One way of dealing with them is to dry them and then heat them with little or no oxygen present. This is called pyrolysis and, if done correctly, results in a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen called “syngas” (short for synthesis gas). With suitable catalysts, syngas can be turned into fuel.
This is the approach taken by Choren Industries in Freiburg, Germany, and Range Fuels in Treutlen County, Georgia. In both cases the feedstock is chippings and other leftovers from forestry and timber-mills. Choren is making hydrocarbon diesel and Range ethanol. Both factories, therefore, are steps on the road to making fuel from trees. Syngas can also be turned into ethanol by bacteria of the genus Clostridium (a group better known for the chemical used in botox treatment). That is being done by Coskata, a firm based in Warrenville, Illinois. General Motors (GM) likes this idea so much it has bought a share of the company.
An alternative to the syngas method is to break the cellulose and hemicellulose up into their component “monomer” molecules. That is easier said than done, particularly if lignin is involved, since lignin is resistant to such conversion. The amount of coal in the world is proof of its resilience. Coal is composed mainly of lignin from plants that failed to decompose completely and were fossilised as a result.
Many firms, however, have developed enzymes that break down biomass in this way. Iogen, of Ottawa, Canada, was one of the first. Its enzymes decompose cellulose and hemicellulose into sugar monomers. (The lignin is burned to generate heat for the process.) Abengoa, a Spanish firm that is also involved in solar energy, uses this approach as well.
Sugar and spice
Once you have your sugar, you can ferment it. These days that need not mean using yeast to make ethanol. A whole range of bugs, some natural, some engineered, can now be deployed to make a whole range of products. Amyris’s souped-up micro-organisms (some are bacteria, some yeasts) turn sugar not into ethanol but into isoprenoids, at a cost competitive with petroleum-based diesel. LS9, based near San Francisco, uses a similar method but is turning out alkanes (for petrol) and fatty acids (for biodiesel). It, too, is starting to scale up production. Synthetic Genomics is doing something similar, though the firm is cagey about which fuel is being produced. In each case, however, what is made is a chemical precisely tailored to its purpose, rather than the ad hoc mixture that comes out of a refinery. The rival companies thus argue that their products are actually better than oil-based ones.
Illustration by Ian WhadcockAt least one firm, Mascoma, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, employs a single species of bug, Thermoanaerobacterium saccharolyticum, both to break down the biomass and to digest the resulting sugar. Mascoma will use both grass and wood as feedstocks. In May it signed deals with GM and Marathon Oil.
It is also possible to use purified enzymes to do the conversion from sugar to fuel, as well as from biomass to sugar, and at least two firms are working on applying them to the whole process. Codexis, based in Redwood City, California, has created a range of enzymes by a method akin to sexual reproduction and natural selection. Last year it signed a deal with Shell to use this technique to produce biofuels of various types. And a Danish firm, Danisco, has teamed up with DuPont to do the same thing with its own proprietary enzymes.
Shell is also involved in a project to turn sugar into hydrocarbons, this time by straight chemical processing. It is putting up the money. The technology (the most important part of which is a set of proprietary non-biological catalysts) is provided by Virent Energy systems, of Madison, Wisconsin.
Which of these approaches will work best is anybody’s guess. But their sheer number is proof that the most radical thinking in the field of renewable energy is going on in biofuels. It is in this area that the most unexpected breakthroughs are likely to come, says Steven Koonin, BP’s chief scientist. BP is backing one of the biggest academic projects intended to look into biofuels, the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI), to the tune of $500m, which suggests that the company’s board agrees with him. The EBI is a partnership of the University of California, Berkeley, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Illinois.
One of the people involved, Steven Chu, the head of the Lawrence Berkeley laboratory, is a man with a grand vision. This vision is of a “glucose economy” that will replace the existing oil economy. Glucose, the most common monomer sugar, would be turned into fuels and maybe even the bio-equivalents of petrochemicals—bioplastics, for example—in local factories and then shipped around the world. That would be a boon to tropical countries, where photosynthesis is at its most rampant, though it might not play so well to James Woolsey’s security fears, since it risks replacing one set of unreliable suppliers with another.
However, there is plenty of biomass to go around. A study by America’s Departments of Energy and Agriculture suggests that even with only small changes to existing practice, 1.3 billion tonnes of plant matter could be collected from American soil without affecting food production. If this were converted into ethanol using the best technology available today, it would add up to the equivalent of 350 billion litres of petrol, or 65% of the country’s current petrol consumption. And that is before specially bred energy crops and other technological advances are taken into account. If America wants it, biofuel autarky looks more achievable than the oil-based sort. And if it does not, then the world’s hitherto impoverished tropics may find themselves in the middle of an unexpected and welcome industrial revolution.
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THE FUTURE OF ENERGY
The end of the petrolhead
Jun 19th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Tomorrow’s cars may just plug in
Illustration by Ian WhadcockNOTHING ages faster than the future. A few years ago there was general agreement that if the internal-combustion engine ever was replaced by something clean, that something would be the fuel cell. A fuel cell is a way of reacting hydrogen and oxygen together in a controlled way and extracting electricity from the process. It was to be the precursor of what was known as the hydrogen economy, in which that gas would replace fossil fuels and power almost everything.
Leaving aside the problems of transporting and storing a light and leaky gas, what no one was very clear about was where the hydrogen itself would come from. You would have to make it from something else. That something would either be a mixture of fossil fuel and water (fuels can be reacted with steam to make hydrogen and carbon dioxide, but you still have to get rid of the carbon dioxide), or just water itself, via electrolysis.
But why bother? Why not cut out the middleman and plug your car directly into the electricity mains instead? And that, it seems, is what may happen. You don’t hear much about the hydrogen economy these days. Nor fuel cells. The buzz-phrase now is “plug-in hybrid”.
Plug-ins should not be confused with existing hybrid vehicles, such as Toyota’s Prius, which contains an internal-combustion engine as well as two electric ones. Either sort may drive the wheels. The electric motors kick in when they can do a more efficient job than the petrol engine, but even then the electricity comes ultimately, via batteries, from burning petrol.
In a plug-in, the electricity comes from the mains, via an ordinary electrical socket. Some intermediate designs retain the idea of two sorts of engine, but the goal is that the car should be powered by electric motors alone. If the batteries run down, a petrol-powered generator will take over. (Existing batteries are too expensive to give such a car the range of a standard petrol-driven machine.) But most cars, most of the time, are used for short journeys. Gerbrand Ceder, a battery scientist at MIT, reckons that if the first 50km of an average car’s daily range were provided by batteries rather than petrol, annual petrol consumption would be halved. Given that the electrical equivalent of a litre of petrol costs about 25 cents, that is an attractive reduction.
The widespread adoption of plug-ins might also reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, depending on what sort of power station made the electricity in the first place. Even energy from a coal-fired station is less polluting than the serial explosions that drive an internal-combustion engine. If the energy comes from a source such as wind or nuclear, the gain is enormous.
Beyond that, the rise of plug-ins has implications for the electricity industry itself. If they succeed, they will put an unanticipated load on the system. In fact, they may remake electricity as well as transport.
Don’t all recharge at once
That is certainly the view of Peter Corsell of Gridpoint, a company based in Arlington, Virginia. His firm hopes to make its living selling the load-management technology required for “smart grids”. There are several reasons why such technology is desirable (see article). Mr Corsell goes one further: he reckons it will become essential if plug-ins arrive in force. At the moment, the grid would be unable to cope if a large number of commuters arriving home plugged in their cars more or less simultaneously to recharge them. Yet if those same cars were recharged at three o’clock in the morning, when demand is low, it would benefit both consumer (who would get cheap power) and producer (who would be able to sell otherwise wasted electricity). Such cars might even act as micro-peakers—reservoirs of electrical energy that a power company could draw on if a car were not on the road. Managing plug-ins, Mr Corsell thinks, will be the smart grid’s killer application.
In sunny climes, plug-ins might also provide another use for solar cells. Google is already experimenting with photovoltaic car parks. These have awnings covered in solar cells which will shade its employees’ cars and simultaneously recharge them. That is an idea which could spread. Supermarkets, for example, might find that car parks with plugs would attract customers who wanted to top up their cars. And the more opportunities there are for stationary cars to be recharged, the more likely they are to be bought.
Plug-ins are moving from idea to reality with amazing speed. General production of the Tesla, Elon Musk’s new sports car, began in March (the firm is Californian, but the cars are built in Britain). The Tesla is not even a hybrid. It draws all of its power from lithium-ion batteries (the sort that power laptop computers), and it has a range of 350km. It can manage that because its price of $109,000 buys a lot of batteries; Tesla owners are not the sort who count their pennies.
Nor is the Tesla the only sports car to go down this road. Electric motors may lack a throaty roar, but they actually do a better job than petrol engines in high-performance vehicles. They have higher torque at low revs which makes them accelerate faster. In Britain a new firm called the Lightning Car Company plans to revive the country’s sports-car tradition with the Lightning GT. Mr Musk also faces competition in California, from Fisker Automotive, whose eponymous founder Henrik Fisker helped design the Tesla. (Tesla Motors is now suing Fisker for infringing its intellectual property.)
Mass-production plug-ins are not far away either, and the rising price of petrol makes them look more attractive by the day. General Motors intends to launch a plug-in hybrid called the Volt by 2010, and Toyota plans a plug-in version of the Prius. Most of the other big car firms are making me-too noises. Only Honda and Mercedes seem to be sticking enthusiastically to fuel cells. It is all very encouraging. But what would really make a difference would be a breakthrough in battery technology.
At the moment, lithium-ion batteries are the favoured variety. This kind of battery uses lithium in its ionic form (ie, with the atoms stripped of an electron to make them positive). When the battery is fully charged, these ions hang around one of its electrodes, the anode, which is usually made of graphite. During operation, the ions migrate within the battery from this electrode to the other one, the cathode, and electrons (which are negatively charged) pass between the electrodes through an external circuit. It is that current of electrons which drives the motor. The cathode may be made of a variety of materials. Cobalt oxide is traditional but expensive. Manganese oxide is becoming popular. But the future probably lies with iron phosphate, which has less of a tendency to overheat, a problem that has resulted in battery recalls in the past.
Iron phosphate certainly will be the future if General Motors has anything to do with it. GM is collaborating with A123Systems, a firm started by Dr Ceder’s colleague Yet-Ming Chiang, to develop batteries with iron-phosphate cathodes for the Volt. A123’s particular trick is that the iron phosphate in its cathodes comes in the form of precisely engineered nanoparticles. This increases the surface area available for the lithium ions to react with when the current is flowing, so such batteries can be charged and discharged rapidly.
The Lightning, too, is making use of nanotechnology. Its batteries, developed by Altairnano of Reno, Nevada, replace the graphite anode with one made of lithium titanate nanoparticles. The firm claims that its batteries are not only safer (graphite can burn; lithium titanate cannot), but can also be recharged more rapidly. Using a 480-volt outlet, such as might be found in a roadside service station, the job should be done in ten minutes.
Dr Ceder reckons he may be able to do even better than this. His version of an iron-phosphate battery can charge or discharge in ten seconds. It, too, could be recharged rapidly at a roadside filling station. He reckons the process would have to be controlled to stop overheating, but a safe refill would take only five minutes. And he thinks batteries might get better still.
The 30,000-compound question
At the moment the process of finding better electrode materials is haphazard, but Dr Ceder proposes to make it systematic. Over the centuries, chemists have discovered about 30,000 inorganic chemical compounds (those that are not based around carbon skeletons), almost any of which might theoretically be suitable material for an electrode. Examining the relevant properties of all of them in the laboratory is out of the question, but Dr Ceder thinks he has found a short cut. He is involved in something called the materials genome project, which takes the known properties of inorganic compounds and turns them into extremely sophisticated computer models. These models are able to calculate the quantum-mechanical properties of the chemicals they are mimicking—and they seem to get it right. When Dr Ceder has checked the predictions for hitherto untested materials by conducting real experiments, he has found that the results coincide.
The materials genome project obviously has much wider applications than battery electrodes, but that is where Dr Ceder has started. His computer is now chewing its way through the chemical encyclopedia, looking for the likeliest candidates. Watch this space.
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Life after death
Jun 19th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Nuclear power is clean, but can it overcome its image problem?
Illustration by Ian WhadcockIF YOU want to make an environmentalist squirm, mention nuclear power. Atomic energy was the green movement’s darkest nightmare: the child of mass destruction, the spawner of waste that will remain dangerous for millennia, the ultimate victory of pitiless technology over frail humanity. And not even cheap. Well, times change. The followers of Rachel Carson and the Club of Rome in the 1960s and 1970s had not heard of the greenhouse effect, but today’s greens have. And they know that nuclear reactors are the one proven way to make carbon-dioxide-free electricity in large and reliable quantities that does not depend (as hydroelectric and geothermal energy do) on the luck of the geographical draw. What a dilemma for a thoughtful tree-hugger.
Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace, faces no such dilemma, though. He is such a convert to the nuclear cause that he now chooses to consult for it. Cynics take him to task for that, but he makes no apology. His view of the world, shared by James Lovelock, the inventor of Gaia (the idea that the Earth itself has some of the characteristics of a living organism), is that nuclear power—which already provides 15% of the world’s electricity—is the only possible way out of climate change. Mr Lovelock thinks it is probably too late anyway, and that Gaia will shake herself and be rid of the plague of humans that now infest her skin. Mr Moore thinks she can be persuaded not to, if nuclear power is applied in even larger doses.
Given the widespread concern about nuclear energy, how can that be done? Partly, the answer comes, by shifting priorities (for today’s youth, climate change is what global nuclear warfare was for the baby-boomers). Partly by the fading of memories: the accident at Three Mile Island, which ended America’s nuclear dreams, took place nearly three decades ago, and even the Soviet disaster at Chernobyl is more than two decades past. And partly by redefining “cheap”. The Electric Power Research Institute, an American industry body, puts the cost of nuclear electricity at 6.5 cents a kWh. Not cheaper than coal’s 5 cents, but cheaper than coal that has had a price put on its carbon emissions. The time, then, is ripe for a rethink.
Ernest Moniz, MIT’s leading energy guru and himself a nuclear physicist, agrees. He thinks that, on the technical side at least, the key to a nuclear revival is to go from a craft-based approach, in which each reactor is a bespoke thing of beauty, to a manufacturing approach, in which modules of components are made in factories and simply bolted together on site.
The other modern desideratum, he believes, is “passive safety”. This seems to be the same as what engineers used to call “fail-safe”, but perhaps the marketing department no longer approves of the word “fail” getting anywhere near a reactor. What it means is that safety measures kick in automatically in an emergency rather than having to be activated. That can be something as simple as configuring the control rods that regulate the speed of a reaction so that they drop by gravity rather than having to be inserted.
Both Dr Moniz’s preconditions are beginning to be met. The world’s three largest nuclear-reactor firms are hoping for sales of reactors whose designs have been upgraded to be more “bolt-together” and passively safe than their predecessors. According to CERA there are plans in America alone to build 14 AP1000 Westinghouse reactors, six General Electric economic simplified boiling-water reactors, two or more GE advanced boiling-water reactors and seven of the French firm Areva’s latest design, the European pressurised reactor.
New generation
Indeed, the idea of modularity can be taken even further. Toshiba, a large Japanese engineering firm, is planning something known as nuclear batteries: factory-made sealed units with an output of 10 megawatts and a lifetime of 15-30 years. When they stop working, you simply send them back to the factory for disposal.
The acme of modular, factory-built, passively safe reactor design, however, is found in South Africa. People there have been experimenting with so-called pebble-bed reactors for decades. They hope to start building one for real in 2010. A pebble-bed reactor is fuelled by small spheres that are, in essence, tiny reactors in their own right. They are made of uranium oxide (the fuel) and graphite (a substance that slows down the flying neutrons that cause nuclear fission). Pile enough pebbles together and a chain reaction will start. Nor is any complicated pipework required to extract the heat. All you need do is run an inert gas such as helium through the pebbles and it will collect the heat for you.
The design also looks like the ultimate in passive safety because a phenomenon called Doppler broadening, which changes the speeds of the neutrons and makes them less likely to cause fission, shuts it down automatically if it overheats—though critics argue that the graphite in the pebbles is a fire hazard, and that helium is so leaky that there is a risk of air getting into the system and starting a fire.
None of these ideas deals with the question of nuclear waste. But that is largely a political problem, not a technical one. Though it sounds like a cop-out, the best answer really is to bury the stuff for the time being. That should be done in places where it can easily be recovered for reprocessing one day when technology has caught up. But it is also worth noting that buried, unprocessed waste cannot be used to make bombs.
THE FUTURE OF ENERGY
Flights of fancy
Jun 19th 2008
From The Economist print edition
The world of energy must change if things are to continue as before
Illustration by Ian Whadcock
AS SAMUEL GOLDWYN wisely observed, you should never make predictions, especially about the future. As far as predicting the technological future is concerned, people almost always either overshoot or undershoot. Holidays on the moon by 2000, as forecast in the 1960s? Not exactly. A quick hop out of the atmosphere, courtesy of Virgin Galactic, is the limit of that vision for the moment. On the other hand, a seemingly boring way of linking computer files full of data on subatomic physics can turn into a world wide web of information in half a decade.
In retrospect, this special report will no doubt be proved to have been guilty of both over- and undershooting. It has begun from the premise that big changes are afoot in the energy field, and has tried to pick the technologies most likely to be important. Some outcomes are mutually exclusive. A truly electric car would eliminate the need for biofuels, except, perhaps, in aircraft. Truly cheap biofuels might price electric cars out of the market. A breakthrough in the capture and storage of carbon dioxide would bring coal back into play with a vengeance. Geothermal may be better than solar. Solar may be better than wind.
The report has ignored some technologies because they will not get anywhere. Fusion, that favourite of fantasists, is 30 years away, as it always has been and probably always will be. Giant satellites collecting sunlight and beaming the energy to Earth as microwaves are an idea of heroic proportions, but enough sunlight gets through the atmosphere to make them irrelevant. Other technologies may make a contribution, but only on a small scale. The idea of floating platforms that capture wave energy is technically feasible, but it seems more trouble than building wind turbines. Tidal power works but, even more than hydro, it depends on geography. And the idea of liberating hydro from geography with small, free-standing turbines may have local applications, but maintaining such turbines is far more trouble than taking a spanner to a windmill.
All sorts of wacky but intriguing ideas are being looked into, such as flying turbines that would exploit the high winds of the jetstream. And so are perfectly sensible ones, such as ultracapacitors for storing electricity, that are now niche products but might suddenly blossom, to the embarrassment of prophets. Maybe, too, the hydrogen economy will rear its head again—but only if a way can be found of storing the gas easily and at high density. That would require a material that can absorb large volumes of it. One for Dr Gerber’s materials genome project, perhaps.
This report has also ignored the question of efficiency, except in the special context of smart grids. The idea of “negawatts”, as improvements in efficiency are sometimes known, has always been a favourite of greens. But there is too often a gleeful hairshirtedness to their pronouncements, which helps to explain why high-profile changes such as the introduction of energy-efficient light bulbs are viewed cynically by so many people.
In any case, a lot of efficiency improvements just happen in the background, as part of most businesses’ continuous search for cost savings. Car engines, for example, are much more efficient than they used to be, and are likely to become still more so. The reason that American cars are such gas-guzzlers is not that their engines have got worse but that the cars themselves have got heavier.
Besides, as Robert Metcalfe, the networking guru, said at a recent conference: “You are not going to conserve your way out of the problem.” The need to keep doing the same thing—consuming energy in ever larger quantities—is a force for change. Price, political security and environmental pressures are all pushing in the same direction. How quickly that change will happen is hard to tell, but it is wise to remember the power of compound interest.
Sunlit uplands
In some fields, such as information technology, change happens suddenly or not at all. In others, such as energy, it can happen gradually to start with, but as the curve accelerates upward there comes a point where things move very fast. Ten years ago wind turbines were marginal. Now they are taken seriously, and in another decade they may contribute as much as a fifth of the world’s electricity.
The same could happen to solar energy, which is ten years behind wind, and geothermal, with a 20-year lag. Whether it would happen faster if carbon emissions were charged for at an honest price is a moot point. Certainly, that is the only way to bring about the widespread adoption of carbon-dioxide capture and storage. But for the rest, the best way might, paradoxically, be what exists now: a threat that is real enough for electricity generators to price it into their future calculations without affecting their existing plants.
The lack of new coal-fired capacity creates a real opportunity for alternatives, among them renewables. But the lack of an actual carbon price still keeps the cost of existing electricity down, and thus the necessary incentives in place to make Google’s cheaper-than-coal equation a reality.
If and when such cheaper alternatives arrive, the markets of Asia will open and Mr Khosla, an Indian-born American, will see the fruits of his adopted homeland roll out into his native country. It will be a long time before King Coal and Queen Oil are dethroned completely, but their reigns as absolute monarchs of all they survey are coming slowly to an end.
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