Solid-state lighting — lightbulbs made from light-emitting diodes — dramatically reduces electricity use and greenhouse gas emissions.
It’s also poised to usher in an era of smart lighting. You’ll eventually be able to control properties of light, such as polarization and color, on-the-fly in indoor lighting, microscopes, computer displays, headlights, telecommunications and greenhouses.
Check out the Department of Energy’s Petroleum Reduction Planning tool (PREP), a nifty calculator that helps you reduce your fuel use.
You set a goal for how much fuel you want to save and choose one or more methods of getting there. The methods are fuel economy, reduced travel, different fuels and fuel blends, and hybrid electric vehicles. It also lets fleet operators calculate truck stop electrification, idling time reduction and onboard idle reduction.
The interface is adequate but we’d like to see it be a little easier to use and it helps to know that VMT stands for vehicle miles traveled, but overall it should help a lot of people cut their fuel use and with it their greenhouse gas emissions. We’ve added the calculator to the “What you can do” section of ERN’s Resources page.
There’s lots going on this week at the Materials Research Society fall meeting here in Boston. One of yesterday’s highlights was the panel discussion on the future of nuclear power moderated by Ira Flato, host of NPR’s Talk of the Nation Science Friday.
The five panelists offered a wide range of opinions (at times loudly and over each other) about whether and how issues like cost and waste management can be addressed and how much of a role nuclear power can play in replacing fossil fuels.
Chaim Braun of Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation argued that government subsidies are necessary to get the industry rolling again in order to work out supply-chain issues and develop the workforce.
Thomas Cochran of the Natural Resources Defense Council argued that instead we need to invest in other energy technologies that will be cheaper, safer and quicker to bring online.
University of Michigan’s Rodney Ewing said the panel was an example of how we’re ill-prepared scientifically to expand nuclear power. “I don’t think nuclear power is something we should rely on if this is the level of our discussion,” he said.
Über VC and clean tech thought leader Vinod Khosla dismissed much of the renewable energy industry as greenwashing during a talk he gave last Thursday at Palo Alto Research Center.
Khosla said photovoltaics and wind power won’t satisfy much of the world’s energy needs. He said well-off Westerners putting solar panels on their roofs and driving hybrid cars are doing little good: renewable energy technologies must be affordable to the masses in China and India to have a significant impact on carbon emissions. And he said we need to put our money where it has the best chance of making a difference.
Khosla’s broadside overreaches and comes off as an attempt to gin up controversy. How can you equate established renewable energy technologies (whatever their shortcomings) with the opportunistic deceptions of international conglomerates?
Nevertheless, Khosla has an important point about the dangers of thinking within the context of existing technologies. It’s important to aim for highly improbable goals, he said. Not surprisingly, he highlighted several companies — including some in his firm’s portfolio — as righteously audacious.
Out of the box
Khosla talked up the central idea of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book The Black Swan — our tendency to apply narrative meaning to random behavior and to extrapolate from the past in predicting the future. The black swans of the title are the unanticipated events that alter the course of history.
Khosla said our forecasts so often fail because they’re based on today’s technologies and those technologies will be replaced in the future we’re attempting to describe. Instead of forecasting we must create the future, and we need to produce black swans, he said. (I guess the term “disruptive technologies” is too ’90s.)
Back to basic research
Though different in tone, Khosla’s talk reminded me of Patricia Dehmer’s talk earlier this month at MIT (see previous post). She said that the cost-efficiency trajectories of today’s renewable energy technologies won’t bring them into mainstream use. She said we need breakthroughs in basic research to alter the fundamental economics of the technologies.
Several energy research heavyweights will have a chance to weigh in on the topic in a symposium, Basic Research for Global Energy Security: A Call to Action, at the AAAS annual meeting in February. Should be interesting, especially with Obama’s energy and research policies starting to take effect right about then.
It’s been busy here in Boston. Two conferences hit town this week (along with midwinter temperatures): the Conference on Clean Energy and Greenbuild.
And what a contrast.
Greenbuild is a sea of well appointed exhibitor booths filling the massive Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Bishop Desmond Tutu kicked off the series of high-profile keynote speakers. One hundred six educational sessions covered all aspects of sustainable design, construction and building management.
The Conference on Clean Energy was a much more intimate affair of panel discussions ranging from technology spinout strategies to regulatory and policy wish lists, and topped off by a business plan competition.
Conference on Clean Energy highlights:
Harvard’s George Church and MIT’s Angela Belcher answered the question of whether they would prefer to win a Nobel Prize or launch a green Google. Both chose green Google, reasoning it would effect greater change.
Science writer Oliver Morton’s keynote speech covered his new book Eating the Sun. He laid out an elegant vision of energy flows as the paradigm for natural energy systems ranging from the astronomical to the molecular and for sustainable energy technologies. I look forward to reading the book.
Speakers on the venture capital panel emphasized that though economic upheaval has changed the game, the pipeline is still open. Marianne Wu of Mohr Davidow said that VCs are continuing to invest in new clean tech businesses because of fundamental trends and the increasing pace of innovation, particularly with universities gearing up energy-related research.
This doesn’t mean business as usual, however. Chuck McDermott of RockPort Capital said that startup valuations are in flux: “We’ve hit the reset button but we don’t know yet what numbers will come up”. He also said it would be better for startups to avoid trying to raise funds in 2009.
The Ignite Clean Energy Competition 2009 kickoff topped off the Conference on Clean Energy last night. The business plan competition for clean energy entrepreneurs started with a networking/teambuilding mixer where five randomly chosen competitors had the opportunity to give one-minute pitches.
The pitches:
Even though it’s only tangentially related to energy, I was tickled by the bicycle trailer shopping cart. A couple of years ago I thought it was a neat idea but couldn’t find one. I sketched out a plan for what I wanted, but quickly encountered several engineering challenges, and so filed it away in my overflowing ideas folder where it languishes alongside many ungerminated seeds of screenplays and novels. I hope the idea is well executed and I get to buy one.
The pitch for limitless clean energy from water mysteriously provided no information and hinted at world-changing potential. We’ve all heard this many times before. But rather than dismiss the presenter, I choose to hold out the hope that maybe this time it’ll be different.
As with all things green these days, the number of energy-related research papers and the number of journals covering alternative energy are growing.
We’d like to welcome a pair of new scientific journals: the American Institute of Physics’ Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy and the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Energy & Environmental Science.
The American Institute of Physics publishes a dozen peer-reviewed journals including Applied Physics Letters. We’ve posted a news brief, Solar cells go micro, about the new journal’s first paper.
Science as a human endeavor is expanding at a tremendous rate. The number of scientists and engineers, and the number of research papers written about science doubles every ten years, according to a May 18, 2000 Nature essay by Terence Kealey.
With the world’s attention focused on the twin crises of global warming and the limits of fossil fuels, a growing amount of research is dedicated to renewable and sustainable energy. ERN has its work cut out for it.
Energy research should get a huge boost in the next few years under the Obama administration, whether or not economic and political factors prevent him from keeping his campaign promise of $150 billion over 10 years for alternative energy research, development and deployment.
In shaping our research priorities, one issue is how to balance short-term and long-term needs. The climate crisis in particular screams for immediate action. At the same time, the decisions we make in the next few years could shape the country’s energy systems for the rest of the century.
In a talk Wednesday at MIT (slides from earlier version), Patricia Dehmer, Deputy Director for Science Programs at the U.S. Department of Energy, noted that 18th and 19th century inventions (steam engine, incandescent light bulb, internal combustion engine) shaped the country’s infrastructure (intercontinental rail system, electricity grid, interstate highway system). This, in turn, determines the fuels we use today.
Dehmer has advocated for a greater focus on basic research as the cornerstone of a “decades-to-century” energy strategy. She also said that basic research is our best hope for accelerating adoption of renewable energy technologies.
Technologies like photovoltaics have seen continuous rates of improvement that are too gradual for the technologies to have a major impact in the near-term. We need revolutionary basic research discoveries to break renewable energy technologies into the mainstream.
Disruptive technologies derive from greater control of matter, said Dehmer. Her push for basic research led to a DOE report that identified the key challenges in controlling matter. It also led to the Energy Frontier Research Centers initiative that will fund research tackling those challenges.
Government research organizations, most notably DARPA, have shifted focus away from basic research in recent years. Let’s hope the flood of resources poised to sweep into energy research fuels a renaissance of basic research, and that our desperation doesn’t lead to shortsighted priorities.
Patricia Dehmer, Deputy Director for Science Programs at the U.S. Department of Energy, used this chart of 2006 US energy flows in a talk yesterday at MIT. The most striking detail is that we waste more energy than we use. Our transportation and electricity generation and transmission technologies are quite inefficient. (I’ll post more on the talk shortly.)
We have a new section on the resources page that points to graphics like this. Let me know of any visualizations we should include.
For many people “solar cells” conjures up images of dark, glassy modules mounted on rooftops. Generating electricity from sunlight, however, is becoming broader than a particular material, form factor or application.
Researchers are continually expanding photovoltaics’ reality. Four of the five news items in the current issue of ERN reflect this broadening. They’re about dye-sensitized, polymer, non-polymer organic inverted and nanotube-silicon heterojunction solar cells — four very different devices with different potential applications.
This diversity of photovoltaics research is driven by need, opportunity and the limitations of today’s sun-harvesting devices.
The needed transition to sustainable energy systems requires as many practical alternative energy sources as we can develop. There’s opportunity in recognizing that the vast amount of energy the sun radiates to the earth’s surface strikes wastelands, building façades, vehicles and portable electronic devices as well as rooftops. And existing photovoltaics’ limitations come down to the cost, bulk and brittleness of crystalline silicon.
Silicon is still king when it comes to converting sunlight to electricity efficiently, but the mere vision of an airplane’s skin or a cell phone’s plastic casing generating electricity is a good measure of how far we’ve come and our good fortune to be traveling down many roads at once.
Congratulations to Riccardo Signorelli, winner of the MIT Elevator Pitch Contest last Saturday. Signorelli and his MIT colleagues developed a carbon nanotube ultracapacitor that promises to boost storage capacities to battery levels while retaining capacitors’ fast charge and discharge rates (see Nanotubes hold more electricity, TRN’s coverage of the researchers’ breakthrough two and half years ago).
At the MIT Energy Night earlier this month Signorelli told me that the nanotube growth process is well in hand and he’s focusing on developing a scalable manufacturing process. During his winning pitch Signorelli said he’s looking for people with manufacturing experience. Check out the webcast of the contest. Signorelli’s pitch is at about the 1:21 mark.
I’m no expert on venture financing, but I’d bet on Signorelli getting funding and building a team despite the current financial crisis. Two key applications he’s targeting are storing energy for intermittent renewable generation technologies like wind power and replacing toxic lead batteries in delivery truck fleets (UPS, FedEx, etc.) that burn through batteries every two to three months. It’s a strong, novel technology addressing acute needs.
Although the credit crunch has hit the clean tech sector, the impact is strongest on existing companies looking for later round financing. Early-stage ventures are likely to fare better, according to Rob Day, a VC with @Ventures. “Early-stage cleantech venture capital remains a very attractive investment area,” he said in a recent post on his Cleantech Investing blog. Incidentally, Day was one of the judges for the Elevator Pitch Contest’s energy track.