New Museums Walk the Talk

The best science museums explain and excite, using whatever materials they have at their disposal, donated or otherwise. Often the exhibits are confined to a defined space within the museum walls. But sometimes ... and increasingly, they creep out of their confines and do much more than advertised. The Water + Life Museums in Hemet, California is one of those cases, and this article describes not only the museum's LEED Platinum rating, but its massive solar installation that provides approximately half the power. (Editorial note: the 540 Watts cited is a bit less than you'd expect from a three thousand panel installation. The article may be off by a decimal point or two ... or more.) Nevertheless, renewable exhibits that power themselves and their museums are a wave of the future. Mark my words ...

One Expert says "10 more years of Solar R&D required"

This article isn't live on the net yet, but here's a sneak preview. Not that there's a hurry. If what this scientist is saying is true, we can chill another decade or so before installing solar en mass to replace fossil fuel sources. Kind of maddening, but good news if 10 years means 10 years. I don't think we're in a fusion power situation where despite breakthroughs the energy payoff is always 50 years away. Not to mention, cold fusion ...

New Orleans - Despite oil prices that hover around $100 a barrel, it may take at least 10 or more years of intensive research and development to reduce the cost of solar energy to levels competitive with petroleum, according to an authority on the topic.

Solar can potentially provide all the electricity and fuel we need to power the planet, Harry Gray, Ph.D., scheduled to speak here today at the 235th national meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). His presentation, Powering the Planet with Solar Energy, is part of a special symposium arranged by Bruce Bursten, Ph.D., president of the ACS, the world's largest scientific society celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Beckman Scholars Program.

"The Holy Grail of solar research is to use sunlight efficiently and directly to split water into its elemental constituents, hydrogen and oxygen, and then use the hydrogen as a clean fuel," Gray said.

In his talk at the ACS Presidential Symposium, Gray cited the vast potential of solar energy, noting that more energy from sunlight strikes the Earth in one hour than all of the energy consumed on the planet in one year.

The single biggest challenge, Gray said, is reducing costs so that a large-scale shift away from coal, natural gas and other non-renewable sources of electricity makes economic sense. Gray estimated the average cost of photovoltaic energy at 35 to 50 cents per kilowatt-hour. By comparison, other sources are considerably less expensive, with coal and natural gas hovering around 5-6 cents per kilowatt-hour.

Because of its other advantages, being clean and renewable, for instance, solar energy need not match the cost of conventional energy sources, Gray indicated. The breakthrough for solar energy probably will come when scientists reduce the costs of photovoltaic energy to about 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, he added. "Once it reaches that level, large numbers of consumers will start to buy in, driving the per-kilowatt price down even further. I believe we are at least ten years away from photovoltaics being competitive with more traditional forms of energy."

Major challenges include developing cheap solar cells that work without deterioration and reducing the amounts of toxic materials used in the manufacture of these cells. But producing low cost photovoltaics is only a step in the right direction. Chemists also need to focus on the generation of clean fuels at costs that can compete with oil and coal.

Go Go Solar Gadget

You know, it's going to get pretty gadgety pretty fast. As a business category that depends on recurring technical innovation, renewable energy, is starting to look a lot like the computer and internet space. As it moves from remote Texas mega-farms to our own back yards and roofs, and then to our own clothes and bodies, its going to get caught up in the personnel technology section covered by folks like Walt Mossberg and David Pogue at NYT. Green tech is already a news staple at popular gadget sites like Gizmodo and Engadget. Tell me this new Solar Gateway from Xantrex, announced today, doesn't sound more like a PC than a piece of renewable energy equipment ... from the product site:

Product Features

• Can monitor a network consisting of up to 20 single phase GT inverters
• Wi-Fi/Ethernet module with 10/100 Base-T or 802.11 b/g
• Can be configured to send energy and alarm reports via email
• Graphical interactive solar monitoring software
• Embedded web page for configuring the Gateway and upgrading inverter firmware 16 megabytes of storage

Silicon Goes Both Ways

Here comes the sun. Some of the same minds and many of the same processes that gave us the every faster microprocessor and the ever denser random access memory (RAM) have turned their sites skyward. Now the NY Times reports that some of them are having success improving the efficiency of the silicon wafer's solar power characteristics. It's not likely Moore's Law - that's the doubling of the number of transistors that can fit on a chip every 2.5 - 3 years - is going to be in effect here. But it is clear that these guys know what they're doing and that the marriage of minds, experience and money is going to be an accelerator for this industry. We can now expect to see solar move closer to mainstream price points in the not-too-distant future.

SolarNanoHydro Breakthrough: It's No Fairy Tale

MIT's Technology Review highlights a Massachusetts' company's recent A-round funding after earlier grants from NASA and DOE. Read it for yourself and see if it sounds plausible. It appears to me (and skeptical others ... like VCs) that Nanoptek has found a way to piggyback on existing technology and manufacturing processes, move them a step further with the material Titania (borrowed from Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream?) and now has a potential breakthrough on its hands. Perchance, will keep an eye on these guys for sure.

Can the US Become Energy Independent? Denmark Did

Middelgrunden off-shore wind farm (Photo: René Seindal [Flickr])

In 1973, Denmark was 99 percent dependent on foreign oil. The '73 oil embargo pushed the Dutch to make a profound comittment to change. The result: Denmark is now energy independent, and in fact, exports electricity to neighboring European countries.

Some highlights of their efforts:

• Wind supplies 21 percent of their energy
  
• They now export wind technology, making 20,000 jobs for a country with half the population of the state of Maine
  
• Cars are taxed at 105% of the cost of the vehicle
  
• The government put up $1 billion to develop and integrate solar, tidal and fuel-cell technology

My original source is a SolarAustin@yahoogroups.com email, but see this Fox News report on the Dutch.

Necessity mothered Danish energy indepenence, the same necessity is coming for the United States.

SO-LARge !!!

Cover of this month's Scientific American promotes a feature article on an all-solar solution to the majority of our indeed dire energy woes. Its primary thrusts are (1) using tolerably small parts of the southwest USA that receive 100 mega shiteloads of solar radiation every second, and (2) building out a DC based electricity distribution system to get the power from there to here ... and everyplace else it's needed. Objectives/benefits would be we'd free ourselves of depending on other countries to feed our energy appetite, we'd radically reduce global warming emissions, and we'd have millions of new jobs. There's a lot of detail here, and even more is referenced if you want to do a deep dive. The overall premise warmed my heart.

Far Out Energy Storage

Storage of energy, like storage of data in the computer world, isn't the sexiest topic on the planet. Re: a recent PowrTalk article on using gajillions of plugged-in Car batteries to to smooth out capacity, this C|Net article raises the specter of some way out-of-box approaches. Think: super batteries, compressed air (titillating image to the right is one of these new compressors ... try to contain yourself !!!). But wait there's more: putting the compressed air in natural underground structures - aka caves. And mega flywheels. Energy created when wind is blowing and the sun is shining that's not used immediately, needs to be stored for use at night and when the winds die down. As solar, wind and wave tech gets better and better, and especially when they start to put coal and oil out of business, this is going to be an increasingly important function. In fact, a la chicken and the egg, the storage issue needs to be solved long before alt-e will be able to go mainstream.

Using Vision to Push Reality Around

Ponder this powerful vision of clean skies and home grown American energy: buildings that draw power from the wind and sun to power themselves and the cars that visit them . But that vision can be thwarted by the realities of how we cost things and how we allocate resources in our political system. Our laissez-faire market isn't as frictionless as we might want. Some of the things that thwart:

• Transmission. If a building's power is made and used in the same place there is little to no transmission cost. But transmission (high voltage lines, substations, and so on, maybe $1M per mile to install) is costed separately from power production. So building power doesn't get credit for this advantage.



• Power loss. More of the power generated on-site gets to the end user, it isn't lost in transmission. No credit here, either.



• Peak Shaving. If solar panels are deployed incrementally to handle peak power needs to avoid building new power plants, the avoided cost is much more than the otherwise too expensive solar panel.



• Oil subsidies. Oil is subsidized more generously than emerging renewable energy sources. The subsidies made sense given oil's national strategic significance during and after World War II . It now makes sense to transition to (that is, to subsidize) alternatives, given that they can now be used instead of oil, and offer significant advantages over oil. (With the building powered car electricity becomes an alternative to oil.)



• Start Up. Given new energy's national strategic signficance, and that it faces the traditional hurdles of the start up, it deserves national subsidization (just as oil and other undertakings did in previous situations).



• Reduced Health Care Costs. Improving air quality probably means less people visiting the doctor for asthma, allergies, lung and heart disease, and so on. So, we can expect, but probably can't price well, lower health care costs and higher productivity.

What is asked is a visionary leader (visionary like FDR or Ronald Reagan or Winston Churchill or John F. Kennedy) to gloss over these pesky realities, and draw us to this place. Why should such a grand vision not materialize because of a dozen or so worth less realities?

Good Day Sunshine

I was just pawing through the current version of Popular Science and noticed their first Best of What's New (BOWN) Green Tech category. The winner of which this year is Silicon Valley based NanoSolar. Ironic, perhaps, in that there ain't no silicon required in their design, and that's the beauty of their creation. Far cheaper to make and move and install, this stuff is a true green energy game changer. Check out the PopSci article here, and here's NanoSolar's site.