A peek into the future of solar

What will the solar landscape look like in the next 5 to 25 years? With growing demand for energy and the imperative of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions dramatically by mid-century, it is certain that solar power will have a major role to play. At the same time, a flood of inexpensive solar panels from China and political uncertainty surrounding tax incentives have led to significant instability in the domestic solar industry. I had a chance to attend two panel discussions held by MIT on March 16, 2012 as part of the 2012 MIT Energy Conference, in which experts from the MIT faculty, the federal government, the solar industry and venture capital attempted to shed some light on the direction that solar energy is heading.

The manufacturing cost of solar panels has been declining rapidly, from around $100 per watt in the 1970s to between $1 and $2 per watt at present. Minh Le from the US Department of Energy discussed the Obama Administration’s Sunshot Initiative, which aims to reduce the cost of solar energy by 2-3 times, making it cost-competitive with other energy generation technologies by the end of the decade. The current goal is $2 per watt for residential solar (including installation and other balance of systems costs). The panelists agreed that the costs of physical panels would continue to decrease over the next 5-10 years, thanks to new technologies and manufacturing techniques (for example, technology website Ars Technica recently reported on a new manufacturing technology that promises to reduce manufacturing costs on solar cells to $0.40 per watt, about half of the lowest-cost current panels). Adam Lorenz of 1366 Technologies stated that he expects crystalline silicon cells to be competitive with the wholesale rate for coal power within 5 to 8 years.

The Sunshot Initiative also aims to reduce overall costs by streamlining the rather Byzantine permitting process in the US, which currently involves dealing with over 18,000 permitting jurisdictions and over 5,000 utilities spread across 50 states. The US system was compared unfavorably to the systems in Germany and other countries, where permitting is much easier and government incentives such as the feed-in tariff exist. To ensure investment in solar generating capacity, the panelists emphasized the importance of policy stability. Because of the long return on investment on these projects, the fragmented US system of federal and state incentives tends to discourage investment.

MIT professor Dan Nocera pointed out that while most of the conversation was focused on the developed world, the real growth area for solar technologies is in the least developed areas where grid power does not exist. In these areas, a small, inexpensive photovoltaic unit that would allow people to charge cell phones and operate indoor lights so that children can study after sundown would have an enormous impact on quality of life. Dr. Nocera emphasized that while developed countries must work within their existing infrastructure, developing countries have the opportunity to leapfrog the developed world, in much the same way that many developing countries skipped landline telephones and moved directly to cell phones.

Panelists discussed several areas where government policy is needed to help create a market for solar. A price on carbon, whether a carbon tax, a cap-and-trade system, or a combination of the two, would help clean energy technologies compete with fossil fuels. Australia, which resembles the US in its heavy reliance on fossil fuels, recently enacted a comprehensive carbon pricing scheme. Policies that encourage the electrification of the vehicle fleet, whose batteries could serve as a form of distributed energy storage for the smart grid, would help to address the problem of intermittency. More resources devoted to public education about energy policy issues would help foster an informed public discussion and raise awareness of renewable energy. Dr. Nocera in particular stressed the importance of making the issues visible to the public, and stated that perhaps an oil war on US soil will be needed before the public starts paying attention.

Despite the challenges facing the solar market at the moment, I took away the message that solar power has a bright future (excuse the pun). The panelists agreed that solar photovoltaics will be increasingly competitive with conventional power generation over the next decade. In the longer term, exotic technologies such as transparent solar cells that can replace glass and “artificial leaves” that can generate hydrogen and oxygen to be used in fuel cells promise exciting new applications for solar. Small, inexpensive solar panels promise to dramatically improve the lives of people in developing countries by allowing them to light their houses and charge mobile devices without connecting to the electricity grid. The solar resource base represents thousands of times the amount of energy humans use each year. Converting this energy into a usable form on such a large scale presents significant challenges, but with technological advances steadily driving solar closer to parity with fossil fuels and a number of exciting new kinds of solar technology on the horizon, the task hardly seems impossible.

Amory Lovins on Reinventing Fire

On February 16, 2012, technology news website Xconomy hosted a talk in Cambridge with renowned environmentalist and co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) “think-and-do tank” Amory Lovins about the Institute’s Reinventing Fire initiative. Reinventing Fire provides a roadmap for moving the U.S. economy entirely off of coal, oil and nuclear energy by 2050 while at the same time sustaining vigorous economic growth. Unlike other climate change blueprints such as the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Climate 2030 report, the Reinventing Fire initiative does not count on aggressive federal policy initiatives and assumes that the price of CO2 emission will remain zero. It also does not pin its hopes on a technological “silver bullet”. Rather, RMI envisions a series of self-reinforcing cycles of technological improvement in existing technologies across the automotive, building, industrial and electricity sectors that will allow efficient, green technologies to outcompete inefficient, fossil-fuel driven technologies in the market.

In his talk, Lovins focused mostly on the automotive sector. In this area, RMI identifies three self-reinforcing technological learning curves leading to the super light-weight “Revolutionary+ Auto”. The first is whole-system design, where engineers take a holistic approach to automobile design with a view to reducing weight as much as possible. Supporting this are advanced materials, such as the carbon-fiber composites currently used in the new Boeing 787, which could produce massive weight reductions by replacing steel in automobiles. As part of his talk, Lovins passed around a carbon-fiber composite “hat” that was as light as plastic and yet (according to Lovins) had withstood a full-on sledge hammer blow without a scratch. While currently quite expensive and difficult to mass-produce, Lovins sees huge potential for technological improvements in the carbon-fiber manufacturing process eventually making it competitive with other materials. Finally, once weight has been significantly reduced, all-electric powertrains will become more feasible. Current all-electric vehicles such as the Nissan Leaf have a maximum range of about 100 miles on one charge. However, because most of a vehicle’s energy use comes from its weight, a significantly lighter vehicle would be able to go farther with fewer electric batteries and smaller motors (making the vehicle even lighter) than current models.

During the question-and-answer period, an audience member asked about improvements in energy storage technology. Holding up his cell phone, Lovins remarked that he believed that portable electronics would drive innovation in this area, and that it would be better for the automotive industry to focus on reducing weight and drag than on developing new batteries. Lovins also downplayed the need for extensive grid storage to handle a higher mix of intermittent renewable energy sources in our electricity supply. Noting that variability in the energy supply from renewable sources is predictable, Lovins expressed confidence that with sufficient expertise a stable electricity grid could be run with a diverse mixture of 80-100% renewables even in the absence of large-scale storage.

The Reinventing Fire initiative presents a hopeful view of an economy almost completely free of fossil fuels by 2050 based on evolutionary improvements in currently existing technology. Much more information on the initiative is available in the book Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era by Amory Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute (available from Amazon). I am currently in the middle of reading it, and have found it to be well-written and insightful, with helpful color charts and illustrations and a writing style that is understandable for a non-engineer but not overly simplistic. The Reinventing Fire initiative grew out of the RMI’s 2004 book Winning the Oil Endgame, which is available for free in PDF form on the author’s website here. I encourage anyone with an interest in renewable energy and energy efficiency to take a look at these books, or check out Amory Lovins’ TED Talk on winning the oil endgame.

Town of Brookline Links Sustainability to Public Health through LEED Certified Public Health Building

Brookline's LEED certified public health building

As part of the Brookline Climate Week, I attended an open house at the town’s LEED Gold certified public health building led by the town’s Health Director Dr. Alan Balsam. The building represents a significant commitment on the part of the Town of Brookline to address sustainability in its public buildings and provide an example of sustainable building practices for the community.

The Brookline Public Health Center was built in 1953. When the building came due for renovation in the early 2000s, Dr. Balsam decided to use the opportunity to make the building a showcase of green building practices by incorporating LEED certification into the retrofit. The town selectmen challenged Dr. Balsam to raise the extra money this would cost. As a result, much of the money was raised privately, including $125,000 from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (now part of the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center) and $30,000 raised by community group Friends of Brookline.

The renovated building incorporates a number of sustainable building materials, including cork floors, bamboo paneling, low VOC paints, and shelving made of a cellulosic composite material made from leaves. Other important green features include double glazed windows that can be opened to cool the building, use of glass for interior walls to allow light to penetrate the interior of the building, low flow toilets and waterless urinals, and motion-activated low energy lighting. Old building materials such as wood, metal and toilet fixtures were recycled rather than sent to landfill.

The centerpiece of the renovation is the building’s 25 kilowatt solar photovoltaic system, which Dr. Balsam estimates covers approximately 35% of the building’s electricity use and which saved the city $8000 in electricity costs last year. Visitors will soon be able to monitor the system’s energy generation in real time on a monitor in the lobby. The solar panels are raised so as to be very visible from the street, which Dr. Balsam hopes will serve as advertising for the project and encourage others in the community to consider solar energy. The economics of the solar system were more challenging. While the town estimated a 15 year payback for its contribution, Dr. Balsam estimates that the total payback (including external funding) will be on the order of 50 years. However, this system was purchased before the precipitous drop in solar panel prices of the past few years. A project today would likely see a much faster payback.

Dr.Balsam indicated that he sees the LEED project as a way to encourage sustainable behavior both within the municipal government and in the community through leading by example. He also hopes that the project will provide a way to begin talking to people in the community about the links between climate change and public health threats. The project has already created some converts: Dr. Balsam noted that several people in the town’s building department were initially skeptical but were won over to sustainable building practices by the renovation. As a result of this project, the town is now obliged to include sustainability in its feasibility studies for all future renovations of municipal buildings. Through high visibility projects like this, Brookline is clearly putting sustainability and the threat of climate change on the local political agenda. Hopefully this will lead to more such projects in the future, both within Brookline and in other municipalities in the state.

Get Into the Recycling Game with Greenbean Recycle

Have you ever wondered whether or not all this recycling is doing any good? We hear plenty of bad news—overflowing landfills, rising energy consumption, islands of garbage floating in the ocean—but until recently it has been hard to figure out just how much impact our own individual behavior was having.  Boston-area company Greenbean Recycle aims to change that by installing high-tech “reverse vending machines” at university campuses and eventually other public areas around the city. Aimed at the Facebook and Twitter crowd, these machines provide recyclers with instantaneous feedback on how much they are recycling and on how much energy they have saved in the process. Users simply sign in and deposit their bottles; their recycling totals are tracked online. According to the company’s website, the company’s machines at MIT and Tufts had recycled 30,058 containers and saved 5313 kilowatt hours of energy as of February 9, 2012. Bottle deposit money can be deposited to a Paypal account, added to a student spending card, or donated to a charity of the user’s choice.

The instant feedback provided by this system gives an incentive to keep recycling in much the same way that the desire to get a high score in Tetris keeps players coming back. This is an example of the phenomenon of gamification, or adding video game-like incentives to encourage people to participate in socially desirable activities. Greenbean offers recycling competitions (the America Recycles for Thanksgiving challenge took 2636 containers out of the waste stream), and CEO Shanker Sahai envisions eventually giving away prizes provided by sponsors, such as Red Sox tickets, to encourage even more recycling.

Anyone who has had (or known someone who has had) a video game obsession knows how easy it is to get hooked on simple, repetitive tasks for which rewards are given. Gamification provides a wealth of opportunities to encourage people to participate in beneficial activities by reframing them as competitive games rather than chores. In the future it would be interesting to see more experimentation in this area, such as testing whether or not intermittent rewards (e.g. a small chance to win a random prize each time a bottle is inserted into the machine), would increase use.

We applaud Greenbean for its innovative program, and hope to see more of its machines around the city in the near future.

Frito Lay’s New Electric Truck Fleet

From left: view of the cab; Erika “driving” the truck; view from the front. Photos courtesy of Isaac Griffith-Onen.

On December 15th Undersecretary of Energy Barbara Kates-Garnick cut the ribbon for 8 new vehicles in Frito Lay’s electric truck fleet at the distribution center in Braintree, MA.  This year, the company increased its electric truck fleet to 176 vehicles, making it the largest in the country.  The greenhouse gas emissions and fuel cost savings these trucks produce make them a sound advancement in environmentally friendly trucking.  Frito Lay drivers rave about the new green trucks; the vehicles are very quiet, almost in audible.  One employee, Ed St. Onge, told me that the trucks help with brand recognition and that people in cities approach the nearly silent running vehicles to ask questions.  The trucks also make more a more pleasant trucking experience because they do not use any gasoline, and therefore do not smell as pungent.

The trucks run entirely on electricity, cutting greenhouse gas emissions by about 75%, compared to a gasoline vehicle.  They are equipped with two large battery packs each containing 24 specially designed 12-volt batteries.  The batteries last 5-7 years, but the manufacturer can remotely detect if there is a problem with the battery before that.  If there is a problem, the company contacts Frito Lay with the exact truck information and details on the problem.  Braking regenerates the batteries, making the trucks ideal for stop-and-go traffic patterns.  The batteries last about 60 highway miles or 100 city miles and take about 5 hours to fully recharge.  Most trips Frito Lay makes are within 50 miles of the distribution center, making these vehicles ideal transporters.

At about $200,000 per vehicle, the trucks cost twice as much as a normal truck. However, Steve Hanson, Frito Lay Senior Sustainability Manager, says that the savings in fuel costs justifies the up-front difference within just 3-4 years.  While a diesel truck generates approximately $50-60 in daily maintenance costs, its electric counterpart only costs $6 per day.  Mr. Hanson said that part of Frito Lay’s motivation in kicking off this “green fleet” is in anticipation of future environmental standards becoming stricter.  Rather than new regulations forcing an abrupt change, Frito Lay has spent the past 7 years testing different green transportation technologies to determine which yielded the highest returns for the company.

From left: view of the dashboard; view of driver side battery pack; LED headlights. Photos courtesy of Isaac Griffith-Onen.

Recap of the MIT Energy Club Lecture by Dr. Steven Chu

Dr. Steven Chu, the U.S. Secretary of Energy, gave a talk on November 30, 2011 at MIT on how the U.S. can lead in the clean energy race. In addition to discussing several new technologies in renewable energy and energy efficiency that will have great impacts in the coming decades, he challenged MIT students to come up with solutions to barriers to energy efficiency as part of President Obama’s Better Buildings Initiative.

First up, Secretary Chu discussed several technologies of the past century that have drastically changed the way we live. The development of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer in the early 20^th century and crop improvements during the Green Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s have so far enabled global food production to keep pace with the expanding population and averted a Malthusian crisis. The evolution from vacuum tubes to transistors to integrated circuits (popular computer processors in 2011 boast in the range of a billion transistors each) has led to a spectacular explosion of consumer electronics that has revolutionized the way we communicate and consume information. Assembly line manufacturing and the relatively rapid adoption of the automobile in the early 20^th century changed the face of our cities and solved one pollution problem (mountains of horse excrement) while introducing others (smog, lead, and greenhouse gas emissions).

Against this backdrop, Dr. Chu discussed a number of promising advances that could play major roles in reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. He  focused on advances in materials science, such as the carbon fiber reinforced plastic used in the body of the Boeing 787, the introduction of high tensile strength steel in automobiles, substitutes being developed for rare earth metals used in electronics, more efficient and lower cost solar cells, and next-generation battery technology that shows promise of drastically reducing the cost of energy storage.

Dr. Chu also spoke about the DOE’s Sunshot Initiative, which aims to have cost-competitive solar power by 2020. Due mostly to large scale manufacturing in China, the price of solar photovoltaic panels has plummeted in recent years, outpacing even optimistic estimates. While this has been bad news for certain US companies trying to compete in the market, it has had the advantage of pushing solar ever closer to the magical break-even point where it becomes competitive with fossil fuels. To help people get past the up-front cost of solar installation, companies such as Simply Solar of Arizona offer programs that allow homeowners to lease solar cells for 20 years with a low initial down payment and fixed monthly payments thereafter. For those who are interested, Sun Run offers a similar program here in Massachusetts.

While I found Dr. Chu’s talk to be informative and enjoyable (if a bit technical in parts), I was hoping he would spend more time addressing the policy and business aspects of winning the clean energy race. As Dr. Chu himself noted, the mass production of solar panels in China has made the competitive environment difficult for US firms. Renewable energy policy in this country has largely been left to state and local governments with little leadership from the federal government. I had hoped that Dr. Chu would spend more time discussing the Obama Administration’s roadmap for clean energy over the next 20 to 30 years and the policy steps they are taking to make that happen. Nevertheless, Dr. Chu is an extremely engaging speaker, and the technologies he discussed were exciting.

A video of the talk is available here.

 

 

U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu to Speak at MIT November 30

With the recent high-profile bankruptcies of Solyndra, Evergreen Solar and Beacon Power, many are wondering about the future of renewable energy in the United States. Dr. Steven Chu, current U.S. Secretary of Energy and Nobel Prize winner in physics, will be giving a talk at 12:00pm on Wednesday, November 30 at the Kresge Auditorium at MIT on “Winning the Clean Energy Race.”  If you are interested in hearing Dr. Chu speak, you can sign up to attend the lecture here. It is expected to fill up, so those who are interested should sign up as soon as possible.

Dr. Chu’s family came to the U.S. from China in the 1940s, when his father and mother both studied at MIT. Dr. Chu received his B.S in Physics from the University of Rochester and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley. He was the co-winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics “for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.”  The former Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Dr. Chu was confirmed as Secretary of Energy in 2009 where he is currently responsible for helping to implement President Obama’s climate and energy agenda.

Among other professional organizations, Dr. Chu is a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Given the recent concern about China’s dominance of the renewable energy sector and uncertainty about the ability of American firms to compete, I will be interested to hear Dr. Chu’s perspective on the situation.

Stay tuned for a follow up after the lecture where I will recap the main points of Dr. Chu’s speech and give my impressions.

I hope to see you there.