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Power Shock: The Next Energy Revolution |
by Christopher Flavin |
We live in a futuristic world--with cyberspace, genetic engineering and other mind-boggling technologies. Yet when it comes to energy, most experts seem to think that our decades-old oil and coal-based energy systems will barely change. Developments around the world are already proving them wrong, however. We may soon witness the most dramatic changes in the world energy economy in a hundred years.
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At a small news conference in Landover, Maryland last October, two major U.S. corporations made an announcement that may one day be seen as a big step in launching the energy systems of the twenty-first century. Bechtel Enterprises Inc., once a leading builder of nuclear power plants, and PacifiCorp, a giant utility that operates several huge coal-fired generators in the northwestern United States, announced that they were teaming up to invest in solar energy and other "human-scale energy systems." The new joint venture, called EnergyWorks, will pursue projects around the world based on wind turbines, biomass generators, industrial energy efficiency, and other technologies that most large energy firms have spurned as puny systems that cannot possibly meet the expanding energy needs of close to six billion people. But those energy executives who still cast their lot with large oil refineries, nuclear reactors, and the like would do well to remember the lessons of IBM, which discovered too late that personal computers were more than a boutique industry that could never challenge the dominance of mainframes. Technological change can move at lightning speed. In fact, historians of technology may one day argue that by the mid-1990s, the world energy economy was already in the early stages of a major transition. One sign, for example, is that relatively small, efficient jet engines are coming to dominate the power industry, sweeping aside less efficient coal-fired models. Another is that advanced electronics have improved the efficiency of lighting by as much as four-fold. Meanwhile, the fastest growing energy market in the early 1990s isn't oil, coal, or even natural gas--it is wind power, which expanded from 2,000 megawatts in 1990 to 4,500 megawatts in 1995. |
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Around the world, advanced electronics, new kinds of synthetic materials, and the techniques of mass production are allowing engineers to substitute clever technologies for brute force. New modular, mass-produced energy systems have the potential to be more economical and flexible than traditional energy systems they replace.
Here, as in the mercurial worlds of computers and telecommunications, prediction is impossible. But the broad outlines of a new energy economy are emerging. Its chief feature is likely to be a radical decentralization, akin to the computer industry's shift from mainframes to PCs. The new technologies will make it possible to decentralize power generation, even down to the household level, harness the world's most abundant energy resources--solar energy and wind power--and greatly reduce the burden that current energy systems place on the world's atmosphere.
But these changes may add up to more than the sum of their parts. Using technologies such as fuel cells and mass-produced solar generators, it should be possible in the long run to replace virtually all fossil fuels with a hydrogen-based energy system, something that author Jules Verne dreamed of more than a century ago. The hydrogen would be produced using sunlight harnessed on rooftops as well as in remote desert collectors, and would be conveyed to homes and industries via pipeline. Although this vision may sound futuristic, most of the inventions needed to make it real have already been made.
ROOFTOP POWER
One of the most neglected "fringes" of the world energy economy is made up of thousands of rural villages that are home to some two billion people who lack access to electricity or other modern fuels. Yet these villages are now at the center of one of the most revolutionary new developments: during the past ten years, silicon cells that turn sunlight directly into electricity have been installed on or adjacent to at least 250,000 homes, mostly in remote areas of countries such as Sri Lanka, China, and Mexico.
In Kenya, in 1993, more homes were electrified using solar cells than by extending the grid. In Brazil, utility companies are starting to support solar electrification in the Amazon and other areas where it is impractical to extend power lines. In South Africa, the government has launched a major effort to provide solar power to millions of people. And in Vietnam, where only 14 million of the country's 72 million people currently have electricity, the Vietnam Women's Union has launched a solar electrification program.
Solar electric systems are also beginning to appear on the roofs of posh suburban homes in industrial countries. In Sacramento, California, for example, the municipal utility is putting shiny blue solar electric panels on 100 homes each year; their rooftop systems are connected to the utility's electric grid, so that power not needed within the home can be sold to other consumers. Consumers pay for the systems via their monthly power bill, at a rate that is only slightly higher than their neighbors'.
In Switzerland and Germany, more than 1,000 buildings have been outfitted with solar power systems in recent years, with government funding. Thousands more are planned. The Japanese government plans to install some 62,000 building-integrated solar generators by the end of the decade. Although such systems must be subsidized to be affordable today, they could become fully competitive with traditional power sources as large-scale production brings manufacturing costs down.
A product of the electronic revolution, solar cells bypass the mechanical generators now used by virtually all power plants, whether they run on fossil fuels, hydropower, or nuclear energy. First used to power orbiting satellites in the U.S. space program in the 1960s, solar cells are a close relative of the microprocessors that make today's computers possible. The cells consist of semiconductors usually made of silicon that emit electrons when struck by sunlight, thereby producing an electric current.
Japanese, Swiss, and U.S. manufacturers have designed experimental "solar tiles" that shelter occupants while also powering their appliances. In Europe, Flachglas, a leading producer of architectural glass, has developed a semi-transparent "curtain wall" that provides filtered light as well as electricity. In a joint venture in the United States, Corning Glass and Siemens Solar are developing a similar product.
The cost of solar cells has declined from more than $70 per watt in the 1970s (in 1994 dollars) to $4 per watt today, and is expected to drop to between $1 and $2 per watt within a decade, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. As a result, the potential applications have multiplied. The world market went from 34 megawatts in 1988 to an estimated 90 megawatts in 1995.
Aerial photographs show that even in the cloudy climate of the British Isles, putting solar cells on all the country's existing flat roofs could generate 68,000 megawatts of power on a bright day about half the United Kingdom's current peak power demand. It is possible that rooftops alone could provide as much as a quarter of the world's electricity by the middle of the next century.
POWER FROM THE BASEMENT
Another technology that may soon allow individual buildings to produce their own power is the fuel cell. First used to provide electricity for orbiting U.S. spacecraft in the 1960s, fuel cells are battery-like devices that efficiently convert a fuel--usually hydrogen--to electricity. Compared to today's generators, which are mechanical devices, fuel cells produce minimal air pollution and virtually no noise. And because they are small and can be located inside buildings, their waste heat can be productively used, rather than vented to the atmosphere as occurs in most of today's power plants.
The hydrogen that powers fuel cells can easily be obtained by splitting the methane found in natural gas--the most common heating fuel in American and European homes--into hydrogen and carbon dioxide. A number of types of fuel cells are now under development, some with government support.
During the past five years, the imperative to improve urban air quality has produced a surge of investment in fuel cells. Several companies have successfully demonstrated the pollution avoidance benefits of fuel cell generators by installing them in hospitals and other buildings. Typically, such fuel cells are used to provide around-the-clock electricity, with waste heat captured for water and space heating.
In the United States, the race is on. Last September, ONSI Corporation, a division of United Technologies, launched the world's first commercial fuel cell factory, which will initially turn out some 50 fuel cells each year, at less than half the cost of earlier fuel cells. Meanwhile, Allied Signal has been working on a 5 to 10-kilowatt fuel cell for home-scale use, relying on technologies it developed in its aerospace business. And IBM announced last summer that it is applying its expertise in multi-layer ceramic substrates to make less-expensive fuel cells in a joint venture with the Dow Chemical Company. In Canada, Ballard Power Systems has developed a fuel cell that is designed specifically for use as a bus engine.
Such commitments suggest that a commercial takeoff for fuel cells is likely within the next decade. And as the volume of production grows, costs are expected to plummet. If this technology flourishes, we may soon approach the day when a city that is now served by three or four power plants may have thousands of small networked generators connected to it. In a sign of things to come, the Netherlands already gets one-third of its power from industrial and commercial co-generators. Low cost fuel cells could one day push that figure to two-thirds or more.
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