Future of Solar

At the workshop in A Toxa I attended in late June, Richard Schmalensee presented findings of a yet to be released MIT report on the "Future of Solar". This will be part of their series on the future of energy. He was skeptical of how much of a role solar can play any time soon in addressing the climate issue. It's not clear that the costs of solar can come down a lot more when most of the costs are now in the non-silicon components. There is also the issue of rare materials needed for alternatives to silicon. Then there is the intermittency / storage issue. Yes, we keep hearing about storage breakthroughs, but they aren't yet commercial products. And even when they will be they will add further huge costs to the cost of solar. There is a need for new transmission infrastructure to the renewable locations. Electricity markets may need to be reformed again to handle the intermittent new renewables effectively.  Back in April, I noted that Ottmar Edenhofer stated that there was an increasing realisation of the difficulties of integrating renewable energy on a large scale into electricity supply systems. These are some of the issues alluded to and the reason that CCS and other alternatives are getting renewed consideration.

House Prices and Wind Farms

House prices within 2km of UK wind farms reduced by 5-6%.

Explaining the Decline in Australian Electricity Use

Some interesting graphs in the Business Spectator that help explain the recent decline in electricity use in Australia. Uptake of rooftop solar by consumers is a big part of the story as official electricity use doesn't include self-generation. Here is the graph for South Australia, which is the most dramatic:



The decline in electricity closely matches the solar intensity curve over the day.

Artificial Photosynthesis

Interesting innovation - solar furnace that uses sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water to carbon monoxide and hydrogen. These are necessary inputs in the Fischer-Tropsch process of synthesizing liquid hydrocarbons. So, this is effectively artificial photosynthesis. At the moment, the efficiency is no better than plant-based photosynthesis and the reactors would be more expensive than harvesting crops presumably. But with efficiency gains this might be a viable way to generate liquid fuels for aircraft and other applications where current electric technologies are not viable. Seems that it is one more nail in the coffin of the "hydrogen economy". Separating the low density hydrogen here would make no sense, I think. An article in Science provides details.

U.S. Electric Supply and Grid

Some great maps of U.S. electricity supply and grid from NPR's website. The map above shows all power stations by size. Other maps show the share of different power sources by state (e.g. Vermont is the most nuclear state in the Union). Most importantly the transmission lines are mostly not where the best locations for alternative energy are (with the exception of some areas of the southwest near Los Angeles. Not surprisingly the latter are a hotbed of solar investment. Australia's situation is similar from what I have heard.

China and Japan Dominate Alternative Energy Innovation

This chart from a Thomson-Reuters report on patenting activity in alternative energy compares 1997-1999 with 2006-2008. EP is patents submitted to the European Patent Office. The most obvious trends are the amazing growth in Chinese activity (and to a lesser extent American, Korean, and British interest) and a swing towards wind energy innovation. The report also splits patenting among origins in large companies, small companies and the academic-government sector. Chinese and Japanese universities completely dominate the latter sector. And almost all of the activity is very recent.

A second report reviews patenting for related technologies:



Here Japan is the leader and has greatly increased its activity. China has also dramatically stepped up R&D but remains in 3rd place. Chinese universities again have a plurality of the academic-government R&D but are less dominant than for in the solar-wind-marine energy nexus: