My current optimism is for solar energy. The simple facts of the matter are that the sun provides more energy to the earth in an hour than humanity makes use of in a year. Of the non-fossil-fuel energy sources, all the big players that are not nuclear – biomass, hydroelectric, wind – are ultimately driven by the sun. I am optimistic that direct solar conversion – photovoltaic cells and their future analogues – will come to take its place among and then surpass these more established technologies a lot more quickly than most people outside the area currently imagine. I'am hoping for at least a terawatt of solar by 2025, two if we're lucky, and dramatic cuts in carbon dioxide emissions as a result...
New materials and new material-processing techniques should allow the cost of installed photovoltaic capacity to be halved in the next few years, and there is room for considerable further improvement after that: while wind power, nuclear power and dams are not going to become radically cheaper to install, solar power capacity is. It is also going to become more flexible, both physically and metaphorically, with new applications on new surfaces, from windows to clothing. Some of these applications may well be gimmicky and unsustainable, but one of the great advantages of the coming solar power boom is that it offers the possibility for a wide range of technologies both to compete for the main prize – cheap domestic and light industrial electricity in developed and developing countries alike – and also to find and to create new niches.
The terawatt (a trillion Watts, or 1,000 GW) of solar by 2025 is a vvvv optimistic goal - we stood at about 5 GW worldwide at the start of 2006, and have probably added 1-2 GW since then - but, as Morton points out, we can expect photovoltaics to become significantly cheaper in the 'next few years'. And in the longer term, the advances in thin-film solar cells he alludes to will create the potential for all sorts of mind-blowingly creative applications - clothing, electronic devices, all kinds of built structures, spaceships - that will make the development of the solar industry very different from that of traditional energy technologies. In addition to new solar technologies, grid and storage technologies, as well as business models, will need to be improved substantially:
The boom will not just be a matter of lower cost manufacture or better efficiency. System-wide solutions need to be found – new ways of accommodating solar materials architecturally, new technologies for storing energy, smart approaches to the electric grid, new financial arrangements and instruments that will allow people to get the benefits of solar electricity without necessarily taking on the capital costs of installation themselves.
The new storage technologies are perhaps most important of all. Solar will never compete with traditional baseline generation until it becomes reliable - until it's something that we can use whenever we want, not just when the sun is shining. Most likely, we'll use either batteries (sooner) or hydrogen (later) to store the electricity as it's produced, but both technologies will need to be dramatically improved to do this cost effectively at a meaningful scale.
- Related: On the business innovation tip, veteran solar entrepreneur Arno Harris's blog is a goldmine of clear-eyed, infrequently-updated, open source cleantech venture capital consulting. Check Clean Energy Niche Opportunities for a rundown of why finding a focused niche is especially important for clean energy startups, also v applicable to other niche-y (Nietszche?) areas of lifework. Postin up like a mailbox on one particularly interesting niche - solar for post-war reconstruction - in a day or two -
It's all an awful lot of progress to be so optimistic about. But, in, yes, California , and around the world there's a lot of brain cells collaborating on these problems, and lots of different experiments in applications, policies, and marketing whose results are being shared more and more rapidly. There's a lot happening already, and 2025 is a looong way away - I think? Ooooomg, only two more years of New Year's glasses with the 00 in the middle!!