The New Carbon Cycle

McKinsey Article Concludes Good News for Emissions: US and EU Emissions Down, Economies UP

McKinsey and Company director Scott Nyquist authored on article entitled Great News on Emissions. Really.  He concludes that the US and EU have cut emissions while growing their economies. 

His article provides an upbeat view.

So it’s very important that in both 2014 and 2015 the global economy grew—and energy-related emissions didn’t.  In the 40 years that the International Energy Agency has been tracking emissions, this is the first two times that year-on-year energy-related emissions have been flat or less, without an economic downturn.  And in 2013, emissions grew less than the global economy.  For perspective, energy accounts for more than two-thirds (68 percent) of global GHG emissions, and energy use increased more than 150 percent from 1971 to 2013.

So all that sounds pretty wonky.  Why does it matter?  Because it means that it is not only possible, but a reality that the link between emissions and growth can, in fact, be cut.  Indeed, in a number of developed countries, that is already happening.  In 2014, for example, the EU grew modestly—and cut emissions by more than 5 percent.  The United States saw power-related carbon emissions decline 10 percent from 2005 to 2014, due to greater efficiency—in effect, like Europe, it is creating more wealth using less energy—and  the displacement of coal with cleaner natural gas.

China and India have room to approve as most of us know.

But here, too, there are encouraging trends.  The rate of growth of emissions in China is slowing, as its economy becomes less energy intensive—services now account for more than half of GDP, the highest ever.  China has also begun to get serious about growing less filthily. In part because of pressure from a public literally sick of living in smog-choked cities, the country is investing in more efficient and cleaner energy use.  In 2014, Chinese emissions increased less than 1 percent compared to the previous year, even as it grew 7.3 percent.  In the previous decade, China’s emissions had grown an average of 6.7 percent a year.  So that’s a big change.  The big reason: China is depending less on coal, which accounts for more than 80 percent of its energy-related emissions.

 

The author concludes, and I agree, that technological innovation is the key to solving greenhouse gas emissions issues. While the emissions issues are far from solved, great steps have been made.  The investment in new technology, renewables, innovations in business models and financing approaches present one of the great business opportunities the world has ever seen.  Trillions of dollars will be invested over the next 10 years and beyond to address these issues as more energy is demanded, but more efficient use and alternative ways of generation energy and controlling emissions from traditional sources opens up an economic boom.

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How Disruptive Technology Can Provide Money-Making Emissions Reductions

I recently published an article entitled How Disruptive Technology Can Provide Money-Making Emissions Reductions.  This article explores the disruptive technologies that are changing the way companies purchase power, or reduce their power consumption or both.  With renewable energy, LED lighting, Cloud-based, Internet of Things energy management, and now batteries, the technologies are getting cheaper and the money that can be saved is signifiant. 

These new technologies also reduce emissions as they reduce the amount of fossil fuel that needs to be burned to produce electricity.   With new business and financing models, the customer may not have to put up any capital, but through a shared savings model, start making money the first or second month.

Thus, emissions go down, and the customer makes money from lower electricity prices or reduced electricity use.  The company providing the power, LED lights, and energy management make money. 

It is a win all the way around.  The new technologies and financial models are bringing clean, cheap energy to corporate America.

Brattle Report Concludes Solar Power Would Save on Texas Electricity Rates

The Texas electricity market within the Electric Reliabibilty Council of Texas or ERCOT, which covers 80 percent of Texas, is suffering from a deficit of peak power.  Concerns are rising that the state will be short on power during the summer months.  The Brattle Group was engaged to prepare a report for ERCOT on how to manage or address the power shortage issue.  The Brattle Group also prepared a report entitled, The Impact on Solar PV on Electricity Markets in Texas, which discusses electricity cost savings Texas could produce if it built more solar farms--the price of solar power would be less than peak power plant prices.

The irony is that many believe that solar power is always more expensive than traditional power plants like natural gas plants.  But electricity markets are complicated.  Base load power is very inexpensive in Texas because of abundant natural gas that has arisen through the technology of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing in the gas shales--which has unleashed a tremendous resource of cleaner burning fossil fuel.

However, peak power prices can be very expensive.  In Texas, ERCOT raised the cap price from $3000 per MW to $4500 per MW, and the cap is going to rise to $9000.  The hope is this will encourage more natural gas power plants to be built.

Solar can be one of the answers.  With rapidly declining prices for solar PV panels and the short time to build solar farms, 90 or 120 days in some instances, solar is much less than $3000 per MW.  A natural gas plant can take a couple of years to permit, finance, and build.  We still need these plants, but solar can be a contributing factor to managing peak power--the sun shines most when peak power is needed to cool homes and businesses in the hot summers in Texas.

Solar PV can contribute to energy savings, if applied in the right way, in the right market, and at the right price.  The Brattle Report shows how solar could contribute to enhancing the Texas electricity market.  Unfortunately, the politics in the Texas legislature is likely to prevent any renewable bills from passing.

While Texas has the largest installed wind power base, it is unfortunate that we could not work to be the leader in solar, so that Texas is the all-of-the-above leader--wind, solar, and oil and gas.  It would appear to all be good for the economy and good for the environment.  Creative and empirical thinking is at a disadvantage if politics gets in the way--Democrats and Republicans both need to realize that we need at this time fossil fuels and alternative energy.  Each has their own necessary role in today's economy and with today's technology.

MIT Discovery May Revolutionize Power Production through Solar Power and May Resolve Greenhouse Gas Emissions Challenge

Scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have announced a discovery that may unleash solar power to generate power during the day and generate oxygen and hydrogen to produce power from fuel cells at night.  This discovery has the potential to revolutionize power production over the next ten years.

Until now, solar power has been a daytime-only energy source, because storing extra solar energy for later use is prohibitively expensive and grossly inefficient. With today's announcement, MIT researchers have hit upon a simple, inexpensive, highly efficient process for storing solar energy.

Requiring nothing but abundant, non-toxic natural materials, this discovery could unlock the most potent, carbon-free energy source of all: the sun. "This is the nirvana of what we've been talking about for years," said MIT's Daniel Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT and senior author of a paper describing the work in the July 31 issue of Science. "Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution. Now we can seriously think about solar power as unlimited and soon."

Inspired by the photosynthesis performed by plants, Nocera and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Nocera's lab, have developed an unprecedented process that will allow the sun's energy to be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases. Later, the oxygen and hydrogen may be recombined inside a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity to power your house or your electric car, day or night.

The key component in Nocera and Kanan's new process is a new catalyst that produces oxygen gas from water; another catalyst produces valuable hydrogen gas. The new catalyst consists of cobalt metal, phosphate and an electrode, placed in water. When electricity -- whether from a photovoltaic cell, a wind turbine or any other source -- runs through the electrode, the cobalt and phosphate form a thin film on the electrode, and oxygen gas is produced.

Combined with another catalyst, such as platinum, that can produce hydrogen gas from water, the system can duplicate the water splitting reaction that occurs during photosynthesis.

The new catalyst works at room temperature, in neutral pH water, and it's easy to set up, Nocera said. "That's why I know this is going to work. It's so easy to implement," he said.

"This is just the beginning," said Nocera, principal investigator for the Solar Revolution Project funded by the Chesonis Family Foundation and co-Director of the Eni-MIT Solar Frontiers Center. "The scientific community is really going to run with this."

James Barber, a leader in the study of photosynthesis who was not involved in this research, called the discovery by Nocera and Kanan a "giant leap" toward generating clean, carbon-free energy on a massive scale.

"This is a major discovery with enormous implications for the future prosperity of humankind," said Barber, the Ernst Chain Professor of Biochemistry at Imperial College London. "The importance of their discovery cannot be overstated since it opens up the door for developing new technologies for energy production thus reducing our dependence for fossil fuels and addressing the global climate change problem."

Currently available electrolyzers, which split water with electricity and are often used industrially, are not suited for artificial photosynthesis because they are very expensive and require a highly basic (non-benign) environment that has little to do with the conditions under which photosynthesis operates.

More engineering work needs to be done to integrate the new scientific discovery into existing photovoltaic systems, but Nocera said he is confident that such systems will become a reality.

"This is just the beginning," said Nocera, principal investigator for the Solar Revolution Project funded by the Chesonis Family Foundation and co-Director of the Eni-MIT Solar Frontiers Center. "The scientific community is really going to run with this."

Nocera hopes that within 10 years, homeowners will be able to power their homes in daylight through photovoltaic cells, while using excess solar energy to produce hydrogen and oxygen to power their own household fuel cell. Electricity-by-wire from a central source could be a thing of the past.

The project is part of the MIT Energy Initiative, a program designed to help transform the global energy system to meet the needs of the future and to help build a bridge to that future by improving today's energy systems. MITEI Director Ernest Moniz, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics and Engineering Systems, noted that "this discovery in the Nocera lab demonstrates that moving up the transformation of our energy supply system to one based on renewables will depend heavily on frontier basic science."

The success of the Nocera lab shows the impact of a mixture of funding sources - governments, philanthropy, and industry. This project was funded by the National Science Foundation and by the Chesonis Family Foundation, which gave MIT $10 million this spring to launch the Solar Revolution Project, with a goal to make the large scale deployment of solar energy within 10 years.

Could Thin Film Solar Make Solar Electricity Cheaper Than Coal Produced Power?

New technology breakthroughs have been the hope of governments and the public for everything from climate change and global warming, energy security, domestic versus foreign production and jobs, to distributed power production that need not be purchased from large utilities.  Solar energy one of the hoped for solutions has been hampered by manufacturing costs.  The solar panels we have all seen are large and costly to produce because they rely on silicon that is also used for computer chips.

With the development of thin film solar, the ability to reduce the cost may be solved.  A story from Celsias describes how a company called Nanosolar is producing a solar film that is printed much like documents on your inkjet printer at home.  The new technology may reduce solar electricity costs from $3 a wat to 33  cents a watt--competitive with electricity from coal-fired power plants. The Nanosolar plant in San Jose, once in full production in 2008, will be capable of producing 430 megawatts per year. This is more than the combined total of every other solar manufacturer in the U.S.

This breakthrough technology has the ability to revolutionize power production. Keep an eye on Nanosolar and other companies in the thin film space.

Google Announces Investment of Hundreds of Millions of Dollars in Renewable Energy

On November 27th Google announced a new strategic initiative to develop electricity from renewable energy sources that will be cheaper than electricity produced from coal. Below is the press release issued by Google.

The newly created initiative, known as RE<C, will focus initially on advanced solar thermal power, wind power technologies, enhanced geothermal systems and other potential breakthrough technologies.  RE<C is hiring engineers and energy experts to lead its research and development work, which will begin with a significant effort on solar thermal technology, and will also investigate enhanced geothermal systems and other areas. In 2008, Google expects to spend tens of millions on research and development and related investments in renewable energy. As part of its capital planning process, the company also anticipates investing hundreds of millions of dollars in breakthrough renewable energy projects which generate positive returns.

"We have gained expertise in designing and building large-scale, energy-intensive facilities by building efficient data centers," said Larry Page, Google Co-founder and President of Products. "We want to apply the same creativity and innovation to the challenge of generating renewable electricity at globally significant scale, and produce it cheaper than from coal."

Page added, "There has been tremendous work already on renewable energy. Technologies have been developed that can mature into industries capable of providing electricity cheaper than coal. Solar thermal technology, for example, provides a very plausible path to providing renewable energy cheaper than coal. We are also very interested in further developing other technologies that have potential to be cost-competitive and green. We are aware of several promising technologies, and believe there are many more out there."

Page continued, "With talented technologists, great partners and significant investments, we hope to rapidly push forward. Our goal is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that is cheaper than coal.  We are optimistic this can be done in years, not decades." (One gigawatt can power a city the size of San Francisco.)

"If we meet this goal," said Page, "and large-scale renewable deployments are cheaper than coal, the world will have the option to meet a substantial portion of electricity needs from renewable sources and significantly reduce carbon emissions. We expect this would be a good business for us as well."

Coal is the primary power source for many around the world, supplying 40% of the world's electricity.  The greenhouse gases it produces are one of our greatest environmental challenges. Making electricity produced from renewable energy cheaper than coal would be a key part of reducing global greenhouse-gas emissions.

"Cheap renewable energy is not only critical for the environment but also vital for economic development in many places where there is limited affordable energy of any kind," added Sergey Brin, Google Co-founder and President of Technology.

Strategic Investments and Grants

"Lots of groups are doing great work trying to produce inexpensive renewable energy. We want to add something that moves these efforts toward even cheaper technologies a bit more quickly. Usual investment criteria may not deliver the super low-cost, clean, renewable energy soon enough to avoid the worst effects of climate change," said Dr. Larry Brilliant, Executive Director of Google.org, Google's philanthropic arm, "Google.org's hope is that by funding research on promising technologies, investing in promising new companies, and doing a lot of R&D ourselves, we may help spark a green electricity revolution that will deliver breakthrough technologies priced lower than coal."

Working with RE<C, Google.org will make strategic investments and grants that demonstrate a path toward producing energy at an unsubsidized cost below that of coal-fired power plants. Google will work with a variety of organizations in the renewable energy field, including companies, R&D laboratories, and universities. For example, Google.org is working with two companies that have promising scalable energy technologies: 

• eSolar Inc., a Pasadena, CA-based company specializing in solar thermal power which replaces the fuel in a traditional power plant with heat produced from solar energy. eSolar's technology has great potential to produce utility-scale power cheaper than coal.
• Makani Power Inc., an Alameda, CA-based company developing high-altitude wind energy extraction technologies aimed at harnessing the most powerful wind resources. High-altitude wind energy has the potential to satisfy a significant portion of current global electricity needs.

Ongoing Commitments

Today's announcement represents just the latest steps in Google's commitment to a clean and green energy future. 

Google has been working hard on energy efficiency and making its business environmentally sustainable.  Last spring the company announced its intention to be carbon neutral for 2007, and is on track to meet that goal. To this end, the company has taken concrete steps to reduce its carbon footprint and accelerate improvements in green technology, including:

• Developing cutting-edge energy efficiency technology to power and cool its data centers in the U.S. and around the world. 
• Generating electricity for its Mountain View campus from a 1.6 Megawatt corporate solar panel installation, one of the largest in the U.S.
• Accelerating development and adoption of plug-in vehicles through the RechargeIT initiative, including a $10 million request for investment proposals.
• Joining with other industry leaders in 2007 to form the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, a consortium that advocates the design and use of more energy-efficient computers and servers.   
• Working on policies that encourage renewable energy development and deployment, such as a U.S. Renewable Energy Standard, through Google.org.

EMCORE Receives a $24 Million Purchase Order for Concentrator Solar Cells

Albuquerque, NM, August 29, 2007 -- EMCORE Corporation (NASDAQ: EMKR), a leading provider of compound semiconductor-based components and subsystems for the broadband, fiber optic, satellite, and terrestrial solar power markets, announced today that it has been awarded a follow-on production order from Green and Gold Energy (GGE) for 3 million solar cells for use in GGE's SunCubeTM terrestrial concentrator system. This 105 MW purchase order represents the largest procurement of concentrator solar cells in the industry to date and is a follow-on order to an initial 5 MW order placed earlier this year. All hardware ordered under this contract is to be shipped by the end of 2008.

EMCORE will ship its industry leading Concentrator Triple-Junction (CTJ) solar cell products, which have been designed and optimized for Green and Gold Energy's 1100x CPV system. EMCORE has demonstrated record conversion efficiency of 39% under these high concentration conditions and this performance will enable the most cost effective CPV system on the market today. These ultra-high efficiency CPV cells are presently in volume production for multiple customers in a variety of cell sizes.

Based in Glynde, Australia, Green and Gold Energy is a world-leading CPV system provider (www.greenandgoldenergy.com.au). With strong support from Australian government, they plan to deploy solar power farms employing their SunCubeTM low-cost CPV system. GGE is also entering into distribution agreements with several partners, representing a potential for more than 500 MW of annual demand. The SunCubeTM CPV has been designed to produce power at a cost lower than traditional photovoltaic technologies.

Greg Watson, CEO of Green and Gold Energy, stated "EMCORE's solar cell serves as the key enabling technology in our SunCubeTM CPV system. The patent pending SunCube together with its supporting technologies and the EMCORE cell, are receiving worldwide recognition as the CPV system capable of delivering truly fossil fuel competitive energy."

As a part of the planned high-volume product roadmap, EMCORE's continuing investment in technological innovation will enable the introduction of CPV solar cell products with conversion efficiencies of greater than 40% under highly concentrated illumination operating conditions required for next generation, cost competitive CPV systems.

"We are very pleased to receive this follow-on order from Green and Gold Energy," said David Danzilio, Vice President and General Manager of EMCORE's Photovoltaics Division. "EMCORE's CPV solar cells are optimized for our customers' systems to yield state-of-the-art performance with the lowest cost per kW-hr. This 105 MW production contract confirms EMCORE's position as the leader in concentrator cell technology and high volume manufacturing. EMCORE is committed to continually investing in our concentrator cell technology and further expansion of our manufacturing capacity to meet the growing requirements of present and future customers," added Mr. Danzilio

University of Texas Study Advocates Texas Taking Lead in Solar Power

Now the leading state in the Union for wind power, does Texas have the opportunity to become the leader in solar power as well?  Researchers at the IC2 Institute at The University of Texas at Austin believe Texas should take action now to become not only a national but global leader in solar.  The IC2 Institute published a paper on their website stating the economic, public policy, and technological rationale for supporting the solar industry across Texas.    

The paper states that Texas should leverage its natural solar endowment, semiconductor industry expertise, energy business talent, scientific leadership, and forward-thinking public policy to create a PV industry that will lead the U.S. and the world in creating the next generation of electricity production.  The goal of the paper was to identify areas of future research and recommend actions for public, private, and academic sectors that will enhance Texas’ PV industry.

Some of the reasons cited for the opportunity for Texas to become the leader in solar energy are:

• Texas has among the best untapped solar resources in the United States;

• Building on its wind energy experience, its high technology infrastructure, and its ability to leverage its demand, Texas can create a photovoltaic industry from “sand to demand”;

• Photovoltaics could bolster Texas’ weakening semiconductor and materials industries;

• Photovoltaics create high-quality technology and manufacturing jobs;

• Photovoltaics benefit Texas energy consumers— residential, commercial, and industrial as well as agricultural and urban areas;

• With solar and other renewables, Texas has a chance to become a net exporter of energy and energy products rather than a net importer;

• Texas has a narrow window of opportunity to enter into the increasingly competitive solar landscape;

• Texas can leverage its demand-creation ability to create a whole industry;

• Photovoltaic electricity generation provides a cost-effective alternative to other forms of peak energy generating technologies.

This paper can be found at http://www.utexas.edu/ati/cei/documents/TexasSolarOpportunity2007.pdf.