Despite Setbacks, Moving Forward in Clean Tech
When environmental history is written, 2010 could be seen a disaster for the clean technology industry. The year dawned just after the disappointment that was December's U.N. global warming summit in Copenhagen, where the nations of the world failed to produce a comprehensive treaty to cut carbon emissions — the sort of agreement that could have given business the long-term confidence to invest in clean tech. It didn't help that the overblown controversy known as "climategate" — which involved allegations of fraud by climate scientists — undermined trust in global warming science, letting skeptics back into the debate. Worst of all, the Senate failed even to vote on a bill that would have capped U.S. carbon emissions and produce a market designed to kick start clean tech. In America, at least, green tech seems to have gone backwards.
But that's a myopic view. In Europe, which already has a carbon market, investment in clean energy — including wind and solar — isn't going away. China has emerged as a major player in clean tech, investing hundreds of billions of dollars in renewable energy and energy efficiency. In doing so, it's positioning itself to lead the world in the industry of tomorrow. And even the U.S., for all its political problems, hasn't stood still: the Department of Energy, under Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu, has begun directly supporting innovative clean tech companies and pumping more money into basic research and development. Most important, the U.S. — and especially Silicon Valley — is still home to what might be the world's most innovative entrepreneurs in clean tech. These folks are not short of smart ideas, as you'll see here.
Recycling e-Waste
High-tech may have a clean image — all smooth-edged iPhones and liquid crystal displays — but the elements that go into mobile phones, computers and TVs can be polluting to the environment and dangerous to human health if incorrectly disposed of. And that's exactly what happens in parts of the developing world, where the poor take apart your phone with little protection, exposing themselves to mercury, lead, cadmium and other dangerous metals so that they can get to the gold, copper and other valuable materials within. So-called e-waste is the fastest growing part of the solid waste stream, and some 20 to 50 million metric tons of it are thrown out every year.
But there are ways to recycle e-waste, reducing the need to mine more of the metals that go into high-tech items, and preventing the environmental consequences of poorly processed electronics. CloudBlue, based in New Jersey, helps tech companies take care of their e-waste, arranging for direct pickup and processing, ensuring that valuable metals can be reused and recycled for future electronics. For customers like banks that have to worry about sensitive data that might be encoded on old computers, CloudBlue can also process the waste onsite. With all this, the company can ensure that no e-waste will ever end up in a landfill — or worse, poisoning a child in Africa or China.
Algae Biofuel
It's a dirty secret: the biggest renewable energy business in the U.S. isn't solar or wind or electric cars. It's plain old corn ethanol. Thanks largely to generous government subsidies, the U.S. produced 10.6 billion gallons of ethanol in 2009. That was enough to displace the need for 364 million barrels of oil, but study after study has shown that high levels of corn ethanol production simply aren't sustainable. Corn that could go to feed the world instead feeds our cars — and not very efficiently. The growth of corn ethanol has more to do with political realities in the U.S. (think Iowa, home of both corn and the first Presidential caucus) than it does with environmental ones.
But that doesn't mean biofuels can't play a major role in a greener U.S. energy policy — they just have to be the right kind. One of the best options on the horizon is biofuel made from algae, which counters a lot of the problems with corn ethanol. (The right strains of algae secrete oils that can be used to make fuel.) Algae do not need farmland to grow: tanks will do the job just fine anywhere there is spare land and a decent amount of sunshine. Algae also grow much faster than traditional crops, and the micro-organisms may be able to use to use wastewater or even saline water during their development, rather than fresh water. Startups like Sapphire Energy and Algenol in California and Florida are passing the pilot phase and nearing commercial development; they just need a little government help.
Algae food
For something that looks like pond scum — actually, it pretty much is pond scum — algae are extremely useful. Just ask the San Francisco startup Solazyme. Like countless other companies, Solazyme is working to create algae biofuel for cars, trucks and planes. Unfortunately, that market has yet to materialize, and because fuel is such a low-margin business, companies like Solazyme will need to sell a lot of their product before they can begin making a profit. It's classic chicken-and-egg economics.
But Solazyme's chemists stumbled on another use for their algae: food. The company's living products can be used to replace the eggs, butter and oil in cakes, cookies and more — except that the algae flour has a lipid profile that is much closer to healthy olive oil. It might sound gross, but the results are excellent — snacks that taste like snacks, but lower in fat calories and higher in protein. It's a perfect combination — as long as you can convince consumers to eat pond scum.
Thin-film Solar
Two factors will make solar power more competitive on the energy market. One is efficiency — the percentage of the sun's energy that a solar panel can convert into electricity. The other is price: how cheap are the panels to produce? Many solar panels in use today — the crystalline silicon arrays you'll see on rooftops — focus on efficiency while costing more.
But there's another way to make solar panels: thin-film. The technology uses much less silicon, which means that the average efficiency of those panels is less than arrays using crystalline silicon. But the very fact that thin-film panels use less silicon makes them much cheaper and faster to produce. That combination has helped thin-film companies like first Solar of Tempe, Arizona, and Nanosolar of San Jose emerge as early clean tech titans. Publicly traded First Solar is one of the most successful renewable energy firms in the world today. The future of solar looks thin.
Molten Salt Storage
Renewable energy has many advantages, as environmentalists won't hesitate to tell you. There's no need to pay for fuel since the wind and the sun are free, and that saves utilities from the price spikes seen in coal, natural gas, oil and nuclear. But wind and solar face one major problem: intermittency. When the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine, turbines and silicon panels aren't producing electricity, and there's no way to store the electricity they do produce during peak times if it's not being used. That's a serious obstacles since utilities, often by law, need to provide enough electricity to meet demand at all times.
But utility-scale solar companies are working on ways to store the energy they produce during the brightest days. One option: molten salt. It can be used in solar thermal, which employs powerful mirrors to focus the sun's heat to create steam, driving an electric turbine. The surplus heat produced during the day can be used to warm up massive amounts of salt, which can absorb significant amounts of heat. When the sun goes down — or when it's simply cloudy — that heat can be used to generate steam and run an electric turbine. It's not perfect, but it's the best battery that's been developed yet for utility-scale solar.
Solar Tower
There are two ways to harness energy from the sun. One is through photovoltaic panels, which transform sunlight directly to electricity. But — news flash — the sunlight also produces heat, which can be concentrated using mirrors to produce steam, which then drives electric turbines. It's this second form — called solar thermal or concentrated solar power — that has the most potential for utility-scale power generation. In fact, there are already solar thermal plants operating in the deserts of Nevada and California, using low rows of curved mirrors to concentrate sunlight.
But Bill Gross at eSolar thinks that he can improve on that fairly basic technology. Instead of rows of mirrors, eSolar uses vertical mirrored towers of that perfectly concentrate sunlight on a ground target. Using sophisticated software that Gross helped write himself — he was an Internet entrepreneur before breaking into alternative power — the mirrors perfectly track the sun as it crosses the sky, maximizing the amount of electricity that can be produced. The result is a relatively compact but power utility-scale plant that gets the most out of that free source of energy called the sun.
Custom Biofuels
Before alternative energy, biotech was the next big thing in California's Silicon Valley, with PhD-stocked startups racing to decode the genome and create new and better drugs. But innovators are discovering that the two fields have a lot in common — especially when it comes to biofuels. First-generation biofuels are limited: corn ethanol packs less energy per gallon than petroleum, and new fuels like biodiesel often can't be used in car engines without expensive technical conversions. That's a hidden obstacle to wider adoption; there is a trillion-dollar infrastructure already in place around petroleum, and changing it won't be easy or cheap.
But what if you could adapt biofuels to use our current infrastructure, not the other way around? That's what a handful of biotech companies are doing right now. Startups like Amyris and LS9 are using the tools of biotechnology to produce new biofuels that are sustainable and ready for use in our cars and trucks right now. The companies create custom microbes in the lab that can produce biofuels to order — even "green crude" that has most of the benefits of petroleum without the drawbacks. The technology is still a long way from commercial scale, but it provides some of the best hopes for a biofuelled future.
Electric Cars
It's an article of faith among many environmentalists: the future will be electric. But how long is it going to take? Electric cars have been around since the dawn of the automobile — in fact, the technology hasn't changed all that much since Henry Ford's own electric Model-Ts. But the electric car lost out to gasoline-powered ones for good reasons: gasoline carries a lot of power per gallon, while batteries never had the capacity to move cars very far. Even in the 1990s, with the introduction of improved electrics like GM's lamentedly discontinued EV1, battery-powered cars remained a fetish for those who value their carbon footprint over convenience.
Times really have changed, though — and 2010 could finally mark the tipping point for electric cars. GM's long-awaited Volt — not a pure electric but a plug-in hybrid — is finally set to go on sale at the end of this year. The Japanese car company Nissan is going one better with its all-electric Leaf — the one with the polar bear ads — and Ford and Toyota have electrics in the works as well. Smaller startups are experimenting with ultra-efficient electric cars, while the innovative company Better Place is installing networks of battery-charging stations in Israel for its own electric transportation system, with a subscription payment system modeled on the wireless industry. Electric cars still have a number of obstacles to overcome, and they won't make a huge dent in carbon emissions unless the grid itself is steadily cleaned up, but they are closing in on the mainstream.
Smart Meters
Our electrical devices may be 21st century, but the electrical grid we plug them into is strictly 20th. The grid is inefficient and prone to breakdowns — as anyone who remembers the great East Coast blackout of 2003 would know. Improving the grid is going to be a vital part of helping clean energy scale up: better transmission lines are needed to carry wind-generated electricity from the middle of the U.S. to the more heavily populated coasts, for example, while a more flexible grid can better handle the intermittency of renewable power sources.
But the first installment on a smarter gird will be smarter meters. Right now the electric meter in your home tells you — and the electric company — only the most basic information. The majority of utilities won't even know that homes have lost power in a blackout until enough annoyed customers call them. But smart meters connected to a network can relay that sort of information instantly, giving utilities and customers alike a real-time picture of how much power is being used at any given moment. And as new appliances are networked into smart meters, we'll be able to use them much more efficiently — programming our washing machines to run only during times of low power demand, say. By smoothing out the electricity demand curves, smart meters can help utilities get more out of the power plants they already have — and avoid building more.
Lithium-ion Batteries
It's not just electricity generation that will make a difference in the future, it's also energy storage. And that's especially true for mobile devices — whether that means iPhones or especially, electric cars. Low-capacity batteries have held back electric cars for decades, but that's beginning to change thanks to a new(ish) technology. The electronics of the 1990s — and most hybrid cars today — used nickel-ion batteries for power. They were an upgrade over the lead batteries used in the past, but they weren't strong enough to power electric cars for long distances.
Lithium-ion batteries, however, are a potential game-changer. If you use a laptop or a mobile phone, chances are you already own a lithium-ion battery. (Without them, your iPhone wouldn't even have the less-than-great operating life it does today.) Lithium-ion batteries can pack more power in a smaller case, so the battery for GM's plug-in hybrid Volt is tiny compared to the gigantic power pack that had been used on its EV1. A smaller battery is also lighter, which reduces the weight of the electric car and the power needed to drive it. The price on lithium-ion batteries still needs to come down — a battery for a new electric car can cost more than $10,000. But battery-making companies like A123 Systems in Massachusetts are already emerging as the future titans of a clean energy economy.
Fuel Cells
Sometimes high tech can start out low tech. Fuel cells are an old and basic technology; they generate electricity within a cell through the reaction of a fuel and an oxidant. Essentially they're a kind of chemical battery, and your average high school chemistry class can make one. Unlike batteries, however, they can't store electricity; you need an outside fuel source that has to be replenished over time. But their simplicity has also made them useful for certain purposes; NASA has long used hydrogen fuel cells to power its spacecraft.
Inventors have tried to use hydrogen fuel cells as a cleaner way to create electricity commercially. Honda and other car companies have made hydrogen fuel cell-powered cars, for example, but they've always been limited by the cost. That's beginning to change, however, thanks to a California startup called Bloom Energy. The company exploded onto the public scene earlier this year with the release of its Bloom Box, a system that uses fuel cell technology to provide off-the-grid power. The Bloom Boxes — about half the size of a shipping container — use solid oxide fuel cells, which generate electricity by oxidizing natural gas. The technology has existed for awhile, but Bloom figured out how to carry out the reaction at a relatively low temperature, making the Bloom Boxes safe to use in corporate offices — which is exactly where they're being put to work now, by companies like Google and eBay that can use the lower carbon power as an off-the-grid back up to conventional grid electricity and as a way to reduce their own carbon footprint.
Rooftop Wind Power
If you want to provide off-the-grid power for your own home, there's only been one solution: solar panels. Wind power is usually deployed on a utility-scale, in vast farms of mighty turbines that feed directly into the grid. That's a scale that helps explains why more than 10,000 MW of wind power were installed in the U.S. in 2009. Solar has always been the choice for homeowners who want to stop paying electricity bills and start generating their own juice.
But if wind can do big, it can also do small — and it does rooftops as well. The startup Windtronics is developing mini-wind turbines that can be installed on any flat root, either alone or in larger arrays. Each turbine measures about 6 ft. in diameter and looks like a large, circular window fan, but it can generate an average of 1,500 KW/h a year, with more or less depending on wind strength. And unlike utility-scale turbines, the Windtronic turbine contains no rotating gearbox to generate electricity, and is thus much quieter. In an ordinary wind turbine, the blades moves the gears, the gears turn a generator, and the generator creates electricity. With a Windtronics model, the blades are equipped with magnets at the tips and are enclosed in a wheel that contains coiled copper, so the entire turbine is an electric generator. That makes the Windtronics turbine silent — something your neighbors will appreciate.
Tidal Power
Tides are the winds of the oceans, generating a tremendous amount of kinetic energy that can be tapped with the right kind of technology. In fact, tides might be better than wind, since they're much more predictable. And while the best wind resources tend to be located far from major population centers, most of the big cities around the world are located right next to the water. The problem has always been that building turbines and other infrastructure is significantly more expensive underwater than on land, since salts can erode equipment and maintenance is a challenge.
That's still the case, but tidal power is slowly beginning to gain acceptance. The technology works the same way a wind turbine does: the steady movement in and out of the tides turns an underwater turbine, which generates electricity. And as with wind, there are some parts of the world that are particularly rich in tidal potential, like the Bay of Fundy in Canada, home to some of the most intense tides on the planet. New York City's tides are a lot calmer, but the city does have potential for tidal power, and companies like Verdant are tapping it.
Green IT
Computers seem so clean, don't they, just sitting there and humming, without any noxious emissions? But of course computers need power, and right now most of our power comes from fossil fuels. Computers and IT are now a small but rapidly growing source of carbon — about 2% of global emissions, a figure that could easily double within a decade.
That's where green IT comes in. Whether it's more energy-efficient laptops and server farms, or software that automatically powers down our desktops when they're not being used, there are ways to curb the IT sector's energy hunger ways without losing performance. Software like Granola, for example, can run in the background of your operating system and tune up your computer's own energy-saving hardware, ensuring you're not wasting volts unnecessarily. There's no reason you can't get all the computing power you need without wasting power.
Green Concrete
Making cement for concrete is energy-intensive. Extremely energy-intensive. Here's how it works: you heat pulverized limestone clay — which is heavy in carbon — along with sand to 1,450°C (2,600°F), usually with a fossil fuel like coal or natural gas. Unsurprisingly, that process generates a lot of carbon dioxide: manufacturing one metric ton of cement releases 650 to 920 kilograms of CO2. The nearly 3 billion metric tons of cement that were produced worldwide last year accounted for about 5% of all CO2 emissions.
The good news is that there are enormous carbon savings that could be realized by making cement production more energy efficient. For example, the company Hycrete had reformulated the products used to waterproof concrete in a way that allows for recycling in the future, reducing the lifetime energy footprint of a building. The London-based startup Novacem is going further, working on a new cement production method that would actually absorb more CO2 than it releases, by substituting cabon-rich limestone with magnesium silicates that contain no stored carbon. As the cement hardens, CO2 in the air actually reacts to make solid carbonates that strengthen the cement while holding onto the gas. Novacem can't yet use its process on a commercial scale, but if it can, concrete could become carbon negative.
Green Building Materials
Want your new building to stand out? Make it green. Green architecture has gone from a niche interest to a major design industry. Massive skyscrapers like the new Bank of America headquarters in midtown Manhattan advertise their energy efficiency, particularly their score on the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) scale. What MPG is for cars, LEED is for buildings. Sustainability has even become a point of competition among mega-mansion owners, with multi-millionaires in California jostling to build the greenest house in America.
Much of green architecture comes from design — making use of natural light and other features to cut down on energy waste; but smarter building materials can make a difference as well. Companies like Serious Materials produce highly efficient windows, insulation and other building features that reduce the amount of heat lost to the outside. Built right, "passive houses" can even be so energy efficient that they require no outside heat at all, bringing energy bills close to zero.
Modular Nuclear Power
Nukes have long been the third rail to the environmental movement; Greenpeace, after all, got its start as an anti-nuke organization. But while radioactive waste and the risk of major accidents still leave many greens wary of nuclear power, there's no ignoring the fact that nuclear is the only utility-scale, non-intermittent electricity source that doesn't emit carbon. If you replaced all of the U.S.'s nuclear plants — which supply about a fifth of the the nation's electricity — with coal plants, carbon emissions would skyrocket.
But there's still a reluctance to build nuclear plants — no new one has been constructed in the U.S. in decades — and it goes beyond environmental concerns. Nuclear power plants are incredibly expensive investments, and right now few utilities would take on the financial risk of building one, or get banks to lend them the necessary capital, even with additional government aid. But what if you could shrink the size of a nuclear plant? That's what companies like NuScale Power and Babcock & Wilcox are trying to do. By building a modular plant that might be a quarter the size of a the current multi-gigawatt operations, it's possible to reduce the capital expenditures needed to start construction and cut the risk that would be associated with an accident. We may at last be approaching a time that nuclear goes nimble.
Artificial Photosynthesis
As smart as human beings can be, nature almost always does it better — possibly because nature has had hundreds of millions of years to get it right. Take photosynthesis for example. Plants with green leaves are able to capture the sun's energy and turn it into useful chemical fuel in a process that is much, much more efficient than our best photovoltaic solar panels.
That's why there are a number of scientists working on creating artificial photosynthesis; it was even a major plot point in Solar, the English writer Ian McEwan's global warming-themed novel. Daniel Nocera, an energy expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is pushing a form of artificial photosynthesis that would create electricity that would then be harnessed to produce hydrogen for use in fuel cells. That's only one way to harness photosynthesis, but already startups like Joule Biotechnologies are looking for ways to take it commercial. The future has to be solar-powered; the question will be how best to harness that free source of energy. The trees might have the best idea.
Waste to Energy
It's the perfect form of recycling: taking our trash and using it to create electricity. Given the amount of garbage the average American puts on the curb every pickup day, that could add up to a whole lot of power. One simple way is to burn trash, and use the heat to generate steam that can run an electric turbine. But that method has significant drawbacks; not all garbage burns, of course, and the waste that does will often produce heavy emissions, including dangerous and sometimes carcinogenic dioxins. So right now most of our non-recyclable waste — and a lot of waste that is recyclable — ends up buried beneath the ground.
But there are companies working on smarter ways to recycle our trash. Costaka has pioneered technology that can turn biomass waste such as grass or woodchips into gas and eventually into ethanol. Their process uses less water and has a smaller carbon footprint than traditional ethanol. The Canadian company Enerkem has a similar process, but the firm has gone further, able to build standardized, easy-to-install plants that allow any municipality to begin turning garbage into cleaner biofuel.
Biochar
Given the scale of the climate challenge, everyone wants to find a silver bullet, a way to cut carbon emissions quickly and cheaply. Until someone perfects cold fusion, however, a cleaner economy will require a portfolio of new and innovative technologies, each playing its part. But that doesn't mean there aren't shortcuts on the road to zero carbon. Here's a deceptively simple one: biochar.
Plants absorb carbon dioxide as long as they're alive, but once they're cut down or burned, that carbon is released back into the atmosphere. Keeping trees standing — especially in tropical areas — is one way to save that carbon. But if plants are cut down, perhaps for agriculture, and you burn the residue in a controlled, low-oxygen atmosphere — a simple process called pyrolysis — you can create charcoal, a stable and solid form of carbon. If you then mix the biochar with certain soils, you can also reduce the amount of methane and nitrous oxide, both of them greenhouse gases, that the soil would naturally release. The result is a two-for-one carbon cutting special, and the potential is tremendous. A recent study in Nature Geoscience found that biochar could offset 12% of global carbon emissions. The challenge is that biochar has relatively little value on its own, so there's not much business case for making the product right now. That's one more reason a carbon price would be so useful.
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