Eat the
Light
The fourth age of solar is on the way…
by Geoff Olson
I
n a 2000 interview on CBC Radio’s Ideas, ethnobotanist Wade Davis recalled a “horrific book that came out called The Secret Life of Plants.” One of Davis’ plant-gathering colleagues, Tim Ploughman, was “infuriated” with the book’s thesis that houseplants respond emotionally to human voices and the music of Mozart. “I remember Tim saying to me, ‘Why would a plant give a shit about Mozart?’ And then he said, ‘And even if it did, why should that impress us? They can eat light. Isn’t that enough?’” Whatever the merit of the slab of compressed pulp that so annoyed the two ethnobotanists, there’s no denying that light-eating is a very impressive trick. In fact, it’s evolution’s greatest routine, the foundation for the pyramid of life. Every cell of algae and every humble weed chows down on photons, as a matter of course. That’s real magic. Let’s see David Copperfield and Kris Angel sit down for a tray of rays. Human beings may not be able to “eat light” as directly as plants do, but our fossil-fuel addicted civilization is beginning to taste the possibility of reducing its steady diet of dirty energy sources like coal, oil and nuclear. With the explosive growth of renewable energy, we are now on the cusp of the fourth age of solar (see sidebar). Tavis Bradford, an industry analyst for The Prometheus Institute, predicts that within a short time, production of solar panels will double each year. The price per volume savings will inevitably follow, as production scales-up and becomes more efficient. The price of solar panels could drop as much as 50 percent from 2006 to 2010, Bradford adds. According to futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil, solar power will be the dominant form of energy source within the next 20 years. With the use of solar 16 .
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SEPTEMBER 2008
power doubling every two years, it is following the exponential growth of previous technologies, Kurzweil says. The futurist has seen similar kinds of patterns in the past and has correctly predicted the outcomes. He foresaw the explosive growth of the Internet and wireless systems and also predicted the downfall of the Soviet Union. With wind factored in, the possibilities are even sunnier. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington – one of the U.S. Department of Energy’s 10 national laboratories – estimates that, as wind power drops to competitive levels, it could quickly supply 20 percent of the US’ electrical needs. With the proper infrastructure implemented, some researchers put the figure at 30 percent. (For the purposes of this article, I include wind power as a subset of solar power because the sun’s electromagnetic energy is the prime driver of the atmosphere’s thermal engine.) The pace of research is tracking the pace of production. It seems that a week can’t pass without another technical or market breakthrough. Passive solar heating, solar ovens, solar-powered trash compactors, solar-powered UV water treatment, hyper-efficient LED lights and building-integrated photovoltaics – the present state of the art has dizzying possibilities for social change, even without the projected technical advances and plunging costs. The entry of big players like WalMart into solar power indicates energy security is as much of an issue as good business practice. Corporations aren’t going to wait to take their cue from the Jurassic oil dynasty counting out its last few months in the White House. Geneticist and entrepreneur Joel Bellenson points out that the founder of Wal-Mart has invested $250M in First Solar,
which now has a market capitalization larger than GM and Ford combined. The founders of Google funded NanoSolar, which just shipped solar panels at $1/W, making it cheaper than coal. And while General Electric is losing its appliance division, it’s going big time into renewable energy via wind and LED lighting. Other big players include Phillips, Sharp Electronics, Boeing, Peterbilt, Intel, Hewlitt-Packard and IBM. “Silicon Valley/Stanford on one coast and MIT on the other coast are driving solar advancements at breakneck speed,” Bellenson notes in an email exchange. “Clearly, the principal countries and their industrial capitalists in the EU are hell bent to switch to renewables. The United Kingdom plans to get all of their residential electricity from wind by 2020.” The game has gone global and North America is playing catch-up. Germany
persistent bugaboos of solar power: it doesn’t work when the sun goes down and storing power is expensive. This is why solar still supplies only a small percentage of the world’s electricity. Offthe-shelf batteries are still too big and expensive to compete with other options. In comparison, fossil or renewable fuels act as their own storage, making for ease of use and transport. That nut may finally have been cracked, however. In August, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) claimed to have found a radically inexpensive way to store solar power. Eoin O’Carroll described the feat in an article published in the Christian Science Monitor: “Daniel Nocera, a chemistry professor at MIT, and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Mr. Nocera’s lab, have developed a catalyst made from cobalt and phosphate that
The question is not how widespread renewable power will be in our future. The question is will its reign arrive in time? With resource wars raging in the Near East, and the planet in the midst of its sixth great extinction period, one expression comes to mind: the power of now. and Denmark are far ahead of us in working renewable technology into their infrastructure. One of the largest wind companies, India-based Suzlon, is going gangbusters; China-based SunTech, one of the largest solar panel companies, is doing the same. At current rates of production, the solar industry worldwide will be producing enough solar panels in 2009 to power nine Vancouvers, Bellenson claims. Nonetheless, there have been two
can split water into oxygen and hydrogen gas. When used in conjunction with a photovoltaic solar panel, their system can use water to store the sun’s energy.” Cobalt replaces electrodes made of platinum, which is more expensive than gold, thereby reducing costs by a huge margin. Nocera describes his catalyst discovery as a solar power “Nirvana,” with the inference that we can now “seriously think about solar power as unlimited and soon.”
