Inventions have kept changing our lives for millennia. Without the invention of the plow, there would be no human civilization as we know it. There would be no Industrial Revolution without the steam engine. This century's key challenge is mastering the energy transition. We need to solve what has been called the "energy trilemma" by providing affordable, carbon-neutral (or carbon-negative) energy, and ensuring the security of its supply. Fresh inventions will be key to make this happen. But what can we do to support our inventors who are working in the frontline of the energy transition? Here are eight viewpoints.
First, we need to pay special attention to technologies that have a ripple effect. What is the equivalent of the wheel in the 21st century energy provision? The wheel changed the game in 3,500 BC. When people were already building canals and sailboats or casting metal alloys in the Bronze Age, they still had no carts. 5,500 years later, we take cheap long-distance overland transport for granted. Without the wheel it would have been impossible to get where we are today. The most exciting technologies are the ones that are pathways to entire new industries.
Second, if we do not dare, we cannot succeed. You want utility-scale cheap renewable energy, regardless of weather conditions? Take the Luna Ring concept developed by scientists at the Shimizu Corporation: a belt of solar cells around the 11,000 km lunar equator generates electric power 24/7—which it transmits to the Earth from the near side of the Moon which always faces the Earth. To achieve this, the Luna Ring uses microwaves and high-powered laser beams for energy transmission. On the moon, there will be no generation inefficiencies due to bad weather or atmosphere, and the Luna Ring could generate enough electricity to power the entire Earth. Too crazy? Well, the Japanese scientists working on this hope to start building the Luna Ring in 2035. For our energy imagination and inventiveness, not even space can be a limit.
Third, we need to advance along all frontiers: energy generation, storage, transmission and efficiency. Alcatel has already demoed a mobile phone with a transparent solar panel over the screen that would allow users to charge their phone by simply placing it in the sun. Now what if mobile phones could be charged rapidly in 30 seconds, and electric cars in three minutes? Similar to proteins used by body builders to bulk-up faster, startup StoreDot used biological semiconductors made from naturally occurring organic compounds to accomplish this. By 2017, the firm plans to demonstrate an electric car battery that can be charged in a mere three minutes. This is the kind of thinking we need to apply to all areas of alternative energy. In solar energy we need to find ways to use a much wider spectrum of sunlight and dramatically raise the efficiency of solar panels. True, multi-junction cells already today allow for a 46% conversion efficiency and the fast rise of the efficiency of 'perovskites', a newer class of materials with a particular crystal structure is promising. Nonetheless, we will need to double that to 90%, and fast. Fresh ideas are needed to enable broad progress on all fronts, adding up to a full energy transition in generation, storage, transmission and efficiency.
Fourth, we need to leverage science and be ambitious. Breakthroughs are waiting to graduate from the lab to becoming commercial products. Take silicene, also dubbed "graphene's cousin;" made of one-atom thick sheets of silicon atoms. In the mid-2000s, scientists theorized that silicon atoms could form sheets similar to graphene—or pure carbon, in the form of a one atom thick, very thin, nearly transparent sheet that is at least 100 times stronger than steel, and that in spite of its low weight, conducts heat and electricity with high efficiency. But even if graphene is the world's most conductive substance, it is missing a crucial characteristic: unlike the semiconductors which are used in computer chips, graphene misses a band gap. This is the energy hurdle that electrons must overleap before they can carry a current, thereby enabling semiconductor devices to switch on and off, performing logic operations on bits. If silicene could be used instead to build electronic devices, it could enable the semiconductor industry to achieve the Holy Grail in miniaturization. A theorist's fantasy? Perhaps—until three years ago, when Guy Le Lay, a French materials scientist at Aix-Marseille University managed to create silicene in the lab. Many current developments in chemistry, nanotechnology, and materials science allow ideas from theoretical physics to be translated into practice.
Fifth, whatever we roll out needs to work—and be cheap; otherwise there will be no large-scale adoption. Take a recent discovery that could make it to production: organic flow batteries. They could be key to achieving the storage solutions we need. MIT scientists calculate that their invention costs only USD 27 per kilowatt-hour, compared to metal batteries at USD 700 per kilowatt-hour. This is nearly a 97 percent saving. Want something even more exciting? If it can be made to work, cold fusion—a theorized type of nuclear reaction occurring at room temperature providing an almost limitless source of energy—would completely upset the apple cart by avoiding perilous toxic waste and offering a pretty much unlimited supply of fuel that is both constant and reliable. But, it still does not exist, and time will tell if it will. To be deployed at scale, renewable energy needs to be able to easily compete with fossil fuels in terms of price and availability—this also when the price of a barrel of Brent Spar trades at its lowest in real terms since the 1980s, as is the case today. And once renewables scale further and seriously disrupt demand for fossil fuels, the latters' price is likely to drop.
Sixth, let's keep things simple and practical whenever possible. We do not know if and when cold fusion will see the daylight. But a lot of new technologies are viable today. For example, the paper-like battery JENAX can fold and is waterproof—this means that it can be integrated into clothing or wearables. The battery has already been safety tested, including being folded over 200,000 times without losing performance. If such a battery is built into the strap of a smartwatch, battery life of wearables will become manageable, and the size of the devices can be shrunk down. There is practical demand for this.
Seventh, we need everyone. To solve the energy problem at the scale required, we will need all the talent we can get. It's hard to see how this could happen without finding new ways of working together: scientists, investors, and business developers.
Finally, if we want the energy transition to succeed, we need to start raising our game today. If you think I'm crazy or over ambitious, that's great, because it means you have read the Exergeia Manifesto until here. Great work has already been done on the energy transition, getting us to where we are now. Germany, a pioneer in the energy transition could build the technology and mobilize the funds needed to go to an 80% renewable economy by 2040. But we will need the entire global economy to graduate to 80% renewables in one generation the latest—and that means we need to step it up: it's time to give the energy transition another nudge and find the next plow or steam engine.
With the Exergeia project, we identify, back and fast-track the inventions needed to get us to the clean energy future we need. Provided your invention works, we are open-minded: we are agnostic if you have a working prototype of a Space Energy Converter—putting out more power than goes in from any previously recognized source—, or if you are working on nanobatteries that are 80,000 times smaller than a human hair and can offer three times the capacity of current efforts while charging in just 12 minutes and working for thousands of cycles. If you are working on a breakthrough and have results to show, come and join the quest. Contact us.
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Maximilian Martin, Ph.D. is the founder and global managing director of Impact Economy, an impact investment and strategy firm based in Lausanne, Switzerland, and leads the Exergeia Project (www.exergeia.com). Join our quest for a full energy transition in our lifetime, and circulate the Exergeia Manifesto to every inventor you know. To succeed, we need all the talent we can get!
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