Even Big Oil is jumping headlong into the renewables market. British Petroleum, for instance, is spending more than a billion dollars to fund hydrogen power plants in California, as well as projects in wind and solar power. Other investors include Shell and Chevron. The latter cut a five-year deal with the Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, to develop fuels from farm waste, excess from feed crops, or biomass from shrubs.
With the new investments comes expanded funding for research, and scientists are vigorously going about solving the problems that keep alternative energy sources, well, alternative. While not-in-my-neighborhood objections are one obstacle to wind power (as exemplified by this year's fuss over proposed wind turbines off Cape Cod), there are also engineering problems to confront. Wind turbines usually sit on platforms bolted to the seafloor in shallow coastal waters, so they miss steady wind currents that blow further out at sea. This year mechanical engineer Paul Sclavounos of MIT introduced an answer: an offshore windmill design that sits on floaters like some oil rigs do. The design, which he claims is hurricane resistant and easily transported, could allow turbines to tap winds 90 miles offshore without requiring expensive towers.
Chemists are also working on improving the efficiency of fuel cells—devices that use replenishable, stable chemical reactions to produce electricity—so that cars can run on hydrogen produced by renewable, non-carbon-emitting power sources. In one small breakthrough, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have created new fluoropolymers that conduct protons three times better than current fuel cell coatings. Robert Hockaday, who founded Energy Related Devices, a company working on fuel cells in Los Alamos, New Mexico, told Science magazine that the material "could set a new gold standard."
To be sure, many alternative energy buffs remain skeptical of the long-touted hydrogen economy, which would presumably require a huge (and politically problematic) investment in new infrastructure. But tell that to BMW and GM. In September both companies announced plans for hydrogen-capable cars. The hydrogen would be derived from fossil fuels while researchers explore other methods of production. GM's fuel cell SUV, Sequel, operates with an energy efficiency equivalent to 39 miles per gallon of gasoline.
Even the electric car, largely given up for dead, made a comeback this past year. At MIT researchers are working to replace conventional batteries with ultracapacitors, which can be recharged far more quickly and last more than 10 years (see story #92, "Capacitors Could Replace Batteries," page 63). Ultracapacitors, like fuel cells, can take in the unsteady flow of energy from wind turbines or photovoltaic cells and store it so that it is available exactly when needed. Plug-in hybrid cars, says Martinot, might also be part of the solution. They could store a charge from wind energy at night and absorb sunlight hitting their rooftop solar cells if parked during the day. In the meantime, Tesla Motors in Silicon Valley is wowing the well-heeled with a conventional electric car powered by unconventional lithium batteries that can blast this $100,000 Lotus-based roadster from 0 to 60 miles per hour in four seconds.
And the energy technologies themselves are improving. Nanosolar, in Palo Alto, California, which announced plans to build the world's largest solar-panel plant, is using nanotechnology to devise solar cells that can be printed like newspapers. Because these cells can be made more quickly than bulky solar panels, the company thinks they might be cost-competitive with coal or nuclear power. Chemists at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory are closing in on cheap ways to make cellulosic ethanol, a form of ethanol derived from agricultural waste rather than food crops like soybeans or corn. Wind-power engineers are developing new turbines that are far more efficient than those built just a decade ago.
"The question about renewables is, Will it be like fuel cells a few years ago, or fiber optics? That had a lot of venture capital in it but few quick returns, and so investors went off and did other things," cautions Nate Lewis, a materials chemist at Caltech who works on solar cells. Keeping the field moving, he suggests, will require funding more basic research. The total federal spending on basic energy research and development doesn't even match the funding at one big institute within the National Institutes of Health. Although many legislators on Capitol Hill see the need, the committees that set the federal budget have yet to tackle the issue aggressively.
Pramodh Panchanadam, an energy analyst at the Frost & Sullivan office in Toronto, thinks all the current renewable energy sources are merely stopgaps until we hit on the true successor to oil. "This is just a balancing time before we get to a disruptive technology," he says. Meanwhile, scientists are working feverishly to achieve that breakthrough—in biomass, superefficient solar cells, or perhaps nuclear fusion. If they succeed, the next Jack 2 could come not from a drill hole four miles below the ocean floor but from a test tube or a packet of plasma.
Eli Kintisch
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