Archaeologists differ on when humanity first tamed fire. Some believe that it was only 125,000 years ago; others point to evidence dating back some 790,000 years. Either way, once our ancestors learned the benefits of rubbing two sticks together, they never looked back. Fire provided a reliable source of heat, warmth, and light that forever altered our history. Unfortunately, for roughly one out of three people alive today, very little has changed in the past 100,000 years.
The United Nations estimates that one and a half billion people live without electricity and three and a half billion still rely on primitive fuels such as wood or charcoal for cooking and heating. In sub-Saharan Africa, the numbers are even higher, with more than 70 percent of the population living without access to electricity. This bottleneck brings with it a collection of consequences. Energy is arguably the most important lynchpin for abundance. With enough of it, we solve the issue of water scarcity, which also helps address a majority of our current health problems. Energy also brings light, which facilitates education, which, in turn, reduces poverty. The interdependencies are so profound that the United Nations Development Programme warned that none of the Millennium Development Goals aimed at reducing poverty by half can be met without major improvements in developing countries’ energy services.
For Mercy Njima, a Kenyan doctoral student, about 85 percent of her nation is still ravaged by energy poverty. Mercy spent the summer of 2010 at Singularity University, where she painted me a picture of the complex problems she observed in her youth:
Imagine being forced to rely on burning poor-grade wood, dung, or crop waste to cook, suffering the effects of the potentially fatal toxic fumes given off by this fuel. Imagine being desperately ill and turned away from a clinic because it has no electricity and can’t offer even the simplest treatment. Imagine your friends living under the shadow of life-threatening disease because there’s no vital vaccine, due to a lack of refrigeration. Imagine if you or your partner were pregnant and went into labor at night and had no light, no pain relief and no way of saving you or the baby if there were complications.
Mercy describes herself as part of the new-breed “cheetah generation” of Africans who are fast-moving, entrepreneurial leaders working to snatch back the continent from the jaws of poverty, corruption, and poor governance—three issues she believes could be changed significantly with more access to energy. “Consider the women and children who spend hours every day searching for increasingly scarce energy resources. They are at risk from wild animals and sometimes rape. And once they start burning biomass, the acrid smoke causes serious lung disease and turns kitchens into death traps. Children and their mothers are most at risk, choking, retching, and gasping. More people die from smoke inhalation than from malaria. Indoor air pollution is linked to respiratory diseases such as pneumonia, bronchitis, and lung cancer. Women and children who spend long periods every day around traditional open fires inhale the equivalent of two packs of cigarettes a day.”
She also points out that because children have to help collect fuel during school hours, time spent on their education is severely reduced. This problem compounds at night, when students need to do their homework but have no light for studying. Kerosene can help matters, but it’s both expensive and dangerous. In addition, Mercy says, teachers don’t want to work in communities with no lights and little equipment. But the consequences of energy poverty extend further than homes and schools. “Lack of energy also means people struggle to start simple businesses,” she explains. “This shortage impacts every aspect of Kenyan life, and it’s mostly the same across the continent. This is the stark reality for most Africans living in energy poverty.”
However, it doesn’t have to be a permanent reality, maintains Emem Andrews, a former senior program manager for Shell Nigeria and now a Silicon Valley energy entrepreneur. “Without question,” she says, “Africa could become energy independent. Nigeria alone has enough oil for the entire continent. Ultimately, though, the biggest opportunity is the sun. It’s decentralized, fully democratic, and available to all. Africa is endowed with underutilized deserts and lies within latitudes with high solar isolation levels. Sunlight is plentiful and essentially free. We just lack the technology to access it.”
According to the Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation, an international network of scientists and experts founded by the Club of Rome, enough solar power hits one square kilometer of Africa’s deserts to produce the equivalent of one and a half million barrels of oil or three hundred thousand tons of coal. The German Aerospace Center estimates that the solar power in the deserts of North Africa is enough to supply forty times the present world electricity demand. Furthermore, David Wheeler, a research fellow at the Center for Global Development, found that Africa has nine times the solar potential of Europe and an annual equivalent to one hundred million tons of oil. When coupled to its vast reserves of wind, geothermal, and hydroelectric, the continent has enough energy to meet its own needs and export the surplus to Europe. Perhaps Africa’s greatest asset in exploiting this vast potential for renewables lies in the paradoxical fact that it has a complete and total absence of existing energy infrastructure.
Just as Africa’s lack of copper landlines allowed for the explosive deployment of wireless systems, its lack of large-scale, centralized coal and petroleum power plants could pave the way for decentralized, renewable-power generation architectures. While wealthier early adopters, primarily in first world nations, will likely pay for and develop these technologies (ideally, in cocreative ways with the rising billion), once they do find their way to Africa, these systems have an immediate advantage over existing options. Many forget that there is a significant price paid for hauling and safeguarding kerosene and generators to remote locations. In most places, this raises the cost of electricity to 35 cents per kilowatt-hour. So even today, with existing solar options at 20 cents per kilowatt-hour (and including the cost of the batteries required for storage), solar would total out around 25 cents per kilowatt-hour—a 30 percent savings over existing technologies.
And existing solar technologies; well, they’re far from the end of this story.
Like many who survived the dot-com bust, Andrew Beebe got out just in time. In 2002 he sold his Internet company, Bigstep, and went looking for greener pastures. Inspired by visionary physicist Freeman Dyson’s ideas about “hacking photosynthesis,” Beebe sought those pastures in the field of renewable energy. Initially he teamed up with Bill Gross, CEO of Idealab, to launch Energy Innovations (EI), a high-concentration photovoltaic (PV) business. They soon split into two companies, with Beebe taking the systems-installation end of the enterprise, EI Solutions. Over the next few years, he grew EI Solutions into a $25 million company, installing PV panels at the headquarters of corporations such as Google, Sony, and Disney, then selling the operation to Suntech, the largest PV manufacturer in the world. He ran global product management there, then took over global sales and marketing—a position he still holds. As the person in charge of selling the most PV in the world, Beebe has his finger of the pulse of solar. According to him, that pulse is strong:
The solar market is a great econ-101 story. PV production and installation have grown at 45 percent to 50 percent per year for the last decade. That is epic, as the remainder of global energy growth is only increasing at 1 percent annually. In 2002, when I got started in this industry, total capacity sold was something like 10 megawatts per year. This year, it’ll probably be eighteen gigawatts. That’s nearly a 2,000-fold increase in less than a decade. At the same time, cost has been plummeting. Four years ago, when I was buying solar panels for Google, it was $3.20 per watt using extremely mature technology. Today the global average price per installed watt is below $1.30. I’m on calls night and day coming up with even more radical price reductions. It’s weird to be in a business where one of the major goals is to find a way to sell our product for less money, but that’s exactly what’s happening.
And the bottom is nowhere in sight. Over the past thirty years, the data show that for every cumulative doubling of global PV production, costs have dropped by 20 percent. This is another of those exponential price-performance curves, now known as Swanson’s law (after Dick Swanson, cofounder of SunPower). According to Swanson, the cost improvement is essentially a learning curve for manufacturing techniques and production efficiencies.
“The expensive crystalline silicon has been the biggest cost in the panel,” he says, “and we have been steadily making wafers thinner and thinner. We use half the amount of silicon to produce a watt of power than we did five years ago.” Lowering the cost of silicon wafers another tenfold is the mission of 1366 Technologies, a solar start-up launched by MIT professor of mechanical engineering Emanuel Sachs. (The name refers to the average number of watts of solar energy that hit each square meter of Earth per year.) Having found a way to make thin sheets of silicon without having to first slice them from solid chunks of the element, 1366 dramatically reduces the most expensive part of any PV system.
This type of discovery shouldn’t surprise anyone. Solar’s potential marketplace and benefit to humanity are so vast that reducing the cost of PVs, increasing the ease of installation, and stepping up global production are the objectives of hundreds, if not thousands, of entrepreneurs, large corporations, and university labs. In the United States, the number of clean-tech patents hit a record high of 379 during the first quarter of 2010, while the number of solar-related patents nearly tripled between mid-2008 and the start of 2010.
And since then, the pace of discovery has only continued to accelerate. Scientists at IBM recently announced that they’ve found a way to replace expensive, rare Earth elements such as indium and gallium, with less expensive elements like copper, tin, zinc, sulfur, and selenium. Engineers at MIT, meanwhile, using carbon nanotubes to concentrate solar energy, have made PV panels one hundred times more efficient than traditional models. “Instead of needing to turn your whole roof into a photovoltaic cell,” says Dr. Michael Strano, leader of the research team, “you could have tiny PV spots with antennas that would drive photons onto them.”
But why have rooftop panels at all? The Maryland-based New Energy Technologies has discovered a way to turn ordinary windows into PV panels. Its technology uses the world’s smallest organic solar cell, which, unlike conventional systems, can generate electricity from both natural and artificial light sources, outperforming today’s commercial solar and thin-film technologies by as much as tenfold.
All this work could soon be eclipsed by far more revolutionary breakthroughs. At the University of Michigan, physicist Stephen Rand recently discovered that light, traveling at the right intensity through a nonconductive material such as glass, can create magnetic fields 100 million times stronger than previously believed possible. “You could stare at the equations of motion all day and not see this possibility,” says Rand. “We’ve all been taught this doesn’t happen.” But in his experiments, the fields are strong enough to allow for energy extraction. The result would be a way to make PV panels without using semiconductors, reducing their cost by orders of magnitude.
Beebe, though, doesn’t think that these sorts of radical breakthroughs are required. “I’m happy with the glide slope we’re on,” he says. “Italy and the US will achieve grid parity [the point when renewables become as cheap as traditional sources] in two and five years, respectively. In California today, home owners with good credit can install PV solar with no money down and pay less for energy in their first month on PV than they did in the previous month buying it from the grid. Of course, this works because of a thirty percent California tax credit, but once solar costs decrease by another thirty percent, which is expected in the next four years, we won’t need the tax credit anymore. Once solar hits subsidy-free grid parity, it will go crazy. When you fly into LAX, you look down and see miles and miles of flat roofs. Why don’t they all have solar on them? Eventually, with grid parity, those buildings will be covered with the stuff.”
Making solar cheap enough to cover our roofs and compete with coal is also the goal of US Energy Secretary Stephen Chu’s recently announced SunShot Initiative, an ambitious effort modeled on President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 “moonshot” speech, wherein he challenged the nation to land a man on the Moon before the end of the decade. Dunshot’s aim is to spur American innovation and reduce the total cost of solar energy systems another 75 percent by 2020. This reduction would put costs around $1 per watt, or six cents per kilowatt-hour—a price capable of undercutting even coal.
Lest we focus only on solar, wind power is also approaching grid parity. According to a 2011 report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, in parts of Brazil, Mexico, Sweden, and the United States, onshore wind power is down to $68 per megawatt (MW), while coal in those same regions is about $67 per MW. Demand is growing too. Between 2009 and 2010, Vestas, one of the world’s largest wind energy firms, reported orders rising by 182 percent. In 2011, worldwide turbine installations climbed 20 percent and are projected to double by 2015.
Yet despite these considerable gains, other forms of energy innovation are also required. Solar and wind are sources of electricity, but they represent only 40 percent of America’s energy needs. The remainder is split between transportation (29 percent) and home and office heating/cooling (31 percent). Of the fuel used for transportation, 95 percent is petroleum based, while our buildings rely on both petroleum and natural gas. To end our oil addiction, we’re going to need to displace this remaining 60 percent. Many believe this won’t be easy. “The oil and gas industries are very well funded and very entrenched,” says Beebe. “The question is: How do we change that? These industries don’t want to let go, and they have enough money to hold on for a very long time.”
But what if the change was coming from within these same entrenched petroleum giants? In 2010 Emil Jacobs, ExxonMobil’s vice president of research and development, announced an unprecedented $600 million six-year commitment to develop a new generation of biofuels. Of course, the older generation of biofuels, primarily corn-based ethanol, was a disaster. These fuels have caused considerable environmental damage and displaced millions of acres of crops, thus helping to drive food prices sky-high. But Exxon’s biofuel isn’t based on food crops, nor does it have the considerable land requirements of first-generation technology. Instead Exxon plans to grow its biofuel from algae.
The US Department of Energy says that algae can produce thirty times more energy per acre than conventional biofuels. Moreover, because pond scum grows in almost any enclosed space, it’s now being tested at several major power plants as a carbon dioxide absorber. Smokestacks feed into ponds and algae consumes the CO2. It’s a delicious possibility, but to make it more of a reality, Exxon has partnered with biology’s bad boy, Craig Venter, and his most recent company, Synthetic Genomics Inc. (SGI).
To study algae-growing methods and oil extraction techniques, Exxon and SGI built a new test facility in San Diego. Venter calls it “an algae halfway house.” On a sunny afternoon in February 2011, I was given a tour. From the outside, the facility looks like a high-tech greenhouse: clear plastic panes, white struts, and a set of airlock doors. As we step through those doors, Paul Roessler, who heads the project, explains the basics: “Our biofuel has three requirements: sunlight, CO2, and seawater. The rationale for using seawater is that we don’t want to compete for agricultural land or agricultural water. CO2 is the bigger issue. That’s why CO2 sequestration would be great: it both slows global warming and provides a concentrated source.”
We walk through another door, and we’re inside the main room, a football-field-sized area with not much by way of decoration save for a half dozen vats of green algae and a large “Life of the Cell” poster on the wall. Roessler points to the poster: “I don’t know how much you remember from school, but photosynthesis is how plants convert light energy into chemical energy. During the day, plants use sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, then combine it with carbon dioxide and turn the result into a hydrocarbon fuel called ‘bio oil,’ which they typically use at night for repair. Our goal is to reliably mass-produce these bio oils.”
Venter, who has also joined the tour, jumps into the conversation. “Paul’s being modest. He actually found a way to cause algae cells to voluntarily secrete their collected lipids, turning them into micromanufacturing plants.” Roessler picks up the explanation. “In theory, once perfected, we could run this process continuously and just harvest the oil. The cells just keep cranking it out. This way you don’t have to harvest all the cells; instead just scoop up the oils they excrete.”
The efficiencies are considerable. “When compared to conventional biofuels,” says Venter, “corn produces 18 gallons per acre per year and palm oil about 625 gallons per acre per year. With these modified algae, our goal is to get to 10,000 gallons per acre per year, and to get it to work robustly, at the level of a two-square-mile facility.”
To understand how ambitious Venter’s goals are, let’s do the math: two square miles is 1,280 acres. At 10,000 gallons of fuel per acre, that’s 12.8 million gallons of fuel per year. Using today’s average of twenty-five miles per gallon and twelve thousand miles driven per year, two square miles of algae farms produce enough fuel to power around 26,000 cars. So how many acres does it take to power America’s entire fleet? With roughly 250 million automobiles in the United States today, that translates to about 18,750 square miles, or about 0.49 percent of the US land area (or about 17 percent of Nevada). Not bad. Just think what can happen when our cars start getting 100 miles per gallon or when more of us make the switch to electric automobiles.
Even if SGI falls short of this goal, Exxon isn’t the only player in the race. The Bay Area energy company LS9 has partnered with Chevron (and Procter & Gamble) to develop its own biofuel, while not far away in Emeryville, California, Amyris Biotechnologies has done the same with Shell. The Boeing Company and Air New Zealand are starting to develop an algae-based jet fuel, and other companies are even further along. Virgin Airlines is already using a partial biofuels mix (coconut and babassu oil) to move 747s around the sky, and in July 2010 the San Francisco–based Solazyme delivered 1,500 gallons of algae-based biofuels to the US Navy, thus winning a contract for another 150,000 gallons. Meanwhile, the DOE is funding three different biofuel institutes, and Clean Edge, which tracks the growth of renewable energy markets, reports in its tenth annual industry overview that global production and wholesale pricing of biofuels reached $56.4 billion in 2010—and is projected to grow to $112.8 billion by 2020.
Clearly, interest in carbon-neutral, low-cost fuels is at an all-time high, but problems remain. None of the aforementioned companies (or any of their unmentioned competitors) have figured out how to bring this technology to scale. To really meet our needs, Secretary Chu says, production has to be increased a millionfold, maybe even ten millionfold, although he also points out that the same scientists working on biofuels have already scaled up products such as antimalaria drugs. “So it’s a possibility,” he says, “and with the quality of scientists involved, maybe—I’d like to believe—a likelihood.”
But the DOE isn’t betting only on biofuels to meet this need. The agency is also interested in hacking photosynthesis. Chu’s SunShot Initiative has now funded the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, a $122 million multi-institution project being led by Caltech, Berkeley, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. JCAP’s goal is to develop light absorbers, catalysts, molecular linkers, and separation membranes—all the necessary components for faux photosynthesis. “We’re designing an artificial photosynthetic process,” says Dr. Harry Atwater, director of the Caltech Center for Sustainable Energy Research and one of the project’s lead scientists. “By ‘artificial,’ I mean there’s no living or organic component in the whole system. We’re basically turning sunlight, water, and CO2 into storable, transportable fuels—we call ‘solar fuels’—to address the other two-thirds of our energy consumption needs that normal photovoltaics miss.”
Not only will these solar fuels be able to power our cars and heat our buildings, Atwater believes that he can increase the efficiency of photosynthesis tenfold, perhaps a hundredfold—meaning solar fuels could completely replace fossil fuels. “We’re approaching a critical tipping point,” he says. “It is very likely that, in thirty years, people will be saying to each other, ‘Goodness gracious, why did we ever set fire to hydrocarbons to create heat and energy?’”
In addition to their energy density and on-demand nature, another reason that we’ve relied so heavily on hydrocarbons is because they’re easy to store. Coal sits in a pile, oil in a drum. But solar works only when the sun shines, and wind works only when the wind blows. These limits remain the largest impasse toward widespread renewable adoption. Until solar and wind can provide reliable 7x24 baseload power, neither will provide a significant portion of our energy supply. Decades ago, Buckminster Fuller proposed a global energy grid that could bring power collected on the sunny side of our planet to the dark side. But most people pin their hopes on the creation of large amounts of local, grid-level storage capable of “firming” or “time shifting” energy—that is, collecting energy during the day and releasing it at night. This, then, has become the holy grail of the green energy movement.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how cheap solar gets unless we can store that energy, and storage on this scale has never been achieved before. Grid-level storage requires colossal batteries. Today’s lithium-ion batteries are woefully inadequate. Their storage capacity would need to be improved ten- to twentyfold, and—if we really want them to be scalable—they have to be built from Earth-abundant elements. Otherwise we’re just exchanging an economy built on the importation of petroleum for one built on the importation of lithium.
Thankfully, progress is being made. Recently, the market for grid-level storage has seen enough improvement that venture capitalists have gotten interested. Lead among them is Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB). With over 425 investments, including AOL, Amazon, Sun, Electronic Arts, Genentech, and Google, Kleiner has a habit of picking winners. And since John Doerr, Kleiner’s lead partner, is passionate about the environment and fighting global warming, many of those winners have been in the energy space.
During the winter of 2011, I caught up with Bill Joy, formerly of Sun Microsystems and now KPCB’s lead green energy partner, to get a progress report on storage. He told me of two recent investments aimed at transforming the marketplace. Primus Power, the first, builds rechargeable “flow” batteries, in which electrolytes flow through an electrochemical cell that converts chemical energy directly to electricity. These devices are already firming wind energy in a new $47 million, 25-megawatt, 75-megawatt-hour energy storage system in Modesto, California.
Kleiner’s second bet, Aquion Energy, builds a battery similar to today’s lithium-ion designs, but with a serious twist. Rather than relying on lithium, a rare and toxic element, its battery uses sodium and water, two cheap and ubiquitous ingredients with the added advantage of being neither lethal nor flammable. The result is a battery that releases energy evenly, doesn’t corrode, is based on Earth-abundant elements, and, literally, is safe enough to eat.
“Using these technologies,” says Joy, “I think we’re going to be able to store and retrieve a kilowatt-hour for a total cost of one cent. So I can put the intermittent flow of wind energy through my Aquion system and firm it for about one cent more per kilowatt-hour. And that’s all up and all in. In a few years, you’ll see these products in the marketplace. After that, there’s no reason that we can’t have reliable, grid-level renewables.”
MIT professor Donald Sadoway, one of the world’s foremost authorities on solid-state chemistry, is also optimistic about the future of grid-level storage. Backed by funds from the Advanced Projects Research Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) and Bill Gates, he’s developed and demonstrated a Liquid Metal Battery (LMB) originally inspired by the high current density and enormous scale of aluminum smelters. Inside an LMB, the temperature is hot enough to keep two different metals liquid. One is high density, like antimony, and sinks to the bottom. The other is low density, such as magnesium, and rises to the top. Between them, a molten salt electrolyte helps the exchange of electrical charge. The result is a battery with currents ten times higher than present-day high-end batteries and a simple, cheap design that prices at $250 a kilowatt-hour fully installed—less than one-tenth the cost of current lithium-ion batteries. And Sadoway’s design scales.
“Today’s working LMB prototypes are the size of a hockey puck and capable of storing twenty watt-hours,” says Sadoway, “but larger units are in the works. Imagine a device the size of a deep freezer that’s able to store thirty kilowatt-hours of energy, enough to run your home for a day. We’ve designed them to be ‘install and forget’—that is, able to operate for fifteen to twenty years without need of human intervention. It’s cheap, quiet, requires no maintenance, produces no greenhouse gases, and is made of Earth-abundant elements.” At $250 per kilowatt-hour, a home unit would go for about $7,500. Spread over fifteen years, adding the cost of capital and installation, one of these home LMBs would run a home owner under $75 per month.
But the real beauty of these systems is their ability to scale up. An LMB the size of a shipping container can power a neighborhood; one the size of a Walmart Supercenter could power a small city. “Within the next decade, we plan to deploy the shipping-container-sized LMB, soon followed by the family-sized unit,” says Sadoway. “There’s a clear line of sight to get there, and no miraculous breakthroughs needed.”
Of course, when we do solve the storage problem, this would give solar and wind a major boost, so what to do with those dirty coal plants becomes a real question. Here too, Bill Joy has an idea. “It’s hard to believe power companies would shut down a completely amortized asset that’s still cranking out money every day. What we ought to do is flip the model and make coal plants into emergency backup plants. We can employ one hundred percent renewables for our baseload, and only turn on the coal plants when the weather forecast says we’re going to have a real problem. We just pay the utilities to maintain them and run them occasionally, like you would run your emergency generator.”
Nathan Myhrvold likes a good challenge, perhaps more than most. He started college at age fourteen and finished—with three masters degrees and a PhD from Princeton University—at twenty-three. Afterward, he spent a year with physicist Stephen Hawking, studying cosmology, later becoming a world-renowned paleontologist, prize-winning photographer, and gourmet chef—all in his spare time. In his work life, Myhrvold was Microsoft’s chief technology officer, retired with a sum that, as Fortune once said, “runs well into nine figures,” then cofounded the innovation accelerator Intellectual Ventures. But all this was just the warm-up round. “To me, the problem to solve this century is how do we supply US levels of carbon-free energy to everyone in the world?” he says. “It’s a massive energy challenge.”
Myhrvold is not wrong. Civilization currently runs on sixteen terawatts of power—mostly from CO2-generating sources. If we’re serious about fighting energy poverty and raising global living standards, then we’ll need to triple—perhaps even quadruple—that figure over the next twenty-five years. Concurrently, if we want to stabilize the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere at 450 parts per million (the agreed-upon number for staving off dramatic climate change), we’ve got to replace thirteen of those sixteen terawatts with clean energy. To put it another way: every year, we humans dump nearly 26 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, or about five tons for every person on the planet. We have little more than two decades to bring that number close to zero, while at the same time increasing global energy production to meet the needs of the rising billion.
Certainly there are plenty who believe that solar will scale and storage will materialize, and meeting those needs with renewables is entirely feasible. But there are plenty of others, Myhrvold included, who believe that the only other option is nuclear power. In fact, widespread belief in this option has never been stronger.
Both the George W. Bush administration and the current Obama administration back the proposal, as do serious greens such as Stewart Brand, James Lovelock, and Bill McKibben. This much overwhelming support of a previously dismissed technology is confusing to people, but that’s mainly because they’re basing their opinions on facts that are now forty years out of date. “When most people argue about nuclear energy,” says Tom Blees, author of Prescription for the Planet: The Painless Remedy for Our Energy and Environmental Crises, “they’re arguing about Three Mile Island and 1970s technology—which is about when the US nuclear industry ground to a halt. But research didn’t die off, just new construction. We’re two generations beyond that earlier tech, and the changes have been massive.”
Scientists denote nuclear power by generations. Generation I reactors were built in the 1950s and 1960s; generation II refers to all the reactors supplying power in the United States today. Generation III is considerably cheaper and safer than previous iterations, but it’s generation IV that explains the recent outpouring of support. The reason is simple: this fourth-generation technology was developed to solve all the problems long associated with nuclear power—safety, cost, efficiency, waste, uranium scarcity, and even the threat of terrorism—without creating any new ones.
Generation IV technologies come in two main flavors. The first are fast reactors, which burn at higher temperatures because the neutrons inside bounce around at a faster rate than in traditional light-water reactors. This extra heat gives fast reactors the ability to turn nuclear waste and surplus weapons-grade uranium and plutonium into electricity. The second category are liquid fluoride thorium reactors. These burn the element thorium, which is four times more plentiful than uranium, and don’t create any long-lived nuclear waste in the process.
As a general rule, all generation IV technologies are “passively safe”—meaning that in case of trouble, they’re able to shut themselves down without human intervention. Most fast reactors, for example, burn liquid metal fuels. When a liquid metal fuel overheats, it expands, so its density decreases, and the reaction slows down. According to retired Argonne National Laboratory nuclear physicist George Stanford, the reactors can’t melt down. “We know this for certain,” he says, “because in public demonstrations, Argonne duplicated the exact conditions that led to both the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl disasters, and nothing happened.”
But what has people most excited are so-called backyard nukes. These self-contained small-scale modular generation IV nuclear reactors (SMRs) are built in factories (for cheaper construction), sealed completely, and designed to run for decades without maintenance. A number of familiar faces such as Toshiba and Westinghouse, and a number of nuclear newcomers such as Nathan Myhrvold’s company TerraPower, have gone into this area because of SMRs’ tremendous potential for providing the entire world with carbon-free energy.
With coinvestments from Bill Gates and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, Myhrvold founded TerraPower to develop the traveling wave reactor (TWR), a generation-IV variation that he calls the “the world’s most simplified passive fast breeder reactor.” The TWR has no moving parts, can’t melt down, and can run safely for fifty-plus years, literally without human intervention. It can do all this while requiring no more enrichment operations, zero spent-fuel handling, and no reprocessing or waste storage facilities. What’s more, the reactor vessel serves as the unit’s (robust) burial cask. Essentially, TWRs are a “build, bury, and forget” power supply for a region or city, making them ideal for the developing world.
Of course, powering the developing world would require tens of thousands of nuclear power plants. Myhrvold recognizes the size of this challenge, but he correctly points out that “if we’re going to reach our goal of energy abundance, places like Africa and India are where the massive increase will be needed most. This is exactly why we’ve designed these reactors with safe, easy-to-maintain, and proliferation-proof features. We have to make them appropriate for use in the developing world.” He is also quick to point out the environmental upside his system brings: “We could power the world for the next one thousand years just burning and disposing of the depleted uranium and spent fuel rods in today’s stockpiles.”
So when might we see one of these reactors? Myhrvold wants a demonstration unit up and running by 2020. If this timetable is accurate, then TerraPower has a real advantage. Outside of a handful of projects, most generation-IV reactors won’t make it to market until 2030. More importantly, Myhrvold believes that the power provided by TWRs can be priced to undercut coal—which is exactly what it would take to spread them around the globe.
Where we source our power is only one part of this issue; how we distribute it is equally important. Imagine an intelligent network of power lines, switches, and sensors able to monitor and control energy down to the level of a single lightbulb. This is the dream of today’s smart grid engineers. Currently the only network this extensive is the Internet, which is why Bob Metcalfe is constantly comparing today’s electric “dumb grid” to the early days of telephony. Metcalfe, founder of 3Com Corporation and today a general partner at Polaris Venture Partners, is an expert in energy-related investments. He began his career as one of the creators of both Arpanet and the Ethernet, and knows what it takes to build something as vast as the World Wide Web. “In the early days, everything was stovepiped,” he says. “Computing was done by IBM; communications was done by AT&T. Voice, video, and data were distinct services: voice was synonymous with telephone, video with television, and data with a teletype machine plugged into a time-sharing computer system. These were three different worlds with different networks and regulatory agencies. The Internet has dissolved these distinctions and boundaries.”
Today we see similar balkanization in energy, but Metcalfe believes that the distinctions among production, distribution, sensing, control, storage, and consumption will ultimately disappear. “When the traffic on Arpanet began to explode,” he says, “our first reaction was to try and squeeze it through the old AT&T infrastructure by focusing on compression efficiency. We conserved data in the same way we’re trying to conserve energy today. Then, like now, the problem was a centralized grid not robust enough to handle our needs. But forty years after Arpanet, it’s not about conservation at all; in fact, it’s about a world of data abundance. The Internet’s architecture has ultimately allowed a millionfold increase in data flow. So if the Internet is any guide, once we’re able to build the next generation energy network—what I call the Enernet—I believe we’ll be awash in energy. In fact, once we have the Enernet, I believe we’ll have a squanderable abundance of energy.”
So what are the features for such a smart grid? Metcalfe envisages a distributed mesh network, not unlike the Internet, which would allow the exchange of power between a multitude of producers and consumers over local and wide-area networks. “It must also be desynchronized,” he adds, “so anyone can put power in or take power out, as easily as computers, phones, or modems plug into the Internet today.”
Perhaps the biggest change that Metcalfe predicts is the massive addition of storage. “The old telecom network had absolutely no storage and looked very much like today’s power grid,” he says. “Your analog voice entered the network on one end and went flying out the other. But this has changed dramatically. Today’s Internet is filled with all kinds of storage at every possible location—at the switch, on the server, in your building, on your phone. Tomorrow’s smart grid will also have storage everywhere: storage at your appliances, your home, your car, your building, the community, and at every point of energy production.”
Cisco, one of the world’s largest networking companies, has made a huge commitment to build the smart grid. Laura Ipsen, senior vice president in charge of Cisco’s energy business, explains the opportunity: “Today we have more than one and a half billion connections to the Internet. But this is small in comparison to the number of connections to the electric grid, which is at least tenfold larger. Just think of the number of electric appliances you have plugged in at home, compared to the number of IP addressable devices. This is a huge opportunity.”
Ipsen feels that we’re moving rapidly toward a world where every device that consumes power has an IP address and is part of a distributed intelligence. “These connected devices,” she says, “no matter how small, will communicate their energy usage and turn themselves off when not needed. Ultimately, we should be able to double or triple efficiency of a building or a community.”
Cisco has an aggressive time line for this vision. “In the near term,” Ipsen says, “the next seven years, the smart grid will be dominated by ‘sensing and response.’ IP-connected sensors will monitor energy use and manage demand, time shifting noncritical applications like delaying the start of your dishwasher to the middle of the night, when energy is cheaper. Starting in 2012 and for the next dozen years, we envision that solar and wind will rapidly be integrated, enabling commercial and residential property owners to go off grid for the majority of their needs.” Ultimately, the goal is integrated distributed generation, coupled with smart IP-enabled appliances, and ubiquitous distributed storage allowing for what Ipsen calls “perfect power.”
In this chapter, we’ve focused principally on solar, biofuels, and nuclear. There are certainly plenty of other technologies to consider. I’ve not spoken about natural gas, which, given the large US supplies, is currently all the rage. Nor have I discussed geothermal energy, which is reasonably reliable and clean, but can lack easy geographic access.
Yet there are reasons this chapter places an emphasis on solar power. It is pollution, carbon, and stigma free. Should we be able to crack the storage infrastructure challenges ahead, sunlight is ubiquitous and democratic. There is more energy in the sunlight that strikes the Earth’s surface in an hour than all the fossil energy consumed in one year. More importantly, if we want to achieve energy abundance, we need to choose technologies that scale—ideally, on exponential curves. Solar fits all of those criteria.
According to Travis Bradford, chief operating officer of the Carbon War Room and president of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development, solar prices are falling 5 percent to 6 percent annually, and capacity is growing at a rate of 30 percent per year. So when critics point out that solar currently accounts for 1 percent of our energy, that’s linear thinking in an exponential world. Expanding today’s 1 percent penetration at an annual growth of 30 percent puts us eighteen years away from meeting 100 percent of our energy needs with solar.
And growth doesn’t end there, but it certainly gets interesting. Ten years later—twenty-eight years from now—at this rate we’d be producing 1,550 percent of today’s global energy needs via solar. And, even better, at the same time that production is going up, technology is making every electron go even further. Whether it’s the smart grid making energy use two- or threefold more efficient, or innovations like the LED lightbulb dropping the energy needed to light a room from one hundred watts to five watts, there is dramatic change ahead. With efficiencies lowering our usage and innovation increasing our supply, the combination really could produce a squanderable abundance of energy.
So what do we do with a squanderable abundance of energy? Of course, Metcalfe’s been thinking about this for some time. “First,” he proposes, “why not drop the price of energy by an order of magnitude, driving the planet’s economic growth through the roof? Second, we could truly open the space frontier, using that energy to send millions of people to the Moon or Mars. Third, with that amount of energy, you can supply every person on the Earth with the American standard of fresh, clean water every day. And fourth, how about using that energy to actually remove CO2 from the Earth’s atmosphere. I know a professor at the University of Calgary, Dr. David Keith, who has developed such a machine. Back it up with cheap energy, and we might even solve global warming. I’m sure there’s a much longer list of great examples.”
To see how much longer that list might be, I tweeted Metcalfe’s question. My favorite answer came from a Twitter handle BckRogers, who wrote: “All struggles are effectively conflicts over the energy potential of resources. So end war.” I’m not entirely sure it’s that simple, but considering everything we’ve discussed in this chapter, one thing seems certain: we are going to find out.