The quest for the most fuel-efficient vehicles has entered a new phase, with major government private-sector investment in research and development for industrial-scale commercial production of a new class of gas-electric hybrid vehicles and EVs (all-electric cars). Swiss-based Solar Impulse is building the world’s first 100% solar-powered airplane, an achievement that will revolutionize the travel, industrial production, transport and fuel sectors.
Now comes the news that the Chevrolet Volt will shatter the existing paradigm for fuel efficiency, achieving 230 miles per gallon (mpg). Nissan claims to have better comparable performance for their LEAF model, and Tesla is preparing a fleet of high-performance “100% torque 100% of the time” EVs.
Solar panels are creeping into automotive design, for supplemental power for commercially sold vehicles, though they have long been the subject of engineering competitions that race solar-only prototypes. Organic solar concentrators (dye-treated SV-edged windows) allow for the highly efficient use of existing window surfaces to capture solar power and generate electricity.
A coalition of German firms has answered a call to study making an investment of 400 billion € in solar energy across North Africa. The plan, initiated by the Club of Rome, which has been promoting sustainable development and sustainable economic growth practices, since 1972.
Munich Re has invited several companies, including Deutsche Bank (DBKGn.DE), Siemens (SIEGn.DE), E.ON (EONGn.DE) and RWE (RWEG.DE), to meet on July 13 to agree on a joint project, said a foundation organised by members of the Club of Rome.
“We have approached Munich Re to get industrial companies on board and Munich Re organised the meeting with the other companies,” said a spokesman for the Desertec foundation, which is fostering the idea to generate solar power in Africa.
China is choking under a thick covering of contaminants produced from burning carbon-based fuels for industrial production, power-generation, and transport. Environmental degradation is so rampant that much of the northwest of the country is being lost to rapidly expanding deserts. And desertification threatens the already shaky balance between China’s available arable land and its skyrocketing demand for cheap food. Policy makers and market theorists in China and abroad should be thinking about whether that desert can produce something to help China escape the mounting environmental and public health cataclysm.
If the windswept desert plains and sweltering sun-drenched sands can be used for power generation, then industrial land elsewhere in the country can be converted to other uses, and the air across China could be cleaned up, at least in part. At present, China relies mainly on coal for its power generation needs, and coal is the dirtiest fuel source that is widely used. Economic “imperatives” drive Chinese policy toward coal, because it can be harvested domestically, but it may not be necessary to keep burning it in order to keep China’s boomtime economy growing.
China could in fact be —due to its size, both geographically and demographically, and the immense amount of investment pouring into the country— an opportunity to implement what might become models for future “clean” industry-based green-economic development. This would require specific improvements, on a massive scale, and one of the key technologies that will be required is a renewables-oriented grid that transports electricity with minimal energy seepage in “real time”, so that massive renewables farms in remote areas can provide power to faraway urban centers.
The United States is examining this problem as we speak, and the dedicated renewables grid is part of the plans of T. Boone Pickens as well as the “we can solve it” campaign, backing Al Gore’s push for an all-renewables economy within 10 years. The single major obstacle to implementing such plans is not technological capacity, but rather the installation of the optimum infrastructure to distribute the power generated by such means to consumers, and to take advantage of feedback loops, so that all available renewable output capacity ends up being shared across the entire grid.
China has soared in economic terms to become the world’s 2nd leading consumer of energy and its 2nd consumer of petroleum, behind the United States. More than 4 times as populous as the US, and facing shocking degrees of environmental degradation and public health risks, China cannot sustain the level of old-fashioned unfiltered coal-fired power plant-use and resulting carbon emissions, without paying a heavy and potentially irreversible cost.
China is also undergoing a dramatic shift toward the individual automobile as a transport staple, a move that could push global carbon emissions far beyond the “point of no return” for catastrophic climate change. And, pressure will mount in coming years, as the US gets closer to supporting a global carbon-emissions reduction regime, for China to surrender its growth engine to a global security imperative. It would be best served by having a safe means of transitioning away from carbon-based combustibles sooner rather than later.
There are times in the history of our nation when our very way of life depends upon dispelling illusions and awakening to the challenge of a present danger. In such moments, we are called upon to move quickly and boldly to shake off complacency, throw aside old habits and rise, clear-eyed and alert, to the necessity of big changes. Those who, for whatever reason, refuse to do their part must either be persuaded to join the effort or asked to step aside. This is such a moment.
The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk. And even more – if more should be required – the future of human civilization is at stake. I don’t remember a time in our country when so many things seemed to be going so wrong simultaneously. Our economy is in terrible shape and getting worse, gasoline prices are increasing dramatically, and so are electricity rates. Jobs are being outsourced. Home mortgages are in trouble. Banks, automobile companies and other institutions we depend upon are under growing pressure. Distinguished senior business leaders are telling us that this is just the beginning unless we find the courage to make some major changes quickly.
The climate crisis, in particular, is getting a lot worse – much more quickly than predicted. Scientists with access to data from Navy submarines traversing underneath the North polar ice cap have warned that there is now a 75 percent chance that within five years the entire ice cap will completely disappear during the summer months. This will further increase the melting pressure on Greenland. According to experts, the Jakobshavn glacier, one of Greenland’s largest, is moving at a faster rate than ever before, losing 20 million tons of ice every day, equivalent to the amount of water used every year by the residents of New York City.
Two major studies from military intelligence experts have warned our leaders about the dangerous national security implications of the climate crisis, including the possibility of hundreds of millions of climate refugees destabilizing nations around the world. Just two days ago, 27 senior statesmen and retired military leaders warned of the national security threat from an “energy tsunami” that would be triggered by a loss of our access to foreign oil. Meanwhile, the war in Iraq continues, and now the war in Afghanistan appears to be getting worse.
And by the way, our weather sure is getting strange, isn’t it? There seem to be more tornadoes than in living memory, longer droughts, bigger downpours and record floods. Unprecedented fires are burning in California and elsewhere in the American West. Higher temperatures lead to drier vegetation that makes kindling for mega-fires of the kind that have been raging in Canada, Greece, Russia, China, South America, Australia and Africa. Scientists in the Department of Geophysics and Planetary Science at Tel Aviv University tell us that for every one degree increase in temperature, lightning strikes will go up another 10 percent. And it is lightning, after all, that is principally responsible for igniting the conflagration in California today.
Like a lot of people, it seems to me that all these problems are bigger than any of the solutions that have thus far been proposed for them, and that’s been worrying me. I’m convinced that one reason we’ve seemed paralyzed in the face of these crises is our tendency to offer old solutions to each crisis separately – without taking the others into account. And these outdated proposals have not only been ineffective – they almost always make the other crises even worse.
Yet when we look at all three of these seemingly intractable challenges at the same time, we can see the common thread running through them, deeply ironic in its simplicity: our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of all three of these challenges – the economic, environmental and national security crises. We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that’s got to change. But if we grab hold of that common thread and pull it hard, all of these complex problems begin to unravel and we will find that we’re holding the answer to all of them right in our hand.
Special transparent dyes coating glass or plastic panes concentrate the Sun’s rays, guiding them to solar-voltaic cells lining the edges, allowing a window to act as a solar panel with 10 times the electricity generation capacity of solar cells, by current standards. The ‘organic solar concentrator’ (OSC) system also reduces cost, by reducing the surface area that needs to be coated by solar-voltaic cells and by eliminating the need for large concentrating mirrors and sun-tracking mechanisms.
Light is absorbed by the coating and reemittedinto waveguide modes for collection by the solar cells. We reportsingle- and tandem-waveguide organic solar concentrators withquantum efficiencies exceeding 50% and projected power conversionefficiencies as high as 6.8%. The exploitation of near-fieldenergy transfer, solid-state solvation, and phosphorescenceenables 10-fold increases in the power obtained from photovoltaiccells, without the need for solar tracking.
The Economist is using the term ‘luminescent solar concentrator’, and notes that the work reported by Michael Currie and Jonathan Mapel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is being researched elsewhere as well, and is related to the standard functioning of fiber optic technologies, which concentrate light and contain it within a conductive glass or plastic fiber. The OSC system conducts light toward the edges of the glass or plastic pane, trapping photons within the pane, causing it to seek out the high-efficiency solar-voltaic cells at the panel’s edge.
There are technical complications with perfecting the OSC system for harvesting solar energy. The dyes capture and concentrate the incoming sunlight, but an excess of dye molecules may prevent a quantity of light from reaching the circumferential solar cells, either by re-absorbing the light or by allowing heat to accumulate and losing the energy through that concentration of heat on the dyed surface.
The EE Times reports that the “edge-mounted” solar cells could receive light concentrated as much as 40 times. With the extreme heightening of efficiency, and the attendant reduction of costs, related to the new panels’ lack of need for mirrors or solar tracking mechanisms, the MIT advance could revolutionize the role of solar power in the global energy economy.
The dye-based solar concentrators could be on the commercial market within three years, distributed widely and helping homeowners and businesses establish productive capacity in linking up with the spreading renewables grid. Consumers with solar and wind-generation capacity can earn money on energy fed back into the local electricity grid.
The solar concentrating dye-coating can also be applied to exiting solar cells, heightening their light-capturing capability by as much as 30%, according to the MIT team. Marc Baldo, an MIT engineer, says “We think that ultimately this approach will allow us to nearly double the performance of existing solar cells for minimal added cost.”
While obstacles to containing and harvesting the full amount of energy captured by the dyes are an issue, Baldo’s team went far beyond previous attempts at increasing the efficiency of solar cells with the dye-retransmit method, by coating only the surface of a glass pane with the dyes, mimicking techniques used to improve the efficiency of lasers, which also contain and bounce light to intensify the retransmission of light at the other end of the contained space.
