The world electrical energy consumption during 2004 was something like 15.400 billion kilowatthours (about 15 terawatt-hours in more technical-sounding terms). If a typical household lightbulb could be 60 watts, this would mean burning about 250 thousand billion of them during one hour, or, for the world's six-odd billion inhabitants, one lightbulb per person about 42.700 hours. Because a year is only about 8600 hours, this would mean that every individual on the earth would keep five bulbs lit all through the year, 24-7, winter,s ummer, spring and fall. Yes, and that was 2004 - we use more now. (And yes, somthing like that is our way of using the electricity - after all, there's lots of it anyway).
After the greenhouse gas problems and related taxation, the unrests in some Arab countries, the dry summers of Europe, and the increase of energy use by the Chinese (and everybody of us others), and many other reasons, the price of electrical energy is on the rise. Despite the managers of big energy companies saying that there's still far to go until the new energy forms start to be competitive to their costs, they are getting more and more interesting practically by the hour, no matter if their production cost is higher.
Some of the more interesting new solutions are based on hydrogen, not only because it can with great certainty be said that the world will never run out of hydrogen. The good news of course also is that hydrogen can be easily stored (for the moments when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow), transported and used in a wide array of different uses, including mobile equipment such as cars, trains, boats - even airplanes and mobile phones. But hydrogen must be separated from the complex chemical molecules it is bound in - most typically out of water H2O. To separate each two hydrogen atom from the oxygen atom that are bound in water molecules, electricity is currently being used. this is at the moment expensive - because electricity is expensive, and because the equipment is expensive.
Lately, there has been a steady flow of relatively small new technological breakthroughs that actually may make alternative energy a lot cheaper: instead of just increasing performance, many researchers are concentrating to lower the costs. Both Altran foundation awards, for example, went in June 2006 to inventions that lower the cost of manufacturing renewable energy equipment. The grand price went to Dutch Maxxun project and to Mr. Rudy van der Blom for groundbreaking new solar cell technology that actually is said to halve the investments required for solar energy systems, and, as a result, take the cost of solar energy down by a factor of two. Solar energy solutions might then be practical and economical even for individual small houses. A fluorescent layer between a plastic sheet and the solar cell, diminishing the reflections of sunlight and allowing a cell to reach up to 95 % efficiency. This allows for less and smaller cells, again meaning less of the expensive materials needed per a certain energy production rate. What is maybe even better, the new type of cell is said to look better on a roof.
Simultaneously, the American company Konarka is starting to produce in small scale another new type of solar cell based on inventions by professor Michael Grätzel of Ecole Polytechnique Lausanne, Switzerland. refusing the idea of expensive pure silicon-based cells, to both absorb the light and to transfer the electricity. The new innovation uses a dye to absorb the light, and nanoparticles below it that resemble the chlorophyll of nature to transfer the electrons. This means that instead of a "cell" the new photocell actually looks like coloured glass or plastic sheet, and can be used in the same way - e.g. in windows, roof covering, facade material, clothing, tents, maybe even sails of boats and wing material of airplanes. This new material is less efficient than the traditional silicon cells, but only about 20 per cent less; the cost instead is about 20 per cent of that of the silicon-based cells. And new reserach in the same area promises even more.
The special award of Altran foundation was this year presented to Pierre Forté of PragmaPac (France) for several innovations on reducing the costs of the hydrogen cells. The manufacturing costs, size and weight of the typical hydrogen cell has slowed the diffusion rate of this technology down. Pragma has replaced many oif the inner components of fuel cells by cheaper, lighter and smaller materials and also changed the geometrical concept so that it would be more suitable for automated production. There's no free lunch it is said, but the new material used in the gas diffusion layers is also said to allow narly double teh electric conductivity of the current solutions. Meanwhile, MIT:s bi-monthly magazine Technology Review reports on MIT researchers having been able to replace many of the rest of the parts in a hydrogen generator by composites such as fibreglass, that again should reduce the cost of these bigger parts by abouth half. All boat and tank manufacturers could easily take the step to the energy sector by benefiting from this development, again lowering the cost through learning and competition.
So, the manufacturing costs are coming down (albeit slowly; the first of these innovations are just being test-producted, most are said to be in the market in 5-6 years). This wouldn't be such ineteresting news if it wasn't for the rapidly-accelerating development that adding all these - and many more - new inventions up. Our own studies show that coming up to a good level of performance (e.g. in digital photography) does not cause the demand from the markets to grow significantly, but getting the good performance down to reasonable "mass-market" level of cost does. If a good energy-producing unit for one household can be produded for about the same price than a mass-market jacuzzi, the decision for a family is not impossible to make any more... and it can be what is needed so that the energy markets tip off.
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