Transition to clean energy and its innovations

Any author who is publicly endorsed as a “must read” by Bill Gates is surely destined to be the focus of attention at social gatherings.

Not Professor Vaclav Smil.

Or so he claims. The Czech-Canadian professor emeritus, polymath and author of 37 books on energy and the environment and the history of technological innovation – two of them among Gates’ ‘top 10 reads’ – maintains he is unpopular among the movers and shakers in the alternative energy industry.

I am disliked by almost everybody,” he explains, “by people who promote nuclear energy, by people who promote wind energy and by people who put their faith in human ingenuity.

“I am disliked by almost everybody,” he explains, “by people who promote nuclear energy, by people who promote wind energy and by people who put their faith in human ingenuity.”

Coming from someone who is both affable and unpretentious, the observation is clearly tongue in cheek.

Yet there is a kernel of truth to what he says. The 72 year-old academic cuts a somewhat isolated figure because he does not buy into the idea that humanity can easily innovate itself out of the ecological problems it faces.

And nowhere has this “misguided notion” become more entrenched than in the alternative energy industry, he says.

To him, the vast majority of clean energy proponents – governments, companies, research institutions – are behaving as if the sector can somehow replicate the technological advances made by the electronics industry to become the world’s chief power source in a matter of years.

“Many observers look at technological developments in clean energy and believe that progress will be as rapid as that seen in semiconductors. But the speed of change inherent in Moore’s Law [which states that a chip’s micro-processing power doubles every 18-24 months] simply doesn’t apply to the energy system,” he says. “It’s quite ridiculous to assume it does.”

And he should know. In his 2010 book Energy Transitions, Prof. Smil presents the findings from a meticulous quantitative analysis of changes in the world’s energy supply. Surveying data spanning 150 years, the study sheds light on how the planet shifted from its dependence on wood to coal in the second half of the 19th century and then from coal to oil in first half of the 20th.

What Prof. Smil reveals is that energy transitions unfold over many decades.

For instance, globally, the shift from an economy dominated by coal to one in which oil became the most important fuel took more than 60 years. Natural gas has been replacing oil at an even slower rate while the share of non-fossil fuels in the world’s energy mix has risen by only 4 percentage points to 14 per cent since 1990.

Gains in energy generation efficiency have come at a similarly sedate pace, by a magnitude of some 1 to 3 per cent per year over the past century and a half.

“There’s no denying it: energy transitions are basically very gradual processes,” he explains.

“Once specific energies become commercially significant, reaching 5 per cent of the market, it takes them another 30-50 years to supply 25-30 per cent of the planet’s overall energy needs. We should be prepared to accept that our adoption of cleaner energy might take as long as the transitions we have seen in the past, and that it must come from diverse sources.”

But is Prof. Smil’s perspective on the prospects for innovation in clean energy universally bleak?

Not quite, he says. There are some grounds for optimism.

Solar energy offers perhaps the best hope for speeding up the transition to a more sustainable energy mix.

Rattling off a bewildering array of statistics, he lays bare the untapped potential of solar power.

The energy contained in just one hour of sunshine is equivalent to the world’s total energy output in one year. But the problem, he explains, is conversion technology.

Globally, the amount of solar energy the Earth receives that is available for conversion averages somewhere between 110 and 200 watts per square metre. Yet today’s commercial solar technology converts 10 to 15 per cent of that into usable energy.

“We can clearly do much better with solar. It’s the best option for [sustainable electricity generation] as it has the highest power density, but we haven’t yet got the right technology in place.”

We can clearly do much better with solar. It's the best option for sustainable electricity generation as it has the highest power density, but we haven’t yet got the right technology in place.

Laboratory tests have been promising, however. Under lab conditions, researchers have found that it is possible to convert up to 40 per cent of the flux into electricity. And Prof. Smil believes that technology which has conversion rates of some 25 per cent could become commercially available during the next decade.

“When combined with better electricity storage – a perennial restriction on the development of intermittent energies – solar could supply a significant share of electricity demand in many countries.”

But while solar might help the world generate cleaner electricity, it is unlikely to be any help in weaning the transport industry off fossil fuels. That’s a problem because transport accounts for more than a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

This is where biofuels might help.

“If you want to have a renewable fuel for trucks, ships and aeroplanes, then biofuel is really the only solution,” he argues.

As things stand, biofuels are not yet a viable option as a replacement for liquid fossil fuels. That is because the most established of them are produced from food crops such as maize, rapeseed, corn and grain, all of which eat up valuable land that would otherwise be used to feed livestock and grow vegetables and fruit.

But a new generation of biofuels is being developed that could potentially avoid this problem.

The success of solar and biofuels is not guaranteed.