Leo Johnson: Changing gears in the journey to a driverless future
Figuring out what’s top of the list for disruptions ahead for 2017? No easy task; I have spent the year exploring game-changing disruptions for the BBC’s FutureProofing series – from virtual reality with haptics technology (taste your virtual lunch) to the end of death and the quantified self. What’s my number one call? Call me prosaic but it’s got to be the DIY autonomous vehicle. With Timandra Harkness, my FutureProofing co-presenter, I went for a trial of Singapore’s new prototype driverless car. Okay, it swung right out into the oncoming traffic, but the car has got a couple of features that could be disruptive.
First of all, it is infrastructure independent. It doesn’t need any sensors on the roads, or upgrades to the urban infrastructure. It uses its own street maps and scanners. Second, its on-board kit is off-the-shelf LIDAR technology (which uses light sensors to measure distance) that comes in at less than USD7,000 and can be retrofitted on any current vehicle. What are the implications? The barriers are low. We are closer than we think to the acceleration of automation and with it a radical reshaping not just of our streets but of our societies.
Chris Goodall: A new dawn for energy storage
Batteries are improving fast, but they don’t solve the long term energy storage problem. On a still and cloudy December day in northern Europe, for instance, we still need many terawatt hours of energy that renewables cannot provide.
I think 2017 will be the year that government and corporations realise that surplus wind and solar electricity needs to be converted into liquid and gas fuels for large-scale energy storage.
The simplest route for “power to gas” uses electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen can be stored and combusted when renewables are in short supply. Or, more likely, it will be combined with carbon dioxide to make methane, the main constituent of natural gas. This methane can then be kept in the conventional gas network for conversion back into electricity when needed. The easiest source of carbon dioxide to use is probably the biogas arising from anaerobic digestion, which contains about 40 per cent carbon dioxide. The world leader in this technology is Electrochaea, based in Munich but with its first plant in Copenhagen. It uses a specific microbe to “eat” the hydrogen and the carbon dioxide to make the methane.
People say to me that using valuable electricity to make cheap gas at about 60 per cent efficiency is foolish. I reply that there is no other way of generating the large amounts of stored energy needed for north European winters.
Andy Ridley: Circular economy to lift off, powered by the masses
The rise of the circular economy is a theme close to my heart, and one that I think will be accelerated over the coming year – and beyond – by a number of global trends. One is the increased global commitment to climate change. With the Paris Agreement at COP21 and the rising prominence of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the circular economy will be key to achieving the targets of slashing carbon dioxide emissions and keeping a lid on global warming.
Another force of change is being driven by consumers – both through the growing popularity of sharing and service-focused businesses and though the growth of bottom-up crowd-based initiatives that increasingly utilise circular principles.
Rising urbanisation, along with rapid technological and digital innovation will ultimately lead to resource maximisation, job creation, and a reconsideration of what is now “waste”.
The traditionally fairly conservative worlds of finance and government are also increasingly becoming forces of positive change. Investors, banks, and asset managers are progressively looking to alternative currencies, new financing models, and impact-based investments. Local, national, and international governments, meanwhile, are implementing laws and regulations that require sustainable and circular business practices.
Vaclav Smil: Clean energy’s incrementalism
We live in a world in which the ability to separate facts from dubious claims is ever more necessary but increasingly rare. In part, that’s because there is frequent oversimplification of complex matters. Take new developments in the energy sector, where a good grounding in engineering, economics and several scientific disciplines is necessary to properly appraise the factors that shape energy demand and use. Instead, we get exaggerated claims and short-run trends extrapolated far into the future.
People frequently quote remarkable numbers for newly-installed capacities of PV panels or wind turbines when actual electricity generation is a small fraction of the theoretical maxima. Claims of rapid global decarbonisation and the pace at which electric vehicles will take over road transport are equally subject to exaggeration and obfuscation. This year, such claims and exaggerations will abound. My advice: try to ignore them. Instead look for continuity and gradual gains as a global energy system of immense complexity and inertia continues its multifaceted evolution.
