Published on Friday, July 11, 2008 by the Boston Globe
Innovation Fuels Solar Power Drive
Rising Fuel Prices, New Technology Help Make Such Generation Feasible
BOSTON - Solar power, which has
been the next big thing on the energy horizon for decades, may finally
be reaching a tipping point.
Long considered far too expensive to be a viable power source, solar
energy is now benefiting from technological innovation, environmental
concerns and the ever-rising cost of fossil fuels.
In the latest discovery, an MIT team yesterday announced it had
developed a new way to concentrate solar beams, potentially reducing
the cost of solar panels.
But such advances, still far from becoming commercial products, are
only a small part of the forces finally making solar look feasible.
Unlike in the early 1980s, when cheap energy prices helped derail Jimmy
Carter’s ambitions for solar power, today’s technology is getting close
to being cost-competitive with other forms of energy.
“We’re not in a hype cycle,” said Nathan Lewis, a chemistry
professor at the California Institute of Technology. “There’s a lot of
innovation we’re seeing now, regulations guaranteeing a market
expanding for the next decade. . . . If you go to Silicon Valley and
around Route 128, everyone and their brother who used to make computer
chips are now trying to make thin-film solar cells.”
In Massachusetts, the Patrick administration’s Commonwealth Solar
rebate program, implemented in January, is part of a push to increase
the amount of solar energy used from 4 megawatts to 250 megawatts over
the next decade. (By comparison, the Pilgrim nuclear plant has a
generating capacity of nearly 700 megawatts.) A novel program included
in the state’s new energy bill would allow utilities to own solar
panels for the first time.
Solar power has also benefited from competition and from scale, as
more companies begin to get into the business. Evergreen Solar Inc.,
for example, will bring part of its new solar manufacturing plant in
Devens online this month. Lux Research Inc., which follows emerging
technologies, has predicted that the solar industry will grow at nearly
30 percent a year, to reach $71 billion by 2012.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has made investigation of
solar power a priority, with a number of solar-specific initiatives,
including the $10 million Solar Revolution Project this spring, the
Eni-MIT Solar Frontiers Center established this month, and the
MIT-Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems earlier this year.
“Tremendous progress has been made, much higher technical
performance, for much lower cost,” said John Deutch, an MIT Institute
professor who knows something about solar’s troubled trajectory.
Deutch recalls standing in the White House Rose Garden when he
worked for the Department of Energy in 1979, and laying out to
reporters the goal of filling one-fifth of America’s energy needs with
solar power by 2000. Instead, he has watched, over the past three
decades, as the portion of energy created by solar has remained at less
than 1 percent.
Still, he says, today’s situation “is not at all comparable to 1979.”
Lewis said it is not clear whether solar technology will become
mainstream through incremental improvements or whether it will take a
transformative new technology.
Still, one thing people underestimate, he said, is the scale of the
problem, which includes not just the cost of the technology, but the
challenge to manufacture and deploy new energy infrastructure. Imagine,
for starters, having to add solar panels to thousands of rooftops every
day for a decade. Because of the massive size of the energy
marketplace, solar energy will not replace significant amounts of
fossil fuels in the near future. But that also presents a huge
opportunity for any company that gets solar right.
Jonathan Mapel, an author of the new MIT study in the Journal of
Science, is cofounding Covalent Solar, a company that hopes to take
advantage of that by developing cheaper, more efficient solar panels.
“The question is, can you make a better solar panel that you can put
on somebody’s roof?” Mapel said. “The two things that matter are: You
want more power output, and you want to pay less for it.”
The work by Mapel and others could potentially do both, by using a
simple trick that makes more efficient use of sunlight and uses fewer
costly solar cells.
Solar cells are made from different materials that each operate most
efficiently when using light from a narrow band of wavelengths. By
filtering the light through a pane of glass coated with dye, Mapel and
his colleagues have been able to direct some light to solar cells that
can use it most efficiently. Those cells are placed on the edge of the
pane, requiring far fewer solar cells than if they were placed along
the surface as on conventional panels.
The remaining light passes through the pane and, if placed on a conventional solar panel, can be converted to electricity.
The researchers found that their setup increased the efficiency of
traditional panels by about 20 percent, but they believe that with a
little more tweaking, they can boost that to 50 percent.
Allen Barnett, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at
the University of Delaware, said that beyond such basic research to
improve efficiency, the industry has already reached a turning point
and is set to shift the way people use energy.
“The parallel is microelectronics,” Barnett said. “Microelectronics
started out in big universities, now they are in laptops, cellphones,
microelectronic chips all over your home. People think of solar as
replacing a coal-fired power plant; it’s really different. . . . It is
a new way to use electricity and use energy.”
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment