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1) Hydrogen from Algae

Prachi Patel-Predd, Technology Review, September 27, 2007

Genetically modified algae could be efficient producers of hydrogen and biofuels.
http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/19438/ 

2) Virus-Assembled Batteries

 Kevin Bullis, Techology Review,  April 07, 2006 http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=16673#

 

A biological template ramps up electrode performance and scales down size.

 

More than half the weight and size of today's batteries comes from supporting materials that contribute nothing to storing energy. Now researchers have demonstrated that genetically engineered viruses can assemble active battery materials into a compact, regular structure, to make an ultra-thin, transparent battery electrode that stores nearly three times as much energy as those in today's lithium-ion batteries. It is the first step toward high-capacity, self-assembling batteries.

Applications could include high-energy batteries laminated invisibly to flat screens in cell phones and laptops or conformed to fit hearing aids. The same assembly technique could also lead to more effective catalysts and solar panels, according to the MIT researchers who developed the technology, by making it possible to finely control the positions of inorganic materials.

"Most of it was done through genetic manipulation -- giving an organism that wouldn't normally make battery electrodes the information to make a battery electrode, and to assemble it into a device," says Angela Belcher, a researcher on the project and an MIT professor of materials science and engineering and biological engineering. "My dream is to have a DNA sequence that codes for the synthesis of materials, and then out of a beaker to pull out a device. And I think this is a big step along that path."

The researchers, in work reported online this week in Science, used M13 viruses to make the positive electrode of a lithium-ion battery, which they tested with a conventional negative electrode. The virus is made of proteins, most of which coil to form a long, thin cylinder. By adding sequences of nucleotides to the virus' DNA, the researchers directed these proteins to form with an additional amino acid that binds to cobalt ions. The viruses with these new proteins then coat themselves with cobalt ions in a solution, which eventually leads, after reactions with water, to cobalt oxide, an advanced battery material with much higher storage capacity than the carbon-based materials now used in lithium-ion batteries.

To make an electrode, the researchers first dip a polymer electrolyte into a solution of engineered viruses. The viruses assemble into a uniform coating on the electrolyte. This coated electrolyte is then dipped into a solution containing battery materials. The viruses arrange these materials into an ordered crystal structure good for high-density batteries.

[Click here for an illustration of the battery-forming process.] http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=16673#

These electrodes proved to have twice the capacity of carbon-based ones. To improve this further, the researchers again turned to genetic engineering. While keeping the genetic code for the cobalt assembly, they added an additional strand of DNA that produces virus proteins that bind to gold. The viruses then assembled as nanowires composed of both cobalt oxide and gold particles -- and the resulting electrodes stored 30 percent more energy.

Using viruses to assemble inorganic materials has several advantages, says Daniel Morse, professor of molecular genetics and biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Barbara. First, the placement of the proteins, and the cobalt and gold that bind to them, is precise. The virus can also reproduce quickly, providing plenty of starting material, suggesting that this is manufacturing technique that could quickly scale up. And this assembly method does not require the costly processes now used to make battery materials.

"You could do this at the industrial level really quickly," says Brent Iverson, professor of organic chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Texas at Austin. "I can't imagine a way to template or scaffold nanoparticles any cheaper."

Yet-Ming Chiang, materials science and engineering professor at MIT and one of Belcher's collaborators, says that, while small batteries designed for specific applications could be made using this process within a couple of years, much work remains to be done. For example, cobalt oxide might not be the best material, so the researchers will be engineering viruses to bind to other materials.

One of the ways they have done this in the past is using a process called "directed evolution." They combine collections of viruses with millions of random variations in a vial containing a piece of the material they want the virus to bind to. Some of the viruses happen to have proteins that bind to the material. Isolating these viruses is a simple process of washing off the piece of material --only those viruses bound to the material remain. These can then be allowed to reproduce. After a few rounds of binding and washing, only viruses with the highest affinity for the material remain.

The researchers also want to make viruses that assemble the negative electrode as well. They would then grow the positive and negative electrodes on opposite sides of a self-assembling polymer electrolyte developed by Paula Hammond*, another major contributor to the project. This would create self-assembled batteries, not just electrodes. Another goal is to make "interdigitated" batteries in which negative and positive electrode materials alternate, like the tines of two combs pushed together -- this could pack in more energy and lead to batteries that deliver that energy in more powerful bursts.

And batteries could be just the beginning. Since the viruses have different proteins at different locations -- one protein in the center and others at the ends -- the researchers can create viruses that bind to one material in the middle and different materials on the ends. Already, Belcher's group has produced viruses that coat themselves with semiconductors and then attach themselves at the ends to gold electrodes, which could lead to working transistors.

"If you can make batteries that truly are effective this way, it's just mind-boggling what the applications could be," Iverson says.

*Correction: The virus-battery work was the result of a collaboration between researchers at MIT. The original article mentions Angela Belcher and Yet-Ming Chiang. An important part of this work was the development of a self-assembling polymer electrolyte by Paula Hammond, MIT chemical engineering professor.

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3) Fixing the Power Grid

Peter Fairley, Technology Review
http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/19584/?nlid=618  October 17, 2007

Big batteries will fight blackouts and could make renewable power economically viable.

 

Large-scale power storage is crucial to our energy future: the Electric Power Research Institute, the U.S. utility industry's leading R&D consortium, says that storage would enable the widespread use of renewable power and make the grid more reliable and efficient. Recent announcements by utility giant American Electric Power (AEP http://www.aep.com/), based in Columbus, OH, suggest that grid storage technologies are finally ready for commercial deployment in the United States. Last month, AEP ordered three multi-megawatt battery systems and set goals of having 25 megawatts of storage in place by 2010, and 40 times that by 2020.

"That was a dream four or five years ago; now it is happening," says AEP energy-storage expert Ali Nourai.

The AEP system uses a sodium-sulfur battery about the size of a double-decker bus (see below), plus power electronics to manage the flow of AC power in and out of the DC battery. Though new to the United States, the system has been used at the megawatt scale in Japan since the early 1990s; the battery was produced by NGK Insulators of Nagoya, Japan http://www.ngk.co.jp/english/index.html .

Charging Charleston: The utility American Electric Power (AEP) deployed this huge sodium-sulfur battery as part of a demonstration project in Charleston, WV. The battery provides 1.2 megawatts of power for up to seven hours, easing the strain on an overloaded substation. Trouble-free operation since installation last year convinced AEP that such energy-storage technology is ready for active duty.
Credit: AEP

Nourai says that AEP and other U.S. utilities gained confidence in the economics and reliability of storage thanks to a demonstration project in Charleston, WV, where AEP installed a large battery system in June 2006. In Charleston, peak demand in both summer and winter had overloaded transformers at local substations, causing blackouts. Rebuilding the substations to accommodate more power could have taken as much as three years. Instead, AEP spent just nine months installing a battery system that charges when demand for electricity is low and can deliver up to 1.2 megawatts for seven hours when demand peaks.

Two of AEP's new projects are slightly larger two-megawatt, seven-hour battery systems designed to provide similar quick fixes in areas with power-reliability problems. A battery in Milton, WV, for example, will provide backup electricity for customers in areas prone to blackouts from a weak power line. "When there is a blackout, the battery will pick up as many people as it can and continue to feed them," says Nourai. "They will not even know there was a blackout." The battery will postpone Milton's addition of a new substation and a high-voltage transmission line by five to six years.

When AEP decides to make more permanent upgrades to substations or completes construction of a new power line--a process that can take five or six years--it will simply move the nearest backup battery to another choke point. "It can be lifted with a forklift and loaded onto a flatbed truck," says Nourai. "Within a week we can have it up and operational at another site in our system."

Richard Baxter, author of Energy Storage: A Nontechnical Guide and chair of a conference held last week in New York City on investing in storage, says that AEP's new projects are a "good litmus test" for the industry. "Storage technologies are emerging as a viable, commercial-level product," Baxter says.

The emergence of a grid storage market is drawing in new battery developers. These include Firefly Energy of Peoria, IL http://www.fireflyenergy.com/ , which is using high-surface-area nanostructured electrodes to revive lead-acid technology, and lithium battery developer Altair Nanotechnologies, based in Reno, NV http://www.altairnano.com/. In June, multinational utility AES agreed to buy an unspecified number of Altair's batteries; CEO Alan Gotcher says that Altair will deliver a one-megawatt, 15-minute prototype by the end of this year.

AEP, meanwhile, is exploring a potentially more transformative role for storage: turning the ever-shifting power output of renewable resources such as wind and solar power into steady, dependable energy. The company plans to connect its third two-megawatt battery system to a group of wind turbines at an as-yet undetermined site. Nourai says that the goal is to learn whether batteries can smooth out short-term fluctuations in power flow from the turbines. If they can, utilities should be able to absorb larger levels of wind power on their grids.

But Nourai says that AEP also wants to determine whether storing wind energy can boost its value. There are at least two ways that this could happen. Wind energy produced at night could be stored for delivery during peak hours of the day, when the price of electricity spikes. And if the power delivered by wind farms were more predictable, it would be more profitable. When an independent generator such as a wind-farm operator sells to power distributors, it must promise to deliver a certain amount of power at a certain hour. While the details vary greatly in different regional and national power markets, wind-farm operators can be penalized if they fail to meet their commitments because the wind didn't blow as hard as expected. Systems that store a fraction of a wind farm's output when the wind is blowing can eliminate most of this risk.

Nourai notes that Japanese utilities are already installing energy-storage technologies to make wind power more reliable and profitable, thanks to government incentives that cover one-third of the cost of the storage system, and to the wider spread between Japan's day and night electricity prices. Nourai believes that NGK, which can currently produce 90 megawatts' worth of sodium-sulfur battery systems per year, is considering constructing a second factory to meet the resulting demand. Meanwhile, a study completed this year by Sustainable Energy Ireland, Ireland's energy-policy agency, concluded that time-shifting storage projects might already be profitable in Europe http://www.sei.ie/.

However, an expert panel assembled by the Electric Power Research Institute last year judged that storage costs needed to drop below $150 per kilowatt-hour to make such time shifting economically attractive in the United States; a report issued by the institute this spring estimates that systems employing NGK's sodium-sulfur batteries cost $300 to $500 per kilowatt-hour. That cost differential has fueled recent interest in solar-thermal-power plants that capture renewable energy in the form of heat, which is easier to store than electricity. (See "Storing Solar Power Efficiently.")

For more information

Ireland Study http://www.sei.ie/getFile.asp?FC_ID=2901&docID=59

Storing Solar Power http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/19440/

EPRI Report http://www.epriweb.com/public/000000000001014668.pdf

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4) Tiny Solar Cells

Kevin Bullis, Technology Review, October 18, 2007

http://www.technologyreview.com/Nanotech/19595/?nlid=618

 

Photovoltaics made of nanowires could lead to cheaper solar panels.

 

By Researchers at Harvard University have made solar cells that are a small fraction of the width of a human hair. The cells, each made from a single nanowire just 300 nanometers wide, could be useful for powering tiny sensors or robots for environmental monitoring or military applications. What's more, the basic design of the solar cells could be useful in large-scale power production, potentially lowering the cost of generating electricity from the sun.

Each of the new solar cells is a nanowire with a core of crystalline silicon and several concentric layers of silicon with different electronic properties. These layers perform the same functions that the semiconductor layers in conventional solar cells do, absorbing light and capturing electrons to create electricity. To make the cells, Charles Lieber, a professor of chemistry at Harvard University, modified methods he'd previously used to make nanowires that could serve as sensors or transistors. He then demonstrated that his solar cells can power two of his earlier nanowire devices, a pH sensor and a set of transistors.

"This paper provides the very first example of using a single silicon nanowire for harvesting solar energy," says Zhong Lin Wang, professor of materials science and engineering at Georgia Tech. He calls Lieber's work "breakthrough research in the field of nanotechnology."

At first, the nanowire solar cells will most likely be useful in niche applications where their small size is key, such as extremely small sensors, or robots whose sensors and electronics might benefit from an integrated power source. "There has been a lot of talk recently about making independent nanomachines and nanosystems," says Phaedon Avouris, a fellow at IBM Research. "The issue has always been, how are you going to power them? If you want to have an independent nanosystem that's self-contained, that's not plugged into a central power supply, then you need something like this."

The ultimate goal would be to build electronic components that can self-assemble into devices that might not be possible to make otherwise. (Lieber has shown that it's possible to make such components from nanowires, which can then be assembled into regular arrays in solution.) "We'd like to incorporate memory, a nanoprocessor, maybe a sensor, and a power source to drive that," Lieber says. "If you try to put together all of these pieces with conventional technology, it gets pretty cumbersome."

In addition to powering tiny machines, solar cells made from microscopic wires might eventually be bundled together into large arrays to replace conventional rooftop solar panels. Lieber's research is still at an early stage, but his new nanowires suggest that a theoretical solar cell proposed by researchers at the California Institute of Technology could be viable. Harry Atwater, a professor of applied physics and materials science at Caltech, and Nathan Lewis, a professor of chemistry there, have suggested that solar cells made of microscopic wires would be much cheaper than conventional solar cells, since they could be made from less expensive materials--including, Lewis says, rust.

Until now, solar cells made from such cheap materials have been impractical because of a fundamental contradiction in their design requirements. To be efficient, solar cells must do at least two things well. First, they must absorb light, so they need active materials thick enough that light can't pass through them. But they also need to collect the electrons knocked loose by absorbed photons. For this, extremely thin materials are usually better; otherwise, electrons can get trapped inside the material. One way to reconcile these competing design constraints is to make relatively thick layers of material but to use extremely pure, crystalline materials that lack the defects and impurities that can trap electrons. Such materials work well, but they're expensive, keeping the price of solar panels high.

Nanowires such as those Lieber used for his solar cells offer an alternative. The nanowires can absorb significant amounts of light along their length. At the same time, electrons have only to move a short distance in the nanowire, from one concentric layer of material to another, to be collected. (The layers serve to separate electrons from their positive counterparts, holes, which allows the electrons to be collected.) Since the materials are thin, the chances of an electron being trapped by a defect before escaping from one layer to the next are low, so it's possible to use cheaper materials with more defects.

Lieber demonstrated that nanowires can indeed produce electricity, but a number of challenges remain before they will find their way into commercial solar cells. Lieber has tested only small numbers of nanowire solar cells. For large-scale applications, the nanowires would need to be chemically grown in dense arrays. Atwater and Lewis recently took steps in this direction, publishing in the past month two papers in which they describe growing dense arrays of microscopic wires, but wires without the multiple layers that Lieber's have. Paired with a liquid electrolyte, the wires generated electricity from light. Since it may prove easier to manufacture solid-state solar cells such as Lieber's, however, Lewis and Atwater are working to produce arrays of wires with multiple layers.

The most significant limitation of the work of both groups is the poor efficiency of their solar cells. For example, Lieber's cells converted 3.4 percent of incoming light into electricity. While that's an encouraging number for proof-of-concept solar cells in the lab, it's a far cry from the 20-plus percent efficiency of conventional silicon solar panels. Even with the potential advantage of cheaper materials, wire-based solar cells would probably need to be about 10 percent efficient if they were to compete with existing technology. The researchers' next steps include finding ways to make more dense arrays of wires to absorb more light and, in Lieber's case, to find ways to generate increased voltage from nanowire solar cells.

Nano solar: (photo caption) A cross section of a silicon nanowire that converts light into electricity. The image has been colored to highlight the functional layers of the device. Each layer is made of silicon modified with another material that gives it distinct electronic properties. The outer layer of silicon dioxide protects the active layers inside. When an electron inside the nanowire is freed by a photon, it leaves a positive “hole” behind it; the blue layer and the red core separate electrons from holes. Once these are separated, the electrons can be collected to create a current. The yellow layer separates the blue layer from the red layer.
Credit: Charles Lieber, Harvard University

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5) Energy neutral homes urged
	Oct 19, 2007	Los Angeles Times
	http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-puc19oct19,1,1863680.story   The PUC adopts targets emphasizing efficiency for new construction. California energy regulators Thursday adopted a target that all homes built after 2020 produce at least as much energy as they consume to reduce demand for electricity and cut pollution tied to power generation. The California Public Utilities Commission approved the guideline at a meeting in San Francisco. Homes would meet the goal through such measures as advanced insulation and solar power systems. The state also adopted a target that all new commercial buildings meet the zero-net-energy target by 2030. California is one of the most aggressive states in offering utilities financial incentives to promote energy efficiency to reduce demand for electricity. "Saving energy will be a lifestyle," Commissioner Dian Grueneich said at Thursday's meeting. "It keeps the lights on, it saves money and it significantly decreases greenhouse-gas emissions." There are little data collected on how many of the approximately 1 million new homes built each year in the U.S. achieve zero-net-energy status, said Paul Norton, a senior engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo. Interest in energy-efficient buildings is rising because of higher electricity prices and concerns about global warming, he said. "There's still lots of room to make homes more efficient," Norton said in an interview last month. "It is taking some time, but it is happening." Investing more in insulation can result in needing fewer heating ducts and using a smaller furnace, thereby offsetting some of the increase in building costs, Norton said. California may influence the building industry by requiring utilities to offer financial incentives that lower the cost of energy-efficient structures, Grueneich said in an interview last month. Utilities regulated by the commission include Edison International's Southern California Edison, PG&E Corp.'s Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and Sempra Energy's San Diego Gas & Electric Co. The ruling adopted Thursday requires the utilities to devise a single, statewide plan for implementing energy-efficiency initiatives.

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Brian Berger, FOX News.com, October 15, 2007 http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,301479,00.html

WASHINGTON -
A Pentagon-chartered report urges the United States to take the lead in developing space platforms capable of capturing sunlight and beaming electrical power to Earth.
Space-based solar power, according to the report, has the potential to help the United States stave off climate change and avoid future conflicts over oil by harnessing the Sun's power to provide an essentially inexhaustible supply of clean energy.

The report, "Space-Based Solar Power as an Opportunity for Strategic Security," was undertaken by the Pentagon's National Security Space Office this spring as a collaborative effort that relied heavily on Internet discussions by more than 170 scientific, legal, and business experts around the world.

The Space Frontier Foundation, an activist organization normally critical of government-led space programs, hosted the Web site used to collect input for the report. Speaking at a press conference held here Oct. 10 to unveil the report, U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Col. Paul Damphousse of the National Space Security Space Office said the six-month study, while "done on the cheap," produced some very positive findings about the feasibility of space-based solar power and its potential to strengthen U.S. national security.

"One of the major findings was that space-based solar power does present strategic opportunity for us in the 21st century," Damphousse said. "It can advance our U.S. and partner security capability and freedom of action and merits significant additional study and demonstration on the part of the United States so we can help either the United State s develop this, or allow the commercial sector to step up."

Specifically, the report calls for the U.S. government to underwrite the development of space-based solar power by funding a progressively bigger and more expensive technology demonstrations that would culminate with building a platform in geosynchronous orbit bigger than the international space station and capable of beaming 5-10 megawatts of power to a receiving station on the ground. Nearer term, the U.S. government should fund in depth studies and some initial proof-of-concept demonstrations to show that space-based solar power is a technically and economically viable to solution to the world's growing energy needs.

Aside from its potential to defuse future energy wars and mitigate global warming, Damphousse said beaming power down from space could also enable the U.S. military to operate forward bases in far-flung, hostile regions such as Iraq without relying on vulnerable convoys to truck in fossil fuels to run the electrical generators needed to keep the lights on. As the report puts it, "beamed energy from space in quantities greater than 5 megawatts has the potential to be a disruptive game changer on the battlefield. [Space-based solar power] and its enabling wireless power transmission technology could facilitate extremely flexible 'energy on demand' for combat units and installations across and entire theater, while significantly reducing dependence on over-land fuel deliveries."

Although the U.S. military would reap tremendous benefits from space-based solar power, Damphousse said the Pentagon is unlikely to fund development and demonstration of the technology. That role, he said, would be more appropriate for NASA or the Department of Energy, both of which have studied space-based solar power in the past.

The Pentagon would, however, be a willing early adopter of the new technology, Damphousse said, and provide a potentially robust market for firms trying to build a business around space-based solar power. "While challenges do remain and the business case does not necessarily close at this time from a financial sense, space-based solar power is closer than ever," he said. "We are the day after next from being able to actually do this."

Damphousse, however, cautioned that the private sector will not invest in space-based solar power until the United States buys down some of the risk through a technology development and demonstration effort at least on par with what the government spends on nuclear fusion research and perhaps as much as it is spending to construct and operate the international space station.
"Demonstrations are key here," he said. "If we can demonstrate this, the business case will close rapidly."

Charles Miller, one of the Space Frontier Foundation's directors, agreed public funding is vital to getting space-based solar power off the ground. Miller told reporters here that the space-based solar power industry could take off within 10 years if the White House and Congress embrace the report's recommendations by funding a robust demonstration program and provide the same kind of incentives it offers the nuclear power industry.

The Pentagon's interest is another important factor. Military officials involved in the report calculate that the United States is paying $1 per kilowatt hour or more to supply power to its forward operating bases in Iraq. "The biggest issue with previous studies is they were trying to get five or ten cents per kilowatt hour, so when you have a near term customer who's potentially willing to pay much more for power, it's much easier to close the business case," Miller said.
NASA first studied space-based solar power in the 1970s, concluding then that the concept was technically feasible but not economically viable.

Cost estimates produced at the time estimated the United States would have to spend $300 billion to $1 trillion to deliver the first kilowatt hour of space-based power to the ground, said John Mankins, a former NASA technologist who led the agency's space-based solar power research and now consults and runs the Space Power Association. Advances in computing, robotics, solar cell efficiency, and other technologies helped drive that estimate down by the time NASA took a fresh look at space-based solar power in the mid-1990s, Mankins said, but still not enough justify the upfront expense of such an undertaking at a time when oil was going for $15 a barrel.

With oil currently trading today as high as $80 a barrel and the U.S. military paying dearly to keep kerosene-powered generators humming in an oil-rich region like Iraq, the economics have change significantly since NASA pulled the plug on space-based solar power research in around 2002.
On the technical front, solar cell efficiency has improved faster than expected. Ten years ago, when solar cells were topping out around 15 percent efficiency, experts predicted that 25 percent efficiency would not be achieved until close to 2020, Mankins said, yet Sylmar, Calif.-based Spectrolab - a Boeing subsidiary - last year unveiled an advanced solar cell with a 40.7 percent conversion efficiency.

One critical area that has not made many advances since the 1990s or even the 1970s is the cost of launch. Mankins said commercially-viable space-based solar power platforms will only become feasible with the kind of dramatically cheaper launch costs promised by fully reusable launch vehicles flying dozens of times a year. "If somebody tries to sell you stock in a space solar power company today saying we are going to start building immediately, you should probably call your broker and not take that at face value," Mankins said. "There's a lot of challenges that need to be overcome."

Mankins said the space station could be used to host some early technology validation demonstrations, from testing appropriate materials to tapping into the station's solar-powered electrical grid to transmit a low level of energy back to Earth. Worthwhile component tests could be accomplished for "a few million" dollars, Mankins estimated, while a space station-based power-beaming experiment would cost "tens of millions" of dollars. Placing a free-flying space-based solar power demonstrator in low-Earth orbit, he said, would cost $500 million to $1 billion.
A geosynchronous system capable of transmitting a sustained 5-10 megawatts of power down to the ground would cost around $10 billion, he said, and provide enough electricity for a military base.

Commercial platforms, likewise, would be very expensive to build. "These things are not going to be small or cheap," Mankins said. "It's not like buying a jetliner. It's going to be like buying the Hoover Dam." While the upfront costs are steep, Mankins and others said space-based solar power's potential to meet the world's future energy needs is huge. According to the report, "a single kilometer-wide band of geosynchronous earth orbit experiences enough solar flux in one year to nearly equal the amount of energy contained within all known recoverable conventional oil reserves on Earth today."

For more Information

 

* Click here to visit FOXBusiness.com's Energy Center. http://www.foxnews.com/business/personalfinance/energy/

* Click here for FOXNews.com's Patents and Innovation Center. http://www.foxnews.com/technology/innovation/

* Click here to visit FOXNews.com's Space Center. <http://www.foxnews.com/science/space/

 

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