Dec. 1: A clean energy initiative driven by billionaire private investors and launched in Paris yesterday will seek to push from the laboratory into the marketplace promising ideas - from new batteries that might last decades to solar paint to photosynthetic energy sandwiches.
The Breakthrough Energy Coalition, supported by 28 private investors including software czar-turned-philanthropist Bill Gates, is expected to support research ideas across a range of sectors such as electricity generation and storage, energy efficiency, and transportation.
The coalition plans to "help promising approaches cross the Valley of Death - to take the risks that allow companies to get innovation out of the lab and into the marketplace," Gates wrote in a paper he released at the coalition's launch at the United Nations climate change conference that opened in Paris yesterday.
"We will focus on early-stage companies that could make reliable zero-carbon energy available to everyone," he wrote. "Some of these companies will fail. We expect the successful ones to attract large amounts of traditional capital investments as they are demonstrated and deployed."
The coalition will examine novel ideas that could make existing technologies dramatically cheaper, more efficient, or easier to scale for wide deployment. Several ideas now brewing in laboratories are expected to accelerate the world's shift away from fossil fuels - which even now power 80 per cent of the world's energy generation - and towards clean energy production required to avert global warming.
Reliance Industries chairperson Mukesh Ambani, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, Chinese businessman-turned-philanthropist Jack Ma, Tata Sons chairman emeritus Ratan Tata and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg are among the investors in the coalition.
In his paper, Gates outlined some ideas, including solar paint that could be used to turn almost any surface - from rooftops and walls to cars - into a conductive surface that could make solar energy far cheaper than it is today.
A research group led by an Indian-origin chemist, Prashant Kamat, at the University of Notre Dame in the US has already made an advance in creating an inexpensive paint made of semi-conducting nanoparticles to generate energy when sunlight falls on the paint.
The scientists had four years ago reported a light-to-energy conversion efficiency of one per cent, far behind the typical 10 to 15 per cent in commercial silicon solar cells. "But this paint can be made cheaply and in large quantities - if we can improve efficiency," Kamat had said.
Gates yesterday pointed out another challenge - the most efficient dyes used to make solar paints come from a family of chemicals called perovskites that convert about 20 per cent of solar energy into electricity - a higher rate than all but the most efficient solar panels.
"Unfortunately, these dyes contain lead which is poisonous," Gates wrote. So researchers will need to develop non-toxic versions of such dyes that are efficient, stable, and easy to apply.
The private initiative is expected to work in tandem with Mission Innovation, a plan under which each of 20 participating countries, including India, China, Japan, France, Germany, the UK and the US, have pledged to double investment in research on clean energy.
The need for new ideas in energy has never been more acutely felt. As India and other countries seek to expand solar and wind power, they will need efficient and inexpensive ways to store and release energy - because neither wind nor solar is available 24 hours or on all days.
Current technology is not economical to store solar or wind energy. Energy economists estimate that it would cost 30 cents to 80 cents to store a kilowatt-hour of electricity, which could triple the cost of electricity bills for households.
But scientists have displayed laboratory-scale innovations to address this problem.
Materials scientist Michael Aziz at the Harvard University and his colleagues announced two months ago a rechargeable battery that could make intermittent sources such as solar and wind safe and cost effective for residential and industrial use.
"The cost of renewable electricity has dropped so much that the greatest obstacle to us getting the vast majority of electricity from the wind and the sun is their intermittency," Aziz told The Telegraph. "We have developed a battery that has a fighting chance of being able to solve the problem by safely and cost-effectively storing massive amounts of electrical energy."
In the new battery, electrons are picked up and released by compounds made from inexpensive and abundant elements dissolved in water. The compounds are non-toxic, widely available, and promise to make such batteries safer and cheaper than any other batteries.
The scientists combined a common organic dye with an inexpensive food additive to increase battery voltage by 50 per cent to develop raw material for flow batteries, a type of storage device for large industrial-scale applications that could last decades. Roy Gordon, a team member and research fellow at Harvard said the results "deliver the first high-performance, non-flammable, non-toxic, and low-cost chemicals for flow batteries".
Among other promising candidate ideas is an artificial leaf, a sandwich-like material, that turns sunlight into energy. In August this year, researchers at the California Institute of Technology reported the development of what they say is a first, complete, efficient and safe solar-driven system for splitting water to create hydrogen-powered cells.
"Our work shows that it is indeed possible to produce fuels from sunlight safely and efficiently with inexpensive components," Nate Lewis, professor of chemistry, said in a media release issued by Caltech. "We still have to extend the lifetime of the system and develop methods for cost-effectively manufacture."
Gates envisions an even more ambitious idea. "Another approach uses water, carbon dioxide, and sunlight to create hydrocarbons - making it possible to produce and burn fuels with no net gain or loss of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere."
