The big question is: why we want to focus

on renewable energy? Well we all know there is an

end date on fossil fuels. We all know, or at least some of us know,
and you might even after having completed this course, know
of Marion King Hubbert, who would predicted
peak oil. The big question is: when is peak oil, and when it happens what happen
s to our
economy? That is of course a scary scenario, and that's why we're looking for so
mething
that's renewable. An energy source that keeps coming to us
at all times or at least for a very, very long
time. We also would like a clean technology. We know from the 70s and 60s how we
polluted most of our environment, where we had industry and
this we would also get rid of. We want to use energy and we want to do it respon
sibly so it's clean, and our
surroundings are clean. We also want to emit less carbon dioxide
when we do it. We all know that carbon dioxide is not
good for our climate or at least it leaves to changes
that we might not want. And therefore we would also ideally like
to lower CO2 emission during our energy
producing activities. And there are of course different types of renewable energ
y, things that qualify as
renewable energy sources. There's wind energy, solar energy, tidal,
wave energy, ocean energy, bio energy, et cetera, et
cetera. So what kind of volume in terms of energy
or how much energy can we get from those
renewable sources? What can they deliver? And Nathan Lewis, he made a very nice
plot
awhile ago, where he looked at the energy we consume
at the moment. This was back in 2007, where, where humans
consumed about 15 terrawatts of energy, 24 hours a day,
every day, every week. Today, it's much higher and we predict by the year 2050,
it's going to be 30
terrawatts. So a near doubling from the 2007 level, By the 21st century end, we'
ll be at 50 TW. And if we look at the energy sources we
have today, we know that fossil fuel, we already know this is
not going to help us. We can look at the ones we know of, of
those renewables like biomass, the hydroelectric, the geothermal, ocean
or tidal energy, wind energy, and also solar
energy. If we look at at those different renewable energy sources and look at wh
at their
potential is - - how much can they give us theoretically and especially how much
of it can we
extract. For instance wind energy, there's plenty
of wind in the middle of the Pacific ocean but it's
going to be much more challenging to extract the
wind energy out there, than it is going to be close to
the shore. So we can also talk about a technical practical value that these
energy sources have. And if you look at biomass, we have maybe
five to seven terawatts accessible. So that's about half the energy that we
are consuming right now, that we can maybe get from biomass if we
used it all. So it's not enough. Hydroelectric is a brilliant renewable
energy source, but it's linked normally to places where
you have large reserves of water at high
altitude close to a steep drop in, in altitude. So you can extract it and in tur
bines et
cetera, by liberating this water through a long
hose going downhill. There's also geothermal energy. In principle, there's a lot
of it. More
than we need in principle at the moment. But it's also very, very tricky to extr

act,
because you have to go deep down to extract it, but
it's there. So the practical potential at the moment is relatively small and lim
ited to areas
where with volcanos or with geothermic activities
that is readily accessible at the surface of the
earth. Then there's tidal or ocean currents,
which we can also use, but again they are linked geographically
to specific places at the moment. And then perhaps the largest one at the moment
is wind energy, it's also the most
explored. The practical potential of wind energy is
about the level of what we are consuming at the
moment. But it's clear that even if we add all
those up, it's not enough. Then there is of course the solar energy
that is little explored in fact, but it's has a
vast potential. The technical value for solar energy is
10,000 terawatts. And if we think about what reaches the surface of, of the Eart
h it's over 100,000
terawatts. The energy flux from the sun - what we call the insulation - so the a
mount of watts
that reach us, is an
astronomical number, of 174 * 10^15 watts. A lot of this energy, of course, stri
kes
the atmosphere first, some of it is transmitted, some of it is already
in the atmosphere remitted as light. And only some of it actually hits the
surface of the Earth so we're talking extraction of solar energy in a
solar cell or a solar heating system. We would look at what actually gets to the
surface where we humans travel around, and that's
about 89 Petawatts. So, how can we then envisage using solar
energy? It comes in, of course, as photons, and
this we can, convert into something else
that is useful to us. And different schools exist on how to
convert this solar energy into a form that we find more
useful. One of them is solar fuels. The vision there was, of course, just to
take sun light and convert it, with some chemistry, into a fuel that is similar
to
what we know today like, petrol or coal. What is being done today mostly, even
though it's very far from being applicable - it
has been demonstrated. That you can, for instance, take sun
light, and you can split water into hydrogen and oxygen that
you can then later burn. There are also examples of, of direct
fixing of carbon dioxide using sunlight and sea
water or hydrogen to convert it into either liquid or
gaseous fuels - like methane, or formic acid, or
formaldehyde, or methanol. So those are solar fuel. In essence they
take sunlight and convert it into a fuel or a chemical, a chemical we can later
burn or convert as we see fit. There's the solar electric or the solar
cells where we convert the sunlight directly into electricity, and this we'll
hear much more about in this course. Then there's also solar thermal energy
- where we convert light into heat. And of the three, the solar fuel is the
least efficient at the moment in terms of converting the
solar energy into a chemical energy. Solar electric systems are a little more
efficient. You can get in concentrated systems up to
high efficiencies but practically accessible values are
somewhere in the 10 to 20% range. Then there's solar thermal. This can be highly
efficient, as efficient
as 85% or more of the solar energies converted
into heat. The solar thermal energy systems are
efficient but the energy you get out is heat. And if you want to convert that to
something else, like electricity in a

turbine you lose a lot of energy, and lose efficiency

so it's mostly suited for heat. This can be large industrial heating
systems, process heat, or it can be a small heating system on your
house. If you think about it, the three are very different, and the harvesting
problem is a surface problem. All, until now I've discussed how much energy does
strike the surface of the
Earth. And it means that the method we choose to
extract it, must also be a surface thing so it needs to be thin
and it needs to cover a large area. There the solar fuel, will only work
well if it's, smeared over a large surface, and the chemistry then
has to take place on that surface. And that puts some requirements on what
the system looks like. That might also account for why it has
been less successful, at least in practical
terms, until now. Whereas the solar cells are easy to
disseminate over a large area and they are inherently thin in
the outline. If we now focus on the solar electric, they are also called photovo
ltaics, they
have actually been known for a long time, or at least
the effect that, they rely on. It was described very early and Albert
Einstein actually got the Nobel Prize in 1921 for a detail explanation of the Ph
oto electric effect that Hertz observed
in 1887. The Photovoltaics effect as we know it
where, potentials develop when we shine light on
an object. Was actually described first by a French physicist called Becquerel a
s early
as 1839. But it's taking a long time for us to get
there, and it certainly has taken a long time for us to get to a point where we
can extract meaningful
energy from photovoltaics. It's only in the past 30 years it has
happened. Before we, dive deep into this course we
need to look at the requirements. I said something about, large surfaces,
and to cover those large surfaces to enable us to
harvest energy. This puts requirement on the technology,
in terms of, how, how expensive is it
going to be? How much material are we going to use in
it's making? How complicated is it to make something
that can cover a large surface, in a short
time? Therefore we need to think about only
using abundant materials, only materials we have enough
of on Earth. Low energy payback time, ideally want the
technology to pay itself back after a very short
while. We want a low carbon footprint. So when we make those solar cells or when
we deploy them, and when we operate them, we don't want to emit
carbon dioxide as I said, earlier. We also want to make them efficient. Or at le
ast make the use of
land mass efficient. So, if our cells are not so efficient,
where we need maybe large surface areas to extract a certain amount of energy, w
e'd
at least use land mass of little value to us. It could be in the middle of the o
cean
or in a desert, where we might not think so much about
wasting a lot of land, harvesting energy. We also need low cost. Economy goes in
to it, and we want the
manufacturer to be very, very fast. We have all those ingredients put
together, there's a chance that we could actually both solve the world's energy
problem, and also have success
financially.