Energy

The Biggest Clean

Energy Advances in
2016
Bionic leaves, a hot solar cell, and other picks for the most
notable renewable energy strides in 2016.

 by James Temple

 December 29, 2016

Clean energy made critical strides in 2016. The Paris Climate

accords went into effect, the price of solar installations continued to drop,
investments in renewable energy soared, offshore wind finally got under
way in the United States, and scientists made a series of technical advances
that promise to make sustainable energy increasingly efficient and
affordable.
That last one is key, since invention is still the surest way to avoid the
greatest impacts of climate change. Today's commercially available
renewable technologies can't meet all of the world's energy demands, even
if they're scaled up aggressively. The United States comes up about 20
percent short by 2050, according to a thorough analysis by the National
Renewable Energy Laboratory. Meanwhile, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change concluded the world must cut greenhouse gas
emissions by as much as 70 percent by midcentury, and to nearly zero by
2100, to have any chance of avoiding warming levels that could ensure
sinking cities, mass extinctions, and widespread droughts.
So we need more highly efficient renewable energy sources, cheaper
storage, smarter grids, and effective systems for capturing greenhouse
gases. Here are some of the most promising scientific advances of 2016.

Artificial photosynthesis
One of the crucial missing pieces in the portfolio of renewable energy
sources is a clean liquid fuel that can replace gasoline and other
transportation fuels. One of the most promising possibilities is artificial
photosynthesis, mimicking nature's own method for converting sunlight,
carbon dioxide, and water into fuels.

There have been slow if steady improvements in the field in recent years.
But this summer, Harvard scientists Daniel Nocera and Pamela Silvers,
in partnership with their co-authors, developed a "bionic leaf" that could
capture and convert 10 percent of the energy in sunlight, a big step forward
for the field. It's also about 10 times better than the photosynthesis of your
average plant.
The researchers use catalysts made from a cobalt-phosphorous alloy to split
the water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then set specially engineered
bacteria to work gobbling up the carbon dioxide and hydrogen and
converting them into liquid fuel.

Others labs have also made notable strides in the efficiency and durability
of solar fuel devices in recent months, including Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory and the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis. This
year the latter lab created a solar-driven device that converted carbon
dioxide to formate at 10 percent efficiency levels. Formate can be used as
an energy source for specialized fuel cells.

But the field still faces considerable technical challenges, as an earlier MIT
Technology Review story explained, and any commercial products are still
likely years away.
Solar thermophotovoltaics
This spring, a team of MIT researchers reported the development of a solar
thermophotovoltaic device that could potentially push past the theoretical
efficiency limits of the conventional photovoltaics used in solar
panels. Those standard solar cells can only absorb energy from a fraction
of sunlight's color spectrum, mainly the visual light from violet to red.
But the MIT scientists added an intermediate component made up of carbon
nanotubes and nanophotonic crystals that together function sort of like a
funnel, collecting energy from the sun and concentrating it into a narrow
band of light.

The nanotubes capture energy across the entire color spectrum, including in
the invisible ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths, converting it all into heat
energy. As the adjacent crystals heat up to high temperatures, around 1,000
°C, they reëmit the energy as light, but only in the band that photovoltaic
cells can capture and convert.

The researchers suggest that an optimized version of the technology could

one day break through the theoretical cap of around 30 percent efficiency
on conventional solar cells. In principle at least, solar thermophotovoltaics
could achieve levels above 80 percent, though that's a long way off,
according to the scientists. But there's another critical advantage to this
approach. Because the process is ultimately driven by heat, it could
continue to operate even when the sun ducks behind clouds, reducing the
intermittency that remains one of the critical drawbacks of solar power. If
the device were coupled with a thermal storage mechanism that could
operate at these high temperatures, it could offer continuous solar power
through the day and night.

Perovskite solar cells

Perovskite solar cells are cheap, easy to produce, and very efficient at
absorbing light. A thin film of the material, a class of hybrid organic and
inorganic compounds with a particular type of crystal structure, can capture
as much light as a relatively thick layer of the silicon used in standard
photovoltaics.

One of the critical challenges, however, has been durability. The

compounds that actually absorb solar energy tend to quickly degrade,
particularly in wet and hot conditions.
But research groups at Stanford, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and
the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, among other institutions, made
considerable strides in improving the stability of perovskite solar cells this
year, publishing notable papers in Nature, Nature Energy, and Science.
"At the start of the year, they just weren't stable for long periods of time,"
says Ian Sharp, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. "But
there have been some really impressive advances in that respect. This year
things have really gotten serious."

Meanwhile, other researchers have succeeded at boosting the efficiencyof

perovskite solar cells and identifying promising new paths for further
advances.
Carbon storage
Electricity generation is responsible for producing 30 percent of the nation's
carbon dioxide, so capturing those emissions at the source is crucial to any
reduction plan. This year saw advances for several emerging approaches to
capturing carbon in power plants, including carbonate fuel cells, as well as
at least some promising implementations of existing technology in the real
world. (Though, to be sure, there have been some starkly negative
examples as well.)
But most of these approaches leave open the question of what to do with
the stuff after it's successfully captured. And it's not a small problem. The
world produces nearly 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually.
One method, however, appears more promising than initially believed:
burying carbon dioxide and turning it into stone. Since 2012, Reykjavik
Energy’s CarbFix Project in Iceland has been injecting carbon dioxide and
water deep underground, where they react with the volcanic basalt rocks
that are abundant in the region.
An analysis published in Science in June found that 95 percent of the
carbon dioxide had mineralized in less than two years, much faster than the
hundreds of thousands of years many had expected. So far, it also doesn't
appear to be leaking out greenhouse gases, which suggests it could be both
cheaper and more secure than existing burial approaches.
But further research will be required to see how well it works in other areas,
notably including under the ocean floors, outside observers say.
Carbon dioxide to ethanol
Another promising option for captured carbon dioxide is, essentially,
recycling it back into usable fuels.
Earlier this year, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge
National Laboratory stumbled onto a method for converting it into ethanol,
the liquid fuel already used as an additive in gasoline. The team developed
a catalyst made from carbon, copper, and nitrogen with a textured surface,
which concentrated the electrochemical reactions at the tips of nano spikes,
according to a study published in Chemistry Select in October. When
voltage was applied, the device converted a solution of carbon dioxide into
ethanol at a high level of efficiency. The materials were also relatively
cheap and the process worked at room temperature, both critical advantages
for any future commercialization.
“We’re taking carbon dioxide, a waste product of combustion, and we’re
pushing that combustion reaction backwards,” said lead author Adam
Rondinone in a news release.
In addition to converting captured carbon dioxide, the process could be
used to store excess energy from wind and solar electricity generation.

Some outside researchers, however, are skeptical about the initial results
and are anxiously awaiting to see if other labs can verify the findings.