National Renewable Energy Laboratory
At the recent Solar Power International show. I ran into a spokesperson for NREL, and engaged in a discussion of the most exciting development happening out there in Golden, Colorado. As it turns out, it’s perovskites, especially calcium titanium oxide, CaTiO3.
What’s the big deal here? Actually, there are two aspects of this:
a) Higher efficiencies (up to a theoretical limit of 31%)
b) Far less energy involved in manufacturing. Where the fabrication of traditional silicon requires temperatures of over 1000o C to form the ingots from which the product is sliced, all the processes associated with perovskites happen at room temperature.
That’s huge.
In closing, let me point out that those who believe government can’t add value in the development of technology simply don’t know their history. I’m reminded of my list of “talking points” that I jotted down in preparation for a radio show I did a few years ago where I expected to be attacked by a libertarian (anti-government) interviewer:
- Yes, government is pushing industry for better fuel economy and alternative fuels; it’s playing a role in the transportation of the 21st Century, just like it did in the 20th, when it subsidized domestic oil exploration, built the roads and highways, and consistently deployed the military to maintain access to oil from foreign sources.
- We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that our tax-payers are still writing checks in the amount of tens of billions of dollars annually to the oil companies, the most profitable industry in the history of the known universe, to make that business even more profitable. While the American voter hates this arrangement by a factor of approximately 70-30, he’s completely powerless to change it. There’s a word for that: corruption. It’s the corruptive force of huge corporations, unchecked and unregulated, that has produced this outrageous ethical, economic, and environmental catastrophe.
- The involvement from government hasn’t been the tragedy that the right wing promotes. Are our listeners aware that radar systems that came from government have virtually eliminated fatal accidents on our commercial airlines? The annual risk of being killed in a plane crash for the average American is about 1 in 11 million, as compared with the annual risk of being killed in a motor vehicle crash, which is more than 2000 times greater (approximately 1 in 5000).
- And speaking of the government and the automobile industry, how many of us know the source of every single safety advancement, from seat belts in 1961 to anti-lock braking, air-bags, and the many dozens of other technologies that save more lives each year (though each one was fought tooth-and-nail by the auto industry itself)?
- Do we remember how our civilization put a man on the moon and began to explore vast regions of the universe?
- Taking the subject of transportation back down to Earth, have we considered where the Internet came from, that provides us our real-time traffic maps, our roadside assistance, the backbone for deployment of emergency medical services, not to mention the hundreds of other benefits we count on every day?
- Let’s conclude this by saying that government’s encouraging progressive concepts in transportation — pragmatic concepts that have proven themselves thousands of times over for their effectiveness in protecting your life and providing the safekeeping of your loved ones — are not entirely bad.
I agree with all your talking points. But the current status quo of “corruption” in your 2nd point is holding us back from further progress. Our challenge then is to eliminate this corruption. I believe the collective “we” already has the mean to do it, by showing and vote at the poll. But alas, I dare not dream of that possibility but can only wish for it.
Hi Paul,
I agree with your assessment. The greatest threat to our national security is here at home – it’s the very flood of bribery capital that has taken our state and national Capitols by storm.
The words of Abraham Lincoln illuminate the danger of inaction against the fixated and methodical army of corporate lobbyists – 11,000 strong and pouring out bribery at an average of $6 million per congressperson in 2009 alone…
“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
Good government is the only hope that We the People have to defend our Public Commons and advance our Common Good. Good government won’t come from people who hate government.
Want improvement? Ban bribery in all its forms. That’s the most important and central issue that controls all others.
As long as cash reigns as king, we’ll be slaves to greed and cowardice.
As Teddy Roosevelt observed, “Capital organizes.” So must we.
Cameron Atwood,
I always enjoy your confident use of the term “We the people “. Hmmm… from the context of your comment, I believe your definition of “we the people ” is really just those whom you believe share your particular ideology or philosophy.
It’s always intriguing to listen to small groups and stentorian advocates, who claim to represent ” the people “. In truth, the vast majority of “the people” neither agree nor are even aware of the would be Lenin’s.
( Bribery, and corruption of public servants, is already illegal, so your call for “banning” would seem to be a bit superfluous ).
Now, just for hell of it, let’s examine your claim of “we the people”. Okay, obviously the first people you discount are the 11,000 corporate lobbyists. Now those lobbyists represent all kinds of organizations, all of which are made up of “people” . At a rough estimate, probably 90% of the workforce, and all of the retired and superannuated. If you include their families, and people dependent on the success of those organizations, that must be in excess of more than 85-95% of the population ! (well, a significant majority anyway).
Now, with all due respect, your claim of “we the people” seems to lack a certain validity, and is just a little delusional.
But, by all means “organize” ! I look forward to seeing the TV coverage of your march on Washington. ( I’ll be the one selling hot dogs, and Gatorade ).
Didn’t mention getting the lead (actually tertraethyl lead) out of gasoline and, more recently, getting sulfur out of diesel fuel then gasoline to very low levels to prolong the life of catalyst systems that cut auto emissions. Also limiting the aromatics content of fuels.
My personal experience with NREL is that they have a bunch of incompetent people who are lazy beyond belief. They are there for the security of never being fired from a government job. Most of them, had they been in the private sector, would be caught quickly and eliminated from the payroll because they have zero or negative contribution. Sure there are a few diamonds mixed in the midst of a pile of crap (excuse my language)
Like 2greenenergy.com, NREL has been derelict in it’s duty. And like 2greenenergy NREL turned its back on me even though I’m in a position of being able to enable a doubling of the deployment of cleaner, renewable and advanced alternative energy.
It’s now clear the U.S. national energy labs, funded by taxpayers to the tune of $12 billion a year, produce too many dead ends and too few transformative clean technologies. And they tend to ignore the small free thinking local entrepreneurs who (like me) would simply love to collaborate.
But that may be about to change.
A wave of new thinking seems to be afoot at the Department of Energy, which oversees the labs. A few pilot programs are nudging the labs to get their clean-technology ideas to market by working with tech firms.
“There’s been a cultural and programmatic shift within DOE,” said Peter Littlewood, the director of Argonne National Laboratory, outside Chicago. He added that commercializing the labs’ intellectual property, known as technology transfer, is moving up the priority list.
“Now it’s on Page 2,” he said. “It used to be at Page 50.”
Those leading the effort said they are trying to effect a cultural change at the labs, many of which date back to the 1950s and still behave as if they were the secretive bastions of the Cold War.
The labs have been given little incentive to engage with local companies, especially smaller ones, even as technology clusters have grown up near some of them, like Argonne in Chicago, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colo., and the four national labs in the San Francisco Bay Area.
I think this BS about Perovskites is a fine example of NREL’s chasing it’s tail while ignoring the low hanging fruit, namely simple and viable new concept approaches that are scalable and deployable around the world in the near term like conversion of municipal trash and all sorts of biomass in distributed generation installations to back up the intermittent sources of energy such as solar and wind and hydro as in the Pacific Northwest that had drained most reservoirs due to the long term drought… Duh
Come on Craig, shake it off.
You are a victim of Willful Blindness just like about 99.99999 percent of people who should wake up and smell the coffiee.
You’ve heard of Willful Blindness I take it. It’s a close kin to Willful Denial you know.
It was recently the centenary of the sinking of the Lusitania which was marked by memorial services across the United Kingdom and around the world. For those that don’t know, the RMS Lusitania was a huge British ocean liner and briefly, the world’s largest passenger ship. She was launched by the British/American Cunard Line in 1906, at a time of fierce competition for the North Atlantic trade.
When the RMS Lusitania left New York for Liverpool on what would be her final voyage on 1 May 1915, submarine warfare was intensifying in the Atlantic during the 1st World War. Germany had declared the seas around the United Kingdom a war zone, and the German embassy in the United States had placed a newspaper advertisement warning people of the dangers of sailing on the Lusitania. On the afternoon of 7 May, Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-Boat, 11 mi (18 km) off the southern coast of Ireland and inside the declared “zone of war”.
A second internal explosion sent her to the bottom in 18 minutes causing the deaths of 1,198 passengers and crew.
Willful Blindness
One of the many interesting facets of this piece of history was the fact that the Germans had pre-notified the world of their prospective target before sinking the Lusitania, and yet its passengers falsely believed they would be immune from such a fate. The Imperial German Embassy had in fact placed the warning advertisement in 50 American newspapers at the time, including those in New York. Unbelievably this warning was even printed adjacent to the advertisement for Lusitania’s return voyage but other American newspapers dismissed the claim at the time as an idle threat.
Submarine warfare was intensifying in the Atlantic during the 1st World War. What is it that is intensifying now all over the world? Oh yeah, human induced sudden and catastrophic global warming and climate change. But now instead of 7 thousand passengers I understand Earth has over 7 Billion passengers.
What a topic. Leaving a good reply defies soundbites to deal with the optics of it. Craig, your inbox is full too often but send me an email and then I’ll begin a good discussion about it.
Yep, good government and lazy government. The lazy just want more money. The good want to (I mean actually wants to) do things that’s innovative. This consist of individuals that care about the future like most of us at these connected devises.
One such man was Alvin Weinberg, the inventor of the molten salt nuclear reactor concept. Well, advanced nuclear wasn’t flying (and I think he knew that even the conventional LWR would also be dieing) so what did he do? He created the NREL because he couldn’t quite fathom how to collect and store the unlimited but diffuse energy from the sun with the present day technology! Thanks to them, we have better solar panels, right?
I don’t believe that other stuff will work as long as crystalline-Si, SIGS and CdTe.
Bty, cadmium tellurium, though toxic, is used in very minute amounts and is already surpassing conventional crystalline silicon in efficiency because of First Solar’s research.
http://solarlove.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/nrel-solar-cell-efficiency-graph.jpg
To Les,
Subs? Huh? What? You mean how the GOVERNMENT (actually) allowed Rickover to build a nuclear sub so that WE would NOT fall prey to tech weakness? I don’t know what the start of WW2 has to do with this topic about the NREL but nukes served their purpose. Hopefully we’ll be smart enough to carry on with Alvin’s latter ambitions.
Back to innovation…
If we all can’t figure out how to build cheaper solar and even cheaper (and better) batteries (like the solid state ones that will soon be able to handle being charged in the desert sun), then we’ll have to learn how to contain the nasty fission products (such as cesium-137, horrible stuff!) AND prevent any possible easier route to proliferation (from any advanced nuclear site by use of corruption) than from the ground up, as any rouge state might also do.
Now, we can’t turn back the wheel, which means we must embrace the technology, in order to survive. We’ll need drones and drone fighting drones surveilling everything because the nuclear genie is out and roaming around the M.E. Eventually, people will be able to convert the very ground into fissionables (ever heard of unlimited power from “burning” rocks?). These drones will have to have geiger counters, infrared, and all the other detectors. If not, we’ll have a mini-nuke, or worst yet, a dose of chemical weapons in one of our backyards.
What does nukes have to do with Craig’s post? That the inventor and prototyper of a reactor design (MSRE at ORNL) had great part in creating the NREL.
So, yes, I AGREE WITH Craig. We need to collaborate. Work together to prevent the unthinkable, to reverse the excess CO2 problem and to turn these issues into just another challenge which improves efficiency and living standards. As long as most the people are not intent on killing each other, the rest of us can prevent the fall (and into an overheated biosphere fueled by depleting fossil fuels). We can only do these things by beginning with pure science research.
Tech spinoffs are usually a good thing.
Goverment is us, some of us understand this and when those that understand outnumber the lost we collaborate and do things like go to the moon, which ends up benefitting all of us including the lost. So Craig keep pounding the drum, because when the stars line up and we collaborate for the common good remarkable things happen. Progress is brewing.
Thanks for this. We can cooperate with one another, and we must. Further, when it happens, it’s a thing of beauty.
It’s pathetic to listen to a roomful of Republicans brag about how quick they would be to start bombing our numerous “enemies,” without so much as a word about working towards peaceful solutions to our disagreements.
Craig,
It’s very difficult to know when military involvement is necessary, and when it only compounds problems.
The “peaceful solutions” pursued by Stanley Baldwin Neville Chamberlain, (both acting with the best of intentions) only allowed a bad situation with the Nazi’s, become much worse.
There are some enemies who must be eliminated by force, while others if left alone, will destroy themselves.
Craig, let’s correct some of your inaccuracies.
!) The US taxpayer does not “write cheques totaling tens of billions of dollars to oil companies ! That is a complete myth. Even at the height of his rhetoric President Obama, could only identify less that $2.7 billion which could vaguely be categorized as “subsidies”, and even those had sunset clauses and were paid to mostly small marginal producers.
The Oil industry is the largest US Taxpayer ! The oil industry represents 22-28% of the total US economy. It pays not only the most tax, but at the highest corporate rate and the nature of it’s revenue collection makes it the most valuable Taxpayer.
In addition, the oil industry largely finances the US retirement/superannuation industry, relieving the taxpayer of an enormous burden.
2) The US government is solely responsible for the environmental and economic disaster created by the US corn-ethanol industry. However well-intentioned originally, , it is now evident that US corn-ethanol has become a hugely expensive environmental disaster. The industry would collapse without government support, and mandated use.
3) I’m not sure what you mean by the US governments use of “radar”. Radar is an invention by may corporation and governments, prior to WW 2. Advances made during the war were applied to civilian aircraft (and shipping) after the war as a natural extension of technology, not “wise government intervention”.
( Goodyear Aircraft Corporation developed synthetic aperture radar (SAR))
4) You are on safer ground when you point to government regulations regarding Auto-safety, but again you are inaccurate as to the cause.
In the 1950’s, Henry Ford Jnr, invested a lot of his own money, and later Ford motors money, researching and developing auto-safety technology. The result was the 1956 ‘Lifeguard Design’ model which incorporated seat belts and other advanced safety features.
The model failed miserably! Some customers even paid dealers to remove the safety features ! Although Ford’s overseas markets responded to the benefits of safety, the US auto-buyer stayed away in droves. It took legislation in the late 1960’s to force buyers to regard safety as an essential requisite.
5) Roadside assistance ? I wasn’t aware that the American Automobile Association is a government organization ?
6) Space X, seems to be doing better than NASA for a fraction of the cost.
Craig, as I have said elsewhere, governments certainly have a role to play in encouraging new technologies and stimulating the economy. What I don’t understand is why you believe perpetuating inaccurate myths, half truths and confused, out of date,ideology is unhelpful ?
Tilting at windmills that don’t really exist, or if they do have no practical alternative, only serves to detract from the valuable contribution you make to more worthwhile projects.
Craig,
The United States was founded on the principle of a minimum of government in the affairs of it’s citizens.
No sensible person would deny the valuable contribution by governments in providing public safety, regulatory structures, and acting in the commonweal. All successful societies are a balance between the various dynamics that make up the ‘commonweal”. One of those dynamics is the role of representative government, and administrative government.
The trick for governments, is to provide essential government services, civic leadership, etc, without becoming oppressive, bureaucratic, or the servant of any particular ideology.
Obviously, there are services needed in any society, which can really only be provided by the society acting as a collective. In these instances the ‘trustees’ (legislators) of the commonweal must strive to act in the best interests of the majority, while respectfully safeguarding and minimizing any harm to the minority.
Not an easy trick to accomplish !
The problem always begins when one group or another forms an ideology, and become convinced the precepts they value, are more valuable than everyone else. Without the power of government, this just leads to endless debates and passionate evangelicalism, but once any group of “true believers” gain a grip on the machinery of government, what were once quite well meaning intentions, invariably become oppressive, bureaucratic policies, very costly to the taxpayer, and almost impossible to get rid of without a lot of angst, and often bloodshed.
Government policies are often poorly constructed, politically driven, simplistic solution to complex problems. When these policies are proven to be white elephants, inefficient, counter-productive, obsolete, or just plain barking mad, it’s still becomes very hard to change the policies because a combination of vested interests, “true believers, bureaucrats, etc, will mount almost fanatical resistance to change.
True conservatives are always cautious of populist, radical, policies requiring massive government support. Experience has shown that invariably the result is a massive cost to taxpayer, repressive government intrusion into the rights of individuals, unnecessary disruption and a whole set of new problems.
( Sigh) It’s always difficult to reason with enthusiastic zealots crying “hooray” for my side, but once they gain the support of governments, it becomes impossible.
It’s my belief that citizens should ensure that government power should be used cautiously, and responsibly. The electors should provide government with a minimum of authority, and stop believing that passing legislation, automatically solves complex problems.
On the other hand, elected politicians have a duty to inspire and lead !
So, it’s not an easy balancing act !