Present at the Future

by Ira Flatow

  THE SAUDI ARABIA OF ELECTRICITY

  And there’s the rub: bringing electricity where the wind blows, to places where the demand is highest. If you look at the wind charts of the United States, remote areas such as North and South Dakota have winds that blow strong enough and long enough to produce enough electricity to supply almost half the power of the entire country. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, just three states—Texas, Kansas, and North Dakota—have enough wind power potential to supply energy to the entire United States. What Saudi Arabia is to oil, these states are to wind. The problem is that the electric grid that would get the juice back to the most populous states where electric consumption is highest doesn’t reach those remote areas.

  One obvious solution is to extend those power lines out to the grid. That would cost tens of billions of dollars. But why not think bigger? As long as we’re going to think about spending the big bucks to modernize and extend the rickety old power grid, why not try something new? Why not convert the electricity into hydrogen, then pipe or truck it to service stations to be pumped into electric cars or power plants running on fuel cells?

  In other words, don’t think of hydrogen as the energy. Think of hydrogen as the carrier of the energy—a universal storage system of electricity. And think of it not as a carrier just for electricity made by wind power but for electricity made by other alternative energy sources such as solar.

  THE HYDROGEN SOCIETY

  That way, says, John Turner, principal scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado, you could not only make the windy plains your home for wind turbines but you could also make the very sunny states of the Southwest your home for solar and photovoltaic generators.

  Turner believes that given all the sources of sustainable energy in the country—energy that never gets used up—we could in a matter of decades become totally energy independent in a hydrogen economy.

  “I say, ‘Do we have enough energy to supply all the energy needs for a future society,’ say, you know, eight to ten billion people? And the answer is absolutely. There is no question.”

  In fact, Turner says solar cells, by themselves, could supply the world’s demand for energy by the year 2050. But it would take a lot of solar cells. “It would take an array the size of Texas,” he says. Nevertheless, he points out, we have that resource available for use, “and we have the technologies today that can take advantage of that. That’s the whole beauty of solar. You know, from villages to buildings, you can have some large arrays in various places around the world.”

  But because the wind and sun are intermittent—because the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow—“we need an energy carrier for transportation and other things like energy storage, and that’s where the hydrogen comes in.” Hydrogen would store the energy. “It’s a chemical carrier.” And we could make extra hydrogen at times of low electric demand, such as night hours.

  “We’re far behind in solar cells,” he points out. The price of solar cells really needs to come down. “So some breakthroughs need to be done there in terms of getting our costs down, but the technology is there.”

  WIND + WATER = HYDROGEN

  Some small steps testing the feasibility of a hydrogen economy are slowly being taken. The U.S. Department of Energy’s NREL, in partnership with Xcel Energy (the same folks who built those wind turbines in Spearville, Kansas) recently unveiled a demonstration plant at NREL in Golden, Colorado, that uses wind-generated electricity to produce and store hydrogen, right there on the spot. “Converting wind energy to hydrogen means that it doesn’t matter when the wind blows, since its energy can be stored right there on-site in the form of hydrogen,” said Richard C. Kelly, Xcel Energy president and CEO.

  The electricity from two wind turbines is passed through water, which splits the H2O into its components, hydrogen and oxygen. (It’s the same demonstration you did in seventh-grade science class: Dip the wires from a battery into a glass of saltwater and out bubbles hydrogen from one wire and oxygen from the other.) The hydrogen is stored for use later in a fuel cell or a generator powered by an internal-combustion engine. Both Xcel Energy and NREL are chipping in to pay for the $2 million, two-year project.

  It’s only an experiment to test the feasibility of such a system. But if alternative energies such as solar, wind, and hydrogen are to catch on and become mainstream, “I really think it has to be a national initiative,” says Dr. Amy Jaffe, associate director of the Rice Energy Program at Rice University in Houston, Texas. “There are groups of people who have called for an Apollo-style national initiative in science,” an effort that is going to take decades, as Dr. Turner pointed out. “And so it’s really important to start focusing on the science today.”

  For example, says Jaffe, when Turner talks about how much land the solar arrays will cover, the land itself becomes an issue, both for wind and solar. “People who are green don’t often mention that. But if we can invest in revolutionary science technologies that utilize nanotechnology, whether that’s to have better membranes or better solar panels or smaller this or smaller that, then I think the potential is larger.”

  Some scientists have already created a nanosolar solution. They have found ways of creating spray-on, plastic solar cells, made with material that uses nanotechnology. Imagine spray-painting houses or barns with nanosolar paint or rolling out large sheets of plastic solar cells to cover arid parts of the desert.

  A company called Nanosolar has found a way to coat sheets and strips of thin metal with photovoltaic plastic, akin to printing ink on paper, opening up the possibility that solar panels could be placed on any building surface exposed to the sun. Nanosolar recently announced it would build the world’s largest factory for producing solar cells in San Jose, California. Working at full steam, so to speak, it could turn out enough solar cells each year to produce more than 400 megawatts of electric power—three times the amount currently installed in the United States.

  Producing wind power in some states and solar power in others is all fine and good. But Jaffe says we won’t see any real progress “until we have a real direction,” as we did in the early days of the space program, which turned all resources to getting to the moon. “You’re going to spend a billion dollars a year for ten years, just on fundamental science because the kinds of technologies that are here with us today are technologies that require huge breakthroughs, especially in storage technologies.”

  In the space program, milestones were set and met. Technologies were developed to meet each target. The same thing needs to be done in energy, says Jaffe. “We need to set goals and targets. We need to know where we need to be in what year. We need to lay these things down together so we understand the science that’s possible at which time in which fields, so we understand what fuels are going to provide us an escape from emissions and which ones aren’t, and that we have a coordinated national policy.”

  A coordinated national energy policy is not what the United States has at the moment. And weaning a country off a coal-and oil-based economy won’t be easy, she points out, because so much money and politics are tied up in these industries.

  “There isn’t anybody who makes a living off of the sun, and so nobody advocates for the kind of technologies that John [Turner] is talking about. But there are coal states in the United States that have great political power and there are certain states that make money from having traditional combustion engines stay on the road, so we have a problem in our political process in terms of going through the evaluation. Not just of what’s technically practical, financially practical, economical and commercially practical, but when you add a layer of the politics of trying to implement what’s best for the country as a whole, then it becomes much, much, much more difficult to do.”

  One thing that is not in doubt is the cost of electricity generated by the wind. It has declined dramatically. With the advent of larger, more efficient wind turbines, wind-generated electric
ity is now competitive with other industries. Depending on the site, wind-power electricity is three to seven cents per kilowatt-hour, says Laurie Jodziewicz, communications and policy specialist at the American Wind Energy Association. “In these days of high costs for natural gas, wind energy is actually bringing down the costs of electricity to some consumers by offsetting that need for more natural gas use.”

  It’s hard to argue against wind power, though some have. Some of the opposition comes from people who fear that the turbines may kill birds and bats. “Even if we got one hundred percent of our power from wind power—which is probably not realistic—but even if we had one hundred percent of our power from wind, the bird impacts would be very minimal, compared to things like buildings, cats, vehicles, pesticides, and all of the other things that affect birds,” says Jodziewicz.

  “With regard to bats, there was something that was unexpectedly discovered in 2003. And the industry immediately partnered with the Fish and Wildlife Service, with the NREL, and with the leading bat organization in the world, Bat Conservation International. We formed together, and we’ve been funding research to understand and hopefully solve the issue that we discovered by better understanding what might make our site risky for bats but also other ways to deter bats away from wind turbines. I think that overall our environmental impacts are minimal. But we certainly want to make sure that we take care of whatever we can.”

  Others argue the windmills are unsightly. They’ll spoil the view. It’s a subjective opinion that can’t really be countered, except by those who live near them and find them majestic.

  But if wind power contributes to our energy independence and helps counter global warming, finding enough homes for those wind turbines will be easy, once we view them not for their size but as symbols of our security.

  PART V

  NANOTECHNOLOGY

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE NEW SMALL IS BIG

  If I were asked for an area of science and engineering that will most likely produce the breakthroughs of tomorrow, I would point to nanoscale science and engineering.

  —NEAL LANE, FORMER PRESIDENTIAL SCIENCE ADVISOR

  The prefix nano- has entered the lexicon, as in “I’ll be done in a nanosecond.” Or the brand name iPod nano. You get the general idea that a nanosecond goes by even more quickly than, say, a New York minute. But you may not know that nano- simply means “billionth,” from the Greek for dwarf. So a nanosecond is a billionth of a second, and a nanometer is a billionth of a meter, or about five to seven atoms in length. That’s tiny! (And that means that the new, smaller, slimmer iPod is not “nano” in the true sense at all.)

  You may have heard people mention nano-, but you may not have heard much about nanotech or nanotechnology. What is it? One of the architects of nanotechnology, British chemist Sir Harry Kroto, defines nanotechnology and nanoscience as “molecules that do things.” Researchers in these new fields work at that incredibly small scale of molecules and even individual atoms to create new materials, new processes, and new machines that could improve our lives enormously.

  It all started with physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman. In 1959, Feynman gave a talk at California Institute of Technology entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” in which he challenged his fellow scientists to come up with tiny, molecule-sized machines that can do surgery, libraries that can be stored on the head of a pin (the entire 24-volume Encyclopaedia Britannica), minuscule computers. Why? Because small machines could work more efficiently, using a lot less power, and manufacturing them would be much cheaper. But to realize Feynman’s vision, researchers needed new tools.

  A big step into that very small world came in 1990, when researchers invented a new kind of microscope, called the atomic force microscope. It has a tiny needle that bumps over atoms the way the needle in an old-fashioned phonograph jumps over the grooves in a vinyl record. This needle also can move atoms and molecules around. Scientists found that they could use the needle to manipulate and rearrange atoms—work on the nanoscale, that is—and make tiny new things. Dr. James Gimzewski is known to his friends as “Jim-Get-Me-Whiskey.” One of his inventions is a “nano nose,” a tiny sensor that can distinguish between different types of whiskey. Gimzewski was then a group leader at IBM’s Zurich Research Laboratory in Switzerland, where he pioneered ways to manipulate atoms and molecules to make tiny sensors and machines with the atomic force microscope. Now he’s a professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he built his own new microscope.

  In the late 1990s, the U.S. federal government began investing large sums of money in labs like Gimzewski’s and other nanotech researchers’. That seed money has about doubled since. One big reason is that nanotechnology could revolutionize electronics by giving us much smaller, more powerful electrical devices that would save a great deal of energy. And we badly need an alternative to today’s silicon chips. In 1965, Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, predicted that the number of electronic circuits on a silicon chip would double every year—a rate that, as circuitry shrank and got more complex, he updated in 1975 to every two years. Today, it’s about every 18 months. But Moore’s law won’t hold true much longer, because there’s a limit to how small you can shrink electronics before heat from the circuitry on the chip begins to melt the plastic from which it’s made. So a major goal of nanotechnologists at companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Lucent, Intel, and IBM is to shrink computer chips down to the size of a single molecule. But so far, there have been only some demonstrations done in the lab of how to build such a chip. You won’t find anything available at RadioShack. Both Gimzewski and Horst Stormer, a Nobel laureate in physics who works at Lucent, say that this goal of a working chip the size of a molecule will be very hard to attain. “Right now, we are far, far from this,” emphasizes Stormer.

  Sandia National Laboratories’ nanotechnologist Jeff Brinker is approaching the next generation of electronics another way. “I like that 1960s slogan ‘Power to the people,’” he says. “I like developing technologies that anyone can use.” One approach Brinker particularly likes is “smart ink,” which he says that “you write with just like you do with dumb ink.” Loaded into a regular printer, smart ink would allow anyone to design and print out working electronic circuits on everyday printing paper.

  While some researchers are focusing on tiny transistors and circuitry, others dream of putting nanosized particles together to make much bigger things that could be incredibly useful. The late Richard Smalley, Rice University chemist, won the Nobel Prize along with his British colleague Harry Kroto for discovering the fullerene, a nanoparticle that resembles a soccer ball because it’s made up of hexagonal molecules. Smalley and Kroto gave the fullerene its name and nicknamed it the buckyball because its hexagons look like those in the geodesic domes that visionary architect Buckminster Fuller unveiled in 1954. (Fuller, who was dedicated to doing more with less, would have appreciated nanotechnology.) Smalley also referred to carbon “nanotubes,” tiny tube-shaped versions of the buckyball, as buckytubes. Despite their minuscule size and the fact that they’re made of carbon, the same stuff that’s in your pencil lead, nanotubes are incredibly strong, yet as light and flexible as straws. They’re an excellent example of how very differently things work at this incredibly small scale.

  To understand carbon nanotubes, one prominent nanotechnologist, Cornell University’s Paul McEuen says, “Think of a stack of paper in which each paper is one atom thin, a sort of chicken-wire mesh of carbon atoms.” Unlike nanoscale circuitry, carbon nanotubes are already in products you can buy: They reinforce your car’s dashboard and tires, making them stronger and longer-lasting, and also go into your skis and the frame of your tennis racquet and your bike.

  Besides being strong, Smalley pointed out, carbon nanotubes also conduct electricity. Smalley believed that once we figure out how to align them and make them into long cables, they could transfer energy
far more efficiently—revolutionizing energy conservation. Others think that carbon nanotubes could make space travel much cheaper and easier. Arthur C. Clarke, in his 1953 sci-fi novel The Fountains of Paradise, describes a “space elevator.” Such an elevator would have a 24,000-mile long cable, one end anchored on Earth, the other on a satellite orbiting the Earth. Just like an elevator in a skyscraper, people would ride this space elevator into Earth orbit. Carbon nanotubes may be just strong and flexible enough to serve as the elevator cable. (See more about this idea in Chapter 17.)

  Meanwhile, some nanotechnologists, such as McEuen, are investigating other uses for carbon nanotubes. McEuen has made “guitar strings” out of carbon nanotubes. Each one is “clamped down at both ends,” he says, “and vibrates just like a guitar string vibrates. There’s the fundamental and the harmonics, just like there are with a regular guitar string.” McEuen wants to use his “guitar string” to weigh and measure atoms and molecules and learn more about their chemical composition: “The heavier a molecule was, the more it would shift the frequency at which the string vibrates. So if you listen for that change in tone, you could infer the mass.” He says, “The way we listen to the nanotube is much the same as the way you listen to a radio broadcast. We take a high frequency signal and we sort of convert it down to a lower frequency where it’s simpler for us to hear. So you could imagine in the future using these nanotubes as a kind of simplified radio receiver, and it might be simpler and use much less power than an existing radio.”

  BIONANOTECHNOLOGY

  Some nanotechnologists are experimenting with nanowires, incredibly tiny wires that could become part of minuscule transistors and electronic circuitry because they have optical and electronic properties. At Harvard, chemist Charles Lieber has combined them with nanoscale lasers for use in photonics, the process by which silicon-chip circuitry is now made, on a tiny scale. Lieber cofounded Nanosys, a nanotech startup company with, he says, “the modest goal of revolutionizing chemical and biological sensing, computing, photonics, and information storage.”