The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

by Daniel Yergin

  The third initiative, developed in Congress and then implemented by the Obama administration, is ARPA-E, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy. It was modeled on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, the organization within the Department of Defense charged with identifying major new needs and challenges and the “far-out ideas,” and funding them on a multiyear basis. Many of the most important advances in computing trace back to DARPA, along with GPS and the Internet. Of course, even with the Internet, it took almost three decades from the first identification of the problem to the beginning of its massive impact.

  The current level of federal energy R&D is about $5 billion a year, which, as a percentage of GDP, is considerably lower than the GDPs of Japan, South Korea, France, and China. With the renewed focus on federal spending and deficits, energy R&D spending is once again, as in the 1990s, a target for cuts. That would have real costs. But if funding and focus are consistently maintained over the years, the consequences could be significant. And could well provide surprising solutions.20

  THE NATURE OF THE EXPERIMENT

  One of the commandments of venture capital is “Thou shall not do science experiments.” Yet venture capital is indeed, along with everybody else in the sprawling energy-research enterprise, part of a very large experiment that is seeking to answer an enormous question: Can today’s $65 trillion world economy be sure it will have the energy it needs to be a $130 trillion economy in two decades? And to what degree can such an economy, which depends on carbon fuels for 80 percent of its energy, move to other diverse energy sources? The answers are far from obvious.

  This experiment is definitely not something just for the future. It has already begun. It takes a variety of forms today—among them, capturing the wind, harnessing the energy that is being created by the giant nuclear fusion furnace of the sun, harvesting energy from the richness of the soil, improving efficiency wherever we use energy, and remaking the vehicles that carry us all about.

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  ALCHEMY OF SHINING LIGHT

  Albert Einstein possessed a power of mind that would do nothing less than forge a new understanding of the universe. In the summer of 1900, he had a more immediate problem. Diploma in hand, he really needed to find a job. He had hoped for a university position, but it was not to be. None of Einstein’s professors would give him a positive recommendation, in part due to a mediocre diploma essay as well as his reputation for being, as one of his professors put it, a “lazy dog.” Yet whatever his supposed sloth, this rebellious student had not only extraordinary gifts for mathematics and physics but also the capability to marshal them with momentous results. But that was not enough to get him employed.

  While hunting for a job, Einstein tried to support himself by doing some private tutoring in math and physics. He even advertised in a local paper, offering prospective students free trial lessons for what he billed as “exceedingly thorough” services. His family, its finances stretched, could not provide much financial assistance, but they were clearly worried about him. Unbeknownst to Albert, his father, Hermann, went so far as to write a chemistry professor asking for help. “My son,” he said, “feels deeply unhappy & each day the thought gains strength in him that his career has been derailed & he cannot find a connection any longer. He is moreover depressed at the thought that he is a burden to us, who are not very well off.”

  But then Einstein had a lucky break. He landed a job at the Swiss patent office in Bern. In June 1902 he reported for work at the patent office in the new Postal and Telegraph Building, near the railway station. Examining patent applications was not very taxing work for the intellectually curious young physicist, but most important, it would provide him the security he needed—and the time.

  The patent office was actually a good fit for Einstein. He was interested in the practical as well as theoretical, particularly when it came to electricity. After all, his father was an engineer. Hermann and his youngest brother, Jakob, ran an electric generation company in Munich. Part of the first generation of entrepreneurs building on Edison’s revolution in electric power, they were at the forefront of the high tech of the day. They competed with companies like Siemens for contracts to illuminate the towns and cities of Europe. Unfortunately, Hermann and Jakob Einstein lost out on a contract to light the Munich city center and were never really able to make a go of their business. But at least Hermann Einstein no longer had to worry about his son’s job prospects.1

  TEN WEEKS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD

  Ensconced at the patent office and with time on his hands, Einstein eventually went to work on a pent-up store of problems that were filling his mind. Over a period of just ten weeks in the summer of 1905, in an astonishing burst of creativity and analysis, he would turn out five papers that would transform the understanding of the universe and change the world in which we live. One of them was called “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend upon Its Energy Content?” This was the paper with perhaps the most famous equation ever: e=mc2. That paper laid the theoretical foundations for both exploiting the terrifying potential of nuclear reactions in the atomic bomb and harnessing nuclear reactions for peaceful power.

  One of the other papers had the obscure title “On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light.” This paper, Einstein wrote to a friend, “deals with radiation and the energy properties of light and is very revolutionary.” In the paper, Einstein proposed the hypothesis that matter and radiation can interact only by way of the exchange of independent “quanta” of energy. He demonstrated that this hypothesis explains a number of phenomena, including what he called the “photoelectric effect.”2

  In so doing, the paper provided the theoretical foundations for what, more than a century later, is the rapidly growing photovoltaics industry, an industry that many see as the ultimate future for renewables. The significance of that paper from the summer of 1905 was summed up succinctly more than a century later by one of the leading technologists in the industry today.

  “Einstein,” he said, “explained it all.”3

  SOLAR CELLS

  Today, while wind has captured much more investment, no part of the renewable industry is attracting as much research focus as the quest to directly harness the power of the sun—especially photovoltaic cells, or PV, otherwise known as solar cells.

  In many ways solar cells represent the purest ideal for renewable technologies. Sunlight is an abundant resource in almost all corners of the earth. Once the cells are made, there are no complex industrial facilities to operate. Cells—a basic system that can go on the roof of a house—can be installed in a matter of hours. They don’t necessarily even need any transmission lines. Just the direct conversion of sunlight into electricity.

  This transformation may sound like the type of feat that alchemists in the Middle Ages claimed to accomplish—the “great work” of transmuting base metals into gold. But unlike the magic of the Middle Age wizards, this modern alchemy is real: light penetrates a surface and emerges as electricity. It is fundamental physics. That was Einstein’s great insight.

  Though the market for PV has seen enormous growth since the mid-2000s, it is still much smaller than that of wind. Yet nothing else across the renewables spectrum generates such high expectations as the potential of directly harnessing the power of the sun—especially for PV. And with good reason. It saves hundreds of millions of years—about the time it can take for organic matter to be transformed into fossil fuels. There is conviction that, in the words of MIT physicist Ernest Moniz, solar energy will eventually be the “tallest pole in the tent”—the ultimate source of electric power. But when? And will photovoltaics fundamentally transform our entire electric power system? Will this system shift from a network of generating stations and wires to one where every house and office building is a mini–power plant, generating its own electricity, without coal, natural gas, nuclear power, or even wind? Or will, instead, a new kind of power plant become commonplace, where the dispat
ched electricity is generated from solar panels ?4

  FROM LIGHT TO ELECTRICITY

  Generalized diagram of a solar photovoltaic cell

  Source: U.S. Department of Energy

  Whatever the path, one obstacle that stands in the way is scale. To get to scale—to proliferate across the rooftops of the world—requires the conquest of costs. And that depends upon further innovation. Costs may be coming down, but they are still higher than competitive sources of generation. Mass production has not yet brought costs down to what is required for true scale.

  Where PV are competitive is where there is no established infrastructure of wires delivering electricity, such as in outer space or remote jungle villages, and they may also be competitive when power prices are high and the solar resources are strong. Otherwise they need significant government support and subsidies. In Germany, the country that did much to transform solar cells from a small niche into a substantial business, those price supports have been at levels as much as five times the cost of conventional electricity. But the whole weight of the industry is concentrated on that single goal—bringing costs down further.

  “THOROUGH INVESTIGATION”

  Well before Einstein had put pen to paper in 1905, earlier scientists and engineers had already observed the photoelectric effect—that in some circumstances light could produce an electric charge—but they just could not explain it. A few scientists and engineers worked with the element selenium, producing electric current by exposure to sunlight, and even candlelight. Werner Siemens, the founder of the Siemens engineering company, proclaimed that “the direct conversion” of the “energy of light into electrical energy was an entirely new physical phenomenon” that required “thorough investigation.” It was left to Einstein to explain the why.5

  Until that time, physicists insisted that light was a wave moving through the ether—an invisible substance that supposedly suffused the universe. Einstein thought otherwise. Light, he said in his paper on the photovoltaic effect, was made up of tiny particles called quanta, also known as photons, that moved at 186,000 miles per second and were indivisible.

  It was this paper that established the science that explained photovoltaic reactions. When sunlight descends on solar photovoltaic cells, the photons are absorbed. They dislodge and displace electrons within the semiconductor. These loose electrons flow out of the silicon along minute channels—almost like water flowing through a canal—as electric current. The photons are one form of energy, and the elections another form.

  Einstein received the Nobel Prize in 1922 not for the paper that laid the basis for nuclear energy, but rather for this paper on photons and quantum mechanics—for “his discovery of the law of photoelectric effect,” in the words of the award.6

  But theory is one thing. It would take a half century after Einstein’s paper for the real breakthrough in putting the theory to practical use. That feat occurred in 1953 at AT&T’s Bell Labs, in New Jersey. There two scientists, Gerald Pearson and Calvin Fuller, were trying to develop an improved transistor for communications, a device that also happened to have been invented a few years earlier at Bell Labs. But now Pearson and Fuller discovered, to their surprise, that silicon panels that were doped—that is, contaminated with a deliberately introduced impurity, in this case gallium—achieved the alchemic reaction described in Einstein’s paper. The light was transmutated into electricity.

  A year later, after much further experimentation, the Bell Labs scientists unveiled “the first solar cells capable of producing useful amounts of power.” To dramatize their discovery when they presented it to the National Academy of Sciences in 1954, they used the solar cells to power a small radio transmitter. But that would only be the beginning. Bell Labs declared that these new solar cells would “profoundly influence the art of living.” “Vast Power of the Sun Is Tapped by Battery Using Sand Ingredient,” trumpeted the New York Times, which reported that this invention “may mark the beginning of a new era” and “the realization of one of mankind’s most cherished dreams—the harnessing of the almost limitless energy of the sun for the uses of civilization.” Yet the initial step along the commercial path was more down to earth: providing power for rural telephone lines near Americus, Georgia .7

  However, these photovoltaic cells were not very efficient, and they were very costly. Aside from rural phone lines, where could they find any use at all?

  THE RACE INTO SPACE

  In October 1957 a Soviet rocket roared into space carrying Sputnik, the first manmade satellite. Sputnik—which in Russian translates to “traveling companion”—caught the United States off guard. Hoisting it into orbit was seen as a political and military victory of the first order for the Soviet Union—and a strategic catastrophe for the United States. The Soviets had not only bested the United States on the frontier of science but, worse, had shattered Americans’ sense of invulnerability. No longer was the United States protected by two vast oceans, not when Soviet armor could circle above it, in outer space.

  For the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, Sputnik was a way to project an image of strength and to disguise what he knew were the country’s weaknesses. But that is not the way it was seen in the United States. The Soviet success ignited what has been described as a “near-hysterical reaction” on the part of “the American press, politicians, and public.” “Whoever controls space will control the world,” declared Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson. Physicist Edward Teller, known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb,” warned President Eisenhower at a White House meeting that Sputnik was a greater defeat for the United States than Pearl Harbor. A high-powered national commission urged the administration to build enough nuclear fall-out shelters to house every single American. Legislation was rushed through Congress to subsidize the study of foreign language on college campuses in the name of national defense.

  At the same time, the government launched a number of programs that would drive American technology with far-reaching impact. It was in 1958 that the Defense Department created what became DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. That same year, NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was established. Government funding for research and science in general surged.

  In the face of the Sputnik challenge, the calmest man in America, it seemed, was President Eisenhower himself. “As far as the satellite itself is concerned,” he said five days after its launch, “that does not raise my apprehension, not one iota.” He was concerned, in a recession year, to keep the budgetary expenditures from going, as he put it, “hog wild.” He shunted aside proposals for nuclear-powered airplanes and also for a nuclear-powered spaceship that would fly to the moon, explaining, “I’d like to know what’s on the other side of the moon, but I won’t pay to find out this year.”

  One reason for his calm was that he knew that the United States had its own missile and satellite program—in fact, several competing ones, from the different military services.

  Whatever his reassuring words to the public, Eisenhower clearly understood that the single most important thing to do was get a satellite up—and get it up quickly. On the first try, in December 1957, the rocket blew up only two seconds after takeoff, and the satellite was destroyed in a highly embarrassing ball of fire. The failed American satellite was immortalized as “Kaputnik.” A second satellite, Explorer I, was, however, successfully lofted into orbit in January 1958. This satellite, though, was very unadorned, even primitive. The need remained to get up a satellite that would be taken seriously. 8 And that meant accelerating the Vanguard program, which was to put into orbit a civilian research satellite to support the 1958 International Geophysical Year.

  But the Vanguard program ignited a critical and acerbic internal battle. How to power the Vanguard satellite once it was in orbit? On this crucial question, the navy, which was responsible for the Vanguard, wanted to use traditional chemical batteries. But on the flank emerged an unlikely adversary in the form of a German scientist named Hans Zieg
ler, who had been brought to the United States by the U.S. military after World War II. Ziegler had become an American citizen and was working on communications for the military. When Ziegler visited Bell Labs in New Jersey soon after the invention of the silicon-based photovoltaics, he was instantly smitten by the new technology. He believed that man’s ultimate source of energy was destined to be the sun and relentlessly lobbied the armed forces and Congress to “give mankind the benefit of this invention at the earliest possible time.”

  The navy, however, had no intention of entrusting the power source of its first satellite to what it described as an unproved “unconventional and not fully established” new invention. But Ziegler convinced a critical government panel that the chemical batteries on Vanguard would last only a few weeks while the experiments aboard Vanguard would “have enormously greater value if they can be kept operating for several months more.”

  In the end, Ziegler managed to muscle solar panels onto the Vanguard vehicle, which was launched in March 1958. The orbiting Vanguard helped restore confidence in America’s scientific preeminence.

  Vanguard was also the great break that established the credibility for solar cells. How big the break was made clear in a New York Times headline nineteen days after launch: “Vanguard Radio Fails to Report/Chemical Battery Exhausted/Solar Unit Functioning.” A year later Ziegler and his colleagues in the signal corps clinked glasses when the orbiting solar cells were still producing current. Indeed, high above the earth’s atmosphere, the cells would produce sustained electricity over a number of years. Here in the emptiness of outer space was the real-life demonstration for Albert Einstein’s paper “On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light.”