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Time is running out for the solar revolution
CULTURELAB
A place in the sun? We have high hopes for solar power, but time is running out for its advocates to make it shine in the real world, says Fred Pearce
WE ARE stardust. And ultimately the energy that powers our world comes from sunlight. For two centuries, we have been tapping into “fossilised sunlight”, burning solar energy trapped over millions of years in coal, oil and natural gas. Now we have to get back to catching real-time sunbeams. That is the key premise of this book about a multimillion pound (largely public cash) scheme known as Project Sunshine which is based at the University of Sheffield, UK. Penned by project leader Tony Ryan and writer Steve McKevitt, it is lucid, optimistic – and plans to save the world. To stave off climate change, the authors calculate we must find up to 20 terawatts of low-carbon capacity by 2050. The sun delivers almost 10,000 times more, of which some 600 TW might be harvested. It is the only renewable source able to deliver the energy generating capacity we need. One day, solar will be the “source of all the energy we consume”, they say. In this future, nuclear, wind, geothermal and hydropower are simply stopgap technologies while we get solar up and running. Electricity grids will be powered by spray-on organic photovoltaics that turn sunlight into electricity. We can redesign photosynthesis to make the liquid fuels, such as The future could be bright if solar power takes off around the world 50 | NewScientist | 23 February 2013
theme: feeding the world. They methanol, that will replace oil. have to address this carefully, Photosynthesis is nature’s way of storing solar energy, but it is, they because all those solar panels and say, “lousily inefficient”. So we can artificial leaves will take up lots of land that would otherwise be used forget regular biofuels: the holy for growing food. No problem: grail is super-productive food production is on the cusp of bioengineered photosynthesis – a revolution as powerful as their artificial leaves, if you will. own solar transformation – Sunshine is the only thing we genetic modification. They are won’t run out of. We may suffer emphatic about the urgent need peak oil, peak soil and peak for GM foods, and resort to crude metals, but the sun will keep Malthusianism in the cause. shining. This is stirring stuff, and “Without GM, people will starve well told. But the authors have in their tens, if not hundreds, of trouble placing their solar dream in the wider world. They are stuck in simple-minded environmental “We might suffer peak oil, peak soil and peak homilies and hand-me-down metals, but the sun will futures full of techno-optimism. keep shining” Take their second, subsidiary
plainpicture/donkeysoho
Project Sunshine: How science can use the sun to fuel and feed the world by Steve McKevitt and Tony Ryan, Icon Books, £16.99
millions,” they say. Phooey. GM technology will be very useful for many things, and we should stop fearing it. But when up to half of the food we grow is wasted, and when tens of millions of hungry African farmers could triple yields with existing crops if only they could afford a few bags of fertiliser, GM crops look like the solution to the wrong problem. The authors’ naivety leads them to mischaracterise a range of problems as supply issues when they are about something else. On energy and food, they pay lip service to the need for much greater efficiency in production, distribution and use – but rarely get further. That’s a shame. If “it’s going to be much easier to use less energy in the future than it will be to generate more power”, as they argue, why not discuss how? Given the importance they attach to the rapid adoption of new technologies, it is also odd that the authors’ analysis of human progress, which occupies much of the first half of the book, spends little time on why even the best ideas often fail to be adopted. Thus we learn that the Roman Empire “had no culture of innovation at all… across its whole 800-year history”. It faltered on the verge of inventing both the printing press and the steam engine, postponing the industrial revolution by almost two millennia. Eventually the British made it happen, turning an “inconsequential European backwater” into “the world’s foremost industrial power”. Since the authors call for a similar transformation to decarbonise our energy economy, why not first try to understand why the Romans failed while the Brits succeeded so spectacularly? Time is short for the solar revolution. As well as fast-tracking the technologies, we have to find out how to break the logjam created by the old technologies. If we continue to act like Romans rather than 18th-century Brits, then stardust is all we will be. n
A place in the sun? We have high hopes for solar power, but time is running out for its advocates to make it shine in the real world, says Fred Pearce
WE ARE stardust. And ultimately the energy that powers our world comes from sunlight. For two centuries, we have been tapping into “fossilised sunlight”, burning solar energy trapped over millions of years in coal, oil and natural gas. Now we have to get back to catching real-time sunbeams. That is the key premise of this book about a multimillion pound (largely public cash) scheme known as Project Sunshine which is based at the University of Sheffield, UK. Penned by project leader Tony Ryan and writer Steve McKevitt, it is lucid, optimistic – and plans to save the world. To stave off climate change, the authors calculate we must find up to 20 terawatts of low-carbon capacity by 2050. The sun delivers almost 10,000 times more, of which some 600 TW might be harvested. It is the only renewable source able to deliver the energy generating capacity we need. One day, solar will be the “source of all the energy we consume”, they say. In this future, nuclear, wind, geothermal and hydropower are simply stopgap technologies while we get solar up and running. Electricity grids will be powered by spray-on organic photovoltaics that turn sunlight into electricity. We can redesign photosynthesis to make the liquid fuels, such as The future could be bright if solar power takes off around the world 50 | NewScientist | 23 February 2013
theme: feeding the world. They methanol, that will replace oil. have to address this carefully, Photosynthesis is nature’s way of storing solar energy, but it is, they because all those solar panels and say, “lousily inefficient”. So we can artificial leaves will take up lots of land that would otherwise be used forget regular biofuels: the holy for growing food. No problem: grail is super-productive food production is on the cusp of bioengineered photosynthesis – a revolution as powerful as their artificial leaves, if you will. own solar transformation – Sunshine is the only thing we genetic modification. They are won’t run out of. We may suffer emphatic about the urgent need peak oil, peak soil and peak for GM foods, and resort to crude metals, but the sun will keep Malthusianism in the cause. shining. This is stirring stuff, and “Without GM, people will starve well told. But the authors have in their tens, if not hundreds, of trouble placing their solar dream in the wider world. They are stuck in simple-minded environmental “We might suffer peak oil, peak soil and peak homilies and hand-me-down metals, but the sun will futures full of techno-optimism. keep shining” Take their second, subsidiary
plainpicture/donkeysoho
Project Sunshine: How science can use the sun to fuel and feed the world by Steve McKevitt and Tony Ryan, Icon Books, £16.99
millions,” they say. Phooey. GM technology will be very useful for many things, and we should stop fearing it. But when up to half of the food we grow is wasted, and when tens of millions of hungry African farmers could triple yields with existing crops if only they could afford a few bags of fertiliser, GM crops look like the solution to the wrong problem. The authors’ naivety leads them to mischaracterise a range of problems as supply issues when they are about something else. On energy and food, they pay lip service to the need for much greater efficiency in production, distribution and use – but rarely get further. That’s a shame. If “it’s going to be much easier to use less energy in the future than it will be to generate more power”, as they argue, why not discuss how? Given the importance they attach to the rapid adoption of new technologies, it is also odd that the authors’ analysis of human progress, which occupies much of the first half of the book, spends little time on why even the best ideas often fail to be adopted. Thus we learn that the Roman Empire “had no culture of innovation at all… across its whole 800-year history”. It faltered on the verge of inventing both the printing press and the steam engine, postponing the industrial revolution by almost two millennia. Eventually the British made it happen, turning an “inconsequential European backwater” into “the world’s foremost industrial power”. Since the authors call for a similar transformation to decarbonise our energy economy, why not first try to understand why the Romans failed while the Brits succeeded so spectacularly? Time is short for the solar revolution. As well as fast-tracking the technologies, we have to find out how to break the logjam created by the old technologies. If we continue to act like Romans rather than 18th-century Brits, then stardust is all we will be. n