Low-carbon vehicles will be a bigger global market by 2020, according to the bank's report for investors
Damian Carrington guardian.co.uk, Monday 6 September 2010 17.10 BST
Low-carbon vehicles, such as electric cars, will be a bigger global market by 2020 than renewable energy, such as wind and solar power, according to a report by HSBC bank.
The report predicts that 8.65m electric vehicles and 9.23m plug-in and hybrid electric vehicles will be sold globally in 2020, up from around 5,000 and 657,000 respectively in 2009.
When fuel-efficiency measures and switches to lower-carbon transport such as trains and coaches are included, the report for investors predicts that the market will be worth $677bn (£440bn) a year in 2020 – up from $113m in 2009. In contrast, HSBC predicts smaller growth in the renewable energy sector, from $203bn in 2009 to $544bn in 2020.
Nick Robins, head of the HSBC Climate Change Centre of Excellence and lead author of the report, said the predicted rise of the transport sector stems from growing confidence in the area over the past year as major manufacturers launched low-carbon cars. But he acknowledged that it has been a difficult year for the low-carbon economy, with growing signs of what he terms "carbon default", such as the US failure to deliver a clean energy bill; Australia's move away from climate change laws; and the economic crisis squeezing green spending. "It is not unmitigated gloom," he said. "But it is more disaggregated than last year." The US failure has been quite damaging to sentiment among investors around the world, he added.
Angus McCrone, chief editor at Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) said: "There is a dichotomy between what is happening on the public front and behind that.". Clean energy shares, as tracked by the WilderHill New Energy Global Innovation Index, has under-performed the US stock-market overall – as measured by the Standard and Poor's 500 index – by 20% so far this year, he points out. But he also notes that BNEF predicts 2010 will be a record year for cleantech investment at between $180-200bn, a little higher than 2008's $173bn total. He also said that microgeneration – for example domestic solar panels – is "taking off on all sorts of places, including the UK".
The HSBC report predicts the overall low-carbon energy market – both generation and use – will triple to $2.2tn in 2020, under its most likely scenario, but suggest it could be as low as $1.5tn if governments renege on existing climate change and energy commitments or as high as $2.7 trillion if current commitments are exceeded. The report argues that the European Union will remain the largest market but will lose market share from 33% now to 27% in 2020, while China will gain market share, from 17% to 24%, pushing the US into third place.
Officials in Shanghai yesterday underlined China's ambitions in green technology, announcing that they would invest $2.8bn in electric vehicles and charging networks by 2012. China has recently overtaken the US as the world's biggest energy user, become the largest single investor in green energy in the G20 group and has been the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases for several years.
The HSBC report predicts, unlike some other analysts, that the EU will meet its target of 20% renewable energy by 2020 but will fail to meet its 20% increase in energy efficiency by the same date. It plays down the promise of biofuels, suggesting a market of $93bn by 2020, because of concerns over their sustainability. But McCrone says that after two to three years of decline the biofuels market has bottomed out and that the remaining companies can take confidence from the mandated targets for biofuel use in the EU.
Finally, the amount of upfront capital required in the green economy will more than triple to $1.5tn a year in 2020, according to HSBC. This may look large, said Robins, but not compared to the sums already needed to invest in energy. For example, the International Energy Agency predicted in 2009 that investment of $1.1trn a year (PDF) was needed until 2030 to ensure projected energy demand was met.
Monday, 6 September 2010
New Self-Assembling Photovoltaic Technology Repairs Itself
ScienceDaily (Sep. 5, 2010) — Plants are good at doing what scientists and engineers have been struggling to do for decades: converting sunlight into stored energy, and doing so reliably day after day, year after year. Now some MIT scientists have succeeded in mimicking a key aspect of that process.
One of the problems with harvesting sunlight is that the sun's rays can be highly destructive to many materials. Sunlight leads to a gradual degradation of many systems developed to harness it. But plants have adopted an interesting strategy to address this issue: They constantly break down their light-capturing molecules and reassemble them from scratch, so the basic structures that capture the sun's energy are, in effect, always brand new.
That process has now been imitated by Michael Strano, the Charles and Hilda Roddey Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, and his team of graduate students and researchers. They have created a novel set of self-assembling molecules that can turn sunlight into electricity; the molecules can be repeatedly broken down and then reassembled quickly, just by adding or removing an additional solution. Their paper on the work was published on Sept. 5 in Nature Chemistry.
Strano says the idea first occurred to him when he was reading about plant biology. "I was really impressed by how plant cells have this extremely efficient repair mechanism," he says. In full summer sunlight, "a leaf on a tree is recycling its proteins about every 45 minutes, even though you might think of it as a static photocell."
One of Strano's long-term research goals has been to find ways to imitate principles found in nature using nanocomponents. In the case of the molecules used for photosynthesis in plants, the reactive form of oxygen produced by sunlight causes the proteins to fail in a very precise way. As Strano describes it, the oxygen "unsnaps a tether that keeps the protein together," but the same proteins are quickly reassembled to restart the process.
This action all takes place inside tiny capsules called chloroplasts that reside inside every plant cell -- and which is where photosynthesis happens. The chloroplast is "an amazing machine," Strano says. "They are remarkable engines that consume carbon dioxide and use light to produce glucose," a chemical that provides energy for metabolism.
To imitate that process, Strano and his team, supported by grants from the MIT Energy Initiative and the Department of Energy, produced synthetic molecules called phospholipids that form discs; these discs provide structural support for other molecules that actually respond to light, in structures called reaction centers, which release electrons when struck by particles of light. The discs, carrying the reaction centers, are in a solution where they attach themselves spontaneously to carbon nanotubes -- wire-like hollow tubes of carbon atoms that are a few billionths of a meter thick yet stronger than steel and capable of conducting electricity a thousand times better than copper. The nanotubes hold the phospholipid discs in a uniform alignment so that the reaction centers can all be exposed to sunlight at once, and they also act as wires to collect and channel the flow of electrons knocked loose by the reactive molecules.
The system Strano's team produced is made up of seven different compounds, including the carbon nanotubes, the phospholipids, and the proteins that make up the reaction centers, which under the right conditions spontaneously assemble themselves into a light-harvesting structure that produces an electric current. Strano says he believes this sets a record for the complexity of a self-assembling system. When a surfactant -- similar in principle to the chemicals that BP has sprayed into the Gulf of Mexico to break apart oil -- is added to the mix, the seven components all come apart and form a soupy solution. Then, when the researchers removed the surfactant by pushing the solution through a membrane, the compounds spontaneously assembled once again into a perfectly formed, rejuvenated photocell.
"We're basically imitating tricks that nature has discovered over millions of years" -- in particular, "reversibility, the ability to break apart and reassemble," Strano says. The team, which included postdoctoral researcher Moon-Ho Ham and graduate student Ardemis Boghossian, came up with the system based on a theoretical analysis, but then decided to build a prototype cell to test it out. They ran the cell through repeated cycles of assembly and disassembly over a 14-hour period, with no loss of efficiency.
Strano says that in devising novel systems for generating electricity from light, researchers don't often study how the systems change over time. For conventional silicon-based photovoltaic cells, there is little degradation, but with many new systems being developed -- either for lower cost, higher efficiency, flexibility or other improved characteristics -- the degradation can be very significant. "Often people see, over 60 hours, the efficiency falling to 10 percent of what you initially saw," he says.
The individual reactions of these new molecular structures in converting sunlight are about 40 percent efficient, or about double the efficiency of today's best commercial solar cells. Theoretically, the efficiency of the structures could be close to 100 percent, he says. But in the initial work, the concentration of the structures in the solution was low, so the overall efficiency of the device -- the amount of electricity produced for a given surface area -- was very low. They are working now to find ways to greatly increase the concentration.
One of the problems with harvesting sunlight is that the sun's rays can be highly destructive to many materials. Sunlight leads to a gradual degradation of many systems developed to harness it. But plants have adopted an interesting strategy to address this issue: They constantly break down their light-capturing molecules and reassemble them from scratch, so the basic structures that capture the sun's energy are, in effect, always brand new.
That process has now been imitated by Michael Strano, the Charles and Hilda Roddey Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, and his team of graduate students and researchers. They have created a novel set of self-assembling molecules that can turn sunlight into electricity; the molecules can be repeatedly broken down and then reassembled quickly, just by adding or removing an additional solution. Their paper on the work was published on Sept. 5 in Nature Chemistry.
Strano says the idea first occurred to him when he was reading about plant biology. "I was really impressed by how plant cells have this extremely efficient repair mechanism," he says. In full summer sunlight, "a leaf on a tree is recycling its proteins about every 45 minutes, even though you might think of it as a static photocell."
One of Strano's long-term research goals has been to find ways to imitate principles found in nature using nanocomponents. In the case of the molecules used for photosynthesis in plants, the reactive form of oxygen produced by sunlight causes the proteins to fail in a very precise way. As Strano describes it, the oxygen "unsnaps a tether that keeps the protein together," but the same proteins are quickly reassembled to restart the process.
This action all takes place inside tiny capsules called chloroplasts that reside inside every plant cell -- and which is where photosynthesis happens. The chloroplast is "an amazing machine," Strano says. "They are remarkable engines that consume carbon dioxide and use light to produce glucose," a chemical that provides energy for metabolism.
To imitate that process, Strano and his team, supported by grants from the MIT Energy Initiative and the Department of Energy, produced synthetic molecules called phospholipids that form discs; these discs provide structural support for other molecules that actually respond to light, in structures called reaction centers, which release electrons when struck by particles of light. The discs, carrying the reaction centers, are in a solution where they attach themselves spontaneously to carbon nanotubes -- wire-like hollow tubes of carbon atoms that are a few billionths of a meter thick yet stronger than steel and capable of conducting electricity a thousand times better than copper. The nanotubes hold the phospholipid discs in a uniform alignment so that the reaction centers can all be exposed to sunlight at once, and they also act as wires to collect and channel the flow of electrons knocked loose by the reactive molecules.
The system Strano's team produced is made up of seven different compounds, including the carbon nanotubes, the phospholipids, and the proteins that make up the reaction centers, which under the right conditions spontaneously assemble themselves into a light-harvesting structure that produces an electric current. Strano says he believes this sets a record for the complexity of a self-assembling system. When a surfactant -- similar in principle to the chemicals that BP has sprayed into the Gulf of Mexico to break apart oil -- is added to the mix, the seven components all come apart and form a soupy solution. Then, when the researchers removed the surfactant by pushing the solution through a membrane, the compounds spontaneously assembled once again into a perfectly formed, rejuvenated photocell.
"We're basically imitating tricks that nature has discovered over millions of years" -- in particular, "reversibility, the ability to break apart and reassemble," Strano says. The team, which included postdoctoral researcher Moon-Ho Ham and graduate student Ardemis Boghossian, came up with the system based on a theoretical analysis, but then decided to build a prototype cell to test it out. They ran the cell through repeated cycles of assembly and disassembly over a 14-hour period, with no loss of efficiency.
Strano says that in devising novel systems for generating electricity from light, researchers don't often study how the systems change over time. For conventional silicon-based photovoltaic cells, there is little degradation, but with many new systems being developed -- either for lower cost, higher efficiency, flexibility or other improved characteristics -- the degradation can be very significant. "Often people see, over 60 hours, the efficiency falling to 10 percent of what you initially saw," he says.
The individual reactions of these new molecular structures in converting sunlight are about 40 percent efficient, or about double the efficiency of today's best commercial solar cells. Theoretically, the efficiency of the structures could be close to 100 percent, he says. But in the initial work, the concentration of the structures in the solution was low, so the overall efficiency of the device -- the amount of electricity produced for a given surface area -- was very low. They are working now to find ways to greatly increase the concentration.