ALGAE, NEXT-GENERATION SOLAR MATERIALS AND SILICON VALLEY ENTREPRENEURS WALK INTO A BAR…

UK Times columnist Camilla Cavendish looked at hot New Energies and came to some engaging conclusions.

First, AGROfuels pit the hungry half of the world against the half of the world with cars: “Sorry, Africa, but I need your next meal to run my pick-up down to the mall. Just shove your corn in my tank, will you? This thing only does 20 miles to the gallon. Don't blame me, blame all those middle-class Indians and Chinese who want to live like us. They're the reason food prices are rising. What, you're hungry? Can't you call the UN?”

Cavendish offered a biofuels solution often advocated by NewEnergyNews: Algae. Cavendish: “Algae can grow almost anywhere, even in deserts. And some species grow so fast that they double in size three or four times a day… Algae also eat carbon dioxide at a similarly prolific rate. That makes them multitasking miracle-workers: both a fuel and a way to clean up power-plant emissions.”

Cavendish's second conclusion had to do with solar energy. The chemistry of next-generation thin film solar materials, based on a mimicry of photosynthesis in plants, may not be as easy to understand as the photovoltaic panels now going up on rooftops but the drive to perfect it makes “cents”: “Making thin films from synthetic materials will dramatically reduce the cost of solar technology.”

Breakthroughs on these and other New Energy technologies are only a research project away. But those research projects cost a lot. That’s where the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs join the party: “While governments wrangle, entrepreneurs and scientists are in a race to reinvent energy, including biofuels. Dot-com billionaires such as Vinod Khosla, of Sun Microsystems, and Paul Allen, of Microsoft, are ploughing their fortunes back into schemes that probably sound as crazy as Google once did.”

For her third conclusion, Cavendish used historical perspective to decide where the responsibilty for dealing with global climate change falls. Western industrial economies, she concluded, must find technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate climate change because emerging economies deserve the opportunity to develop just as advanced countries did in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The burden of this responsibility could make a get-together in a bar betweeen these disparate characters pretty somber. Except: The strange chemistry of next-generation solar materials and the unlikely little critters growing on the surface of ponds look to be real solutions and those dot-com entrepreneurs need something useful to do with their money. Cavendish: “…the humble algae could, at the very least, power one person to the shops without taking someone else's food off the table.”

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Algae: the big idea for future energy; Huge investment is needed in innovative technologies to give us energy in the future
Camilla Cavendish, June 4, 2008 (UK Times)

WHO
Camilla Cavendish, columnist, UK Times; Fred Krupp, President, Environmental Defense Fund/Author, Earth: The Sequel; Silicon Valley entrepreneurs (Vinod Khosla, Sun Microsystems; Paul Allen, Microsoft; John Doerr, venture capitalist-backer of start-ups Google and Amazon)

An algae field. (click to enlarge)

WHAT
- Cutting edge New Energy technologies are just around the corner and are being aggressively developed and funded by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

WHEN
- Algae double in quantity 3 to 4 times/day.
- Algae are already being used as biodiesel fuel in New Zealand.
- Huge solar power plants are now being built in the U.S. southwest by

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WHERE
- Algae grow naturally on pond surfaces and are commonly known as “pond-scum.” They can be grown almost anywhere there is light.
- Next-generation solar materials will be applied inexpensively to any surface like paint.
- Japan and Germany have built big solar energy infrastructures with government subsidies but in economies unwilling to have governments pick the winners a cap-and-trade system puts the marketplace to work on the task. Presidential candidates Obama and McCain are on the record favoring a cap-and-trade system.

WHY
- 47 million acres of algae could fuel 50% of U.S. cars. It would take 1.5 billion acres of soy beans to do so.
- Successful dot-com breakthroughs were funded with millions of dollars; Algae and next-generation solar materials may require hundreds of millions.
- The challenge in algae is production at massive scales.
- The challenge in next-generation solar materials is bringing the cost down and finding efficient methods of storage and transmission.
- The financial opportunities in New Energy are immense and multinational. China has moved into 3rd place in solar cell production behind Japan and Germany. Singapore is building the world’s biggest solar cell manufacturing plant with Norwegian funding. Denmark leads the world in wind turbine production.

Next-generation solar materials are inorganic mimics of organic photosynthesis. (click to enlarge)

QUOTES
- Cavendish: “The moral dimensions to food and energy prices, and the links between them, are becoming inescapable.”
- Unnamed Brazilian quoted by Cavendish: “You lot started the first industrial revolution…Why can't you start the second?”
- Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn in Earth: The Sequel: “The potential yields from algae dwarf those of any other biofuel crop. Some seventeen hundred U.S. power plants, GreenFuel estimates, have enough land (most of which nobody else wants) for both algae greenhouses and on-stie refineries, plus enough waste heat to power both. Unlike soybeans or corn, which can be harvested just once or twice a year, algae multiply so fast they can be harvested daily (“like milking a cow,” [Isaac] Berzin says). While an acre of soybeans yields about 60 gallons of biofuels and oil palms about 600 gallons, an acre of algae could yield 5,000 gallons of biodiesel and ethanol a year…”