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DR. Jerry M. Woodall National Medal of Technology Laureate and Distinguished Professor University of California, Davis
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Keynote: 24/7 Electricity Produced by Intermittent Power Requires Its Energy Storage This is a simple story with a no-brainer punchline included in the title. Except for geothermal and nuclear energy, the sun is, and has been, the source of nearly all energy used on our planet. The problem is that the earth receives plenty of intermittent solar power, but not as solar energy. Solar intermittency was not a problem before the industrial revolution, when human daily energy needs were only 1.5-2.0 kWh. The intermittency problem came with the emergence of iron and steel production, industry, and fuel powered transportation. It is important to stress is that daily sun power did not enable the Industrial Revolution. Rather, it occurred as the result of the availability of energy storage materials created by the death of life created by intermittent solar insulation over millions of years. In retrospect, using fossil fuels, rather than using daily solar insulation, to launch and develop our current enormous energy consuming and data-driven society was a human tragedy. We are now faced with two daunting global scale energy creation and distribution issues. One is having to legislate use restrictions for societies with opulent lifestyles. This is a dangerous ploy because the “haves” will not be eager to give up what they already have. The other one is that, owing to instantaneous global communication, the “have nots” will “vigorously” demand energy parity. After all the low hanging “energy conservation” fruit is picked, what’s next? Resources are available to realize a “greatly reduced fossil fuel” solution to satisfy future disparate societal demands for energy. The sun is free. Less than 10 minutes of solar insulation will create a year’s worth of global energy needs. Capitalization costs of solar cells and wind turbines make them non-competitive with fossil fuel. However, a long-life use factor amortization could bring solar power economics into parity with fossil fuels. The principal remaining issue is to mitigate the sun’s intermittency. This simply requires economical energy storage of wind and solar power. Finally, there is plenty of fossil fuel to supply worldwide energy needs for the foreseeable future. But there are many reasons to stop using fossil fuels for energy and to get on with converting daily solar power into 24/7 electricity. An important one is that global scale conversion of solar power to electricity via storage does not raise earth’s temperature!
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DR. Birol Dindoruk Chief Scientist Shell |
Keynote: Evolution of the Energy Mix and Its Implications With the worldwide industrial development, demand for energy increased over time. From a historical perspective, such demand or hunger for energy was met through various means over the time. One of the interesting observations that we can make is that the future has been hard to predict. This talk will focus on the current state of affairs in terms of global energy mix and various trends and future and current alternatives. It is well known that Human Development Index and primary energy use per capita is correlated. As the future energy demand is expected to increase, meeting such demand in a scalable manner poses many current and also future challenges. Some of the key challenges are the GHG emissions and various environmental footprints depending on the source of the energy. Meeting the challenge of reducing GHG emissions will require a fully diversified portfolio of approaches, including conservation and efficiency gains from fossil fuels and renewables. |
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DR. Daniel G. Nocera Patterson Rockwood Professor of Energy Harvard University
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Keynote: A Sustainable and Renewable Cycle for Food and Fuels from Sunlight, Air and Water Hybrid biological | inorganic (HBI) constructs have been created to use sunlight, air and water (as the only starting materials) to accomplish carbon fixation and nitrogen fixation, thus enabling distributed and renewable fuels and crop production. The carbon and nitrogen fixation cycles begin with the artificial leaf, which was invented to accomplish the solar fuels process of natural photosynthesis – the splitting of water to hydrogen and oxygen using sunlight – under ambient conditions. To create the artificial leaf, an oxygen-evolving complex of Photosystem II was mimicked, the most important property of which was the self-healing nature of the catalyst. Self-healing catalysts of the artificial leaf permit water splitting to be accomplished using any water source—which is the critical development for: (1) the artificial leaf, as it allows for the facile interfacing of water splitting catalysis to materials such as silicon and (2) the bionic leaf, as it allows for the facile interfacing of water splitting catalysis to bioorganisms. For the latter, using the tools of synthetic biology, a bio-engineered bacterium has been developed to convert carbon dioxide from air, along with the hydrogen produced from the catalysts of the artificial leaf, into biomass and liquid fuels, thus closing an entire artificial photosynthetic cycle. The HBI, called the bionic leaf, operates at unprecedented solar-to-biomass (10.7%) and solar-to-liquid fuels (6.2%) yields, greatly exceeding the 1% yield of natural photosynthesis. Extending this approach, a renewable and distributed synthesis of ammonia (and fertilizer) at ambient conditions has been created by coupling solar-based water splitting to a nitrogen-fixing bioorganism in a single reactor. Nitrogen is fixed by using the hydrogen produced from water splitting to power a nitrogenase installed in a bioorganism. The ammonia produced by the nitrogenase can be diverted from biomass formation to extracellular production with the addition of an inhibitor. The nitrogen reduction reaction proceeds at high turnover per cell and operates without the need for a carbon feedstock (other than the CO2 provided from air). This nitrogen-fixing HBI can be powered by distributed renewable electricity, enabling sustainable crop production with a carbon negative budget. The science that will be presented will show that using only sunlight, air and water, a distributed system may be established to produce fuel and food. Such science will be particularly useful to the poor of the world, where large infrastructures for fuel and food production are not tenable. |
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DR. Jacopo Buongiorno TEPCO Professor Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
Keynote: Nuclear Energy: A New Beginning? Harnessing the power of the atomic nucleus for peaceful purposes was one of the most astonishing scientific and technological achievements of the 20th century. It has benefitted medicine, security, and energy. Yet, after a few decades of rapid growth, investment in nuclear energy has stalled in many developed countries and nuclear energy now constitutes a meager 5% of global primary energy production. In the 21st century the world faces the new challenge of drastically reducing emissions of greenhouse gases while simultaneously expanding access to energy and economic opportunity for billions of people. In the new MIT study presented here, we have examined this challenge in the electricity sector, which has been widely identified as an early candidate for deep decarbonization. In most regions, serving projected electricity load in 2050 while simultaneously reducing greenhouse gas emissions will require a mix of electrical generation assets that is different from the current system. While a variety of low- or zero-carbon technologies can be employed in various combinations, our analysis shows that excluding nuclear energy as an option may significantly increase the cost of achieving deep decarbonization targets. The least-cost portfolios in our analysis include an important share for nuclear, and the magnitude of this share grows substantially as the cost of nuclear energy drops. Despite this promise, prospects for the expansion of nuclear energy remain decidedly dim in many parts of the world. In this study, we have examined what is needed to reverse that trend. The salient findings will be presented in this talk. |
