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 Thursday, June 05, 2008
 Posted by Roberto
 10:24 AM   0 comments   

THE BIG PICTURE

This week I participated to the ESA Emerging Market and Future Application Study, Macroeconomic Workshop, in Zurich, Switzerland. The goal was to jointly create scenarios of future development of ICT using the year 2020 as a time horizon.


I. ORGANIC SOLAR CELLS, ELECTRICITY FROM A THIN FILM
Teams of researchers all over the world are working on the development of organic solar cells. Organic solar cells have good prospects for the future: They can be laid onto thin films, which makes them cheap to produce. At nano tech in Tokyo, The Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE has presented a flexible solar module that is as small as the page of a book. It was produced by a method that can easily be transferred to roll-to-roll technology, a vital step en route to mass production.
Article: ScienceDaily.com

Developing organic solar cells from polymers is a cheap and potentially simple alternative energy. New Jersey Institute of Technology's Dr. Somenath Mitra has developed solar cells that use a carbon nanotube complex. Nanotubes are 50,000 times smaller than a human hair, but one nanotube can conduct a current better than any electrical wire.
Video: EngineeringTV.com



II. CLEAN ENERGY TRENDS 2008

1. Biofuels (global production and wholesale pricing of ethanol and biodiesel) reached $25.4 billion in 2007 and are projected to grow to $81.1 billion by 2017. In 2007 the global biofuels market consisted of more than 13 billion gallons of ethanol and 2 billion gallons of biodiesel production worldwide.

2. Wind power (new installation capital costs) is projected to expand from $30.1 billion in 2007 to $83.4 billion in 2017. Last year's global wind power installations reached a record 20,000 MW, equivalent to 20 large-size 1 GW conventional power plants.

3. Solar photovoltaics (including modules, system components, and installation) will grow from a $20.3 billion industry in 2007 to $74 billion by 2017. Annual installations were just shy of 3 GW worldwide, up nearly 500 percent from just four years earlier.

4. The fuel cell and distributed hydrogen market will grow from a $1.5 billion industry (primarily for research contracts and demonstration and test units) to $16 billion over the next decade.

Together, these four benchmark technologies, which equaled $55.4 billion in 2006 and expanded 40 percent to $77.3 billion in 2007, are projected to grow to $254.5 billion within a decade.

Sources:
Clean Energy Trends 2008 Report
Clean Energy Trends 2008 Charts



III. THE VISION
"Design, Ecology, Ethics and the Making of Things"
William McDonough, architect William McDonough,
a prophet of the sustainability and clean-technology movements.

What if the concept of waste didn't exist?
The following is an excerpt from "Industrial Revolution, Take Two"
by Matt Tyrnauer, Vanity Fair Magazine.
Source: VanityFair.com/culture/

"If we understand that design leads to the manifestation of human intention, and if what we make with our hands is to be sacred and honor the earth that gives us life, McDonough said that day, "then the things we make must not only rise from the ground but return to it, soil to soil, water to water, so everything that is received from the earth can be freely given back without causing harm to any living system. This is ecology. This is good design. It is of this we must now speak." William McDonough

One of the things that is holding back the environmental movement and its proponents, says McDonough, is the collective burden of guilt about the ills of our society. "They say they want durable products that last a long time. Like a 25-year car. I'll tell you why that's not good. That car will still be made with toxins in the adhesives, compound epoxies. O.K., it amortizes its damage over a longer period of time, but it's still a car that is damaging. You also lose jobs, because people don't buy enough cars. You are using outdated technology on the roads for a longer time. The solution that he and Braungart suggest is a five-year car that allows for industry to "transform the technology at high speed toward the Cradle to Cradle concept. The five-year car is a car whose materials are all coherent and tagged. In fact, all materials in the car have passports. So we know where they come from, and we know where they're going "back to the auto-makers" after five years of utility, so the car could be recycled and updated with the latest in safety and efficiency. All done with the same materials that you in effect lease from the auto company. They keep making the cars out of the same stuff."



IV. THE FUTURE
A Revolution Coming Sooner than Expected
The following is an excerpt from "The Future Is Now? Pretty Soon, at Least"
by John Tierney, The New York Times.
Source: NYTimes.com

Dr. Kurzweil sees biology, medicine, energy and other fields being revolutionized by information technology. His graphs already show the beginning of exponential progress in nanotechnology, in the ease of gene sequencing, in the resolution of brain scans. With these new tools, he says, by the 2020s we'll be adding computers to our brains and building machines as smart as ourselves.

This serene confidence is not shared by neuroscientists like Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, who discussed future brains with Dr. Kurzweil at the festival. It might be possible to create a thinking, empathetic machine, Dr. Ramachandran said, but it might prove too difficult to reverse-engineer the brain's circuitry because it evolved so haphazardly.

"My colleague Francis Crick used to say that God is a hacker, not an engineer," Dr. Ramachandran said. "You can do reverse engineering, but you can't do reverse hacking."

Dr. Kurzweil is accustomed to this sort of pessimism and readily acknowledges how complicated the brain is. But if experts in neurology and artificial intelligence (or solar energy or medicine) don't buy his optimistic predictions, he says, that's because exponential upward curves are so deceptively gradual at first.

"Scientists imagine they'll keep working at the present pace," he told me after his speech. "They make linear extrapolations from the past. When it took years to sequence the first 1 percent of the human genome, they worried they'd never finish, but they were right on schedule for an exponential curve. If you reach 1 percent and keep doubling your growth every year, you'll hit 100 percent in just seven years."

 
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