CleanTechies Staff

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) has awarded a three-year, $3.75-million contract to a team of Harvard researchers to further develop a promising grid-scale battery technology they demonstrated earlier this year. The innovative organic mega flow battery is designed to safely and inexpensively store solar and wind energy for use when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.

The battery was created in the laboratories of Michael J. Aziz, Gene and Tracy Sykes Professor of Materials and Energy Technologies at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences; Roy G. Gordon, Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Materials Science; and Alán Aspuru-Guzik, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.

The team demonstrated the technical feasibility of the concept using seed funding from ARPA-E.

Their unusual approach, using small organic molecules rather than expensive metals, has the potential to make power from intermittent renewable energy sources such as wind and solar far more economical and reliable. The breakthrough was announced in a paper published inNature in January.

The new support will allow the researchers to further refine the molecular chemistry and to engineer an improved prototype. In collaboration with the Harvard team, Connecticut-basedSustainable Innovations, LLC, will develop and deploy a commercial version of the organic flow battery that will demonstrate the technology at a large scale. William W. Hogan, Raymond Plank Professor of Global Energy Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and one of the world’s foremost experts on electricity markets, will model the economics of using the technology.

An MIT team whose integrated chip restores lost power to partially shaded solar panels — achieving double the energy capture improvement of similar technologies — won big on Monday night at the seventh annual MIT Clean Energy Prize (CEP) competition.

Equipped with a promising business plan and a snappy catchphrase — “shade happens” — Unified Solar took home both CEP grand prizes: the DOE Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Clean Energy Prize, worth $100,000, and the NSTAR MIT Clean Energy Prize, worth $125,000.

Solar panels on residential rooftops that are partially shaded by clouds or trees sacrifice as much as 30 percent of their energy potential over a year. Unified Solar’s technology, for the first time, integrates an entire power balance circuit onto a low-cost chip that can be integrated into a solar panel to regain that lost energy.

“In the real world, shade happens,” said Bessma Aljarbou, a graduate student at the MIT Sloan School of Management, during Unified Solar’s winning pitch last night to a capacity crowd. “Shade brings energy loss, reliability concerns, and a constrained market. And we have a solution.”

“Compared to our competitors at the panel level, we can recover twice as much energy under partial shading conditions, at a fraction of existing costs,” added Arthur Chang, an MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) who invented the technology.

With the prize money, the team — including students from MIT, the California Institute of Technology, and Stanford University — aims to further develop the technology and launch the company. By 2015, the team aims to complete in-lab testing and pilot their technology in outdoor solar systems.

Unified Solar now becomes the finalist in the energy category in the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, whose winner will be announced May 14.

The CEP, the nation’s leading student-run energy business-plan competition, awarded a total of $320,000 last night to six teams that have developed clean-energy startups and innovations. More than 60 teams entered this year’s contest; 19 semifinalists made it to Monday’s grand finale.

One finalist team was selected in each of three categories — renewable energy (ThermoVolt), energy efficiency (MF Fire), and infrastructure and resources (uLink) — with each receiving $25,000. Four winners of the Audience Choice Awards — including one from MIT — earned $10,000 each.

Since its 2008 founding at MIT, the CEP — co-sponsored by Massachusetts utility NSTAR and the U.S. Department of Energy — has awarded more than $2 million to help launch clean-energy startups. Past participants have gone on to raise more than $250 million in capital, said Thomas Baade-Mathiesen, a graduate student at MIT Sloan and co-managing director of the CEP. “And that’s even counting conservatively,” he said.

Open to students at any U.S. university and now partnered with Cleantech Open, the competition aims to promote clean energy innovation and entrepreneurship across the nation and the globe, said CEP co-founder Bill Aulet, managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. “Sustainability is not just a problem for Cambridge,” Aulet said. “It’s a problem for the world.”

Innovation at the cell level

Existing solutions for partially shaded solar panels optimize power at the panel level. But these bulky “boxes” rely on costly energy-storage components, such as capacitors and inductors. Failing to account for the strength or weakness of each individual PV cell, these also only restore roughly half of lost power. But Unified Solar innovates “at the cell level,” Chang said.

The idea is that providing power balance for individual PV cells — instead of for an entire panel — allows for finer tuning of power optimization. “When you’re at the cell level, the improvement in energy capture under partial shading is basically two times better compared to panel level solutions,” Chang said.

By using intrinsic parasitic components, specifically “diffusion capacitances” — unwanted electrical charges between two components — Chang was able to eliminate the need for external energy storage and integrate all other necessary components for power balance onto a single chip that can be manufactured at high volume and low cost.

“We took a bottom-up approach,” Chang told MIT News after the competition. “When you take into account the fundamental device physics, you learn a lot about properties of solar cells that people often ignored as parasitic components. People wanted to get rid of them, but we found a way to leverage them.”

“No one has ever thought of using the solar cell as an energy storage itself, and that’s what we’re effectively doing,” added team member Albert Chan, a graduate student in MIT’s Leaders for Global Operations program.

So far, the team has built a prototype, which was trialed successfully, and earned a best technical presentation award at the 2014 Applied Power Electronics Conference and Exposition, co-sponsored by IEEE and the Power Sources Manufacturers Association.

Stove, solar, and recycling solutions

Taking home the infrastructure and resources prize was another MIT team, uLink, which developed a low-cost power conversion and routing device that plugs into solar panels to power electronic devices, enabling a pay-as-you-go electricity system for people off the grid.

But the true novelty is in its connectivity: The uLink units can be linked to one another, effectively creating a “peer-to-peer” electricity network, Wardah Inam, an EECS PhD student studying power electronics, said during the team’s pitch. “It empowers users to build their own grid, from the ground up,” she said.

The top prize for energy efficiency (and an Audience Choice Award) went to a University of Maryland team, MF Fire, and its Mulciber Stove — a woodstove equipped with sensors and a control system that automates burning. The stove adjusts its intensity to address problems with too little or too much wood, or bad wood or wet wood — and provides real-time feedback.

Winning in renewable energy (and also an Audience Choice Award) was ThermoVolt, which turns solar cells into cogeneration systems. Sun exposure to solar panels produces about 0.5 percent of wasted heat per degree Celsius increase. ThermoVolt’s modified solar cell captures that wasted energy and uses it to heat water for homes.

The two other audience choice awards went to REEcycle, which reclaims rare earth elements from recycled electronics to create other resources, and MIT team BelLEDs Technologies, which is developing smart LED lights that can wirelessly connect to the Internet and change colors to match people’s moods.

The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) reinforced the call to action from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to limit global atmospheric temperature increase and avert catastrophic climate change in a statement issued today. The transition to a sustainable global energy mix must be accelerated, the Agency said, in order to reduce global carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions by 40-70 percent compared with 2010 by 2050. According to the statement release by IRENA, renewable energy is the most economically viable and technologically proven option to keep CO₂ levels below the widely accepted threshold of 450 parts per million (ppm).

“The latest report by the IPCC reconfirms that averting catastrophic climate change is possible if we act now. But we need to act decisively. Renewable energy, in combination with energy efficiency, provides the most affordable and technologically mature path to bring about the necessary change,” Adnan Z. Amin, IRENA’s Director-General, said at the opening of the World Green Economy Summit in Dubai. “The accelerated deployment of renewable energy significantly reduces energy-related carbon dioxide emissions at a reasonable cost, and also provides other benefits, including enhanced energy security, more local jobs and value-creation, and a cleaner and healthier environment.”

With an average concentration of CO₂  in the atmosphere of 398 ppm at the beginning of 2014, renewable energy provides a path to lower energy-related CO₂ emissions and will help prevent a buildup of atmospheric CO₂ beyond 450ppm, the widely accepted threshold to keep global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2100.

Based on the world’s current path, annual global energy-related CO₂ emissions will rise from 30 gigatons (Gt) in 2010 to 41.4 Gt in 2030, according to IRENA estimates. The IRENA global roadmap for a transition to a sustainable energy future,“REmap 2030”, due to be published in May, shows that renewable energy can reduce emissions by 8.6 Gt to an estimated 32.8 Gt in 2030. Based on numbers from the International Energy Agency, energy efficiency can yield an additional 7.3 Gt reduction, resulting in global energy-related CO₂ emissions of 25.5 Gt by 2030. In addition to improvements in energy efficiency, this path would include a quadrupling of the share of modern renewable energy sources in the global energy mix by 2030.

The renewable energy transition also has positive socio-economic impacts. Investments in renewable energy will create an additional 11 million jobs globally by 2030, and reduce the dependence on imported energy. Accounting already for around half of all new additions to power generation capacity worldwide, renewable technologies are the most economic solution for new capacity in an increasing number of countries and regions. Renewable energy has entered into a virtuous circle of falling costs, increased deployment and accelerated technological progress.

IRENA emphasized that the world needs concrete actions and partnerships to mitigate climate change. In this context IRENA welcomed the upcoming Abu Dhabi Ascent to the Summit, a high-level meeting hosted by the United Arab Emirates on May 4 and 5 to generate momentum for the UN Climate Summit in September. The Abu Dhabi Ascent focuses on tangible actions and partnerships for countries, businesses and organizations.

Photo by inkknife_2000 (Thanks for a million views)

Renewable energy naysayers often cite U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) projections, which currently show that renewable energy sources will provide only 16% of the nation’s net electrical generation by 2040. But in a new 32-page study, released today, the SUN DAY Campaign challenges the EIA’s assertions on the slow growth of renewable energy generation and, using EIA’s own previously published data, the independent analysis shows it’s more likely the 16% level will actually be reached within just five years.

In its “early release overview” of the Annual Energy Outlook 2014 (published December 16, 2013 with the final release of the full AEO2014 now slated for April 30, 2014), the EIA’s Reference Case foresaw renewable energy sources (i.e., biomass, geothermal, hydropower, solar, wind) accounting for just 16% of the nation’s net electrical generation by 2040.

However, EIA’s own published data for the 11-year period – January 1, 2003 through December 31, 2013 – reveals that the percentage of the nation’s net electrical generation represented by renewable energy has expanded from less than 9% in 2004 to nearly 13% in 2013 – i.e., within a decade. Given the relatively consistent growth trends of the past decade (or longer) for most renewable energy sources and their rapidly declining costs, it seems improbable that it will require another 27 years to grow from 13% to 16%.

Thus, EIA’s forecast is not just unduly conservative; almost certainly, it is simply wrong.

In fact, if the trends reflected in EIA data from the past decade continue, renewable energy sources could increase to as much as 13.5% of net U.S. electrical generation in 2014, to 14.4% in 2015, to 15.3% in 2016, and reach or exceed 16.0% no later than 2018 – i.e., within five years and not the 27 years forecast by EIA. At worst, they would reach 16% by 2020.

“Inasmuch as policy makers in both the public and private sectors – as well as the media and others – rely heavily upon EIA data when making legislative, regulatory, investment, and other decisions, underestimation can have multiple adverse impacts on the renewable energy industry and, more broadly, on the nation’s environmental and energy future,” noted Ken Bossong, Executive Director of the SUN DAY Campaign. “Consequently, EIA is doing a serious disservice to the public by publishing analyses that are inherently inconsistent with its own historical data and near-term projections.”

The full 32-page report includes the assumptions and projections made, on a technology-by-technology basis, using EIA data. In addition, following the projections provided for each technology is a listing of recent studies and news reports that offer alternative or complementary scenarios – many of which are more aggressive than those provided by the SUN DAY Campaign. These additional studies suggest that even SUN DAY’s analysis may prove to be unduly conservative.

Photo by Joe Parks

Photo by Andrew Stawarz

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will deliver the keynote address at the seventh annual National Clean Energy Summit scheduled for Thursday September 4, 2014 at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas. Billing itself as the nation’s foremost clean energy conversation, “National Clean Energy Summit 7.0: Partnership & Progress” will highlight how the private sector, through public-private partnerships and collaboration, is deploying clean energy, investing in innovation, modernizing our nation’s electric grid, and reducing climate pollution.

The annual conference is co-sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), Center for American Progress, the Clean Energy Project, MGM Resorts International and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Clean energy visionaries, business leaders, bipartisan decision makers, and advocates will convene this year to discuss the future of our nation’s clean energy economy and the progress we have made through innovation, investment in infrastructure, and greater collaboration.

“I am delighted to welcome Secretary Clinton to Nevada for our seventh National Clean Energy Summit on September 4th in Las Vegas,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “Secretary Clinton has been a staunch supporter of bolstering our national security and protecting our climate by deploying clean and renewable energy resources. She understands the energy issues we are facing in the U.S. and around the world and I look forward to her valuable contribution to this conversation in September.”

“Secretary Clinton is the perfect choice to keynote this year’s summit. At the State Department she pioneered partnerships that will improve lives and reduce climate pollution,” said Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress. “The National Clean Energy Summit will continue to provide a forum to generate ideas to bring together the public and private sectors to invest in clean energy infrastructure, and help communities become more resilient to future extreme weather.”

In addition to Secretary Clinton, a diverse set of speakers and panelists will participate in “National Clean Energy Summit 7.0: Partnership & Progress” including policymakers and industry leaders.

“The National Clean Energy Summit has become the nation’s premier conversation about clean energy issues and solutions,” said Rose McKinney-James, Board Chair of the Clean Energy Project. “As we welcome Secretary Clinton we will open a discussion about the best ways to leverage the power and innovation behind the clean energy economy.”

WHO: “National Clean Energy Summit 7.0: Partnership and Progress” confirmed speakers include

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV)
Neera Tanden, President, Center for American Progress
More speakers to be announced soon.

WHEN: Thursday, September 4, 2014

9 a.m. – 6 p.m.

WHERE: Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino

3950 S. Las Vegas Blvd.

Las Vegas, NV 89119

REGISTER: To register for Summit 7.0 and for the latest information about the panels and panelists, please visit www.cleanenergysummit.org