Clean Energy Revolution Is Ahead of Schedule

By Noah Smith

  

The most important piece of news on the energy front isn't the plunge in oil prices, but the progress that is being made in battery technology. A new study in Nature Climate Change, by Bjorn Nykvist and Mans Nilsson of the Stockholm Environment Institute, shows that electric vehicle batteries have been getting cheaper much faster than expected. From 2007 to 2011, average battery costs for battery-powered electric vehicles fell by about 14 percent a year. For the leading electric vehicle makers, Tesla and Nissan, costs fell by 8 percent a year. This astounding decline puts battery costs right around the level that the International Energy Agency predicted they would reach in 2020. We are six years ahead of the curve. It's a bit hard to read, but here is the graph from the paper:

This puts the electric vehicle industry at a very interesting inflection point. Back in 2011, McKinsey & Co. made a chart showing which kind of vehicle would be the most economical at various prices for gasoline and batteries:

Looking at this graph, we can see the incredible progress made just since 2011. Battery prices per kilowatt-hour have fallen from about $550 when the graph was made to about $450 now. For Tesla and Nissan, the gray rectangle (which represents current prices) is even farther to the left, to about the $300 range, where the economics really starts to change and battery-powered vehicles become feasible.

But in the past year, the price of gasoline has fallen as well, and is now in the $2.50 range even in expensive markets. A glut of oil, and a possible thaw in U.S.-Iran relations, have moved the gray rectangle down into the dark blue area where internal combustion engines reign supreme.

Still, if battery prices keep falling, the gray rectangle will keep moving to the left. The Swedish researchers believe that Tesla’s new factories will be able to achieve the 30 percent cost reduction the company promises, simply from economies of scale and incremental improvements in the manufacturing process. That, combined with a rebound in gas prices to the $3 range, would be enough to make battery-powered vehicles an economic alternative to internal combustion vehicles in most regions.

But this isn't the only piece of good energy news. Investment in renewable energy is powering ahead.

The United Nations Environment Programme recently released a report showing that global investment in renewable energy, which had dipped a bit between 2011 and 2013, rebounded in 2014 to a near all-time high of $270 billion. But the report also notes that since renewable costs -- especially solar costs -- are falling so fast, the amount of renewable energy capacity added in 2014 was easily an all-time high. China, the U.S. and Japan are leading the way in renewable investment. Renewables went from 8.5 percent to 9.1 percent of global electricity generation just in 2014.

That’s still fairly slow in an absolute sense. Adding 0.6 percentage point a year to the renewable share would mean the point where renewables take half of the electricity market wouldn’t come until after 2080. But as solar costs fall, we can expect that shift to accelerate. In particular, forecasts are for solar to become the cheapest source of energy -- at least when the sun is shining -- in many parts of the world in the 2020s.

Each of these trends -- cheaper batteries and cheaper solar electricity -- is good on its own, and on the margin will help to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, with all the geopolitical drawbacks and climate harm they entail. But together, the two cost trends will add up to nothing less than a revolution in the way humankind interacts with the planet and powers civilization.

You see, the two trends reinforce each other. Cheaper batteries mean that cars can switch from gasoline to the electrical grid. But currently, much of the grid is powered by coal. With cheap solar replacing coal at a rapid clip, that will be less and less of an issue. As for solar, its main drawback is intermittency. But with battery costs dropping, innovative manufacturers such as Tesla will be able to make cheap batteries for home electricity use, allowing solar power to run your house 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

So instead of thinking of solar and batteries as two independent things, we should think of them as one single unified technology package. Solar-plus-batteries is set to begin a dramatic transformation of human civilization. The transformation has already begun, but will really pick up steam during the next decade. That is great news, because cheap energy powers our economy, and because clean energy will help stop climate change.

Of course, skeptics and opponents of the renewable revolution continue to downplay these remarkable developments. The takeoff of solar-plus-batteries has only begun to ramp up the exponential curve, and market shares are still small. But it has begun, and it doesn’t look like we’re going back.

To contact the author on this story:
 
Noah Smith at nsmith150@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor on this story:
 
James Greiff at jgreiff@bloomberg.net

Thorium nuclear reactor trial begins, could provide cleaner, safer, almost-waste-free energy

• By Sebastian Anthony
• Original link:  http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/160131-thorium-nuclear-reactor-trial-begins-could-provide-cleaner-safer-almost-waste-free-energy 

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At a test site in Norway, Thor Energy has successfully created a thorium nuclear reactor — but not in the sense that most people think of when they hear the word thorium. The Norwegians haven’t solved the energy crisis and global warming in one fell swoop — they haven’t created a cold fusion thorium reactor. What they have done, though, which is still very cool, is use thorium instead of uranium in a conventional nuclear reactor. In one fell swoop, thorium fuel, which is safer, less messy to clean up, and not prone to nuclear weapons proliferation, could quench the complaints of nuclear power critics everywhere.

In a conventional nuclear reactor, enriched uranium fuel is converted into plutonium and small amounts of other transuranic compounds. There are ways to recycle plutonium, but for many countries, such as the USA, it is simply a waste product of nuclear power — a waste product that will be dangerously radioactive for thousands of years. While the safety of nuclear power plants is hotly contested, no one is arguing the nastiness of plutonium. Any technological development that could reduce the production of plutonium, or consume our massive stocks of plutonium waste, would be a huge boon for the Earth’s (and humanity’s) continued well-being. (See: Nuclear power is our only hope, or, the greatest environmentalist hypocrisy of all time.)

Enter thorium. Natural thorium, which is fairly cheap and abundant (more so than uranium), doesn’t contain enough fissile material (thorium-231) to sustain a nuclear chain reaction. By mixing thorium oxide with 10% plutonium oxide, however, criticality is achieved. This fuel, which is called thorium-MOX (mixed-oxide), can then be formed into rods and used in conventional nuclear reactors. Not only does this mean that we can do away with uranium, which is expensive to enrich, dangerous, and leads to nuclear proliferation, but it also means that we finally have an easy way of recycling plutonium. Furthermore, the thorium-MOX fuel cycle produces no new plutonium; it actually reduces the world’s stock of plutonium. Oh, thorium-MOX makes for safer nuclear reactors, too, due to a higher melting point and thermal conductivity.

Thor Energy’s thorium reactor in Halden, Norway. The rod in the

middle of the picture contains thorium-MOX pellets, and is being

inserted into the reactor (which is underground).

Thorium-MOX, in short, is about as exciting as it gets in the nuclear power industry. Before it can be used, though, Thor Energy needs to make sure that the thorium fuel cycle is fully understood. To do this, the company has built a small test reactor in the Norwegian town of Halden, where rods of thorium-MOX provide steam to a nearby paper mill. This reactor will run for five years, after which the fuel will be analyzed to see if it’s ready for commercial reactors.

The first batch of thorium-MOX pellets, which are inside the rods, was made in Germany; the next batch of pelles will be made in Norway; and the final, hopefully commercial-grade pellets will be made by the UK’s National Nuclear Laboratory. Westinghouse Electric Company, one of the world’s largest producers of nuclear reactors, is one of Thor Energy’s commercial backers.

(And yes, just in case you were wondering, the element thorium really is named after Thor, the Norse god of thunder. And yes, Norse mythology originated from Norway, where Thor Energy is based. Coincidence, I think not!)

For the first time ever, researchers have encoded quantum information using simple electrical pulses.

Image: Arne Laucht

Researchers achieve electrical control of quantum bits, paving the way for quantum computers

For the first time ever, researchers have encoded quantum information using simple electrical pulses.

FIONA MACDONALD

Original link:  http://www.sciencealert.com/researchers-have-achieved-electrical-control-of-quantum-bits-paving-the-way-for-quantum-computers

Researchers from UNSW in Australia are a big step closer to creating affordable, large quantum computers, after gaining electrical control of quantum bits, or qubits, for the first time.

The team was able to store quantum information in silicon using only simple electrical pulses, instead of pulses of oscillating magnetic fields. This is the same way that the computers we use today encode data, and it means that we now have the ability to cheaply and easily control the quantum computers of the future.

"We demonstrated that a highly coherent qubit, like the spin of a single phosphorus atom in isotopically enriched silicon, can be controlled using electric fields, instead of using pulses of oscillating magnetic fields," said lead author of the study, Arne Laucht from UNSW Engineering, in a press release.

This is something that researchers have been attempting since 1998, and the results have now been published in the open-access journal Science Advances.

The method works by distorting the shape of the electron cloud attached to the phosphorous atom, quantum engineer Andrea Morello, who also worked on the research, explained in the release.

"This distortion at the atomic level has the effect of modifying the frequency at which the electron responds," he said.

"Therefore, we can selectively choose which qubit to operate. It's a bit like selecting which radio station we tune to, by turning a simple knob. Here, the 'knob' is the voltage applied to a small electrode placed above the atom."

The research suggests that it will be possible to locally control data in a large-scale quantum computers using only inexpensive voltage generators, as opposed to the pricey high-frequency microwave sources that quantum researchers have used to encode information in the past.

It also means that these types of qubits can be manufactured using technology similar to the kind we currently use, which will greatly cut the cost of quantum computers.

The key to the team's success was embedding the phosphorous atom in a thin layer of purified silicon that contains only the silicon-28 isotope, which is non-magnetic and doesn't disturb the qubit.

The UNSW Engineering quantum group was the first in the world to demonstrate single-atom spin qubits in silicon back in 2012, and they also last year showed that they could control these qubits with 99 percent accuracy. Their overall goal is to build the world's first affordable, large-scale quantum computer, and we honestly can't wait.

Love engineering? Find out more about the world-leading research happening at UNSW Engineering.