CLEANTECH BUZZ: Top trends for 2011

The Australian Cleantech Review 2011 was released this week, with 70-odd pages on the state of play in the local and global clean technology sector, including detailed analysis of 750 listed and unlisted Australian companies – "their activities, locations, revenues, profits, employees and capital transactions" – all put together by consulting group Australian CleanTech. One section in particular – a list of the technology trends of 2011 – we thought worth sharing. As the report itself states, "there are many trends emerging globally that will impact cleantech activities in Australia. There are also some local technology trends that need to be understood and carefully watched. Some of these are detailed in the table below."

Turning over a new leaf

Imagine a world in which solar power technology was so cheap and mass-produced that each and every household could have its own energy source, and all they would need was an artificial leaf (I'll get to that in a minute) and about 16 ounces of water. That's the kind of world that MIT chemist Daniel Nocera is working towards, with his very-small-scale solar technology – the aforementioned "artificial leaf", which is more like a small piece of card made of silicon and other materials – that uses sunlight to split water for energy-generating purposes. Nocera unveiled his new technology to much excitement at the end of March, but Climate Central's Alyson Kenward says she had remained unconvinced about its potential until seeing Nocera in action at a Princeton symposium two weekends ago. In his presentation, Nocera demonstrated via video that he could already make sunlight turn a glass of water – containing an "artificial leaf" – into hydrogen and oxygen gas. And, says Kenward, "I have to say it was pretty impressive."

"It might not sound like anything too fancy, and it doesn't look like any leaf I've ever seen," says Kenward, "but it's being described as the first time that a chemist has found what appears to be an inexpensive way to mimic what plants have naturally been doing for millions of years." And that would be to convert sunlight into energy by splitting water into its constituent parts: oxygen and hydrogen, and then to store these alternative forms of energy until they are needed. The goal for technology has been to do the same thing, but more efficiently, and then recombine the hydrogen and oxygen in a fuel cell to produce electricity on demand. It may also be possible, says Kenward, to combine hydrogen with carbon dioxide (CO2) to make fuels resembling gasoline, not unlike the way plants use the hydrogen to make sugars. And while water splitting, itself, is nothing new, Nocera's version uses much cheaper materials, says Kenward. "He hasn't revealed the exact identity of his new catalysts (which are now being patented), but preliminary versions of his 'leaf'... call on some of the cheapest metals around."

Behind Nocera's technology, says Kenward, is his argument that most new global energy demand will come from the developing world, and that building up solar power for individuals will be a more realistic option to meet this demand than other forms of energy. “In the US, we're stuck with this ball and chain of legacy energy,” he told the Princeton audience, meaning that it is so heavily invested in existing energy infrastructure that there isn't much chance of easily switching to renewable options. Developing countries, meanwhile, completely lack a central electrical grid, with many people in developing are completely without access to electricity. But, as Kenward points out, "this is all still in ivory tower-territory, and it will be years before a commercial model of Nocera's setup might be available... But the fact that so much energy is stored up in the chemical bonds of water explains why so many chemists think that solar-powered water splitting is such an essential research goal."