UC Berkeley Researchers Working on Renewable Energy

The SF Chronicle has an article on groups of Berkeley researchers hoping to make significant breakthroughs on a variety of renewable energy initiatives. While I think its great that these folks are motivated by a desire to halt global warming, the economic potential is enormous. The demand for renewables continues to increase, anyone who comes up with low-cost scalable solutions, will reap billions in patents and technology licenses.

Inspired by advances in molecular science and materials technology taking place at Cal and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the researchers feel their work could make a difference even in the limited time that may remain before climate change makes real trouble.

"In 50 years, if everything goes on business as usual, CO2 levels will be twice as high," said Paul Alivisatos, who is Gur's mentor and leads the lab's nanotechnology group. "That is a problem we have in society right now. I think the important issue is for people to see this. It's not really a political issue. It's a technological issue that has a real solution if we decided to pursue it."

For Alivisatos, it's not a question of the world running out of oil; he sees plenty of carbon fuels left to exploit.

"We'll run out atmosphere," he said.

Gur is building on Alivisatos' work, first published in 2002. Alivisatos pioneered chemical means to arrange inorganic crystals a thousandth of a human hair in width into structures that have useful properties, such as the ability to conduct electricity.

The test-tube chemistry is surprising simple, which suggests that inexpensive, large-scale manufacturing would be feasible if the crystals' zip began to approach that of silicon.

Andrew Isaacs, a professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, said the solar work is Nobel Prize-level research and called it part of a trend in which the best minds at Berkeley are combining to make an impact on society's most pressing problems.

"More and more we've discovered that some of these solutions may be technological in nature," said Isaacs, who heads a technology management program that links Cal's engineering and business schools. "What we're combining, which I think is new, is a technological focus on some of these problems.

"That we will find a breakthrough that makes solar cells more efficient is certain. The question is how soon."

Parallel to the work of Gur and others under Alivisatos is the Helios Project, a solar initiative created by Lawrence Berkeley Lab Director Steven Chu. The project's most futuristic vision: vast fields of bioengineered plants designed to break down cellulose to make ethanol and other carbon-neutral fuels, thus eliminating America's need for foreign oil and creating a new market for sustainable agriculture.

"If we could reduce the energy cost of breaking down cellulose by a factor of 5 or 10, the resulting fuel could be competitive," said Elaine Chandler, who leads strategic planning and program development for the lab's materials science division.

The fuel-making plants would have to be more efficient and sturdier than plants that grow by themselves, but researchers say new-found tools to work with natural and inorganic material at the molecular level make this an idea whose time has come. Chandler said the technology is likely to bear results inside of 10 years.

Gur faces a similar challenge with his solar project, as he tests ways to make a super-light material as efficient as today's silicon-based solar panels. So far, the new material is less than a third as efficient as the old. The efficiency must triple -- to a 10 percent solar-to-electricity conversion rate -- before the new technology could be marketed.

"We're doing a lot of different things to try to get there," Gur said. "We're trying to improve on the work we've done but we're always looking at new materials and architectures to see if we can get a big jump in efficiency.

"If we're lucky, we'll make an impact soon. If we're not, hopefully we can still develop this so at the end of the road there's something to move to that's a cheaper alternative. It's going to happen one way or the other.''