PERSPECTIVE
In 1996, Dr. Richard Smalley of Rice University in Texas was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for creating and identifying new carbon structures which came to be known as “fullerenes.” Because of his work, we now have buckeyballs and carbon nanotubes and a completely new branch of chemistry which brings the promise of materials with properties beyond anything we have previously known. During the latter part of his life (he died of leukemia in 2005 at the age of 62) Dr. Smalley spoke often and passionately about the global need for cheap, clean energy from renewable resources. His talks often began with a list of important problems that humanity would face in the twenty-first century as the world’s population continued to grow. The big problems that he saw included poverty, disease, war, and terrorism, as well as the need to provide clean water, adequate food, quality healthcare, education, and a healthy environment.
Dr. Smalley would then point out that nations with abundant supplies of low-cost renewable energy could solve each of the challenging problems on his list. With cheap, clean energy, nations could provide adequate supplies of nutritional food and clean water for their citizens without causing unhealthy environmental conditions. They would have the resources to improve education, to combat disease, and to provide good healthcare for all; and a healthy, well educated populace would be less prone to involvement with racial prejudice, religious extremism, or politically driven terrorism. Even population growth, a recurring problem for the human race, would cease to be a problem because, historically, birth rates stabilize in nations where the standard of living is raised above subsistence levels.
Dr. Smalley believed that energy is the lifeblood of modern industrial societies, providing sustenance and vitality to economies which, with proper social and political institutions, can eliminate poverty, ignorance and the other associated social challenges that plague us today. But where can the energy come from? That’s what Dr. Smalley referred to as the Terawatt Challenge. His view was that “solar energy is the only big number out there.” In other words, solar was the only renewable energy resource capable of meeting future energy needs worldwide. But there were some major problems associated with using solar to meet the Terawatt Challenge:
The solar resource has very low intensity. It’s spread over large areas with relatively low power per unit area. It must be collected and concentrated to be useful.
Except for photosynthesis processes occurring in plants, solar radiation cannot be utilized without converting it into other forms of energy. The conversion processes must be economical and efficient if solar is to be a viable primary energy resource.
The solar resource is intermittent. There are large hourly, daily, and seasonal variations in its availability. Energy derived from the solar resource must be stored so it will be available whenever it is needed—and the storage technologies must be capable of cost-effectively bridging the longest time scales of the resource variation, namely, seasonal time scales.
Collection of solar energy, conversion of solar energy to useful energy forms, and long-term storage of energy derived from the solar resource—these are the technologies that we must master in order to make solar a viable primary energy resource.
There have been many important advances in solar technology during the years since Dr. Smalley traveled the world advocating for widespread use of the sun’s energy. These advances have come slowly and they always seem to be incremental. They don’t attract much attention from the press or from the people who ultimately stand to benefit; and those working in the solar field would probably not characterize their innovations as game changers or scientific breakthroughs. But when taken together, the many small steps taken during past decades, the contributions made over the years by thousands and thousands of scientists and engineers, have brought us to the threshold of an amazing opportunity. We now have at our disposal the base technologies for making solar the preferred primary energy resource that people everywhere can rely on to meet their energy needs. By properly integrating these existing technologies, we can answer the Terawatt Challenge. We can create systems that will transform sunlight into the types of energy we use every day, we can store that energy for long periods of time, and we can recover that energy whenever we need it. Then any country on Earth can become energy independent and our societies will claim, at long last, the broad-based socio-economic benefits that Dr. Smalley could only dream of.