Conferences & Events
Scialog: Solar Energy Conversion
2011 Keynote Presentations
Dan Arvizu
The Rise of Renewables
Dan Arvizu, director and chief executive of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), capped off the Scialog keynote addresses on the third day of the conference.
Arvizu, a presidential appointee to the National Science Board, is one of the world’s leading experts on renewable and sustainable energy. His talk, “Beyond Energy Innovation,” provided an overview of the current state of renewable energy globally and in the U.S. The challenges America faces – economic, security and environmental – all have an element related to energy, Arvizu said.
“We have to put together our strategies for research in the context of all these problems,” he said. “We can’t just solve one at the expense of the others.”
Arvizu recently administered the solar energy section of a United Nations report on the global renewable energy situation. He quoted the report as noting 12.9 percent of worldwide energy production currently comes from renewable resources, but more than 10 percent is comprised of “traditional biomass” -- wood-burning, animal waste and “really hazardous-to-your-health kind of stuff.” All other renewable energy-producing technologies globally amount to less than 3 percent of total production, he said, adding there is tremendous potential for renewable technologies to produce a much greater share of the world’s energy.
Currently China is the largest producer of renewable energy that is not hydroelectric; meanwhile, Germany has the largest percentage of renewable energy produced by solar technology. “Interestingly, China is the major exporter of solar technology, but the installations are all in Germany,” Arvizu said.
“Germany has the same solar insolation as Anchorage, Alaska, just to show there is plenty of opportunity for everybody else,” he said. (“Insolation” refers to solar radiation energy received on a given surface area in a given time.)
Global investment in renewable energy industries currently amounts to $268 billion annually, he said. By 2010 total global installation of wind-generated energy amounted to 194 gigawatts, up from a total of 17 gigawatts in 2000; meanwhile, photovoltaic installations went from less than a gigawatt in 2000 to more than 35 gigawatts globally in 2010. *
Photovoltaics
Focusing on photovoltaic solar cells, Arvizu noted that it has taken decades for fundamental research advances to reach the commercial market. “And part of my job is to make sure that it doesn’t take 30 years for things that we’re working on in the lab today to make it to our rooftops. We can’t wait 30 years. That’s a key point.”
In an effort to speed up the deployment of photovoltaics, the U.S. Department of Energy has instituted the SunShot Initiative. Arvizu said it is a collaborative effort to make solar energy cost competitive with other forms of energy by the end of the decade. This would require reducing today’s average installed cost of solar energy systems by about 75 percent, according to DOE estimates.
Arvizu said a tremendous amount of innovation in creating renewable energy systems, including photovoltaics, is occurring in today’s world, “it’s just that most of it isn’t going on in this country.”
He said NREL has chosen to demonstrate the effectiveness of renewable energy by constructing a 330,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art research-support building to house 1,300 workers on its campus in Golden, CO.
“Forty percent of the energy consumption in the U.S. occurs in buildings, include roughly 70 percent of all electricity usage,” he said. That is why the new building is designed to rely mostly on sunlight for lighting. Also, a thick-walled “labyrinth” under the building stores warm air in the winter and cool air in the summer to reduce heating and air-conditioning costs. Arvizu said he received a special exemption from the U.S. government to allow the building’s windows to open and close, something that is not permitted in other government structures of this size. The roof of the building and its nearby parking garage are equipped with photovoltaic panels capable of generating 2.5 megawatts of electricity.
“It is the largest, most efficient building in the world,” Arvizu said. “On an annual basis, it generates as much energy as it consumes.” The average per capita consumption of energy for workers in the building is less than 300 watts, he added. (Some estimates put the average per capita consumption of electricity in the typical home at 2,000 watts.)
The total cost of the building was less than $289 a square foot, including the cost of the photovoltaic panels, he said, adding the building is a net exporter of electricity.
Arvizu said buildings like this can “change everything” in America. “But we need to invent the future that we want,” he said. “It’s not going to happen naturally.”
*A watt is a unit of power and indicates an amount of energy that is used in a given period of time (e.g. for heating or lighting). A kilotwatt equals 1,000 watts. One kilowatt of power is approximately equal to 1.34 horsepower. A small electric heater with one heating element runs on about one kilowatt of power. The average annual electrical energy consumption of a household in the United States is about 8,900 kilowatt-hours. For an electrical device running with constant power, its energy consumption in watt-hours is the product of power in watts and time in hours. For instance, a 60 watt light bulb running for one hour consumes 60 watt-hours. Arvizu, however, talks in terms of the gigawatt, which is one billion watts (one thousand million); total annual U.S. energy consumption from all sources, including burnable fuels, is currently estimated at more than 25 thousand terawatt-hours. A terawatt is composed of one trillion watts (one million million). Global annual energy consumption from all sources has been estimated at well over 100 thousand terawatt-hours – an immense figure most authorities believe will have to at least double if not triple as earth’s population rises from seven billion people today to roughly 10 billion three decades from now and worldwide per capita energy use increases.
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