Aspen, CO -- MIT scientist Daniel G. Nocera did a fabulous job of explaining not just the science but also the underlying strategy behind his successful search for an artificial leaf, one that will enable cheaper and more-effective use of the sun to create useful power for humans.
I'll get to a quick once-over on the science in a moment, but what was most revealing about Nocera's talk was the deployment strategy he has linked to his basic science. The goal is to develop the cheapest possible off-grid energy for places like India and Africa, not to create the most advanced gee-whiz toy for use in Europe and the U.S.
To that end, Nocera has partnered with India's Tata Group, whose deep commitment to renewable village electrification is combined with huge engineering resources and talent. Tata owns fuel-cell technology, has a solar-manufacturing company in partnership with BP, is one of India's major providers of grid electricity, and also owns thousands of off-grid cell phone towers that need renewable energy. Nocera's emphasis on making his stuff cheap will, I suspect, be the wave of the clean-tech future, as more and more of the best opportunities for rapid deployment and scale lie among the "base of the pyramid" households: the world's two billion poorest people.
Nocera's breakthrough was to find cheap catalysts that enable an electrical current to break water apart into oxygen and hydrogen -- the energy-generating step in photosynthesis. He then sandwiches a silicon solar cell, which generates electricity when exposed to sunlight, between these catalysts, and dunks the resulting "artificial leaf" into water. When placed in sunlight, the silicon starts pumping an electrical current, the catalysts break down the water into oxygen and hydrogen, and (by storing the hydrogen) you've now got a fuel you can either burn or use in a fuel cell to generate electricity. The potential cost advantages are that this artificial leaf doesn't require the expensive wires, inverters, and other components that make solar cells expensive and storing the hydrogen should be cheaper than using a battery.
There's lots of engineering left in figuring out how to deploy this system. But by partnering with Tata, Nocera has given himself a talented and deep-pocketed ally to help solve those problems, and to do so specifically for the Indian context. And Nocera says that if some other scientist can figure out how to combine the hydrogen with CO2 cheaply at small scale, then you could make your own biofuel on your roof. If a formula for small-scale combination of hydrogen with nitrogen emerges, farmers could even make their own fertilizer.
We're going to need lots of this kind of innovation -- but what I took away from today's talk was the incredible importance of teeing up basic research with doing new things cheaply and at small scale. Nocera believes the industrial world won't adopt his -- or other -- innovations rapidly enough because we are too locked into the old fossil-fuel, centralized paradigm.
I think he's underestimating the potential. That many of America's public utilities have actively made it difficult or even illegal for people to generate their own solar power at home suggests that they are, in fact, worried that U.S. electric customers would like to be energy independent. But Nocera is clearly right that most of the world's unmet power needs are in poor places that don't yet have electricity. Just as Willie Sutton robbed banks because "that's where the money is," clean-energy entrepreneurs ought to focus on the poor -- because that's where the market is.