This is the next generation of renewable
energy technologies
Hi-tech
football pitches, wave power and nuclear fusion are helping to move Britain
away from 'dirty' fuels towards sustainable energy
Children playing football in the Morro da Mineira favela in Rio de
Janeiro are helping to power their neighbourhood’s street lights by running on
an AstroTurf pitch that converts their steps into energy
Scientists
all over the globe are working to develop sustainable new energy sources to
reduce our dependence on dwindling fossil fuel supplies.
In the
UK, just 5pc of the nation’s energy comes from renewables. The Government has
set a target of 15pc by 2020, but progress is slow.
Some
sustainable energy sources, such as solar energy, are mature marketplaces, with
60 years of research behind them. Others, such as antimatter, are more
experimental.
The
science of antimatter is still in its infancy but scientists claim that mixing
just half a gram of antimatter with half a gram of matter would create the same
energy generated by the Hiroshima bomb.
There
are several start-ups developing other ground-breaking technologies for
generating electricity, some using methods that seem more Star Trek: The Next
Generation than National Grid. We meet three entrepreneurs leading the charge
into next-generation renewables.
Turning
footsteps into electricity
Youngsters
playing on a newly-installed football pitch in one of Rio de Janeiro’s most
notorious slums are now powering the neighbourhood’s street lights with every
step.
Their
movements across the AstroTurf are converted from kinetic energy into electricity
by 200 hidden energy-capturing tiles built by London-based Pavegen.
The
Pavegen tiles took less than a week to install
Founded
by Laurence Kemball-Cook in 2009, the company exports its energy-converting
tiles to 20 countries across the world. Customers range from infrastructure
giants such as Siemens to retail brands Nike and
Uniqlo.
“I started this in my bedroom with just a sketch,” Kemball-Cook, 29, tells The
Sunday Telegraph. “Now we employ 30 staff in four offices and we’re
profitable.”
Pavegen,
which converts high footfall areas into pseudo-batteries, and sister company
Roadgen, which aims to harvest energy from vehicles on the world’s roads, will
help to power the cities of the future, says Kemball-Cook. “We want to take the
cost of the technology down to the same price as normal flooring. We’re looking
to raise investment this year to help us meet that goal.”
Pavegen,
which has been shortlisted for this year’s UK Private Business Awards, has now
passed the £1m turnover mark and is on target to double that this financial
year. “Next year will be pivotal for the company,” says Kemball-Cook, revealing
that the company’s technology is due to be installed outside the White House
next spring in its biggest US project to date.
The
challenge of storing and converting energy from renewable sources is on the
verge of a breakthrough, he said. “Elon Musk [of Tesla fame] has built his
Gigafactory, which will manufacture batteries on a huge scale, bringing down
the cost massively. And we’re working with technologists in the super and
ultra-capacitor space to find solutions to the storage problem.”
Wind
and solar alternatives are less efficient than Pavegen’s technology, and depend
heavily on weather and geography, Kemball-Cook claims. “Human footfall is
currently a wasted resource,” he adds. “We will become part of the fabric of
urban infrastructure.”
The new
wave of energy
The
World Energy Council has estimated that if the planet’s wave power was
harnessed, we could generate double the amount of electricity currently
produced worldwide. The west coast of Scotland is home to some of the most
powerful and consistent waves in the world. Over the past few days, waves have
been recorded in the Orkney Islands topping 14ft.
Sam
Etherington, a 24-year-old engineer and founder of Aqua Power Technologies, is
testing a new device that captures wave power at a site near the UK archipelago.
“We’ve
had some rough weather,” he says. “The waves are trying to destroy everything
they hit and are coming every 20 seconds. It’s the best environment to test the
technology.”
Etherington’s
invention sits on the surface of the water and, unlike other wave power
systems, works on a multiaxis basis; it can generate power no matter what
direction the waves come from.
The
multi-axis device generates energy from waves breaking at any direction
Enquiries
are flooding in from all over Europe from consortiums keen to install the
devices. “It’s very encouraging, given that we’re still developing the
technology and don’t even have a price for them yet,” says Etherington, adding
that the devices are likely to cost “millions”.
Etherington
has funded his start-up through grants from the Regional Growth Development
Fund, topped up with £1,000-worth of prize money for winning the Shell LIVEwire
competition for bright young entrepreneurs. The devices are made in Cumbria,
and Etherington is hoping to have two wave farms deployed in the UK by 2018.
“This
is absolutely the future,” the young investor said. “The industry has seen some
setbacks with two industry incumbents going bust, so we’re underpromising on all
fronts. We’re telling people that the devices will pay for themselves within
six years with a lifespan of 25, but that’s very conservative.”
Star
power
Serial
entrepreneur Richard Dinan, former star of reality TV show Made in Chelsea, has
started a business that plans to recreate nuclear fusion – the process that
powers the stars – right here on Earth.
Richard
Dinan, better known for his role in structured reality TV show Made In Chelsea,
is now an amateur physicist
Applied
Fusion Systems, which is trying to build a tokamak reactor, which traps red-hot
plasma in a magnetic field to generate nuclear energy, is working on a
prototype demonstrator.
“I saw
one company that built one for just £127,000,” he said. “I looked at the design
and realised we could build something better.”
Dinan,
who left school at 16, has taught himself physics in order to understand the
particle theory behind fusion. He claims that AFS is not trying to match the
research coming out of international nuclear fusion research and engineering
organisation ITER, but that “getting my hands dirty” is necessary to know how
to commercialise the technology when it arrives.
“For
example, some of these reactors use tritium deuterium [a radioactive isotope of
hydrogen],” he says. “That costs $30,000 (£19,000) a gram, so perhaps we will
start breeding it.”
The
company is still at a very early stage and Dinan is trying to raise funding.
“When I tell people I’m building a nuclear reactor, they look at me as though
I’m mad,” he says. “People think it’s science fiction or impossible, or at
least a billion-pound effort that shouldn’t concern them yet, but I’m going to
prove them wrong.”
The Telegraph
Published by Djamel Benrejdal, Scarborough, North Yorkshire
Electric avenues that can
transmit the sun’s energy onto power grids may be coming to a city near you.
Electric avenues
that can transmit the sun’s energy onto power grids may be coming to a city
near you.
A subsidiary of Bouygues SA has designed rugged solar panels, capable of
withstand the weight of an 18-wheeler truck, that they’re now building into
road surfaces. After nearly five years of research and laboratory tests,
they’re constructing 100 outdoor test sites and plan to commercialize the
technology in early 2018.
We wanted to find a second life for a road said Philippe Harelle the
chief technology officer at Colas SA’s Wattway unit, owned by the French
engineering group Bouygues. Solar farms use land that could otherwise be for
agriculture, while the roads are free.
As solar costs plummet, panels are being increasingly integrated into everyday
materials. Last month Tesla Motors Inc. surprised investors by unveiling roof
shingles that double as solar panels. Other companies are integrating photovoltaics into building
facades. Wattway joins groups including Sweden’s Scania and Solar Roadways in
the U.S. seeking to integrate panels onto pavement.
To resist the weight of traffic, Wattway layers several types of plastics to create
a clear and durable casing. The solar panel underneath is an ordinary model,
similar to panels on rooftops. The electrical wiring is embedded in the road
and the contraption is topped by an anti-slip surface made from crushed glass.
A kilometer-sized testing site began construction last month in the French
village of Tourouvre in Normandy. The 2,800 square meters of solar panels are
expected to generate 280 kilowatts at peak, with the installation generating
enough to power all the public lighting in a town of 5,000 for a year,
according to the company.
For now, the cost of the materials makes only demonstration projects sensible.
A square meter of the solar road currently costs 2,000 ($2,126) and 2,500
euros. That includes monitoring, data collection and installation costs.
Wattway says it can make the price competitive with traditional solar farms by
2020.
The electricity generated by this stretch of
solar road will feed directly into the grid. Another test site is being used to
charge electric vehicles. A third will power a small hydrogen production plant.
Wattway has also installed its panels to light electronic billboards and is
working on links to street lights.
The next two sites will be in Calgary in Canada and in the U.S. state of
Georgia. Wattway also plans to build them in Africa, Japan and throughout the
European Union.
We need to test for all kinds of different traffic and climate conditions
Harelle said. I want to find the limits of it. We think that maybe it will
not be able to withstand a snow plow.
The potential fragility joins cost as a potential hurdle.
We’re seeing solar get integrated in a number of things, from windows in
buildings to rooftops of cars, made possible by the falling cost of panels
Bloomberg New Energy Finance analyst Pietro Radoia said. On roads, I don’t
think that it will really take off unless there’s a shortage of land sometime
in the future.’
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Bloomberg News
Published by Djamel Benrejdal, Scarborough, North
Yorkshire