Fighting Climate Change at Nanoscale

Climate laws alone cannot shift the global energy paradigm to clean, renewable sources by 2050, but with the help of nanoscience they just might.

U.S. scientists are on the leading edge of nanoscience work that has the potential to facilitate a quantum leap in technology innovation.

This relatively new area of scientific work involves control of materials at the atomic, or molecular, level causing it to undergo a quantum change that makes it lighter and better by increasing the surface size and strength of products, explains Wade Adams, director of the Richard B. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology at Rice University.

Nanoclay, for example, has been used for a decade to make light, flexible car bumpers and side panels. Scientists studied the nanostructure of lotus leaves to create water repellant surfaces used on clothing to repel moisture and stains.

Nate Lewis, professor of chemistry at California Institute of Technology, believes nanoscience is also key to making clean energy affordable by providing inexpensive replacements for expensive components in clean energy technologies.

He is on the verge of a breakthrough in solar energy technology with the creation of a revolutionary nanomaterial to replace silicon, the most expensive component in solar panels. The material will be used to develop solar energy products that can be rolled out like bubble wrap or painted on buildings, roads and other flat surfaces. The idea, says Lewis, is to make solar technology so inexpensive that even people living in undeveloped nations can afford it.

Hydrogen fuel cells are already in use in hydrogen cars, but aren’t being massed produced because platinum, a precious metal required in the electrolyte process, makes fuel cells expensive to manufacture. Japan’s Daihatsu Motor Co. Ltd. recently announced the development of a fuel cell that uses alkali, rather than acid, in the ion exchange membranes, allowing fuels cells to work with inexpensive materials like cobalt, instead.

Adams is working on superconductive carbon nanotube wire, which could transmit electricity with little or no resistance. This breakthrough in energy infrastructure may make it possible to build a global grid that immediately delivers inexpensive, clean, renewable energy anywhere in the world it’s needed.

“If you have grid-wire capable of ‘slothing’ energy around the world along 12 time zones, you don’t have to store it,” Adams says, pointing out that the sun is always shining, wind is always blowing, somewhere in the world. Currently, 8 percent of energy is lost for every 200-mile stretch it travels, or 40 percent in 1,000 miles.

Nanoscience is the game changer because it will make it possible to create, store or immediately deliver clean, inexpensive, renewable energy anywhere in the world, says Garry Golden, futurist consultant and editor of The Energy Roadmap.

“If energy can be stored on wind farms or locally in buildings and homes, it will be possible for these resources to grow,” he says, noting that utilities are resistant to expanding renewables due to their intermittent nature.

He suggests that eventually utilities might become obsolete, or at least less important to daily life. With energy stored at the nanoscale, enough electricity to power a home for a month could be stored in a block the size of a bar of soap.

“Within five to 10 years, we might be buying a packet of energy at the grocery store to feed into a home energy appliance—a fuel cell or flywheel about the size of a refrigerator—manufactured by someone like GE, Siemens or Chevron,” Golden says, noting blocks of energy could also power cars.

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