Rarely do we talk about tomorrow in the same terms we might speak of an impending dinner. appointment or trip. Instead we cast the stone a little further, to a date, a year, that ends in a nice round zero.
But by the same token, nor do we tend to dream too big about the future, at least not the way we used to.
In a remarkable chapter of the International Energy Agency's Solar Energy Perspectives, author Cédric Philibert considers the "big picture" of a possible solar powered world 50 years from now ... and in some ways departs from the sober and grounded analysis contained in the 180 pages or so of text that precedes it.
In short, it is a depiction of an energy system that's for us to build, and swings for the fences in terms of what can be reached for and what can be achieved.
"It's important to distinguish what's said here from a scenario," Philibert said during a recent conversation. "It's barely a scenario, being a bit more loose and far-ranging from that.
"In any case, the future will be different from what we can imagine today. History is full of wrong predictions," he said.
The future the chapter depicts has about 9 billion inhabitants, compared to the 7 billion co-inhabitants of the planet that we have today. Most will live in hot and sunny countries.
But if the world that provides the context to the author's dreams is more crowded -- with the world gross product increasing fourfold - he suggests that the intensity of energy use will be greatly reduced, resulting in a demand that's only 40 percent higher than in 2009.
These energy efficiency improvements will result from technical progress and sound policies, with a key driver of this reduced energy intensity being the refurbishment of most of the currently existing building stock.
The book suggests that against this backdrop. solar electricity could provide half of the projected electricity demand of 90,000 TWh, with 18,000 TWh from solar PV, 25,000 TWh from CSP and 2,000 TWh from solar fuels (namely, hydrogen).
Getting to that point will take both an exponential increase in the deployment of existing technologies as well as the development of new ones; it also take some thoughtful strategizing.
For instance, apart from rooftops, parking lots, farms and other structures, the chapter suggests that considerable potential for the further deployment of PV solar power rests in "brown fields," areas that have been severely impacted by former industrial activities, and whose re-use options are limited.
Another intriguing option -- although one that surely has its supporters and skeptics today -- is to developed floating PV plants. Such plants could have an increased efficiency with easy one-axis tracking: simply rotating floating structures supporting PV systems one revolution per day.
Besides electricity generation, solar energy can help meet other energy needs: heat and fuel for transport, the chapter said. Direct solar heat could take a share of water and space heating, as well as providing heat to industry and services.
Heat pumps would transfer ambient energy, whose origins are solar and geothermal energies, into buildings and some industries.
Solar fuels, besides a role in electricity generation, could also provide some heat in buildings and industry; enhance the energy content of bio-fuels for transport, industry and other uses. and possibly provide some hydrogen for direct uses in various transport systems.
Philibert doesn't write at length about the obstacles that would need to be overcome to achieve these goals, but he does describe what's needed: A real sense of continuity when it comes to public policy.
In conversation, Philibert expanded on that point.
"I mean, I understand you can't just put a system in place and leave it at that; Of course you have to adjust programs to be in line with changing realities," he said. "But at the same time, you can't change the rules on people every other year.
"When you have policy uncertainty, it is very difficult to convince investors that they will make something of their money," he added.
So the chapter, and the publication as a whole -- a publication, incidentally, that represents the IEA's first in-depth, book-length study of the solar sector -- underscores the need for real policy commitments that span years and indicate a real policy direction.
"The direction need not be 'by 2050 or 2060,' that's not what I am saying," Philibert said. "But at least you have to have some targets and commitments that will, hopefully, continue, even when you have some political change in the country."
As an example of such a policy, Philibert pointed to Germany's decision to get out of nuclear power following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.
"People see that decision by Angela Merkel as a sudden shift, but in fact, it was not a new idea," he said. "The law in Germany has prohibited any new construction of nuclear facilities since 1982 and the decision to get out of nuclear was first taken at the end of the 1990s.
"Of course, at that time, the position was that you could not extend the lives of existing plants indefinitely because it was expensive and becoming more and more difficult, but what Merkel did after Fukushima was go back to a position that was taken before," he said.
That history -- even acknowledging that Conservatives in Germany did slow the evolution away from nuclear -- suggests a common and shared understanding that something needed to be done and could be done.
"When commitment changes every other year or with every other election. Then, of course, it becomes difficult," Philibert said.
The publication both as a whole and in chapter 11, also obliquely hints at something else -- that in the renewable sector as a whole, there is a growing cohesion that's similar to that evidenced in the tech community, the creation of vested interests in the continuation of the experience.
"These vested interests, for example, a big company like Siemens, are making choices on investment that will greatly shape the future of renewables; at the same time, there are others who are still having difficulty believing the growth of renewables in sustainable," Philibert said. "That's true even among the politicians, you know?"
"And that's where this book has a value, I think," he continued. "While chapter 11 should not be taken as a true forecast, it does suggest that what we should be aiming for is not just a small addition to existing systems."
In a sense, with all due apologies to former US President Bill Clinton, Solar Energy Perspectives will cause some to revisit the question of what "is" is.
While many governments, policy makers and members of the European Union agreed to, in Philibert's words, "do this 20/20/20 thing by 2020", it is now obvious that what they meant by that commitment varied widely.
"For some that was only the beginning of something, and for others, it was kind of the maximum they could envision because of the viability, the footprint, the costs … it was never their intention to do more after that," he said.
"That's not to demonize the latter: In most cases that were willing to compromise for the future and took a stand to diversify the energy mix, which is always a sounds policy. But the idea was to do the 20 percent and that's it," he continued. "By comparison, for others, the 20/20/20 goal was a first step, with the belief that the gains achieved would be self-evident and followed by other, larger steps.
"In a sense, Chapter 11 is a vision of where those larger and larger steps could take us," he said. "The chapter is a way of saying, it is possible to go way beyond where we are.
"We are at less than one percent of in terms of the adoption of renewables and the idea of some people is, 'OK, let's raise that to three to five percent for solar power, five percent from wind, 10 percent for hydro ... with the rest to remain a mixture of coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear," Philibert said.
"But what we're saying with this publication is, 'OK, maybe, but it is possible to go way beyond that,'" he said. "Thermal storage for CSP is a very exciting development. I'm not saying there won't be any fossil fuels needed in the future -- even our best possible vision includes some here and there, but I think if there's a message to Solar Energy Perspectives it's that when it comes to renewables, we can think bigger than we currently are."
In green-lighting the writing of the book, the IEA acknowledged that solar needed a more in-depth analysis because it represents a wide range of technologies and is therefore more complex that of other renewables.
One message that clearly streams out of the work is that solar is not just PV, not just CSP, and it's not just electricity.
It goes on to illustrate that PV itself is 10 different things, CSP is 10 different things, and then, of course, there are a whole host of possibilities related to solar fuels.
Solar Energy Perspectives considers these as a family of technologies and shows how these various technologies not only can be fit together into an effective energy regime, but also how they can be integrated with the adoption of other low carbon energy technologies.
Asked about the potential of solar fuels, Philibert acknowledged that in many respects, they're simply too new to be on most people's radar at the moment.
"Except for one important politician, President Barack Obama, nobody ever talks about them, and in fact, no government really spends any serious money on that," he said.
Nonetheless, the publication suggests that solar fuels will have a wide range of possible applications in the future.
"I tried to underline that, and I don't really spend a lot of time writing about the most futuristic ones," Philibert said. "
"For instance, just think about making solar hydrogen from natural gas. Today, we burn natural gas to in the making of hydrogen, but we could use solar as the heat source and run the same process," he said. "Then you could use the solar hydrogen as a blend with natural gas and use that blend as you use natural gas today. You could transport it, export it, store it ... all without big investments or needing big technical breakthroughs."
Because of the reach of Solar Energy Perspectives, it seemed natural to ask Philibert if people imagine big enough when it comes to renewables, or whether some unseen or unexplored force is tamping down on vision in the sector.
"Personally, I think it can be attributed to many people still not knowing very much about renewable energy," Philibert said. "I mean, who really knows all of this?
"For instance, people in China, Turkey, Cypress, Israel, Austria and Spain, all use solar water heaters on a normal, regular basis, but apart from those countries, all of the focus on solar has been on PV; all you've heard about is PV, with the exception of Spain and the Southwest in the US, where you also have CSP. So that's part of the issue," he said. "Most people know a little about OPV and almost nothing else."
"The other things is people are very concerned about the cost. They'll look at a technology and say, 'Wow, that's going to cost a lot of money' and they conclude it's not really worth it," he said. "So it [solar] falls down to domestic hot water, which is nice, but almost nobody talks about industrial heat or service sector heat, and that's where the potential lies. This too is what I hope will come out from this book."
All of this seems to beg the question of a need for a new kind of energy business model, something Philibert described as "An area for future work".
"In fact, we don't know much about that right now," he said. "What we say in the book because we are approaching competitiveness; this is not an argument to dismantle the systems that work today, like feed-in tariffs or renewable energy portfolio standards or long-term PPAs, because all of these systems provide some certainty to the investors ... but at some point, this should be replaced by a new market design.
"Having said that, I can’t tell you today what the market should look like in the future, because we don’t know yet. It’s something we need to investigate," he said.
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