Engineered energy flows

"Founded in 2003, the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development is a US-based non-profit focusing on collecting and disseminating information on all types of technology and processes used in promoting global economic, industrial, and societal sustainable development." Side note: this institute runs off of funds from Atlas Capital Partners.

"TR: You've written that chemistry "will likely play the most central role of all the sciences" in addressing energy problems. How would you summarize the role of chemistry? DN: For game changers, it's really easy. There's three. Make photovoltaics cheap, which is a lot of chemistry. It's inventing new materials to make PV cheap. Replace noble metals--things like platinum--with abundant metals. Because there's not enough stuff. When you're talking about this much scale, you better be using things like iron and manganese. You better look at your book that says what are the most abundant elements on the face of the earth. TR: And this is for fuel cells, and also for photovoltaics. DN: Photovoltaics--everything. That's the real technology issue that you have to keep in your mind. Not something that's so great, it's 100 percent efficient--and oh, by the way, I'm using ruthenium. I can use ruthenium now to teach me a principle, but ruthenium's below iron [on the periodic table]. So I better figure out, how can I take everything I'm learning with ruthenium and apply it to iron? TR: And the third game changer? DN: Split water with light. You do those three things, and you have a full new energy economy. It's hard for me to say exactly what that technology will look like, because the science is missing. But at the beginning of the 1900s, we built an entire society based on a new energy system. And I believe, once solar is in place, with help from biofuel, with a little help from wind, we will invent our society again from a new energy source."

CEN news Nov, 20 2006 cover story