I guess it's possible to be optimistic about the new IPCC report, and some are. I'm not.

The newest United Nations report on planetary climate, different from previous cautious reports, minces few words. 

Things are getting worse, and faster than ever, and we have no time left to act. Paraphrasing Yoda, it's time to do something; simply trying is not an option.

“The report is a full-throated call for the massive—yet doable—changes our species must enact to limit the damage that comes with each fraction of a degree of warming,” said Wired, the online magazine. 

There is now more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, 410 parts per million, than in the past 2 million years—that’s before there were humans on our planet. No other period in the past 2,000 years has seen climate warming as fast as in the past 50 years.

The impacts of these changes have been seriously inequitable. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2023 report says the people least responsible for the change are suffering the most.

“Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred. Human-caused climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe. This has led to widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people. Vulnerable communities who have historically contributed the least to current climate change are disproportionately affected,” the report said in its summary for policymakers.

You can find the actual report summary and various associated documents here. 

Nearly half the world’s population is vulnerable and at risk of climate change disruptions, from coastal inundation, storms, flooding, drought, food and water shortages, and related issues. That risk is playing out now, and continues to increase.

“Between 2010 and 2020, human mortality from floods, droughts and storms was 15 times higher in highly vulnerable regions, compared to regions with very low vulnerability,” the report said.

The already-observed changes include water shortages, crop failures, livestock health problems, reduced fishery yields, malnutrition, infectious diseases, community displacement, and immense impacts on ecosystems. The report cites throughout how much faith it has in its observations.

“Climate change has caused substantial damages, and increasingly irreversible losses, in terrestrial, freshwater, cryospheric, and coastal and open ocean ecosystems (high confidence). Hundreds of local losses of species have been driven by increases in the magnitude of heat extremes (high confidence) with mass mortality events recorded on land and in the ocean (very high confidence). Impacts on some ecosystems are approaching irreversibility such as the impacts of hydrological changes resulting from the retreat of glaciers, or the changes in some mountain (medium confidence) and Arctic ecosystems driven by permafrost thaw (high confidence.)”

As we move along in time, it gets worse. “Every increment of global warming will intensify multiple and concurrent hazards.”

There are two primary options: Mitigation, or doing something about it; and adaptation, or learning to live with it.

The report says we have the technology to mitigate, to turn things around. But it would take severe and dramatic action. We do not seem to be willing as a planet to do what’s necessary.

“Deep, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions would lead to a discernible slowdown in global warming within around two decades, and also to discernible changes in atmospheric composition within a few years.”

But we are not spending enough money on it, and not committing enough of our policy initiatives to it.

So what about adapting? Realistically, even with drastic action, things would get worse before the arrow of livability starts to turn upward. So some adaption will be required anyway.

Clearly the poorest among us will be hit soonest and hardest, and they will have the fewest opportunities to adapt. The wealthier communities will be able to adapt, to a degree. But increasing climate change will threaten even their adaptation options.

“Adaptation options that are feasible and effective today will become constrained and less effective with increasing global warming. With increasing global warming, losses and damages will increase and additional human and natural systems will reach adaptation limits,” the report said.

To avoid catastrophe, the report says, the world needs immediate and severe cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. To limit the worst impacts in the coming few decades, emissions need to be driven to near zero.

But policies currently in place don’t do that. If anything, they leave emissions flat, meaning the situation continues to get worse.

This is the frustration. We can do it. We must do it.  But it is not clear we will do it.

What are the odds that this particular planet can galvanize its systems to do what the IPCC says is required? Here is the IPCC’s vision:

“Effective climate action is enabled by political commitment, well-aligned multilevel governance, institutional frameworks, laws, policies and strategies and enhanced access to finance and technology. Clear goals, coordination across multiple policy domains, and inclusive governance processes facilitate effective climate action. Regulatory and economic instruments can support deep emissions reductions and climate resilience if scaled up and applied widely. Climate resilient development benefits from drawing on diverse knowledge.”

Lots of media reports—ignoring the essence of the report—are all about the upside: “We can fix this! Yes, we can!”

The Christian Science Monitor takes the middle path, noting that the IPCC “walks a fine line between desperation and hope in an effort to spur a more forceful global response.”

Some publications get lost in the weeds. CNBC decided to focus on reflecting the sun's light and heat back into space. Others wondered whether carbon capture technology is ready for prime time.  

All the while ignoring the elephant in the room--we need to stop burning oil and coal.

So, the thinking goes, maybe we can do these interesting techie things, and keep on burning coal in power plants and gasoline in our big luxury cars. And everything will be just fine.

That, of course, is dithering. And while dithering, perhaps we can ponder this: 

How much misery are we willing to subject our grandchildren and their grandchildren to, to keep living the way we are living?

© Jan TenBruggencate 2023 

Fiddling as the planet burns. Climate change is upon us.

We saw it coming, but we did not know it would come so fast.

Climate change, long a threat for future decades, for the grandchildren, is here now.

In part, after a century of comparatively stable climate, the very concept of sudden dramatic change seemed so bizarre that many scientists have underplayed the possibilities.

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in early years issued conservative predictions. Some say the authors felt nobody would pay attention to the more alarmist predictions. Bizarrely, when scientists couldnʻt agree on how much Antarctic and Greenland ice melting would add to sea level, they just left those contributions out of their calculations entirely, vastly understating possible sea level rise.

In the Hawaiian Islands, king tides now regularly flood low coastal areas that 50 years ago and 25 years ago were always dry. Thatʻs going to keep getting worse.

The IPCC is getting up to speed and has been more realistic in its 2018 report. It has had to: "One of the key messages that comes out very strongly from this report is that we are already seeing the consequences of 1 degree of global warming through more extreme weather, rising sea levels and diminishing Arctic sea ice, among other changes," said Panmao Zhai, co-chair of IPPCʻs Working Group 1.

In Hawai`i, as temperatures rise, mosquitoes are able to survive at higher and higher elevations—where they carry fatal diseases to Hawaiian forest birds. I attended a meeting last week at which a bird researcher, when asked what was happening right now with Kaua`i forest birds, he said "theyʻre quietly dying of malaria."

Recently 11,000 scientists, exhausted with inaccurately conservative predictions, raised the alarm in a paper in Bioscience Magazine. There is an "urgent need for action," they said. 

Our planet has a fever, itʻs just starting on a long uphill trajectory, and so far, weʻre doing virtually nothing about it.

In our Hawaiian Islands, reduced rainfall associated with climate change has parched forests, and exacerbated wildfires that have burned thousands of acres on all the major islands. 

So, if we continue doing too little, itʻll get a little hotter and weʻll just to adapt, right? Wrong. All the evidence suggests it will keep getting worse, keep getting hotter, keep getting less tolerable.

The central Pacific—our part of the ocean—is seeing corals bleaching and dying. They are impacted by changes in water temperature, changes in ocean acidity, changes in current patterns, all related to climate change.

Here is the summary for policymakers issued by the IPCC in October 2018.

Little blogs like this one have been raising the alarm for years, with little apparent impact on policymakers. Examples? Here from January this year, here from 2016,  here from 2015, here from 2012, here from 2010, here from 2009. And those are just a few of the articles. 

But itʻs hard to feel isolated, because mainstream science has been suggesting ever more alarming scenarios. And while smaller responses to climate change might have worked in the past, what is now required is perhaps more alarming than the threat.

"Collective human action is required to steer the Earth System away from a potential threshold and stabilize it in a habitable interglacial-like state. Such action entails stewardship of the entire Earth System—biosphere, climate, and societies—and could include decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values."

That is from a paper, "Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene," published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

It suggests that if we donʻt act fast and now, the warming instead of stabilizing, will run out of control. That we are on a path to a tipping point, a threshhold, that will keep driving despite our intervention: "If the threshold is crossed, the resulting trajectory would likely cause serious disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies."

In the Hawaiian Islands, on several islands, coastal roads are already being eroded away, forcing highway engineers to consider alternative routes, or extraordinary coastal armoring scenarios.

Here is the list of the more than 10,000 scientists who signed the extraordinary paper in Bioscience. They represent 153 countries, including the U.S., China, Russia, Canada, India, France, most of the nations on the planet, and all the major nations.

Their message is stark: "Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are still rapidly rising, with increasingly damaging effects on the Earth's climate. An immense increase of scale in endeavors to conserve our biosphere is needed to avoid untold suffering due to the climate crisis."

It is not a long paper. Please consider reading it. Hereʻs the link again.

And yet globally, human populations continue to rise. Our energy use continues to rise. Weʻre raising more ruminant animals. Our forest cover is dropping.  In Hawai`i, we celebrate increased air travel as a good thing, we keep buying gas guzzler vehicles, we buy our air conditioners as we complain about the heat.

The first rule about holes is that if youʻre in one, stop digging.

Our Legislature this year started the session with a laudable array of bills to address climate change, and then killed almost all of them. Nathan Eagle at Honolulu Civil Beat reviewed the distressing result. 

© Jan TenBruggencate 2019

Aluminum tariffs, hotel taxes, electric cars and the value of complexity

Targeted taxes and added regulations always have unintended consequences.

In Hawai`i, when we pile taxes onto hotel rooms, it encourages alternative accommodations that may be able to avoid the tax—thus damaging the hotel industry.

When we regulate the heck out of taxis, it opens the door for Uber and Lyft.

Transportation fuel taxes provide an inadvertent subsidy to electric vehicles. Discussions of fixing that with a mileage tax will punish lower-income people who are forced to live where housing prices are cheaper, but who have to commute longer distances.

When President Trump announced new steel and aluminum tariffs, at first blush it seems sound. If these metals from foreign producers pay a big tax to get into the U.S., then that improves the competitiveness of metals from American producers.

But the unintended consequences are many.

Nearly a year ago, the firm NERA Economic Consulting looked into aluminum tariffs and their impact. They used an economic model from another firm, Regional Economic Models Inc. (REMI).

Among the conclusions: the higher prices from across-the-board tariffs would cost more jobs to the larger economy than they would add to the aluminum industry; and the tariffs would harm the parts of the manufacturing economy that rely on aluminum.

The study suggested that tariffs could be tweaked to actually be productive to the local economy, by targeting semi-finished aluminum products.

But, of course, that’s not what President Trump has proposed.

Tariffs and taxes are complicated. They often don’t produce the results intended.

One of the most concerning impacts of the metals tariffs is that while they may be intended to target our economic competitors, they more directly target our friends.

China is a big aluminum producer, and it has severely cut into our aluminum exports. But our biggest source of aluminum is Canada. Sixty percent of the product comes from our northern neighbor.

So it seems that an aluminum tariff could very well not harm China, but further damage Canada, which is already reeling from China’s growing exports.

Unintended consequences.

Which is a statement about complexity. Complexity breeds suspicion and misunderstanding. But complexity is almost always unavoidable in tax and tariff policy. Difficult subjects need smart people and careful consideration.

Simple solutions can sometimes be worse than no solution at all.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2018

There's an electric car in your future--and sooner than you think

A hot red Tesla S. Credit: Tesla

Electric cars represent a fraction of the number of vehicles on the road, but that’s changing—and indications are it’s soon to be changing a lot faster.

EV sales are picking up every month, according to www.ev-volumes.com.

And if they're not quite increasing at an exponential rate, they are increasing real, real fast.

In January 2014 plug-in car sales were about 15,000 globally. 

By January 2015 it was close to 25,000. 

And by January of this year 40,000.

By the middle of 2016, it was approaching 70,000 plug-in cars sold every month. 

In these examples the sales include pure electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids.

Those stats are from the consulting firm EV-Volumes, which says growth in the plug-in market is expected to be 57 percent higher in 2016 than 2015. It says that globally, about 60 percent of the plug-ins are pure electric and 40 percent hybrid.

By September 2016, Hawai`i had more than 4,700 electric vehicles, 27 percent or more than 1,000 more than the year before. The state had more than 22,000 hybrid cars, up 6.5 percent from a year before.

China is the biggest player in the electric vehicle field, followed by Europe, then the U.S. and Japan. 

This Forbes article cites a figure estimating 450,000 electric car sales in China in 2016.

Europe is an interesting area. The Netherlands sees electric vehicles reaching almost 10 percent of every car sold. Holland is pushing to reach 100 percent electric car sales by 2025.

Indeed, all of Europe is pushing hard to increase the numbers, with both subsidies for electric car buyers and aggressive goals. Germany is talking about requiring 100 percent of new cars to be electric by 2030. 

The car manufacturers have gotten the message. More and more of them are offering electric cars. Nissan says it expects 20 percent of its 2020 production to be emission-free. 

The push is not only to push electric vehicle sales directly, but to push back against polluting cars. Paris has banned the weekday use of cars built before 1997. The theory: they don’t have engines that are as efficient as those built during the past 20 years, and they don’t have the same pollution control equipment. 

"We know that the major source of pollution in Paris is traffic. Sixty-six percent of nitrogen dioxide and fine particles come from road traffic. And we know it's old cars that spew out the most toxic fumes. That's why we are progressively going to get rid of them,” said Christophe Najdovsky, the Parisian deputy mayor for transport and public space.

If you’re in the market, know that the list of plug-in cars is a long one these days. In mid-2016, according to EV-volumes, Nissan Leaf led the market, following closely by Tesla’s Model S. Then come BYD’s Tang and Qin models, Chevy Volt, SAIC Roewe E550, Mitsubishi’s Outlander, Renault’s Zoe, BYD’s e6, BMW’s i3 and Tesla’s Model X—and more than a dozen others.

You may not recognize some of those names. BYD is a Chinese car manufacturer. SAIC is a British-Chinese company. 

Another sign that the industry is maturing: None of the cars on the list is a golf-cart looking thing. They’re all sedans or SUVs.

For early adopters, the idea that their hot new EV looks just like your father's sedan could be a problem. But the industry isn't just going for early adopters any more. 

© Jan TenBruggencate 2016

Circling the globe on the power of the sun: Solar Impulse II ready to leave Honolulu

There’s so much going on in the solar world, but the concept of flying around the world in a plane powered by solar cells is one step beyond.

Hawai`i has some solar flying cred. (Image, the Helios flying wing off Kaua`i. Credit: NASA.)

AeroVironment’s  solar plane Helios flew off Kaua`i’s Pacific Missile Range Facility early in the last decade. Ultimately, the experimental unmanned aircraft crashed in June 2003 in rough weather, but not until it had set some records, including a world record altitude in 2001 for non-rocket-powered flight.

The Helios flying wing reached 96,863 feet on the back of some solar cells and propellers.

Its other mission was to prove that solar planes could fly continuously, using fuel cells to store energy during the day, which could be used to power the plane at night.

(Image: Solar Impulse II over Hawai`i. Credit: Solar Impulse.)

It was Solar Impulse I that accomplished that goal in 2010, staying aloft for 26 hours.

That was then. Today, another solar aircraft, Solar Impulse II is parked in Honolulu, ready for the next leg of its flight around the world. That mission was delayed last year when its flight across the western Pacific damaged some of its batteries.

Solar Impulse II is an idea 15 or more years old, and in some ways it is a descendant of the Helios. While Helios was flying, back in 2002, Solar Impulse pilot Bertrand Piccard consulted with AeroVironment’s late Paul McCready, one of the visionaries in solar-powered flight.

The new Solar Impulse, completed in 2014, is a feather-light but gangly aircraft, with honeycombed wings that stretch 236 feet tip to tip. Its upper surfaces are covered by photovoltaic cells. It has four electric motors powering four propellers, each powered by lithium-ion batteries.

Looks a bit like a giant dragonfly.

SI II launched on its global tour in 2015 from Abu Dhabi. Pilots Piccard and André Borschberg took turns flying the one-seat aircraft. They crossed Asia, hopping to stops in Oman, India, Myanmar, China and finally Japan, and then made their longest flight, from Japan to Hawai`i, last year.

The Japan-Hawai`i leg was the world’s longest-ever solar-powered flight. Pilot Borschberg stayed aloft 8 minutes short of 118 hours. But in doing so, his batteries overheated and were damaged, requiring replacement. That, and weather, kept SI II grounded on O`ahu for most of a year.

But the organizers say they are days from a new liftoff, aimed at crossing the rest of the Pacific and then continuing around the world, back to their Abu Dhabi starting point. The remaining flights are expected to all be shorter than the Japan-Hawai`i marathon of five days aloft.

The eastern Pacific flight's conclusion will be determined by wind or weather.  The plane could land anywhere up or down the West Coast, or as far inland as Arizona.

SI II, in anticipation of taking off in mid-April, performed several takeoffs, extended flights and landings in late March from the runway at Kalaeloa with Piccard at the controls.

In a blog post, Piccard wrote: “It was beautiful to fly #Si2 under the full moon tonight and I really enjoyed it. I even flew with the window open to feel the night breeze. My second

landing was the best: a kiss landing. We call it like that because the plane touches down so smoothly that you can barely feel it.”

Here is a YouTube video on the mission. Here is the Solar Impulse website. The mission is to send the world a message about the potential of clean fuels. Here is their clean fuels website.

You can subscribe to get updates on the voyage here. The most recent information we have is that it should leave within two weeks.

When the Solar Impulse II does take off for its long voyage to the northeast, it will pass over hundreds of Hawaiian rooftops outfitted with the same technology that is keeping this plucky airborne adventurer aloft.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2016

The Top Ten Energy Stories in Hawai`i, 2015

Whew, it’s been a big year for energy in the Islands—big enough that it’s risky to pick just 10 of the biggest Hawai`i energy

stories of 2015.

But we’re not shrinking violets at RaisingIslands, so with the caveat that folks can disagree, here we go.

Number One: The top energy story of the year is certainly the controversial proposal by the Florida electric behemoth NextEra Energy to merge with Hawaiian Electric Industries, the corporation that includes Hawaiian Electric, Maui Electric and Hawaii Electric Light. The merger was announced in December 2014 and the PUC docket seeking approval on January 14, 2015. 

It seems like every community group in the state asks to intervene in the HECO/NextEra. The PUC approves 28 intervenors, among them the Renewable Energy Action Coalition of Hawaii, Hawaii Island Energy Cooperative, Kauai Island Utility Cooperative, Hawaii Water Service Co., Ka Lei Maile Alii Hawaiian Civic Club, Maui County, Sun Edison, Hawaii Solar Energy Association, Friends of Lanai, Puna Pono Alliance, Hawaii County, Ulupono Initiative, AES Hawaii, Blue Planet Foundation, SunPower Corp., Tawhiri Power, Hawaii PV Coalition, Paniolo Power, The Gas Co., Hawaii Renewable Energy Alliance, the state Office of Planning, Sierra Club, Hina Power Corp. and the Honolulu Board of Water Supply. Those, and a few others. Some have since dropped out, but still… 

2. The state announces that its goal is for Hawai`i to be100 percent powered by renewable energy by 2045, although it is something of a theoretical standard. Under the language of the commitment, the state could meet the 100 percent standard and still burn some oil. 

3. Gov. David Ige announces in August that he’s against Hawaiian utilities using liquefied natural gas (LNG) to replace oil and coal for energy production, arguing that it would detract from the state’s movement toward renewable energy solutions. 

4. The Kaua`i Island Utility Cooperative dedicates the state’s largest to date solar array, at Anahola, Kaua`i, which replaces the previous largest array at Koloa, also on Kaua`i, which in turn replaced the next previous largest array, also on Kaua`i. KIUC has more solar power per customer on its grid than any other utility in the country. On sunny days, most of the island’s electricity is generated by solar. 

5. It’s not purely a Hawai`i story, but the federal government’s extension of renewable energy tax credits means Hawai`i’s solar and wind industries get a big boost—federal tax credits stay at 30 percent through 2019. 

6. NextEra/HECO merger announcement prompts neighbor island utility self-determination proposals:  Hawai`i Island Energy Cooperative is formed in hopes of capturing Hawaii Electric Light if it becomes available ; and Maui Mayor Alan Arakawa studies a municipal power utility for Maui County. 

7. The Department of Hawaiian Home Lands announced a contract with NextEra affiliate Boulevard Associates LLC for a 60-megawatt wind farm at Kahikinui on Maui, which is a little smaller than the state;s biggest,  the 69 megawatt Kawailoa wind farm on O`ahu. But if built, the Kahikinui windfarm would make Maui the wind capitol of the Islands, adding to the 51 megs of wind power at Kaheawa and 21 megs at Auwahi.

8. KIUC announced plans with Solar City to build the biggest dispatchable solar/battery plant in the nation: a 13-megawatt solar array with a 52-megawatt-hour battery. 

9. Continuing on the battery front, Tetris owner Henk Rogers, through his company Blue Planet Energy, starts selling Sony’s lithium ion phosphate battery technology along with Blue Planet’s own software suite, under the name Blue Ion. And several other vendors are also marketing battery systems for solar arrays.

10. Finally, solar development rolls on. The PUC approved nearly140 megawatts of new solar for O`ahu. Three projects are by Sun Edison and one by Eurus Energy. These, if built, will finally knock Kaua`i out of first place in the biggest-solar-farm category, since each of these plants is bigger than the biggest one on Kaua`i. 

(Full disclosure: This blog’s author, Jan TenBruggencate, serves on the elected board of directors of the Kaua`i Island Utility Cooperative.)

© Jan TenBruggencate 2015

Battery technology exploding, in a good way

If the future of energy is the ability to cheaply and safely store intermittent renewables, then there’s lots of good news on the battery front.

Renewable plus storage means decarbonizing the grid. Public policy argues that’s something we should do effectively and as quickly as possible.

One of the problems is that batteries haven’t been up to the task. Some are too expensive, some are too toxic, some are too fragile, some lose too much energy charging and discharging, some die too soon and need to be replaced. 

The list goes on.

But there’s amazing work being done globally on battery technology. We have reviewed some of that in an earlier series that starts here.  

But since that 2013 series, there’s lots of new stuff. We’ll review a couple of innovations here, starting with flow batteries. .

Researchers at Harvard have been looking for non-toxic alternatives to flow batteries using bromide electrolytes. Flow batteries have energy-rich electrolytes in external tanks, and the electrolytes are pumped through the battery, meaning battery capacity can be increased simply by increasing electrolyte storage.

“Harvard chemistry professor Roy Gordon said they found a formulation using cheap, common materials that “deliver the first high-performance, non-flammable, non-toxic, non-corrosive and low-cost chemicals for flow batteries.  They reported their research in the Sept. 25 issue of Science.

Project chief investigator Michael Aziz said it would be a great way to store solar power: “"This is chemistry I'd be happy to put in my basement. The non-toxicity and cheap, abundant materials placed in water solution mean that it's safe -- it can't catch on fire -- and that's huge when you're storing large amounts of electrical energy anywhere near people." 

Scientists at Ohio State have combined a solar cell and a battery in what they’re calling an aqueous solar flow battery. It’s still a ways from commercial production, but its inventors believe it has a lot of potential.

"This solar flow battery design can potentially be applied for grid-scale solar energy conversion and storage, as well as producing 'electrolyte fuels' that might be used to power future electric vehicles," said lead author Mingzhe Yu. They reported their findings in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. 

Stanford researchers have written about their new aluminum battery, which they say is fast-charging, inexpensive and lasts a long time. They believe it can replace alkaline and lithium-ion batteries. How fast a charge? Think about charging a cell phone in a minute, and a battery that can handle daily charging for decades.

The battery has an aluminum anode and graphite cathode in a liquid salt electrolyte. It still needs some work, but shows great potential, its inventors say.

And it’s not just for small electronics. “The grid needs a battery with a long cycle life that can rapidly store and release energy. Our latest unpublished data suggest that an aluminum battery can be recharged tens of thousands of times,” said Stanford chemistry professor Hongjie Dai. 

But this isn’t to say that all the research is on new battery technologies. There’s also still a lot of work underway on improving existing batteries. As an example, South Korean researchers are reporting on a new lithium-ion design that improves its performance while reducing the problem of overheating. 

And MIT researchers say they’ve developed a way to cut in half the cost of building lithium-ion batteries. That, and they work better, too.

Furthermore, there’s research underway in figuring out how to improve the amount of energy lost in charging and discharging a battery. Generally, you can lose 20 percent or more of the energy it takes to charge a battery when to draw that energy back out.

Researchers at Case Western Reserve University say they’ve adapted solar cells to dramatically increase that efficiency. They wired four perovskite solar cells in series and were able to charge a lithium-ion battery with 7.8 percent loss—the best performance seen to date, they say.

Here is the paper, but it’s a little technical. The Science Daily report on the work is here. 

Perovskite solar cells are comparatively new on the solar scene. They can be manufactured inexpensively, and reportedly can convert into electricity a larger proportion of the sun’s light than other solar panels.

A lot of folks have wondered whether supercapacitors can be adapted to provide long-term energy storage. Supercapacitors are units that can store a lot of power, but they discharge almost instantaneously. Great for a sudden need for power—like when a motor starts up—but less useful as a continuing source of energy.

But there are a lot of applications for bursts of energy that are inefficiently met with standard batteries. Researchers at Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Drexel University looked at new ways to use water materials—specifically old tires—in the manufacture of supercapacitors. 

The point here has not been to cover the universe of battery innovation, but to show that there’s a lot going on. Some of this stuff may not pan out, but a lot of it will, and it will change the energy landscape. 

Some of these technologies may end up in our phones, in our cars, in our houses, out on our utility grids--and maybe even in places where we've never imagined a role for energy storage.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2015