In Energy Innovation, Everything New Is Old Again

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PEORIA, Ariz. -- As light filled the sky on a recent morning here, a handful of giant mirrored dishes were being prepared to track the sun and ultimately feed solar-generated electricity into the Phoenix area.

High-tech marvels, the solar dishes look like three-story-tall mirrored flowers atop steel stems. But at the heart of each dish is a very old-fashioned invention: a Stirling engine, patented by a Scotsman in 1816, decades before the diesel or internal combustion engine.

The cutting edge of renewable energy is littered with long-established ideas such as the Stirling. From generating power from the wind to harvesting liquid fuel from algae, some of today's most promising new technologies are actually quite old.

Technology often stands on the shoulders of prior discovery. In the energy field in particular, there are precious few killer apps -- ideas that supersede earlier methods. New energy technologies tend to develop slowly and spread at a snail's pace. It takes time and money to accomplish small improvements, and even more of both to spread those improvements across the energy system.

The invention of the gas turbine -- used to power aviation and generate electricity -- is the only true energy breakthrough in the 20th century, says Vaclav Smil, a prolific author on energy topics and professor at the University of Manitoba. "There is nothing new under the sun."

Others would disagree. They cite nuclear power, even though a nuclear plant incorporates old-fashioned steam turbines. And other inventions might yet turn out to be game changers, such as the lithium-ion battery or regenerative braking, the technology hybrid vehicles use to capture energy while reducing the car's speed.

So while the Obama administration is pouring billions of dollars into renewable-energy research and counting on green technology to create new jobs, some energy experts warn that change is likely to be less rapid than many Americans -- conditioned by the lively pace of computer innovation -- expect.

Even technology enthusiasts admit that innovation is slow, and costly. "If you want to speed up the innovation process, you are not going to do it on the cheap," says Ted Nordhaus, chairman and founder of the Breakthrough Institute, an energy think tank in Oakland, Calif. "You are going to do it with brute-force expenditure."

Other optimists say that improvements in alternative energy now occur more rapidly than in the past, because the quest for renewables is no longer the providence of inexperienced enthusiasts but has been embraced by corporations with big research budgets.

"What has really shifted in the last five, 10 years is the caliber of talent and resources and infrastructure that is being brought to bear," says Nicholas Parker, the chairman of the Cleantech Group LLC, a San Francisco research and consulting firm.

But he acknowledges the time to move an energy idea from patent to market is generally measured in decades, not years.

Things have moved faster in some other areas of science and technology, such as genetics, which in less than half a century went from the description of the double-helix to cloning and gene therapies. But in the energy arena, ideas tend to percolate longer.

American inventor Charles Fritts developed the first solar cell in 1883, introducing the basic design still in use today. Five years later, the first wind turbine used to generate electricity was built in Cleveland.

President George W. Bush ushered cellulosic ethanol into mainstream consciousness when he spoke about turning wood chips and switchgrass into liquid fuels during his 2006 State of the Union address. But the first effort at turning wood into fuel was made by German chemists more than a century ago.

When Exxon Mobil Corp. said this summer it would invest up to $600 million over the next six years on research on turning algae into fuel, it was the second turn for the tiny organisms. The federal government poured money into algae-to-fuels research from 1978 until 1996.

Royal Dutch Shell PLC is building a multibillion dollar facility in Qatar to turn natural gas into a clean-burning liquid fuel. It is the culmination of years of work, but the basic technology -- the Fischer-Tropsch Process -- dates back to the 1920s.

Even when a groundbreaking new energy source emerges, its spread is often slow. It took oil 80 years from the first commercial production in the 1860s for it to capture one-quarter of the global energy market.

And sometimes, a new energy technology turns out to have significant drawbacks once it is employed on a large scale, which makes the energy industry adopt new technologies only slowly.

Consider the case of solar thermal generation -- a group of inventions that concentrate the heat of the sun to make electricity. Hundreds of large-scale solar installations have been proposed from Southern California to West Texas to take advantage of the region's ample blue-sky days.

There is a catch. More traditional big solar plants guzzle water to turn turbines -- much like a coal plant burns the fossil fuel to heat up water to turn turbines.

"Look at where solar is going to be deployed. By and large it is in sunny places where water is scarce," says Justin Elliott, head of field operations for Stirling Energy Systems, which built the Peoria solar project.

He is happy to talk about this because his solar dishes use a tiny amount of water to produce electricity thanks to the old Stirling engine. Put simply, the engine uses an external heat supply to cause a trapped gas to expand, driving a piston. By comparison, an internal combustion engine uses heat within the engine (the spark plug-fired explosion of petroleum droplets) and a continuous supply of new fuel.

The 1,000 square feet of mirrors on each dish concentrate solar heat on a nine-inch aperture, heating up coils of hydrogen to 720 degrees Celsius. The hydrogen expands, pushing pistons that turn a generator. The hydrogen is then cooled through a radiator and the process starts anew.

If the Stirling solar dish is finally finding its place in the sun, the road has been long.

The idea of powering a Stirling engine with the sun's rays was taken up by Ford Motor Co. in the 1970s. It sold its work to McDonnell-Douglas, which was later bought by Boeing, which sold it to Southern California Edison. In 1996, it ended up in the hands of a group of investors led by a holistic health-care entrepreneur. Last year, a majority stake in the company was acquired by Ireland-based NTR PLC and has a portfolio of renewable-energy companies, including Stirling Energy.

The first thing the new corporate parent did was to focus on driving down costs. It cut the amount of steel needed for each dish by 38%. It replaced three specially made radiators, used to cool the hydrogen, with a single off-the-shelf radiator for heavy-duty construction equipment.

The basic Stirling engine may have been around for a long time, says Steve Cowman, chief executive of Stirling Engine Systems, but making it work on a large scale hasn't been easy. "If it were easy, everyone would be doing it."

Steve Cowman is CEO of Stirling Energy Systems. This article on energy innovation incorrectly identified the company as Stirling Engine Systems



Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126048948482786623.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories