Royal Society Impressions
June 10, 2009
It was an interesting couple of days. Its a long time since I’ve talked to people doing fundamental science and I was really treading water when things started to get technical, but I survived, which is nice.
Impressions are;
That these guys are sick of being asked when its going to be in the shops. They understand the time-dependency where climate is concerned, the political dependency where energy security is concerned and the social and developmental imperatives too. They know their own areas incredibly well and were not really calling for more investment in those areas. What they want is science undergraduates from the UK in order to sustain the full development cycles for these technologies. OK, that’s investment, but its not something that can be fixed short term by throwing cash at it.
Overseas undergrads and postgrads are good at keeping university research departments open from a financial point of view, but those guys & girls go back home after a few years taking their skills with them. This disrupts development and slows it down. International and inter-disciplinary working are really good, even essential, things to get a set of solutions to market, but the fundamental science needs long-term dedication as well.
Having said that, the time-table is as follows:
Fuel cells – domestic commercialisation in the next couple of years in the UK for fuel cell CHP running on natural gas – looking at it from the outside the market needs a policy kick-start, but apart from that its good to go. Industrial commercialisation appears more price dependent because of the engineering involved in coping with the stack heat, and is strictly niche at the moment. The focus is on bringing the stack operating temperature down.
Hydrogen fuel cell cars – 2015 roll-out date from a consortium of several manufacturers, but requires govt investment in infrastructure. Looks ambitious to me, even in Japan. 2020 looks more like it.
Synfuels from CO2, sunlight and water – 10-15 years to pre-commercial scale. Something about this one seems a bit ‘too good to be true’ to me. I’m sure that you can synthesize simple hydrocarbons from water and air, but I’m not sure that its a great idea in the full life-cycle. I think that we should probably aim higher. Early days though.
Fusion – sometime this century (probably)
Fission – the first 3rd gen is currently being built in Finland
Photovoltaics – 15-25 years to cost parity with current grid power based on silicon technologies – dye-sensitized organics or thin film could disrupt this curve. Dye sensitized cells are much closer to mass roll-out than second gen thin film. First gen thin film (CIGS) are available now in small volumes.
Supercaps – already commercialised and in 1 million Prius’s
Hydrogen storage – 10+ years at best
So, really and truly sustainable solar PV, hydrogen and synfuels are 10+ years away, at least, and investment will not help in the short term because there are not enough science grads out there to do the actual work. That’s kinda depressing.
There were some misapprehensions, from non-scientists in the audience, about what fundamental scientists do. These participants seemed to feel that scientists should know what their discoveries will bring before they discover them. Seems weird to me, expecting an explorer to draw the map before they set out. Maybe that’s the communication breakdown between arts & science (CP Snow’s Two Cultures and all that), and why we are lacking science undergrads. People just don’t understand what science is or does at a really fundamental level, never mind the applied sciences and engineering.
The most pleasant folks that I met were the nuclear scientists, the least pleasant the environmentalist (singular), but please don’t extrapolate that to all nuclear scientists are nice guys and all environmentalist are ogres. Of the 4 or 5 people in the audience of ~200 that I had a decent chat to, two were nuclear, one environmental, one finance and one undecided.
Conference Collaborations 1
March 3, 2009
As a group my student collegues and I are organising a conference to run later this year called “Transforming the Energy Future:Pathways to Change”. We had a competitive pitch between ourselves and the subset that I was part of won. The USP was to bring an incredibly wide range of energy actors together with graphics, media & design students from our campus, our sister campus and beyond in order to get a really inter-disciplinary feel.
Apart from providing a forum for debate on energy between the normal governmental, academic and non-governmental interests, we wanted to give access to students from other disciplines to the, sometimes rather closed, energy policy debate and comment through means that they feel comfortable in i.e. their own disciplines, so films for film makers, graphics for graphicists, etc. It doesn’t sound much, but the bunker mentality in academia is already being felt as the administration starts to express its reservations about the idea.
We had our first meeting with some graphic design students at University College Falmouth today to present our idea for collaboration and it went well. A number have come forward to have a more detailed meeting and maybe take on the task of providing a graphical interpretation of the conference’s mission.
I was a little nervous. I wasn’t sure what to expect. For the graphics students this is an elective choice to be involved, so there was no guarantee that any of them would want to take part. I’m glad that there was a positive response and am looking forward to some really interesting approaches to the brief.
Next meeting, next week.
