Publications
August 2008 Newsletter
Dear Friends of CITRIS,
I recently returned from a conference in Copenhagen feeling hopeful about the ability and willingness of some of the world’s smartest and most capable people to address global climate issues. The Research Conference on Innovation in Climate and Energy was co-sponsored by CITRIS and the Copenhagen Climate Council in June as part of a series of meetings in preparation for next year’s United Nations Summit on Climate Change, where delegates from around the world will fashion a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol.
Broadly speaking, the mission of the conference was to explore the ways that technology, business, and public policy can work together to help reduce carbon emissions as much and as quickly as possible while doing the least harm to the world’s economies. That task taps directly into CITRIS’s greatest strengths. One of those, of course, is developing new technologies in the fields of energy production and efficiency. The first story below—about Ali Shakouri’s brilliant effort to create thermoelectric materials that can recapture energy lost as heat in combustion engines—is only one example of dozens. UC Davis has an impressive program in energy use in transportation and agriculture; UC Merced has created a super-efficient building environment that is both an expression of the best existing technologies and a living laboratory employed in the search for new ones; UC Berkeley has a nuclear engineering department dedicated to developing safe and clean nuclear power as well as an important bio-fuels program. There are many, many more.
But the technological progress we are making at CITRIS and elsewhere around the world, however great, cannot, by itself, solve the carbon emissions problems we face. Without good public policy aimed at getting those technologies into production, and without innovative business models that can make them profitable to promote and affordable to implement, even the very best innovations will not get the kind of the kind of traction they need.
And that is exactly why CITRIS, which combines its core technological mission with public policy, legal, and business expertise, has so much to contribute to this effort. And that is why the conference was so encouraging.
One important innovation emerging from the meeting is the subject of the second story in this newsletter. The Climate Navigator is a web-based set of tools under development by CITRIS scientists that will help to model different carbon emissions scenarios. Users can enter different values for various policy and business approaches and investigate what ramifications they will have in the adoption of different technologies and ultimately on the resulting carbon emissions. The calculator shows just how interrelated the technological, regulatory, and economic variables are; change one and the whole picture shifts. We are fortunate that Dr. Gary Baldwin will lead this important project, among others, in his new role as our Director of Special Projects.
As the article below explains, the Climate Navigator is more than these modeling tools, however. It is also an online community where the best and brightest minds trying to pave the way for a successful Copenhagen Treaty can compile and share their results, where they can work together, and where they can share the progress they are making with the broader world.
Climate change poses unprecedented risks and challenges to humanity. But it is also an opportunity to create innovative solutions and new ventures and partnerships that may result in a better and more sustainable ways of life. We at CITRIS are dedicated to doing whatever we can to help humanity both face those challenges and seize those opportunities.
Keep up the good work.
Paul Wright
Acting Director
CITRIS Awards, Honors, & News
Solar Taxi visits
CITRIS
Swiss adventurer Louis Palmer is taking a small blue environmentally-friendly taxi around the world. The solar-electric two-seat taxi with attached trailer is an attempt to call attention to global warming while providing solutions for oil independency. Photos and a video of the lecture are available online.
http://www.citris-uc.org/solartaxi
CITRIS Research
Exchange Schedule online
The schedule for the fall semester is now online at http://www.citris-uc.org/RE-fall2008.
As always, these talks are free and webcast live, in addition to being available afterwards on our youtube site [http://www.youtube.com/citris].
UC Students travel to
Denmark for Renewable Energy Summer Program
Faculty members at the University of California, Santa Cruz,
have organized a renewable energy program that brought together U.S. and Danish
students for four weeks this summer in Lolland, Denmark.
http://www.citris-uc.org/news/uc_students_travel_denmark_renewable_energy_summer_program
Improving Maternal
Health Worldwide
UC Berkeley EECS Professor John Canny and graduate student Divya Subramanian received the best paper prize at the "Persuasive Technology" conference. The paper shows that conversational presentation of information is more effective than lecture style and is part of a project on maternal health care for developing countries.
Helene York to speak
at Berkeley, Sept. 22
Helene York is the director of the Bon Appétit Management Company Foundation,
an educational organization whose mission is to educate consumers, chefs, and
food service managers about how their food choices affect the environment and
the livelihoods of traditional food producers.
http://www.citris-uc.org/events/helene_york_speak_citris
Services in
Healthcare workshop: Sept. 17-18
How can we improve the service of healthcare? This topic will be examined from a variety of viewpoints including the emerging field of services science, engineering, management, and the field of health services research.
CITRIS Headquarters
Dedication, Feb. 27, 2009
On Feb. 27, 2009, CITRIS will mark the official opening of its new headquarters, Sutardja-Dai Hall, with a day of talks and celebration.
http://www.citris-uc.org/HQdedication
Too Darn Hot: Thermoelectric Power Generation
by Gordy Slack
Two attacks in the technological battle against the energy crisis are the search for new and renewable energy sources, and the battle against energy waste. New materials under development by Ali Shakouri, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, stand to address both issues at once by converting energy now wasted as heat into a reusable new source of electricity.
About 65 percent of the energy generated by the cylinders of a car engine leaves the car as wasted heat. If a significant portion of that wasted energy could instead be recovered and put to use, says Shakouri, it could substantially improve automobile efficiency.
Shakouri and his colleagues in the UC Santa Cruz-based Thermionic Energy Conversion Center are working to rescue some of that heat and convert it directly into electricity. They have recently received a four-year, 6.8-million-dollar grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to further their work and develop thermoelectric materials that will allow them do just that. This research started under a prior, Office of Naval Research (ONR) multi-university research initiative in 2003.
The new project involves scientists from six universities (UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, Delaware, Harvard, MIT, Purdue, and North Carolina State) and an independent company (BSST Inc.), who work together to create new materials that could, according to Shakouri, boost the efficiency of an engine by as much as 20 percent.
For over a century, physicists have known that if one side of a material is much hotter than the other, then free charges, such as electrons, on the hot side move faster, and some of those fast-moving electrons will find their way to the cold side, creating a flow of electricity. This conversion of heat into electricity has never been efficient enough to commercialize profitably, except in very specific applications where efficiency is not vital. But by exploiting new materials that can coax and guide electrons effectively from the hot side of the material into a condensed stream on the cold side, thermoelectric energy generation, as the process is called, may soon become a potent resource, says Shakouri.
To be efficient, the materials have to have high electrical conductivity, low thermal conductivity, and a high “Seebeck coefficient,” that is, the hot electrons must flow much more easily than the cold ones flow.
Shakouri and his colleagues are focusing on solid-state thermionics, developing metal semiconductor nanocomposites that selectively scatter cold, low-energy electrons, while allowing hot, high-energy ones to flow easily in one direction. “The materials are like filters for some electrons,” Shakouri says.
The researchers are initially focusing on recovering heat energy from the catalytic converter and the exhaust rather than the engine because they are simpler targets.
Once the heat is converted into electricity, it could be directed to an electric motor, in the case of a hybrid car, or to operating the car’s air-conditioner, headlights, and other electrical functions.
“The field is so multi-disciplinary,” says Shakouri, “that to assemble a team of the leading experts in the nation for each of these areas, we had to open the project to seven institutional partners.” Collaborating scientists come from such fields as thermal transport, electrical transport, physics, electrical engineering, and material science.
In addition to its six participating universities, the project has a corporate partner, BSST, the research arm of Amerigon. BSST is helping Shakouri’s team develop scalable manufacturing approaches for their thermionic materials. The production methods employed up to now, while demonstrating proof of concept, would scale-up sufficiently for commercial manufacturing, notes Shakouri, who predicts that within a decade his materials, or materials like them, will be used to increase the fuel efficiency of vehicles by 10 to 20 percent.
Navigating Climate Change: Tools for the UN Summit and Beyond
While there is broad consensus that carbon emissions must be drastically reduced to avert substantial climate change, there is still no consensus among scientists or policy makers about how best to effect those reductions. Even if there is a will to improve the atmosphere at the 2009 Copenhagen Summit, it will still be necessary to forge a way. Helping to navigate this task was the goal at this summer’s conference in Copenhagen, Innovation in Climate and Energy, which was co-sponsored by the Copenhagen Climate Council and CITRIS. Top representatives from governments, corporations, and universities discussed ideas and explored innovative models that would accelerate the promotion of carbon-reducing technologies and help ensure a successful transition to a low-carbon, low-fossil-fuel world economy.
The Copenhagen conference was unique in that it focused on the relationships among public policy, the role of business, and technological means that could be used to fight global warming.
“Broadly speaking, the mission of the conference was to explore the ways that technology, business, and public policy can work together to help reduce carbon emissions as much and as quickly as possible while doing the least harm to the world’s economies. That task taps directly into CITRIS’s greatest strengths,” notes CITRIS Acting Director Paul Wright.
A key objective of the conference was to facilitate networking among people from a wide range of academic, industrial, and governmental backgrounds. This was accomplished by bringing together policymakers to the brainstorming table with executives from large and innovative energy companies such as Vestas, Duke Energy, DONG Energy, and Novozymes, and with leading scientists, such as Professors Paul Wright, Laura Tyson, Daniel Kammen, and Steve Chu. That networking effort will continue in a new forum that represents one of the meeting’s biggest accomplishments.
“The question is, how can we develop and adopt policies to enable the productive interplay between technologies, policy, and business?” asks John Zysman, a UC Berkeley professor of political science and an organizer and presenter at the conference.
In an effort to create models of the relationships in business, policy, and technology to help guide innovative and rational decision making at the 2009 UN Summit, CITRIS and Denmark have launched a global collaboration to develop a suite of tools known as the Climate Navigator.
The Climate Navigator will have several interrelated parts and functions, according to Gary Baldwin, who will be leading this project as part of his role as Director of Special Projects at CITRIS. It will serve as an Internet-based community forum for researchers, policy makers, and business leaders, allowing politicians and others to direct questions to experts or open on-line discussions about specific proposals. It will also be a digital library, organizing the growing base of knowledge about how business models and policy can influence technology. In addition, the Navigator will employ new technology itself, including computer modeling applications developed by Dan Kammen’s lab at Berkeley.
The Navigator will give people a place where they can try out new ideas toward addressing climate change, both in text such as white papers and blogs, and in modeling tools such as the one developed by Dan Kammen’s group that models different biofuel scenarios, allowing users to see the carbon-emissions ramifications of various policy and investment strategies.
“The central challenge of the 21st century will be to replace the vast fossil-fuel infrastructure with a new economy based on low-carbon technologies,” says Kammen, Director of the UC Berkeley Renewable and Appropriate Energy Lab. “The issue on the table is the need to finance clean energy research programs and to build markets where low-carbon technologies are rewarded.”
“We have some models that allow users to set greenhouse gas limits. The programs tell them what will happen to the planet given various numbers,” continues Kammen. “They can then work backwards to calculate what the US or China, or both, would have to do, or have the ability to do, to avert catastrophe.”
Kammen’s lab is now building a model that would allow users to look at how different carbon prices would impact the expected build-out of transmission lines. A similar model could compare the carbon advantages of investing in innovations in battery technology to investing the same amount in solar energy’s cost efficiency, for example.
A model Kammen built two years ago became the basis of California’s low-carbon fuel standards. “It had a direct route into policy and is a very widely used model,” says Kammen.
While new energy sources like biofuels, the development of wind, solar, and other renewables, more efficient engines and building practices, smart buildings, and other CITRIS-style innovations will be key to any long-term solution, Baldwin says, “technology alone cannot solve the climate crisis. Nor can governments alone, through public policy, solve the problem. And while good business practices will influence emissions levels, their full impact will only be felt if coordinated with technological innovation and policy.”