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DENVER – The red-hot nanotechnology industry — the development of super-products from tiny particles with surprisingly powerful properties—gets a fair amount of grief from environmentalists concerned about its environmental health and safety.
Yet at a time when the Gulf oil spill has revived pressure for “clean energy,” nanotech might also be generating some of the most promising hopes for jump-starting fossil-fuel alternatives like improved electric-car batteries and energy-efficient tires —if their inventors can find funding in new capital “valleys of death.”
A new report from Lux Research sees a $29 billion clean-tech nanotech market in 2015.
“Most of the lower-quality, me-too ventures have exited stage left,” said Peter Hébert, co-founder and managing partner of Lux Capital, which invests in energy technology. (Lux Research is a spinoff, founded in 2003.) “A handful of segment leaders have consolidated their positions [both large corporations and startups]. Throughout this winnowing process, we’ve seen great leaps forward in the commercialization of nanoscale science and technology.”
Ray Stults, associate laboratory director of the Colorado-based National Renewable Energy Laboratory, also sees “a really bright future both for renewable energy and the role that nanotechnology can play.”
Some of those innovations were on display at May’s Nano Renewable Energy Summit, held at the University of Denver. (Click on the play arrow to view a video about the conference.) We need these innovations to work, because the U.S. right now is an energy glutton, wasting two-thirds of its source energy. Renewables are just 6 percent of our energy mix, and despite all the recent activity NREL projects it will reach only 9 percent by 2030 (when we’d be almost as oil dependent as we are now).
Clearly, that’s a center that can’t hold. With about 5 percent of the world’s population, we consume a quarter of its energy. Nanotech can help, but much of the research is still at the lab stage. And as many of the entrepreneurs at the conference remarked, there is a “valley of death” between lab and prototype stages and commercialization.
The successful initial public offering (IPO) by A123, a company that makes nano-engineered electric car batteries, “got the attention of investors,” says consultant Joel Serface, a fast-talking futurist. “But it wasn’t a disruptive change.” And we need one, if we’re going to get going with nano-enabled applications for photovoltaics, electricity transmission, fuel cells, semiconductors and the smart grid.
Serface points to the really rapid land rush for wind power in Texas. Despite a political orientation not generally seen as conducive to renewable energy, the state has 10 gigawatts of installed capacity now and expects to leap to 20 gigawatts in five years.
“There are nights when 28 percent of the grid going into Texas is renewable,” he said, adding that businesses today can see a very clear and quick return when they invest in Texas wind. “We need to close the philosophical and financing gap between Silicon Valley and Texas,” Serface said. “In reality, there are multiple ‘valleys of death’ for nanotech funding, and they all have to be addressed.”
Let’s look at the phenomenon of quantum dots. It’s hideously complicated, of course, but the quick version is that tiny quantum dots are minute bits of semiconductor on the nanoscale (a “nanometer” is a billionth of a meter). Using billions of them instead of one large piece of semiconductor allows more effective light capture and allows an efficiency improvement known as “carrier multiplication.”
“In the last year we’ve finally been able to make these things,” said Stultz. “They can be really efficient, but the challenge is to get the right configuration, and to actually make it work.”
So quantum dots could probably vastly improve solar efficiency — if they can get commercialized and produced at an affordable price. Serface, pointing to the vast wind reserves of South Dakota that go untapped because there are not smart grid transmission lines, called for an “Apollo mission for renewables.”
I enjoyed a presentation by Karen Buechler, one of the few women at the conference and co-founder, president and chief technology officer of ALD Nanosolutions. The company makes coatings that are nanometers thick and change the properties of everything from polymer films to carbon nanotubes, battery materials, diamonds and Teflon. “Things you think we couldn’t coat, we can put coatings on,” she said. That can lead to huge improvements in the usefulness of materials, protecting them from moisture, for instance, or from oxygen. And they can change the optical and electrical properties of those materials pretty significantly, too.
ALD has applications in everything from lighting to EVs, sunscreens to electronic devices, Buechler said. The company is working with tire manufacturers to improve fuel efficiency where the rubber meets the road (“incredibly challenging,” said Buechler), and with automakers to get more energy out of EV batteries.
In fact, quite a lot of applications, in and out of the conference, are aimed at improving the environmental performance of cars. For instance, John Finley (pictured), CEO of MemPro Ceramics, has developed a new method for making ceramic nanofibers to be incorporated into a much less expensive (and thus more widely used) catalytic converter for everything from lawn mowers to railroad locomotives. The ceramic catalyst is $237 an ounce, compared to $1,000 an ounce for conventional precious metal catalysts.
Right now, Finley said, the company is testing small engines of six to 30 horsepower. (There are 14 million of those engines made every year, and they are typically big polluters.) Finley’s technology is infinitely scaleable. In the video about the conference posted above, he describes a $10 billion annual industry.
Right now, MemPro has 82 investors who have put in $2.25 million, but that’s not enough to get the company’s Albuquerque fully up and running.
KleenSpeed Technologies is a San Francisco-based company trying to get a battery EV into prodution. President Tim Collins, a former investment banker, said that nanotechnology can increase the electron flow from EV batteries, and make them both lighter and more efficient. The Tesla Roadster has 880 pounds of batteries, he said, but KleenSpeed is aiming at no more than 300 pounds. And reducing battery weight would greatly increase range — the holy grail for EVs at the moment.
Keith Blakely, CEO of NanoMech, said that fuel cells “are approaching commercial viability through the use of nanomaterials as catalysts,” and there are also applications for the ultracapacitors that can make EVs perform more efficiently. NanoMech itself is working on improving lubricants to reduce the friction in wind turbine motors and gearboxes.
The nanotech breakthrough in A123 batteries, developed at MIT, changes the lattice structure of iron phosphate atoms to improve the conductivity of the company’s relatively inexpensive iron phosphate cathode, enabling more charge cycles.
Nanotech-now.com called A123 “a ‘perfect storm’ company — nanotech, global warming, energy storage, batteries, green, high fuel prices, pressure for electric and hybrid car energy storage improvements, electrical grid storage…manufacture in China — all make A123 the right company in all the hot investible spaces.”
Yeah, maybe, but its stock, after a spectacular rise, has fallen from over $20 a share to around $9 today. At the conference, Jim Hurd, a live-wire corporate advisor who operates Molecular Business Consultants, pointed out that the Chinese government is a much bigger investor in renewable energy development than is the U.S. Venture capital funding is going into software companies today, he said, because companies can invest a little and get to profitability quickly.
“There’s a lot of technology developed here but commercialized elsewhere,” agreed Kelly Carnes, president and CEO of Washington-based consultants Techvision21. “Other countries are more aggressive and visionary. We say it is wrong to pick winners and losers, but while we sit around and have philosophical debates, other countries have just moved on.” Russia is big on nanotechnology funding now, they said.
Of course, we shouldn’t put nanotechnology into the market until we know it’s safe. But if some of these applications can get more renewable energy into a market starved for it, they will be doing a huge public service.