Renewable energy 2.0: Look to the past for a better future | Bangkok Post: business

BY INVITATION

If you go driving in Thailand, from time to time you may see billboards promoting great new solar power plants being built. This is a clean and efficient way to make electricity and the technology is well proven, safe, and extremely low-maintenance. Indeed, with the growth of solar panels, we would be forgiven in thinking that the future of renewable energy is solely in electricity production.

But when we wake up in the morning, we not only use electricity: if we have a shower we need heat of some kind to warm the water. We also need heat to make our coffee, and we need mechanical energy to turn our fans and so forth; indeed, when we drive our cars we need liquid or gas fuels to make the car go too.

And here is the key challenge: Electricity does not convert into other forms and cannot be transferred for long distances without real and significant energy losses. The current ideas have been that we fit renewable energy into existing energy systems, but the flaw in this approach is simply that doing that brings in real and problematic inefficiencies.