A Look at Alternative Energy Sources and the Challenges Ahead

Energy and environmental experts agree that there are three hard truths in the field of energy. The first one is that the demand for energy is going to rise, the second is that there will not be enough conventional fuel to cover this demand and the third is that with the increasing demand and use of energy, CO2 emissions will multiply.

“We know that demand is going to increase dramatically because of the many billions of poor people around the world who don’t have access to sustainable energy, wanting a better life,” says Josef Waltl, a senior advisor to the UN initiative, Sustainable Energy for All.

That’s why, he says the world needs new energy and the only real new energy source is renewable energy. But as of yet the world is not economically and technologically capable of putting conventional energy resources aside in favour of renewables.

“We need every kind of resource in the energy mix. It’s not about either this or that,” says Waltl. “It’s about renewables and non-renewables. The world will have to allocate a huge amount of money, capital and brainpower into the topic of developing alternative energy sources, finding ways to store them and using them in a way that’s different from what we have become used to in the last century.”

One of the areas where alternative energy is already being used is e-mobility but the batteries’ capacity and their high cost is still a problem.

In their documentary film ‘The Lithium Revolution’, Andreas Pichler and Julio Weiss say rechargeable lithium-ion batteries could solve the energy storage problem. In a time of global resource shortage and increasing energy prices, it is lithium that is on the way to becoming “the” natural resource of the 21st century, they say. 

The American company Tesla Motors has delivered more than 70,000 electric cars since 2008 and has now put serious money, up to $5 billion to be exact, into producing a gigafactory to manufacture lithium-ion battery packs for cars as well as homes. The factory is supposed to produce 50 gigawatt hours of electricity and manufacture about 500,000 batteries for cars and an unknown number of batteries for regular households by 2017.   

The project, according to economists is the first real sign that we’re moving toward a future in which alternative energy sources will have a greater share in the energy mix.

“With regards to available resources of lithium, we don’t have a real problem,” says Professor Reinhard Haas from the Vienna University of Technology. “The question is how to harvest this lithium and the costs involved.”

The biggest producers of lithium are Chile, Argentina and Bolivia. Around 50 percent of the world’s lithium reserves lies in the Salar de Uyuni salt flat in southwest Bolivia and the country has already opened its first lithium processing plant. The project is state-funded and does not permit intervention from foreign investors, which doesn’t help since the extraction demands a lot of money as well as technological know-how.

China on the other hand is using a lot of its money alongside South Korean and Australian technology to extract lithium carbonate from the raw material and use it to manufacture battery cells. The biggest challenge is their storage capacity.

Often leading demand not least because of the size of its population and economy, China is currently the world’s number one in almost all technologies for environmentally friendly electricity generation. But even in China around 90 percent of electricity is produced with coal.

“Over the next 20 to 30 years, China will see a 7 to 8 percent growth in energy demand and to cover that demand, it will have to use traditional fuels,” says Waltl. “Then, we have the 1.2 billion Indians, a billion Africans, 250 million Indonesians and 200 million Brazilians; so we will need all sources of energy we can get a hold on and fossil fuels will continue to be a major part of the energy mix.”

More fossil fuel means more CO2 emissions and tackling that through the increased use of renewable energy requires finding an answer to the question of energy storage. 

“If people want to have a green environment and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we have to set the corresponding regulatory conditions,” says Professor Haas. “One kind of regulation is taxing rather than subsidizing, and currently worldwide many countries are subsidizing fossil energy and others are taxing it, obviously it depends on whether you have it in excess or whether you import it. If we have this cost of greenhouse gas emissions included in the final energy prices, then we can have competition between different supplies and demands of technologies.”

Experts agree that more research is needed. “About 30 years ago the production of solar electricity was seen as hugely uneconomical and the cost of production was about four or five times more than traditional methods of electricity production but this price gap has now closed,” says Waltl.  “We should be quite positive about the ingenuity of human beings and their ability to solve very difficult problems provided there is support by governments and regulators and the right economic incentives,” he concludes.

HL/HSN   

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