When talk turns to energy and its related issues—cost, availability of resources, the potential of alternatives—what becomes clear is that clarity itself is at a premium. Agreement on any single aspect of our energy present or energy future is elusive, in part because complex questions defy simple answers.
Understanding the technology is difficult enough, and the science is obscured by political partisanship, special-interest agendas, and common misperceptions. Sifting for reliable, objective information becomes an exercise in frustration, if not futility. Yet as we look to our collective future, we expect policymakers to guide us to a world in which energy is powering our potential, not constraining it.
Does anyone have an answer? The answer? No, but some can help clear the path to understanding. That’s a role that the Engineering Policy and Leadership Institute (EPLI) at Iowa State University intends to fill through the Engineering Thematic Year.
Each year, EPLI will hold a series of presentations and roundtable discussions dedicated to thoroughly studying a global technological issue. The issues themselves stem from the College of Engineering’s 2050 Challenge, essentially a platform for ensuring that renewable nonpolluting energy, abundant clean water, access to modern health care, sustainable agriculture and manufacturing, and safe roads and bridges will be available to the nine billion people who will populate the planet by mid-century.
Tools, not advocacy
EPLI’s first thematic year, Energy Security and Sustainability, began in September and will run to April 2009. Experts will cover energy and its relationship to national security, politics, conservation, supply and demand, economic prosperity, alternative energies, and agriculture. Monthly events feature keynote speakers and moderated roundtable discussions, concluding with a thematic year capstone summit in fall 2009.
“The objective of each thematic year is to provide lawmakers and other constituencies with thoughtful, well-articulated information that can help them in policymaking decisions,” says EPLI director Ed Jaselskis.
Keynote speakers include R. James Woolsey, former director of the CIA; Eldon Boes, senior professional staff on the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry; and various energy industry leaders. Also featured will be two Iowa State researchers: EPLI scientific advisor Vikram Dalal, Thomas M. Whitney Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering; and Robert C. Brown, Bergles Professor in Thermal Science, Iowa Farm Bureau director of the Bioeconomy Institute, and director of the Center for Sustainable Environmental Technologies.
From those presentations and the roundtable discussions that follow, EPLI will generate information in various forms that accurately conveys the viewpoints of participants and data relevant to their positions. The goal, according to Katy Rice, associate director of the thematic year, is to provide tools, not advocacy or recommendations. One objective, she says, is to produce an “energy lexicon” that can be used as a reference by policymakers. By including information culled from the roundtables, as well as additional data gathered from research, the lexicon will bring clarity to the complex and wide-ranging subject of energy alternatives.
“We will learn from the speakers,” says Rice, “but will fill any gaps by conducting our own literature reviews and eliciting information from experts at Iowa State and elsewhere. The hope is that with the lexicon in hand, decision makers will focus their time and energy on formulating and implementing policy. As Jaselskis puts it, “We just want to help policymakers make informed decisions.”
Capturing the sun
Particularly when considering alternative sources of energy, the complexity of options and technical challenges can be even more difficult to understand. This is certainly the case with solar energy, the basis of a suite of featured stories in this issue of Innovate.
The sun remains an obvious but elusive resource. The principle seems simple enough—making use of an unlimited, “free” resource—but troublesome issues of efficiency and cost cloud wide-scale implementation. Most people are aware that solar panels can be used to convert sunlight to usable energy, but few understand the technology that makes them work, let alone the technical challenges involved with making them a significant response to the world’s energy needs.
EPLI’s Dalal leads research that seeks to improve the efficiencies and economies of solar cells. One of the fundamental issues facing engineers is to find substitutes for the crystalline silicon semiconductors that are a basic component in today’s solar panels. Dalal’s approach is to fabricate lattices of less-expensive versions of silicon. Yet his success in doing so has uncovered a new challenge: the less-expensive materials are also less efficient.
One of Dalal’s collaborators, Rana Biswas, a scientist at Iowa State’s Institute for Physical Research and Technology and adjunct associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, is working to address that issue by exploring the use of photonic band gaps to create more efficient pathways in the photon-to-electron process. As Dalal, Biswas, and their team strive to engineer today’s solutions, they also look 15 years ahead to concepts such as organic semiconductors and their potential applications in solar cells.
Sumit Chaudhary, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, also sees an organic future in solar cell construction. His vision focuses on organic solar cell polymers, and his goal is to make solar energy affordable enough to be a widely available option. Yet the obstacles he faces are all too familiar to those in the solar energy field: finding just the right composition of materials and enhancing the efficiency of power conversion from the cells. Chaudhary has opened his mind and his lab to any idea that might advance his research, convinced that solar cells have world-changing potential.
Bringing it home
While research aims to develop these technologies, the call intensifies for energy solutions that bridge the laboratory and the places where we live and work. The Solar Decathlon, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, presents engineers and designers an opportunity to implement, demonstrate, and showcase the application of solar cell technology in the home as a way to provide renewable energy.
Iowa State’s participation in the 2009 version of the Solar Decathlon represents a multidisciplinary, cross-college effort to integrate design and technology. Faculty and students from across the university are designing and building the “Interlock House,” an 800-square-foot structure that not only will be fully energy self-sufficient through solar technologies, but also seeks to generate more energy than it consumes, potentially altering our perception of “the good life” in a renewable energy future.
These are just three of the numerous multidisciplinary efforts among many more ongoing research tracks at Iowa State in solar and other renewable forms of energy. Yet they highlight the search for practical solutions that lies at the heart of the 2050 Challenge and will present policymakers with workable options as they guide us in the decades to come.