Better cheap than good: renewable power for developing world

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A bit over a year ago, we reported on a variety of developments in the production and use of hydrogen. One of those was a cheap and easy way to produce a catalyst that would liberate hydrogen from water when provided with an electric current. The results-focused description provided in the Science paper turned out to obscure the fact that this catalyst was part of a much larger vision for changing the global energy economy. MIT's Daniel Nocera, whose lab produced the research, used a talk at today's EmTech conference to fill the audience in on the vision.

Nocera pointed out that most of the work in providing carbon-neutral energy has focused on increasing efficiencies of existing technology and creating economies of scale, both of which will ultimately reduce the cost of electricity produced in the developed world. The problem has been that this has kept the price of the hardware expensive. As a result, the solutions we're arriving at won't make sense for the developing world. "We need to tackle the non-legacy world, and they don't have any money," Nocera said.

To drive the point home, Nocera showed a curve that plotted the weight of something and the number produced, and showed that heavy, rare stuff costs a lot (like 747s), while lighter, more common items are cheap—the Hamburger was on the other end of the spectrum. "I want to be the Hamburgler of energy," Nocera said.

His point was that to get there, you need to ignore efficiency. Instead, you have to focus on bringing the cost down for solutions that can operate on the individual level, without the big, expensive infrastructure like an electric grid. And that's where the catalyst comes in. Given the right salt solution, one containing cheap ingredients like cobalt and phosphate, a current could be run through it, and the catalyst would form spontaneously. Keep the current running, and it will start splitting the water and producing hydrogen, which can be stored and converted to energy long after the sun goes down.

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