It is the year 2004. With record high prices at the gas pumps and what seemed like a largely oil-explored world, it was an occasion to do what engineers do best: identify technical problems and devise solutions. With what seemed like a real “peak oil” energy shortage looming ahead, the need for reduction of electric power use had a direct impact on electronic design, resulting in the emergence of low-power circuit design. Is that emphasis still required?
While some decry the demise of the ecosphere due to the burning of hydrocarbon fuels, an equal problem is the anticipated inability to supply those fuels to meet the growing world demand. This article looks in retrospect at the problem, largely through comments from senior oil engineers inside the industry, and then surveys what happened.
Alternative Energy Solutions
As the existing large-scale solution to the problem of supplying electric power falters, the prospects for alternative energy solutions grow more promising, and they all lead to a need for power and control electronics. Here is a list of what I see as the most interesting possibilities, with some technical comment on them.
Solar photovoltaic (PV) panels: semiconductor batch-processed PV panels have been expensive, but there are alternative processes. Continuous-process “extruded” amorphous solar-panel ribbons were projected in 2004 to reach by 2009 a high-volume target price of $0.50/W, competitive with the North American power grid. These PV panels are presently in high volume production from multiple manufacturers. The demand from Europe has been so high that one leading company sold their entire first-year production to a customer in Europe. PV panels are currently being sold for $3.50/W to as low as $1/W from China. Progress was slower than anticipated in 2004 but has since accelerated. A middle-class urban resident can now afford electric power backup with a solar PV electric system, especially if it uses long-life nickel-iron batteries for charge storage.
Several different fuel cell technologies are being developed. Hydrogen (proton exchange membrane, PEM) technology has been the leader, under development by www.ballard.com. The fuel is still gasoline, which contains impurities that will easily foul a PEM “stack”, the chemical-to-electric converter of the cell. The problem is being worked on by Detroit. A pre-conversion process is needed to filter out sulfur compounds, etc., and this is proving difficult (expensive).
In summary of the alternatives, a decade ago there were several promising energy developments with a 1 to 10 year time frame for mass commercialization. In that time, only solar PV and large-scale wind have achieved high-volume application. The alternatives result in a distributed and not necessarily centralized electric power source which reduces the need for more copper distribution lines, and relies upon energy that will be available for the foreseeable future (and then some). It also is more robust relative to social instability to have many small distributed sources. It also vastly increases the emphasis in electronics on power conversion. Semiconductor power switches have undergone vast improvement over the last decade to where TO-220 MOSFETs sell for around a U.S. dollar and have channel on-resistances of as low as a milliohm.
Closure
A key question a decade ago was whether enough interested inventors, developers, financiers, and entrepreneurs would arise in time to avert the perceived oil crisis and maintain global energy supply. With the resurgence of oil (albeit more expensive to acquire) and especially natural gas, the direness of the peak oil scenario a decade ago has faded, though the new threat of developed-world infrastructure failure and social instability has shifted threat consciousness to small-scale preparedness for loss of electric power. As more residents acquire working off-grid systems, one element of social collapse might be ameliorated, if or when it happens.
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