14 DAY TRIAL // Biofuels, wind farms, batteries, solar power plants, geothermal facilities and osmotic power plants are just some of the clean energy technologies being pursued today. In a new study, experts in the United States will attempt to determine which of these approaches to clean energy is actually worth pursuing.
The determining factor in the new analysis will be the potential each of these technologies has, as well as the amount of public and private investment that will need to go into each of them in order to make them cost-efficient and feasible at a large scale.
At this point, research in clean energy is a series of disparate efforts in a number of directions, but researchers want to bring them all together via the recently-proposed, in-depth, innovative analytical approach. The study will begin shortly.
One of the main objectives the tool will have will be to maximize economic strain that the new technologies will put on the market, while at the same time reducing its environmental impact by as much as possible.
The investigation will be conducted by researchers at the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). It will also be capable of providing investigators with a sense of how their technologies will affect the world before the latter hit the market.
“It’s a fairly new approach for the Lab, to use the analytic lenses we’ve developed to analyze the costs, and energy, water, materials and climate change impacts of technologies that are still in the research and development phases,” explains Eric Masanet.
“The ultimate goal of the work is to provide guidance to scientists, funding agencies, and policymakers about which technology options are the most beneficial to pursue,” adds the expert, who is the leader of the Carbon Cycle 2.0 Energy and Environmental Analysis Team (E2AT).
The team is based at the Berkeley Lab Environmental Energy Technologies Division. Its goal is to create a cross-disciplinary framework capable of analyzing emerging green technologies, as well as their potential role in the coming decades.
The first stage of the research is to study a number of technologies that have been under development at the Lab, such as geologic carbon sequestration, next-generation coatings for energy-efficient windows, salt- and drought-tolerant switchgrass for biofuels and large-scale solar photovoltaic installations.