Wallet-Driven Change: The Crazy Idea of a "Sail" Boat

In an earlier post I pointed out that simple wallet-driven economics (i.e. people start to act once it hits them in the wallet) would begin to have bigger and bigger effects on behavior and environmental impact. Well, an article today seems to bear that out. In the container shipping business, fuel is a huge cost. Hermann Klein of Germanischer Lloyd states that "ship efficiency is of paramount importance considering a fuel bill for a big container ship over a 25-year lifespan adds up to nearly $900 million." That's about $3 million a month ($100k a day) so you can see why rising oil prices would spur change.

So they're getting creative. One idea is "smack your forehead" simple: outfit the container ship with a wind-powered device, or "sail."


Inventor Stephan Wrage claims this novel idea can cut 20 percent, or $1,600, from the ship's daily fuel bill. (Never mind the fact that Klein's figure above puts the daily fuel bill at $100k, not $8k... honestly, why is it so hard for journalists to get their numbers straight?!?)

Putting that to the side, Klein goes on to point out another amazingly simple idea: "slowing down by 10 percent can lead to a 25 percent reduction in fuel use."

So if you outfitted all container ships with a sail and half of them slowed down (some shipments are urgent, after all), then we could see a combined 30% reduction in fuel usage and C02 emissions. And since the article claims that the world's merchant ships emit 5% of the world's total CO2, these two extremely simple measures, spurred on by wallet-economics, could cut 1.5% of all CO2 production just like that.

Now imagine what will happen when oil hits $200/barrel.

Can Coal be Clean? - Part 1

While renewables should still far and away be our top priority, one area that strikes me as (a) important and (b) filled with opportunity is cleaning up coal. A report from the UK's Parliamentary Office of Science & Technology states that as of Dec 2005, 1,000 gigawatts of global electricity come from coal, representing ~39% of worldwide energy. Coal provides 27% of the world's overall energy (i.e. electricity plus transportation), according to BP...

...and 23% of the energy in the U.S. now, rising to 26% by 2030, according to the Dept. of Energy.


So coal is already a huge portion of our energy supply, and China and India's booming economies will want new coal plants to help fuel their growth.

Meanwhile, coal's high carbon content makes it the biggest CO2 emitter per unit of electricity produced. So when you turn on your light switch, you're pumping CO2 into the air just as you are when you turn on your engine. It kind of makes you want to clean up coal, doesn't it??

Some organizations such as Greenpeace have dismissed clean coal as infeasible, throwing their support behind renewables instead. I disagree with their position mainly because they're not viewing the whole picture. Yes, renewables are always better even than "clean coal," but no, coal is not going away tomorrow. It has a huge installed base, and since coal is relatively cheap to produce, the temptation will be there (especially for emerging economies) to bring new coal plants online. We need to try to improve the clean-coal technologies.

My next post on coal will focus on the different technologies and their stages of development. Finally I'll look into economic opportunity, particularly from carbon trading.

To be continued...

Q-Cells and the Future of Solar Photovoltaics

The solar industry is booming. According to this article, "sometime in the next two years, more raw silicon will be going to solar panels than to electronics chips." And according to a report recently released by BCC, the market for solar PV cells will reach $32 B/year in 2013. Good news, but there's one catch: supplies of polysilicon, one of the key ingredients in many solar PV panels, are growing tight. The bottleneck isn't the raw material (sand), but rather the production capacity for refining sand into polysilicon.

This means two things: (1) a scramble among polysilicon PV cell manufacturers for supply, and (2) a move towards thin-film technologies, such as CIGS, which don't use silicon or use much less of it.

One company that's moved to address both of these issues is Q-Cells out of Germany. They've signed a long-term supply agreement with China's LDK Solar, locking in a supply of 43,000 tons of silicon wafers through 2018. And EverQ, their joint venture with Evergreen Solar and Norway's REC, has locked in supplies of up to 2,100 tons of polysilicon per year through 2015. That translates to enough silicon for an output of roughly 6,600 megawatt peak.

A quick back-of-the-envelope analysis shows that this translates to securing access to enough raw materials to convert into $16 billion of revenue, using the revenue per MW of PV cell in 2013 from the BCC report I mentioned above. So the polysilicon shortage shouldn't dent their growth:



Meanwhile, their subsidiary companies are ramping up thin-film technologies. Calyxo makes cadmium telluride PV cells and Brilliant 234 produces thin-film silicon modules. Solibro GmbH, a joint venture with Solibro AB, is a CIGS (cadmium indium gallium selenide) manufacturer.

This is an impressive company that seems to have all the bases covered. I'd keep an eye on them.