Remarks on Mercom Renewable energy summit 2025

25 Jul 2025

It was a pleasure to attend the Mercom Renewable energy summit last week. It was a great opportunity for me to learn from the leaders in the RE space about their plans to help meet decarbonisation goals & push the manufacturing sector to use RE.

While I was optimistic about the growth of the industry & shared the general enthusiasm about the policies and the favorable env created for RE I felt that there was scope for the industry to do much better than it currently has.

For RE to take over it would imp. to build systems that can generate and store energy at a far greater efficiency than what the current tech offers.

Wind energy ,hydropower require massive engineering investment in addition to reliance on powerful magnets.

But even in magnet manufacturing things are rapidly changing. Iron nitrogen systems could pave the way for sustainable and powerful magnets that can easily challenge the dominance of rare earths. However, the challenge remains to scale these lab results of magnetic thin films to bulk magnets. Recent developments in electrostatic generators can flip the script here.

Magnet free power generation could make smaller turbines extremely attractive.

Solar energy requires semiconductor manufacturing tech but even with it solar cells are effectively capped at 33% efficiency due Shockley Queisser limit. Multijunction cells overcome these inherent limitations but it's a big challenge to stack wavelength selective layers without reducing the efficiency of underlying layers.

Pervoskite cells have to deal with material constraints in addition to SQ limits. Whereas hot carrier solar cells, even though promising 66% efficiency are very difficult to realise due to both material limitations and fabrication challenges.

Could it be possible to build systems that can take advantage of solar energy instead of trying to fit in a landscape that has been created and dominated by fossil powered energy? I believe it's possible. It's important to master heat. Heat seems to be overlooked as an energy source.

Solar concentrator lenses offer >90% energy capture — light to heat. They can be created with earth abundant transparent materials like glass using moderately sophisticated manufacturing tech. Sand batteries have recently shown promise in trials for storing energy at scale. When coupled with Stirling engines (having capability to extract mechanical work from any heat source) this setup has the potential to convert sunlight to energy at 30-40% efficiency counting storage.

I feel that these new approaches of harvesting energy should be actively pursued especially when they promise much higher efficiency at lesser manufacturing cost and well understood engineering practices.

Nations pursue RE with a mind set to decarbonise. But self reliance is a powerful ideological motivator. The imp. of hydrogen can't be overstated especially for regions that are dependent on foreign oil. With current concern about lithium and copper supply chains it is imp to pursue hydrogen as an alternative to batteries that are dependent on a scarce resource.

Another challenge is energy distribution that is often ignored in RE talks. Can we make better conductors? Can we switch to HVDC?

It is critical to keep pushing the boundaries. Solar cells and wind are not the final word in the story of renewables. There is so much more left to uncover.

Akshat Jiwan Sharma

Strategy Consultant--Innovation/ Materials science/International relations/Telecommunications/Digital Transformation/Partnerships Mobile/whatsapp:+9196541197

71 email:getellobed@gmail.com

Comments

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Notes by Akshat Jiwan Sharma

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