Skip to main content

India Renewable Energy Expo—Materials Challenges in Clean Energy



At the renewable energy India expo today I had the good fortune to connect with industry professionals and researchers across the energy landscape from battery makers and critical mineral providers to solar energy professionals. During my interaction I gained valuable knowledge about intricacies of manufacturing and how even the seemingly simplest of steps like electrical connection of solar cells, through tin coated copper wires, becomes extremely sensitive given the thin wafers and volume of large scale manufacturing. 

It is true that the renewable energy industry has come a long way from its very humble beginnings and it now presents a viable alternative to traditional forms of energy. This in itself is a huge achievement, something that would have been considered impossible several decades ago. But some issues remain that prevent RE from becoming dominant. 

On the battery level the answer is obvious. Lithium is a scarce resource. New discoveries will be made but current projections show that there is not enough lithium to be able to satisfy demand for even automobiles let alone home storage solutions. Recycling could help but frankly the complexity of material recycling is being underestimated. New battery materials are urgently needed to address this issue. Sodium ion is a good start but can even more abundant materials be discovered? On the grid scale flow batteries look promising. But what if we could couple electrical energy storage with thermal storage? These questions must be asked by researchers and policy makers. 
Solar panels are highly efficient on a weight basis. 1 square meter of silicon solar cells uses only a few 100 grams of silicon. Each being only a few 100 micrometers thick. 

But all solar cells need glass coating adding several Kgs of weight. Not just any glass; optical quality glass is necessary. Glass comes from sand but the kind needed to make optical grade for solar cells must be highly pure and that is an unevenly distributed resource somewhat scarce. 

Glass is important in another renewable energy product —wind turbines. Glass fibers used in wind turbine blades must be made from highly pure sand as well because impurities can reduce the strength of fibers making them more brittle. 

Sand purification is an extremely demanding process, usually requiring acid leaching to remove iron oxides that strongly adhere as a coating on silica surface, for optical grade production. Theoretically acid used is recyclable but that takes additional input and given the large quantities of sand used in making glass it is frankly a bit hard to implement. 
So it's clear to see that the renewable energy industry faces some fundamental challenges especially on the materials side. 

If alternative purification techniques could be developed then sand would start looking more attractive as a raw material. On the processing side colloidal silica could provide new ways of making glass films as compared to melt processing methods that could be valuable in the coatings industry and perhaps one day enabling thin films of glass. 

Filmmaker Michael Moore had raised the issue of raw materials for renewable energy in his documentary Planet of the humans but it was promptly censored under the pretext of copyright violation. The questions Moore raised though still linger on. 

Silicon is inherently dependent upon carbon for production. Glass consumes huge amounts of fossil fuel. Plastics used in solar panels for bonding and in wind turbine blades as resin in GFRP raises questions around the sustainability of these products. Especially considering their limited lifetime. 

The renewable energy industry is now mature and has 100s of players in the value chain, most working at assembly level. Yet like most other industries it follows trends and often tends to be conservative. It's hard to expect a manufacturing plant to make swift changes to its production process. The burden lies on researchers to continue to push for materials advantages. Every little improvement ,every small victory matters. 
Renewable energy is such an important issue that we need to have hard scientific debates around the materials that make it work. Can we really base the future of the industry on materials that are hard to source? 

The decisions that we take today are going to affect the technological landscape over the next 100 years. Let us make sure that we get it right. 

Also read 



Akshat Jiwan Sharma
Strategy Consultant--Innovation/ Materials science/International relations/Telecommunications/Digital Transformation/Partnerships 

Mobile/whatsapp:+919654119771
 email:getellobed@gmail.com



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why does collapsing a bubble with a sound wave produce light?

My thoughts on a reddit discussion  https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhysics/comments/1lwxxc3/comment/n2jx8gp/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button The collapsing of a bubble with sound wave leads to the emission of light in a phenomenon known as sonoluminescnce.  The bubble collapse is rapid and the gas inside the core doesn't have time to exchange heat with the surroundings as it's compressed rapidly leading to what is known as adiabatic compression.  This compression heats up the gas to very high temp. The exact temperatures are inferred from the spectrum of emission which is thought to be a blackbody. But some sophisticated models have also been developed that put the temp in the range 5000k-20000k some even higher.  There's also debate on whether the bubble emission spectrum is truly a blackbody or is it line emission or bremsstrahlung? Personally I think its a mix of all three. The pressures create...
Post a Comment
Read more

WeWork India Sustainability Summit 2025 Tackling Technical Challenges in Green Building Innovation

I thank we work India for organising sustainability summit 2025 to help drive real change towards decarbonising the commercial real estate sector. I gained valuable insights from the esteemed speakers especially around policy and regulation in this space.  My own thoughts kept pulling me towards some of the more technical challenges which are quite significant.  The current strategy of making buildings sustainable focuses on reducing the carbon footprint of a building during its operation and construction. In the operational stage the challenge is to ensure that the building can run on green energy. Heating and cooling are the heaviest users of energy and thus obvious targets for decarbonisation.  Since buildings these days scale vertically it's impossible to cover the energy requirements from rooftop solar panels. Unless solar panels can be installed vertically along the facade, the surface area would be too limited to generate any significant power. The idea has been tr...
Post a Comment
Read more

Can you compress water and turn it solid?

A question asked on reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1n02vlg/ Yes and this has been experimentally confirmed. Shock compression of water has produced different forms of ice crystals.  SOME REFERENCES Experimental evidence for superionic water ice using shock compression https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-017-0017-4 This particular form of ice melted at 5000K at 200Gpa.  https://www.llnl.gov/article/44081/first-experimental-evidence-superionic-ice An interesting tidbit from the research is in this paragraph  >Using diamond anvil cells (DAC), the team applied 2.5 GPa of pressure (25 thousand atmospheres) to pre-compress water into the room-temperature ice VII, a cubic crystalline form that is different from "ice-cube" hexagonal ice, in addition to being 60 percent denser than water at ambient pressure and temperature.  I'm not really sure at what temp this compression was performed but ice vii is known to exist at room temp at high enough pre...
Post a Comment
Read more

Is there a future for materials science students in tribology?

My comments on a reddit discussion https://www.reddit.com/r/materials/comments/1nmooy5/comment/nfg6vub/ Tribology is a very important subfield of Mat sci and highly relevant anywhere there are moving parts. Like many other materials science domains its cross disciplinary and overlaps with automotive , aerospace ,manufacturing and even nano systems. I think its definitely worth studying and one should atleast  know about core concepts. From a purely research point of view the field is quite deep especially as it is being developed for nano systems and other emerging areas like triboluminescence. It does have a future. Wear is one of the major failure mechanism in materials and lots of resources are allocated to minimise it. Turbines,engine components, tyres ,cutting tools all suffer from wear and constant monitoring and refinement of process parameters is necessary.Many coatings are designed to reduce friction and wear Diamond like carbon films are cutting edge if you can build some...
Post a Comment
Read more

What IMC 2025 Revealed About the State of Telecom

IMC 2025 lived up to its reputation as India's most anticipated communication event in India attracting big industry players—Intel,Qualcomm,Mediatek,Ericsson,Nokia along with research institutions and startups. All the 7 layers of the networking stack from the PHY to APPLICATION were well represented by various organisations.  Mobile operators serve as the face of the network but we often forget that they are powered by a long list of manufacturers and service providers. IMC gave them a platform to showcase their products and directly engage with customers.  5G is already here and very predictably there were talks around whether it has delivered on the promises it made. Speakers shared their thoughts and while the general consensus was that 5G did bring about somewhat faster speeds and a bit of lower latency the massive promises that it made especially around remote healthcare AR,VR and smart cities have all been forgotten.  mmwave is no where to be seen or even heard of....
Post a Comment
Read more

Unlocking the Potential of Carbon for Long-Distance Electrical Transmission

ABSTRACT: We present a technique to manufacture large scale carbon based conductors for transmission of electrical energy over continental scale distances. We start by identifying precursors that could be used for production processes.We review the current manufacturing techniques of producing carbon based fibers and explain why certain precursors have dominated carbon materials industry. We identify methods that can be used to increase the yield through alternative precursors.We put forward a theory of why carbon conductors have less conductivity than metals and what can be done to improve it. Finally we postulate that with cheaper production methods even if carbon based conductors are 10 times less effective than poor metallic conductors like steel, they can still outperform them in High Voltage transmission lines if cheap manufacturing techniques could be developed.  INTRODUCTION: Copper and in certain very specific applications aluminium & silicon steels dominate when it co...
Post a Comment
Read more

Do electrons really flow as a beam in cathode ray tubes?

  Abstract: It is generally well accepted that a beam of electrons flow from cathode to anode in a cathode ray tube. Taking pressure  data from a variety of sources from CRT manufacturers’  data sheets to engineering documents of large hadron colliders we show through calculations that there is enough residual gas in these devices to form a conducting path from anode to cathode due to plasma formation. When high voltages are applied at the anode the gas is ionized and becomes a plasma forming a ‘wire’ between the two electrodes that causes conduction of energy.  The objective of this brief note is to encourage scientists and engineers to re-investigate commonly accepted beliefs about vacuum tubes and develop new knowledge that can revitalize the field especially at a time when nano scaled vacuum channel transistors are being envisioned.  Most vacuum tubes have  operating pressures in the ultra high vacuum range. This is true for cathode ray tubes, vacuum tu...
Post a Comment
Read more

Low energy fabrication of a high strength layered ceramic composite for high temperature oxidative environments

High temperature materials are required in various applications: in metallurgy, for making combustion chambers of internal combustion engines ,for the body of Stirling engines, for wall material of nuclear fusion reactors, for the body of Jet engines among a few.  For such applications we need materials that can retain their strengths at elevated temperatures and can survive in an oxidative environment  It is the second requirement which is more stringent. Although numerous metallic alloys have been synthesized that can sustain both high temperatures and oxygen attack they require complex processing steps  On the other hand ceramics are good at resisting both oxygen attacks and high temperatures and are relatively simpler to fabricate but are limited by massive amounts of energy required. For example c/sic composites will perform well in demanding high temperature oxidative environments but require vacuum to be manufactured. The acheson process for the formation of sic is...
Post a Comment
Read more

Force calculations on electron in vacuum tubes

ABSTRACT A claim was made in the paper titled “Do electrons really flow as a beam in cathode ray tubes? ” where we asserted that electrons remain near the cathode surface during the operation of CRT. Here we do force calculations on electrons by estimating the debye length of electrons emitted after thermionic emission and show that under given applied voltages if electrons are placed at debye length they are sufficiently far away from the cathode surface to be accelerated towards it. Debye length, while typically used to measure charge screening distance in plasmas and electrolytes, can also be used to estimate the distance of emitted electrons from the cathode surface. In the same way debye length is used to calculate the thickness of an electrical double layer in which the surface charge and charge on inner helmholtz plane are immobile & the charges on outer helmholtz plane are mobile we can model emitted electrons as mobile charges & image charges distributed on the cathode...
Post a Comment
Read more

Manufacturing technique for layered carbon /ceramic composite for use in high temperature oxidative environment

We previously described a layered carbon glass material system that is different from c/sic , c/sio2 matrix composites in that it consists of a distinct C/C phase which is coated by an sio2 layer.  https://akshatjiwannotes.blogspot.com/2024/12/low-energy-fabrication-of-high-strength.html This material system presents a distinct advantage in a high temperature oxidative atmosphere as the C/C matrix is protected by the oxidation resistant glass shield. Such a material can supposedly be synthesized in an open oxidative atmosphere. In this short note we will answer some questions such as  What manufacturing technique will be used?  How can silica particles be sintered on the substrate? How can adhesion between sintered particles and carbon substrate be ensured? What, if any ,sintering aids will be used? What would be the mechanical properties of the composite so formed?  What level of heat treatment will be required? To make the composite only the minimum amount of heat ...
Post a Comment
Read more