Revisiting the Terawatt Challenge
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Revisiting the Terawatt Challenge OPINION
By Sarah R. Kurtz, Ashling (Mehdi) Leilaeioun, Richard R. King, Ian Marius Peters, Michael J. Heben, Wyatt K. Metzger, and Nancy M. Haegel
R
ichard E. Smalley, in 2003, defined the Terawatt (TW) Challenge as “Adapting our energy infrastructure to simultaneously address diminishing oil resources and rising levels of atmospheric CO2.” Smalley, best known for the discovery of C60, for which he received the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, continued to address the challenges of anthropomorphic and natural global energy flows1,2 until he passed away in 2005. Smalley challenged the world to transform the energy sector. He envisioned
Nobel Laureate Richard E. Smalley described “The Terawatt Challenge” as the need to develop a new power source capable of increasing “our energy output by a minimum factor of two, the generally agreed-upon number, certainly by the middle of the century, but preferably well before that.” Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory.
electricity transmitted by high-voltage direct current (DC) lines from massively deployed solar plants in sunny areas and remotely sited nuclear plants. He also envisioned using advanced batteries for local storage of energy. To meet the needs of ~1010 people in a world with a dwindling oil supply, Smalley asserted that the world would need to transform its fossil-fuel-driven 14-TW (average power) energy used in 2003 to a largely renewable-energy-driven 30–60 TW (average power) in 2050. This would be possible only if solar-electricity costs could be drastically reduced. The challenges associated with this transition have been called the “Terawatt Challenge.” Fifteen years later, solar-module costs have been reduced tenfold, and annual deployment of solar photovoltaic (PV) modules has grown by a factor of 100. The installation rate for PV has increased from an average of ~1 gigawatt (GW)/ year in 2004 to ~100 GW/year in 2018, with a total of 500 GW capacity installed worldwide, producing 2% of the planet’s electricity. As global solar-generating capacity approaches 1 TW, we revisit Smalley’s TW Challenge to identify what has changed. We quantify the TW Challenge for a baseline scenario that extrapolates current trends. We also envision two other bracketing scenarios: one showing the most efficient and the other an inefficient system depending on the use of electrification and storage. We show that the energy choices we make today will dramatically affect the magnitude of future global energy requirements.
In the 16 years since Smalley posed his TW Challenge, some things have evolved as he predicted. The world’s population has grown, and evidence for climate change is becoming clearer, increasing the urgency of the challenge. However, a few things would have surprised Smalley. Notably, instead of fossil fuel production decreasing, the United States now produces more oil and gas than in Smalley’s day, and OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) is actively curtailing oil production to increase pri
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