(209e) Democratizing Energy Technology

Do you have a billion dollars? Neither do most of the 6 million companies in the Unites States. In fact, less than 10 companies in the U.S. can reasonably finance a billion-dollar investment on their own. And, in the current paradigm, a billion dollars is about what you need to develop new energy technology. Whether you are using coal, biomass, biogas, or natural gas to make electricity, fuels, or chemicals; today’s economic production is achieved through “economies of scale” where huge upfront capital investments are required. This high price of entry is a financial barrier that stifles all but the most incremental technological advancements. In this talk, the long-held belief in “scale-up” to achieve economic production will be challenged and “economies of number” will be proposed as an alternative to achieve cost-reductions through the development of an open modular manufacturing architecture that allows the production of many small, mass-produced modules by a multitude of venders. Numerous advantages are offered by small-scale, modular systems over large-scale deployment, including: 1) less upfront capital, no down time, and less risk; 2) faster market response and adaptable output; 3) the creation deployable assets (no sunk capital); 4) access to remote resources/assets; 5) better integration resulting in less waste; 6) access to new capital resources and consumer markets; and 7) faster innovation through more players and a lower barrier to experimentation. However, simply reducing the size of an existing process alone will not be sufficient to realize the benefits of mass production—innovations are required. Fundamentally, there a two key technical challenges to operating processes at small-scale: 1) high surface-to-volume ratio prevents near-adiabatic operation and 2) common gravity-based processes (separations) at small-scale may not yield sufficient residence times. These challenges and overall production efficiency will require innovations in process intensification that dramatically reduce the process volume, capital, and/or environmental footprint per rate of production and the development of an open modular architecture platform. Recent advances, emerging opportunities, and challenges ahead in “democratizing” energy conversion technology will be discussed.