The Next Bets for Renewable Energy
From underwater turbines to high-flying kites, companies look at innovative ways to harness traditional renewables.
5 min
With enormous kites that pull shipping vessels across oceans using wind power, floating devices attached to jetties that generate electricity from the motion of waves hitting the shore and other new technologies, companies are looking to diversify options for harnessing familiar sources of renewable energy in innovative ways. Many of these innovations aim to overcome cost and maintenance issues associated with existing technologies.
As world leaders endorse climate goals like reaching net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions within the next 30 years, these companies are pushing to move their projects from research and development to commercial phases. The net-zero objective—balancing emissions produced and emissions removed from the atmosphere—has spurred growth in the business of sustainable energy, which generates fewer emissions than fossil fuels. Some of these possibilities, like satellites that can wirelessly beam down solar energy from orbit, remain experimental, while others, like underwater turbines that harness tidal movements, have progressed from prototypes to commercial demonstrations. Here are some of the newest developments in generating power from the air, sun, water and Earth.
AIR
Stacked Turbines
Norwegian company Wind Catching Systems is developing a roughly 1,000-foot-tall structure consisting of 126 small turbines stacked and arranged together. The plan is for this “Wind Catching unit” to sit atop a floating platform anchored to the ocean floor about 50 miles offshore. The company says the unit will be able to turn 360 degrees to capture wind from any direction and generate electricity sent via underwater transmission lines back to shore.
The unit can produce up to five times more energy using one-fifth the space of typical offshore wind farms, says CEO and co-founder Ole Heggheim. The company expects to start construction on its first commercial prototype in the North Sea in 2023 and plans to market these wind catchers in the U.K.
Kite Power
SkySails Group, a Germany-based power company, is developing kites that fly a quarter-mile off the ground to produce energy. As the kite rises, it unwinds a tether connected to a winch and generator, which convert the force on the tether into electricity.
“High-altitude wind is the largest untapped energy resource on Earth,” founder and managing director Stephan Wrage says. Its largest kites are nearly 1,940 square feet in size—generating about 200 kilowatts of power, and meant to replace diesel generators in remote, off-grid islands and villages. The company has installed several pilot kites at sites including the Indian Ocean island nation of Mauritius, with plans to connect them to the grid. Starting next year, the company plans to start shifting toward commercial rollout, and eventually hopes to increase its kite size and flying altitude.
A French company, Airseas, has developed an 1003sqm kite called Seawing that attaches to a ship’s bow with a cable and pulls the vessel along using wind power. The company’s aim is to help decarbonize the shipping industry, says CEO and co-founder Vincent Bernatets.
WATER
Turning Tides
When placed underwater, turbines can harness kinetic energy from the natural rise and fall of ocean tides to generate electricity. But turbines placed on the seafloor are expensive to build and maintain. So Scottish company Orbital Marine Power designed a floating tidal turbine named Orbital O2.
The 72-metre-long turbine is anchored offshore near Scotland’s Orkney Islands, where a subsea cable connects it to the local grid. It can power around 2,000 U.K. homes and offset more than 2,400 tons of carbon annually. The company is focused on developing sites around the U.K. coastline and Europe, CEO Andrew Scott says, with an aim to deploy flotillas of tidal turbines. Future turbines will be anchored between about a mile and 3 miles offshore.
Wave Energy
Eco Wave Power Ltd. is working on harnessing water power from the shore. The company has designed 10-foot-long floating devices attached to piers, jetties and existing marine structures. These floaters use the rising and falling movement of waves to generate electricity.
The technology requires less than two feet of water to produce energy, “so we can basically install everywhere and anywhere,” says CEO and co-founder Inna Braverman. If waves get too rough, the devices can lock in an upward position above the water line. The company opened a 100-kilowatt facility connected to the grid in Gibraltar in 2016 that will be refurbished and moved to Los Angeles within the next three months. It expects to connect another power station in Jaffa, Israel, to the local grid by midyear this year. Future projects include possible facilities in New Jersey, California and Portugal.
EARTH
Geothermal Energy
Heat left over from when Earth formed and from radioactive elements decaying inside the planet’s molten core permeates toward the crust, creating accessible wells of steam or hot water. Some geothermal power plants pipe that steam or water—between 300 and 700 degrees Fahrenheit—to the surface for use as direct heat. Other plants can also convert that heat into electricity. The hydrothermal resources are injected back into the ground after cooling.
More than 60 geothermal plants operate in the U.S. today, providing nearly 4 gigawatts of electricity, which can power more than one million homes. But the plants tend to be concentrated in areas like California and Nevada with geothermal hot spots like geysers or volcanoes, or where tectonic plates grind past each other and Earth’s heat can move more easily through the crust. The key to making geothermal competitive with other renewables, is “going into regions where nature hasn’t been so generous, and figuring out a way to engineer the system,” says Cornell University professor Jefferson Tester. He is chief scientist for a pilot project at Cornell that aims to directly heat the 30,000-person campus with geothermal resources by 2035.
One solution, Dr. Tester says, is injecting “hot, dry rock”—which lacks the naturally occurring hydrothermal resources needed to generate electricity—with high-pressure water from the surface. That process can crack the rock, allowing a power plant to then collect the injected water after it is heated. The U.S. bipartisan infrastructure bill passed last year devoted $84 million to innovations like this, known as enhanced geothermal systems. These systems may enable engineers to expand the geographic range of where geothermal plants can be built.
SUN
Space-Based Solar
The sun’s power can only intermittently be harnessed from the ground due to weather, changing seasons and nighttime hours. But some scientists and engineers say within the next decade solar energy could come consistently from much closer to the source—wirelessly beamed down as microwaves or laser beams from orbiting satellites to receiving stations on Earth connected to the electrical grid.
“The basics are to put a large, very large platform in space, harvest sunlight, where the sun shines, essentially 99.95% of the time, and send it to markets on the ground, where, on average, the sun is shining only about 15% of the time,” says former NASA scientist John Mankins, president of Mankins Space Technology, a company working on developing a 1.6-km wide solar power satellite prototype that will use microwave beaming.
Wirelessly transferring energy across distances using microwave transmission has already been tested: The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory sent 1.6 kilowatts over a distance of 0.6 mile last year. Engineers at the Japan Aerospace Agency have sent about the same amount of energy the length of a football field.
Other groups are also working on the experimental technology: The California Institute of Technology plans on testing prototypes, which can transfer solar power in space via a steerable microwave beam, by the end of 2022. Engineers in Japan, China, Australia and Russia have all either made strides or expressed interest in developing space-based solar power.
The U.K. has integrated space-based solar energy into the country’s plan to reach net-zero emissions. Its Space Energy Initiative is spearheading a plan to send a 500-megawatt prototype that uses microwave beaming into orbit within the next decade, and aims to connect a satellite four times more powerful to the grid by 2035.
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Competitive pressure and creativity have made Chinese-designed and -built electric cars formidable competitors
4 min
China rocked the auto world twice this year. First, its electric vehicles stunned Western rivals at the Shanghai auto show with their quality, features and price. Then came reports that in the first quarter of 2023 it dethroned Japan as the world’s largest auto exporter.
How is China in contention to lead the world’s most lucrative and prestigious consumer goods market, one long dominated by American, European, Japanese and South Korean nameplates? The answer is a unique combination of industrial policy, protectionism and homegrown competitive dynamism. Western policy makers and business leaders are better prepared for the first two than the third.
Start with industrial policy—the use of government resources to help favoured sectors. China has practiced industrial policy for decades. While it’s finding increased favour even in the U.S., the concept remains controversial. Governments have a poor record of identifying winning technologies and often end up subsidising inferior and wasteful capacity, including in China.
But in the case of EVs, Chinese industrial policy had a couple of things going for it. First, governments around the world saw climate change as an enduring threat that would require decade-long interventions to transition away from fossil fuels. China bet correctly that in transportation, the transition would favour electric vehicles.
In 2009, China started handing out generous subsidies to buyers of EVs. Public procurement of taxis and buses was targeted to electric vehicles, rechargers were subsidised, and provincial governments stumped up capital for lithium mining and refining for EV batteries. In 2020 NIO, at the time an aspiring challenger to Tesla, avoided bankruptcy thanks to a government-led bailout.
While industrial policy guaranteed a demand for EVs, protectionism ensured those EVs would be made in China, by Chinese companies. To qualify for subsidies, cars had to be domestically made, although foreign brands did qualify. They also had to have batteries made by Chinese companies, giving Chinese national champions like Contemporary Amperex Technology and BYD an advantage over then-market leaders from Japan and South Korea.
To sell in China, foreign automakers had to abide by conditions intended to upgrade the local industry’s skills. State-owned Guangzhou Automobile Group developed the manufacturing know-how necessary to become a player in EVs thanks to joint ventures with Toyota and Honda, said Gregor Sebastian, an analyst at Germany’s Mercator Institute for China Studies.
Despite all that government support, sales of EVs remained weak until 2019, when China let Tesla open a wholly owned factory in Shanghai. “It took this catalyst…to boost interest and increase the level of competitiveness of the local Chinese makers,” said Tu Le, managing director of Sino Auto Insights, a research service specialising in the Chinese auto industry.
Back in 2011 Pony Ma, the founder of Tencent, explained what set Chinese capitalism apart from its American counterpart. “In America, when you bring an idea to market you usually have several months before competition pops up, allowing you to capture significant market share,” he said, according to Fast Company, a technology magazine. “In China, you can have hundreds of competitors within the first hours of going live. Ideas are not important in China—execution is.”
Thanks to that competition and focus on execution, the EV industry went from a niche industrial-policy project to a sprawling ecosystem of predominantly private companies. Much of this happened below the Western radar while China was cut off from the world because of Covid-19 restrictions.
When Western auto executives flew in for April’s Shanghai auto show, “they saw a sea of green plates, a sea of Chinese brands,” said Le, referring to the green license plates assigned to clean-energy vehicles in China. “They hear the sounds of the door closing, sit inside and look at the quality of the materials, the fabric or the plastic on the console, that’s the other holy s— moment—they’ve caught up to us.”
Manufacturers of gasoline cars are product-oriented, whereas EV manufacturers, like tech companies, are user-oriented, Le said. Chinese EVs feature at least two, often three, display screens, one suitable for watching movies from the back seat, multiple lidars (laser-based sensors) for driver assistance, and even a microphone for karaoke (quickly copied by Tesla). Meanwhile, Chinese suppliers such as CATL have gone from laggard to leader.
Chinese dominance of EVs isn’t preordained. The low barriers to entry exploited by Chinese brands also open the door to future non-Chinese competitors. Nor does China’s success in EVs necessarily translate to other sectors where industrial policy matters less and creativity, privacy and deeply woven technological capability—such as software, cloud computing and semiconductors—matter more.
Still, the threat to Western auto market share posed by Chinese EVs is one for which Western policy makers have no obvious answer. “You can shut off your own market and to a certain extent that will shield production for your domestic needs,” said Sebastian. “The question really is, what are you going to do for the global south, countries that are still very happily trading with China?”
Western companies themselves are likely to respond by deepening their presence in China—not to sell cars, but for proximity to the most sophisticated customers and suppliers. Jörg Wuttke, the past president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, calls China a “fitness centre.” Even as conditions there become steadily more difficult, Western multinationals “have to be there. It keeps you fit.”
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
Americans now think they need at least $1.25 million for retirement, a 20% increase from a year ago, according to a survey by Northwestern Mutual
