On a Rocky Mountain day that saw cloudy skies and several inches of powder, solar energy experts gathered at the Aspen Environment Forum encouraged conference participants to turn sunlight, normally abundant in Colorado, into profit. 

Solar power is expected to be a growth market, in both developed and developing countries.

While captured sunlight will never account for the bulk of energy on a global or regional scale, it could provide up to 25 percent of U.S. energy needs and play an important role in delivering energy to poorer countries, said Neville Williams, founder of several solar companies and the author of Chasing the Sun.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in 2007, solar energy accounted for less than one percent of total American energy use.

Dennis Dimick, moderator of the Forum's solar panel discussion and executive editor of National Geographic magazine, reminded participants that humans once relied solely on the sun for energy. That changed with the industrial revolution.

"The real question is what might it take to return to sunlight as a dominant source of energy to sustain us," asked Dimick.

"Solar technology is taking off for people who don't have any power," Williams responded. "The story here is the tremendous opportunity for people to make a lot of money. We're just at the beginning of the beginning."

Williams, who calls himself a serial solarpreneur, developed a company in India and has grown his Maryland-based Standard Solar from two to 55 people over the last two years.

China seems to have embraced the technology, with the largest solar business in the world and nearly 30 million households equipped with solar water heaters, according to Christopher Flavin, president of the nonprofit research organization Worldwatch Institute.

The answer to Dimick's question is simple, said Williams: the end of cheap oil will bring people back to the sun.

The technologies that convert sunlight into heat for human use have barely changed over the last two centuries, according to the experts at Aspen.  In the 1830s, a collection box was used to absorb sunlight and generate heat to cook with.

The solar to electricity transformation takes a bit more wrangling, with the use of photovoltaic (PV) cells or power plants that use solar thermal, or heat, to produce steam power.

Obstacles

The obstacles to widespread solar have been price, a lack of storage capacity and minimal government incentive, according to the panelists.

But the price is coming down. In a recent study, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that solar installation costs declined from $10.50 per watt in 1998 to $7.60 per watt in 2007. And some experts, including Williams, think that you'll be able to buy and sell a unit of solar for the same price as coal by 2010.

Big Ideas

Daniel Nocera, director of MIT's Solar Revolutions Project, is tackling the storage question. There will never be a big market for solar until there is a way to store that energy for later use—either by putting it back into the grid, moving the energy to a battery, or converting it into a chemical fuel, he explained.

Nocera envisions a world of energy autonomy and security where homes are also power and gas stations. Last summer the scientist and his research team found a user-friendly way to store solar energy for use at night or into the future.

The new technology, modeled on the process of photosynthesis, uses solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The two gases can then be reunited in a fuel cell to generate electricity for your home or electric car.

The simple catalysts for the split are cobalt metal, phosphate, and an electrode placed in water that when charged produce oxygen.  A platinum catalyst will produce hydrogen.

The process can be done with saltwater and wastewater, making solar much more accessible, Nocera said.

Five liters a day will be enough to fuel a house and car in the U.S.

"It's going to happen," he added.

Photograph of solar panels at Oberlin College courtesy National Renewable Energy Laboratory and of Dr. Daniel Nocera courtesy MIT.

The Aspen Forum is sponsored by the Aspen Institute, the National Geographic Society, Shell, Duke Energy, and General Motors.

—Tasha Eichenseher

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