Revisiting the Terawatt Challenge

Journal Article · Wed Mar 11 00:00:00 EDT 2020 · MRS Bulletin

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1557/mrs.2020.73· OSTI ID:1659927

Kurtz, Sarah R. ^[1]; Leilaeioun, Ashling ^[2]; King, Richard R. ^[3]; Peters, Ian Marius ^[4]; Heben, Michael J. ^[5]; Metzger, Wyatt ^[6]; Haegel, Nancy ^[6]

---

1. National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL), Golden, CO (United States); Univ. of California, Merced, CA (United States)
2. Univ. of California, Merced, CA (United States)
3. Arizona State Univ., Mesa, AZ (United States)
4. Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States); Hemholz Inst. for Renewable Energy Erlangen, Nürnberg (Germany)
5. Univ. of Toledo, OH (United States)
6. National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)

Richard 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 flows until he passed away in 2005. Smalley challenged the world to transform the energy sector. He envisioned 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 ~10 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 by tenfold and annual deployment of solar photovoltaic (PV) modules has grown by a factor of 100,from ~1 gigawatt (GW) in 2004 to ~100 GW in 2018, with a total of 500 GW installed worldwide, producing 2% of the planet’s electricity. As global installed solar generating capacity approaches1 TW, we revisit Smalley’s TW challenge to identify what has changed and quantify the TW Challenge for a baseline scenario and for two scenarios designed as upper and lower bounds determined by the degree we implement electrification and storage. In this paper, we show that the energy choices we make today will dramatically affect the magnitude of future global energy requirements.

• Research Organization: National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE)
• Grant/Contract Number: AC36-08GO28308
• OSTI ID: 1659927
• Report Number(s): NREL/JA--5K00-75520; MainId:7166; UUID:ff997376-a80f-ea11-9c2a-ac162d87dfe5; MainAdminID:13652
• Journal Information: MRS Bulletin, Journal Name: MRS Bulletin Journal Issue: 3 Vol. 45; ISSN 0883-7694
• Publisher: Materials Research Society
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

SOLAR ENERGY
photovoltaics
terawatt challenge