Principles of Sustainable and Ethical Energy Access and Consumption

Two main aspects need to be considered, with 6 principles each:

Access and consumption for all, now and in the future

1. Energy infrastructure and clean cooking facilities in all areas
2. Access and consumption aligned with climate change mitigation goals
3. Energy prices at reasonable share of minimum income, including indirect costs e.g. resource depletion
4. Energy harvested from renewable sources
5. Energy harvested by processes with little environmental impact, using recyclable materials and techniques
6. Energy not used for unethical purposes

Sustainable and ethical supply chains

1. Safeguarding against natural hazards (floods, earthquakes, space weather)
2. Safeguarding against human hazards (terrorism, hacking, financial market effects)
3. Actively anticipating and solving supply chain bottlenecks; International cooperation on mining rights, land use, and safe transportation
4. Guaranteeing backup availability during emergencies of core services
5. Regular maintenance/replacements in infrastructure, knowledge of techniques, R&D investments
6. Increasing knowledge of best techniques by anticipating needed workforce and skills

To help implement these principles, the Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) needs to be calculated justly, including the mining of substances for nuclear reactors and recycling costs; in other words an entire Life Cycle Analysis including the costs of climate impacts.

Technologies under development in NIMS: solar cell technology

In addition to batteries and fuel cells, another important technology helping society to reach 80% or more greenhouse gas emission reduction is photovoltaics or solar cells. At NIMS, a team lead by Kenjiro Miyano is researching the application of perovskites in solar cells to increase efficiency rates.

"Perovskite" is the name given to a structure whose elements can vary. Researchers are still discovering different combinations of elements that can function as perovskite structure and that have a high efficiency for solar power conversion. At NIMS one of the configurations under study is CH3NH3PbI3. You can learn more technical details about perovskites in this TEDX talk.

Perovskite CH3NH3PbI3 

(Image from https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8497)

Technologies under development in NIMS: fuel cells

A future technology enabling 80% or more greenhouse gas emission reduction is that of fuel cells. The difference between a fuel cell and a battery is that batteries have their energy stored inside, whereas fuel cells generate electricity from external fuel that can be refilled. At the moment hydrogen fuel cells are still under development, but their main advantage over current battery driven electric vehicles are their short refueling time. It takes several minutes to replace a hydrogen fuel tank, whereas charging batteries of electric vehicles regularly still takes several hours. Other advantages of fuel cells compared to batteries are their longer life time, their continued efficiency vs batteries whose efficiency decreases over time, and the reduced environmental impact in comparison with batteries that require more recycling processes. 

NIMS has two teams working on fuel cell developments. One is the  Polymer Electrolyte Fuel Cell Group led by Je-Deok Kim. This group is developing new conducting electrolyte membranes for alternate temperature fuel cells and new catalyst electrode materials. Another group is the Solid Oxide Fuel Cell Materials Design Group led by Toshiyuki Mori. Their goal is to increase fuel cell efficiency, by developing an optimum of materials on the active solid electrolyte/electrode interface and enable high speed ion diffusion pathways. 

The main difference in functioning of these two types of fuel cells is explained below: