 So we're here in Thessaloniki at the nanotechnology conference and hi, so who are you? Well, I'm Ravi Silva. I'm the director of the Advanced Technology Institute at the University of Surrey. I also act as an advisor to the Sri Lankan government with regard to energy and nanotechnology. So the University of Surrey is just outside London, right? That's correct. It's about 25 miles south of London and we specialize particularly in providing solutions to everyday problems. So as a university we are a top ten university very much oriented towards the applied sciences. And so you focusing on doing things that are real in the real life and that becomes useful? Absolutely. I think the whole point of research and our university is about finding solutions to society and one of the great challenges that we have are the grand challenges faced by humanity at present and these are so significant that we need to have multidisciplinary teams that work in a synergistic manner to solve these both scientifically, technologically so that there are engineering solutions that are provided. So I guess there's a lot of different fields that are covered, that are worked on. One of them that you're talking about here is stuff like this, right? This could potentially change the world? Absolutely. Probably the greatest problem faced by humanity at present is energy. In fact, if you look at the work that was sponsored initially by Rick Smalley, the Nobel laureate who discovered Bucky Balls, he asked some of his Nobel laureate friends as well as policy makers, what are the greatest challenges faced by humanity in the next 50 years? When he compiled the data, he was surprised to see that energy was number one and when you start thinking about this, you can find out why energy is even higher than poverty, food or water. Simply because if you have unlimited sources of energy, you can do desalination, you can do greenhouses that provide your foods. So as a result, if you can solve the energy crisis, there are many other problems, grand challenges that can be also addressed. So in society we are doing impressive stuff with energy but we need to master it much better, right? That is correct. At present, energy is one of those very strange phenomena where it does not follow any standard economic principle. If you think of the standard models associated with supply and demand, you would say that the supply dictates the demand and the cost associated with that. But energy just baffles everyone. So for example, the sunlight that we see in this beautiful day in Thessaloniki, there's around 165,000 terawatts of energy coming on a daily basis. Whole of humanity put together would use about 10 to 15 terawatts on a daily basis. So there is this huge oversupply of energy coming to the earth from the sun that we are not utilizing. Ten times more than what we need? Ten thousand times more than what we need. So it's a huge factor really. So we just need to take a small piece of it and we have free energy. That's absolutely correct and that's basically what drives myself and my group. That we hope that by just taking a small fraction, 0.01% of the energy that is radiating the earth and we can solve the world's greatest problem which is energy. So if I just stand right here, when Thessaloniki is very bright sunny day, where are the solar panels going to be? There seems to be a lot of space everywhere but there's got to be studies about where you put them, right? And there's lots of space for them? There are studies as to where you need to put them and that also highlights one of the major problems associated with it because at present the world is based on centralized grid based energy provision. In the future it has to be much smarter and actually that's where the name comes from on smart grids. The whole idea is that you will have micro and mini grids all over the world that starts providing energy for those various regions. Now by doing so you reduce the energy loss that you see in transmission lines typically from the point at which energy is produced to the point at which the consumer uses it there is over 50% of the energy lost in transmission. So you can just imagine that energy that's not just lost to humanity but it heats the environment too. So as a result the consequences are absolutely dire. So we are losing 50% now in the system we have now? Absolutely right. We are losing more than 50% in the system and it doesn't matter which system you use, whether it's based on power generation on coal or whether it's based on gas petroleum products all of these lose around 50% of the energy particularly when you have grid based transmission lines associated with it. So every time you have an up converter or a down converter to regulate your voltage there is energy loss associated with it. So if I'm just going to film here one more time how do you build a smart grid? Is it relatively straight ahead? Do people know how to do this or is it like you need to invent new things? It's a bit of both, technology is such that you could take the example of the Apple iPad the iPad really has created a major revolution in terms of technology the way you run meetings, the way you have data at your fingertips in order to run your various meetings. Now when the iPad initially came it wasn't a revolutionary technology it was purely bringing together of different technologies that already existed. Capacitive touch? Absolutely all of that came about purely based on technology that was invented probably 10 years before that. So much like that in the case of the smart grid we have all those components around us it's really about bringing them together. The most important part of this is being able to facilitate the energy capture and that's where solar cells comes in. So your original question as to where do solar cells sit? Solar cells can be grid based or off grid based. I think the typical idea that I would have is every rooftop that you see should have some sort of solar cells on there. Now if within those buildings itself that it can provide just the air conditioning provision for those buildings on sunny days such as these you're probably going to reduce your energy consumption by 20% or more on the energy used to cool your buildings and the irony really at the end of the day is that in the colder climates during winter you're probably using 20% of your energy bill to heat the buildings. So once more the idea is that you will be able to have lower carbon footprints of your building by using the energy during the peak hours and then if you're not at home and using your electricity you could have a way of paying it back through a feed-in tariff to the smart grid that keeps these centralized energy systems that can then be used by others. Another example of where the smart grid could work hugely in favour of changing the human mindset is electric cars. So for example if we were to take the transportation sector which is dominated by fossil fuels over 80% of your energy comes from fossil fuels now if we were to try and decarbonize that particular sector you'd need to go to electric vehicles and now once everyone has an electric vehicle that means they have their energy storage capacity within their household i.e. in their car so you could potentially use solar cells in order to travel and fill in your lithium ion battery or any other type of battery that you might be using for your car but during the night it could act as your storage point where other sunnier climates would be charging your batteries for you while it gets stored for later use within your own household. At peak time requirements the energy would come back from the batteries throughout the smart grid and if every single car is on a big portion gets electric there will be a lot of storage in there but is anyone already doing the smart grid or are they just talking about it? I think in academic circles this is being looked at as something that is being researched actively but it needs government policy it needs some sort of governance to come in to set the infrastructure in place that makes it a reality. It's not cheap right but it's required we need a smart grid. Again I would say in terms of costing the smart grid will need some sort of capital to get it started but it's not the huge amounts that you're talking about with the current grid based electric system because it's much smarter it's smaller networks where you don't need to have large transmission lines associated with it. So it's more efficient it loses less of the power than current systems? That is correct it is significantly more efficient it's smarter because you can modulate the energy that is used you can use artificial intelligence in order to predict where you're going to need your peak energy supplies and the classic example of the vehicle we were talking about you could get into your vehicle go to your office and while you're in your office sitting in your office your car would be connected to your smart grid that then allows you the provision of using the energy or storing the energy as what would be needed in your building and therefore with smart technology for metering you could even make some money going to the office not just by doing your work but also by your car actually discharging some of the energy stored at your home place or street side using solar cells to capture it. So you're in the UK and Theresa made this cool thing on her way out right where she puts targets and now it's going to happen in the UK and the EU everybody's talking about green green green all the time everybody's like this is the number one priority right now so now they need to put the action where their words are right now this things are going to happen right very soon. Things have to happen very soon otherwise the potentialities of climate change hitting us and all the gas and fossil fuel CO2 gases that have gone out will probably start changing the way we live so I think the various provisions that the UK government are putting in place and in order to be carbon neutral by 2050 is extremely required. It's positive even though she does it last days, she could have done it in the first days but anyways it's happening now hopefully and can you show because you had that presentation yesterday kind of like at the opening. Yes so this is very interesting because what I wanted to try to show was that when it comes to energy the changes that we see within the world usage is quite slow so if we were to compare the energy usage in 2010 to the energy usage that we see today in 2018 the change of renewables hasn't been very significant typically for the last 10-15 years we've stood at about 80% fossil fuels and 20% renewables that's because it's so difficult to make change we as humans and society are ingrained in using fossil fuels what it needs is a significant boost in order to change our lives to start using renewables. Now in order to do so we currently use solar cells based on silicon. Silicon provides nearly 90% of your solar energy but we can do better because silicon needs about 100 microns of thickness in order to absorb the energy that we require for energy harvesting. Now to put that into context 100 microns is about the diameter of a human hair so two diameters of a human hair side by side will be the thickness of the silicon you need. Now the new materials we are using and working on called polymer electronics or polymer solar cells have come to the fifth generation of technologies and in looking at these sort of technologies what we want to do is to be able to harvest that same amount of energy with 200 nanometers so if you notice there's a scale there from 200 microns to 200 nanometers it means that you're using a thousandth of the thickness of what we used previously to harvest the same amount of energies that the silicon solar does with polymer solar cells. It doesn't mean a thousand times cheaper no? It doesn't necessarily mean it's a thousand times cheaper but you're absolutely right. Due to the scale of reduced material usage you're using a thousandth of that material so by definition the cost of your material is going to be much lower but saying that the technology that we're using to produce these solar cells based on organic materials is sprayable so it's much like painting much like putting coating on your roof or your wall what we're doing is using solution processable inks that are produced in layers such that they can harvest the energy that we require. Is it so what's happening here? So this is a this solar cell is a classic example of a solar cell that is going to be there on your rooftops on your cars on your windows on the wall yes so as you can see it's truly flexible it's made out of layers of materials that starts with a metal grid on the back that metal grid is on plastic and above that metal grid you would have a number of layers that allow you to capture the sunlight and that is topped up with a transparent material in this particular case. And this can just be done by roll to roll potentially very very cheaply. It's the same technology that's used for your newspaper runs so the idea is that with the scale of manufacture with large numbers square kilometers of organic solar cells being produced we will be able to get as cheap as newspapers so your initial summation that indicated can we go to a thousandth of the cost of a silicon solar cell may not be that bad a prediction but I would say right at the beginning you're probably talking about an order of magnitude lower but that's amazing if you can do that yes the order of magnitude itself is quite incredible because at present if we were to compare the cost of energy provision from silicon based solar to fossil fuel based electricity they are comparable so for example at present just last week in California they provided an auction for four hundred megawatts of electrical energy and that four hundred watts of electrical energy was auctioned off at point zero one nine dollars per kilowatt hour so that's basically just under two cents per kilowatt hour so per megawatt hour you're probably talking about twenty dollars to put that into context within the UK nuclear energy is being provided or is being requested from Hinkley Point C at ninety five pounds per megawatt hour on a thirty five year payback deal so when we are the government is trying to buy nuclear at ninety five pounds we can provide silicon based renewable solar energy at twenty so five times cheaper already it's five times cheaper already you do have to look at the point that in the case of solar at the moment due to its intermittency you need to have the storage capability too it needs to have its infrastructure and as I said the smart grid so there are kids in the electric cars yes at least yes so these are the different provisions that need to be there before we can start really thinking about the availability of total solar power based electricity but people buy a lot of cars every year so if you just have a large percentage of all the new cars and pretty rapidly over two or three years try to have a majority of them be electric maybe you could have the smart grid and before like three or four years and five years from now well I think that is happening and once more the UK government have taken the lead there where they said by 2030 there will be no more fossil fuel only based vehicles being provided through the national network so just to put that into context within the next ten years there will be no petrol only cars being sold in the UK that's a great yes in China in certain cities it's even faster where certain ministers have come out and said by 2035 they want to start removing fossil fuel only based cars so number of countries and a number of European nations also have similar provisions being put within their governance structure to fast forward this adaptation adoption of electrical cars electrical vehicles in order to save the planet as well as provide cheap energy is there other ways to store the energy other some other things are being researched could you use for example huge tanks of hydrogen or something like that there are many many routes in which you can store electricity and as we currently know even today if you didn't have nuclear you need to have some way of providing continuous electrical supply so a typical example is hydroelectricity where during low usage you would pump water up to hills or higher places and then during peak hours you would use that to run your turbines a fly wheels is another technology that is being used even today to store energy fly what fly wheels where basically you just have a wheel that is turning and and you keep turning it faster and faster using oversupply of energy and you decrease the speed whenever you want to pull the energy out of those fly wheels the fly wheels or the water based systems are they efficient enough they also lose a lot of power they do lose some power but again they are as efficient as you can get at present for the scale in which we want to work with but just for backup when it's very very cloudy right yes and and probably probably the most exciting area currently is energy storage and in energy storage too there's huge leaps and bounds being made it's not just lithium ion lithium sulphur that is coming sodium ion batteries but many other types of new energy storage for example in the older days if you took your laptop and you had one hour of battery life that would have been quite significant my current computer has ten hours of battery life so within the time frame of five years you're probably talking about a ten times increase in the capacity and what we are also seeing is that there is about a twenty percent decrease in the cost of batteries lithium ion batteries at present and with newer technologies coming on board I can only see the cost of energy storage getting lower and lower to match the reduction in cost we are seeing in the solar energy provision too Do you think the sodium or another technology is going to replace lithium ion soon? There are other technologies that are coming that are certainly competitive Maybe cleaner or what's called easier to make cheaper? Yes there are cheaper materials and also we don't even have to go down that route of sodium or lithium based ions we can do even super capacitors and pseudo-capacitors but these are much more used when you need to have fast power delivery there are mixtures of both super capacitors and lithium ion batteries so there are a number of areas in which this is being looked at and within the UK once more we've got the Faraday Challenge which is a 280 million pound program set up by the government that is purely looking at new ways in which energy can be stored And in your presentation you also talk more about the efficiency so what's the latest in terms of technology matching or potentially perhaps exceeding the silicon based efficiency of solar maybe also most importantly the cost right? Yes so it's a very interesting point that we currently have that if you think of just purely plastic purely plastic electronics on a daily basis these new technologies coming on board and what I'm showing you here is some new non-fulerene acceptors that have come on the market and with this sort of non-fulerene acceptors these are materials that can be used with polymers over large areas we are getting over 10% power conversion efficiency in fact we can push this up to 16% Are you talking about what's going on here? Yes that is correct so technically we can go up to 16% Now on the other hand we can also start looking at the newest materials the newest kid on the block where we have materials that have come through called perovskites and these perovskites are pushing on to 24% now 24% is very significant because that's beyond silicon. So you can do perovskite with this? Yes this is the same technology that we will be using for perovskite materials and looking at the perovskite provision it is really a very cheap technology some would say it's cheaper than earth the whole point of this is that it's some of the cheapest materials that are being used but like everything else there are the plus and the minus points and in the case of perovskites the highest efficiency materials currently is using lead based compounds so once more due to the toxicity there are certain precautions we need to take but we will be once more looking within the research sector on how we reduce the perovskites that are being used or mitigate against that particular material system because we are talking about small small fractions we are talking about less than 0.1% of the entire material build with being just perovskites. Is it possible to replace lead with something else? We are working on replacing lead with tin at present unfortunately that will reduce the efficiency of our devices so for example you could take something that is working at 20 to 24 degree percentage efficiency down to probably something more around 14 so we are losing but we keep we keep inventing different types of materials that can keep reducing the cost so I think on one hand we are looking at the next generation of plastic electronics that are coming through but on the other hand we already have silicon based technologies that can certainly compete grid electricity so I think that is the key thing that we need to work on and if I can just show you one further chart as to how cheap can solar get and this basically is showing that if we keep deploying silicon in the current manner for solar by 2035 there is a good chance that the cost of electricity from solar will be half that of any fossil fuel based system just to put it into context if you were to go and look at your electricity bill today you will probably be paying something like 15 cents of a dollar for every kilowatt hour that you are consuming and if I were to say that with solar I can provide that at 3 cents per kilowatt hour now wouldn't you want to change your power supply change your lifestyle and also help save this earth that's the proposition I have for you today in using silicon or other new technology based solar in order to provide your energy in terms of changing lifestyle to me it sounds like you could be using even more energy and be cleaner that is correct you could certainly be consuming more having more fun on this planet it doesn't have to be like you're hurting to be green that is correct but at the end of the day what we all would like to do is to democratize the whole process of energy and at the present time we in the west are using probably on average 5 times more energy than some of our Asian colleagues or African colleagues so as a result if we are truly trying to be democratic in terms of energy usage we need to start having energy efficiency gains within the western world at present within the western world on average in the US you would probably be using about 10 kilowatts on a daily basis in terms of energy provision whereas in Europe on average you are talking about 2.5 kilowatts in terms of Africa you are talking about less than a kilowatt so as a result we really do need to start becoming more democratic with the energy and there is no fun in just wasting energy absolutely right nobody is gaining anything to be smarter and humans we are quite smart sometimes it is a little bit sad if the smart brains are not being used and somehow you know what I mean I do understand and I think the key point that you made there was the fact that if we were to just waste energy for the sake of instead of walking down 500 metres or taking your car that is fully air conditioned to drive to that point that is a luxurious way of living whereas on the other hand many other people depend on energy to such an extent that they don't have electricity in the rural community so therefore it is a luxurious way of style for us but it is an absolute necessity in some of the third world developing countries that need this electricity not just in order for school kids to learn in the nights to be able to read up books to be able to connect to the internet and tap the vast amount of energy and knowledge that is out there that we take for granted I have a feeling that it looks like a lot of technologies exist it is just a question of somebody saying it has to be done but on the other hand how much technology needs to be found if there is a will there is a way of doing things I am a great believer in that and at present I think we just need to have a number of world leaders from developing nations and developed countries to work together in order to find certain areas in which we can demonstrate our technology I am pretty sure that we will be able to demonstrate this in countries such as Singapore already and it really is about scaling it up next to provide this and then provided to everybody in the world all the developing countries can have better access to energy and that would be amazing for them that is the dream the dream is that everyone has free energy and if necessary someone pays for their supply so it is a bit like data at the present time you go to the developed countries you go to Singapore, you go to Hong Kong you go to the various airports in all major cities you have a free internet connection you have unlimited data downloads I believe electricity can also be sold in a similar manner simply because if you think that there is a 10,000 oversupply of solar electricity at present there is no money in trying to charge people for the electricity bills it should be a service industry and much like the air, water that we have around us it should be provided free of charge is there any chance in the next 5 years we have a role like this that is as efficient or more efficient than silicon and that is unbreakable it stays on the walls and no roofs without breaking or something like that or easily replaceable to a point where it is a no brainer I think it is going to be a no brainer I don't think we do need to replace silicon with this sort of plastic electronics because in everything in life it is about an energy mix it is about having silicon where silicon is appropriate where organics are appropriate but to put it into context as to whether you need it to last a lifetime or not organic materials such as the ones we are looking at in this case has a payback time of less than one year to put that into context if I were to buy silicon solar in order for me to pay back the capital it will take me around 6 to 8 years at present which is already okay I would think yes it is already okay because it used to be 20 years any bank would say this is a no brainer to invest should be yes now in organics you are actually talking about less than a year probably 6 months now just imagine that right you spray coat your house every 6 months right because your energy provision has already paid for the cost of implementing that change but you don't need to do it every 6 months we don't need to do it every 6 months but that's the sort of aspects that you could have because these solar cells will last you up to 2 years and in time with increased stability we will probably go up to 5 years so as a result after your initial period of payback of 6 months the rest of it is going to be free energy for you because your capital has already been paid for with the electricity that you've used