 So, so far, brief review of the different technologies. I'm sure if you go out and do your own research, you'll find some of the technologies that I didn't talk about. But, you know, if everything is based on what I told you, and I, please remember again, everything that you saw so far, except the flat-pound PD, they're all from the backstage. You know, people are working on it. They are making things better, and they are trying to make them more viable financially, economically, and to see if they can actually sell those. So what are the challenges for the energy? Three challenges. Is the cost, always cost, intermittency, and production difficulties. We can't do anything with production difficulties. You know, we have to learn, learn, develop machinery, and these kind of things to develop the good system and the low cost system to produce those technologies, but we might be able to do things regarding the cost of intermittency. So how we can tackle cost? We can increase efficiency basically from the same system that costs us a certain amount of money by increasing efficiency to get more power. So basically cost per generated unit of power or energy drops, but people are working on efficiency, but efficiency changes are going to be in the range of one or two percent, and there isn't going to be drastic change in efficiency. I mean, suddenly efficiency is not going to do anything. Okay. They kind of gradually will increase as we learn more and the technology actually advances. The other one is the use of power electronics. Currently for PV technology, there are like three main power electronics that people use. There are DC optimizers, microinverters, and soft panel level power management. The third one is what I've been working on in the past three years, and actually a company announced it publicly two days ago, so I'm allowed to announce it here to be so far, but it's secret. No one here allows it. This is happening. And very quick overview of why power electronics are important. Solar panels, the solar cells give you a small voltage because it's just a little diode. Diode voltage is going to be random, like 0.5 to 0.7 volts, right? So in order to get the voltage is like 220 or 480 volts, we have to put this diode in series to build up the voltage. However, because PV cells act like current source, basically this group of cells that are working with each other, if there is a weak cell, that is weak either because of some manufacturing problems or it's shaded by a shadow or a leak that kind of falls on the panel or things like this, it's going to be the weak link in this team. And everybody is familiar with this saying that the team is as strong as its weakest link. Right? Nobody wants to be the weak link. So therefore, if in this spring up, let's say 100 or 200 cells, one of the cells is kind of weak for whatever reason, the whole cell is jeopardized and it's not going to generate electricity. So they use power electronics, like this up in my room, in my converters, and the soft panel level to isolate the cells from each other. So if one of the cells is weak, it doesn't affect the entire system. Okay. We can, to reduce the cost, we have to create better manufacturing processes. I've been to China and India and I kind of looked at how people build these panels because most of the solar panels are being built in China and India, as we speak. There are some in Korea and Japan as well, but everything happens manually. So there are just people, they grab the cell, they put it on the table, they solder the wires by hand one by one and kind of take about three hours to build one panel. Okay. So that's one of the reasons that most people prefer to do the manufacturing in countries like China or India because labor is an extensive, so they can reduce the cost. But if the manufacturing processes are improved and everything is automated, there is no reason to do the manufacturing in those places. Right? Because everything just happens and you don't need no cost to be done. So this is another area that really, really people can contribute. The solar power as an industry so new is at its infant stages that people haven't developed machinery for building those machines. So if someone comes up with an idea to have this big machinery to build a solar panel in one minute, that's a fantastic achievement. Balance of system. What is balance of system? To generate electricity from solar panels, we don't need the solar panel only. We need a lot of things around it. We need cables, we need racks to hold the solar panels. If they're stopping the sun, we need electric boilers, softwares, we need like inverters and invertees, this is official AC, we need all the circuit breakers, control system, everything, everything, like fault detection, we need so many things to actually put together a solar power system. Anything other than the solar panel of the cell itself is called balance of system. And as we speak, actually from the top, the balance of system comprises about 50% of the cost of a solar power system. It's a huge portion of that. So if somehow a system can be redesigned or something that someone can do to reduce the balance of system costs, it's going to be a huge contribution. Shipping and installation too. As I said, everything is being manufactured in East Asia and are being shipped back to where they need to install. And the way they do, so basically the cost of a solar panel is a tiny sheet. It's like your student ID. It's like laminated between two layers and that's it. It's a cardboard, but they put it in big frames and all these kind of things. It becomes bulky to be shipped. So it takes a lot of space and the shipping companies charge a lot of money and it's also heavy. So the shipping and even installation is a big deal in this arena. Also the operation. So we installed a system there, especially imagine like a utility scale solar system. You have, let's say, one million solar panels and you know, somehow you have to understand if your solar panels are operating well, if there is a problem with any one of the solar panels and if there is one, each one of these one million panels has problems. You know, you can send someone to check one of the solar panels. You listen about solar themes. Pain. Solar paint. Yes. We talk about right now about solar panels, yes? But I listen about paint, solar. You can paint it in your roof and no panels. Only viking, yes? How you paint? What you listen about then? Yes, I've heard those ideas, too. But as I said, those basically go in the category of solar panels because they basically have particles in the paint that somehow they basically connect electrically to each other and it's supposed to generate electricity. But if you read the literature properly, you have to be careful about the reliability and that is one very important thing. I mean, which paint has lasted for 30 years? I don't know, you know? Pardon me? Thank you. Like thin film technology is very inefficient. You know, they are hardly about like 10 or even less than 10% efficient. Which, again, someone can argue that and say, you know what, you say solar panel is free, it's efficient. Someone can argue that. But if you compare the efficiency, the efficiency is lower and the reliability and all the balance of system that is going to come around it. As a research project, it's a fantastic idea and good to think about it. The real problem is because all these technologies are right now very expensive, yes. All the work is really great. Just the sound gives us free energy and we can use it free. But right now one of the most expensive energy, yes, it's solar energy, yes. And we can realize I write somewhere and because I ask you about that, yes, about that paint. But it's, if scientists can realize that you can everywhere, you can use it everywhere. In cars, yes. I don't know, in facets, in all roofs, yes, all everywhere. Absolutely, yes. So as I said, as a research project, great. So people are working on that. They keep working on that. But at this point, it's not ready to become commercialized yet. At some point, it may prove to be the best thing and it goes out of business. Everybody takes the walls. That could happen. Over the past 10 years, I can show you how many companies were bought, which one's made out of business and how similar things are going to happen over the next couple of years. And that... And the thing is, when we say expensive, technology is expensive, I want all of us to understand what is expensive. We compare with the regular ways of creating the generated electricity. That's it. As I said in the US, they mostly generate electricity. So basically, when the utility company sent you a deal at the end of the month, because their generating electricity is in coal, it's like the cost of electricity generated by coal. And that's what people are used to pay for. So when they say solar power is expensive, it's expensive than coal. Now, maybe after 20 years, when we run out of coal or petroleum resources or all these kind of things, the electricity price starts creeping up, then boom, everything makes sense. You know, it's okay. That's expensive, but solar next. So these things are a matter of technology development, making things, engineering things in the best possible way, the most reliable way, the cheapest way, but also environment or the atmosphere that we're working in. It makes the place a bigger place. After five years, the electricity prices kind of go up by a factor of five, it's easily everybody who goes to the store, nobody has to do any marketing for that. We're trying not to use another big doting policy. Yeah. Here are the emissions produced in the coal and the use of the solar energy and the influence of emissions on the health and the expenses on the health. So, it's going to be the solar energy of solar energy and the expenses of the coal. We should consider also the influence of emissions on the health and the expenses of the health. The expenses in the environment, in the environment of the coal. So, you mean like the solar technology has worse no, no, no. She's talking about the conventional technology. If you count the external costs of the conventional technology, then the solar energy, yes. That's absolutely true, but like an intellectual, like all intellectual people in this room will think about it and will make that true statement that it is made. But people in the streets they don't know this, you know, and those are the people we're dealing with. Yes, of course, a person who knows all these things will go because that person wants solar power to become like widespread will even go spend the expensive money through just to help the improvement of the technology. I contribute to this technology like as early adopters. But, you know, those people are very small to send in so we need to educate people to help people. Hey, you know, this is the case so people start becoming concerned about, you know, the side effects that you mentioned and they kind of are willing to send slightly more expensive technology for the side benefits. You know, any social change takes a long time. I mean, if you look at social change as a system it has a very long time constant. You give the impulse and the response takes decades to show. But eventually it will happen like this. Anyways, I want to move fast. I'm very quickly so over almost past decade from 2001 to recent, like last March the retail prices of modules have gone through various kind of play. Initially they dropped and they went up and here there was this basically crisis in economy and nobody knew what was going to happen and they saw a good or bad event of state flood but 2008 suddenly started coming. So in 2008 nothing happened. There was no breakthrough in efficiency. There was no nobody to solve the intervitancy of solar panels. There wasn't any specific like big numbers of installation to actually force the prices to go down. The main thing that happened was actually the China dumping battle that happened in the war. What happened is that China's solar industry received massive subsidies from government to actually create solar cells and solar panels and dump all of them at very low prices because the industry was getting they could sell their product at very low prices. Government was compensated for the losses of the companies so government told the companies hey sell yourself sell your module at loss below your cost or even at your cost I'll pay that for you but for now just do that and sell it outside of the China which is mainly US market and the result was that it basically killed all the manufacturing jobs and companies in the US and Europe because those companies couldn't compete in this project nobody was buying their product so they went out of business they closed the doors or they consolidated and laid out the people I'm sure you have heard the stories like Solindra or some other companies that business happened it basically couldn't compete with the prices of kind of that China was off it's not that China was making money off of it no China was at a loss but China was doing this to exactly to actually push out all the competition and basically they say and China itself still doesn't have a big market Chinese people still aren't into getting this new technology or solar panel so China had to send all these things to the US and Europe to kill the competition and basically have a higher market to enlarge the market as much as possible then it becomes the only manufacturer of solar panels that everybody has to buy solar panels from China and they usually say when you have when you own your customer you own the price and you own the volume so basically China becomes like a big huge solar power like giant everybody has to buy from China because all the competition is not in China you know what now I'm selling this you don't want to buy it I'm sorry there's another person there is no competition from other countries but still the balance is going on lots of people have like five companies international and so on but what the US has done so far is discharging technology so any solar panel that is being imported to US from China the order person has to pay 30% on power cash and recently we were brought in some panels from India and they charged us 205% as a share so US is trying to charge these things so people don't buy panels from China they buy from local manufacturers see like local manufacturers go through the economy difficulty they learn to go through the learning process and become capable of generating the kind of building solar panels at low prices so they can so there is a style going on between the US and China and the US the second problem is the renewable energy this is just a graph that shows this is for a solar installation this is for a wind turbine it shows how during a day you are losing power maybe here because of the clouds or these things like this because the wind dies down so this is a big problem with renewable energy they don't exist all the time they only can generate power and energy when you have the sun when you have the moon when you don't have it systems don't work so this is another thing that everybody in this room can think about the contribution that you can bring into on the table to tackle the needs the most important way that you can tackle the needs is to generate some kind of an energy source so when you have energy and you are generating more than what your load is demanding you just store the excess energy somewhere and then when you lose the sun or when you are losing you use that store energy and supply to your customers energy storage can be in the form of thermal energy it can be a flywheel that kind of stored like in like inertia I don't know what you call that energy that is stored in like mass of the system that is turning it can be used yeah it's like mechanical energy like kinetic energy right you have a compressed air superconducting magnetic energy storage is very interesting it's like a inductor you know what inductor is what inductor does it actually stores energy form of magnetic energy in the magnetic field to be smaller exactly this is basically so your conductor, this is a big copper they are superconducting material it's basically the same mass this only operates at very very very low temperatures so you have systems around it to keep it at very low temperatures if you can do that, if it makes sense great like pump hydro or different kinds of batteries also are options for energy storage or any other new things that you guys will come up with so what battery is the latest technology you have like two big tanks of chemicals and you throw the chemicals through a membrane it generates electricity okay and then when you put electricity into this membrane it generates the same chemical and goes in the tank so basically you have big tanks that energy is stored there when you want to use the energy you create that electrochemical reaction or store it backwards but if you are thinking about energy storage you always have to think about energy density so if you are comparing different energy storage options you have to think about the cost so which one makes sense self discharge is like side effect of an energy storage system when it sits there it doesn't always keep the energy like think of your water heater if it hits up the water and you turn it off after a few hours it's cold because the energy discharges out of the system so you have to resolve these problems and there is a round-trip efficiency so you do some work to store the energy in your energy storage medium and then you get it back what portion of the energy that you store comes back to you that's the round-trip efficiency can be from 66% to almost 100% in different technologies and also life if you are using the batteries you have a low life time but if you are using like thermal or hydro it depends on your application and what you want to do with energy storage but these are the factors that need to be considered other arenas I don't think talk too much about this but you maybe take a note and see how you can again contribute these are like smart grids coming area and renewable energies that basically has a lot to do with emerging computer software with electric distribution okay how the network infrastructure can be designed what architecture how the grid should be optimized because after 5 or 10 years when each house or like each big building has a TV system you have this power generating nodes in your entire system currently we have this big huge nuclear power plant or steam power plant they generate enormous amount of energy and electric lines overhead lines bring that electric power for households so currently the power grid is designed to be backing but once each house now is generating 2 kilowatts, 3 kilowatts like the Yereban city is generating 15 kilowatts of power and the whole system dynamic changes impact this generation and consumption and what problems might come might be what kind of challenges we will face, you still don't know until the number of distributed power generation become more prominent in our system and we start causing problems it's good to think about a lot of time so when they happen we can resolve them about building automation you know when you are not in a room or in a cleaning system these are very busy stages they have a lot of room for development demand response and all the software and applications that come in controlling this big huge infrastructure I know that lots of students here have very strong background in software engineering and computer science so this might be of particular interest we are thinking about and see how we can contribute and what kind of things we can add to make things work better so I think since I am already way over time I will stop right here and thank you all for being here and listening to this presentation so you leave this room and you know something or something in your mind is now bothering you to go open a book or read about something that happens I think I have some questions questions