Technologyquarterly June 6Th 2009 Concentrate! the Other Kind of Solar Power
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The rise of the Building the The father of the connected car smart energy grid mobile phone TechnologyQuarterly June 6th 2009 Concentrate! The other kind of solar power TTQCOVERJune09.inddQCOVERJune09.indd 1 226/5/096/5/09 113:27:513:27:51 2 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly June 6th 2009 Contents On the cover Think of solar power, and the chances are you will think of photovoltaic panels. But there is another way to make electricity from sunlight which may have even brighter prospects. Concentrating solar•thermal technology is growing fast and could Third time lucky re•emerge as the leading form of solar power, page 16 Monitor 2 Biotech’s third wave, a better robot hand, red tape in space, pneumatic•hybrid engines, military blimps, interplanetary Industrial biotech: A third wave of biotechnology is arriving. Will it be able e•mail, a new articial heart, to avoid a poor reception from the general public this time around? zapping mosquitoes with lasers, rewarding pill•poppers, OR a long time the public has perceived imagines a future in which bio•reneries campaigners embrace maps, Fbiotechnology to mean dangerous are dotted around the countryside produc• and sewing with nanotubes meddling with the genes in food crops. ing fuels and other chemicals from bio• But biotechnology is of course about mass such as agricultural waste. Rational consumer much more than transgenic food: it also One company which has been work• encompasses the use of microbes to make ing in industrial biotechnology for years is 10 With a little helpð pharmaceuticals, for example. The many DSM, based in Heerlen in the Netherlands. Domestic robots’ slow progress benets of the rst wave of biotech pro• In the 1990s it started making enzymes for ducts, in medicine, have unfortunately cheese and omega•6 fatty acids for infant Energy been overshadowed by the supposed formulas, and went on to develop a bio• 11 Building the smart grid risks of biotech’s second wave, in agricul• logical process to produce cephalosporin, An internet for electricity ture. Might its third waveso•called indus• an antibiotic, in a much cleaner way than trial biotech, also known as white bio• the chemical processes used to make the Automotive technology tech or green chemistryresolve drug. Its most recent e ort has been to nd 14 The connected car biotech’s image problem? a biological way to produce a chemical Vehicle shall speak unto vehicle As with other forms of biotechnology, called succinic acid (C4H6O4), which is industrial biotech involves engineering used to make a wide range of products Case history biological molecules and microbes with including spandex, biopolymers for agri• 16 Solar•thermal technology desirable new properties. What is di erent culture, de•icing salts, esters, resins and The other kind of solar power is how they are then used: to replace acidity regulators in foods. chemical processes with biological ones. The usual chemical process involves Mobile phones Whether this is to produce chemicals for making succinic acid from crude oil or other processes or to create products such natural gas. DSM’s biological approach is 19 Sensors and sensibility as biopolymers with new properties, based on fermentation using enzymes Mining the data from handsets there is huge scope to harness biology to and genetically engineered microbes. accomplish what previously needed big, After a successful pilot•production phase, Photoacoustic imaging dirty chemical factories, but in cleaner and the next step is a demonstration factory in 21 The sound of light greener ways. Lestrem, France, which will be running by A new scanning technique Sales of industrial•biotechnology the end of the year. If that goes well, a products were about $140 billion in 2007, much bigger commercial operation will Brain scan and 6% of all chemicals sales were gener• follow. The company says that as well as 23 Cellular seer ated with the help of biotechnology, says making succinic acid from biologically A prole of Marty Cooper, the Jens Riese of McKinsey, a consulting rm. derived starch, rather than fossil fuels, its father of the mobile phone Steen Riisgaard, chief executive of Novo• process also uses 40% less energy and zymes, a biotechnology company, says he produces fewer carbon•dioxide emissions. 1 The Economist Technology Quarterly June 6th 2009 Monitor 3 2 Novozymes, as its name suggests, has greener biological alternatives. Surely that space agency. And it has taken an order focused its attention on supplying opti• should make it easier to convince people from Britain’s Ministry of Defence, which mised enzymesbiological molecules of its benets, and hence to rehabilitate wants to try the hand out on the arm of a that help make reactions happen faster, or the notion of biotechnology more widely? bomb•disposal robot. at lower temperatures. This sounds trivial One problem is that even though the Shadow Robot’s hand is about the but it can make the di erence between a raw materials used in industrial biotech• same size as a man’s. It has four ngers commercial and a non•commercial pro• nology may not be derived from fossil and a thumb made from various metals cess. The company says it has 47% of the fuels, they are still capable of stirring up and plastics, and even has polycarbonate market for industrial enzymes, which are some dicult ethical questions. In partic• ngernails to help it prise things apart. The used in areas such as detergents, brewing, ular, using food crops like maize as raw joints in its ngers, thumb and wrist pro• baking or to produce animal feeds. materials to make biofuel is already huge• vide 24 degrees of freedom (a degree of Enzymes are the rst tool of choice in ly controversial because of its impact on freedom is the ability of one part of a white biotechnology if the chemical food prices. And even growing non•food system to move independently of the conversion process is a fairly simple one. crops for industrial use is problematic, others in a particular way). All this enables But if a more complicated series of re• because it can reduce the land available it to copy the movement of a person’s actions is required, or the enzyme in the for food production. hand very closely. The robot hand mimics process is used up during conversion and The use of agricultural waste is less the movements of a human operator who needs to be regenerated, it is time to reach controversial. Mr Riisgaard reckons that wears a special virtual reality glove for a microbe. Microbes can accomplish converting agricultural waste into other equipped with sensors that can determine hundreds of chemical tasks at the same chemicals (including fuels) using industri• the positions of the ngers inside it. time and are able to recreate the enzymes al biotechnology could replace 20•25% of And the robot hand mimics not just the they need. Novozymes is working on a global oil consumption. And there is movement, but also the means of achiev• biological process to make acrylic acid plenty of waste about. He also suggests ing it. The hand has a combination of (C3H4O2) from starch or biomass rather that raw materials could be grown on articial muscles and tendons. Each air than fossil fuels. One stage uses optimised marginal land which is unsuitable for food muscle in the forearm behind the hand enzymes, and another is carried out by production. That is true, but it could have consists of a rubber tube covered in a rigid engineered microbes. knock•on e ects on biodiversity. Perhaps plastic mesh. Inating the tube strains the Creating a suitable microbe involves the most promising approach for ad• mesh, providing a powerful pulling force. starting o with one that does part of the vocates of biotechnology’s third wave is By using two air muscles to pull a joint in job in question, and then convincing the to emphasise the potential for a new, di erent directions, the robot hand is microbe to specialise in that activity. (DSM greener chemicals industry to create jobs capable of strong and precise actions. The found its microbe, a yeast, living in ele• in remote rural areas. 7 40 muscles are attached to ne cables in phant dung, where it broke down cellu• sheaths, much like the brake cables on a lose in starch; Novozymes started out with bicycle, and these pass through the robotic a bacterium from its large library of mi• wrist to operate the joints. crobes.) The next stage is to eliminate the The tactile sensors which take the place things the microbe does that are not relat• Very handy of nerve endings at the ngertips are even ed to the task in hand by inactivating more advanced. They are made from a non•essential genes. The modied mi• material that conducts electricity crobes are then produced in large num• only when it is squeezed. The bers and those that are best at the job are sensors rely on quantum tunnell• selected. The result is a bug that is special• Robotics: Mechanical hand ing, in which electrons take ly adapted for a particular task. seeks dangerous, dirty and journeys that would not be Novozymes says it is close to complet• dull jobs. Qualied to allowed by the laws of classical ing its acrylic•acid process. Around 40% of physics, as long as the distances acrylic acid produced is used to make handle eggs involved are tiny. super•absorbent material like that found HE arm of a typical Minuscule changes in the in nappies (diapers); most of the rest goes Tindustrial robot is a squeezing of the sensor into paints and coatings.