Sustainable Energy Solutions

Short description of the future field

Sustainable Energy Solutions belongs to the new future fields, which have been elaborated within the Foresight-Process as focal issues in future research activities. Interviews with experts at home and abroad as well as an online survey and bibliometric investigations led to the following definition and delineation:

Definition and Delineation

One of the biggest future fields dominating the debate at the moment is »energy«. Research into the supply and efficient use of energy is being carried out in Germany as a high priority. »Energy« was identified as a future field from the outset. Among the new future fields, two have emerged that do not directly relate to energy research and technology, but could still provide solutions for energy problems that should not be underrated. These sub-fields indicate factors well beyond current activities:

1. The »energy concert« as a field of action: Methodically supported long-term coordination of energy-relevant findings from various research fields not directly involved with energy
2. Research field of gaining Micro-Energy from the Environment: Finding new ways of using ambient micro energy to operate mobile devices

While the »energy concert« is an area of research coordination activity in-volving large amounts of energy, intensive research in various areas is required in the case of Micro-Energy from the Environment. Gaining micro energy from the environment is not a purely energy-related topic. It involves such small amounts of energy that it is irrelevant for energy experts and plays no role in the »energy concert«. Micro-Energy from the Environment is a research and in-novation topic that primarily involves microelectronics, so this research topic comes up in the future field of information and communication technology.

The »energy concert« as a field of action

Coordinated diversity in research into sustainable energy
The »energy concert« is, apart from its methodical aspects, not a research area in the true sense, but an area for research coordination activities. The goal of the »energy concert« is the early strategic bundling of contributions from vari-ous research areas to achieve sustainable energy production and use. A future-oriented, structured observation of the research environment is recommended to achieve this. Integrated scenario analyses and »meta-roadmapping« should help identify synergies and inconsistencies and indicate opportunities through selective strategic bundling. Possible areas for such an energy-related »strategy adjustment« include:

• Materials sciences/ Nanotechnology/ Electro-mobility
• Energy-efficient production technology/ Bioproduction
• The Intelligent House/ Photonics

This field can be included in the BMBF's current activities involving system-oriented research into energy efficiency.

Micro-energy from the environment

Using micro-energy from the environment in autonomous, decentralised, mobile applications and systems
Every day we consciously or unconsciously use a range of different devices that need energy. These devices are becoming smaller (miniaturisation) and integrated into systems, some in the form of implants, even into people. Applications increasingly need to be able to run autonomously, be decentralised or mobile, or operate without a power supply or even without batteries. The use of micro-energy drawn directly from the environment is therefore a precondition for new applications and decentralised systems in many cases.

Examples of this might include permanent power supplies for heart pacemakers, the permanent, the mobile measurement and transmission of bodily functions such as heart rate and blood pressure and autonomous, distributed sensor systems with monitoring functions etc. The innovation potential for mobile devices requiring just a little energy is not nearly fully exploited yet and would seem to be a major precondition for developments such as the »Internet of Things« and »Ambient Intelligence«.

Technologies for using appropriate energy sources, such as mechanical energy from vibrations or movements of air, thermal energy from waste heat, frictional heat or body heat, radiation from the sun or artificial light, electro-magnetic energy from transformers or energy from chemical and biological processes, could serve as »enablers« for innovative microelectronics applications that would otherwise be completely impossible. How this can take place and in which cases it would be economically and ecologically reasonable, is still to be researched. The use of such micro-energy sources also requires corresponding applications that can use the small amounts of energy supplied. This area still needs ideas in many areas on both the energy and devices sides. Devices must become more energy-efficient and energy must »get into« the devices in sufficient quantities and be stable and inexpensive.

More on this topic

Report

The complete chapter on this new future field from the Foresight report is available for download here.

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