gREAT INVENTIONS CAN BUILD ON THE SUCCESS of others or arrive with the burst of an epiphany, but progress rarely follows a straight line. Even in a field as advanced as energy, innovation doesn’t come knocking. Rather, daunting challenges inspire great minds to invent ingenious solutions.
Consider solar energy. In the early 1950s, Bell Labs engineers were stumped with a power problem. In the tropics, batteries used by the telephone system had a habit of corroding, a humid hang-up that disrupted service. Toying with alternative power sources, engineers couldn’t make a connection until someone mentioned their promising experiments with silicon, then seen as a cheap byproduct of sand. Despite the unorthodox material and methodology, they followed their gut instinct, and after endless prototypes, arrived at the Bell Solar Battery — a remarkable new device that could convert sunlight into useful electricity, and the ancestor of today’s rooftop arrays. Billed as “a modern version of Apollo’s chariot,” the technological leap suggested that, even when attempting to harness the world’s most abundant energy source, success comes from serendipity, tangential thinking and vision.
BELL’S BIG DISCOVERY OFFERS A PRECEDENT for the type of solutions needed to solve tomorrow’s global energy demands. With an expanding population expected to surpass 9 billion by 2040, according to the IEA, the world will need to roughly double its energy supply by mid-century, and focus on fostering clean sources of power. Simply growing the grid won’t do; with future economic and population growth concentrated in developing countries, new infrastructure will often be built in areas without reliable access to power today (a quarter of India’s surging population can’t reliably access electricity).
It’s an unprecedented clean energy challenge: create affordable, scalable and decentralized power. How do you tackle a challenge of this scale? It requires progressive change, something Shell supports via Shell LiveWIRE and Shell Springboard, initiatives which have provided assistance and millions in funding to help startups and today’s clean energy innovators realize their visions. Real shifts often come from small, smart and flexible ideas, ones that seem as outlandish as harvesting the sun’s rays with silicon seemed more than a half century ago.
Asad Liaquat
Capture Mobility
For Pakistani electrical engineer Sanwal Muneer, 22, the solution came by recasting a longtime enemy of environmentalists — traffic — as a savior and energy source. The company he co-founded with CTO Asad Liaquat and Sidra Muneer, Capture Mobility, a Shell LiveWIRE alumnus that recently won an Outstanding Achievement award from the UK Trade and Investment department, manufactures 8-foot tall columns topped with a spinning turbine, which resemble roadside artwork. But when positioned in medians or along highways, the hybrid power source uses a built-in helical turbine, turned by the wind and turbulence from passing cars and trucks, as well as solar panels, to generate electricity. Portable enough for roadsides and rural areas, the device creates enough power in a day to run a small home. Removable filters also help clean air that’s been polluted by passing traffic.
“I wanted to create something that could be scaled up easily.”
The idea came to Muneer in 2013, when he was competing in Shell Eco-marathon — a competition to design, build and test an energy-efficient vehicle. A stray observation led him to consider the high speed traffic turbulence which made him think about using wind turbines to capture the energy of traffic being wasted; soon he was planting prototypes beside local roads.
“I wanted to create something that could be scaled up easily irrespective of geography and environment,” says Muneer. “Available renewable resources might not be efficient and reliable everywhere — such as solar in Scotland — so we need to come up with innovative ways to generate clean energy to pace up with the demand.”
