Materials Science Breakthrough at MIT Will Greatly Improve Efficiencies of All Thermal Power Plants

Here’s a video made by a PhD student at MIT that illustrates how rapidly energy-related technology is evolving, and how this will effect a migration to renewables far faster than most people believe to be possible.  That, of course, is the theme of my current book project (“Bullish on Renewable Energy – Eleven Reasons Why Clean Energy Investors Can’t Lose”), i.e., an enumeration of all the reasons that the migration away from fossil fuels and nuclear is in the process of happening far faster than we predict.

This young man’s breakthrough is a hydrophobic coating 1/2000^th of the thickness of a piece of paper that can be deposited on the heat exchangers in power plants; this will greatly improve efficiencies, since water droplets clinging to metal tubes serve to insulate them thermally.

This will be a boon for all steam-power plants (coal, gas, and nuclear), and it also makes OTEC (ocean thermal energy conversion) much more practical.  That’s joyful news for the one billion people living near tropical oceans, most of whom suffer from extremely expensive electricity—where it exists at all.  It’s also good for the many hundred investors (of which I’m one) in Ocean Thermal Energy Corporation, the leader in all this space.