SIEMENS

The amazing success story of electricity began in darkness — or at least it did so in the Kingdom of Bavaria. It was there in the tranquil valley of Graswangtal, almost 140 years ago, that the legendary King Ludwig II ushered in a new technological era: the age of electricity. On clear winter nights, while the rest of the populace slept, the shy monarch would ride through a moonlit forest in a horsedrawn sleigh. For the lucky few who were fortunate enough to witness this spectacle, the royal sled was a magnificent sight — and also a glimpse of the future, since it was illuminated by a mysterious light that was almost as bright as day.

Ludwig’s sleigh, which was lit by battery-powered carbon arc lamps from Siemens, was only the first of a number of royal follies to feature electrical illumination. In 1878, for example, the whimsical monarch commissioned the construction of an artificial cavern, hidden away on the grounds of Linderhof Palace. Complete with an underground lake and a waterfall, it was modeled on the Grotto of Venus in Richard Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser and the Blue Grotto on the island of Capri. Some 24 Schuckert dynamos, based on a concept discovered by Werner von Siemens and driven by a steam engine housed in a specially-built machine building, provided power for the lighting. It was the world’s first small-scale generating facility — four years before the Edison Electric Light Station in London and the Pearl Street Station in New York, both built in 1882 and generally regarded as the world’s first public power plants.

“Electricity has many advantages, not least the fact that it’s highly flexible and easy to use,” says Prof. Eberhard Umbach, President of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). “It serves to produce light, heat, and mechanical motion, and when the electricity itself is generated with renewable energy it doesn’t generate any greenhouse gases.” For Umbach, electricity is therefore the perfect energy carrier. Ludwig II was not the only person to profit from this new form of power. Only a few years after the fairytale king had installed electric light in his castles, the general public also began to enjoy its benefits. In the wake of Thomas Alva Edison’s development of the incandescent light bulb and Siemens’ discovery of the dynamo-electric principle, which made it relatively easy to generate large quantities of electricity, more and more cities around the world began to take the first tentative steps into the age of electricity.

By the mid-1880s cities such as New York, London, and Berlin were a blaze of electric light. In the mean time, Siemens developed the first electrically powered locomotive in 1879 and the first electric streetcar in 1881. By 1890 the world’s first electric subway was in operation beneath the streets of London, and in 1905 Siemens began construction in Berlin of the Elektrische Viktoria, an electric automobile that was mainly used as a hotel taxi.

During the 20th century, the use of electricity rapidly gathered pace. “One milestone was the transition from steam to electrically-powered drives,” explains Umbach. “Today, you’ll find highly efficient electric motors in use almost everywhere — in electric toothbrushes, in trains, in industrial processes.” In fact, many aspects of everyday life would be unthinkable without electricity. These range from the home to public transportation, communications, IT, and healthcare.

More than a Passing Trend. What’s more, the age of electricity is by no means on the wane. According to a study by the KIT, electricity currently accounts for 22 percent of total energy consumption in Germany. The largest share goes to industry, with 43 percent, followed by private households, trade, commerce, and services, each with 27 percent. The KIT forecasts that consumption will continue to rise in all of these sectors by as much as 1.4 percent a year. “We’re also seeing a shift to electricity from other forms of energy,” says Umbach. All in all, the International Energy Agency predicts that global electricity consumption will increase by around 70 percent by 2035. In other words, we are on the threshold of a new age of electricity.

According to Umbach, electricity is going to provide serious competition for the conventional heating systems used in today’s buildings. Electrical heat pumps, for example, are more efficient at providing warmth than carbon fuel-based systems, particularly now that improved thermal insulation is progressively reducing the amount of energy that buildings require for heating purposes. Moreover, according to the Federal Association of the Heat Pump Industry, emissions of the environmentally harmful gas CO2 caused by heat pumps are around 40 percent lower than those from gas-fired heating. “The generation of heat for buildings is the largest consumer of energy in industrial nations,” says Umbach. “I see big potential for electricity here.”

New Applications for Power. Commercial and residential buildings are an area where new developments can be expected. Researchers are investigating the use of networks of tiny sensors to transmit data on parameters such as temperature and CO2 concentrations to an intelligent building management system (see article "Instant Communities"). Thus equipped, a new generation of smart buildings could become active agents on the power market and automatically adjust their consumption to fluctuating supplies of solar and wind energy. As a recent study by Siemens and the Technical University of Munich shows, such a vision is by no means unrealistic (see article "Automation’s Ground Floor Opportunity"). The study demonstrates that it is perfectly feasible to ramp down air conditioning and heat pumps without compromising comfort within a building.

In order to ensure that green power reaches consumers more efficiently, grid technology will also need to smarten up its act. Engineers from Siemens Corporate Technology are currently working on this problem at a special test facility in Erlangen (see article "No Longer a One-Way Street"). Here they are busy developing special control algorithms and hardware components for the smart grids of the future. To date, results have been highly encouraging, and now a pilot project to test the findings has been launched using the grid of power company Allgäuer Überlandwerk (AÜW) in southern Germany.

Electric Mobility. Another area in which electricity could be an alternative to carbon fuels is road transportation. According to the KIT, transportation currently accounts for a mere four percent of electricity consumption in Germany. Practically all of this is for rail transport, 90 percent of which is electrified. Meanwhile, roads remain dominated by vehicles equipped with internal combustion engines, which are responsible for around 20 percent of total CO2 emissions worldwide. Given climate change, however, and the increasing difficulty of tapping the earth’s remaining oil reserves, researchers at KIT confidently predict the coming of age of the electric automobile. Just when a mass market begins to develop will depend on when the technology — charging systems, for example — has become affordable and practical for everyday use. At Siemens, engineers are investigating concepts to advance the development of electric mobility. At the end of last year, for example, the company launched a major field trial with employees testing a fleet of around 100 electric vehicles (see article "Just Plug ‘er in!"). The project’s goal is to examine not only the everyday practicality of electric cars but also the overall system itself and the interplay between various components — ranging from the generation and distribution of power to the process of recharging vehicles. Technologies for the drive, communications, and charging systems have been developed by Siemens and will be progressively installed in the company’s electric vehicles in the course of the project.

Electricity will also be required in many other areas. These include the desalination of seawater. In Singapore, for example, Siemens researchers have developed a desalination plant that works by means of electrical fields (see article "Desalination: Plunging Price"). Conventionally, seawater is desalinated using either evaporation or reverse osmosis processes, both of which are extremely energy-intensive. The new technology requires only half as much energy — and that amounts to a technological revolution. Since December 2010, a pilot plant has been converting seawater highly efficiently into pure drinking water.

The future will also bring new ways of generating electricity. These include tidal energy systems, which function like underwater wind turbines. A number of these are already in operation at various locations, including the coast of Northern Ireland, where SeaGen went into operation in 2008. With an output of 1.2 megawatts, enough to supply 1,500 households, it is currently the most powerful tidal current power plant in the world (see article "Tapping Invisible Rivers"). “Electricity has virtually limitless applications,” says Umbach. Whether these are realized or not will depend on a number of constraints, not least the future price of power. “The best route to a sustainable future is not yet clear,” he emphasizes. “That’s why it’s crucial to continue intense research in all areas and not neglect other energy carriers such as synthetic hydrocarbon fuels and hydrogen.” For the purposes of storage, for example, excess wind-generated power could be converted into a chemical energy carrier. Here too, Siemens is working on such a system — one that uses hydrogen (see article "Second Wind for Hydrogen"). According to Umbach, when it comes to mastering future challenges, the most important thing is to combine a firm grip on reality with a well-developed sense of imagination — something that takes us right back to Ludwig II, Bavaria’s eccentric monarch.