Following on an article from the professional networking site Focus.com on disruptive innovations that have turned markets upside down (iPad, Google Apps, Pandora, Zynga, etc.), the Carbon War Room posted a tweet asking, “What have been the disruptive innovations in the cleantech space?”  After a week of thinking this through, here’s my response.

First, what constitutes a disruptive innovation? I think of it as above all something that enables fundamental change.  Secondly it can be a product, process, or widget; and finally, the changes it engenders can take a long time to diffuse through society but they are fundamental.  History is littered with these innovations, including the telephone, the internal combustion engine car and the contraceptive pill.

But what’s next? What is on the horizon?  If, like me, you believe that we are approaching a convergence of technologies that over the next decade will rival the early 1900s in speed of change, then we have a number of examples that are worthy of inclusion.  I have limited my list to five potential cleantech disruptive innovations that will enable large-scale change.  In alphabetical order:

• 3D Printing
• Energy Harvesting
• Energy Storage
• Fuel Cell Technology
• Smart Meters

3D Printing

This, along with energy harvesting, is one of the two longer-term technologies on this list.  3D printing is still very much under development, probably at the same stage as the very first mobile phone,  and represents what could be a step change in manufacturing.

The technology prints successive layers on top of each other, building up to a pre-specified component. At present the technology, which is still very expensive, can be used to build working prototypes.

Why is it on this list?  With development, if the technology can get to the stage where it can print, with precision, parts for assembly, then outsourcing of manufacturing to third-world countries could become a thing of the past.  Taking into consideration that over 50% of the global shipping fleet, which itself contributed 4.5% of all global emissions of greenhouse gases in 2008, is made up of ships which are in effect floating warehouses of products sent from country of manufacture to country for sale, the clear potential for change is there.

Time till impact: near the end of this decade.

Energy Harvesting

Energy harvesting is the process of scavenging small amounts of power from a variety of sources, including saliently and temperature gradients.  Biomechanical energy harvesting is harvesting energy from movement.  Think about it: If we could even collect some of the energy it takes to type up a blog, go for a 10km run, or even walk to the corner coffee shop, it could be enough to offset some of each person’s power use.  Each person on the planet.  Now scale it up.  What about getting a nightclub to power their lighting from the energy produced by the dancers?  Actually, that’s already been done, at the Latitude Festival, in Suffolk, England.

Why is this significant?  Because the charging of gadgets such as mobile phone and laptops, according to the IEA’s base demand scenario, will account for approximately 1,700 terawatt-hours of electricity consumption by 2030.  To put this another way, with the proliferation of high-intensity energy-using consumer electronics, such as plasma screen TVs, as well as heating and cooling equipment, the residential sector will require an extra 280 GW of power to be installed by 2030.  This represents an additional 6% of global installed capacity over 2007 levels.

If we can offset even a fraction of this by collecting the energy in our bodies, and in our movement, we can reduce the need for new capacity, which even by 2030 is still likely to come largely from fossil fuels.

Time till impact: near the end of this decade. 

Energy Storage

Energy storage, from supercaps, flywheels, batteries, compressed air and hydrogen, is the latest step forward in the cleantech industry, and its impact is likely to grow significantly over the next decade as its potential to be a true disruptor is increasingly understood.

What it represents is the ability to create energy at time x, but use it later, at time y.  Considering that one of the biggest drawbacks of some renewable sources is their sporadic power production levels, the ability to take any excess and store it for later use represents a fundamental breakthrough.

According to my colleague Anissa Dehamna, in her Pike Research energy storage report Energy Storage Systems for Ancillary Services and Energy Storage on the Grid, these two areas represent a combined revenue of $125 billion by 2021.

The drivers of this scarily large number are many-fold, with one being that, on a fundamental level, electric grids require balance in order to function properly.  Energy storage technologies are emerging as a means of providing grid operators with an alternative to traditional grid management and being able to offer the grid operators the much needed control of grid loads.

But it’s not just at grid level that energy storage will offer a chance to change.  It is right up from residential, off- and on-grid, to community, to grid, to country-wide. Now that’s a real disruptor.

Time till impact: two to four years.

Fuel Cells

What fuel cells offer is a new General Purpose Technology (GPT) that can be used across many areas with minimal modification.  Note that here it’s not the end-use application that I am classifying as a disruptor, but the technology itself.

At its heart, fuel cell technology is simply an efficient hydrogen-rich fuel conversion device. As long we don’t use the worst possible fuel production chain (i.e., coal without carbon capture and sequestration), it has the potential to reduce emissions at the point of use. In many fuel chains it also represents the potential to reduce emissions from wheel-to-wire.

Applications that will see the largest benefit, in terms of the environment, are likely to be in the marine sector, micro combined heat and power (mCHP), and, if the kinks can be ironed out, reducing power demand from data centers.  Apart from residential mCHP, most of these applications won’t see a change in attitude toward energy consumption; the process itself will be the disruption.  Micro CHP, though, represent a real game changer.  Here fuel cells will be just one of a suite of options being developed to go into residential units that will provide, at a minimum, the baseload power demand of a home.  I’ve already written a number of blogs on fuel cells that provide the full flavor of this disruption, so feel free to look back at them.

Time till impact: two to four years.

Smart Meters

Smart meters provide consumers with information in a format that empowers them to alter their behavior.

Education has always been a key to change, and smart meters provide householders with an energy education,  among other things.  How much power or water is being used when?  When users alter their behaviour, how does this change affect their power demand (and their bills)?  We have already seen evidence from Japan that when users discern a clear, visible, and direct correlation to energy costs, energy consumption per home goes down.

Although technically advanced, smart meters are the easiest technology on this list to understand in terms of their impact. And of the five technologies on this list, they are the one technology that’s already starting to have an impact. This is likely to snowball over the coming decade.

Time till impact: Now.

These are not the only five potential disruptive cleantech innovations, but the five that get me thinking. I believe that in 10 years, when we look back upon 2011, the energy landscape will be different, and in twenty years it could be virtually unrecognizable.  Technology and sustainability have not always been easy bedfellows, but our increasing ability to harness innovation for sustainability will make the next decade or two an exciting time to be working in this space.