The Power of Design: Product Innovation in Sustainable Energy Technologies

1.3 Sustainable Energy and Product Design

From a technical point of view, a lot of opportunities for and applications of sustainable energy technologies already exist. However, the way in which sustainable energy solutions will be offered to the market and end users will help to decide their success and thus their effectiveness in providing solutions for greenhouse gas reduction and energy security in the short and long term. Therefore, in our opinion product design could play an important role in developing sustainable energy solutions that can be incorporated into products or the environment. This will be explained in this section, which covers a brief history of the conceptual term energy solutions.

Until the early 2000s, as a rule, the expression energy solution was directly translated as energy system. This engineering approach focused on technical aspects, which may be translated more or less by a desire to increase a technology's energy yield. As an example, in the last 35 years due to successful R&D the efficiency of different types of solar cells was increased by a factor of approximately 4, leading to efficiencies of 40% and higher (Kazmerski, 2011). The end of these developments is not yet in sight, and efficiencies of over 50% are predicted in the nearby future. Similar upward trends in energy efficiencies can be observed for other renewable technologies such as wind turbines, fuel cells, and light-emitting diodes (LEDs).

At the same time, people aimed for a significant ...