Home » Posts tagged 'energy' (Page 3)
Tag Archives: energy
It’s Raining Electrons in Small Spaces
Four recent reports on new breakthroughs in renewable energy generation and storage technology reinforce the promise that was once made for nuclear power: abundant energy for all, including the poorest in society, even though it may never be “too cheap to meter.”
High Performance Flow Batteries The promise of renewable energy technologies will be fully realized when battery storage becomes reliable enough and cheap enough to even out intermittent flows. Today the problem is partly solved by feeding energy from rooftop panels into the grid and then receiving compensation from the energy utility for the power supplied either in cash or in the form of reduced electricity bills. Looking at a typical electricity bill in Euroland (my own) I see the following charges. The unit price (per KWh) is between 6.5 and 7.3 Eurocents, but after grid charges, network costs and taxes are added, I pay 26 cents per KWh. Ironically, bulk consumers (factories, office blocks and large companies) pay lower rates, around 8 to 15 cents per KWh, depending on level of consumption. Now the whole picture is changed with the advent of low cost storage systems that make home batteries affordable and economical. Imagine home systems that can deliver electricity for all your needs at no cost for twenty to thirty years, once installed, barring the onetime cost of the system. Coming soon, to an affordable home near you.
Silicon cones inspired by the architecture of the human eye. The retina of the human eye contains photoreceptors in the form of rods and cones. Rods in the retina are the most sensitive to light, while cones enhance colour sensitivity. Modelling photovoltaic cells based on the makeup of the retina, researchers have been able to enhance the sensitivity of solar cells to different colours in the sunlight that falls on each cell and thereby increase electricity output by “milking the spectrum” closer to its theoretical maximum. Increasing efficiency of the average rooftop PV cells from the current 18-20 to 30% would make such systems cheaper by far than grid electricity mostly anywhere in the world, even in temperate countries. Coming soon, to a rooftop near you.
Modular biobattery plant that turns biowaste into energy. Biogas plants are old hat. They have undeniable benefits, turning plant, animal and human waste into energy (methane) while leaving behind a rich sludge that is excellent fertiliser. However, good designs are not common and they are sometimes cumbersome to feed and maintain. Now comes an efficient German design that promises to be modular and economically viable even at a small scale. In another development, the University of West England at Bristol has developed a toilet that turns human urine into electricity on the fly (pardon the pun) and the prototype is currently undergoing testing, appropriately enough, near the student union bar. Coming soon, to a poo-place or a pee-place near you.
New electrolyte for lithium ion batteries. Lithium ion batteries using various electrolytes have already become the workhorse of the current crop of electric cars and for medium-sized storage requirements. New electrolyte chemistry discovered at PNNL Labs shows that reductions of upto ten times in size, cost and density are feasible and various electrolyte/electrode combinations are being further tested for production feasibility. Coming soon, to a battery storage terminal near you.
So what should you do, as a concerned global citizen, until you can lay your hands on one of these devices (or all of them) for your own use? Tread lightly on the earth, don’t buy bottled water, reduce energy use, walk when you can instead of driving your car (your arteries will love you for it), buy local produce, eat less meat (your grateful arteries again), think twice before flying off to that conference (think teleconferencing), buy an electric car if you need a new one, and remember that every liter or gallon of petrol you fill into your old one not only fuels your car but potentially also the conflicts in the Middle East and/or lines the deep pockets of Big Oil which definitely does not want your energy independence.
The Flea on the Behind of an Elephant
Scroll backwards in time to the early 1970s. US President Richard Nixon appointed the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to produce a study of recommendations on “The Nation’s Energy Future” based on advice from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Requesting the AEC for energy prognoses is akin to asking a tiger for dietary recommendations; there will surely be no vegetables on the menu! Dr. Dixy Lee Ray, chair of the AEC, predicted in her summation of the report that “solar would always remain like the flea on the behind of an elephant.” In the early 1980s I knew another eminent researcher, Dr. Thomas Henry Lee, a Vice President for research under Jack Welch at General Electric, who often stated that nuclear power would produce “energy that is too cheap to meter,” essentially free.
The AEC study, when it was published, proposed a $10 billion budget for research and development with half going to nuclear and fusion, while the rest would be spent on coal and oil. A mere $36 million was to be allocated to photovoltaics (PV). Dr. Barry Commoner, an early initiator of the environmental movement, was intrigued that the NSF had recommended such a paltry amount for solar. In the 1950s he had successfully lobbied for citizen access to the classified results of atmospheric nuclear tests and was able to prove that such tests led to radioactive buildup in humans. This led to the introduction of the nuclear test ban treaty of 1963.
Dr. Commoner’s own slogan (the first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else) prompted him to question the AEC’s paltry allocation for solar PV, especially since he knew some of the members of the NSF panel who advised on the recommendations. He discovered the NSF panel’s findings were printed in a report called “Subpanel IX: Solar and other energy sources.” This report was nowhere to be found among the AEC’s documents until a single faded photocopy was unexpectedly discovered in the reading room of the AEC’s own library. The NSF’s experts had foreseen in 1971 a great future for solar electricity, predicting PV would supply more than 7% of the US electrical generation capacity by the year 2000 and the expenditure for realising the solar option would be 16 times less than the nuclear choice.
Clearly, the prediction of 7% solar electric generation has not yet happened, but current efficiency improvements in photovoltaics and battery storage technologies point the way to an energy future far beyond what the NSF predicted in 1971. Fifty years from now, it is nuclear power that is likely to be the flea on the behind of a solar elephant.
Love Oil, Hate Oil
The story of oil begins more than 2,500 years ago. Reliable indicators show that in China people were drilling a mile deep with bamboo pipes to recover natural gas and liquid hydrocarbons that were used as a source of fuel for fires. This was before the start of the Han dynasty in 400 BC. See this fascinating slide presentation on the progress of drilling technology by Allen Castleman, a self-confessed oil redneck.
Image: courtesy ecowas.com
The modern oil age is popularly considered to have started in the 19th century with the use of internal combustion engines for everything from pumping water to transportation. A glorious age, but now it’s time to move on (pun intended) to other fuels. As Saudi oil minister Sheikh Zaki Yamani predicted more than three decades ago, “the Stone Age did not end for lack of stones, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil;” a statement at once prescient, rueful and flippant. In today’s lugubrious world, they don’t make oil ministers like that any more.
As a reminder that the world turns and turns and comes full circle in more ways than one, here’s a parting thought; an article from the Guardian of 30 January 2014. In 2013 alone, China installed more solar power than the entire installed capacity in the US, the country where the technology was invented. There is a caveat to the article that some of this newly installed capacity is not yet connected to the grid but, once installed, connections are only a matter of time.
Terrorism and Climate Change: A Single Solution
Two thirds of the world’s electricity is generated by burning fossil fuels.
Much of the world’s wars and terrorism occur in the Middle East where, not so coincidentally, much of the world’s oil also originates. A lot of the world’s climate change problem (the majority of the world by now admits that there is a problem) is due to burning fossil fuels. In 2013, oil provided around 33% of global primary energy consumption* (i.e. energy contained in fuels used to generate electricity, heating, industry, transportation or other end users). This amounts to nearly 87 million barrels of oil per day. One third of this oil came from the Middle East.
The World Coal Association states that (in 2013): Coal provides around 30.1% of global primary energy needs, generates over 40% of the world’s electricity and is used in the production of 70% of the world’s steel. Coal is more democratically distributed around the world than oil, and there is not much likelihood of wars being fought over coal reserves. Coal is also a relatively “dirty” fuel and produces more CO2 (ca. 200) per unit of energy delivered than oil (ca. 150) or natural gas (117).
A listing of principal terror groups in the world includes ISIS, Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab, Al-Qaeda, Al-Nusra, Ansar al-Sharia, Hezbollah and Hamas. Al-Jazeera news notes that the United Arab Emirates published this week a list of 80 organisations worldwide, including the foregoing, that it formally identified as terrorists. Some of the organisations on that list perhaps do not belong there, but the larger point to be made in this article still holds. When great wealth flows from all parts of the world into the hands of a few, great disparities ensue; injustice and violence occur. The world needs to get off its greed for oil and move to renewable sources of energy. Of course the transition will be painful; but less disruptive than continued terror. Reduced global oil consumption can lessen the flow of disproportionate wealth that the world directs into the coffers of a few by 20 to 30% in the next ten years.
Is the transformation do-able within this time frame? The world’s experts are divided fairly equally between yes and no. Why? Because it hasn’t been done before. But here is an indirect answer. The Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) has revised its estimates for deployment of renewables worldwide upwards several times in the past decade. The forecasts made in 2002 for the year 2020 were exceeded by the year 2010. So perhaps the correct answer is not to be found among energy experts but in a quote from Spanish poet Antonio Machado (1875 – 1939) who said:
Caminante, no hay camino
Se hace camino al andar.
Traveller, there is no path
The path is made by walking.
Paraphrased less poetically into modern business-speak: walk the walk, don’t simply talk! We have to make choices as individuals before nations and governments follow in our footsteps.
*For more background, see Energy Trends Insider, with links to BP’s widely used Statistical Review of World Energy 2014. Oil accounted for 33 percent of all the energy consumed in the world in 2013. This amounts to 86.8 million barrels per day. Of this, roughly 32% came from the Middle East.
http://www.ren21.net/Portals/0/documents/activities/gfr/REN21_GFR_2013.pdf
Fossil Fuels to Renewables: Cost of Transition
How much would it cost to transition our #energy system from #fossilfuels to #renewables? A new study from IIASA Energy researchers shows that while large increases in investment are needed, the overall cost is not much more than what we currently invest in fossil fuels. (IIASA: International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, a think-tank based in Laxenburg, Austria)
2 Recent Books: Burning Question, and Burning Answer
The burning question was asked in May 2013 by Mike Berners-Lee, Duncan Clark and Mill McKibben. The Burning Answer was published a year later, in May 2014 by Keith Barnham, a physicist with practical experience in industry. The topics raised in these two books, the questions posed, and the answers to them will change the world in the coming decades.
The Burning Question: We can’t burn half the world’s oil, coal and gas. So how do we quit?
by Mike Berners-Lee, Duncan Clark and Bill McKibben
May 2013
The Burning Question reveals climate change to be the most fascinating scientific, political and social puzzle in history. It shows that carbon emissions are still accelerating upwards, following an exponential curve that goes back centuries. One reason is that saving energy is like squeezing a balloon: reductions in one place lead to increases elsewhere. Another reason is that clean energy sources don’t in themselves slow the rate of fossil fuel extraction.Tackling global warming will mean persuading the world to abandon oil, coal and gas reserves worth many trillions of dollars — at least until we have the means to put carbon back in the ground. The burning question is whether that can be done. What mix of politics, psychology, economics and technology might be required? Are the energy companies massively overvalued, and how will carbon-cuts affect the global economy? Will we wake up to the threat in time? And who can do what to make it all happen?
The Burning Answer: A user’s guide to the solar revolution
by Keith Barnham
May 2014
Our civilisation faces a choice. We could be enjoying a sustainable lifestyle but we have chosen not to. In three generations we have consumed half the oil produced by photosynthesis over eight million generations. In two generations we have used half our uranium resources. With threats from global warming, oil depletion and nuclear disaster, we are running out of options. Solar power, as Keith Barnham explains, is the solution. In THE BURNING ANSWER he uncovers the connections between physics and politics that have resulted in our dependence on a high-carbon lifestyle, which only a solar revolution can now overcome. Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2 led to the atomic bomb and the widespread use of nuclear energy; it has delayed a solar revolution in many countries. In a fascinating tour of recent scientific history, Keith Barnham reveals Einstein’s other, less famous equation, the equation the world could have relied on.
Einstein’s other equation has given us the laptop and mobile phone, and it also provides the basis for solar technology. Some countries have harnessed this for their energy needs, and it is not too late for us to do the same.
In this provocative, inspiring, passionately argued book, Keith Barnham outlines actions that any one and all of us can take to make an impact now and on future generations. THE BURNING ANSWER is a solar manifesto for the new climate-aware generation, and a must-read for climate-change sceptics.
Peter Forbes, writing in the Guardian, has published thoughtful reviews of both these important books.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/31/burning-question-berners-lee-review
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/22/burning-answer-solar-revolution-keith-barnham-review
Fuel from Seawater: a conversation with my grandfather
My grandfather died in 1962 at the age of 76, so the heading is merely a hook to underline the passage of time and relativate (verb?) the content of this posting. If the idea of making fuel from seawater seems preposterous, try to picture the news as seen through my grandfather’s eyes. I was fortunate to go on many long walks with him before he died. I was in my early teens then, and he was in his seventies. My grandfather was a retired physician, a surgeon. He was born in 1888, as a subject of Queen Victoria, and at the time of his death, India had become an independent republic. He studied at the Madras Medical College, an institution that the then governor of the East India Company, named Yale, was instrumental in developing in the late 1600s. Thirty years later around 1720, Elihu Yale was the benefactor of another college on another continent, also a British colony at the time. Yale College and University were subsequently named after him. My grandfather proudly told me that one of his mentors at Madras Medical was Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddy, who was among the first women graduates of medicine in the world, and certainly the first Indian woman to do so, at a time when women were not allowed to join medical colleges in Britain.
As a freshly qualified young surgeon in the early 1900s my grandfather was 24 years old when the world’s first radio distress signals at sea began to come from the Titanic in April 1912. During his lifetime, he experienced the birth of wireless radio transmission, saw the first motion pictures, watched telephones become a part of everyday life, began to use antibiotics to ward off post-operative infections, and flew in Mr. de Havilland’s new-fangled Comet jetliner. So what would he have made of the news that the US Navy will power ships with fuel made after extracting carbon dioxide from seawater or that a University-based research group has perfected a solar cell that produces electricity from sunlight with conversion efficiencies of upto 43%? As a comparison, the solar cells that are commonly seen on rooftop arrays today have efficiencies ranging from 10 to 18%. I believe he might have been surprised, but would have quickly taken the news in his stride. After the monumental changes witnessed in his lifetime, the two developments above might seem to be fairly insignificant. But these technologies are potential game changers. Here’s why.
With efficiencies of over 40%, utility scale solar farms become feasible and cost effective, producing electricity at prices below that of conventional power plants. To make fuel from seawater, carbon dioxide and hydrogen are first extracted from it using a catalytic converter. This mixture is then converted by polymerisation to longer chain hydrocarbons which are the building blocks for a range of fuels of different grades for ships, cars and aircraft. The entire process is carbon neutral because the carbon used for combustion is extracted from the environment. Too good to be true? At the moment, yes. The process is roughly at the stage where the Wright brothers’ heavier-than-air flying machine was in the early 1900s.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/13/newser-navy-seawater-fuel/7668665/
In the link below, it states that we are 60% towards cost-effective utility scale solar power. Cells with almost three-fold efficiency gains will produce electricity at lower cost than conventional plants today.
http://www.energy.gov/articles/us-utility-scale-solar-60-percent-towards-cost-competition-goal
Clean and green vs. might and blight Many acquaintances who are not averse to renewables but are still captive to the current energy paradigm, remark that wind and solar farms take up too much space and that too many windmills or panels are a blot on the landscape. But so are open cast mines, oil wells, fracking sites and many of the other wonderful extractive technologies that power much of the world today. Just because they are tucked away in remote places does not make them any less environmentally destructive. The images below speak for themselves.
Which brings me back to my grandfather. World population doubled in his lifetime, but there were still large chunks of virgin territory around the globe. Today there are 7.2 billion of us around and it behooves us to tread lightly on this planet and conserve what we can of its considerable beauty. We owe it to our children and grandchildren, if not to ourselves.
Oil Companies Step into the Sunlight
It has been fashionable in green circles to portray oil companies as a major part of the multinational axis of evil that feeds global warming, contributing to the destructive exploitation of our planet, driven by their greed for profit. This blogger has been of the opinion that, ironically, oil companies are among the best equipped to handle the technological challenges that face large scale deployment of renewable energy technology. Compare the technical challenges of setting up large offshore wind farms or drilling from a deep-sea oil platform; installing ocean energy conversion devices, wave generation or tidal flow streams in rough coastal waters; think of the setting up of large scale solar thermal plants or solar PV farms under Saharan conditions. All of these ventures require a high degree of engineering skills and huge amounts of capital; all of which are in plentiful supply at oil companies.
There are visionary leaders among the oil companies who see that the transition to lower carbon fuels was inevitable. BP for one, under the leadership of John Browne, briefly tried to recast itself in the late 1990s as a company “Beyond Petroleum,” but the initiative was defeated by market forces, the world’s insatiable demand for more and bigger cars, and the success of the oil companies themselves in finding ever more efficient ways of secondary and tertiary recovery of oil from wells that had long been considered pumped dry. And now another development to slow the adoption of renewables, the plentiful availability of natural gas through fracking. In addition to being awash in natural gas, the US is set to overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s second largest oil producer, behind Russia.
Despite all these seeming setbacks to renewables, it is increasingly accepted by research and advisory groups within the oil companies themselves that the large-scale transition to renewable sources of energy is inevitable. BP notes in its 2012 annual report that oil demand has fallen in six of the last seven years, as has coal. Here is a link to several scenario studies by Shell that postulate what the transition could look like. The energy output from renewables worldwide today has reached the level forecast for the year 2025 by the International Energy Agency in 2000, I would similarly argue that Shell’s renewables forecast for the year 2070 will probably be achieved by the year 2050, if not earlier. Predicting future developments is always uncertain, of course, but it is the strength of our collective beliefs and actions today that will determine our tomorrows.
http://www.shell.com/global/future-energy/scenarios/new-lens-scenarios.html
Renewables: Solar Cells and CO2
For those who despair at the daily news reports of record-breaking summer temperatures and the inexorable onset of global warming, take heed and take hope from the following numbers. The total installed generating capacity of photovoltaic (PV) solar worldwide in 2012 equalled 100 GW, or roughly the equivalent of 100 nuclear power plants. Solar PV is a silent, reliable technology (as long as the sun shines, but see Intermittency below for more on that) with no moving parts and a life expectancy of 20 – 40 years. This currently installed generating capacity uses PV cells that convert sunlight to electricity at efficiencies ranging from 9 to 14 percent, around 10 percent on average.
But there are a number of new generation PV cells in the works in dozens of countries around the world that have achieved efficiencies of 40% under laboratory conditions. These are mostly multi-junction PV cells coupled with a layer of light-focussing elements. These cells are currently too expensive for everyday use but have proved their worth in satellites and at remote research locations. As mass production techniques for each of these new technologies evolve, the price of such systems will come down within a decade to the affordability range of the current crop of monocrystalline cells that are the most commonly used worldwide.
Mass production in China has reduced the prices of monocrystalline cells so much in the past few years that they are now being used in rural areas in India. For a more detailed report by someone active in rural electrification efforts, see the link below.
Click to access PB_Off-grid%20solar%20Power%20in%20Rural%20India.pdf
Intermittency: Solar power is great as long as the sun shines, but what about after dark? Well, there’s wind, for one, but that is intermittent too. The evolving answer to that is storage technology (see my blog of 22nd June: Renewables – 13 next-generation battery designs). Link below
https://aviott.org/2013/06/22/renewables-13-next-generation-battery-designs/
The bottom line is: systems are not perfect, and if anyone wishes to poke holes in an argument, they can and will. So in the end, choice of energy systems comes down to attitudes, opinions and habit. This fact lies at the heart of the renewable energy debate. Proponents of business-as-usual, nested comfortably as they are in a carbon-based economy that has reached a high degree of organizational efficiency over a century, see no need to change, and dismiss all thought of powering the world with renewables instead of coal, oil and gas as it is now. As Carl Jung pointed out nearly a century ago: Attitudes are more important than Facts, so a proponent of nuclear energy is likely to insist on the relative safety of nuclear technology (an argument that is statistically correct) until the day his own family is forced to shift from their home forever because of uncontrolled radiation release.
For anyone looking for more details on the PV technologies mentioned above, I can recommend the blog postings of the indefatigable Dave Elliott at http://blog.environmentalresearchweb.org/2013/08/17/solar-cells-1/
Renewables — Undersea Energy Storage 2
Here’s another simple idea in the works for undersea energy storage of the intermittent power generated by renewables. See article and video at the New Scientist link below.
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/04/green-machine-undersea-air-bag.html
This report is a year old already and I don’t know yet if it has proven to be a cost-effective storage option in practice. But the point of this posting, and the next one on 13 promising battery technologies, all of which are currently in development and working with a mix of venture capital and public funding, is to show how thousands of entrepreneurial people are at work with potential breakthroughs imminent.
aviott 