A webjournal to blow off the haze of misinformation and pessimism obscuring climate change solutions, charting the technological paths available today to stop dumping on Earth’s atmosphere and re-energize our economies.
“Cool” was the first word out of University of Minnesota aerospace engineering prof Jeff Hammer’s mouth when I told him Toyota’s Prius may soon come with its own rooftop solar generating system. But does it make sense? Not really, says Hammer: “The car is not always in the sun and there’s no surface facing the same direction all the time. The best thing to do is set [your solar panels] somewhere fixed that’s always in the sun and use the energy directly. That’s what the economics would tell you to do.”
That’s pretty damning coming from Hammer, whose job is to help turn solar energy into motive power. Well, sort of. Hammer is faculty advisor for an engineering team that put together one of 18 solar-powered vehicles competing in the 2008 North American Solar Challenge — a 2,400 mile race from Dallas to Calgary that got underway this weekend. His job is actually to help engineering students learn. “The main thing that solar car racing does to help automakers is that engineering students get a better education,” says Hammer. “We don’t think of building a solar car as a research activity or technology development activity.”
So what is Toyota doing offering solar panels that will be largely wasted? Showing once again that it is the master of green marketing. For the full story, see my full report — “Does Car-Mounted Solar Make Sense?” — at MIT’s TechReview.com today.
Bryden [PlascoEnergy's CEO] says the core functions of their 100-m.t./day demo plant are performing to expectations. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that its also had its share of teething pains. The feed system has proved susceptible to jamming, regularly interrupting test runs. And they discovered that after such unanticipated interruptions oxygen entering the system ignited particulates and burned the baghouse filters designed to capture that soot before it exits the plant. Adding a valve stopped the filter fires, and Bryden says PlascoEnergy will install a new waste feeder in August.
These are the kinds of glitches one expects with new technology. But they’re also an important reminder that this is new technology and, as such, there’s no guarantee it will work as advertised.
Rising costs of energy and other commodities have silenced erstwhile critics of municipal collection of plastic, paper and glass for recycling. Critics of converting trash into energy may be the next to go, if developments in Ottawa are any guide. Last week Ottawa’s city council unanimously approved a proposal by local technology developer PlascoEnergy to build an innovative 400-m.t./day waste-to-energy facility within city limits. If built, it would be the first such plant in North America in over a decade.
PlascoEnergy CEO Rod Bryden says the plant’s technology is key to public acceptance. “There wasn’t a single person who attended the council meeting to object. There’s no chance that would happen with a landfill or an incinerator,” says Bryden.
Rather than simply tossing trash into a giant furnace, PlascoEnergy’s design employs superhot electric plasma torches to first gasify municipal waste. Gasification eases the subsequent removal of contaminants such as mercury and produces a clean-burning ’synthesis gas’ amenable to combustion in high-efficiency engine generators; net power exports to the grid will be about 21 megawatts. At the same time the plant will cut the equivalent of 2.1 m.t. of CO2 for every tonne of waste, thanks largely to avoided methane emissions from Ottawa’s landfill.
More gasification-based waste treatment is on the way, and not just to generate electricity. In April General Motors-based cellulosic ethanol firm Coskata, which plans to make ethanol from syngas, announced plans to integrate its first demonstration plant with an existing waste gasification pilot plant in Pennsylvania.
Diesels are returning to auto showrooms nationwide. Major automakers will offer them from this fall for the 2009 model year, equipped with vastly improved emissions control devices that make them a lot cleaner than the diesel image. But their main attraction – fuel economy — is rapidly fading. The cost of diesel is rising more rapidly than gasoline, while there is increasing skepticism about their impact on climate change.
I explore the environmental implications of diesel in “Dark Clouds Over Clean Diesels”, a web-exclusive news piece on Spectrum.com. The short take: diesels still emit more soot than gasoline-fueled vehicles and the bad news on soot just keeps getting worse. Estimates of mortality from breathing fine particles is still rising, and there are top climate scientists who believe that soot is also a serious contributor to global warming. It could be second only to CO2, even outpacing methane.
Interestingly, while the U.S. and Canada prepares for a new generation of diesel cars and light trucks, European car buyers are moving in the opposite direction. A German automotive research center recently forecast a sharp decline in diesel’s share of the European car market over the coming decades, thanks to the cost of adding tailpipe controls and tough competition from gasoline-powered engine technology. From a current market share of 53% (compared to 3% in the U.S.), the study predicts diesels to drop to 38% of Europe’s car market in 2015 and to 30% in 2020.
Threatened American jobs and higher gas prices were the points of attack that deep-sixed the latest effort to put a price on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions — a cap-and-trade bill that died in the Senate on Friday. This defensive posture, seeking to preserve energy-intensive transportation and industries, is short-sighted in light of the transition to alternative forms of energy underway worldwide.
China gets it. Not only is it racing to implement renewable energy (ie setting a nationwide renewable portfolio standard for utilities, installing enough wind power in just the last two years to edge out wind-energy pioneer Denmark for fifth place in the Global Wind Energy Council’s annual capacity rankings, and building a photovoltaics export business essentially overnight). China designs these initiatives to favor the development of domestic industries.
In a recent article for Spectrum magazine I show how China’s dramatic installation of wind power parks is occuring despite rock-bottom pricing — a situation that analysts say favors local players. See China Doubles Wind Watts in Spectrum’s May 2008 issue.
Note that while John McCain and Barack Obama both claim to get it on both green jobs and climate change, neither bothered to show up for Friday’s vote.
Those of you who mistook CN’s April 2 post Wind Power That Floats for a belated April Fool’s joke will want to consider last month’s project launch by Norway’s StatoilHydro. The North Sea oil and gas giant has teamed up with engineering conglomerate Siemens AG to anchor a full-scale commercial wind turbine in over 200 meters of water off Norway’s southwest tip.
StatoilHydro and Siemens plan to take a different tack from the startups profiled in the April 2 piece. As I show today in Wind Power Moves into Deep Waters at TechnologyReview.com, these big players are selecting components conservatively to prove that the concept of floating wind turbines is workable rather than trying to engineer the optimal floating system from the start.
Consider the turbine itself. Tech startup Sway is designing a downwind rotor, and rival Blue H Group is building a two-bladed rotor with hinged blades. Both designs could reduce the forces on the machine and thus reduce the weight of the entire system–including the super-pricey counterweights required to anchor giant buoys to the seabed. But both designs were also left behind as the commercial wind power industry went mainstream in the mid to late 1990s and coalesced around the less elegant but more durable upwind three-bladed rotors now universally used on utility scale turbines.
StatoilHydro and Siemens will use a well-tested Siemens three-blade upwind machine, thus simplifying both their design process and their demonstration of the floating wind concept. As StatoilHydro’s vp for wind power notes in my story, if the demo fails in any way they’ll know that it’s not the turbine itself that’s to blame.
Carbon-Nation returns today from a month-long hiatus that took editor Peter Fairley on a fact-finding mission to North Africa. More to come on that. For instant gratification we refer you to the latest installment of Renewable Energy World’s Inside Renewable Energy podcast, released this morning. Topping this week’s podcast is an interview with C-N’s editor on the growing acrimony within organic photovoltaics research over the credibility of recent reports touting record power output from this promising next-generation approach to solar power.
Call it another friendly effort to pop the solar bubble before unrealized hype damages the entire industry. Akin to lancing a wound to stem a life-threatening infection.
Two months ago, on the evening of February 26, power grid controllers at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) found themselves in an uncomfortable position: they were rapidly running out of power. As consumption outstripped supply the frequency of the alternating current — nominally 60 hertz — began to slide, threatening to damage utility and customer equipment. At 6:41 pm the grid controllers declared a grid emergency and began ’shedding load’ to restore the grid frequency. Which is to say, they shut off the power to some customers.
These customers had agreed in advance to participate in such “demand-response” situations and would be compensated for their trouble. Nevertheless, saying no to a buyer is as much a measure of last-resort for the power industry as for any other.
Wind power got the blame early on, because wind turbines in West Texas were delivering less power than their operators had projected. But subsequent studies showed that other factors were more important. In the 40 minutes leading up to the emergency conventional power plants delivered 350 megawatts less than they had promised, while wind generation slipped just 80 megawatts relative to plan. At the same time consumption rose by a whopping 1,185 MW more than ERCOT had forecast. ERCOT’s report to the Public Utility Commission of Texas highlights that electric load growth as a key cause.
Still, smarter integration of Texas’ wind power could have prevented the trouble. As ERCOT’s report shows, an independent wind power forecast prepared for ERCOT on February 25 under an ongoing pilot project predicted the February 26 wind power drop with “good fidelity.” Unfortunately ERCOT’s grid operators never saw the forecast and hence could not take steps in advance to ensure that alternate power supplies were available.
My story on TechReview.com today, Scheduling Wind Power, shows that grid controllers increasingly get the message: Integrating wind forecasting into grid planning is not only key to reliably accomodating much greater levels of wind power. It will also maximize the pollution reductions achieved in the process.
Wind farms continue to inspire considerable opposition from neighbors and bird lovers. None more so than the proposal by Boston-based Cape Wind to erect 130 wind turbines in Nantucket Sound in what would be the first offshore wind farm in U.S. waters. Ted Kennedy, senior senator from Massachusetts, has led the charge against the proposal, claiming this industrial intrusion would mar the view from his family’s seaside compound and, by extension, harm Cape Cod’s leading industry: tourism.
Now, into these contested seas sails a new developer with a proposal designed to please all: Blue H Technologies, which has staked out a parcel of seabed for a wind farm 23-miles off Nantucket, well beyond the sight of sling-sipping vacationers. And the technological solution enabling Blue H to site a wind farm in water 167 feet deep? Floating wind turbines.
Blue H’s proposal struck some partisans of the Cape Wind debate as a fraud. See this rant from Cape Cod Today, for example, suggesting the Blue H is an underhanded scheme by Ted Kennedy and other politicos to protect their waterfront viewscapes.
However, as my report headlining MIT TechReview.com today shows, Blue H is for real. The Dutch firm is well on the way to demonstrating a novel application for conventional oil and gas platform technology, and it has competitors just as intent on proving the economic and energy potential of deepwater wind.
A sudden zeal to go fossil-free is fueling plenty of hype in renewable energy circles. That hype hits its shrillest notes in the promise of the least cost-effective of the major renewable options: photovoltaics that convert sunlight directly into electricity.
Consider the holiday season gush around silicon-valley PV startup Nanosolar. The firm was founded to demonstrate a truly novel nanotech-inspired design, but is now commercializing comparatively conventional CIGS thin-film PV. Nevertheless, after Popular Science crowned the company’s “Powersheet” as its innovation of the year, articles on this “game-changing technology” multiplied to fill the slow late-December news season.
Never mind that Nanosolar declined to disclose the most important spec on its product: the efficiency with which it converts sunlight to electricity. Without the efficiency, it is impossible to analyze the product’s economic potential.
The solar rot, however, goes deeper than venture capital-fueled startups. My latest feature for IEEE Spectrum – “Solar-Cell Squabble” – shows that some scientists may also be overstating their advances. And they may be doing so in peer-reviewed reports in top journals such as Science and Nature.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of solar energy, in all of its myriad forms. I’m ecstatic to see research dollars once again pouring into solar energy. But let’s make sure those dollars don’t pour back out via the sink, or walk out the rear exit.
The ZEV directive requires car manufacturers to market ultraclean and emissions-free vehicles (or buy credits earned by others making such vehicles). The California Air Resources Board decision yesterday reduces the quantity of emissions-free battery or fuel cell vehicles mandated for the 2012-2014 period from 25,000 to as few as 5,357, responding to automaker concern over the cost and reliability of EV batteries and fuel cells.
CARB says this reduction is offset by new rules recognizing the transitional value of plug-in hybrids. The agency claims that the ZEV rules will require automakers to produce 66,000 plug-in hybrids over the 2012-2014 period, thereby mainstreaming electric vehicle components and charging infrastructure that will hasten the day when the pure EVs go mainstream.
However, Plug In America claims the new rules will actually lead to 18,000 less plug-in hybrids over 2012-2014. It’s difficult to say who is right because the ZEV rules are devilishly complex, and automakers are not currently required to disclose how many credits they have banked (a transparency gap the new rules would fix).
Plug In America charges that California legislators should take back responsibility for driving electrification of the automobile, but ironically one of their proposals seems to affirm the very battery qualms underlying CARB’s revisions. Specifically, Plug In America proposes that legislators free manufacturers from providing the 15-year, 150,000-mile warranty CARB requires for hybrid batteries. That hardly seems like a recipe for driving mass confidence in the electric car.
Thispost was created for Tech Talk - Insights into tomorrow’s technology from the editors of IEEE Spectrum.
That’s the headline that an editor at MIT Technology Review popped onto my story (topping TechReview.com today) on a project to turn Boulder, Colorado’s power system into the world’s smartest grid. The punch phrase would be pronounced ’schmahten up’ by my old boss at Ferranti-Dege, a professional photo shop in Harvard Square that finally gave way to the digital revolution and Boston’s soaring property values just a few years ago. And Bill’s sentiment would fit perfectly: You know how to do it right, so get to it.
Electrical engineers have the wherewithal to install smart meters and otherwise upgrade our power grids to deliver power more efficiently and accomodate intermittent but clean renewable energy. As utility IT chief Mike Carlson told me this week: “We’re not talking the Jetsons or Star Wars here.”
What is needed–and where Carlson’s project for Xcel Energy truly innovates–is a way of getting the required demonstrations paid for. To date conservative public utility commissions in state capitols around the country have been relucant to finance much-needed investments in grid modernization, without the kind of proof that Xcel hopes its Boulder project will provide.
That’s an emerging theme: Public utility commissions have immense control over investment in power infrastructure, but have a bottom-line mentality that tends to override environmental concerns. This is one factor delaying adotpion of coal gasification technology for power plants. The coal gasification or IGCC power plants are cleaner-burning but more expensive to build up front and, barring an EPA mandate to even consider the technology, public utility commissions have been relucant to approve the extra expense.
Two reports of ocean-crossing innovation breathe new life into the old addage that necessity spurs invention. The first is the completion last Thursday of the maiden 11,952-nautical mile voyage of a sail-assisted cargo ship. According to Hamburg-based Beluga Skysails, the tug of the 160-square meter kite saved about $1,000/day worth of bunker fuel.
The second proof of our capacity to think innovatively is Japanese adventurer Kenichi Horie’s departure from Hawaii on a wave-powered boat. Yes, that’s right: equipment Horie’s boat absorbs the vertical motion of waves hitting the bow into dolphin and converts this energy into dolphin kicks at the stern to propel the boat forward. He figures he’ll reach Japan, 4,400 miles away, by about June. A novelty, you might say? I guess many people said the same thing to Beluga Skysails.
I’ve often said that the accelerating exploitation of Alberta’s tarsands is living proof of peak oil. These innovations are living proof that human society can adapt to a carbon-constrained world.
“When analysts tell you that the only thing that will bring down the price of oil is a recession, you know you’re in trouble.” Gal Luft, Executive Director, Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, delivered that quote of the day here in Vancouver during a panel discussion on future automotive markets at the biennial Globe trade fair and conference — a premier event on the business / environment nexus.
Luft’s policy solution to break oil’s virtual strangle-hold on transportation fuels markets worldwide? Mandating production of flex-fuel vehicles (that can burn a range of alcohol/gasoline blends) and plug-in hybrids (that can charge overnight on comparatively diversified electric power systems). “Flex-fuel should be a standard feature in every automobile,” says Luft, “just like the rear-view mirror, seat belts and air bags.”
Mea cupla of the day goes to Walter McManus, former director of forecasting for automotive market analysts J.D. Powers & Associates. During the same Globe session McManus, now at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute, admitted personal culpability in Detroit’s decision to sit out the first round of hybrid vehicle development–handing the market to Toyota. He says that Detroit, himself included, considered fuel economy to be simply a question of cost and thus discounted the weight consumers placed on it as “irrational.” He now advises market researchers to pass consumer demands up to senior management even when those demands don’t jive with the researchers’ preconceived notions!
I vividly remember McManus selling me preconceived notions just a few years ago when I was exposing Toyota’s dominance of hybrid technology for MIT Technology Review. (We didn’t quote him in the resulting story, “Hybrids’ Rising Sun”, which ran as TechReview’s April 2004 cover.) I look forward to getting back to my files and digging out my own McManus quotes. For now, here’s a representative quote from a 2004 L.A. Times story: “We don’t see hybrids, per se, ever being more than a niche vehicle.”
I have to thank Beth Wellington of Newport, VA for helping to share C-N’s reporting on solar thermal energy with a new and discerning audience: the readers of NewsTrust.net. On February 29th Beth reviewed “Solar without the Panels” for NewsTrust, giving it a 4.3 rating out of 5.0 (averaged from a 4/5 overall recommendation, a 4/5 for information content, and a 5/5 for trust).
Beth’s review forwarded the story into the mix available for other readers to browse, read and assess. Six reviews later we’re still batting a 4.1 and holding on to second position on NewsTrust.net’s energy page.
Which, of course, earns NewsTrust a coveted spot on Carbon-Nation’s list of Credible Reading!
Power industry webzine EnergyBiz Insider published the following commentary today from C-N’s editor. Call it one more attempt to clear away some of the dust kicked up by DOE’s efforts to restructure the FutureGen project:
I’m glad you took up the Department of Energy’s reversal on the FutureGen clean coal project because there is considerable confusion surrounding its likely demise. The biggest misunderstanding concerns FutureGen’s place in the context of commercializing IGCC and carbon capture technology.
The Department of Energy rejected FutureGen in favor of investing the same funds to equip commercial coal-fired power plants - each of which would be larger than FutureGen - with the equipment to capture their greenhouse gas emissions. With over 40 IGCC projects in various states of development and technology for capturing CO2 at conventional coal plants improving rapidly, DOE will have no shortage of targets to choose from. And while the individual DOE projects may look smaller, the plants involved and the scale of the carbon capture are likely to be several times larger.
DOE now recognizes what gasification technology providers have been screaming for years: FutureGen set out to develop next-generation technology rather than applying commercially-ready technology, thereby miscasting carbon capture itself as a sort of technological moonshot. The best evidence of this remains Dakota Gasification, a 1970s era synthetic fuels plant that has been capturing its CO2 and selling it to oil producers across the border in Saskatchewan since the late 1990s …
… DOE’s rejection of FutureGen suggests that even Washington has realized that gasification and carbon capture are ready for action. While I applaud their reformulation of FutureGen, we’ll know they’re truly serious about seizing the opportunity inherent in existing technology when they institute the carbon caps or taxes required to make carbon capture pay.
Solar thermal power cuts a fascinating contrast with solar photovoltaics and wind turbines — today’s leading renewable energy technologies — besting one on price and the other on quality. Little surprise then that it is being selected for power plants equal in output to large wind farms and ten-times the size of the largest photovoltaic installations.
Whereas photovoltaics employ semiconductors to directly convert sunlight into electricity, solar thermal power stations convert sunlight into heat to generate steam and drive a turbine. This roundabout is, ironically, a huge money-saver. The mirrors, pipes, pumps and steam turbines that form a solar thermal plant cost less than half than an equivalently powerful array of photovoltaics.
Solar thermal cannot similarly challenge wind turbines on cost (at least not at present). But solar thermal plants can store some of the energy they capture and, as a result, produce a much steadier and more reliable supply of electricity than the famously variable wind turbine.
So why then did we hear so much about solar photovoltaics over the past decade and sol little of solar thermal? Because the latter is inherently utility-scale technology, whereas photovoltaic panels provide value one rooftop at a time. Fred Morse, a solar thermal pioneer and currently senior advisor to renewable energy developer Abengoa Solar, likens it to a bakery operating through the depression. ”If you had a bakery and you sold cookies or big wedding cakes, during hard times you could sell a lot of cookies,” says Morse. “PV has little niche markets and it could grow and grow and as the price came down it expanded those markets to where it is today.”
These days, thanks to state and (albeit on-again-off-again) federal incentives and record fuel prices, solar power is back to wedding cakes.
Trying to track California’s developments in climate change policy is a full-time job these days. Carbon-Nation has followed the state’s efforts to drive the electrification of the automobile, but this is but a scratch at the surface. California’s initiatives also include: incentives for renewable energy, taxes on high-carbon fuels, tough vehicle fuel economy standards (in the absence of real leadership from Washington), and,
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mirrors, pipes, pumps and steam turbines that form a solar thermal plant cost less than half than an equivalently powerful array of photovoltaics.
Trying to track California’s developments in climate change policy is a full-time job these days. Carbon-Nation has followed the state’s efforts to