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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Energy Storage

Here’s some good news: U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairman Ron Wyden is a huge supporter of smart grid.  In fact, he recently promised today to do everything he can to move the government’s “clumsy … machinery” to make the U.S. electric grid a smart grid.

Demographically, Wyden is perfect for the job (an Oregon Democrat).  Thus it’s clear that not everyone on Capitol Hill agrees with him on this initiative.  But the fact that anyone in that blighted region of the universe is even talking about the subject is a pleasant surprise.  Per the report linked above:

(Wyden) is planning to hold oversight hearings with federal agencies responsible for building out the smart grid to understand whether they are working on all angles to facilitate a transition to a digitized grid, especially on the consumer end.

In addition, he said he’s working on a tax reform measure aimed at achieving “neutrality and parity” for all energy technologies that could strip tax incentives for the oil and nuclear industries. Technological parity, he said, would help newcomers such as energy storage, which is key for introducing more renewable energy and demand response to supply electricity.

“Modernization of the country’s electric system is under way. Are we going to allow that momentum to accelerate or just play nice and think it is going to happen by osmosis?” Wyden told the Edison Foundation’s “Powering the People” conference in Washington, D.C. “The Recovery Act certainly helped and promoted some innovation. … The question is now can we mobilize and make sure that the private sector, utilities, regulators, financial community and all those that helped us get us to where we are today reach the next level?”

A level playing field for clean energy?  An end to subsidies for the oil companies?  You have my full support, sir.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Biofuels

My friend and colleague Tom Konrad of AltEnergyStocks.com comments on my piece on biofuels:

(The efficiency of PV) is still 10x better than biofuels, but the capital costs of all those solar panels are probably much more than costs of planting, harvesting, and converting the plants into biofuel….which is why a lot more cars are powered by biofuel than electricity.

You may be right about the former, i.e., the capital costs.  However, though I can’t find a study on this, I wouldn’t discount the capital costs of biofuels (and, more to the point, the operating costs) of the tractors, etc.  Also, the opportunity cost of arable vs. desert land is enormous – and seldom brought into the equation.

As to why more cars are powered by biofuel than electricity, I think it’s more a matter of our current devotion to the dispensing infrastructure for liquid fuels, which is (albeit slowly) eroding.  The shift away from burning hydrocarbons that are ruining our planet in favor of plug-in vehicles powered by renewables isn’t happening as fast as many of us would like, but it’s most certainly in motion.  And when liquid fuels leave, they won’t be coming back. In the words of Simon and Garfunkel, “When she goes, she’s go-o-o-o-ne…”  

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Energy Storage

I thought I’d post an unusual conversation I had earlier today with Paul DiRenzo of Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania regarding his concept for a 300 MW pumped storage project.

Paul: Our small family group remains convinced that planned coal surface mining and reclamation can result in a pumped storage scheme. Accordingly, we are currently studying this approach at a specific site here in the heart of the anthracite coal region of eastern PA, as well as the PJM-RTO. More info available at: www.opportunityforblythe.com

Craig: Wow, I have to say that this is interesting, but I’m not a fan of coal mining.  

Paul:  That’s understandable. However, there’s an old saying /slogan… “It’s not just coal…it’s Anthracite!”

Craig: Huh?

Paul:  A large worldwide market for anthracite coal includes water / wastewater filtration media. So anthracite is actually used to clean the environment. It’s a niche multi-use coal comprising less than 1% of the coal burned used in the world.  99% of the world thermal generation coal(s) are of lower bituminous and lignite rank.

Here are some other relevant links.

Any help sharing our project is greatly appreciated.

Craig: I see.  Let me think about this.

Paul: There are other existing and planned pumped storage schemes that utilized abandoned surface / underground mines.  Beside ours, we are not aware of any other that integrates substantial natural resource recovery to help subsidize pumped storage development costs.  Are you aware of Eagle Crest Pumped Storage in Cal?

From a financial standpoint the project is unique because +$200M worth of high grade anthracite coal will be recovered in the process of creating the lower reservoir by and through surface mining and reclamation. What’s more, surface mining will produce sufficient earth and rock for upper ring-dam construction. The integration of mining and pumped storage would greatly reduce construction costs. With the cost of the lower reservoir and earth moving absorbed by mining and coal recovery, we anticipate a relatively low $/KW installed cost.  We have not yet completed long range financial analysis. We seek partners at this early stage…essentially to take our FERC pre-permit and run with it.

Craig: Neat idea, though, obviously, I’d rather see the coal stay where it is.  And yes, I had come across Eagle Crest.

Can you share some of the financial information that may serve to attract people?  What’s the cost?  The terms of the PPA?  The IRR? 

Paul: This is early stage; we’re looking for partners/investors to explore this.

Craig: Well, this sounds sketchy in the extreme, but I’ll post something on it anyway, since it’s unique; I’ve never seen another one like this. 

Paul: Thanks.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

Frequent commenter and smart guy Tim Kingston writes:

Hi Craig. I’d be interested in your take on Anthony Watts, featured in “Climate Change without Catastrophe.” 

You can still find a few people with extremist and contra-scientific viewpoints like Watts; in fact, it’s possible that you’ll always be able to find a few.  

PBS’s FrontLine found him in a big, embarrassing way last fall – a way they wish they hadn’t. When the show’s producers aired a “balanced” news article, providing Watts with equal time against the viewpoints of the vast majority of real scientists on the subject, they took a considerable shellacking from thousands of people like me who wrote things like this. 

The fact that there is a handful of people with fringe views (Watts is not a scientist, but a TV weatherman) on climate change does not mean there is a “debate” on the subject, any more than there is a debate about the holocaust or the theory of evolution or plate tectonics or quantum mechanics. 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Biofuels

Frequent commenter from the U.K. Gary Tulie writes on my piece this morning concerning creating biofuels from sugar beets:

… the efficiency of photosynthesis to energy stored in biomass is at the very best in the 3 to 5% range – and that with all the dominoes stacking perfectly….Having in a very good case converted perhaps 2 to 3% of the sun’s energy into plant material, the material then has to be processed, dried, pressed, fermented, pyrolysed or whatever has to be done to turn it into fuel.

Taking into account inputs such as energy, water, fertilizer, labor, buildings and farm tracks as well as everything else needed to produce the biofuel including the embodied emissions of all these processes, and I would be surprised if anyone has used biological systems to convert more than around 1% net of the sun’s energy falling on a field into useable biofuel.

Even then, if you use the fuel in an internal combustion engine, you may well average only around 15 to 20% energy at the wheel compared to chemical energy in the fuel.

On this basis, it would appear to make more sense in terms of net emissions to install solar panels or wind turbines almost anywhere that it is possible to displace fossil fuel use in a power plant than to grow any kind of crop purely as a biofuel.

Yes, Gary, this is my point exactly.  If biofuels can get a percent or so efficiency on a good day — then we pay for the planting, irrigation, fertilization, harvesting, processing, transportation and distribution — then we lose 80% in our internal combustion engines — we’re one heck of a lot better off with wind or solar.  Of course, the issue is portability; energy-dense liquid fuels will remain convenient until electric transportation (batteries in particular) replaces this whole mess. 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Photovoltaics

As we’ve learned in our last monthly webinar, Germany is undergoing some rapid changes in its adoption of photovoltaics.  Many people say that the huge feed-in tariffs that created an enormous influx of investors a few years ago didn’t need to be quite as aggressive, and thus wouldn’t have caused such a shock to the market when it was cut to a  fraction of what it was.  But what will be the overall effect of the German PV market’s “sobering up?” I predict a “soft landing” (rather than a crash) and a continued, steady interest in the subject. 

Milk The Sun is a group that agrees.  As readers will see, this is a very professional attempt to bring together developer, land owners, and investors, forming an extremely efficient way for the market to keep on rolling along – and to reach into other countries, like the U.S.  They called me last week and want to establish some sort of cooperative relationship, which I’m more than happy to support.

In related news, German manufacturing giant Bosch is exiting the PV manufacturing market, citing oversupply.  Given China’s exponential and unflagging growth in this space, it’s easy to see Bosch’s reasoning.

 

 

 

 

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Biofuels

I may have mentioned that my wife bred race horses for many years, and her interest in the subject wound us up in a fairly rural area of California. As I like to do on weekends, I took a long walk yesterday, during which I happened to go past perhaps 40 acres of alfalfa, I presume as horse feed. This made me think of the basic energy issues associated with converting energy from the sun into chemical energy, which, in turn, reminded me of this piece a friend sent me on growing sugar beets as the feedstock for ethanol.

I remain unconvinced that there is a real future in converting the plants we grow into biofuels. Obviously, there are the normal array of resource issues: land use, effects on the food supply, and all the ecological (and financial) cost of planting, irrigation, fertilization, harvesting, and processing. But also militating against growing and type of plant for  fuel, I would think, is the basic thermodynamics of converting the radiant energy of the sun into chemical energy. How efficient can this possibly be, given all the metabolic processes that need to happen to keep the plant alive?

Perhaps some heavy-duty botanist could comment on this.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Energy Storage

 Frequent commenter Cameron Atwood writes:

I’m pleased to hear that further strides are being made in storage, and I look forward to seeing specifics emerge on this technique. The more of this progress is made and adopted, building on already proven storage technologies, the more obsolete and empty the red herring of intermittency will become.

I look at storage as just another cost item associated with serving peak load. Btw, this is what makes the zinc-air battery deal (from our list of clean energy investment opportunities) so exciting. The main question is: Can storage cost less than the same size peaker plant? And the answer, it seems, will soon be Yes.

Of course, this isn’t a straightforward trade-off; peaker plants have an array of advantages and disadvantages vis-à-vis storage that make this a slightly more complicated issue, though this high-level comparison is a good place to start.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Energy Storage

In response to my recent post on Storage Week, the energy storage conference that I try to catch each year, a longtime 2GreenEnergy reader from the Middle East writes:

Hi Craig!  I admire your persistence. The concept has been in discussions under a different context since around April 1989.  I have attached this for your convenience. Wish you a successful meeting.

Thanks for the kind words.  Re: your comment about my persistence, I have to laugh.  I’m not going away anytime soon, absent getting hit by a bus or something else unforeseen, that is. 

You’re 100% correct that the concept of energy storage is not a new one. One could argue that the concept goes back to candles, albeit on a micro scale.  And, of course, anyone is free to postulate ideas about utility-scale storage, like the people you mention here with their enormous volumes of lead-acid batteries.  The issue of course, then as now, is cost.  Getting the cost of large-scale energy storage down to a viable level is, for the first time in history, right around the corner.

For my money, the people with the best chance to make this happen are the zinc-air battery chemists, noted on our list of clean energy investment opportunities. 

Again, I appreciate your thinking of me. 

 

 

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

A reader in India writes about my upcoming trip to the Storage Week conference:

Nice to know you are participating in the storage conference in Austin, Texas. I would be happy to hear from you about your experience there in due course. I myself am working on storage solutions for roof top wind/solar which I will share with you sometime in future. 

 You may not remember: I had grumbled about your books being solely US-centric, which you accepted too. In your present letter, there is mention of what is going on in the world elsewhere in the RE field – a welcome sign. India has an ambition plan of generating 20000 mw of energy from renewable by 2020, which is going to be certainly surpassed.  things here are not done in organised and methodical manner as they are done in your country. But the happy thing is we do not have political obstructions, interference from vested business interests, particularly oil etc. to scuttle green efforts. Hope you will, when you have time, try to know about national solar mission of India.

Yes, I remember well, and thanks for raising that excellent point: I do tend to write about the U.S. to the exclusion of the rest of the world, though I’m trying to become less parochial.  Making the shift isn’t easy, as I tend to know more about what’s happening here – not that that’s a wonderful excuse. 

For what it’s worth, I’m extremely impressed with what you folks are doing in India with respect to renewable energy.  Over the past two years, I’ve had literally 100+ Skype sessions with Vijay Rochlani, a key business contact in Mumbai (see 2GreenEnergy “Associates”), who’s attempted to keep me abreast of the developments, and, in fact, connect Indian business interests to our clean energy investment opportunities.  

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