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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

The Electric Power Research Institute’s Mark Duvall helped out with the book’s chapter: Electric Transportation and Its Impacts on our Power Grid.  EPRI is an independent, non-profit company performing research, development and demonstration in the electricity sector for the benefit of the public. EPRI’s broad array of collaborative programs focuses on the many specific technology challenges of helping its members provide society with reliable, affordable, and environmentally responsible electricity.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

I had lunch last week with a senior engineer at SMUD (Sacramento Municipal Utility District), whose responsibility is managing the delivery of electricity while minimizing damage to air quality. “It’s terrible,” he told me over our salads.

“I thought it was actually pretty good.” I replied, a bit surprised.

“No, I mean what we were talking about a second ago. The clean air mandates in California are so onerous that they’re prohibitively expensive.”

“Oh. But don’t most other states face a different version of the same problem?” I asked naively.

“Not at all. To win popular appeal, our legislators have set the bar ridiculously high. You could replace every car on the roads with bicycles – and there would still be a few days in the year that you wouldn’t meet the targets. There were pictures of Los Angeles taken in the early 20th Century that show smog from decaying vegetable matter and wild fires. We have concentrations of ozone precursors that are simply impossble to deal with; it’s just the way the land is formed.

“So California has to do things to have clean air that cost far more per kilowatt-hour than any other state in the union. And how do we pay those costs? With taxes and regulation that drive the businesses out to states that simply haven’t gotten tough with air quality, or that are fortunate enough to have good air naturally.”

This got me thinking about my position on a federal Renewable Portfolio Standard that I’ve been recommending. Maybe this isn’t really a good idea after all. The southwest has sun, the plains have wind, the mountains have geothermal, the east has hydro, but renewable energy resources in some areas of the country are simply far more scarce than they are elsewhere. I suppose the fair thing to do is to rate each state on the availability of clean energy resources, and build mandates around those ratings.

Of course, the real solution (as I’ve often suggested) is simply to remove the subsidies that make energy from fossil fuels artificially inexpensive, and let the problem take care of itself in about a nanosecond.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

Plug-In America spokesperson Jay Friedland contributed the chapter on EV advocacy, discussing numerous thorny challenges it faces in the real world of politics.

Jay points out, “Big oil is trying to preserve the status quo. They are now the largest supporters of the hydrogen economy. They see hydrogen as a mechanism for them to continue to have a service station — to continue to provide a consumer with something they can pump.”

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

Steve is one of the most important spokespeople for hydrogen, and I was pleased to get his take on fuel-cell vehicles.

A hydrogen fuel cell vehicle can be a zero CO2 emission vehicle — just like a battery electric vehicle. A battery electric vehicle advocate should be saying, “Battery electric vehicles can be zero carbon emission vehicles…just like a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle can be too.”  There is no reason that the two should be attacking one another.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

Dr. Michael Kearl, Professor of Sociology at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, helped out with the chapter on the sociology of driving.

For years, he’s been interested in the relationships and the social structures for the road — how different communities develop different kind of cultures with regards to driving etiquette, honking and so forth.  In particular, he’s intrigued by the whole element of conspicuous consumption and displays even though everyone’s in gridlock and you in your Maserati are going no faster than the beat up VW in front.

He points out, “The whole idea of the car and the open road is just so firmly ingrained in our cultural identity in the 20th century that it will be hard to wean. Our car is one of the few zones of solitude we have — next to the bathroom, I might add. And that’s why bathrooms have gotten so much larger over time.”

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Hydrokinetics

The University of Washington’s Dr. Brian Polagye contributed to the book’s chapter on hydrokinetics.

His work focuses on responsibly harnessing the kinetic energy in moving water, in particular, developing a better understanding of the practically recoverable resource for tidal streams. He says, “There is no one energy solution that gets you all the way there. I mean, you wouldn’t legitimately expect to replace all the power we currently consume with a single source like in-stream river hydrokinetics. That being said, I think that river, tidal, wave, ocean current, all of these can make a valuable contribution, either nationally or regionally, to the electric grid. So I think it’s important not to discard an idea simply because it doesn’t solve all of our problems.”

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

Paul Thomsen, spokesperson for Ormat Technologies, provided the book’s chapter on geothermal, discussing his company’s power plants that are a field-proven, mature commercial product operating worldwide.

The first geothermal project was about 1905 in Italy. A farmer drilled a well, hot water came out, which turned to steam and the concept of putting a steam turbine on that to produce electricity was created. Soon we had flash technology, where water comes out of the ground, turns to steam and you put a turbine on it. And there are projects like that in Northern California at the geysers; there are projects like that in Iceland, in Africa – but they tend to be unique anomalies.

Ormat Technologies became a company in 1965. Our chairman decided that there were probably more stable ways to produce electricity and started to work on a heat exchanger and a turbine design utilizing what’s called the organic Rankine cycle. The cycle simply creates a secondary loop; where there are deviations in temperature, you can heat a working fluid which does the vaporizing, which builds pressure and turns a turbine. He first implemented this on a solar project in Mali, Africa. It was technically a success, but commercially not that attractive, so he turned towards geothermal.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Solar Thermal

Dr. Mills, known worldwide for pioneering Compact Linear Fresnel Reflector (CLFR) technology and for his work over the past 30 years in non-imaging optics, solar thermal energy, and PV systems, contributed to the book’s chapter on solar thermal.

This chapter addresses the notion of scale.  Dr. Mills believes wind and solar can all scale to be very large; each of them has the capability to take on the entire electricity load. But the question is how much does that cost and do they do it in a way where we have reliable energy?

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Photovoltaics

Bruce Allen is supremely well-qualified to have contibuted to the book’s chapter on photovoltaics.  His recent book Reaching the Solar Tipping Point describes the key technologies and applications that are enabling solar energy to become a primary cost-effective energy source. He has designed solar concentrator systems sold worldwide and worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, under contract to NASA, DOD and the US Missile Defense Agency.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Wind Energy

Dr. Amir Mikhail, Clipper’s senior vice president of engineering, contibuted to the book’s chapter on wind. Clipper Windpower is one of the most visible organizations on Earth in the race to provide solutions that offer utility-scale clean energy. The company strives to advance the technologies and services that make its customers successful in the expansion of wind energy, lessening the impacts of fossil fuel generation.

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