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Archive for August, 2011

Unicorn Tears As An Energy Source?

I sometimes think that many of us have a deep-seated mania that causes us to believe that for a substance to be an effective source of energy it must be something that can be burned. Not only must it be combustible, the substance must be hard to get. This manic belief requires that the energy source must be searched out and dug up or clawed from the earth at great trouble and expense.

What’s more, to be a credible source, the fuel must be retrieved from the bowels of the earth or the deepest depths of the ocean in an odyssey by intrepid explorers with fedoras and a five day growth of manly stubble, all else is considered to be alchemy.

“We know that renewable energies like solar and wind at this point in time are not capable of addressing the world’s total energy demands.” The Remarkable Energy Potential of Methane Hydrate from Clean Technica by Glenn Meyers

Not to single out a fellow writer here at Clean Technica, I’ve heard and read similar statements many times but the fact that they grossly distort the reality of the potential energy sources all around us does make them nettlesome. Actually we “know” no such thing.

I don’t know where this belief comes from or how it got started, maybe it’s primal. It could be an archetype, lodged early in the human mind, left over from the terror, fascination, even trauma, when some guy with a five-day stubble first dragged a burning branch from a lightning struck tree back to the cave for a mastodon roast.

Lightning strikes had to be hard to find even then, so the fire that made that long ago mastodon buffet so tasty and the damp and dark old cave so toasty and bright became a precious commodity, bringing about the birth of the intrepid fire finders… and the fedora.

Not too long ago a reader responded to something I wrote about renewable energy by writing that solar, wind, and all the other hippie forms of energy, like unicorn tears, just don’t have the kick, the raw power of fossil fuels, that swift punch in the belly of a good fission reaction.

I recognized the macho energy syndrome and wrote in reply that a watt is a watt, no matter the source that produces it, the kick is the same. I also pointed out that when hippies use a unicorn as a source of power they ignore the tears and move to the other end of the unicorn in their search for combustibles. I haven’t heard back from the guy, I hope he took it well.

Following the leadership of the giant multinational oil conglomerates and the governments they own is affecting our perspective, our ability to think rationally about energy. Maybe this belief in the machismo of combustibles, fossil fuels, and explosions of all kinds arose more recently, perhaps it began somewhere deep in the bowels of the PR departments of the energy industry. Yes, that’s it, portray the conquering heroes scouring the far reaches of the planet, braving every danger to produce the power to brew our cappuccino.

Reddy Kilowatt in a fedora rides to the rescue.

Every watt that we add to the grid from renewables is one less watt we need from fossil fuels and the watts are being added daily. Just as our existing energy infrastructure wasn’t built overnight, the clean renewable energy of our future will be added one wind or solar farm at a time.

It’s happening all over the world, hundreds of megawatts of renewable energy are being added to the grid yearly, from wind, solar, tidal and other sources in countries from China to Germany and Spain, and from Mexico to Brazil. The technology and resources exist, now. We can, we are “at this point in time”…capable of addressing the world’s total energy demands” with renewables.

Efficiency and economies of scale will follow as will new and improved technologies and challenges, as was true of the long process of building our old, dangerous, planet-killing energy system. As we proceed, the pace of replacement will quicken and the costs will come down. Even the US military has quietly shifted its emphasis to green energy as it has quietly recognized global warming as a serious threat to national security.

We no longer have to claw through the ancient muck at the bottom of the ocean, drill miles into the earth, remove the mountaintops, destroy our water supplies through fracking, or scrape the very hide off the earth to warm our pop tarts or cool our Jagerbombs.

We also don’t need to waste our time and resources searching for new things to burn, looking for lightning strikes ever farther from the cave while despoiling more of the planet and likely killing ourselves in the process.

We just need to start following the right leaders, and the guys with the burning sticks ain’t it anymore.

Photo: Domenichino [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

It’s rare to find electric lights along the Indian countryside. But a startup called Husk Power Systems is trying to change that. The company has developed biomass miniplants — pared-down power plants that convert oft-discarded rice husks and grasses into electricity — providing power and jobs to the people of rural India.

The power stations are small, typically only producing about 40 kilowatts of power. But that’s enough electricity to illuminate about 500 homes (three to four adjacent villages) per plant, says Manoj Sinha, Husk Power’s co-founder. This means that villagers can trade out their kerosene lamps, with their flames and carbon monoxide emissions, for light bulbs. In addition, plant operations are kept local: the company employs about 300 workers throughout the northeastern Indian state of Bihar to run the power stations.

One of the ways Husk Power Systems’ miniplants are more simple than a traditional power plant is they don’t use complex feedback loops, explains Sinha. Gas needs to be maintained at a certain pressure and temperature. To do this, more complex gassifiers rely on feedback systems that automatically adjust pressure and temperature.

While these feedback loops work well most of the time, they can be tricky to fix on the occasion they don’t, says Sinha . Especially if the plant operator is a villager who doesn’t have an engineering degree. Therefore, Husk Power Systems designed the plants to be manually operated and monitored without complex feedback loops, so when a problem arises, the operator can see exactly what it is and know what to fix.

Distributed power

Simplification was one of the key business innovations for the company. The other was realizing that by spreading out its small power plants, Husk Power Systems could reach more people than if it built a few larger plants. “It’s a combination of making it much more simple than a typical power plant combined with the decentralized way of power generation and distribution,” Sinha says.

Even so, the company’s approach isn’t without its detractors. Mark Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford would prefer that all new energy be solar, wind, or an other emission-free process. “Biomass isn’t clean,” he says. “You’re putting out air pollution because it’s still a combustion process.”

Moreover, he says, while the electricity produced by Husk Power Systems is enough to light homes, it’s not enough to offer an alternative to stoves that also burn wood and dried dung cakes (which are made partially of use rice husks).

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A serialized version of ILSR‘s new report, Democratizing the Electricity System, Part 1 of 5.

The 20th century of electricity generation was characterized by ever larger and more distant central power plants.  But a 21st century technological dynamic offers the possibility of a dramatically different electricity future: millions of widely dispersed renewable energy plants and storage systems tied into a smart grid.  It’s a more democratic and participatory paradigm, with homes and businesses and communities becoming energy producers as well as consumers actively involved in designing the rules for the new electricity system.

Several decades ago, several people – Amory Lovins in Brittle Power, David Morris in Self-Reliant Cities – explored the implications of this decentralized vision.  Most importantly, this vision represents a transformation in the ownership and control of the electricity system.  Instead of a 20th century grid dominated by large, centralized utilities, the 21st century grid would be a democratized network of independently-owned and widely dispersed renewable energy generators, with the economic benefits of electricity generation as widely dispersed as the ownership.

This graphic, adapted from the European Commission, illustrates the paradigm change (click for a larger version):

The difference in the ensuing decades is the commoditization of distributed energy production (e.g. solar panels sold at Home Depot), the renewable energy industry growing to $100 billion, and the critical mass of such production on the electricity grid.

In the last two years a number of events have forced policymakers at the local, state and national level to grapple with the implications of a decentralized grid system and how the policies they adopt help or hinder such a 21st century energy system:

• Sixteen (16) states of the twenty-nine (29) that have renewable energy mandates have added mandates for solar and other distributed energy technologies.
• Germany installed an astonishing 7,400 megawatts (MW) of distributed solar PV in 2010.  It has begun to change its incentive program to not only maximize solar power but on-site self-reliance via a combination of distributed generation, demand shifting and storage.
•   In this country’s largest solar market, California, the number of rooftop solar PV systems has grown from 500 to 50,000 in 10 years. [2]   The number of buildings with rooftop solar in San Francisco alone has increased from 9 to 7,050 in the same period.
• California’s governor announced his goal for the state to generate 12,000 MW from renewable distributed power plants by 2020. [3]   The state public utility commission has established a new renewable auction mechanism for up to 1,000 MW of distributed renewable energy projects 20 MW and smaller.
• Southern California Edison recently completed its solicitation for 250 MW of distributed solar PV on dozens of commercial rooftops with the price of electricity expected to be lower than natural gas generation. [4]
• And many more [5]

These events coincide with a dramatic rise in the amount of renewable energy on the U.S. electric grid.  Although total renewable generation is only 10 percent of total electricity, in some regions the concentration has reached 15 to 20 percent or more.  The rapid growth rate of this distributed renewable energy means that regulatory and utility policy must change immediately, to plan appropriately for the coming distributed generation grid.

–>> Page 2: Why Distributed Generation?

So, the winner of our Wind Uprising DVD giveaway is a Randy Allen Bishop (will contact you). Now, here’s a compilation of wind power stories from around the internet this week:

Wind Projects

1. Jack-Up Barge B.V. signs multi-year charter agreement with BARD Group [Marine Log]
2. China’s XEMC prepares ground for first European wind turbines [Business Green]
3. Cape Wind May Drop To Second In Race To Be First Offshore [Boston Herald]
4. Enel Green Power wins 3 wind farm projects in Brazil [Reuters]
5. China Ming Yang, China Wind Power ink wind farm deal [Reuters]
6. Navajo Nation and Edison Mission Energy to Jointly Own Boquillas Wind Farm in Arizona [Indian Country Today Media Network]
7. Salazar Wants Offshore Wind Expedited [The Boston Globe]
8. U.S. Interior Department Solicits Developers for Rhode Island Offshore Wind Farm [Providence Business News]
9. Giant 10MW Britannia wind turbine project shelved [Business Green]
10. ABS: Approval in Principle for Floating [Marine Link]
11. First turbine starts spinning at Vattenfall’s Ormonde offshore wind farm [Business Green]

Wind Manufacturing

1. Vestas poised to green light UK factory if offshore turbine orders materialise [Business Green]
2. Vestas strong orders underscore Western edge in wind [Reuters]

Wind Troubles

1. Is Wind Becoming a Victim of Eco-Sabotage? [Greentech Media]
2. Koch Brothers Fund Bogus Study Bashing Offshore Wind in New Jersey [Climate Progress]

Wind Successes

1. During High Temperatures Nuclear, Coal, and Gas Power Plants Go Down, But Wind Turbines Keep Turning [CleanEnergy]
2. Electric Cars Plugged In Overnight Could Get Most Of Their Electricity From Wind [Autos]
3. Community Wind: Small Now, But Growing [Greentech Media]
4. Brazil’s booming wind sector faces auction test [Reuters]

The future of data centers isn’t about performance. It’s about performance per watt. It’s about building a data center that uses less power, lowers operating costs and leaves a smaller carbon footprint. And drivers are emerging that indicate that the semiconductor and server markets, the lifeblood of the data center, are open to disruption.

Enter the disruptors: Calxeda, Tilera and SeaMicro. These are companies with new ideas about how to build low-power servers, and Calxeda and Tilera want to build those servers on non-x86 architectures. Unseating Intel and AMD on the microprocessor side and HP, Dell and IBM on the server manufacturer side is a feat.

To read more about how power is disrupting the data center, check out the latest Weekly Update (subscription requires) from our GigaOM Pro Green IT curator Adam Lesser (@adamdlesser).

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