Huge, new offshore wind turbines can be competitive with natural gas, according to Bloomberg. Skeptics in the article bring up the intermittent nature of wind, but don’t address whether battery storage could be a cost-effective solution at this point.
Tag Archives: energy
Vicar of Bray
Michael Liebreich at Bloomberg New Energy Finance describes renewable energy investments some oil and gas companies are making, which he calls the “Vicar of Bray”. I don’t quite get the reason for that name.
Under the first strategy – which we could call the Vicar of Bray – oil and gas companies attempt to maintain leadership of the commanding heights of the energy industry as it shifts away from fossil fuels to clean energy, through a perfectly-timed and elegantly-executed redirection of capital and human capacity.
Early attempts at the Vicar of Bray include BP’s famous “Beyond Petroleum” rebranding under Lord Browne in 2000 – which was followed by the investment of $8 billion in clean energy, some of which was later written off. Similarly, Shell tried to gain a leadership position in the nascent solar sector by buying Siemens Solar in 2002; six years later it sold the sub-scale and failing operation. David Crane, former CEO of NRG, famously failed in his attempt to turn it into a clean energy company.
Today, it looks like all the major European oil companies are planning on some variant of Vicar of Bray. Shell (disclosure: whose New Energies Advisory Board I recently joined) has announced its intention to invest $2 billion per year in its New Energies division until 2020, out of its total capital spending of $25-30 billion; BP is investing a more modest $0.5 billion out of its $15 billion capex budget. French oil giant Total has committed to 20 percent low-carbon businesses within 20 years (although this includes mid-stream and down-stream gas). Statoil has been investing in floating offshore wind as well as carbon capture and sequestration, and this year announced its relaunch as Equinor, removing “oil” from its name, if not from its cash flows.
May 2018 in Review
Most frightening stories:
- The idea of a soft landing where absolute dematerialization of the economy reduces our ecological footprint and sidesteps the consequences of climate change through innovation without serious pain may be wishful thinking.
- Lake Powell is in increasingly deep (actually shallow, ha ha) trouble.
- The American Academy of Pediatrics says climate change is already killing children.
Most hopeful stories:
- There are some new ideas for detecting the potential for rapid ecological change or collapse of ecosystems.
- Psychedelics might produce similar benefits to meditation.
- Microgrids, renewables combined with the latest generation of batteries, are being tested in Puerto Rico.
Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:
- I learned about the stag hunt, a cousin of the prisoner’s dilemma in game theory.
- Uber Air is looking a little more real. There are other ideas for autonomous urban helicopters too.
- Connecticut is the latest U.S. state to join the National Popular Vote Compact.
microgrids in Puerto Rico
The Puerto Rico blackouts have provided some opportunities to test microgrids, or small-scale combinations of intermittent renewable energy with battery storage.
Broken transmission lines and utility poles have been repaired–at a painfully slow pace, though the majority of Puerto Ricans finally have power again–but the grid is still vulnerable (last week’s blackout followed another blackout two weeks ago). The next hurricane season is a little more than five weeks away. In the event of another storm, a network of microgrids could keep going even if the larger grid fails again…
Though the current microgrids are used at individual buildings, in theory, larger systems could support a whole community. Jonathan Marvel, a Brooklyn-based architect working with Resilient Puerto Rico, is talking to mayors about the possibility of microgrids that could provide power to 20,000 people.
Individual microgrids could also be linked together. In Arizona, Sonnen is adding solar and energy storage to thousands of new homes in a community to create a “virtual power plant” that can share energy between homes. When connected to the grid, the system helps stabilize the overall grid, but it can also operate if a disaster takes the larger grid out. Sonnen has done the same thing in Germany.
April 2018 in Review
Most frightening stories:
- According to a UN-affiliated study, “Conflict will remain a major driver of food insecurity in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, while drought is likely to worsen crop and livestock output, increasing food insecurity in countries such as Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya”
- BREAKING NEWS: Global warming is cause by increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Seriously.
- That big California earthquake is still coming.
Most hopeful stories:
- There was a slate of hopeful climate news this month (I couldn’t bring myself to pick just one, or even just three of these.) Long-promised smaller, safer, more modular nuclear reactors are starting to come to market. Maybe nuclear waste can be stored safely and cheaply in deep horizontal tunnels. There’s a new X-Prize for turning carbon emissions into useful products. Coal really is losing out to renewables. And Exxon may eventually pay for its climate crimes.
- It’s possible that your brain could be scanned at a high resolution so that your consciousness can be revived far in the future. The down side is that scientists would have to kill you first to do that with anything similar to current technology. Well, technology does have a tendency to improve.
- There are free online resources to teach general systems theory in middle school.
Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:
- There’s a phone app that can identify plants and animals in your back yard.
- A space hotel could open as soon as 2020.
- Dog food and people food made from synthetic meat are here.
envisioning a water-energy utility with smart metering
This article envisions a single utility that provides water, electricity, and natural gas service, meters all three at the household level, and is able to integrate them using smart grid concepts. To me it illustrates some concepts of how multiple utilities and government agencies, each making cost effective operating and capital investment decisions within their narrowly defined missions, do not necessarily add up to an efficient whole.
Advanced metering technologies coupled with informatics creates an opportunity to form digital multi-utility service providers. These providers will be able to concurrently collect a customers’ medium-high resolution water, electricity and gas demand data and provide user-friendly platforms to feed this information back to customers and supply/distribution utility organisations. Providers that can install low-cost integrative systems will reap the benefits of derived operational synergies and access to mass markets not bounded by historical city, state or country limits. This paper provides a vision of the required transformative process and features of an integrated multi-utility service provider covering the system architecture, opportunities and benefits, impediments and strategies, and business opportunities. The heart of the paper is focused on demonstrating data modelling processes and informatics opportunities for contemporaneously collected demand data, through illustrative examples and four informative water-energy nexus case studies. Finally, the paper provides an overview of the transformative R&D priorities to realise the vision.
“coal plant chicken”
No, coal plant chicken is not grilling chicken using waste heat from a coal plant, although that is not a terrible idea. It’s the idea that coal-fired utilities are competing for slices of a shrinking pie, and they are going to blink out of existence one by one.
Zindler, BNEF’s head of Americas, said about half of all U.S. coal plants lose money on any given day as cheap gas, along with wind and solar farms, push electricity prices lower. Meanwhile, demand for power is flat. The result, Zindler said, is coal plants wrestle to outlast one another, fighting for a bigger piece of the pie. “Every day across multiple regional transmission operating systems, we see power plants staring across at each other and saying ‘Who is going to go first?’ ” Zindler said. “It’s only a matter of time as these plants try to outlast each other.”
Elsewhere in the same article, coal-fired utility executives say this is not true because coal and nuclear are currently the only two cost-effective ways to generate a constant base load. I don’t have the expertise to agree or disagree, but I know that nuclear technology is advancing, and battery technology which can be used to smooth out intermittent loads is also advancing.
more on small modular nuclear reactors
From Bloomberg:
The type of reactor NuScale is targeting would be cheaper to build than current designs and more capable of operating intermittently to back up wind and solar power, Chris Gadomski, a BNEF analyst, said Tuesday on a panel at the summit. NuScale is aiming for commercial operations in 2026 for a plant in Utah comprised of a dozen 50-megawatt reactors. It is the only company with small-reactor design certification pending before the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Exxon on oil demand
Exxon says oil demand could be down 20% by 2040 if the Paris accords are implemented. Or…it could be up if they are not.
March 2018 in Review
Most frightening stories:
- One reason the U.S. blunders into war repeatedly is that it does not do a good job of analyzing the motives of its adversaries.
- International investors may be losing confidence in the U.S. dollar. And a serious financial crisis in China is a possibility, although China is also trying to become a “cyber superpower“.
- One reason propaganda works is that even knowledgeable people are more likely to believe a statement the more often it is repeated.
Most hopeful stories:
- One large sprawling city could be roughly the economic equivalent of several small high-density cities. This could potentially be good news for the planet if you choose in favor of the latter, and preserve the spaces in between as some combination of natural land and farm land.
- The problems with free parking, and solutions to the problems, are well known. This could potentially be good news if anything were to be actually done about it. Self-parking cars could be really fantastic for cities.
- The coal industry continues to collapse, and even the other fossil fuels are saying they are a bunch of whining losers. And yes, I consider this positive. I hope there aren’t too many old ladies whose pensions depend on coal at this point.
Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:
- Some people really do win the lottery more than they should.
- You can buy a computerized chicken coop or cider maker.
- You can do network analysis or call Matlab in R.