Tag Archives: energy

Three Mile Island

A lot of people probably don’t realize that 2 of the 4 reactors at Three Mile Island have been operational without issues since the 1970s. They are projected to be shut down next year.

Across the U.S., more communities are grappling with such questions, as the owners of nuclear plants dating back to the 1960s and ’70s begin to put their facilities into premature retirement. That’s because the plants are having trouble staying competitive in an era of cheap natural gas, a product of the shale boom. Also, nuclear power’s attraction as a clean energy source has been eclipsed by no-emissions alternatives such as wind and solar power.

One enemy of the nuclear industry in Pennsylvania is natural gas lobbyists.

Even so, nuclear advocates have thus far had better success mobilizing resources at the state level. In Illinois, the state that leads the U.S. in nuclear power generation, lawmakers passed controversial legislation in 2016 to subsidize nuclear plants with so-called zero-emission credits. Exelon, which operates the largest nuclear fleet in the nation, owns the state’s six operational sites.

States including New York and New Jersey have enacted similar policies. Pennsylvania has been a tougher sell. A nuclear energy caucus in the state legislature has failed to pass anything helpful yet. Its efforts have been stymied, in part, by forces supporting the state’s booming natural gas industry.

 

stranded fossil fuel assets

An article from Cambridge (University, not Analytica) in Nature Climate Change estimates potential losses if renewables were to lead to a sudden drop in demand for fossil fuels.

Our analysis suggests that part of the SFFA would occur as a result of an already ongoing technological trajectory, irrespective of whether or not new climate policies are adopted; the loss would be amplified if new climate policies to reach the 2 °C target of the Paris Agreement are adopted and/or if low-cost producers (some OPEC countries) maintain their level of production (‘sell out’) despite declining demand; the magnitude of the loss from SFFA may amount to a discounted global wealth loss of US$1–4 trillion; and there are clear distributional impacts, with winners (for example, net importers such as China or the EU) and losers (for example, Russia, the United States or Canada, which could see their fossil fuel industries nearly shut down), although the two effects would largely offset each other at the level of aggregate global GDP.

So coal subsidies might be “making America Great Again”, but not for long. And they might not even have the desired effect according to this article, which argues they would primarily benefit nuclear. And solar energy, it turns out, is a growth industry creating jobs in many Republican districts.

 

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:

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:

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:

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

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.

Integrated intelligent water-energy metering systems and informatics: Visioning a digital multi-utility service provider

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.