Tag Archives: renewable energy

Trump may bail out obsolete coal-fired power plants

According to Bloomberg, the Trump administration is about to subsidize obsolete, inefficient, and polluting coal-fired power plants. Remember the Republican sound bite about “picking winners and losers”? Hypocrites.

The plan cuts to the heart of a debate over the reliability and resiliency of a rapidly evolving U.S. electricity grid. Nuclear and coal-fired power plants are struggling to compete against cheap natural gas and renewable electricity. As nuclear and coal plants are decommissioned, regulators have been grappling with how to ensure that the nation’s power system can withstand extreme weather events and cyber-attacks…

The Energy Department would be relying partly on the Federal Power Act — the so-called Section 202 authority — that lets the administration order guaranteed profits for power plants that can store large amounts of fuel on site. And the Energy Department would be tapping the 68-year-old Defense Production Act, a Cold War-era statute once invoked by President Harry Truman to help the steel industry…

The issue is a priority for some of the president’s top supporters, including coal moguls Robert E. Murray and Joseph Craft of Alliance Resource Partners, who donated a million dollars to the president’s inauguration. The move would be one of the most direct efforts by Trump to make good on campaign promises to revive the nation’s shrinking coal industry…

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.

renewable energy economics

Coal is already starting to get squeezed out by the dropping cost of renewable energy and battery storage, and natural gas is next, according to Bloomberg.

“Some existing coal and gas power stations, with sunk capital costs, will continue to have a role for many years, doing a combination of bulk generation and balancing,” said Elena Giannakopoulou, head of energy economics at BNEF. “But the economic case for building new coal and gas capacity is crumbling…”

One new factor: lithium-ion batteries have enjoyed a 79 percent drop in costs since 2010, making the idea of storing energy a possibility the coming years. The price per megawatt-hour for generating from wind farms built on land fell 18 percent in the first half of 2018 to $55 while photovoltaics dropped 18 percent to $70…

The cheapest solar and wind costs can now be found in China and India, which are also among the worst polluters. The tumbling costs will continue until at least until 2040 for both renewable energy sources worldwide and they’ll become cheaper than coal and gas within five years, the report showed.

 

Firstenergy close to bankruptcy

Firstenergy, a major coal and nuclear utility in Ohio and Pennsylvania, is asking those state governments for subsidies to help it avoid bankruptcy. It’s biggest critics? Groups like the Sierra Club, which you might expect, but also the oil and gas industry.

Natural gas and renewable energy have been making up a larger amount of the country’s electric grid, eating into coal and nuclear power on wholesale markets. With that backdrop, FirstEnergy is also asking the Department of Energy to issue an immediate emergency order to PJM Interconnection, the grid operator for mid-Atlantic states, to provide “just and reasonable” compensation to its fleet of aging coal and nuclear power plants in order to keep them open…

“The Nation’s security is jeopardized if DOE does not act now to preserve fuel-secure generation and the diversity of supply…”

“FirstEnergy needs to stop misleading the public and government officials about the status of its power plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania,” said Todd Snitchler, Market Development Group Director for the American Petroleum Institute, in a statement. ”For FirstEnergy to cry wolf on the issue of grid reliability is irresponsible and is the company’s latest attempt to force consumers to pay for a bailout.

The collapse of the coal industry isn’t all that surprising, and anyone who has children or lungs should be glad. The possibility of nuclear going down with it is a little surprising. The idea of nuclear appeals to me at least a little bit, but it seems like the economics and keeping the plants up and running just isn’t working out. I wonder if this is just because most of our nuclear plants consist of obsolete, 50-year-old technology, or if nuclear really just will never be able to compete.

utility-scale solar cost dropped 30% in one year

According to Inhabitat:

In a recently published report, the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratories documented that the cost of utility-scale solar, generated from large plants rather than residential rooftops, has decreased by 30 percent within the past year…

Although China has frequently been cited by the US President as a dangerous competitor, the solar renaissance in the United States has been made possible because of the pioneering work in solar energy being done in the People’s Republic. More solar modules are being produced in China than there is demand, which has enabled US importers to purchase this technology at low prices. As a result, the average price per watt is now only $1.03 for fixed-tilt systems and $1.11 for those that move to track the sun’s movement.

printed solar panels and batteries

According to Inhabitat, a company in Australia is working on thin, flexible, cheap “printed” batteries and solar panels, which could be attached to each other.

Solar energy appeals to a lot of people concerned about the environment and reducing electricity costs, but the cost of installing the energy-generating panels remains prohibitively high for a lot of people – even though prices are gradually falling. Printed Energy has proposed a solution. The Australian company is on a mission to print out ultra-thin, flexible screen-printed batteries, which can then be applied on top of super-thin flexible screen-printed solar panels, considerably cutting installation costs.

Earlier this week, the company signed a deal with UNSW and the University of Queensland — and received backing from the federal government —  to produce the printed batteries and offer them on the market. The $12 million project also received a $2 million grant from the Cooperate Research Centres Projects scheme. Having obtained funding, Printed Energy now seeks to produce “solid state” batteries that are thin and can be printed in a “roll-to-roll” process — similar to a newspaper. The printed batteries will also be adaptable to any shape.

The idea isn’t to pair the printed batteries with existing solar technology but to match it with printed solar panels, and other devices the batteries could power. According to Rodger Whitby, CEO of Printed Energy and of the St Baker Energy Innovation Fund, the printed battery technology is ideal for powering sensors, devices for the internet, disposable healthcare devices and, of course, renewable energy. While the invention could revolutionize the renewable energy industry, the company’s main priority is developing the batteries for “disposable devices.” Battery storage for solar will follow. Said Whitby, “We are really thinking of this type of battery in a different paradigm. We have also got IP for printed PV – so the idea is to have a sub-strata plastic sheet, and print solar on one side and battery on the other.”

 

stealing used fast food oil

According to Bloomberg, theft of used fast food oil has become more common as its economic value has increased recently. There are a few interesting reasons for this:

Finding value in old grease isn’t new. For more than a century, the waste product has been processed into ingredients for everything from makeup and paint to pet food and livestock feed, according to the Arlington, Virginia-based National Renderers Association, which represents 51 companies with 205 plants in the U.S. and Canada.

What’s different is more cooking oil is being made into fuel. It’s now the largest use for old grease, at around 30 percent of demand. A 2007 energy law calls for American cars, trucks and buses to use escalating amounts of biofuels. Most of that is corn-based ethanol used in gasoline, but refiners also are making more biodiesel. Soybean oil is the primary raw material, followed by used grease and corn oil…

The rally in biodiesel is boosting the value of grease. Since Feb. 17, the fuel is up 12 percent to $3 a gallon, as of April 28. Further gains may be likely because of a trade dispute with competitors in Argentina and Indonesia, which may limit imports of biodiesel

So the value of, and therefore the incentive to steal, grease is on the rise due to a complicated set of factors involving fuel demand, government regulation, and international trade policy. If some of the biodiesel we are using in the U.S. is coming from palm oil plantations in the tropics, that adds another element to consider in the environmental benefits or costs of the technology. I also suspected that the typical burger joint owner who is paying someone to pick this stuff up doesn’t care all that much if someone else picks it up. From that person’s perspective, either way it goes away. I suppose the environment could be hurt depending on where it goes, and the licensed grease hauling industry gets hurt (and yes there is an industry association for that, called the National Renderers Association, and they are very concerned about this issue.

making your own biodiesel

Do you want to make your own biodiesel? Here’s an article. Basically, biodiesel is vegetable oil either mixed with regular diesel or processed to change its properties so it can fuel a diesel engine or generator. If you try this please don’t poison, burn or blow yourself up. If you poison, burn or blow yourself up don’t say I didn’t warn you.

This is interesting on a small scale but I don’t think it’s the answer to civilization’s energy problems for a few reasons. The obvious one is that it takes a lot of vegetable oil, vegetable oil crops/trees take a lot of land to grow, and if you do it on a huge scale you will not have that land available for anything else, like growing food. We should be diversifying our economy away from our reliance on oil specifically, and liquid fuels more generally. Still, there are applications like air travel where liquid fuels seem to be the best technical solution, and it might make sense to reserve biofuels for those. If you need an emergency generator for some reason, like at a hospital, and battery or fuel cell technology are not up to the job or cost-effective enough yet, a tank of biodiesel certainly seems like a safer and less toxic alternative to a tank of regular old diesel.

solar panel roads

According to Bloomberg, the technology to build roads and parking lots out of solar panels is coming along fast. This could be a big breakthrough considering the sheer amount of area that would be available. As solar panels get closer to being cost-competitive with fossil fuels, the time will come when space to install them is the limiting factor. This could open up enormous new areas compared to only having rooftops available. I can also imagine the possibilities for roads and parking lots being able to fund their own maintenance and repairs, then generate additional revenues for cities, states, and private entities on top of that. This could really be a game-changing technology.

oil discoveries at 70 year low

Here’s a long article from Bloomberg called Oil Discoveries at 70-Year Low Signal Supply Shortfall Ahead. The basic thesis is that prices are so low companies have stopped looking for new oil, and ones existing supplies start to run out prices will rise.

Explorers in 2015 discovered only about a tenth as much oil as they have annually on average since 1960. This year, they’ll probably find even less, spurring new fears about their ability to meet future demand.

With oil prices down by more than half since the price collapse two years ago, drillers have cut their exploration budgets to the bone. The result: Just 2.7 billion barrels of new supply was discovered in 2015, the smallest amount since 1947, according to figures from Edinburgh-based consulting firm Wood Mackenzie Ltd. This year, drillers found just 736 million barrels of conventional crude as of the end of last month.

That’s a concern for the industry at a time when the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that global oil demand will grow from 94.8 million barrels a day this year to 105.3 million barrels in 2026. While the U.S. shale boom could potentially make up the difference, prices locked in below $50 a barrel have undercut any substantial growth there.

How soon will this have an effect? 2025 according to one source cited in this article, 2040 according to another. That seems pretty far out to me to make precise predictions. Hopefully we will have a cheap, reliable renewable energy source by then. But maybe we will have explosive population and consumption growth. Or maybe the world economy will tank. It’s just hard to say. I’m not snapping up oil stocks just yet.