EcoRadio

Category: Energy Matters

The twentieth century way of life has been made available, largely due to the miracle of cheap energy. The price of energy has been at record lows for the past century and a half.As oil becomes increasingly scarce, it is becoming obvious to everyone, that the rapid economic and industrial growth we have enjoyed for that time is not sustainable.Now, the hunt is on. For renewable sources of energy, for alternative sources of energy, for a way of life that is less dependent on cheap energy. 

  • Solar plane unveiled in Switzerland

    Swiss adventurer, Bertrand Piccard, has unveiled a solar powered plane in which he plans to cirumnavigate the globe. Built by Solar Impulse, the plane has a 63.4 metre wing, is built of light weight carbon fibre and carries enough batteries to keep it flying overnight. The wings have the span of a jumbo jet are covered with 12,000 solar panels but weigh less than half a tonne. The plane is expected to make its first flight this year.

    Related story

  • California fires up laser fusion machine

     

    The building, which has taken almost 15 years to build and commission, is due to be opened in a ceremony attended by the US energy secretary, Steven Chu, and the California governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has said the facility could “revolutionise our energy future”.

    “If they’re successful, it will be a very big deal. No one has achieved a net gain in energy before,” said Derek Stork, assistant technical director at the UK United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA)’s centre for fusion research in Culham, Oxfordshire.

    Inside the building, scientists will use the world’s most powerful laser to create 192 separate beams of light that will be directed at a bead of frozen hydrogen in a violent burst lasting five billionths of a second. Each fuel pellet measures just two millimetres across but costs around $40,000, because they must be perfectly spherical to ensure they collapse properly when the laser light strikes.

    The intense beams produce a powerful shockwave that crunches the fuel pellet at a million miles an hour, generating temperatures of around 100,000,000C. Under such extreme conditions, which are found only in the core of stars, the hydrogen atoms will fuse, producing helium and vast amounts of energy.

    The facility will gradually work up to full power over the next 12 months or so, but experiments are scheduled to run until around 2040.

    If the NIF succeeds, politicians will be under pressure to invest in the technology to develop a first generation of demonstration plants to feed fusion energy into electricity grids.

    Plans for a laser fusion plant have been drawn up at UKAEA in Culham. The Hiper project would use two lasers to produce power from seawater and lithium, an abundant element.

    “When this works, it will immediately change the future energy map for the world. One cubic kilometre of sea water has the fusion energy equivalent of whole world’s oil reserves,” said John Parris at the Hiper project. That would overturn concerns over energy security caused by vast amounts of the globe’s oil been locked up beneath a small number of nations.

    The NIF facility must overcome major technical hurdles before scientists can start celebrating. The laser at the heart of the facility can only fire a handful of times a day. In between each shot, the hydrogen fuel pellet needs to be replaced. Over the coming years, scientists want to see improvements that allow the facility to run continuously. That could mean firing the laser 10 times a second, at fuel pellets that are shot mid air as they are dropped into the fusion chamber.

  • Australia filthiest place in the world to make aluminium

    Even putting aside all the obvious arguments that we cannot eat coal, and that food security is a paramount responsibility of government, John Kaye said that the figures about export earnings are dubious. He pointed out that while the coal industry might earn revenues equivalent to one tenth of the total national export income, a lot of that money goes straight overseas to foreign shareholders. “The money from coal that goes into the national economy is a fraction of the revenues earned by the industry as a whole,” he said.

    He also pointed out that the money spent in the production of minerals might contribute to the economy but it is not necessarily good for the nation, either economically or environmentally. He said that this is most clearly illustrated by the aluminium industry. Aluminium is manufactured by running electric currents through aluminium oxide to separate the raw metal. It has been described by scientists, politicians and industrial engineers as “bottled electricity”. An act of the NSW parliament makes it illegal for anyone to divulge the price paid by the aluminium companies for their electricity, but it is widely believed to be around three cents per kilowatt hour. Householders pay between 40 and 50 cents per kilowatt hour. Ordinary householders, then, subsidise the production of aluminium in this state.

    On top of that the State governments in Victoria, NSW and Queensland have provided massive cash payments to the multinational companies on a number of occasions. As part of the proposed Carbon Pollution Reward Scheme, the Federal government is proposing to give the aluminium companies over $600million dollars each year to compensate them for producing the 20million tonnes of carbon dioxide they pump into the atmosphere. Otherwise, the aluminium companies have threatened to move offshore.

    “We should let them go,” Dr Kaye said. He points out that the $200,000 per employee in the aluminium industry would be better spent on retraining and equipping those workers to produce renewable energy technology that we could use domestically and export. He also said that the government encourages the assumption that sending an industry like this offshore would be bad for the environment because other countries are not as tightly regulated as Australia. “It is simply not true,” he said. “NSW is the second dirtiest place in the world to make aluminium because of our reliance on coal fired electricity.” He said that China, Rumania or Brazil would be cleaner because everywhere else in the world has a better mix of renewable energy than Australia. “The only place in the world that is dirtier than NSW is Victoria,” he concluded.

    Extracted from an interview with John Kaye by Giovanni Ebono for The Generator. Watch or listen to the interview at www.thegenerator.com.au

  • German village pioneers energy-saving ‘dial-a-light’ scheme

     

    The village has trialled the so-called Dial4Light scheme on several of its streets for a year and because of its success now plans to roll it out to the entire settlement, as well as further afield.

    All 9,000 residents of Dörentrup can register their details for the free system. They can then make a phone call, entering the code number displayed on a lamp post, which triggers the lights to go on within seconds. They stay on for up to 15 minutes before automatically switching off.

    Dörentrup’s mayor said the scheme aimed first and foremost to save money but was also a useful way of raising the community’s awareness of how they used energy.

    “We’re doing this for the sake of saving costs,” mayor Friedrich Ehlert told the Süddeutsche Zeitung. “But we also want to do our bit to protect the environment and take care of the climate. In this, the community should be held accountable just like every private individual.”

    The project came into being after the village council made the unpopular decision several years ago to turn out the lights at night because it could no longer afford the electricity bill. A frustrated local resident came up with the idea to allow the lights to be available on demand.

    “We took his idea very seriously,” said Bernd Klemme from the county council in Lemgo, which developed the system with the help of experts and secured a patent for it.

    “We developed a special modem and a software allowing every registered user the ability to control the lights,” he said.

    Data collected by the council shows that the Dial4Light will lead to an annual reduction in the community’s carbon dioxide emissions of almost 20 tonnes – the equivalent of the emissions of 11 four-person households.

    Publicity generated during the pilot stage of the project prompted inquiries to the Lemgo authorities from numerous European countries as well as Saudi Arabia, Japan, India and the US. Later this month Lemgo will launch the Dial4Light system internationally.

  • Another renewable energy rebate goes

     

    A solar energy businessman, Adrian Ferraretto, says it is disappointing.

    “Right now there is no rebate for the solar energy industry, well we got dealt another blow this morning with the Government pulling the stand-alone power system rebate,” he said.

    The rebate for solar installations was withdrawn by the Federal Government recently.

    Tags: environment, alternative-energy, federal-government, australia, act, nsw, nt, qld, sa, adelaide-5000, tas, vic, wa

  • Denmark to power electric cars by wind in vehicle-to-grid experiment

     

     

    The concept, known as vehicle-to-grid (V2G) is widely cited among greens as a key step towards a low-carbon future, but has never been demonstrated. Now, the 40,000 inhabitants of Bornholm are being recruited into the experiment. Denmark is already a world leader in wind energy and has schemes to replace 10% of all its vehicles with electric cars, but the goal on the island is to replace all petrol cars.

     

    Currently 20% of the island’s electricity comes from wind, even though it has enough turbines installed to meet 40% of its needs. The reason it cannot use the entire capacity is the intermittency of the wind: many turbines are needed to harness sufficient power in breezes, but when gales blow the grid would overload, so some turbines are disconnected.

     

    So the aim of the awkwardly named Electric Vehicles in a Distributed and Integrated Market using Sustainable Energy and Open Networks Project – Edison for short – is to use V2G to allow more turbines to be built and provide up to 50% of the island’s supply without making the grid crash.

     

    Each electric vehicle will have battery capacity reserved to store wind power for the island rather than for travelling. This means it acts like a buffer, says Dieter Gantenbein, a researcher at IBM’s Zurich Research Laboratory. IBM is developing the software needed for the island’s smart grid, and will showcase its work next week. When the cars are plugged in and charging their batteries, they will absorb any additional load the grid cannot cope with and then feed it back to power homes when needed, he says.

     

    “It’s never been tried at this scale,” says Hermione Crease of Cambridge-based Sentec, which develops smart grid software. There are plenty of smart grid trials already under way, usually involving the use of software to monitor and manage supply and demand, for example, by temporarily switching off industrial cooling units during periods of peak load, she says. But unlike these so-called “negawatt” approaches, proving that cars can be used as part of the grid has yet to attempted.

     

    Andrew Howe of RLTec in London, another smart grid technology firm, says many important questions need answers. It is not clear, for example, how the cost and lifetime of batteries will influence the economics of such a system.

     

    These are the kinds of issue the project seeks to shed light on, says the project manager Jørgen Christensen of the Danish Energy Association, which with technology companies Siemens and Dong and the government are running the scheme.