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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 sparkle for arizona

    FACTBOX

    How many m2 of collector area are installed?

    85 collectors at 10.5 m2 (113 ft2 each)
    = collector area of 892.5 m2 (9605 ft2)

    Which type of collector was installed?

    Gluatmugl GS 10.5 m2 flat plate collectors

    Size of the tanks?

    Buffer tank = 37.9 m2 (10,000 gal. U.S.)

    Type of control system?

    As with all SOLID installations, the visualization system allows access via an internet connection which is an important factor for system optimization and support.

    The new plant is providing hot water for a leading sports drink manufacturing plant that produces a well-known sports drink. The solar plant in Phoenix is expected to supply over a million kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year of heat energy to the soft drinks factory — each one of the 892.5 square meters (9605 ft²) of panels producing 1200 kWh/year. The manufacturer also installed a 500-kW solar PV plant on its distribution plant at Tolleson, Arizona at the start of this year and now the two solar plants will be making large savings in conventional energy and make a strong statement for integrating renewables in the brand’s production processes.

    The new solar thermal plant serves to preheat the water that is processed into the soft drink process — bringing it from mains water temperature up to a maximum of 35°C (95°F). The system designers have had to build in a number of safety features to guarantee that this maximum temperature is not exceeded, since a higher temperature could damage the membrane in the reverse osmosis water purification system that the heated water passes through in the next stage.

    The solar system at the plant went live at the end of December 2008, but because remaining work such as insulation measures still had to be done, the performance monitoring could not start immediately. It will be completed mid-2010 and the team from SOLID expects the numbers to confirm their estimates. There are two reasons behind the optimism — first, Arizona has an outstanding solar resource; second, the efficiency of the thermal collector increases as the temperature is lowered. 

    The Installation

    SOLID is an Austrian company (now with U.S. and Asian subsidiaries) that specializes in large-scale solar installations for a range of applications. Since 1992, SOLID has been planning, building, delivering, assembling and operating solar plants in excess of 100 m² around the world, providing hot water, heating rooms and supplying process heat, including district heating. SOLID also designs and builds solar-chilled water plants, including the largest commercial solar cooling projects currently in operating.

    The plant uses 85, 10.5 m² Gluatmugl solar panels, manufactured in Austria by OEKOTECH. While this is a separate company from SOLID, ownership of the two companies is in the same hands and they work together on their two specialties of manufacture and installation. Gluatmugl is the company’s flagship product and has already won several awards

    In Europe, SOLID’s preferred panel size in large plants is 14.3 m². The dimensions of that panel have been optimized for transport by truck. International shipping presents different constraints, so the 10.5 m² panel is designed to fit exactly inside a standard shipping container. This means that installations outside Europe can benefit from the considerable advantages of using large panels. 

    SOLID’s Harald Blazek, responsible for business and project development outside Europe, explains why large panels are preferable. “It’s partly for the solar efficiency, but mostly for the improvement in the hydraulic conditions, providing more stable results when the system is being run. Large panels make the system more tolerant.”

    Being able to lift large areas of module “with one movement of the crane” also has benefits in terms of speed and installation cost. When it comes to the actual collector installation, Blazek says that in Europe, when the larger collectors are in use, it’s quite usual to install up to 600 m² in a day.

    All the technical control equipment is assembled in Austria in a standard shipping container with prefabrication and pre-testing performed at the manufacturer’s site. When the container arrives on the erection site, it is simply placed on the prepared foundations and connected to the local interfaces. This “plug and play” approach guarantees a high level of reliability and shortens the erection period on site, says SOLID.

    Naturally there’s much more to an installation than simply putting in place the solar collectors. In the case of the Arizona plant, a steel structure had to be placed on the roof to avoid putting pressure on certain parts of the roof. There was also the extensive pipework and installation of the substantial buffer storage tank.  Overall, the work took about 3 months, which Harald Blazek says is typical on an installation of this size.

    Phoenix, Arizona, is not only the place for the realization of this landmark project but also the headquarters location of SOLID USA. All local coordination was in the hands of SOLID’s U.S. team, led by John Ellers, while the technical background was represented by an experienced technician from the Austria office.

    The Arizona project was carried out with the support from U.S. federal solar tax credits and equity finance, with support of the local authorities in Arizona and with excellent co-operation with the Salt River Project (SRP), the local energy provider, explains Harald Blazek. Return on investment is expected in less than 5 years.

    Large Is Beautiful

    This is one of the first process hot water installations that SOLID has delivered in the United States, and is typical in size — many process hot water installations the company has worked on are about 900 m² in scale. But it depends on the need: in Boston, at Harvard University, the company is working on two schemes to supply hot water to university residences that are 95 m² and 50 m². In Europe, several of the schemes that SOLID is working on, or has in the pipeline, are far larger. For instance, very close to home in Austria a new solar plant supplying energy to Graz District Heating and will provide space heating for the buildings occupied by the water agency of Graz AG. This plant includes 3800 m² (40,000 ft²) of collector area.

    “The sector is growing exponentially” says Blazek, “and project sizes are going up all the time.”

    Process Heat – A Sector with Great Potential

    SOLID CEO, Christian Holter, believes there is huge potential in industrial process hot water, and that this form of onsite energy could rapidly overtake household-scale installations in terms of overall installations worldwide and in terms of the CO2 savings it offers.  (To see an interview with Christian Holter, watch the video here.)

    Little attention is paid to the heat that goes into industrial processes. Uses include heating of process fluids, washing detergents, heating processes, drying processes and cooling of technical processes.  One of the industries with a huge and ongoing demand for industrial process heat (and chilling) is the food and beverage industry. Solar thermal hardly features in this field today, yet a study on solar process heating from an IEA task force calculated that between 3% and 4% of the world’s total industrial heat demand could be met by solar process heat. Even that small percentage of process heat offers higher potential than the whole domestic hot water market.

    SOLID will be exhibiting at Intersolar in Munich, May 27th -29th. (Hall B1/stand 443)

    Jackie Jones is Chief Editor of Renewable Energy World magazine.

    Image Gallery (1)

  • Concentrated solar power could generate ‘quarter of world’s energy’

     

     

    “Due to the feed-in tariff in Spain and a few schemes in the US, this technology is actually taking off and we wanted to highlight that we have a third big technology to fight climate change — wind, photovoltaics and now CSP,” said Teske.

     

    Spain is leading the field on CSP: more than 50 solar projects in the country have been approved for construction by the government and, by 2015, it will generate more than 2GW of power from CSP, comfortably exceeding current national targets. Spanish companies are also exporting their technology around the world.

     

    Environmentalists argue that many countries in the “sun-belt” around the equator would benefit from CSP technology — including desert regions in the southern United States, north Africa, Mexico, China and India.

     

    The new study, carried out by Greenpeace International, the European Solar Thermal Electricity Association and the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) SolarPACES group, looked at three scenarios of future growth in CSP. The first was business-as-usual reference scenario that assumed no increases at all in CSP; the second continued the CSP investments seen in recent years in places such as Spain and the US; while the advanced scenario was most optimistic, removing all political and investment barriers to give figures for the true potential of CSP.

     

    Under the third, most optimistic, scenario there could be a giant surge in investments to €21bn a year by 2015 and €174bn a year by 2050, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. In this case, solar plants would have installed capacity of 1,500GW by 2050 and provide 25% of the world’s electricity capacity. Even in the second scenario, which sees only modest increases, the world’s combined CSP capacity could reach 830GW by 2050, representing up to 12% of the world’s energy generation needs.

     

    Teske acknowledged that these estimates were far higher than official figures from the IEA. It says that by 2050, CSP would provide only0.2% of global power generation. But Teske added that the IEA analysis does not assume any increases in production capacity in the next few decades, hence CSP forms a very small part of the overall energy mix.

     

    The new report also said that CSP technology was improving rapidly, with many new power plants fitted with storage systems for steam so that they could continue to operate at night. In addition it said the cost of the electricity produced , currently at €0.15 to €0.23 a kilowatt, would fall to €0.10-€0.14 by 2020 if governments continued to support the technology with incentives such as feed-in tarriffs.

  • “bottletop” technology could slash aviation emissions by a fifth

     

    “Around half the drag a plane experiences is the result of skin friction, so anything that reduces that will deliver big savings in fuel use,” he said, adding that the research team was still not entirely clear how the phenomenon worked, but that early test results from wind tunnels had been encouraging.

    Lockerby explained that the innovation is based on the Helmholtz resonance principle – the same principle that applies to blowing over a bottletop whereby air is forced into a cavity increasing the pressure and forcing air out of the space, creating an oscillation.

    By perforating a plane’s wing with tiny holes with chambers underneath, the research team believes an additional layer of air can be created around the wing that limits drag.

    Simon Crook, senior manager for aerospace and defence at the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), which co-funded the research aviation giant Airbus, said that the breakthrough could help “drastically reduce the environmental cost of flying”.

    The team is now working on prototypes designed to get a better understanding of the process and ensure that the perforations can be added without compromising the structural integrity of the aircraft.

    Airbus is said to be keen to accelerate the project and it is hoped that new wings could be ready for trial as early as 2012.

    EPSRC said that if tests prove successful the technology could also be used to improve the fuel efficiency of cars, boats and trains.

    • This article was shared by our content partner BusinessGreen.com, part of the Guardian Environment Network

     

  • With Billions at Stake, Trying to Expand the Meaning of ‘Renewable Energy’

     

    The lure of the renewable label is understandable. Federal tax breaks for renewable energy have been reauthorized, and quotas for renewable energy production have been set in 28 states, accompanied by extensive new grants, loans and other economic advantages. And legislation is moving through both houses of Congress to establish national quotas for renewable energy sources, including the climate bill passed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday.

    With billions of dollars at stake, legislators have been besieged by lobbyists eager to share in the wealth.

    “They’ve been queuing up outside staff offices, everyone with all their ideas as to what should be included,” said Bill Wicker, the spokesman for the Democratic majority on the Senate energy committee, which is considering a national quota.

    In some states, the definition of “renewable” or “alternative” has already expanded. In Pennsylvania, waste coal and methane from coal mines receive the same treatment as solar panels and wind turbines. In Nevada, old tires can count as a renewable fuel, provided microwaves are used to break down their chemical structure.

    About half of the 28 states with renewable mandates include electricity generated by burning garbage (the District of Columbia also has a quota for renewable energy). In Florida, the nuclear power industry is lobbying to be included but has not yet succeeded.

    Government incentives for renewable energy were intended to give an economic boost to technologies like wind and solar power that were not yet economically competitive with coal and natural gas, which together provide more than two-thirds of the country’s electricity.

    The benefits that go with the designation include renewable energy credits, which promise to be a valuable commodity if a national renewable energy standard becomes law and utilities with high levels of renewable sources can sell credits to those with less.

    If a source of electricity already widely used by some utilities — hydropower or nuclear power, for example — is deemed renewable, it allows utilities to meet the new renewable-energy requirements while doing little to add wind or solar power to the electrical grid. House Republicans tried unsuccessfully last week to have nuclear energy included under the climate bill passed by the House committee.

    Environmental groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists, Environment America and the Natural Resources Defense Council say they are frustrated by the increasing elasticity of the word “renewable” in legislators’ hands.

    “Usually this is a very political process, and not driven in any way, shape or form by any strict scientific or ecological definition of renewables,” said Nathanael Greene of the N.R.D.C.

    But some of the industries that have claimed the renewable mantle argue that they deserve it.

    “A banana is renewable — you can grow them forever,” said Bob Eisenbud, a vice president for government affairs at Waste Management, which receives about 10 percent of its annual revenues of $13.3 billion from waste and landfill energy generation. “A banana that goes into garbage and gets burned,” he added, is “a renewable resource and producing renewable energy.”

    But environmentalists argue that one of the goals of renewable energy is to cut back on the heat-trapping gases emitted from burning most things, whether fossil fuels or bananas. When there is no fire, there are no emissions. The waste-to-energy technology described by Mr. Eisenbud was not included in the original draft of the climate legislation that received House committee approval, but it was contained in the version that moved out of the committee, thanks to language inserted by Representative Baron P. Hill, Democrat of Indiana. A new $227 million waste-to-energy plant was already planned in northern Indiana, outside his district.

    On the Senate side, an effort to get the benefits of the renewable designation for advanced coal-burning technologies failed, however.

    Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico and chairman of the Senate energy committee, said that if too many new technologies beyond core renewable sources like wind and solar were to be included, “the whole purpose of the renewable electricity standard is defeated.”

    The goal, he said, is “to encourage the development of some of these newer technologies and bring the price down.”

    He added, “If you throw in everything else” and call it renewable, “then your numbers get way out of whack.”

    Leon Lowery, a Democratic staff member for the committee, said that both environmentalists and industry had tinkered with the common-sense understanding of renewable sources to make definitions fit policy goals.

    “If you try to assign a sort of conceptual definition, you find yourself in strange places,” Mr. Lowery said. “Anyone would acknowledge that hydropower is renewable, but do we want to give credits to the Grand Coulee Dam?”

    To do so, he added, would give hydropower — which already benefits from rich federal subsidies that make it some of the cheapest energy available — the same status as solar or wind technologies.

    Among states that have already adopted quotas for renewable energy, the standards vary from Wisconsin’s, which requires that 10 percent of all power come from renewable sources by 2015, to those of Oregon and Minnesota, which call for 25 percent from renewable sources by 2025. California is raising its mandate to 33 percent by 2020, though its utilities have already indicated that the existing quota — 20 percent by 2010 — will be difficult to meet.

    In some states, quotas for renewable energy are paired with mandates for advanced technologies that are not necessarily renewable. For example, Ohio, which currently receives nearly two-thirds of its electricity from burning coal, requires that 25 percent of the state’s electricity must come from renewable or advanced technologies by 2025, but of that, half must come from core renewable sources, and some of the remainder can come from burning chemically treated coal.

    Graham Mathews, a lobbyist representing Covanta Energy, another waste-to-energy company, said the political horse-trading on renewable energy legislation was typical of all energy measures. “Energy policy is balkanized by region, and that dictates the debate. The politics become incredibly complicated,” he said.

    “Stepping back and looking at it,” Mr. Mathews added, “it sometimes doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

  • Spate of batteries announced

    The drive for commercial releases of electric cars has launched a spate of announcements about battery technology. The weight of existing batteries, the toxic chemicals employed in their manufacture and the limitations on the amount of power they can store makes the battery a limiting factor in the widespread adoption of electric vehicles. This week alone, announcements have been made about an air fuelled battery, sulphur lithium batteries and a ‘spin’ battery that uses the magnetic fields in atoms. Major investments in recharging stations have been made in Israel and Australia in anticipation of the release of electric cars and Warren Buffet has invested in a Chinese company that plans the widespread release of an electric car in the US next February.

    Detailed stories

  • Wales legislates for zero waste

    The small British country, Wales, has passed laws which commit future government’s to a zero waste future and one hundred percent of energy to be obtained from renewable sources. The package is the most far reaching legislation in Europe and is pegged for a twenty year time frame. Recycling is mandated for 70 per cent of all waste, free plastic bags will be banned and major investments made in generating electricity from agricultural waste, tide and waves. Once a major coal producer, Wales plans to be independent of fossil fuels by 2030.

    See related article from the Guardian