Category: Energy Matters

From the New York Times

When Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg dreamed out loud last week about a New York skyline filled with wind turbines, one of the most serious issues raised by the naysayers was that the wind does not always blow when you need it.

But a New Jersey company plans to announce on Tuesday that it is working on a solution to this perennial problem with wind power: using wind turbines to produce compressed air that can be stored underground or in tanks and released later to power generators during peak hours.

The company, Public Service Enterprise Group Global LLC, a subsidiary of P.S.E.G. Energy Holdings, is forming a joint venture with Michael Nakhamkin, a leader in the development of energy storage technology. The new company, Energy Storage and Power, will promote the use of compressed air storage technology to utilities and other power producers. (P.S.E.G. Global is the sister company of Public Service Electric and Gas Company, New Jersey’s largest power distributor, which has 2.2 million customers.)

The technology has been around for decades, though the only major plant in the United States opened in Alabama in 1991. Another plant was built in Germany in the 1970s. But compressed air storage is getting a fresh look because so many windmills have been built across the country in recent years, and energy producers are increasingly looking for ways to avoid building power plants that rely on expensive oil and natural gas.

Dr. Nakhamkin, who worked on the plant in Alabama, has developed new technology that reduces the startup time for generators powered by compressed air and cuts the amount of emissions they produce. The new facilities would also use more standard components, which would make the plants cheaper to build, depending on how much mining is required to create an underground reservoir.

“This is a game-changing technology,” said Stephen C. Byrd, the president of P.S.E.G. Energy Holdings, which will invest $20 million over three years. “There is a desire for energy independence, and this will reduce the need for oil and natural gas.”

The venture has met with utilities that might buy the storage technology. Compressed air can be produced by a variety of fuels. But the new venture hopes to put wind power generated during off-peak hours to use during peak hours — typically 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. — and especially on hot days.

One of the main challenges to using wind power is that the wind, in general, is unpredictable, which makes it harder for utilities to rely exclusively on it since they prefer to buy energy a day or more in advance.

In New York, that unpredictability is compounded by the fact that the city is at its windiest on winter nights, while power use peaks on sticky — and still — summer days.

P.S.E.G. Global is trying to win a contract to build 95 windmills that would produce a maximum of 350 megawatts of electricity off the New Jersey coast. If the company is chosen, it would consider linking the windmills to a compressed air storage plant, Mr. Byrd said, and then feeding it into the power grid.

If a storage plant were to be built in New Jersey, it would most likely use above-ground tanks or abandoned gas pipelines because so much of the state is on solid rock, which would be expensive to excavate, Mr. Byrd said.

More favorable locations, he said, include upstate New York, where there are depleted salt mines as well as wind farms. Old coal mines and tapped-out natural gas fields can also be converted into underground reservoirs.

Roy Daniel, the chief executive of Energy Storage and Power, said that an underground reservoir the size of Giants Stadium could hold enough compressed air to power three 300-megawatt plants. (One megawatt hour can power a large hospital for an hour.) The reservoirs, which are typically more than 1,500 feet below ground, could take eight hours to fill at night. The compressed air would be released to run generators for eight hours during the day.

Though the former Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island has been deemed suitable for a wind farm, and the mayor has envisioned a future in which the city’s bridges and skyscrapers are topped with turbines, a compressed air storage plant is unlikely to be built in New York City because of the rocky underground and the lack of free space above ground.

But New York utilities could buy power stored and produced anywhere. Advocates of wind power support the use of compressed air storage facilities, but say that almost all of the wind power produced nationally is fed straight into the grid without having to be stored.

“Different sectors like to associate with wind power, and if compressed air will truly help wind, then fine,” said Robert E. Gramlich, the policy director at the American Wind Energy Association. “But we don’t want to give anyone the impression that storage is needed to integrate wind. Even growing 20-fold, storage isn’t needed.”

Mr. Gramlich pointed to a federal Department of Energy report that showed wind power could meet 20 percent of electricity needs in the United States by 2030 without the need for storage facilities.

Still, storage facilities could help reduce the need to build new gas and coal plants, or to use current plants, powered by fossil fuels.

“In the next couple of years, we want to install a couple of them so it becomes a tool in the toolbox to meet needs,” said Arshad Mansoor, the vice president of power delivery and utilization at the Electric Power Research Institute.

From Physorg.com

A huge freighter capable of carrying 6,400 automobiles will be equipped with 328 solar panels at a cost of 150 million yen (1.37 million dollars), said the official at shipping line Nippon Yusen.

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The ship, which is expected to be completed in December, will be used to transport vehicles for Toyota Motor Corp. as part of trials by Nippon Yusen and energy distributor Nippon Oil Corp.

It will be the world’s first attempt to use solar energy to help power a large ship’s propulsion system, the official said. So far its use has been limited to lighting and by crew in living quarters.

“Conditions are very different from land transport due to the risk of (the system) getting wet with sea water or being subjected to constant shaking” by the wind and the waves, the official said.

The companies aimed to build a 40-kilowatt solar power system, which would initially cover 0.2 percent of the ship’s energy consumption for propulsion.

They hope to raise the ratio to one percent by 2010, when they are considering ordering a ship with a new solar system.

The experiment is part of Nippon Yusen’s plan to halve fuel consumption and carbon-dioxide emissions for marine transport by 2010, the official said.

Once collected, the solar energy would be safely beamed to Earth via wireless radio transmission, where it would be received by antennas near cities and other places where large amounts of power are used. The received energy would then be converted to electric power for distribution over the existing grid. Government scientists have projected that the cost of electric power generation from such a system could be as low as 8 to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, which is within the range of what consumers pay now.

In terms of cost effectiveness, the two stumbling blocks for space solar power have been the expense of launching the collectors and the efficiency of their solar cells. Fortunately, the recent development of thinner, lighter and much higher efficiency solar cells promises to make sending them into space less expensive and return of energy much greater.

Much of the progress has come in the private sector. Companies like Space Exploration Technologies and Orbital Sciences, working in conjunction with NASA’s public-private Commercial Orbital Transportation Services initiative, have been developing the capacity for very low cost launchings to the International Space Station. This same technology could be adapted to sending up a solar power satellite system.

Still, because building the first operational space solar power system will be very costly, a practical first step would be to conduct a test using the International Space Station as a “construction shack” to house the astronauts and equipment. The station’s existing solar panels could be used for the demonstration project, and its robotic manipulator arms could assemble the large transmitting antenna. While the station’s location in orbit would permit only intermittent transmission of power back to Earth, a successful test would serve as what scientists call “proof of concept.”

Over the past 15 years, Americans have invested more than $100 billion, directly and indirectly, on the space station and supporting shuttle flights. With an energy crisis deepening, it’s time to begin to develop a huge return on that investment. (And for those who worry that science would lose out to economics, there’s no reason that work on space solar power couldn’t go hand in hand with work toward a manned mission to Mars, advanced propulsion systems and other priorities of the space station.)

In fact, in a time of some skepticism about the utility of our space program, NASA should realize that the American public would be inspired by our astronauts working in space to meet critical energy needs here on Earth.

Victorian electric vehicle company, BEV, has announced a 20 percent price decrease in line with increased sales of the zero emissions car. The Blade Electric Vehicle has dropped from $49,000 to $39,000 as a number of metropolitan  councils have ordered the car, allowing the company to take advantage of economies of scale.

BEV founder, Mr. Ross Blade, said that BEV had kept faith with early adopters on its promise that their support would lead to a reduction in the cost of the all-electric Blade Runner. He explained that most early adopters paid the high initial price in the belief that this would lead to price reductions – they were right – the new price is only possible through their support.

The new price of $39,900 plus GST includes both the host vehicle and the retrofit. The new offer comes into effect on completion of the June –  August production run.

For more information about the vehicles visit the BEV website

“What we’ve found with Miscanthus is that the amount of biomass generated each year would allow us to produce about 2 1/2 times the amount of ethanol we can produce per acre of corn,” said crop sciences professor Stephen P. Long, who led the study. Long is the deputy director of the BP-sponsored Energy Biosciences Institute, a multi-year, multi-institutional initiative aimed at finding low-carbon or carbon-neutral alternatives to petroleum-based fuels. Long is an affiliate of the U. of I.’s Institute for Genomic Biology.

In trials across Illinois, switchgrass, a perennial grass which, like Miscanthus, requires fewer chemical and mechanical inputs than corn, produced only about as much ethanol feedstock per acre as corn, Long said.

“It wasn’t that we didn’t know how to grow switchgrass because the yields we obtained were actually equal to the best yields that had been obtained elsewhere with switchgrass,” he said. Corn yields in Illinois are also among the best in the nation.

“One reason why Miscanthus yields more biomass than corn is that it produces green leaves about six weeks earlier in the growing season,” Long said. Miscanthus also stays green until late October in Illinois, while corn leaves wither at the end of August, he said.

The growing season for switchgrass is comparable to that of Miscanthus, but it is not nearly as efficient at converting sunlight to biomass as Miscanthus, Frank Dohleman, a graduate student and co-author on the study, found.

“One of the criticisms of using any biomass as a biofuel source is it has been claimed that plants are not very efficient — about 0.1 percent efficiency of conversion of sunlight into biomass,” Long said. “What we show here is on average Miscanthus is in fact about 1 percent efficient, so about 1 percent of sunlight ends up as biomass.”

“Keep in mind that when we consider our energy use, a few hours of solar energy falling on the earth are equal to all the energy that people use over a whole year, so you don’t really need that high an efficiency to be able to capture that in plant material and make use of it as a biofuel source,” he said.

Field trials also showed that Miscanthus is tolerant of poor soil quality, Long said.

“Our highest productivity is actually occurring in the south, on the poorest soils in the state,” he said. “So that also shows us that this type of crop may be very good for marginal land or land that is not even being used for crop production.”

Because Miscanthus is a perennial grass, it also accumulates much more carbon in the soil than an annual crop such as corn or soybeans, Long said.

“In the context of global change, that’s important because it means that by producing a biofuel on that land you’re taking carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it into the soil.”

Researchers at Illinois are exploring all aspects of biofuels production, from the development of feedstocks such as Miscanthus, to planting, harvest, storage, transport, conversion to biofuels and carbon sequestration.

Using Miscanthus in an agricultural setting has not been without its challenges, Long said. Because it is a sterile hybrid, it must be propagated by planting underground stems, called rhizomes. This was initially a laborious process, Long said, but mechanization allows the team to plant about 15 acres a day. In Europe, where Miscanthus has been grown for more than a decade, patented farm equipment can plant about 50 acres of Miscanthus rhizomes a day, he said.

Once established, Miscanthus returns annually without need for replanting. If harvested in December or January, after nutrients have returned to the soil, it requires little fertilizer.

This sterile form of Miscanthus has not been found to be invasive in Europe or the U.S., Long said.

Many companies are building or operating plants in the U.S. to produce ethanol from lignocellulosic feedstocks, the non-edible parts of plants, and companies are propagating Miscanthus rhizomes for commercial sale, Long said.

Although research has led to improvements in productivity and growers are poised to begin using it as a biofuels crop on a large scale, Miscanthus is in its infancy as an agricultural product, Long said.

“Keep in mind that this Miscanthus is completely unimproved, so if we were to do the sorts of things that we’ve managed to do with corn, where we’ve increased its yield threefold over the last 50 years, then it’s not unreal to think that we could use even less than 10 percent of the available agricultural land,” Long said. “And if you can actually grow it on non-cropland that would be even better.”

Diana Yates is life sciences editor at the University of Illinois.