A question about climate change/global warming.

Yeeeeeep. We're all screwed if the U.S. and China don't take the lead in reducing emissions, and soon.

Haha yeah, I've always been a Contraction and Convergence stan, but that's being totally eclipsed by a panicky part of me that's just screaming for someone to do *something* to get us rolling on this. Whole conference felt like a terrible step backwards. The EU apparently went there with an offer of a 30% reduction by 2020 up its sleeve and after a lot of pretty words, it just stayed right up there. Really is time for them to shit or get off the pot.

What a fucking fiasco. Our only hope now is to make low carbon technology really really profitable, the economically best option. Its the only way we can modify behaviour it seems.

A price on carbon would go a long way toward making low carbon technology the economically best option, though, right? I did some research a few years ago showing that even a $20/ton price on carbon would make wind the lowest-cost option for utilities in the interior west of the United States.

newt gingrich:

As callista and i watched what dc weather says will be 12 to 22 inches of snow i wondered if God was sending a message about copenhagen
about 7 hours ago from TwitterBerry

$20 a ton seems a little low. Europe, admittedly with limited cap and trade is up around €14/Mg. The major barrier to significant wind penetration is a lackof storage. Its very hard to displace baseload and you end up with a lot of peaker plants that are pretty inefficient. I've seen some modelling work that suggests that CO2 emissions can actually rise when you add significant amounts of intermitted generation.

Its all about the storage, I'm very happy that low cost bulk storage is my job.

(NB low cost bulk storage is my job and if you talk a wind industry person he will not say the same, however I can point to research that isn't funded by GE or Vestas)

What is good about the mountain west though is it is rich in both wind and good sites for subterranean compressed air energy storage (although this still needs natural gas to work).

We are getting there and China will hit peak coal very soon which will change the game somewhat. I think there is a growing awareness in China that they would be foolish to squander their economic gains on increasingly expensive imported energy when they can provide it renewably at home. The best hope for us all is that China sees both the danger to itself (pressure on costal populations from rising sea level and the dessertification of the west) and the economic opportunity. I am not sure that they are all the way there yet but significant portions of the Chinese political establishment are.

As for the US I am resigned to any significant efforts coming at the state level or lower. Unfortunately the best hope for reconfiguring the US is probably high oil prices and I have no confidence in OPEC discipline over the next few years and the recent Iraqi oilfield auctions are a disaster in this regard. (That said the Iranian capture of an Iraqi oil well seems to be a calculated move to keep the market jumpy).

What are the main options for energy storage at the moment Ed?

(Apologies if you rather not talk shop on a Saturday night)

I wholeheartedly agree about the importance of wind storage and the difficulty in actually displacing baseload. However, I do note that many countries have much larger portions of their electricity generated from wind. Denmark, for example, generates 20% of its wind from wind, and is expected to ramp up toward 50% over the next few decades. They are able to address wind's fluctuating generation because of the strength and extensiveness of Europe's grid.

Despite my comments in this thread, I've been heartened in recent months by some of the clean energy advances that China has proposed in their own country. I'm just pissed that they played the lead role in derailing Copenhagen this year.

As far as oil prices go, considering that production didn't jump up even when prices were at a peak during the summer of 2008, and new discoveries have dropped off due to the recession (affecting new production over the next decade), I'd say prices are bound to rise higher than ever as the recession eases off.

Ed's list of storage technologies:

1) Pumped Hydro

This is cheapest and oldest, essentially pumping water up hill and releasing it when necessary. Capital intensive but long lived so very low lifetime unit service costs. Unfortunately it is very geographically constrained and in the US and Europe most of the good sites are already in use. There is talk about re-engineering some of the western dams and the great lakes power plants such as Niagara to make them reversible but these are colossal undertakings and mucking around with great lakes water is hard and nearly impossible in the West. Norway has some spare capacity and already stores a lot of Danish wind power but new interconnects are required to both Denmark and the UK before any new sites can be considered.

Sustainability wise, Dams are a pretty big ecosystem changer and pretty permanent.

2) CAES - Compressed air energy storage

Essentially compressing air and then releasing it to drive a turbine. There are many different forms, all really at pilot stage. The biggest is the so-called subterranean CAES, where air is pumped into underground geological formations, often pumped out oil and gas wells. This is also potentially pretty cheap on a lifetime basis. Downsides, to maximise efficiency you need to burn gas in the outlet turbine so it is not operationally zero carbon but its way better than peak gas plants. This is geographically constrained but, not surprisingly big in Texas although there is competition from subterranean natural gas storage and forthcoming Carbon Capture projects. There's big money behind, especially from gas storage folk, who incidentally are the only people out there who talk about doing bulk electricity arbitrage profitably.

Other things in the pipeline is "adiabatic" CAES which removes the natural gas from the equation and undersea CAES where the air is compressed in giant bags (University of Nottingham are doing some demos this year IIRC). There is surface CAES as well where you have a lot of steel pressure vessels but this pushes the cost up a lot. There has been talk about using the towers of Wind Turbines as pressure vessels but I'm not sure if anyone has done this yet.

3) Sodium Sulphur

This is probably the most mature of the battery technologies. Developed by NGK in Japan, it is relatively cheap and can last 15 years if treated right. Initially this was developed to address specific Japanese needs, essentially to defer capital upgrades to substations in powerlines in japanese cities by shifting peak loads. There are several installations in the US as well some experimenting with wind smoothing.

Downsides, you have to heat these to 350˚C before they work and this means that your net AC-AC efficiency is around 70%. You also have to over size your plant as to get 15 year life you can only discharge to a 30% state of charge. The other issue is buying them is next to impossible. The current plant is sold out for the next 5 years and a much larger plant, now under construction, is sold out for its first 2 years.

4) Lithium-Ion

Lots of people have high hopes for lithium Ion connected to the grid, either new or as cast off from all the hybrid vehicles we are meant to be buying. Without some major technical breakthrough Li-Ion will never be cheap enough for large scale bulk storage. The Bill of materials for the average Li-Ion cell is higher than the on the dock price for sodium sulphur and Li-Ion cells are expensive to manufacture.

They do have their uses, though, theya re great for fast charge and discharge applications. Both A123 and Altairnano have grid products and these work great for frequency regulation or ramping. Freq Reg is the process of adding supplementary power into the grid to account for all of the tiny fluctuations in demand. Currently this is done with single cycle jet engine derived gas turbines which are much less efficient than combined cycle and performing this function knackers their useful life and efficiency.

Ramping basically turns a gas generator from something that takes 15 minutes to spin up into an instant on resource. Currently a gas turbines are kept spinning with electric motors and warm so they can start quickly. A big battery can act as a buffer so they can be brought up from cold but still be offered as 'spinning reserve' power.

5) Flywheels

These work well for Freq Reg as above but are much longer lived. Esstetially you spin flywheels with motors and then tap the energy as required. Really good for short term storage. NYSERDA and NYISO are working with Beacon Power to put a massive 20MW facility in the New York area which should be interesting to see if it works. (New York is a great place to do storage as it has some of the highest ancillary service prices in the world which makes it easy to be profitable)

6) What I'm working on

Something that is as modular as NAS, super efficient and as cheap as CAES. I might have something to show and sell by the end of next year but till then we are being relatively quiet about it.

7) Other Things - hot salt storage with solar thermal, other forms of heat storage, Superconducting magnetic electric storage, flow batteries etc.

The US utility industry seems to have come round to the idea of storage as a necessity which is good. However I am concerned that Shale gas is changing the game, making gas turbines attractive again. We'll have to see though. the DoE is pouring money into storage right now so there is a good window of opportunity. That said West texas has significant negative elctricity prices, as do Demark and Spain because of wind and solar and more gas turbines cannot fix that. Storage can.

Maine is trying another interesting approach with their immense offshore wind resource. The private Ocean Energy Institute, which already has a few turbines up supplying island communities, is planning on building hundreds of deepwater moored turbines and manufacturing ammonia with off-peak and off-season power. Ammonia can be used directly in internal combustion engines with a few fuel line modifications, and it can be applied to cropland as nitrogen bearing fertilizer, replacing Haber process fertilizers made (with a large CO2 footprint) from natural gas.

Wait, if you burn ammonia, won't you end up with a load of NO2 being pumped out the back of your car? NO2 is a *horrible* air pollutant healthwise, and also a really potent greenhouse gas.

and quite a good hit, for about 20 seconds

i'm hardcore, me

Ed, thanks a lot for the primer, I'm going to digest that at leisure. ONe thing with the pumped hydro: reservoirs are totally dependent on predictable rainfall etc - isn't that going to be a lot more of a guessing game as the effects of climate change kick in? Also I'd worry about the downstream impacts, particular in times of increased water stress.

LJ - you're thinking of N2O I think! Laughing gas yeah? NO2 is nasty stuff and if you wanted to inhale that shit I wish you all the best.

Nitrogen dioxide is toxic by inhalation, but this could be avoided as the material is acrid and easily detected by our sense of smell. Symptoms of poisoning (lung edema) tend to appear several hours after one has inhaled a low but potentially fatal dose.

it's cool i'm a science journalist

(oops)

Just remember:

N2O - ho ho ho
NO2 - you're gonna go blue

I keep seeing these proposals to use ammonia as energy storage, they scare the wits out of me, not just because of the NOx pollution which is a significant risk but also Ammonia is really nasty stuff.

The worst was a proposal from denmark which proposed using it as a car fuel in internal combustion engines as a "hydrogen store". I can't imagine the horror of a fuel tank rupture in an accident.

Ammonia combustion: 4 NH3 + 3 O2 ===> 2 N2 + 6 H2O (nitrogen and water vapor)

Yep, I wouldn't be too comfortable with using ammonia, one of the most significant chemicals (by quantity of releases) on EPA's RMP toxic chemical list, as a tool to move toward a "clean energy" future!

I suspect that the crunch for liquid fuels from 2013-2025 won't permit us to choose. There will be a lot of methanol and ammonia conversions made.

Ammonia combustion: 4 NH3 + 3 O2 ===> 2 N2 + 6 H2O (nitrogen and water vapor)

Ah, okay, those are much less scary products!

imo HNO3 unfairly missing out there

Thinking about this, catalytic converters would take out a lot of the secondary nasties.

It's not complete combustion I am worried about, its everything else. I wonder how big the catalytic converter and how much platinum it would need to make any ammonia combustion engine truly pollution free at the tailpipe.

esquire got me ready for a world of nuclear energy

Evidently one can also use the ammonia fuel as an active reagent to do a complete reduction of any NOx incomplete combustion products. I'm really not terribly familiar with the chemistry.

I did think it was an interesting alternative to methanol, or much worse, gas-to-liquids & coal-to-liquids as a short term solution as international market crude plummets 2013 and on. The automobile population turns over only once every 14+ years (in a good economy). Even if every car sold was a plug-in hybrid, it'll be a long time before ICE only cars are off the road.

Ammonia, methanol, gas-to-liquids/coal liquefaction, oil shale, nuclear...

How about conservation? Public Transit? Car-pooling? Teleworking? Sweaters?

I understand the pressure to maintain the status quo lifestyle of the West is overwhelming, but I'm much more comfortable pushing efficiency and conservation in tandem with a strong price on carbon, ideally with a double-dividend mechanism in place to offer incentives to lower-income people.

Z_S, you're preaching the Climate Protestor line! Hence, a line that is both OTM and slightly doomed. You get all sorts of right-wing/libertarian assholes all 'HOW DARE THEY CONTROL OUR LIVES' and you're all 'nonono you can do what you like just have some respect for your planet and show a bit of maturity/reserve' and they're all 'FASCISTS' and everyone is unhappy

The right to have a Hummer and a massive fucking mansion for a 4-person family is a bit like the right to defend one's home with automatic weaponry tbh - nobody with a conscience would take advantage of such a right, because it is inhuman and not within the standards of our current society - and if it could be challenged then only bastards who don't belong in society would react negatively - they are still free to do so much fucking awesome stuff with their lives - if they are narrow-minded it is their fault they are suffering

Z S, those will be done too, first. Everyone in the room agrees conservation is the cheapest energy out there.

Its just that some people on places like the Oil Drum are looking at scenarios in which while crude production drops 3%/annum 2013-on, international exports drop 8-9%. We (in the U.S.) have an absolutely enormous misallocation of capital in suburban sprawl that won't be replaced or be repurposed in the neccessary timeframe. The trick isn't just getting from A to B, its getting from A to B without serious collapses in the economy and production of food etc. Finding liquid fuel alternatives for the existing fleet of ICE vehicles is part of the transition.

We have the technology right now to make internal combustion powered vehicles significantly more efficient right now. All it will take is stricter legislation. I hope Obama or california institutes a serious CAFE standard soon. this is without public transport, densifying cities or even asking people to change their behaviour all that much. It's shaping choices and preferences.

The problem with ammonia, hydrogen electric and other alternative fuel vehicles is the massive infrastructure that will be needed to support them just isn't there and it seems ridiculous to invest in it when we can use today's technology, legislation and the existing infrastructure to make savings starting right now.

We need to start cutting emissions right now so lets start with the things we can do right now.

I mean, there is so much low hanging fruit lets grab that first.

esquire got me ready for a world of nuclear energy

― born loser (CaptainLorax), Sunday, December 20, 2009 8:50 PM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

The only thing McCain said during the campaign that I liked (and he probably wasn't serious about it) was the idea of a new Manhattan Project for clean energy. Clean nuclear would indeed solve the world's energy problems.

What about better solar panels? They harness so little of the energy that hits them, are there any good ideas about increasing that?

do I have to mention Desertec again?

Lots of money invested into this idea. An idea which is bright but which requires quite a lot of international diplomacy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec

Who's going to pay for that?

Clean nuclear would indeed solve the world's energy problems.

Too bad new nuclear electricity, ie, building new plants, is one of the most expensive options currently available. And unlike a host of other low-carbon alternatives, the cost curve isn't bending down over time for nuclear.

Btw, what is "clean nuclear" as opposed to just "nuclear"? There's a clean version that doesn't involve storing nuclear waste?

Z_S OTM again. Nuclear energy isn't clean, oh no. Until fusion happens, that is.

Ed, a load of German banks have pledged billions of euros towards that idea, and it'll take a bit of governmental support, but I think it could be feasible...

Nuclear waste disposal for light-water reactors is more a matter of politics than geology. There are plenty of deep salt domes on the Gulf coast that are intrinsically a lot more resistant to ground water seepage than Yucca mountain, and the places in the world we could just drill under some igneous province overlaying sediment and drop or pump pretty much any amount down with no chance of any returning to the biosphere in 10s of thousands of years

But in terms of clean nuclear, I think one of the most interesting ideas are the molten fuel Thorium reactors, in which thorium is mixed in sodium and bred into U-233. This is nice because there's a LOT more thorium than U-235 in the world, and the waste products of the thorium-U233 cycle aren't nuclear proliferation risks. The U.S. had a molten salt reactor experiment for several decades demonstrating the concept, and evidently a Japanese consortium led by Fuji is engineering a modular production version.

Will any of the "clean nuclear" be ready for large-scale deployment in the next 20 years, when the big energy crunch is likely to occur in the next half decade? And will anything change in the next decade or two that will make nuclear remotely cost-effective without massive subsidies?

Nuclear IS cost effective without massive subsidies. See the experience in France. The problem the first time around in the U.S. was that there were not pre-approved standardized designs, so every build was a bit unique, every regulatory change required a substantial reengineering and delay. In France, they adapted a Westinghouse and built dozens of reactors to the same design. The U.S. decided to adopt that policy only after Three Mile Island and the subsequent issues with public opinion. So we're all breathing in dozens of times more radioactivity from coal plants than we would have had we went the nuclear route decades ago.

had we gone obv...

To be honest, derelict, a good chunk of my stance on the high cost of new nuclear power comes from Joe Romm at ClimateProgress, and pieces such as this article, which among other things notes that:

New nuclear power plants are currently far and away the most expensive form of carbon free power you can (try to) buy...

The most detailed independent cost estimate of nuclear power published this year — here on Climate Progress by a leading expert in power plant costs, Craig A. Severance — puts the generation costs for power from new nuclear plants at from 25 to 30 cents per kilowatt-hour — triple current U.S. electricity rates!

... Time magazine noted that nuclear plants’ capital costs are “out of control,” concluding:

"Most efficiency improvements have been priced at 1¢ to 3¢ per kilowatt-hour, while new nuclear energy is on track to cost 15¢ to 20¢ per kilowatt-hour. And no nuclear plant has ever been completed on budget."

This aligns with a lot of cost estimates that I read on nuclear, but I'd be more than happy to read through anything that convincingly argues that new nuclear power isn't expensive.

(On clean energy) Btw, that esquire article did say that all the nuclear waste could be taken care of pretty well z_s

Yes, cost is the problem initially

Z S, there's a problem comparing intermittant renewable energy without integral storage and base-load generation plants that would be competive with nuclear. I suspect concentrating solar thermal with enough heat storage for off-peak generation is very close to competitive with new build nuclear for base-load, but we'll have to see how the Spanish pilots work out.

This OECD/IEA joint report found the levelized costs at a 5% finance cost in $USD/MWh:

nuclear energy: 21-31
natural gas: 37-60
coal: 25-50

At the same finance cost, and correcting for availability/capacity factor:

wind: 35-95 (but most below 60)
hydroelectricity: 40-80
solar: 150-175 in US southwest, 300+ in much of Europe

As renewables go, there's no question wind is the way to go. And if we had a large enough network of say the 765 kv DC transmission lines so that wind power generated in blustery North Dakota could be used in Chicago, then wind would probably be competitive with nuclear.

Btw, what is "clean nuclear" as opposed to just "nuclear"? There's a clean version that doesn't involve storing nuclear waste?

― Quiet, I'm making my Youtube Star Wars Review (Z S), Sunday, December 20, 2009 9:35 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

There isn't one that I know of, yet. Which is why we would need the Manhattan Project-like endeavor in the first place...

Finding a use for the waste, or using radioactive material which breaks down into non-radioactive or non-dangerous material would be the way around this problem, and as you see people are working on it.