America's Best Places For Alternative Energy

The "cubic mile of oil"--a metric roughly equivalent to the amount of oil consumed worldwide each year--is frequently used to explain the challenge facing solar, wind, geothermal and biomass power. What would it take to replace the amount of energy in a cubic mile of oil? The best location for specific technologies varies, and some areas are best for one technology or another. Some places are windy, others sunny, the wind varies from season to season, and geothermal power is easily tapped only in volcanic regions.

The Texas panhandle was recently highlighted by oilman T. Boone Pickens. But that's not the only place where the wind blows strong, it just happens to be one which Mr. Pickens is fond of.

The deserts of the U.S. Southwest are great places for solar power. The most insolated place in the country is Inyokern in southern California. Ensconced on the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Inyokern covers 11 square miles of Kern County in the dust-choked Mojave Desert. Those 11 square miles receive more solar insolation annually than any other comparably sized locale in North America. FPL Energy recently announced plans to build a massive 2,000-acre solar power plant in the area called the Beacon Solar Energy Project.

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America's Best Places For Alternative Energy

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The technology that will save humanity

"Clearly, the world needs a massive amount of carbon-free electricity by 2050 to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions." This is the key of a salon.com article discussing a specific form of energy technology that could very well make a huge difference to our world. Basically, to solve for global warming requires getting to an energy which doesn't have, as a side effect, to cause global warming.

There are many alternative energy technologies which could do this to some extent but might not work so well. For example wind power only produces electricity when the wind is blowing..

This salon.com article offers one energy source which could provide lots of power.. The Sun shines essentially limitless energy upon this planet. It's inexpensive, it's easy to capture, but the question would be how to store the energy and convert it into some useful form of energy like electricity.

"Solar electric thermal, also known as concentrated solar power (CSP), meets all these criteria." There's a long history to to concentrating solar power, such as mirrors used by ancient Chinese to ignite wood.

"The key attribute of CSP is that it generates primary energy in the form of heat, which can be stored 20 to 100 times more cheaply than electricity -- and with far greater efficiency. Commercial projects have already demonstrated that CSP systems can store energy by heating oil or molten salt, which can retain the heat for hours. Ausra and other companies are working on storing the heat directly with water in the tubes, which would significantly lower cost and avoid the need for heat exchangers."

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The technology that will save humanity

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Creating power out of thin air

The Princeton, N.J.-based company is working on a material that, when combined with another substance, will generate electricity with ambient room heat, Andrew Surany, the company's president, told CNET News.com this week.

Conceivably, one could take that material and fashion it into a passive fuel cell that can create power by just sitting in an ordinary room heated to about 72 degrees Fahrenheit, leading to self-charging electronic devices.

...It's not just theoretical: Germany's EnOcean, another energy-harvesting specialist, has come up with sensors that get power from the temperature differentials between the interaction material that makes up a pipe filled with hot gases and a material heated to room temperature.

...Outlandish as it sounds, the CEA, the atomic energy agency of France, has already concocted a microgenerator that can produce electricity at ambient temperatures via the Seebeck effect.

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Creating power out of thin air

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Storing wind power for a calm day

One common critique of wind power is it's only available when the wind is blowing. Often hot days have no wind, hence the power isn't available when it's most needed. And wind is gusty, the strongest winds might be happening at times other than when the power is needed. While this point is thrown out to say that wind power is no good, what it means is to use wind power means finding a way to store electricity generated when the wind is strong and releasing it when its needed later.

A strategy that's used in California, that could be used for electricity from wind power, is to pump water uphill. Since electricity rates are low at night there's an economic argument to make that one can use night-time electricity to pump water to an uphill reservoir, and then release that water through hydroelectric facilities during the day when electricity rates are higher. Indeed this does happen in California and probably elsewhere.

Another strategy might be to use excess electricity to electrolyze water and extract hydrogen. Store the hydrogen in a tank, then release it later to generate electricity. This can be done either with fuel cells or by burning in a turbine.

Utility will use batteries to store wind power covers storing the electricity in batteries. American Electric Power is an electric utility operating in Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Oklohoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas.

AEP to deploy additional large-scale batteries on distribution grid is their press release. The battery technology uses a sodium sulfur chemistry and goes under the trademark NAS ®. The press release seems to be saying the batteries will be used similarly to a peaker plant, which is a strategy where a "small" natural gas power plant can be fired up during the day, during peak demand times, to handle peak loads, hence the name "peaker". They are also including wind power in their generating network and due to the gusty effects of wind will also see peak generating times. They describe the size of these installations as "1 megawatt" or "11 megawatts" but that is a nonsensical measure for battery packs. "Megawatt" is a measure of current at a given moment, what's important here is how long can the plant sustain that power delivery. Can it only provide 11 megawatts for 1 second? Or over an hour? Or for a full day? Inquiring minds want to know.

The reasoning in the article goes like so:

They can charge at night, when the wind is strong but prices are low, and give the electricity back the next afternoon, when there is hardly any wind but power prices are many times higher, company officials said. That strategy would reduce the amount of power generated from inefficient peak-demand units.

The batteries can also insert energy into the grid during brief voltage drops, reducing the chance of a blackout and stabilizing the grid for all users. They may also delay or eliminate the need for transmission upgrades in some areas, the company said.

This appears to me to match the reasoning of peaker power plants, not wind power. But as I said earlier wind generation has its own peak times which don't necessarily match peak times of customer demand, so this gives the utility some extra flexibility to adopt wind power.

AEP Commissions First U.S. Demonstration of the NAS Battery describes the battery technology, but again does not describe the actual size of the systems they are installing. The page has a picture looking like a relatively small installation you could see on a concrete pad in a parking lot. The battery technology is said to come from Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and NGK Insulators, Ltd., (NGK) and elsewhere it says Ford Motors originally discovered the battery chemistry, which makes this yet another example of an American company skipping over developing some technology only to allow foreign companies to exploit it.

Saving wind power for later is another technique developed by General Compression to use a wind turbine to compress air, and release the compressed air through another turbine when electricity is required. They sell these as combined units.

It seems the critical item in all the different strategies for storing wind power, is the cost of the storage system. We're facing the same issue in electric vehicles where the best batteries to store electricity are also expensive.

10,000 kW Electrical Power Generation in Your Backyard

Want to get off the grid? the Electric grid that is. The QR5, from U.K.-based Quietrevolution, is a residential-scale wind turbine that generates enough electricity to power a standard U.S. home or a small office. It also looks like a piece of wind-powered sculpture. Unlike the shape of a conventional windmill propeller, it’s a Vertical-axis wind turbine.

Prior coverage of vertical axis wind turbines: Vertical axis versus horizontal axis wind turbines

The maker: quietrevolution

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10,000 kW Electrical Power Generation in Your Backyard

Wind Power Is Spain's Top Energy Source This Week

This seems to be an interesting threshold to have reached ... for a whole country, Spain, to get the majority of their electricity from a renewable resource like wind power.

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Wind Power Is Spain's Top Energy Source This Week

Clueless about the real oil situation?

Route 50 Conversations: Illinois, Indiana, Ohio is part of a goofy series of stories on NPR this week. Their idea is that as the New Congress is heading towards Washington DC, they're calling regular folks from across the U.S. For this story they're following U.S. Highway 50 calling people in small towns along the highway. The series of stories is largely fluff, but this particular one has several people saying stupid things about the Oil situation.

The idea they present is that the U.S. is not utilizing its own oil supplies very well, and that's why the oil prices are high. They seem to think that all we have to do is drill for oil, and we'll have plenty of oil again, and the gasoline prices will fall again.

This shows the people who said that are clueless about the real situation.

The U.S. had its oil peak in 1970-71.

The "oil peak" model describes the capacity to deliver oil. There's a lot of mathematics and whatnot involved, and the book Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak is a really good introduction to the phenomena. I also have links to Peak Oil web sites which will help educate you.

Essentially the oil peak model describes the delivery capacity for a set of oil fields. Such as the oil fields in the U.S. The capacity to deliver oil will grow over time until it reaches a maximum capacity, and once the fields reach that maximum capacity they go into an inexorable decline.

The U.S. had its oil peak in 1970-71. That means the capacity to deliver oil from U.S. oil fields has been in decline since 1970. That does not mean the U.S. has run out of oil, it means our capacity to deliver oil has been declining and cannot increase.

In 1973 during the first oil crisis the U.S. imported only 35% of the oil we used. Today the percentage of oil imports is close to, if not beyond, 70%. This is due in part to the decline in delivery capacity from U.S. oil fields, and due in part to the increase in oil demand.

Because the U.S. is past its oil peak we cannot increase the capacity to deliver oil from U.S. fields. That does not mean we cannot do more drilling for oil. It means that new fields that are found will not replace the exhausted fields.

WAKE UP!!!! DRILLING FOR NEW OIL IS NOT A SOLUTION!!!!

The game has to change and cause the U.S. people to leave behind their addiction to fossil fuel oil.

Not only has the U.S. gone past our oil peak, it's possible that the world went past its oil peak a year ago. If true it means the world capacity to deliver oil cannot increase beyond the amount that was delivered over the last year. Given that demand for oil has consistently grown over the years, the growing demand will conflict with the inability of the market to deliver more oil. And, what will result from that conflict?

Economists suggest that Market Forces will take care of it. The rising oil price will cause people to decrease their oil usage. Simple enough. In fact one of the speakers in the NPR peace linked above suggested the same, that the rising price for oil would cause people to do less recreational stuff.

But will it be that simple? Consider The Road Warrior as an alternate scenario. It depicted a crumbling society falling apart from the heights of high-tech wonders, all due to their inability to have oil to drive the machines they've come to depend on.

One thing that's for sure is that if The People continue being as clueless about the real situation as those interviewed by NPR, the U.S. will continue to be unprepared for the real problem that's looming in front of us.

Audubon Society coming out to support Wind Power, even in the face of bird kills

According to Tree Hugger, Audubon Society "Strongly Supports Wind Power" even though many environmentalists get knots in their stomach thinking about the birds being killed by wind turbines. There have been studies recording birds being killed by being hit by wind turbine blades, but there are other studies on why birds get killed by wind turbines, how to avoid the bird deaths, and in any case the rates of bird death due to wind turbines are lower than birds killed by flying into skyscrapers.

Wind-turbine based bird deaths found to be less than thought likely is my earlier blog entry on this subject.

What's interesting here is that the Audubon Society is saying, essentially, maybe it doesn't matter if a few birds are being killed. In the greater scheme of things wind power has so many more plusses that this minus, if it's at all significant, is completely overwhelmed by the positive effect from generating electricity without any greenhouse gasses, or drowned valleys, or radioactive substances that last zillions of years, etc. Wind power is a relatively benign way to generate electricity compared to all the other methods.

The Audubon Society magazine first ran an article doing an in-depth study of wind power and then in the next issue ran an editorial giving this support to wind power.

Let's hope it captures some attention. There are a lot of NIMBY's who are resisting wind power, but who are otherwise environmentalists. I am absolutely baffled by their resistance. How can they possibly be an environmentalist and be so closed minded as to resist wind power???

Well, this is one of those issues dangerously like that adage of squeezing a balloon just to find the balloon expanding in the area you didn't squeeze. Like many problems you solve, it can create other problems. So it seems to be with wind turbines, that in some cases birds get killed by them. But I am myself completely in agreement with the points I wrote above. First, wind power itself is so extremely benign compared with the many other things our society has done with technology. Generating electricity by capturing the wind seems so completely harmless compared to the urban vistas we see in the major cities, concrete and gleaming steel towers for as far as the eye can see. How can anybody think wind turbines are ugly compared to that? And what of the exhaust spewed by fossil fuel burning power plants? Again, the byproducts from wind turbines seem so completely benign compared to that.

Second, as I noted the problem has already been studied and the solutions are well known.

Third, as I noted, birds get killed by so many other human structures, why are the environmentalists focusing their worry against wind turbines when skyscrapers kill lots of birds as well?

An interesting twist on wind energy

The typical wind turbine is a propeller sitting atop a tall pole. It makes a fair amount of noise, apparently from vibrations that also require frequent maintanence of the turbine. It's difficult to get this kind of wind turbine installed in urban settings because of the noise. Yet, wind energy is inexpensive and becoming cost competitive with the major power systems.

Urban Wind Visionary University of Illinois professor says the answer to cities’ energy needs are blowin’ in the wind (Conscious Choice, August 2005)

Bil Becker, a University of Illinois professor, has invented a radically different sort of wind turbine. One that's ultra simple, ultra reliable, small enough to be installed anywhere, flexible in orientation, dead quiet, able to operate over a wide range of wind speeds, and rather safe for wildlife. Sounds great!

His company is Aerotecture, Ltd., and the turbine is this spinning sculpture (it's so beautiful and graceful, "sculpture" is the only word I have for it) inside a cylindrical cage. It can easily run in wind blowing from any angle. It is meant especially to capture the gusting winds that occur around tall buildings in urban settings.

Part of the story is distributed generation of electricity. This idea is being fought by the major power companies because, well, obviously it would render them somewhat obsolete. But it makes a lot of sense.

With distributed generation you create the electricity near where it is going to be used. For example a factory with a large rooftop could have these turbines or solar panels on the roof.

Among the advantages is that you avoid the power loss that comes when you transmit electricity long distances over wires. This loss is unnavoidable due to resistance in the wires, unless you come up with some kind of high temperature superconductor. The transmission power loss can be pretty dramatic, and if you stop to think about it, rather consternating. See, most ways of generating electricity involve some kind of environmental degradation like poisinous exhaust from burning fossil fuels, toxic waste from nuclear plants, or dammed up river valleys. To think that a large portion of that environmental degradation is attributable to transmission loss is, well, making me angry. You can avoid all that with local generation.

This turbine seems especially suited to local generation.

Wind-turbine based bird deaths found to be less than thought likely

While wind power is getting economically feasible, it's facing one repetitive criticism. That the turbines kill lots of birds.

I saw a study once describing this. The idea is based on the wind farm in California's Altamont Pass. The experience there is that those turbines do kill lots of birds, especially rare raptors. However further study showed several fixable problems with the Altamont Pass wind farm, and the solutions have been put into use in newer wind farms. Why the solutions haven't also been put into use in the Altamont Pass is beyond me.

Basically the problem was twofold: 1) the turbines in Altamont Pass are located primarily on ridgelines, a place where the birds frequently fly, placing them in more frequent proximity to the turbines; 2) the turbines in Altamont Pass are small, with fast moving blades, and the tower design also gives many places for birds to roost, all of which contributes to more frequent contact between birds and turbine blades.

Wind turbines not so deadly for birds -Dutch study (Tue Jul 5,12:00 PM ET, AMSTERDAM (Reuters))

In The Netherlands and other parts of Europe they've been installing massive wind turbines. The blades on these are often 100 meters in diameter, and each tower produces around 1 megawatt of electricity.

And, their experience with bird deaths is that they're a lot less frequent than expected. e.g.

The new study suggests the Netherlands' 1,700 wind turbines kill about 50,000 birds a year. About 2 million birds perish each year on Dutch roads, it said.

This was predictable from the study I read of the Altamont Pass. With the larger turbines, the blades actually move a lot slower, making it easy for birds to dodge the blades. Further, when the tower makers pay attention, they make sure there's no ledges for birds to sit on, making it less likely the birds will stay around the towers in the first place. Finally, siting of the towers makes a difference, simply by putting the towers in places the birds don't stay in.

Several years ago Home Power Magazine published this summary of research into bird death around wind turbines. The article concludes the issue is overblown - for example, the recorded bird deaths in Altamont Pass are small compared to the birds killed in collisions with buildings or radio towers and the like.

Further the rates of bird death at other wind farms in California are a fraction of the rates at Altamont Pass, so there must be something special about Altamont Pass. Namely, the population growth in the San Francisco Bay Area is causing an out-migration of wildlife, and the Altamont Pass area is pretty open (other than the wind turbines) giving refuge to the out-migrating wildlife.