Energywise

After a two-month hiatus from nuclear power, Japan restarted one of its 50 functional reactors on Thursday just as a report on the Fukushima disaster strongly criticized nearly everyone involved.

The reactor restart, at the Ohi plant in Fukui prefecture in the western part of Japan, comes after widespread protests over nuclear plants' safety. But Japanese officials say they need at least some nuclear power in order to stave off blackouts over the summer, and insist that the Ohi reactor has passed substantial safety tests before the restart.

The new report, from an independent commission of experts, though, will do little to assuage fears surrounding the continued use of nuclear energy. In panel chairman Kiyoshi Kurokawa's preface to the report, he calls the Fukushima crisis a "profoundly manmade disaster -- that could and should have been foreseen and prevented." Kurokawa's message is a striking look inward:

"What must be admitted -- very painfully -- is that this was a disaster "Made in Japan." Its fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to 'sticking with the program'; our groupism; and our insularity."

In other words, even as the report lays blame at the feet of Fukushima operator TEPCO, regulators, and higher levels of government, there is also an underlying notion that it was a cultural failure rather than a series of individual failures. "Had other Japanese been in the shoes of those who bear responsibility for this accident, the result may well have been the same," Kurokawa writes.

The commission of 10 included two medical doctors, two lawyers, a seismologist, a chemist, several other university professors, and a former U.N. ambassador. It interviewed 1167 people and conducted more than 900 hours of hearings to determine what caused the disaster and what can be done to prevent another. One important conclusion is that "TEPCO was too quick to cite the tsunami as the cause of the nuclear accident.... We believe there is a possibility that the earthquake damaged equipment necessary for ensuring safety." This implies that Japanese reactors not at risk from a tsunami could still face some sort of similar disaster. The Ohi reactor that just came online, for example, may sit atop an active fault line.

The report's recommendations, though, stick largely to government issues and regulatory oversight rather than offering technical safety advice. Among them are reforms in the methods for crisis management, substantial changes to TEPCO's and other nuclear operators' systems, and new nuclear energy legislation that clearly defines operator and government roles.

This critical internal examination comes as countries around the world continue to back off the use of nuclear power. But the Ohi restart highlights that nuclear power is too ingrained in the energy picture around the world to disappear any time soon.

Image: Digital Globe/Wikimedia Commons

A dozen years ago, surveying the situation facing those responsible for restructuring and reorganizing the U.S. electric power system, I noted that their task was complicated by the system's thinly-stretched physical and human resources. "Whether the talk is of generation and transmission capacity, distribution lines or control equipment, service personnel or simulation engineers, it is the same story: too few resources to easily satisfy demands made on systems designed for radically different requirements."

The difficulties Mid-Atlantic utilities have had in the last days restoring service following wide outages over the weekend show that even though there has been much progress making the grid more robust, shortages of trained personnel continue to be an acute problem. In West Virginia, Virginia, and Maryland, some 2 million customers were left without electricity for three days or more—in some places suffering record-high temperatures—as crews worked frantically to restore service. The massive thunderstorm system that hit without warning in the middle of Friday night, a so-called derecho, was itself powered to some extent by temperature extremes, making for yet another vicious circle grid planners have to contend with. In ten hours, with direct wind speeds as high as 125 kilometers per hour, the storm system swept from Chicago to the D.C. area.

"The lack of air conditioning [among those affected by the storm] came as much of the nation continued to swelter under extreme heat and drought," as The Wall Street Journal noted. "Since June 24, 1587 communities have reported record temperatures, including 105 degrees [40.5 degrees Celsius] in Denver, 111 degrees in Dodge City, Kansas, and 109 degrees in Athens, Ga.…" Fourteen people are believed to have died as a result of the storm, some of them of heat exposure, as an estimated 3.6 million were left without power. Longer-term, expectations that the heat wave will wreak havoc on what was expected to be a bumper U.S. corn crop have sent maize futures soaring, the Financial Times reports.

For the record, shortages of technicians and engineers are not the only bad-old problems still getting the attention of policy-makers and managers. J.P. Morgan Chase, already suffering a lot of adverse publicity because of trading losses that could reach $8 billion, has been subpoenaed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in connection with charges it manipulated electricity markets in the Middle West and California. In April, FERC announced it was investigating Barclays and four former traders on suspicion of California power market misconduct.

When it comes to market behavior and corporate management, does industry consolidation help or hurt? Presumably it depends on who is doing the consolidating and who is minding the shop. Market power is one thing if exercised by a dubious character like Enron's Ken Lay, at a time when electricity deregulation was all the rage. It's something else, at least we may hope, when it's exercised by a respected and forward-thinking industry leader. Today, as it happens, Duke Energy completed a merger with Progress Energy, creating a $26.1 billion Midwest-Southeast energy company with 7.1 million customers in six states. Contrary to expectations, Duke's Jim Rogers will serve as CEO rather than executive chairman of the new company.

As such, Rogers will be a figure of no small importance in just the part of the country expected to be most hotly contested (no pun intended) in this year's presidential election. A long-time leader in the industry on carbon regulation—he's in favor of it—Rogers appears to have adopted a cautiously neutral stance in the race. Some people watching his career have wondered whether he may have political ambitions himself.

The U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) announced progress on two wind power fronts this week, with environmental reviews completed on both a massive Wyoming wind farm and on a large offshore area near Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

The Chokecherry and Sierra Madre Wind Farm in Carbon County, Wyoming, are two sites about 15 kilometers apart covering less than 800 hectares each. When taken together, though, they would be the biggest wind project in the United States. The Power Company of Wyoming wants to build 1000 turbines, totaling as much as 3000 megawatts of power. The project will cost between US $4 billion and $6 billion to complete, and the hope is that construction will begin in 2013.

The DOI released a final environmental impact statement on the project, which is now followed by a 30-day "public availability and protest period."

If built (and it looks promising, based on this progress), the wind farm would be capable of powering somewhere around 1 million homes. Of course, Wyoming itself only has about 260 000 homes in the entire state, which means all that wind power has to travel to be useful, which means new transmission lines, connections to the grid, and substations. It is, clearly, a massive undertaking, though the company hopes to finish construction within three to four years. Given that the U.S. is currently hovering around 50 000 MW of total installed wind capacity, adding six percent of that in one fell swoop is an impressive idea.

But it will be even more impressive when we finally have that first offshore turbine spinning. At the end of 2011 I was optimistic that this year would see that landmark happen, but with Cape Wind hoping to start construction only in 2013 and no other project all that close, it isn't looking good. Still, the news from the DOI is promising: the agency released an environmental assessment for wind development over a massive area off the coasts of Rhode Island and Massachusetts, which could lead to lease sales to developers in the near future. The area in question covers more than 65 000 hectares, and eight companies are interested in pursuing projects in the region.

The DOI's "Smart from the Start" initiative, launched in 2010, aims to speed up permitting and review processes for offshore wind projects, in reaction to the intense difficulty seen in getting wind projects going during the last decade. The Rhode Island-Massachusetts site was designated a Wind Energy Area in February, a key step in the DOI strategy to move projects ahead more rapidly. Still, we are likely a few years away from any actual construction in the region.

Map: Department of the Interior

This post was updated 5 July, 2012

A three-member panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which after the Supreme Court is the most influential and important American court in matters of regulation and policy, has unanimously upheld the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases and declined to second-guess EPA’s timetable for limiting noxious emissions from motor vehicles, power plants, and industrial facilities. The panel said EPA was "unambiguously correct" in claiming authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under standing clean air law.

Today's appeals court ruling is notable as much for the force and clarity of its language, as for its substance. The 14 states challenging the EPA's authority argued that EPA had relied on unsound climate science in classing greenhouse gases as pollutants. "The E.P.A. is not required to reprove the existence of the atom every time it approaches a scientific question," said the court, leaving no doubt it considers mainstream climate science essentially credible.

The D.C. appeals panel that issued today's ruling was headed by David B. Sentelle, the court's chief judge, an appointee of Ronald Reagan. The two other members were appointees of Bill Clinton. While the plaintiffs can now appeal the ruling to the full court, it is not obvious that they would fare better with the 13-justice group. To be sure, the court often is sharply critical of regulations and regulators; recently it took the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to task for being too lax in its oversight of nuclear waste management. Then too, the court is known for rigorously and sometimes ruthlessly applying the kind of free-market economic analysis that is near and dear to business-oriented conservatives. At least three members of the court, including Sentelle, have been or are considered potential Republican nominees to the Supreme Court.

Yet, for all that, the character of today's decision strongly suggests the panel is in no doubt about where the court as a whole stands on this issue. A serious environmentalism can be found among conservatives as well as liberals, of course, and respect for scientific consensus is hardly a monopoly of one or the other party. Indeed, the interpretation of EPA's authority enunciated by the D.C. Appeals Court on Tuesday originated in a landmark 2007 decision by a Supreme Court that had essentially the same political balance as today's, despite the retirement and replacement of two justices in the intervening years--that is, a balance that is just slightly tilted to the right.

eBay announced this week that its expanded data center in Utah will rely on a 6 MW fuel cell array supplied by Bloom Energy, based in Sunnyvale, Cal., which makes an innovative solid oxide system. It will be the largest stationary fuel cell bank ever installed in a non-utility setting, and the first time a data center has been designed to rely on fuel cells as its primary energy source, with the grid serving as backup. The normal procedure is for data centers to get electricity from the grid, with some kind of backup system to kick in when the grid goes down—an expensive procedure.

The decision by eBay to commit to the Bloom energy system represents a significant vote of confidence not only in the company, which has has set itself the strategic objective of perfecting a fuel cell system reliable enough to power data centers, but also in the broader technology. A decade ago, mobile fuel cells fell out of favor and largely out of public view, when they failed to revolutionize vehicular transportation as manufacturers had promised. But meanwhile, makers of larger, stationary fuels cells have made steady if undramatic advances, building incrementally on existing technology like the solid oxide cell.

Advantages of the solid oxide fuel cell, which uses a ceramic electrolyte, include high efficiency, reliability and durability. A disadvantage is its high operating temperature, though waste heat can be used to generate the steam needed to reform a hydrocarbon feedstock. In the basic process, fuel reformed at the cathode—basically a source of hydrogen molecules—combine with oxygen from the anode to generate a current, with water and carbon dioxide the waste products. Bloom says it has made improvements in both materials and design, and though the details are proprietary, its claims appear to be validated by its market success. In the particular case of the fuel cell array Bloom is supplying eBay, most or all of the fuel is supposed to be derived from biogas. (Bloom's press release says flatly that the fuel cell bank will be powered by biogras; but an eBay spokesperson told the New York Times that  eBay "would pay a premium to enable the production of biogas somewhere in the United States in amounts comparable to its gas usage in South Jordan [Utah]."

In principle, whether the plant is running exclusively on biogas or biogras production is being subsidized to compensate for natural gas consumed at the plant, the facility would appear to be doubly green: It runs on a renenewable fuel and produces no solid waste, carbon dioxide being its only undesirable byproduct. So it's easy to see why the Bloom Energy Server is attractive to high-tech companies that depend on big energy-guzzling data centers and fervently wish to build green credentials. Apple has installed a 4.8 MW Bloom system at a North Carolina data center, albeit not one that will emphasize use of biogas. Facebook is putting a data center close to the Arctic Circle in Sweden, so that it can rely mainly on natural cooling rather than artificial refrigeration.

General Electric and the Norwegian firm Sargas announced today an alliance to make and sell natural gas fired power plants in which 90 percent of the carbon dioxide will be captured from flue gases and sold for re-injection into the earth for enhanced oil recovery. The first two plants, consisting of GE's LMS100 aeroderivative gas turbines and Sargas's system for scrubbing CO2 from flue gases (diagram above), are to be built on the U.S. Gulf Coast and on the Norwegian coast. A GE-Sargas "clean gas" plant has also been under discussion for Malta.

The two companies say that their technology will be economically competitive, without government subsidies, at today's cost of carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery (EOR), which is about $30 per tonne in Texas, according to the Financial Times. As Sargas CEO Henrik Fleischer puts it, "Traditional EOR supplies of naturally occurring carbon dioxide stored underground is running out, and with oil prices expected to remain above $80/barrel, it is important for oil companies to maximize oil production with enhanced oil recovery. . . . Our solution . . .  also offers low-emissions electricity, in a proven and practical manner."

Generally, proposed carbon capture systems have focused on coal, because coal is so carbon-intense and its use still is so widespread in countries like China, India, and the United States. But as prices of natural gas have dropped with the advent of fracking, and as gas-fired electricity generation has rapidly displaced coal (at least in the United States), a system for capturing carbon dioxide from gas turbine plants is naturally attractive. Its appeal is all the greater as prospects for a nuclear renaissance have waned--at least in the United States.

Replacing a coal-fired electric power plant with a nuclear plant cuts greenhouse gas emissions virtually to zero; replacing the coal plant with the new GE-Sargas system would accomplish virtually the same thing. But, promising as the technology may be, the timing of the GE-Sargas announcement raises an obvious question. Brent crude oil prices have dropped from $120/barrel in the first quarter of this year to $95/barrel, and some other indexes of global oil prices today are hovering not far above $80/barrel, the level at which Fleischer says the new system will be competitive and commercially attractive. If the global economic recovery continues to falter and oil prices continue to plummet, it will be interesting to see whether GE and Sargas are able to stick with their plans.

A study published by the Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) found that renewable energy sources could "adequately supply" as much as 80 percent of electricity demand in 2050, using only the technologies that are commercially available today. Such technologies, NREL says in the Renewable Electricity Futures study, could provide balance between supply and demand for electricity on an hourly level.

This is a remarkable endorsement for deep integration of renewables, given the ongoing concerns about intermittency and storage for wind and solar power. And the NREL report went even farther, saying that fully 50 percent of electricity could come from "variable renewable generation" (wind and photovoltaics) without any blips in supply. The modeling NREL used suggested a growing role for offshore wind as total renewable supply increases—a not-insignificant assumption, of course, given the zero offshore turbines currently spinning in U.S. waters. The agency also saw a need for dedicated biomass power plants, as opposed to just feeding biomass to coal plants. Hydropower, meanwhile, which is currently the biggest renewable contributor, plays less and less of a role over the next few decades. (We have dammed pretty much every river we are going to dam.)

Also importantly, NREL found no major geographical gaps in the renewables map. "All regions of the United States could contribute substantial renewable electricity supply in 2050, consistent with their local renewable resource base." This is notable especially for regions like the Southeast, which so far has lagged far behind other areas in terms of renewables generation. Photovoltaic and biomass plants will play the biggest role in that region.

Of course, actually getting to an 80 percent renewables scenario by 2050 is a lot harder than simply saying the grid can handle it. From the report:

"Annual renewable capacity additions that enable high renewable generation are consistent with current global production capacities but are significantly higher than recent U.S. annual capacity additions for the technologies considered. No insurmountable long-term constraints to renewable electricity technology manufacturing capacity, materials supply, or labor availability were identified."

They may not be insurmountable, but the numbers are daunting nonetheless. Take wind, for example. The 80 percent scenario requires 439 gigawatts of installed wind capacity in 2050, only about 50 GW of which is currently installed. Can the United States build more than 10 GW per year—or between 2500 and 3000 turbines—for almost 40 years? Or the extensive transmission requirements to move that power? Or the 150 GW of photovoltaic panels needed? It all remains to be seen, but the NREL sign-off on renewables' ability to support the grid is big either way. The fossil fuel supporters who claim coal and natural gas will always be required to provide baseload power are standing on shakier ground all the time.

Image via NREL

This is certainly not the first time I've mentioned, and probably not be the fist time you've noticed, how carelessly the terms alternative energy, clean energy and green energy are bandied about, as if they mean exactly the same thing.

What occasions me to repeat this complaint is the revival of the television series "Dallas," which epitomized everything we love to hate about oil. In the new version, says New York Times television correspondent Alessandra Stanley, "the writers have reconstituted the feuds of the second generation of Ewings as an allegory about clean energy versus fossil fuels." Thus Christopher Ewing, nephew of the infamous J.R. (photo), "has turned his back on drilling and wants to develop methane hydrates as an energy source."

There are a couple of problems here, at least as the setup is described by Stanley. Methane hydrates, or methane clathrates if you prefer, are fossil fuels; and unless perfectly extracted—an art still waiting for a virtuoso performance—they are not necessarily clean.

The so-called hydrates or clathrates are cystalline solids (consisting generally of methane, the basic constituent of natural gas) which happen to be trapped in ice deep under oceans. In terms of available energy, the amount of gas hydrates may be twice the world's total conventional fossil reserves, according to the U.S. Geologic Survey. If safe and practical extraction methods can be found, they could obviously contribute significantly to world energy resources.

The rub is that methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas, ten times as effective per molecule as carbon dioxide in causing global warming. If the ice surrounding the hydrates were to melt as a result of warming and the trapped methane were liberated, the effect would be to accelerate warming. "Methane released as a result of landslides caused by a sea-level fall would warm the Earth, as would methane released from gas hydrates in Arctic sediments as they become warmed during a sea-level rise," says the USGS.

In fairness, the term "alternative energy" is a bit slippery, inasmuch as it's often used without specifying what something is alternative to. This is why it so easily lends itself to use as a synonym for "clean" or "green" or "renewable," which it is not. So the Times correspondent may be forgiven for having written a little carelessly (even though, let it be said, she attained such a reputation for carelessness that the Times assigned her a special factchecker several years ago).

Having not seen the episode in question myself, I cannot attest whether the writers got the distinction between clean energy and alternative energy right. But a detailed recap of the premier Dallas episode  posted on one website refers only to a proposed methane extraction plant and a dinner argument concerning alternative energy versus oil, without saying anything about clean energy. However, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, the actor who plays Christopher Ewing, a young fellow by the name of Jesse Metcalfe, says he took the part "because my character is trying to pull the family away from the old way of doing things into the more environmentally friendly fossil fuels."

So Metcalf gets credit for being half right. He recognizes that the methane hydrates are a fossil fuel. But whether they are environmentally friendly remains to be shown.

The German energy company Conergy is working with Hong Kong-based Ensunt to build a 50-megawatt solar plant in Bahawalpur, in the Cholistan region of Pakistan. According to a Conergy press release, when completed, the plant will be the biggest solar facility in the country; it will be owned by the Pakistani government and the DACC Power Generation Company Limited.

Pakistan relies heavily on hydroelectric generation, and is thus at the whims of variable river flows. Marc Lohoff, a Conergy board member, said in a press release that only 63 percent of the country's population even has access to electricity at present, and those that do face frequent blackouts. Just a glimpse at the Pakistan Ministry of Water and Power's "daily power situation" snapshots suggests a broad gap between electricity demand and supply, with substantial variations. For example, in early April the country's hydro facilities were generating at a capacity of around 2000 MW, while over the last few days in June it has been closer to 4500 MW. The most recent day's data indicates a shortfall of more than 6000 MW on a total electricity demand of almost 18 000 MW.

Critics of solar power may find it strange to look to the sun for a reliable answer to an intermittency problem, but when a shortfall is in the thousands of megawatts then beefing up the total capacity is a good first step. And Pakistan—in particular the Cholistan region—has ample and consistent sunshine. Conergy says that Pakistan gets about 8 to 9 hours of sunshine per day, with an annual insolation rate (basically, how much of the sun's energy hits a given spot) of over 1700 kilowatt-hours/m². That's far better than, say, Germany, which has the most solar capacity in the world and recently set a record by getting half its power from the sun.

The new 50-MW plant will eventually supply power to more than 30 000 households in Pakistan. Says Conergy's Lohoff, "Due to the decentralized character of this form of energy and the high insolation levels, solar energy is ideally suited to close [the demand] gap and to supply the population with safe, clean, and affordable energy. At the same time, solar power can support the economic development of the country."

Image: Solar panels on a road in Pakistan, via wetlandsofpakistan

The U.S. Photovoltaic Manufacturing Consortium has launched an effort to develop a roadmap for the copper-indium-gallium-selenide (CIGS) photovoltaic materials, long considered one of the most promising technologies for next-generation solar cells. The exercise presumably will be based on the influential roadmaps developed in recent decade for technologies deemed critically important to the nation's future, such as semiconductors and chip lithography. In keeping with the potential significance of the latest such exercise, the PV consortium has put three extremely well known solar technology experts in charge of building the CIGS roadmap.

The three co-chairs of the CiGS PV Roadmap will be Larry Kazmerski, long-time director of the National Center for Photovoltaics at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., the go-to place for certification of claimed advances in solar cells; Richard Swanson, the founding president emeritus of  SunPower Corporation in San Jose, well established as a world leader in solar; and Joseph Laia, CEO of MiaSolé in Santa Clara, which specialized in CIGS and thin-film technology. Laia was previously group vice president for metrology at KLA-Tencor.

The Photovoltaic Manufacturing Consortium is headquartered at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at the University of Albany, in Albany, N.Y. It is closely affiliated with the semiconductor industry consortium Sematech and is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative. The PV consortium is shooting for a 75 percent reduction in the installed cost of solar systems over the next decade.