Energywise

The prototype for the first practical "artificial leaf," which has been hyped in the media since its flashy debut at the American Chemical Society national meeting last year, has hit development hurdles and will not be scaled up for field testing. The leaf, a playing-card-sized coated-silicon sheet, turns sunlight into storable fuel by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, but at a cost that's too high to justify further development, the prototype's maker told the journal Nature.

Hydrogen from a solar panel and electrolysis unit can currently be made for about US$7 per kilogram, the firm estimates; the artificial leaf would come in at US$6.50. (It costs just $1-2 to make a kilogram of hydrogen from fossil fuels.) With the prices of solar cells dropping all the time, the firm is not going to make a heavy investment that's unlikely to pay off. Instead, it is looking at cheaper designs—but these require yet-to-be-invented semiconductor materials.  

The leaf was designed by chemistry professor Daniel Nocera at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who founded Sun Catalytix in Cambridge to pursue development. Other groups have had some success with artificial photosynthesis before, but always hit stumbling blocks. Nocera's group made it work, in part, by using cheap, abundant materials as catalysts. The design involves joining a commercially available triple-junction solar cell to two catalysts: cobalt-borate for splitting the water molecule and a nickel-molybdenumzinc alloy to form the hydrogen gas. Nocera reported his design in Science in September.

Sun Catalytix has claimed that the device could eventually produce a kilogram of hydrogen for about US $3. Nocera has also claimed that artificial leaves could enable people everywhere to live without being connected to a power grid.

But Nocera has a reputation for hyping his discoveries, which are often amplified by journalists and MIT's public relations office, according to a recent profile on Nocera in The New Yorker.

[Nocera] hasn't always rushed to correct mis-impressions, and at least some of this overselling has been intentional. Attracting funding for renewable-energy research requires showmanship...Nocera's challenge outside the laboratory has been to build enthusiasm for the artificial leaf even though, in anything like its current form, it is designed to meet a level of energy demand that by modern American standards is almost immeasurably low. 

In case you are feeling down about companies generating buzz for new renewable energy research and then abandoning the work, check out Hypersolar in Santa-Barbara, California, which is hanging tough and chronicling its progress in producing hydrogen gas from wastewater.

Photo Credit: American Chemical Society

The U.S. Commerce Department, acting in response to the case brought by seven American photovoltaics makers, imposed a second round of tariffs on Chinese manufacturers that are much tougher than the ones previously levied. The new anti-dumping tariff on products exported to the United States by China's Suntech Power Holdings Co. is 31.22 percent; Trina Ltd. faces a 31.14 percent levy; and for 59 other firms, it will be 31.18 percent. In March, the Commerce Department imposed anti-subsidy tariffs on Chinese PV companies ranging from 2.9 to 4.73 percent, so that together, the penalties on China's solar exporters will now be in the vicinity of 35 percent—a hefty bite.

Greentech Media Research analyst Shyam Mehta points out that there are ways Chinese exporters can evade the tariffs, but the alternatives are not cost-free either. "Broadly speaking, [the Chinese PV makers] have two strategies: set up cell manufacturing outside China, or use the tolling services of Taiwan-based suppliers to turn wafers into cells there, and then assemble the modules in China." One way or another, the cost of installing photovoltaics in the United States will rise.

Naturally, the U.S. solar community is sharply divided between project developers and consumers, who want lower module prices, and domestic manufacturers, who have been getting killed by their Chinese competitors. The greentech/clean tech lobbies are divided along the same lines. And so, for that matter, is the country as a whole, which is torn between anger at perceived Chinese trade tactics and fear of igniting an all-out trade war.

The foundation for the Commerce Department decisions was a unanimous finding by the U.S. Trade Commission in December that "U.S. industry is materially injured by reason of imports of crystalline silicon photovoltaic cells and modules from China that are allegedly subsidized and sold in the United States at less than fair value."

There is bound to be some Chinese backlash, as Keith Bradsher and Diane Cardwell point out in today's New York Times. "The American decision was made by civil servants in a quasi-judicial process that is heavily insulated by law from political interference, and does not represent a deliberate attempt by the Obama administration to confront China on trade policy. But that distinction has been largely lost in China, where the solar panel issue has been one of many causes embraced online by the country’s vociferous ultranationalists, who put heavy pressure on Chinese officials to respond forcefully to perceived snubs to China."

As the solar dispute has escalated, China has threatened to take steps such as imposing a counter-tariff on U.S. polysilicon producers, who benefit from inexpensive hydroelectricity in Tennessee and Washington state. So, if China's hard-nosed communistic capitalists do just that, blame it on Franklin Roosevelt's socialistic Tennessee Valley Authority and his Grand Coulee Dam, celebrated in song by Woody Guthrie.

This week, two months after a costly and embarrassing battery recall, A123 Systems released sharply lower first-quarter revenues and earnings: The battery innovator posted a first-quarter loss of $125 million, with revenues down 40 percent from the first quarter of 2011, a result far worse than investors had anticipated, according to the Wall Street Journal. Struggling to regain confidence and in desperate need of a short-term cash infusion, the maker of nano-technology-enabled lithium ion batteries announced it was seeking strategic guidance.

Over the years, A123 Systems has received extensive support from the U.S. Advanced Battery Consortium and obtained $128.6 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Energy to build a manufacturing plant in Michigan. With Republicans eager to highlight Obama Administration failures in "picking technology," could the A123 situation turn into a significant political liability for the president, like the Solyndra debacle? Not likely. The battery consortium itself goes back decades, predating even the Clinton Administration. And Energy Secretary Chu long ago expressed doubts about whether lithium ion is the best way to go in advanced car batteries, as Dexter Johnson pointed out here, two months ago.

The Department of the Interior has issued a "no competitive interest" finding for the Atlantic Wind Connection, a 790-mile transmission "backbone" that will theoretically allow connection of offshore wind power along the Atlantic coast to the onshore grid. The finding basically means that no one else wants to spend 10 years and billions of dollars building transmission lines along the sea floor to connect offshore turbines that don't yet exist, so the company -- Atlantic Grid Holdings -- can go ahead and start an environmental review for the project.

This is just the first piece of a lengthy regulatory process. "Our next step will be to evaluate the potential environmental impacts of issuing a renewable energy right-of-way grant for this project," said Tommy Beaudreau, the director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), which is responsible for offshore development.

The Atlantic Wind Connection, funded in part by Google, is a forward-thinking project, given that no offshore wind turbines yet spin in American waters (Cape Wind is getting there! They've selected a construction contractor! But they won't build until 2013). Transmission is a challenge for many renewable energy projects, offshore wind perhaps most of all. Bringing the power from where the wind blows to where the lights go on is a huge undertaking, especially when the wind blows miles away from land.

The transmission project would involve high voltage direct current (HVDC) lines running for nearly 800 miles along the sea floor. It could theoretically connect up to 7000 megawatts of wind power to the grid. Even with the biggest new turbines, though, that means more than 1000 of the monster windmills, and the U.S. doesn't have the best of records when it comes to building offshore wind farms. Some think, though, that once the first turbines go up in the next year or so, the floodgates will open. Having transmission ready to support that flood is certainly a worthwhile undertaking.

The environmental review process for the backbone could take up to two years, so even the first stage of the project likely won't be built until at least mid-decade. But with many gigawatts of potential off the Atlantic coast and a number of projects pushing forward through a tough regulatory environment, there may even be a few turbines spinning when the transmission lines are finally laid down.

Image via Atlantic Grid Holdings

It sounds so sensible, you have to wonder why everybody isn't already doing it: Tap the excess pressure found in many urban water mains to drive small turbines that could feed electricity into the grid, block-by-block. Often such pressure has to be relieved by means of specially installed valves that do no work. Why not exploit it to generate power?

It took a New York City wireless company executive, musing idly about emergency power shortly after 9/11, to dream up the idea of electricity from water mains. The startup he founded and leads, Rentricity, has been attracting attention and interest locally. It has obtained modest R&D funding from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and is a tenant of the  New York University Polytechtechnic Institute Incubator that was started by the New York City Accelerator for a Clean and Renewable Economy. On 1 May, NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed into law a city council resolution calling on New York to do an 18-month study of the feasibility of widely deploying electricity-from-water-main technology throughout the city.

The city, which gets all its drinking water from reservoirs that at are much higher elevations upstate, has a water distribution system that is inherently highly pressurized. As such, it would seem to be ideal for what Rentricity is proposing to do. It is not, however, the site of the first test installation. That honor goes to Keene, N.H., a town close to that state's southern border and Boston's high-tech periphery. Rentricity has also installed a 30-kilowatt generator at a reservoir near Pittsburgh; though that setup is in a water distribution system, it is basically a standard low-head hydro installation, and not an example of the power from water mains concept.

Could Rentricity turn out to be a company that is better at PR than engineering? To judge from its website, the opposite may be the case. The listing of its executive leadership makes a credible impression. The videos promoting its work, on the other hand, leave a good deal to be desired in terms of production values.

Whatever you may think about climate change, there’s no denying that the whole controversial subject has become so intimately intertwined with long-term energy planning, they are inseparable.  Just about every press release about any novel energy technology, every public statement in favor of a new energy project, makes reference to expected climate impact. By the same token, every major development in climate science has energy implications.

The issue of Science magazine that appeared yesterday, May 4, carried three articles on the sensitive issue of how much ocean levels may rise in this century as waters warm and glaciers melt. The news is more good than bad. Though there are many uncertainties, the latest research indicates that the rise will not be nearly as high as the worst-case projection of two meters by 2100 and much closer to two thirds of a meter (or two feet).

On the other hand, in news more bad than good, researchers at Stanford and the University of California, Santa Cruz, believe they have shown the Permian extinction that took place 252 million years ago was closely associated with global warming and ocean acidification. Some trends they discern are closely analogous to what we are seeing today.

The lynchpin of the Science magazine report is a research article, "21st Century Evolution of Greenland Outlet Glacier Velocities," which is based on satellite observations of Greenland ice. The scientists found a high degree of variability: "Changes on fast-flow marine-terminating glaciers contrast with steady velocities on ice-shelf–terminating glaciers and slow speeds on land-terminating glaciers. Regionally, glaciers in the northwest accelerated steadily, with more variability in the southeast and relatively steady flow elsewhere."

In a comment piece, Richard B. Alley and Ian Joughin observe, "Early models of the coupled ocean-atmosphere system treated the ice sheets [of Greenland and Antarctica] as static white mountains." A new generation of ice sheet models incorporating more physics, they suggest, may inaugurate an important new phase of geological and climate research.

A second comment by Josh K. Willis and John A. Church argue that there is still a great deal we need to learn about how ocean rises will vary regionally, which will require better understanding of ice sheets and Antarctic precipitation, among other things. The stakes are high, in terms of climate adaptation and mitigation strategies, "Without adaptation, a rise [of average sea levels] by 0.5 m would displace 3.8 million people in the most fertile part of the Nile River Delta. A rise by 2 m could displace 187 million people globally."

Even if the average rise in ocean levels could be close to two feet that two meters, the effects of ocean acidification could be as bad as or worse than pessimists have suggested. In work featured in the New York Times science section on May 1, two California researchers analyzed the Permian extinction in terms of which living beings were most vulnerable. They found that the main marine victims were "genera with poorly buffered respiratory physiology and calcareous shells." That is to say, animals died from a shortage of ocean oxygen, and reduced ability to build shells in water that was warmer and more acidic.

In a second closely related article, the same authors, Jonathan L. Payne (Santa Cruz) and Matthew E. Clapham (Stanford) attribute warming and acidification to widespread volcanic eruptions in the Siberian Traps. "The end-Permian extinction may serve as an important ancient analog for twenty-first century oceans," they warn.

Photo: Puturana Plateau in Siberian Traps

The Department of Energy, along with the Japan Oil, Gas, and Metals National Corporation and ConocoPhillips, completed a successful field trial of methane hydrate extraction along Alaska's North Slope.

Methane hydrate is basically natural gas locked up in ice. Actual, commercial-scale production of gas from these formations has never been accomplished, but the DOE's success here might open the door to the industry. The method the DOE used was novel: carbon dioxide was injected into the hydrates, where it was exchanged with the methane molecules locked up in the ice. Using this technique, they were able to extract natural gas continuously for 30 days. The previous longest run was six days.

If methane hydrate production becomes cheap and easy, it could change the global energy picture dramatically. The exact amounts aren't totally clear, but around the world there could be more energy locked up in hydrates than in all the rest of the planet's fossil fuels combined. Of course, burning all of it wouldn't be great for the climate, even if natural gas is a bit better than coal in that regard. And some think that methane hydrates might melt on their own as the climate warms, releasing a gas that is more than 20 times as potent as a warming agent than CO₂. 

The DOE says the next step is to test methane hydrate production over even longer periods of time, with the goal of bringing costs down into the economically-viable range. This process, though, "may take years to accomplish." Along with its own tests, the DOE is also offering $6.5 million in funding this year research into methane hydrate extraction technology, and is asking for another $5 million from Congress to add to the effort next year.

Image: USGS

In September 2011 a blackout in the area around San Diego, Calif., left 2.7 million customers without power for up to a half day or so. A report issued this week [PDF]  by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission blames the outage on "inadequate planning and a lack of observability and awareness of system operation conditions on the day of the event," as a press release puts it.

The report's executive summary says that the cascading disturbance on Sept. 8, 2011 started with the loss of a single 500 KV transmission line, which the system should have been able to withstand. Instead, the loss led to a wide redistribution of power, sizeable voltage deviations, transformer overloads, and overloading of a key transmission corridor south of the San Onofre nuclear power plant, designated Path 44 by the Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC).

Excessive loading of Path 44 prompted the San Onofre nuclear power generating station to go off line, plunging San Diego and a Baja Caifornia operating-area into a complete blackout. Yet during the 11 minutes the outage lasted, "the WECC Reliability Coordinator issued no directives, and only limited mitigating actions were taken by the transmission operators of the affected areas."

Yikes! The executive summary goes on to detail underlying factors that contributed to the event, including grid operators not properly having evaluated how loss of generating facilities smaller than 100 kV could affect bulk power reliability, "not recognizing" Western Interconnection reliability limits, "not studying and coordinating" how protection systems might function under certain contingencies, and "not providing effective tools and operating instructions for use when reclosing lines with large phase angle differences across the reclosing barriers."

The report also finds operators and regulators were insufficiently aware of adjacent system particulars and how neighboring systems might interact in an emergency. The report recommends improving external visibility of systems, use of real-time tools, and communications among entities. In conclusion, says the report, "The Sept. 8th event shows that all protection systems and separation schemes … should be studied and coordinated periodically to understand their impact on bulk power system reliability to ensure their operation, inadvertent operation, or misoperation does not have unintended or undesirable effects."

From the sounds of it, lessons that ought to have been learned from previous outages—the big Northeast-Midwest blackout of 2003, and the two big western system disturbances of the late 1990s—are still being absorbed.

Photo: Sean M. Haffey

The United States had the hottest March this year since record keeping began in 1895, with some 15,000 localities around the country registering record highs. In the map above, which comes courtesy of the National Atmospheric and Oceanographic Administration (NOAA), the red states had the warmest March ever, beige states temperatures well above normal, pink states above normal, and white states about normal; only Washington state had a cooler than usual March.

Is global warming responsible for the March temperatures? Writing earlier this week in the Los Angeles Times, John Michael Wallace, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Washington, delivered a measured assessment. Wallace, one of the world's most highly regarded specialists in climate dynamics, first of all affirms that the effects of global warming are clearly evident in a statistical increase in record high temperatures, which now outnumber record lows by a ratio of three to one. Rising average global temperatures raise all ships, he observes.

Yet when it comes to March's madness, Wallace withholds judgment. "The cause of last month's strange weather was an extraordinarily large and persistent meander of the jet stream that swept tropical air, with temperatures reaching into the 80s as far north as southern Canada," he writes. "But let's remember where the burden of proof lies. In the world of sports, when an athlete is accused of relying on performance-enhancing drugs, it is the prosecutor who must prove the case. The same should apply to claims that the behavior of the jet stream is being profoundly altered by global warming. Thus far, such assertions are not well supported by scientific evidence."

Much more serious, concludes Wallace, is the projected impact of rising average global temperatures on biodiversity and crop yields in tropical Africa and southern Asia.

"The gradual warming of the tropics may not seem as weird as March Madness, but it has much more important implications for biodiversity, food security and the stability of world financial markets. If global warming continues as projected, the global consequences of deteriorating conditions in the tropics will soon be a lot more serious than a foretaste of summer weather in late winter."

If your eyes have been locked on hybrid and electric vehicles in the race to design and build the advanced vehicles of the near future, watch out for diesel coming around the outside track. As stubborn concerns about cost and range are putting a drag on electrics, the introduction of advanced-technology diesels is accelerating.

IEEE Spectrum magazine, in this month’s “Top 10 Tech Cars 2012” report, features two such automobiles: Volkswagen’s diesel Passat and the Mercedes-Benz E300 diesel Bluetec hybrid. One-fifth of the VWs sold in the United States last year were diesels.

Meanwhile, Ford Motor Co. CEO Alan Mulally caused a stir last week with a public statement about the high cost of EV batteries. They can run between US $12 000 and $15 000 for a car that might otherwise sell for just $22 000, he said.

The news here is not so much what Mulally said as the fact he said it. It would seem that the highly regarded Ford chief executive is getting cold feet about some of the hybrid and electric vehicles his own company is introducing.

And no wonder. According to a New York Times run-down of pay-back periods for such cars, published on 5 April, the break-even time for the Ford Fiesta with the super fuel economy (SFE) package that lets it go 100 kilometers on only 5.88 liters of fuel is 26.8 years, for the Ford Focus SE SFE 9.0 years, and the Fusion 8.5 years. (Breakeven is the time it would take to pay off the additional cost of the car, as compared with its non-electric version.)

Many of the cars being introduced by other manufacturers fared little or no better. Break-even for Chevrolet’s Volt was estimated at 26.6 years, and Honda’s Civic hybrid at 12.1. Some, to be sure, did much better, among them the Toyota Camry hybrid (6 years), and  the Prius, with an impressively short payback period of just 1.2 years.

But VW’s advanced diesel Jetta does even better than that, with a payback period of 1.1 years. Volkswagen and Daimler pioneered the introduction of high-tech diesels in the U.S. market several years ago, with their development of diesel cars capable of meeting U.S. clean air standards—including California’s, the most exacting of all.

Now, U.S. carmakers and other non-U.S. manufacturers are racing to match them in the American market. Chrysler, General Motors, Audi, and Mazda all plan to introduce diesel models in the next couple of years.

The Diesel Technology Forum, a U.S. trade group, has hailed the ability of such diesel vehicles to comply with California's latest and strictest clean air standards. The forum boasts that NOx emissions from diesel trucks and buses have been cut 99 percent in the last ten years, and particulates emissions by 97 percent, as a result of new technology. With the introduction of the ultra-low-sulfur diesel fuel required by law since 2010, sulfur emissions from diesel trucks and buses are down 97 percent already, the forum claims.

Photo: Volkswagen Jetta TDI