Energywise

The Nuclear Regulation Authority of Japan has released draft safety rules for nuclear power facilities. Before the Fukushima incident, precautions against major disasters or terrorist attacks were left up to utilities. The new rules, which regulators hope to finalize by the middle of 2013, will require significant safety improvements to nuclear plants.

Some of the new measures are clearly in direct response to problems confronted at Fukushima. Plants would need to feature back-up control rooms located separately from the reactors themselves, and venting systems will need to be capable of filtering out radioactive gases. There are also rules that would govern evacuations if an emergency does occur; authorities were rightly criticized in the aftermath of Fukushima over the evacuation, with some indications that radiation levels were relatively high even outside the evacuation zone.

The new rules would also require that reactor buildings withstand the impact from a jet if one were used as a weapon. Some are designed with such protection already in mind.

It sounds a lot worse than it is. Happily, this isn't some science fiction movie about a post-apocalyptic Mad Max future, or even about radioactive rain. It's just a simple atmospheric interaction thanks to the water vapor coming out of nuclear plant cooling towers. If you live near a nuclear plant, maybe you've already noticed that the the weather is different downwind of it.

The National Weather Service posted a radar image on Tuesday of a single band of snow falling on Western Pennsylvania, straight downwind from the Beaver Valley Nuclear Power Station in Shippingport. A band of cold air moving across the eastern United States slammed into the very hot steam directly above the plant's cooling towers, creating clouds and precipitation that otherwise wouldn't have been there. Nuclear snow!

To be totally clear, though: the only thing that comes out of nuclear plant cooling towers is water vapor, so there is nothing dangerous about this phenomenon. And this has been observed before; the video below is from storm chasers who found themselves in a narrow band of extremely intense snow in Oklahoma City thanks to a nearby power plant. And two years ago, exhaust from the Martin Drake coal plant in Colorado Springs appeared to mix with cold air to produce clouds and light snow as well. Way back in 1976, researchers published a paper in Science on observed snowfall thanks to cooling towers, with accumulations of up to 2.5 centimeters. Complicating things, though, is another Science paper from 25 years later, showing that pollution from cities and industrial facilities including power plants can often have the opposite effect, with reduced cloud particle size and suppressed precipitation.

The words in that headline don't sound like they should go together, do they? Well, it's true: according to reporting by Reuters, Belgium is hoping to construct an artificial island in the North Sea, shaped like a donut and made out of sand, that will be able to store some of the excess power generated by extensive offshore wind farms in the area. When you look at it that way, what country wouldn't want an artificial donut-shaped island with which to store its offshore wind power?

The principle here is pumped water storage. When wind farms generate more power than can be used, it would be sent to Crazy Belgian Donut Island (that's my proposed name) and used to pump water out of the donut's central reservoir. When demand is higher or the wind is lower, the water would be allowed to flow back in to the reservoir, spinning turbines and regenerating the electricity to be sent back to the mainland. The planned site for the island is about 3 km off the Belgian coast.

Belgium is in the process of scaling up its wind power capacity, though it isn't yet at the level of some other European countries. Overall, wind accounts for less than four percent of installed electricity generation, though a 2011 report from the European Wind Energy Association projected Belgium would quadruple its wind capacity by 2020. According to Reuters, this country of about 11 million people hopes to generate 2300 megawatts from its offshore wind farms.

This would play a big role in Belgium's transition away from nuclear power. In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, the country was one of several countries—others included Switzerland, Mexico, and most notably, Germany—to disavow the use of nuclear energy. In 2011, nuclear accounted for more than half of Belgium's electricity generation.

Storage of renewable energy has always been considered a stopping point for rapid expansion. Without good ways to store wind power, there is a chance it can't function as baseload power like nuclear or fossil fuel-based generation. Ideas of how to solve that issue are plentiful, but if built—planning and construction would take at least five years—this would most likely be the first artificial donut-shaped island used for energy storage in the world. Let's hope it's not the last.

Images via Ahmad van der Breggen and Ashley Dace

According to finalized data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2012 ranked as the 10th warmest year since recording began in 1880. That doesn't sound so terrible, except that of the nine years ahead of it eight of them came since 2000; among earlier years, only 1998 was hotter.

Also impressive is the streak of years above the 20th century average temperature: 2012 was the 36th such year in a row. The global average for 2012 was 0.57°C above that average, and NOAA says the mercury has risen at an average rate of 0.16°C per decade since 1970. It is—ahem—getting very hot in here.

Also released recently, a paper in the journal Climatic Change demonstrated the global temperature rise in another way: monthly temperature records are being broken at an astonishing rate. In fact, records are falling around the world at a five-fold higher clip than would be expected with no long-term warming trend. Even scarier: "Under a medium global warming scenario, by the 2040s we predict the number of monthly heat records globally to be more than 12 times as high as in a climate with no long-term warming."

Post-Sandy, New York City's regional utilities naturally have come under a lot of heat for their performance during and after the storm, which left lower Manhattan without lights for a week or ten days.

I, for one, thought that with so much ground-level and subterranean electrical equipment flooded for days, it might take months--not days or weeks--to get the lights back on. When it comes to telephones, in fact, Verizon reports that the landline network may not be back up and  running until May (with copper being replaced throughout with fiberoptics). New York City's MTA has asked the Federal government for $770 million to help restore the subway system's signalling system--notably to replace some 300,000 electro-mechanical relays, many of which date to the system's earliest days. How is it that the subways somehow are running, before that upgrade has been completed? Don't ask; don't tell.

I am not among those, in short, taking local authorities to task for post-storm performance, which appears to have generally been an exercise in brilliant improvisation. This is not to say, of course, that power restoration was without problems--or that there are no fundamental underlying problems in urgent need of attention.

In oh so many ways it was an unedifying year: reaffirmation of U.S. political deadlock, an even worse political sclerosis in Europe, ghastly atrocities in Syria, a festering war in Afghanistan. But in energy, 2012 was a very very good year indeed--at least if you were a U.S. citizen.

This was the year in which it became clear not only that the United States has a real shot at energy independence, after 40 years of just talking about it, but that the U.S. strength in energy gives the country an economic edge across the board. For this blogger, the message first came through loud and clear at a New York Times energy conference, inspired by a new book from energy guru Daniel Yergin, The Quest.

The implications, though vast, are not hard to list.

One already has played out: Presidential candidate Romney tried hard to play the energy hand, but President Obama held all the cards.

Another was the theme of the Times energy conference: the United States now is at an advantage vis-a-vis virtually all other countries, including China and India.

A third, as yet virtually unstated, is the United States can now afford to adopt an aggressive greenhouse gas reduction policy and has no excuse not to. Incoming Secretary of State John Kerry has his work cut out for him.

It's no secret that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (ailing today in the hospital) has done an outstanding job of executing U.S. policy in no small part because she has understood so well that policy ultimately is made in the White House, not her office. The downside has been that there was no real independent voice in U.S. foreign policy for the last four years. This will change with the accession of Senator John Kerry, a strongly independent personality with a well known track record.

One area in which that difference will make a difference is climate policy. Kerry was an early co-sponsor of cap-and-trade carbon reduction legislation, and he quietly used his considerable influence in the Senate to address global warming issues however he could. Climate change is one of the issues that Kerry feels personally passionate about. Six months ago, in a small Massachusetts newspaper, he wrote that the time for U.S. action on climate change is now. Quoting the Revolutionary War publicist Thomas Paine, who called it “an affront to treat falsehood with complacence,” Kerry continued, "Yet when it comes to the challenge of climate change, the falsehood of today’s naysayers is only matched by the complacency of our political system."

Whether seen in a global or a U.S. perspective, and whether it is defined narrowly or broadly, "cleantech" or "greentech" did not do well in the last year compared with most recent previous years. Wind and solar growth rates decelerated, while sales of electric vehicles and hybrids fell well short of hopes and expectations. Improvements in both vehicular and grid-scale storage technologies were likewise incremental at best, while some of the luster came off the smart gird vision, as measurable efficiencies and economies from smart meter deployments proved slow to materialize.

When the 2012 figures for all renewable energy investments are finalized and released, they are expected to show for virtually the first time in this century a decline in wind and solar spending rather than increase--a decline that could be as big as 10 percent, insiders say. General factors include political disillusionment (mainly connected with excessively high subsidies in Europe and public investment failures like Solyndra in the United States), a U.S. and European crackdown on solar dumping by Chinese manufacturers, sharp competition from dirt-cheap natural gas in the United States, and Chinese difficulties in building out regional power grids to accommodate larger shares of wind and solar energy. In the United States, wind farm developers are racing to get blades spinning by year end, so as to secure eligibility for production tax credits that expire at midnight on Dec. 31.

This year, the United States installed wind capacity passed the 50 GW milestone, while solar power continued a meteoric rise as well, now upwards of 6 GW installed. After a couple of years of massive resource assessments and grandiose thinking on renewables, though, 2012 seems to have been a year when we confronted the difficult realities involved with huge renewables scale-up.

With nuclear power phaseouts in Europe and Japan still looming, adding large amounts of renewables in a hurry has become an urgent priority. Some of these countries are starting to see how hard that is, with assessments of Germany's phaseout costs rising into the trillions. Still, that country continues to offer a solid example to the rest of the world: On part of one day in May, Germany met half of its total energy demand from solar power alone. It also has a massive transmission project on the board aimed at bringing 25 GW of offshore wind to the grid.

In the U.S., the offshore wind industry stalled yet again; last year we wrote here about the coming celebration for the first offshore turbine, but I have yet to put on my party hat. This time, though, I am more confident: in 2013 the first offshore turbine in U.S. waters will start spinning. (Probably.) The Department of the Interior has been pushing ahead on various offshore plans, including the release of environmental assessments for huge areas of the East Coast. The DOI also has helped the Google-backed Atlantic Wind Connection, an offshore wind "backbone" of transmission lines, move closer to reality, useful for when those turbines do end up in the water.

In Europe, offshore wind continues to impress. In February, the United Kingdom switched on the world's largest offshore wind farm (at least for a little while, until the much more massive London Array beat it), at 367 MW. More than 5 GW of offshore power are in some phase of construction around Europe, and turbine manufacturers have begun rollouts of the biggest turbines the world has ever seen.

Tornados are very energetic. But of course, they are far too unpredictable and uncontrollable to actually make use of that energy. Right?

Peter Thiel, billionaire founder of PayPal and early Facebook funder, says wrong. Thiel's foundation, through its Breakout Labs fund, awarded US $300 000 to a company called AVEtec, based in Canada, to work on designs and prototypes for an "atmospheric vortex engine." The AVE involves a circular chamber into which warm air is introduced at tangential angles, creating a rising vortex controlled by colder air above the chamber (mini-prototype pictured). Turbines at the base will spin thanks to the artificial tornado, generating energy. According to AVEtec, a 200-meter wide version of this could generate 200 megawatts of energy at a cost of only $0.03 per kilowatt-hour, below even the cheapest forms of power we have now.

In a press release from Breakout Labs, AVEtec founder Louis Michaud said: "The power in a tornado is undisputed. My work has established the principles by which we can control and exploit that power to provide clean energy on an unprecedented scale. With the funding from Breakout Labs, we are building a prototype in partnership with Lambton College to demonstrate the feasibility and the safety of the atmospheric vortex engine."