Energywise

The Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) funds innovative projects on wind and solar energy, electric vehicles, biofuels, grid tech, and yes, carbon capture and natural gas technologies. But when the politicians show up here at the ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit in Washington, D.C., it's those fossil fuels that end up dominating the conversation.

In a way, the continued prominence of coal and oil seem like background noise to the high-end technology conversations that fill the hallways at ARPA-E. But coal still accounts for around 40 percent of U.S. electricity, and in spite of increasing EV adoption oil is still powering nearly every vehicle in the country. Thus, when prominent politicians, including New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Senators Lamar Alexander (R–Tenn.), Lisa Murkowski (R–Alaska), and Ron Wyden (D–Ore.), speak at an energy conference, the background noise becomes the signal.

Mayor Bloomberg spent the bulk of his talk going hard at coal. "King coal is dead," he said, citing the recent closure of a coal plant just outside Washington as just one evidentiary piece of the case he was building. "It was upwind from Congress, so you would have thought they would have done something about it earlier." (Zing!) Bloomberg said the death of coal was being driven by the need to address climate change and the low price of natural gas. He acknowledged that India and China aren't quite so done with the dirtiest of fuels, but his speech was surprisingly optimistic, given some of the ongoing battles over coal export terminals on the west coast. By most accounts, coal plants are unlikely to be built in the U.S. now, but that doesn't mean we will suddenly start leaving it in the ground in Appalachia and Wyoming.

The Mayor also expressed optimism about natural gas. Actually, pretty much every politician expressed optimism about natural gas. To be sure, ARPA-E funds some interesting work on gas, especially its use as a transportation fuel; but there is no question its place in politics right now is far more central. And even someone as smart and progressive on energy as Bloomberg has his blinders on when natural gas is in the picture; until we can store renewable energy better, he said, "you will always need backup power sources." First of all, ask scientists—like, say, the DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory—and renewables can supply much of our energy with tech that exists right now. Second, the mayor might want to walk the Technology Showcase floor at this ARPA-E summit; it is littered with storage companies and ideas; if natural gas backup plants are needed at all, they won't be for long. Wyden, in fact, spent much of his speech zeroing in on storage, and just how transformative advances in the area will likely be in the near future.

The Technology Showcase at the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy Innovation Summit in Washington, D.C., is dotted with projects from companies, national labs, and universities that aim to change how we produce and use energy. They're all ARPA-E awardees, meaning they fall under a number of broader project categories, but what's clear from wandering the floor is how many of them are related to energy storage. A few examples of innovative energy storage projects that ARPA-E is helping get off the ground:

Beacon Power: Scaling up the flywheel

Flywheels are an old idea, so why has ARPA-E given Beacon Power more than $4 million? Because this is no ordinary flywheel. "The improved design [pictured] resembles a flying ring that relies on new magnetic bearings to levitate, freeing it to rotate faster and deliver 400 percent as much energy as today's flywheels." Well then.

ARPA-E categorizes the tech as still in the "proof of concept" stage, but Beacon does have at least one large installation of flywheel storage up and running in Stephentown, N.Y. It has built a 20-megawatt plant on 3.5 acres that lets the New York ISO improve its grid frequency regulation.

Sun Catalytix: The artificial leaf growers go for megawatt-scale storage

This company has gotten plenty of press in the last few years, including from us. But that was for work on the so-called "artificial leaf," a small solar device that mimics photosynthesis. Sun Catalytix has spun off some of that research into work on new chemistries for flow batteries, which they say will be able to scale up to grid-level storage. So far they've built kilowatt-scale devices, and are aiming for megawatts.

Energy Storage Systems: An all-iron flow battery

More flow batteries: Energy Storage Systems leaves behind traditional flow battery materials like vanadium in favor of earth-abundant iron. That is not a trivial change: it drops the per kilowatt-hour cost from around $400 to less than $200. Craig Evans, the company's president and CEO, told me they have a 1 kilowatt prototype now, and will scale up as part of the requirements of their ARPA-E award by the end of the year. And interestingly, ESS isn't the only ARPA-E awardee working on all-iron flow battery tech; Case Western Reserve University is also working toward a $200/kwh battery.

Halotechnics: Molten glass (yes, glass) energy storage

Solar thermal systems often now use molten salts to store energy: heat up the salts during the day, and when the sun goes down use that stored energy to keep the power flowing. Halotechnics' ARPA-E-funded project involves abundant glass, instead of salts, that can stay stable hundreds of degrees past other materials and are potentially much cheaper.

There are, impressively, dozens of other storage projects as well. If this trend keeps up, the common talking point regarding the lack of storage options for renewable energy won't have much stable ground under it.

Image: Beacon Power

Ordinarily it would be big energy news if one of the world's larger emerging market economies were to announce plans to build sixteen nuclear reactors, representing a substantial fraction of such undertakings. Sixty nuclear power plants are under construction worldwide, and about 160 are planned.

But here's the rub: The country that announced last week that it would build 16 new reactors is Iran. Given the long-standing impasse over Iran's uranium enrichment program and well-founded suspicions that its leadership wishes to attain a "breakout" capacity to build nuclear weapons, the reactor plan could be nothing but a cover for a covert military program.

In principle, the so-called P5+1 talks with Iran that resumed yesterday could cast light on that issue and ultimately legitimize Iran's nuclear energy program. But are there any real prospects of the talks succeeding?

On Monday, in a discussion of Iran hosted on Monday by the Arms Control Association and broadcast on C-SPAN, career ambassador Thomas Pickering said he would be "willing to put a little money on a positive outcome." However, former Iranian nuclear negotiator Hossein Mousavian, currently at Princeton University, said that for the Iran talks to be successful, the United States would have to adopt a respectful rather than threatening attitude and stop coupling peaceful rhetoric with escalating sanctions. Meeting those hypothetical conditions, which Mousavian also spelled out in the Financial Times, would not be trivial.

Last night at the Advanced Research Projects Agency—Energy (ARPA-E) Innovation Summit in Washington, D.C., eight early-stage energy startups had three minutes to sell a panel of high-level angel investors and venture capitalists on their hair-brained schemes. The ideas on the table ranged from innovative geometries for vehicle natural gas tanks to wireless electric vehicle charging schemes; here are three that stood out to me.

Altenera Technology: Rotation-free, noiseless wind power

The Altenera BreezeBee is a wind turbine that doesn't turn. Okay, so it's not really a turbine. It is instead a grouping of vibratory "reeds." The hexagonal panels incorporating these reeds can snap together "like LEGOs," making the idea scalable to virtually any size. Chase McCarthy, who presented the idea to the panel, says the first goal is to combine the BreezeBee with solar installations or to throw them up on water towers and similar structures; he estimated a cost of between 10 and 20 cents per kilowatt-hour, making it competitive with other wind technologies.

How, exactly, the BreezeBee works isn't entirely clear. McCarthy says the reeds vibrate and make use of Faraday fields, but that was about it. He says it is patented, though. Still, the claim of "noiseless" was questioned by some on the investor panel, considering the fact that vibrations are involved. McCarthy was also a bit short on some wind power-relevant details such as price per kilogram of material, and energy generated per unit area. The investors were a bit ruthless: without some of that info, one said, "It's a hobby." Still, a vibrating wind power device that requires basically no moving parts in the way a standard turbine does has undeniable appeal.

Last month, right after taking a camel ride into the Sahara Desert to sleep under the stars, on the far outer fringes of what we take to be civilization, I wasn't expecting to see a striking example of high tech. But see it I did, atop street light poles in the Moroccan village of Lgarfe: A small photovoltaic panel linked to what was obviously a battery box, so that energy from light stored during the day could be used to illuminate streets at night.

It took me a while to track down the manufacturer named on the poles, and to distinguish it from other manufacturers with very similar names, because, as it turned out, the maker of the PV streetlight system is a native Moroccan startup, not the subsidiary of some large global player. That is, Ecolite.ma is a private, independent Moroccan company, where "We are developing and manufacturing our products in Morocco," as a company representative reported in an e-mail. "We are helped by big European firms such as Philips, Solar World, [etc.], who provide us by equipments and devices," he continued, with evident pride. "[But] our products are certified made in Morocco."

According to the company's website each lamp is a 33 Watt LED, capable of producing 3000 lumens and with an operating lifetime of 50,000 hours; the pole-mounted energy storage system is a 12 Volt, 75 amp-hour battery; enough energy can be stored during the day to light streets for two nights, with a 50 percent discharge

A quick Google search reveals that Ecolite.ma is not the only company out there with a battery-equipped solar streetlighting system. But it is the first one I have ever noticed. How much potential is there for such systems? could Ecolite.ma some day be a household word in, say, Arizona or Andalusia? Well, remember this: Daytime temperatures on the edge of the Sahara can exceed 55 degrees Celsius (135 degrees F). It is not your usual environment.

In a series of articles this week and last, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times have reported that carbon prices in the European Trading System (ETS) are falling so low, there is no longer any real incentive for big economic players to cut greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and some players are cancelling plans to adopt lower-carbon technologies. The Journal reports for example that utilities in the Czech Republic, Poland and Germany are reconsidering plans to phase out coal generating plants.

Since reaching a high of 28.70 euros a tonne (around US $40/t) before the world financial crisis, the price of a carbon emission allowance has dropped back to as low as 3 euros per tonne--about $4/t--a fraction of what would be needed to spark GHG-reducing investments. A decision by the European Parliament to withhold 900 million emission allowances over the next five years has not done much so far to shore up the ETS. The price of allowance remains barely above 5 euros/tonne, a third of what it was just 18 months ago.

Commenting on an earlier vote by the European Parliament's environment committee supporting the idea of curtailing issuance of allowances, a reporter for the Financial Times wrote, "It’s curious that in this little corner of European Union co-ordination, a little good news doesn’t even provide a brief rally; prices fell more than 20 per cent after news of the vote."

Among those who are hostile to the idea of taking aggressive action to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, it's been fashionable to poke fun at the European Union, its seemingly hapless cap-and-trade system, and the apparent gap between the EU's ambitions and its actual performance. This is unfair and unreasonable from most points of view. As documented repeatedly by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Europe--and for all practical purposes Europe alone--has made substantial progress toward achieving the goals enunciated in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. And the failures of the ETS are not intrinsic to the cap-and-trade concept as such, but arise merely from the procedures adopted to implement the trading system.

One might suppose, given strong European traditions of rational bureaucratic government going back to the era of "enlightened despotism" in the eighteenth century that the number of emissions allowances issued in the ETS would be a direct function of what the ETS is supposed to achieve: Europe has said it wants to cut its collective emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels, and so shouldn't the number of allowances be geared to get exactly that job done? In fact, the number of allowances is agreed to in back-room haggling among the Union's 27 member states. So far, the eastern European countries that depend heavily on coal generation and the German steel industry (photo)--to name the two most important players--have seen to it that allowances are so generous nobody really needs to do anything different from business as usual.

If there is a silver lining in this cloud it could be this: Until the middle of the last decade, Europe was making rapid strides to cut emissions, while Americans were sitting on their hands; but in the last eight years, despite U.S. distaste for Kyoto, the United States has sharply cut emissions while Europe's performance has deteriorated. So, from a diplomatic point of view, we now have a somewhat level playing field, which may make for warmer feelings and more constructive attitudes in upcoming climate negotiations.

Image: Ulrich Baumgarten/Getty Images

After Hurricane Sandy smarty-pants pundits like me suggested that maybe what we need right away is not a smarter, more agile grid but, rather, a really tough dumb grid. Indisputably, technologies integrating digital communications and computing into power system infrastructure were materializing much more slowly than their proponents had predicted, and measurable benefits were hard to find. But if the darkest is just before dawn, as the saying goes, then perhaps now the smart grid may at last be coming over the horizon.

• At the beginning of this week, Forbes energy blogger William Pentland took note of the acquisition by Toshiba of Consert, which he described as a San Antonio startup "chasing hard-to-tap value at the intersection of home energy automation and wholesale power markets." Pentland observed that Consert's demand-management system Virtual Peak Plant (or VPP) will be a nice complement to Toshiba's μEMS, a grid management system that responds to changes in consumption as monitored in real time. Earlier, Toshiba acquired the top smart meter maker Landis+Gyr.
• In an earlier post, Pentland cited several reputable studies indicating that "engineered resilience" and distributed smart power will be a big part of the answer to the growing problem of major outages and mega-disasters like Sandy. Quoting numbers from the University of Minnesota's Massoud Amin, editor of the IEEE's smart grid e-newsletter, Pentland noted that the number of big U.S. outages more than doubled from the first half of the last decade to the second.
• In the latest issue of the IEEE newsletter, published on Wednesday this week, the U.S.  Department of Energy's Joseph Paladino describes some recent findings from 99 projects initiated four years ago in DOE's $7.8-billion Smart Grid Investment Program. Though some of the benefits—lower energy use and costs as a result of demand-response programs, for example—will strike some readers as modest, at least some of those benefits are now measurable and predictable. Utilities and energy companies will proceed with larger investments, knowing more about the returns they can expect.

Not least among the last weeks' positive indicators: President Obama's plea in his State of the Union address for a "self-healing grid," made in the context of his overall pitch for much greater spending for infrastructure improvement. It was nice to hear, especially coming so soon after the outgoing energy secretary's farewell talk, in which Chu neglected to include the words "smart grid" even once in his 3750-word peroration.

Photo: iStockphoto

Environmentalists and clean energy proponents rejoiced a few weeks ago when President Obama devoted all of eight or nine sentences (depending where you choose to drop some punctuation) on climate change and energy issues during his relatively short second inaugural address. Last night during a much more extensive State of the Union speech, the President went even longer, and with at least a few more specifics, on his plans to combat what many see as an issue that will define his second term. The final count: 34 sentences, give or take.

Other than length, the big change in Obama's rhetoric on energy lies in his willingness to directly confront its relationship to climate change, now that he doesn't need to run for anything ever again. In the past, Obama touted clean energy for its ability to create jobs. This time, he began by noting that the United States produces "more oil at home than we have in 15 years" and then went right at the climate problem:

"But for the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change. Now, it’s true that no single event makes a trend. But the fact is the 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15. Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods—all are now more frequent and more intense. We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science—and act before it’s too late."

Unfortunately, the speech was still somewhat short on hard, detailed plans. Obama did say, though, that if Congress fails to enact a "market-based solution to climate change"—meaning, something resembling the cap-and-trade bill that passed the House in 2009 but then died in the Senate—he will take executive action to address the issue himself. Of course, there is essentially zero chance of Congress getting its act together on this issue (or most issues, these days), so presumably executive action it is.

When U.S. President Barack Obama nominates successors to outgoing Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lisa Jackson, pundits will naturally scrutinize the biographies of the proposed successors for hints to future policy. In the case of the EPA, the main issue will be whether the new administrator intends to aggressively use the agency's authority to regulate greenhouse gases without having to go to Congress for a cap-and-trade bill. One example of a workaround the agency might set up is a trading system to reward more efficient and less polluting energy generation.

Given the huge range of matters subject to the Department of Energy's purview, evaluation of a newly nominated DOE secretary will be a more challenging task. I suggest focusing on those technologies notably unmentioned or underplayed in Chu's remarkably voluminous farewell statement to energy department staff: the smart grid, advanced nuclear reactors, electric and hybrid-electric cars, batteries and energy storage, and "clean coal" or carbon separation and sequestration.

As noted in an earlier post, Chu mentioned the smart grid not once in his farewell remarks, despite the heavy emphasis put on advanced metering and related technologies in the president's 2009 stimulus program. While there are good reasons to be disappointed in what those public investments have yielded so far, surely some benefits deserved to be noted and built upon.

Though the president always has supported nuclear energy, reactors are mentioned only twice in Chu's speech—once in the context of safety simulations, and once in connection with disposing of Soviet-era fissile materials.Advanced reactors weren't mentioned at all. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been looking at ideas for small, modular, intrinsically safer reactors; surely there is a role for DOE here as well.

What about electric vehicles and advanced cars generally? Chu mentioned a DOE-sponsored plug-in hybrid challenge, but otherwise had nothing to say about research on more energy-efficient vehicles. The same goes for energy storage, where he confined himself to two brief mentions in the context of newly created R&D centers,

As for carbon separation and storage, while I'm not wildly optimistic about the prospects for making it technically viable and economically attractive, doesn't the energy department need to do more get us off the dime in this area?

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The U.S. Northeast's Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI, or "Reggie") has proposed that the region shoot for a 45 percent reduction in greenhouse gas levels next year. The target is not quite as ambitious as it appears at first glance, because it reflects greater-than-expected decreases to date, which have been associated with the economic slump and fast-growing contributions of renewable energy sources. A year ago, as reported here, the RGGI greenhouse gas trading system had already registered a 30 percent reduction since its launch three years previously, at the beginning of 2009. Still, the higher target for next year is expected to drive the price of emissions allowances up five-fold, to roughly $10 per ton, roughly the level they are going for at present in California's newly inaugurated cap-and-trade system.

The strong progress made by the two principal U.S. carbon trading systems, and the fact that total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are at an 18-year low, could not come at a better time. In Europe, where by far the most progress had been made in cutting emissions in the decade following adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, headway is at a standstill and emissions are on the rise some places. Because of Fukushima's impact and decisions to accelerate the phase-out of nuclear energy, coal generation of electricity is sharply on the rise. Lignite, the dirtiest kind of coal, accounted for more than a quarter of Germany's electricity generation last year, up from 22.7 percent the year before. Hard coal, also up, accounted for 19.1 percent.

Because of this higher dependence on coal in some of the largest European economies, at just the time the United States is relying much less on coal and more on natural gas plus renewables, U.S. coal miners are able to make up for lower domestic demand with higher exports. So, in a sense, the United States is coming out ahead or even both ways: In global climate negotiations, it will now be at a moral advantage because of its strong five-year performance in cutting greenhouse gases, after years of coming across to other countries as the global slacker; yet at the same time its energy exporters are making out like bandits.

Despite the cancelling effects of more coal dependence abroad and less here, the situation also is a net plus for the world as a whole in terms of climate diplomacy. The world's two foremost economic areas--the United States and Europe--have both now made substantial progress in trimming emissions. That will mean stronger pressure on fast-growing less-advanced countries like China and India to get on board too.

Photo: Anna Lubovedskaya/iStockphoto