Energywise

The most impressive thing about standing at the foot of a Vestas V47 wind turbine—or looking out from inside the turbine tower itself—is the thought that this model isn't even all that big. The V47 turbine at the American Wind Power Center, a wind energy museum in Lubbock, Texas, has a capacity of 660 kilowatts. But it is dwarfed by the 3- and 5-megawatt turbines that populate modern large wind farms.

The V47, which provides far more power than the center itself uses (they sell most of it back to the grid), in turn dwarfs the dozens of other windmills that dot the museum's grounds. There are modern micro-turbines spinning frantically atop 9-meter towers, plush varying sizes of the Eclipse-style windmills that used to dominate the Plains, and giant modern turbine blades lying on the ground, all centered around the massive V47 towering above. (To give a sense of its scale, the museum's staff says that when ice that forms on the blades in the winter begins to thaw, the turbine has been known to toss ice chunks clear across the property to the far side of the museum, dozens of meters away.)

But the most striking thing one notices during a visit here is that wind energy is clearly very, very old. Solar cells were conceived of in the 19th century, without practical uses for them until well into the 20th; the traditional windmills one imagines dotting the Dutch countryside were invented in the 12th century. The replica windmill at the Wind Power Center (top image) is a copy of one that would have been used in the 1600s.

We talk of wind energy as if it is a new thing that only needs to find its way off the ground in order to succeed, and of course there is always room to improve the technology. But harnessing the wind is not a new concept; wind turbines, especially land-based, industrial-scale devices, are a remarkably mature technology. The technical challenges as we scale up have more to do with the manufacturing process itself (i.e., it is not easy to make 80-meter long one-piece blades) than with figuring out how best to generate electricity from the wind. That is not to say, of course, that the wind industry isn't still nascent; if the government pulls support for wind farm development at the end of this year, as it is threatening to do, the boom in wind power could end up in a museum as well.

Hardly ever now is energy strategy brought up without climate being mentioned in the very next breath. But it was only 13 years ago when an international team produced a record of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations and temperatures going back 420 000 years (illustration above). That chart, and its descendants, has been one of the most powerful elements of climate science. Climate change alarmists emphasize the lockstep relationship it revealed between greenhouse gases and temperatures. Climate skeptics emphasize puzzling leads and lags in the record, which sometimes suggest that temperature fluctuations caused changes in greenhouse gases, rather than the other way around.

A complicating factor has been the absence of a definitive record of carbon-14 concentrations in the atmosphere going back beyond 12 000 years or so, a record that could help corroborate or refute various theories about the last glacial period. This week, in Science magazine, an international team published a definitive account of yearly changes in atmospheric C-14 levels going back more than 50 000 years, based on sediments from a Japanese lake.

C-14 decays at a fixed rate, so its concentration in organic fossils can be used to date them. The rub is that atmospheric concentrations of C-14 vary from time to time, for a number of reasons. The new chart should—among other things—provide greater resolution for the periods in which the last glaciation and deglaciation occurred. It may also yield a more fine-grained history of solar activity, a complicating explanatory factor in climate changes.

Over a period of 52 800 years, Japan's Lake Suigetsu was surrounded by trees whose leaves dropped into the waters every year, leaving readily distinguishable layers. Because the lake bottom has been still and oxygen-free, those deposits have remained undisturbed for tens of thousands of years. The concentrations of C-14 found in the leaf layers yields a record that will improve dating of organics by as much as hundreds of years, according to Science.

Measurement of the carbon-14 concentrations was done using two independent methods at leading labs in Wales and Germany, the authors said during a press conference earlier this week. The team, led by C. Bronk Ramsey of Oxford University and Takeshi Nakagawa of the University of Newcastle, included representatives of those labs.

Besides yielding a well-calibrated record of radiocarbon levels and local terrestrial changes, Suigetsu will  permit high-precision direct correlation with other terrestrial climate records, says Nakagawa. "This allows us to see how changes in climate in different parts of the world relate to one another, and particularly where there are leads and lags. Information like this is very useful for studying climate mechanisms."

In a companion commentary published in the current issue of Science, Paula J. Reimer notes that the new record "stretches back over the full length of the radiocarbon age scale"—that is, it covers the entire period in which C-14 fully decays. "The results are invaluable for improving the accuracy with which radiocarbon dates can be converted to the calendar time scale," she concludes.

Natural gas has no odor, but you can smell a leak thanks to the addition of an odorific mercaptam compound. Do carbon dioxide and other similarly odorless greenhouse gases (GHGs) require some analogous device to make their presence known and thus prompt evasive action? Yes, and for these ubiquitous gases, it will be a visual cue indicating the source and quantity of GHGs.

Consider the software unveiled this month by researchers at Arizona State University, which estimates GHG emissions in cities at the level of individual road segments and buildings. According to their report in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, the system mines public databases for broader statistics on energy use, local air pollution and traffic flows, then feeds those to traffic simulators and a set of building-by-building energy-consumption models. The resulting high-resolution maps present GHG emissions in a format that's both useful to policymakers  and comprehensible to the public.

“Cities have had little information with which to guide reductions in greenhouse gas emissions—and you can’t reduce what you can’t measure,” says Kevin Gurney, a senior scientist with ASU's Global Institute of Sustainability. “We can provide cities with a complete, three-dimensional picture of where, when and how carbon dioxide emissions are occurring.”

So far, maps for Indianapolis are complete and work is ongoing for Los Angeles and Phoenix. Ultimately the scientists hope to map CO2 emissions for all major cities across the United States.

ASU's effort to pinpoint emissions is part of a broader trend that I profiled in July for Earthzine, an online Earth observation journal, earlier this year. I noted a forerunner to ASU's software that has been operating for several years in Finland, where environmental consulting firm Benviroc’s CO2-raportti news portal presents weekly estimates of Finland's emissions by province and, increasingly, by city.

There are also more sophisticated systems that attempt to directly observe rather than estimate localized GHG emissions. Last year, for example, researchers at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology used ground station detection data to model how much trifluoromethane (a gas whose 100-year warming impact is 15 000-times greater than that of CO2) were being released from each country in Western Europe. Their findings differed substantially from the emissions levels reported to the U.N. by several countries; Italy's reports appear to be 10 times too low, likely due to undeclared emissions from a refrigerants factory near Milan.

Such top-down reporting thus does more than simply raise consciousness about sources and causes of GHGs. It provides an independent means of verifying GHG emissions, something that could be critical to reignite diplomatic efforts to control and ultimate drive down GHGs. As ASU's Gurney puts it: “These results may also help overcome current barriers to the United States joining an international climate change treaty.”

Jason Plautz of InsideClimate News has an interesting and relevant article this week drawing attention to recent studies of why coal's role in U.S. electricity generation is declining, an issue that has come to have an outsized place in the presidential campaign. One such study, from the Brattle Group, finds that 77 GW of coal generation will be retired by 2017 under very strict environmental policies; in a somewhat laxer regime, 59 GW will be retired.

Yes, that's right: whether Federal policy is strict or relaxed, 59-77 GW of coal generation--the equivalent roughly of 59-77 nuclear power plants--will be taken out of service in the next five years. What is more, says the Brattle Group, its estimate of retirements has grown by 25 MW since it previously reported on the issue two years ago, and that is almost entirely because of the revolution in unconventional gas and the precipitous drop in natural gas prices.

By comparison, Plautz observes, regulations issued by the Environmental Protection Agency have had a lesser impact on coal because their future is so uncertain: Two key EPA pollution rules—the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule and the Boiler Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) Rule—"are stuck in legal and regulatory limbo, and their impact on industry has actually lessened."

To be sure, those rules are not going to be stuck in regulatory limbo forever. The cross-state rule first was formulated in George Bush's administration and may, if things turn out that way, finally meet with Federal court approval in a Romney administration. Whether it is somewhat stricter or laxer, it will make burning coal even more unattractive relative to natural gas. As for MACT, the EPA claims that in its current guise it would produce economic and health benefits amounting to ten times the cost of its implementation, according to Plautz. It too, when it finally clears all hurdles, will make coal--or shall we say reveal coal as?—still less of a good deal.

Several years ago, Fuel Cell Energy of Danbury, Conn., got our attention with news it would supply South Korea's leading independent power producer with 25.6 MW of fuel cell power plants over a ten year period. Now Fuel Cell Energy is getting our attention again, with a press release this week announcing it will install a 2.8 MW fuel cell plant at a water treatment facility in San Bernardino County, California, where the generating plant will run on biogas from the facility and produce electricity without emitting a significant amount of carbon or much in the way of pollutants (photo, above).

The fuel cell plant, from Fuel Cell Energy's DFC3000 line, is being sold to project developer and investor Anaergia, a renewable-energy-from-waste company in Burlington, Ontario,  which will sell power and heat from the plant to California's Inland Empire Utilities Agency, under a 20-year purchase agreement. The agency is not allowed to emit the biogas generated in water treatment directly into the atmosphere, and flaring it would release carbon dioxide and pollutants. So using the biogas as the feedstock for a fuel cell array is a very nearly ideal solution, from an environmental point of view.

This approach to handling biogas from water treatment helps California meet its renewable portfolio standards and qualifies the project for certain financial advantages, as a public-private enterprise.

This isn't all from Fuel Cell Energy. Today, the company announced that plans are being finalized for a 58. 8 MW fuel cell power plant in South Korea, which will be the world’s largest stationary fuel cell generating facility; it will “utilize ultra-clean and efficient fuel cell power plants sold by POSCO Energy [Fuel Cell Energy's utility partner in Korea],  based on [the Connecticut company's] designs and fuel cell components." Yesterday the company said it would be entering the second phase of a carbon-capture-and-sequestration project, as part of a U.S. Department of Energy program.

In the project, says a company press release, "the exhaust of a coal fired plant is directed to the air intake of a DFC power plant, which separates and concentrates the CO₂ in the exhaust for commercial use or sequestration. Another side reaction that occurs when the fuel cell is used in this application is the destruction of some of the nitrogen oxide (NO_x) emissions in coal plant streams as the exhaust passes through the fuel cell. This reduces the cost of NO_x removal equipment for coal-fired power plant operators."

It is all good news for Fuel Cell Energy and for the future of power producing stationary fuels cells generally.

With gasoline prices sky-high and climate policy low on the public agenda, you may be wondering why coal has such a singular place in the two presidential candidates' contrasting energy platforms. Let's go, as they say in sportscasting, to the videotape.

A week ago, the Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration (EIA) released its quarterly coal report, highlighting dramatic trends in U.S. coal production, consumption, and exports. Coal production was 9.4 percent lower than the previous quarter and coal consumption was 16.3 percent below what it was during the same quarter a year ago.

Second quarter U.S. coal exports, on the other hand, were 39.1 percent higher than in the second quarter of 2011. Without that increase, U.S. production in the second quarter would have been 19.9 percent lower than in a year earlier, rather than 9.4 percent lower. All three elements of the coal picture--consumption, production, and exports—are highly sensitive to Federal policy.

Production is down, to be sure, partly because of market forces—that is to say, because natural gas is so plentiful and cheap. But its contraction also is a result in significant measure of the Obama administration's strict air pollution policies (which have made it much more expensive to operate and maintain older coal plants), and because of expectations that future carbon-reduction policies will make coal even more unattractive.

Exports may be equally dependent on Federal policy. Will the next president go all-out to see that infrastructure is put in place to facilitate future coal exports? What if, to take an improbable but not impossible scenario, a president decided to actively discourage coal exports, on the ground that is bad for the global climate to burn coal anywhere?

All that market uncertainty is music to the ears of politicians who have the means to reduce it. That's why coal money has been pouring into the coffers of the Romney campaign, and why highways in the coal-rich regions of western Pennsylvania, West Virginia and eastern Ohio are lined with billboards trumpeting the benefits of "clean coal." Even on commercial-free PBS television or NPR radio, you won't likely make it through an hour without hearing a message boosting coal.

Out west residents in northwest Washington are bitterly divided over a proposed coal export terminal to be built at Cherry Point (photo). Native American leaders have joined with environmentalists and green-minded politicians in opposition to the facility, which they believe would be inimical to fishing rights and sacred sites. In Wyoming, the likely source of any coal exported from a future terminal at Cherry Point, production was down 16.8 percent in the second quarter of this year.

In an effort to expose nuclear plant security flaws, 70 Greenpeace activists descended on two nuclear plants in Sweden and broke in. The state-owned plant operator Vattenfall says security measures worked as they were intended and all were detained. But, oops, six people managed to spend 28 hours inside the plants, just hanging out on the roof until they called the media and exposed themselves.

It was a dramatic display of nuclear security issues, and Greenpeace says it lays bare the serious security gaps in what are obviously very sensitive sites. One Greenpeace Nordic campaigner, Isadora Wronski, even tweeted from inside the Ringhals nuclear plant:

Unfortunately, a message to Wronski has not been returned, so we're guessing she has been detained without use of a phone at this point.

Another activist who managed to stay undetected in the nuclear site, Lauri Myllyvirta, wrote on the Greenpeace blog about what this breach shows: 

I took part in this demonstration to draw attention to how little nuclear companies care about the health and safety of people, and how little they do to protect reactors from accidents. The gaps in safety recently revealed about Swedish nuclear reactors are an absolute disgrace and a cause for alarm. Nuclear operators have not prepared for obstruction of seawater cooling, for snowfall, or earthquakes of a magnitude that can occur in Sweden.

Sweden has 10 reactors at three plants, providing about 40 percent of the country's electricity. A referendum more than 30 years ago approved a phase-out of nuclear power, but a 2010 parliamentary vote instead voted to replace existing plants with new ones. The Ringhals plant, one of two where activists managed to hide out, has had its share of mishaps in recent years. In June authorities stopped a truck heading to the plant that had explosives hidden inside. And in 2011, a fire broke out inside the plant because—I'm not kidding—someone left a wet vacuum cleaner in the wrong place. After the explosives incident earlier this summer all three of Sweden's nuclear sites were supposedly put on "high alert." But it doesn't seem to have been high enough to keep Greenpeace from having a nuclear slumber party.

Image via Isadora Wronski

Like many countries in Europe, Ireland has lofty renewable energy goals. One ambitious plan currently under discussion would feature construction of more than 700 wind turbines in central Ireland, with a capacity of 3,000 megawatts. The strange part, though, is that these turbines, built in the huge Bog of Allen, would be entirely independent of the Irish electricity grid. In fact, the entire point would be to send the power under the Irish Sea to the United Kingdom.

Element Power's proposed project, dubbed Greenwire, would cost as much as £6.5 billion ($10.4 billion). The "small clusters of onshore wind farms in the Irish Midlands" would connect to a set of redundant high-voltage direct current cables that would carry the power to two landing points in Pentir and Pembroke, both in Wales, where they would connect to the UK grid. If some financing issues involving energy subsides can be resolved, developers think the power could start flowing by 2018. They already have the grid connections in Wales secured for 2017 and 2018.

Element says the onshore turbines would save £7 billion for UK consumers compared to building an equivalent amount of wind power offshore, which is where much effort and money are being spent these days. It would also provide substantial income for Ireland, one of the countries central to the ongoing European Union debt crisis.

Ireland is also working hard to build up its own, not-for-export clean energy infrastructure. According to the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland's 2010-2015 strategic plan, the goal is to get half the country's power from clean sources within 15 years. Within 25 years, Ireland hopes to be totally green-powered and even be a net exporter of that clean energy, a goal that the Greenwire project would obviously support. The idea of moving renewable power around Europe has been gaining steam, including designs for an undersea grid that would connect Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, the UK, and Ireland. And there seems to be a growing trend toward producing the power in a place that needs less but has more and actually using it in a country with big needs and lower capacity; the primary example is Desertec, an effort to massively build out solar installations in North Africa and ship the power to demand centers across the Mediterranean in Europe.

Ireland's wind resource is substantial, so the country of only 4.5 million people could easily end up a net exporter of power. The Greenwire project is a good first step, and building in the bogs is apparently not a problem, though they may want to look out for bog bodies.

Image via Greenwire/Element Power

Last Friday, two substantial representatives of the Romney and Obama campaigns debated energy before an audience at MIT, with Technology Review editor Jason Pontin acting as moderator. Oren Cass, domestic policy director of Romney for President represented the Republican; Joseph Aldy, a former White House adviser on energy and the environment, spoke for the Democrat. The whole two-hour conversation was posted as a webcast today by EE News's EETV, along with a complete transcript.

The standoff initially took a predictable course, with Obama's surrogate asserting that the president's "all of the above" energy strategy has been associated with prodigious increases in domestic U.S. oil production and big cuts in oil imports, while Romney's man argued the private sector was largely responsible for those achievements—and that the improvements would have been even bigger if the Federal government had not got in the way. Romney's Cass took Obama to task for opposing development of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge and for temporizing on the Keystone pipeline, while Obama's Aldy accused Romney of being insensitive to the environment and to the needs and desires of future generations.

Overall, as far as that went, neither surrogate made an overwhelmingly convincing case that the other candidate would govern much differently as president. (Arguably, the odds are that Obama would eventually approve Keystone if re-elected, on the one hand, and that Romney would eventually find excuses for not opening ANWR to development, on the other.) To the extent the surrogates did differ significantly on oil and gas questions, the results seemed on the whole to be a draw, with one doing better on certain specifics, the other excelling on others.

Cass claimed Federal permitting was too slow, and that some states do much better, issuing permits in two weeks rather than a year; but Aldy asked if it is really in the nation's interest for us to have 50 different set of rules on drilling, even from business's point of view. On the question of what energy independence means, Aldy said it meant not having to worry about world oil prices when buying gasoline at the pump--but then proceeded to implicitly contradict himself, saying that fuel efficiency standards would make the future total cost of gasoline lower even if world oil prices were higher. (If cars are 50-percent more efficient, then even if world oil prices are twice as high, the cost of filling your car will stay the same.)

Regarding the Corporate Fuel Efficiency Standards (CAFE), which Obama has greatly strengthened, Cass may have scored a point when he said, rhetorically, that you should always be suspicious when the government says it's doing something to save you money; if the development supposedly being encouraged by the policy would save you money, he said, it will happen anyway.

It was on the four Cs--climate change and "clean coal"--that the really sharp, irreducible differences emerged. Cass asserted that the Obama administration is flatly anti-coal; tellingly, he argued that the administration's stated support for "clean coal" is essentially disingenuoous because it means the administration only supports coal if all carbon associated with combustion can be captured and sequestered. Since carbon cannot for all practical purposes be captured and sequestered, argued the Republic surrogate, Obama in effect opposes all coal.

In response to a probing question from Pontin, Cass said the Romney campaign does not see greenhouse gas reduction as a legitimate policy objective in the context of coal and clean coal, despite s Supreme Court Decision ordering EPA to regulate carbon emissions. Cass said coal should not be the exclusive focus of greenhouse gas reduction policy, and that the Clean Air Act should be modified to exclude regulating carbon as a pollutant, which Romney considers inappropriate.

Aldy, alluding evidently to statistics that are widely cited these days but evidently not yet available to the general public, said that U.S. greenhouse gas emissions have decreased more than any other country's in the last five years. That echoes a statement by the Colorado governor, at the time of the real presidential debate last week, that per capita U.S. greenhouse emissions are now back at 1990 levels. Aldy stressed the role of improved energy efficiency in bringing down emissions.

Cass repeatedly accused the Obama administration of having made an anti-coal agenda the centerpiece of its climate program. He said Romney does acknowledge that the world is warming, but is unsure about the magnitude and gravity of the trend. He said Romney favors a "no regrets" approach, with an emphasis on technology innovation. He wondered musingly what Obama's climate policy actually is.

Perhaps the most interesting two points in all that are these: (1) The Romney campaign does not see carbon capture and sequestration as an answer to greenhouse gas reduction; (2) it seems to think that the United States should have an explicit climate policy.

Five billion dollars over its original budget and years behind schedule, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) deserves to be recognized as perhaps the biggest and fattest white elephant of all time. The giant laser facility at Lawrence Livermore Lab in California first was conceived as a major project to demonstrate one of two alternative paths to harnessing the "energy of the stars" for power production, which is called inertial confinement fusion (the other, somewhat more credible path being magnetic confinement fusion).

Years ago, when the energy rationale for laser fusion began to look a little implausible and the projected cost of NIF already had ballooned from $2 billion to $4 billion, its promoters began to sell it to Congress and the Department of Energy as a means of simulation-testing nuclear weapons. The idea that the reliability of nuclear warheads could be evaluated by making laser beams collide in a microscopic point may never have seemed very plausible to the average layperson. As it happens, it didn't seem very plausible to most experts either: Richard Garwin, for decades the most highly regarded independent specialist on nuclear weaponry in the United States, told IEEE Spectrum six years ago that it would be "a mistake to assume that NIF experiments are going to be directly relevant to weapons testing.The temperatures in the NIF chamber are much lower than they are in actual nuclear weapons, and the amounts of material being tested are much smaller." But that didn't stop the U.S. Department of Energy from recommending the project and Congress from funding it.

With the total tab for NIF now running to an estimated $7 billion, the laboratory has been pulling out all the stops to claim success is just around the corner. At the beginning of July, it announced that 15 years of work had paid off in "an historic record-breaking laser shot," in which 192 beams delivered more than 500 trillion watts of peak power and 1.85 megajoules (MJ) of ultraviolet laser light to its target." The lab's leaders predict that "ignition"-—the point where the 192 lasers actually deliver more energy than they consume—could occur as early as next year.

But "next year" already is years behind schedule, and so far, as William Broad reported in the New York Times last week, NIF simply "has not worked." Donald L. Cook, an official at the National Nuclear Security Administration who oversees the laser project, told Broad—who for decades has been the Times’s leading reporter on all matters relating to nuclear weapons—that "we're going to settle into a serious investigation" of what has gone wrong.

Having sold the fusion facility in its current incarnation as a device for testing the reliability of nuclear weapons, the lab's leaders now are back to selling it as an energy machine. The lab's director told CBS's "60 Minutes" earlier this year that NIF's aim is to generate "clean, limitless power." He said that would free the United States of greenhouse gas emissions and dependence on Mideast oil, and that commercialization of the technology could begin in ten years.

Unbelievable! For decades the joke about magnetic confinement fusion--much the more plausible approach to harnessing the energy of the sun--is that the technology is always 20 years away. So when will inertial confinement fusion be delivering commercial electricity? That one is easy. Never.