Energywise

South Africa's painful electricity shortages suggest that the wealthiest country on the African continent is a technological laggard. That's not so. Indeed, despite the well-publicized woes of Eskom, the national electricity supplier, South Africa is an exception to the general rule that sub-Saharan Africa is impoverished scientifically and technology, at least in the realm of originality.

In the case of South Africa, the legacy of European immigration and the now-dismantled apartheid regime meant that the country maintained an active and dynamic scientific and engineering sector. Because of trade sanctions, South African technologists tended to create their own versions of everything, including nuclear weapons.

While the country dismantled its weapons when the apartheid system collapsed in 1994, South Africa remains a leader in nuclear power, owning much of the intellectual property for an exciting new approach to reactor design called "pebble bed." The country also has two operating nuclear reactors that provide 6% of the country's electricity. Uranium is also mined from South Africa.

Westinghouse, the leading American producer of nuclear reactors (and now owned by the Japanese), is part owner of the South Africa research entity devoted to commercializing the pebble-bed concept. The design approach, which is considered inherently safer and more economical than existing reactor designs, is also being tested in the U.S. and China.

South Africa's government said earlier this year that it plans to fund the construction and operation of as many as 24 pebble-bed reactors relying on its home-grown designs. The rollout would be the world's largest of its type, and evidence of continued strength of South African energy technology. The technology behind pebble bed was originally developed in Germany, but when the Germans shut off funding for nuclear energy development in their own country they sold off their innovations.

At the time of South Africa's purchase more than a decade ago, pebble bed looked like a useless curiosity but the revival of nuclear energy in general has cast a new light on the value of South Africa's nuclear expertise. And so has the country's electricity shortage.

[By the way, Spectrum featured an article by J. Weil in 2001 about pebble-bed reactor technology]

Plug-in mania has an influential new fan: the California Air Resources Board, which looks set to elevate plug-ins several notches in its zero-emissions vehicle (ZEV) mandate.

The ZEV directive requires car manufacturers to market ultraclean and emissions-free vehicles (or buy credits earned by others making such vehicles). The California Air Resources Board unleashed intense lobbying this winter among battery EV start-ups, major automakers, hydrogen fuel-cell developers, and coalitions promoting plug-in hybrids when it promised to tweak the level of credits earned by various technologies. From the Air Resources Board staff proposal released late last week, plug-ins appear to be the big winners.

Presently the ZEV credit ratios favor fuel cells and offer relatively little help for plug-ins. The staff proposal would change this by enabling manufacturers to meet most of their ZEV requirements through 2014 with plug-in hybrids and hydrogen combustion vehicles. While not pure ZEVs like battery EVs and fuel cell vehicles, the California regulators bet that manufacture of plug-ins will yield components and infrastructure that will hasten the day when the pure EVs go mainstream.

"The goal continues to be to accelerate the development of pure ZEVs," says Air Resources Board member Daniel Sperling, director of the University of California, Davis, Institute of Transportation Studies. Sperling says promoting plug-in hybrids is the "only realistic way" to push car makers forward in light of the continued high cost of batteries and fuel cells.

Sperling and his fellow Air Resources Board members will take up the staff proposal after a public hearing in Sacramento scheduled for March 27-28.

Meanwhile, Arizona regulators seem to be feeling considerably more bullish about the viability of pure electrics. The Arizona Republic reports that Airzona's Department of Environmental Quality has drafted rules mandating that 11 percent of all cars sold in the state must be ZEVs from the 2011 model year. In 2018 the mandate would jump to 16 percent.

By far the most important project in the U.S. government's carbon sequestration program came to a screeching end on 31 January with the announcement by the U.S. Secretary of Energy that the department was pulling the plug on FutureGen. The basic idea of FutureGen, which goes back more than a decade, was to develop an integrated carbon-free coal gasification technology, where the gas would drive electric power turbines, separated hydrogen might power fuel cells, and the captured carbon dioxide would be permanently disposed of in geologic repositories. With the demise of FutureGen, whether it turns out to be somewhat exaggerated or not (as Mark Twain once said of his own alleged death), all the more significant is the clean coal plant being built in eastern Germany, with an alternative carbon-capture technology called oxyfuel.

That project will be the first larger-than-laboratory-scale electric power plant in which the carbon is captured for permanent disposal.

The East German plant, located in a town called Schwarze Pumpe, not far from the Czech and Polish borders, is a joint project of the Swedish national energy company Vattenfall and the French power engineering company Alstom. At that demonstration facility, which is to be completed this spring, nitrogen will be separated from air pre-combustion, so that post-combustion flue gases consist essentially of just water and carbon dioxide. The initial air separation process is costly in terms of both energy and money, but the dividend comes with the simplification of the CO2 removal process.

As for FutureGen, the concept for the plant was outlined in a 1997 report by the energy panel of the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), the last-such top-level look at long-term U.S. energy policy (if one excepts the controversial 2001 Cheney report, which was produced behind closed doors, without the same kind of open scientific review). The Bush administration adopted the project in 2003, defining it as a public-private partnership, in which a group of private energy companies would pay for the gasification and generation plant, while the government, would cover the carbon capture and disposal costs. In the meantime, however, the estimated cost of the project has soared from about $1 billion to $1.8 billion, the Energy Department says.

A site for FutureGen had been selected in Illinois, and so the department's decision to shelve the project drew howls of protest from several of the state's heavyweight political leaders, including presidential candidate Barack Obama and Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the Democratic Party's most influential strategist. Like a Phoenix, the project may of course rise again--but by the time it does, Vattenfall's Schwarze Pumpe plant will be up and running, and follow-on commercial-scale oxyfuel projects will likely be well along.

Last year, the best-known and hardest-charging company commercializing the so-called high-temperature superconductors, American Superconductor Corporation (AMSC), came under fire in connection with a contract to upgrade the New York City power system. The basic idea, which was new and untested, was that by using superconducting cable in the New York distribution grid, not only could the capacity of the system be increased up to ten-fold, but the intrinsic properties of superconductors could be exploited to damp excess currents.

AMSC and its subcontracting partner in the plan, New York's Con Edison, obtained a commitment to fund the project from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. DHS saw the project, which it dubbed Hydra, as an opportunity to demonstrate technology that could be used to fortify grids against breakdown and attack everywhere in the country. But because of a pattern of sole-source contracting between AMSC and U.S. government agencies, and the role of one person in particular in negotiating such contracts for the government, Project Hydra came into the sights of Representative John Dingell (D-Mich.), surely the most feared investigator on Capitol Hill.

AMSC had obtained contracts to develop superconducting electric motors for the U.S. Navy, when Rear Admiral Jay M. Cohen was Chief of Naval Research, and now this very same Cohen was giving AMSC another big contract as a research director at DHS!

AMSC and Project Hydra appear now to have survived Dingell's challenge. The company announced yesterday that DHS has signed a contract with AMSC to proceed with demonstration of the company's Secure Super Grids technology in New York, using its second-generation "344" cable. DHS, having already paid AMSC $3.8 million under a letter agreement, will now pay up to a total of $25 million to complete the project, contingent on demonstrated performance, step-by-step.

What Dingell may have missed, as emphasized in the analytic story IEEE Spectrum published about Project Hydra last November, is that this is basically a research and development project: as it proceeds, new technology will be developed and tested, and only if it pans out at each stage will the next phase of the project be funded. But if Dingell is confused, he's not to be blamed. The company itself, seeking to project a confident image and to persuade the world that this is a wholly done deal, has obscured the project's experimental character.

Remember the "hydrogen highway?" This was California Governor Arnold's Schwarzenegger's vision back in 2004. He proclaimed that, by 2010, California highways would be lined with hydrogen fueling stations, some 20 miles apart throughout the state, enabling hydrogen-powered cars and buses to travel freely. He signed an executive order setting up a private and public partnership to implement that vision.

2010 is almost here, and it hasn't exactly worked out. (We didn't think it would; IEEE Spectrum called the effort a "loser" in its January 2004 issue.) At its peak in 2006, the state had 24 stations; now it has 23, next month that number is expected to drop to 22 when PG&E closes a San Francisco station. While a few new ones opened, a few also closed. And several planned were never built. The California Air Resources Board agreed to spend about $1 million each to fund stations built by the San Diego Unified School District and the California State University-Los Angeles; both projects fell through. And PG&E just turned down $1.5 million to build a hydrogen refueling station in San Carlos.

The Air Resources Board hasn't given up; it's putting out a call for proposals for a total of $7.7 million of funding already set aside for new hydrogen fuel stations or upgrades. And the new state budget asks for $6 million more for such projects. But will there be any takers?

Field notes from Spectrum executive editor Glenn Zorpette, now on assignment in Iraq:

1-15-08

Traveled to the al Quds power station today from the Green Zone. I made that same trip two and a half years ago and the experience became the lead of the story I wrote about electrical reconstruction. "We had an incident, the engineer tells me."

Today we didn't have an incident, and that fact seemed to pleasantly surprise the handful of Army Corps of Engineers officers and civilians on the trip. The territory between the Green Zone and Quds (or, as the military insists on calling it, Qudas) has become somewhat more dangerous in the last couple of years. The trip to Quds is always a bit of a risk; it goes through dense, urban territory in north Baghdad, with lots of tall buildings and alleyway escape routes lining the travel route. There are many choke points, check points, and traffic tie ups.

About a mile past the checkpoint out of the Green Zone, we saw a young man in a red hooded sweatshirt, standing on a high concrete platform, looking at us, waving a black flag and looking in a different direction, and then looking at us again. Look at armored convoy, wave black flag, look at armored convoy, wave black flag. I'm not a security expert but I didn't think that was good. The Navy Commander who is the executive officer of the Army Corps division in charge of Quds seemed fairly sure we were going to get hit. He's survived more than a dozen IED attacks so I figured his judgment is probably pretty good on this subject. But we weren't hit. Blissfully event-free.

I was reassured, sort of, by the fact that this time we were in Revas vehicles, rather than in armored Toyota Land Cruisers, which is what we were in last time. The Revas are made in South Africa. They have a V-shaped hull to deflect an IED blast outward, and

they're much higher off the ground than humvees. They also have level 6B armor. I have no idea what that is. But the security team leader, from Aegis, said it in a way that was clearly meant to be reassuring. So I took that cue. The Revas also have two canopies on the roof where gunners get a very good look at the surrounding situation.

So we made it to Quds, and I saw dozens of diesel fuel trucks, and I knew what that meant. They got the LM6000 turbines running! Or at least a couple of them, anyway. In one of the lousier decisions of Iraqi electrical reconstruction, somebody decided to put four GE LM6000 turbines at Quds. LM6000s like natural gas, or highly pure diesel fuel. Neither is available at Quds.

The diesel fuel they've been trucking in is fairly crummy, and the LMs haven't run much so far. But lately they've gotten either better fuel or figured out how to operate the plant's fuel filters, so two of the four LM6000s are running, and adding about 150 megawatts to Baghdad's power supply. Last time I was there, none of them were running. It was starting to look like none of them were ever going to run.

It's good news that two of the turbines are running, but the bad news is that just those two units consume diesel fuel about as fast as it can be brought to the plant. There were about 35 tanker trucks in a queue that snaked all around the Quds facility today (the line can't go outside the facility because it's not really safe out there). Those 35 trucks hold one day's worth of fuel for the two turbines, I was told.

One of the Corps of Engineers assistant site managers, from Roswell, New Mexico, was surprised earlier that day when her Iraqi workers slaughtered a lamb to celebrate some milestone in an ongoing expansion project to add two more turbine-generators to the Quds facility.

Let me digress a bit here to say there's some machine gun fire that's pretty audible now outside. There have been about half a dozen short bursts. I suspect it's some sort of training, because I'm on the Victory Base Complex, surrounded by miles and miles of blast walls, razor wire, checkpoints, and countless other security measures.

Back to that Navy commander who is the executive officer of the Corps of Engineers group that oversees Quds, the guy who survived all those IED attacks. He survived those attacks while traveling through extremely dangerous territory to construction sites where Iraqi workers were building health clinics, with Corps funding, for women and children in Iraq. One of the IEDs that hit him was an EFP, an explosively formed penetrator, a particularly dreaded form of IED. It forms a heavy projectile of semimolten metal that travels at speeds great enough--more than twice the speed of a rifle round--to penetrate armor. I've seen the holes it leaves in armor--they're like the clean, perfect holes that Bugs Bunny used to leave in the cartoons, rabbit ears and all.

He and the other people in his vehicle survived that EFP attack, but they were all gravely injured. He had to be airlifted to Germany and he needed 600 internal stitches to stop his internal bleeding. And then he came back here.

I asked him why. He said it was because of the feeling he got when he saw women and children using the health clinics he set up. Yeah, go ahead and call that mawkish. But only after you've earned the right to do so by surviving a horrendous EFP hit.

--GZ

In the streets of every electricity-starved African city, the new meeting place is the local phone charger--the man with an outlet who can rejuvenate your mobile phone â''Ã'¶ for a price.

More mobile phones are getting charged in Africa than ever. In recent years, phone usage has exploded. Today nearly one in five people own a phone, from nearly nothing 10 years ago. The World Bank, which supplies these statistics, calls Africa's mobile phone market, "the fastest growing" in the world.

The spread of mobile telephony is one of the great development success stories, one largely driven by private investment now totaling in the billions of dollars. The only trouble is that supplies of electricity haven't grown nearly as fast as dial tones.

Some of the world's leading telecom companies are trying to address Africa's electricity gap through clever innovations. Motorola tested both solar-powered and wind-power cell-phone base stations in sunny Namibia, in southwestern Africa in 2007.

The idea is that rural Africans, about half of whom live off the grid with no hope of getting connected anytime soon, at least will be able to make a phone call. In African cities, mobil-telephony service is excellent, but frequent electricity outages leave people--rich and poor-- scrambling to charge their phone batteries.

Enter Wasswa Abbey, owner of a dusty storefront in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Kampala, the capital of Uganda. Abbey runs recreation and after-school programs for children in his neighborhood. On the side he's begun to charge mobile phones for people who don't get electricity delivered to their homes. "This is a slum," he says of his neighborhood. "Many people don't have a place to charge their phones."

A complete charge costs about 30 cents, about the price of a one-minute phone call.

When I met Wasswa at his shop, he was charging five phones, a good day for him, he says. For his customers, trust is key. He is well known in his neighborhood for his community work. "Customers trust me not to use their phones while charging," he says.

Up the street, on a second meeting, Wasswa, took me on a walk of his neighborhood. We passed a few other shops offering charging and then we came upon a construction site: a new cell tower rising up a mere 100 yards from his shop.

Yet there are new electricity sources coming into the neighborhood, which highlights one difference between the new technology of wireless telephony and the older system of electricity transmission. Mobile phone calls are managed by digital computers and theft of calling time is virtually impossible. Customers buy prepaid cards and then run down their "units" like clockwork. By contrast, electricity is carried over wires. The juice can be stolen; so can the equipment. In poor neighborhoods, many customers don't pay their electricity bills. Prep-paid services are only beginning, and they require smarter, more expensive meters, which themselves are targets for thieves.

Investment in mobile phone services rises, while investment in electricity stagnates.

And another customers drops off a phone for Wasswa to charge.

Anaheim, California--Is EVS already dead? That was just one of the questions that's been debated late into the night here at the Electric Vehicle Symposium (EVS-23).

Among the plenaries, the workshops, the auditorium sessions (on no fewer than six parallel tracks, damnit), the small lecture series, the lunches, the receptions, and of course gallons of urn coffee are hallway chats, sidebar conversations, and random comments.

So here's my list of factoids, comments, questions, suppositions, and a bit of opinion (broken into two parts, 'cause there were so many). They've been gathered from three intensive days of discussions with engineers, technologists, researchers, and executives. They were from automakers, battery companies, research institutions, regulatory bodies and more.

Consider this food for thought on the state of electric vehicles today:

- Is EVS already dead? Many of us have debated whether, within 10 years, there'll simply be no need for EVS. By then, its topics will routinely be part of mainstream auto and utility industry conferences. When Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) conferences start running tracks on energy storage alternatives, and electric-drive systems⿿ÿ¶it's over. Some say five years, some say 10. But where will the true believers and garage converters go then?

- Could it be? Did Toyota goof, big-time? It's starting to appear that they initially put their money on the wrong lithium-ion chemistry. Their long-term partner Panasonic, which makes nickel-metal-hydride battery packs for the Prius and other Toyota hybrids, has most experience with cobalt-based lithium-ion batteries--the ones behind those videos and pictures of flaming laptops you've seen on TV or YouTube. Most automakers view them as simply too risky to use in vehicles. GM, on the other hand, put out solicitations to dozens of battery makers for its Volt battery pack, got back 13 proposals, and issued development contracts to Continental (using new vendor A123's iron-nanophosphate cells) and to another new vendor, Compact Power Inc. (using LG Chem's manganese spinel cells). Perhaps tight kereitsu relationships aren't so useful when transformative technologies come along?

- Toyota has clearly changed its tune on plug-in hybrids. The company expressed polite skepticism on the topic as recently as six months ago. But as part of the opening plenary here, Koei Saga, the senior general manager in the company's hybrid-vehicle system engineering division, said clearly, "We think a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle is the most practical approach for normal-size passenger cars." On Sunday and Monday the company offered drives in its own Prius plug-in conversion (adding a second NiMH battery pack to the standard one, for an all-electric range of 7 to 10 miles). Gratuitous advice to GM, Ford et al.: Never, ever count Toyota out--as many of you have learned, painfully, over the last three decades.

- Fun factoid: According to a GM insider, for a short while the project now known as Chevrolet Volt was internally called the EV2. But the firestorm around the movie Who Killed the Electric Car? gave that name too many unfortunate connotations, hence Volt.

I'm headed back home in a few hours. If anyone has specific follow-up questions they'd like me to explore, please contact me: J V [dot] spectrum [at] ieee [dot] org.

Dec. 6, 2007--As representatives of the world's nations meet in Bali to discuss how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012, the U.S. Congress is taking actions that will significantly enhance the credibility of American negotiators. Last night, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee approved a bill that would establish a cap-and-trade system to cut emissions and accelerate adoption of new technology. By the end of this week, the House is expected to vote on an energy bill that would boost average fuel efficiency standards for vehicles from 25 miles per gallon to 35 miles per gallon by 2020.

Even if adopted by Congress, to be sure, both bills may end up getting vetoed by President George W. Bush. But they still will establish a legislative agenda for the coming years and outline a platform on which the Democratic Party's candidate for president¬¿whoever that turns out to be--surely will stand.

The House energy bill raising fuel efficiency standards, which may also include a renewable energy mandate requiring the nation's utilities to generate some fraction of their electricity from green sources by some year in the next decade, is considered a victory for Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat. Though the House and Senate leadership has dropped sharply in the public's estimation since Democrats took control at the beginning of last year, Pelosi had to overcome substantial opposition in her own party to obtain the higher fuel efficiency standards--in particular, opposition from Rep. John D. Dingell Jr. of Michigan, an ardent and very powerful advocate of the U.S. auto industry's interests. In recent years, efforts to increase fuel efficiency standards have been stymied as much by jobs-oriented Democrats as by profits-minded Republicans.

The climate bill, America's Climate Security Act or S. 2191, also is a substantial legislative accomplishment. Co-sponsored by Democratic Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut and Republican Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, the bill emerged last summer as the favored compromise among a handful of similar proposals. The bill covers all sources that emit more than 10,000 tons of carbon in the electric power, industrial, and transportation sectors, and would cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions back to 1990 levels by 2020 and by 65 percent by 2050. Though the immediate targets fall far short of Kyoto, which required the United States to cut its emissions by 7 percent from their 1990 level by 2012, the bill would commit the country to the principle of binding emissions reductions. With many countries failing to meet Kyoto targets, sincere intentions now count for as much or more than actual immediate success.

Useful summary materials describing S. 2191 can be found at Lieberman's website, including semi-independent assessments. An important issue to watch as the bill wends its way through Congress is how existing big emitters of carbon are handled when emissions allowances are distributed and auctioned: experts like Granger Morgan, a professor of electrical engineering and public policy, have warned that "grandfathering" big coal plants built in recent years--that is, giving them emissions allowances for free, based on their historic emissions--would reward their owners for having made short-sighted investment decisions.

For background on U.S. bills--some 200 in all have been introduced in the last couple of years--Google on Congressional Research Service, climate, and the names Jonathan L. Ramseur and Brent D. Yacobucci. Though CRS reports are done strictly for Congress and are not meant for public distribution, many of them get leaked and end up being accessible online.

The California Clean Tech Open, a competition for start-ups, awarded $100,000 in prizes to six companies this fall. Selected from 130 entries in six categories, the companies presented practical technologies that clearly have good chances of commercial success. But none of them captured my imagination quite so much as some of the winners in 2006, the competition's first year, like Kiteship , a company building helium-filled sails that pull giant freighters, or GreenVolts, a solar energy company that got its start when its founder was sailing to New Zealand and discovered that he could help island villages by repairing discarded solar panels. GreenVolts actually received a special award this year, the first "Alumni Award," for outstanding business achievement. GreenVolts is working with PG&E to install what will be the largest concentrating solar array in the world, a 2-megawatt facility in Tracy, Calif. The company also announced that investors have committed $10 million to the company.

This year's winners:

Lucid Design Group won the AMD Smart Power Award for "Building Dashboard," a PC-based tool that allows homeowners to monitor electricity and water use and solar electricity production in real time.

NiLA Inc. took the Energy Efficiency Award for an LED-based stage set lighting system.

1-Solar's low-priced long-life inverters for photovoltaic systems received the Renewables Award.

BuildFast's House Kit, a highly insulated, earthquake resistant, easy to assemble building intended for low-income and post-disaster housing, won the Google Green Building Award.

Synchromatics, a company that developed a bus tracking system that uses GPS and cell phone location to make speed, location, and other data to people operating transit fleets, won the Lexus Transportation Award.

And Microvi Biotech LLC took the Air, Water, & Waste Award with its biotech based waste-free water treatment technologies.

This year's competition featured the youngest team to catch clean-tech start-up fever. Sunergy (formerly Calsunergy) from Santa Clara, Calif., designed a solar system that concentrates the light coming into the cells and simultaneously uses the heat from that light for electricity generation. The CEO, Alec Boyer, is in eighth grade; the rest of the management team is in fifth or sixth grade. The competition has no age limits. Sunergy didn't make the finals, but still plans to announce their first product in 2008, targeted at providing energy in the developing world.