Biofuel Breakthrough?

I have just been notified by my friends at Talk Polywell of a break through in the biologic generation of liquid fuels. The Globe and Mail reports on the breakthrough (although my friends at Talk Polywell think the report is garbled by a not entirely science literate reporter).

In September, a privately held and highly secretive U.S. biotech company named Joule Unlimited received a patent for “a proprietary organism” – a genetically adapted E. coli bacterium – that feeds solely on carbon dioxide and excretes liquid hydrocarbons: diesel fuel, jet fuel and gasoline. This breakthrough technology, the company says, will deliver renewable supplies of liquid fossil fuel almost anywhere on Earth, in essentially unlimited quantity and at an energy-cost equivalent of $30 (U.S.) a barrel of crude oil. It will deliver, the company says, “fossil fuels on demand.”

Not only that. They can tailor the organisms to produce specific fuels using only CO2, water (fresh or salt), and sunlight.

Joule says it now has “a library” of fossil-fuel organisms at work in its Massachusetts labs, each engineered to produce a different fuel. It has “proven the process,” has produced ethanol (for example) at a rate equivalent to 10,000 U.S. gallons an acre a year. It anticipates that this yield could hit 25,000 gallons an acre a year when scaled for commercial production, equivalent to roughly 800 barrels of crude an acre a year.

By way of comparison, Cornell University’s David Pimentel, an authority on ethanol, says that one acre of corn produces less than half as much energy, equivalent to only 328 barrels. If a few hundred barrels of crude sounds modest, recall that millions of acres of prime U.S. farmland are now used to make corn ethanol.

So is this reputable or just a bunch of scammers?

Joule acknowledges its reluctance to fully explain its “solar converter.” CEO Bill Sims told Biofuels Digest, an online biofuels news service, that secrecy has been essential for competitive reasons. “Some time soon,” he said, “what we are doing will become clear.” Although astonishing in its assertions, Joule gains credibility from its co-founder: George Church, the Harvard Medical School geneticist who helped initiate the Human Genome Project in 1984.

Well how about a look at what Biofuels Digest has to say.

In Massachusetts, Joule Unlimited has won a second key patent for its genetically modified cyanobacteria that directly convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into n-alkanes, and other diesel fuel molecules. The patent is the first awarded for a bacteria that makes fuel directly from water, sunlight and CO2, as opposed to organisms that make fuels from sugar or other cellulosic biomass, such as those engineered by LS9, Amyris or Solazyme.

As reported previously in the Digest, Joule is using a genetically modified form of cyanobacteria. Two weeks ago, Joule received its first key patent for “methods and compositions for modifying photoautotrophic organisms as hosts, such that the organisms efficiently convert carbon dioxide and light into n-alkanes."

Those reporting the death of the US as a world power may have been somewhat premature. Joule is reported to be building a prototype plant in Leander, Tex. At this stage of course nothing is certain. It will probably take a couple of years to prove this out and get the "bugs" out of the system. And probably a couple of decades to scale up the idea until the production becomes a significant fraction of US liquid fuel use. Time will tell.

Here is another possible approach:

Green Algae Strategy: End Oil Imports And Engineer Sustainable Food And Fuel

Welcome Instapundit readers.

Thanks to reader clazy here is a link to the Joule patents.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Alarmism

More than six billion humans face extinction every year. And every year millions die. If the death rate accelerates it is hard to predict the overwhelmingly catastrophic consequences.

Inspired by Ecologist who says:

More than 25% of flowers face extinction – many before they are even discovered

I wonder if he didn't spell his name wrong. Mistakes happen. I'm just wondering if it shouldn't be Ecoligist.

And where did I find this person? At the Guardian UK's enviro blog where they claim Germany will get all its energy from renewables (or France) by 2050.

I wonder what their plan is for days when the wind doesn't blow? Or days when it blows too strong? Solar I guess until the sun goes down.

Except for one minor problem, German subsidies will be shifted from solar to wind.

The German photovoltaic industry knew bad news was on the way, and it could have been worse. Last week, Germany’s Environment Ministry recommended a shift in subsidies from solar energy installations to offshore wind farms. The solar sector breathed a collective sigh of relief because the subsidy could have easily been significantly cut or completely eliminated. Nevertheless outraged, the German Solar Industry Association issued a statement complaining that its members were in “a sensitive phase of development and [face] harsh competition with Asia.”

With Germany's impressive track record of renewable energy legislation, we have to wonder if the future will cause fickle investors to flock to wind now that solar subsidies have been cut in Germany. On the surface, this might look like a victory for wind power, but if you do a bit of digging, a different picture emerges.

Germans get 13% of their energy from renewable sources, but little of this energy comes from offshore wind farms, and the technology has been struggling to get out of the starting blocks. "The development of the offshore wind industry has gone forward more slowly than expected," said Michael Schroeren, a spokesman for Germany’s environment ministry. "And the cost of these new technologies is also higher than was expected." By shifting subsidies from solar to wind, the German government is essentially signaling to the market that wind isn't doing that great, and that the technology needs all the help it can get.

And why is a subsidy even necessary? Simple. Solar and wind are not competitive without lower cost collectors and really low cost storage. Otherwise you have to keep coal and natural gas plants on hot standby to make up for instantaneous declines in output. And of course on a really good day when solar and wind are producing more electricity than needed the excess is just wasted. And you still need the fossil fuel plants on hot standby - just in case. So where is the subsidy for storage? Not in evidence.

It looks to me like a classic case of ignorant politicians leading a stupid people. Well, in the long run the Germans (and every one else for that matter) always get what they deserve. Let us hope they get it good and hard and soon. Pour encourager les autres. Nothing like a Greek tragedy to wake people up.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

A Solar Powered Government

A wind and solar powered government? I kid you not.

WASHINGTON — The federal government, the nation's largest energy consumer, will reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 28% over the next decade, the White House will announce today.

"It's a real opportunity to lead by example," says Nancy Sutley, chairwoman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). "And not just for the environment but to spur innovation and create jobs and savings."

The council says the reduction in energy use in the government's 500,000 buildings and 600,000 vehicles will be equal to taking 17 million cars off the road for a year or not consuming 205 million barrels of oil.

Some states, cities and companies have set similar goals, but environmentalists say the federal government's plan is ambitious. "It's a bold target," says Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council. "It's a great deal for the American taxpayers … and a great example for the rest of the country."

I'd like to see them get that up to 100%. Then the government could shut down in the winter when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow. Not to mention freezing in the winter without natural gas for building heat. Or burning in summer when there are electrical shortages from a lack of electricity for air conditioning. I could see a real exodus from government service with conditions like that. Why didn't the Republicans think of that?

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Tower Of Power

Here is an interesting development that may be good for continuous output solar power.

The company's approach uses calcium hydride, a simple, non-toxic salt.

Under Solar Fusion's plan, solar heat is collected by an array of heliostats directed to a central down mirror, eliminating the requirement for a power tower.

The heat, focused on a power head immersed in liquid calcium, chemically separates the calcium and hydrogen during the day. At night, the hydrogen, having been collected in a separate tank, is pumped back and reacts with the calcium to reform as calcium hydride.

The reaction runs at approximately 1,000 degrees, and powers a dual shell Stirling engine of Bliesner's design to create power after dark.

"We can generate electricity continuously unlike other solar technologies," said Bleisner, inventor of the technology and a former Boeing engineer.

They claim the system compares to the cost of fossil fuels. The question is: coal (very cheap) or natural gas (rather expensive).

It is still interesting. Now if they could develop a fuel cell along the lines of this patent [pdf] or something similar I think they would have a real winner. Getting rid of the thermal energy to mechanical motion step (Stirling engine) could greatly improve efficiency and reliability. It would mean pumping reactants around. But you would have to do that in any case, I think. More details on how the system operates would be nice.

Bleisner was originally involved in Stirling Engine development at ADI Thermal. So he may have a vested interest in the Stirling engine route. No matter. Others can now start in on the Hydrogen/Calcium fuel cell route. One breakthrough can show the path to others.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Giving Thanks

We have so much to be thankful for. Not the least of which is abundant energy which makes our lives so comfortable. At ECN Magazine I have reposted an idea I had from November of 2006. The idea is to develop a neighborhood energy source and storage unit along with communications facilities that could be dropped into a neighborhood to start improving life. Also included would be water pumping and storage modules.

I only mentioned wind power in the article, however any energy source that makes sense in a particular location could be added or interchanged.

The changes from 2006 are adding an off the shelf battery with included motor generator set and substituting WiFi and laptops for a TV station and television receivers. Read the article. There are links.

So what about giving thanks? One way would be to do what you can to make something like this happen.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

California Says NO To Solar Power

California is not going to build a thermal solar plant in the desert. It seems the "environmentalists" are against it. You know. The usual. It is unnatural.

A proposed solar energy project in the California desert that caused intense friction between environmentalists and the developers of renewable energy has been shelved.

BrightSource Energy Inc. had planned a 5,130-acre solar power farm in a remote part of the Mojave Desert, on land previously intended for conservation. The company, based in Oakland, Calif., said Thursday that it was instead seeking an alternative site for the project.

The Wildlands Conservancy, a California environmental group, had tried to block the solar development, as had Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who proposed that the area become a national monument.

The land was donated by Wildlands to the Interior Department during the Clinton administration, with assurances from President Bill Clinton himself, the group says, that it would be protected in perpetuity. But the Energy Policy Act of 2005, a Bush administration initiative, opened the land to the development of solar projects.

I think this is just another example of the Cloward-Piven strategy at work. Create a crisis and then put the government in charge of "fixing" the problem. You have to wonder why Californians are such suckers for this strategy, given that the State is bankrupt.

H/T Watts Up With That

Oil From Algae

The question as always is how well does it scale? How much surface area does it require per BTU of fuel?

Oh, yeah. What is the conversion efficiency? Watts of sunlight vs BTUs from the fuel. And BTUs per dollar.

H/T Robthebob Talk Polywell

Energy Myths

Drew Thornley [pdf] has a look at what Americans believe about energy resources and production and what the real facts are. This one is my favorite:

Sixty-three percent of those surveyed believe that human activity is the greatest source of greenhouse gases. In fact, such emissions are significantly smaller than natural emissions. The burning of fossil fuels is responsible for just 3.27% of the carbon dioxide that enters the atmosphere each year, while the biosphere and oceans account for 55.28% and 41.46%, respectively.

Now I question his carrying out his results to four decimal places because I believe we would be lucky to know the numbers to two decimal places. But you get the idea. He gives more details in the whole report.

Here is one Congress should be paying attention to:

Additionally, considering the momentum behind renewable energies and carbon-emission regulation, it is noteworthy that almost half of respondents believe renewable-energy sources will not replace fossil fuels and uranium any time soon—91% of our electricity is generated by fossil fuels and uranium and the EIA projects that 85% of our electricity in 2030 will be generated by such fuels—and that a plurality (49%) do not think reducing carbon emissions will be simple or inexpensive.

He has way more. So you know. Go read the whole thing.

Green Energy Kills Jobs

Durango, Colorado is having economic difficulties. And what are they giving up to be able to pay for city workers? Green energy.

For two years, the city of Durango, Colo., bought electricity for all its government buildings from wind farms. The City Council ended that program this year, reverting to electricity derived from coal-burning plants and saving the cash-strapped city about $45,000.

“It’s very hard for us to lay off an employee to justify green power,” City Manager Ron LeBlanc said. “Those are the tradeoffs you have to face.”

As long as wind and solar electricity cost more than conventional (coal, nuclear) electricity they are going to be a job killers. Now imagine what a plan to reduce fossil fuel use by 80% by 2050 is going to do if they are not replaced by low cost alternatives.

Plus, it seems wind is having reliability problems. Not just the intermittency of wind. The gear boxes connecting the turbine blades to the generators are falling apart.

Engineers at DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory want to know why some gearboxes and other key wind turbine components wear out too soon. Wind turbines are expected to operate for 20 years. Early equipment fatigue threatens to reduce performance and drive up wind power costs. "The end users and the owner-operators say we're only getting five years, or in some cases, three years out of these gearboxes," said NREL principal engineer Sandy Butterfield, who is leading the Gearbox Reliability Collaborative. Initially, the gearboxes are being tested at NREL's National Wind Technology Center before testing at a Colorado wind farm under real conditions.

Well that is going to raise the cost of wind power. A lot.

In good economic times the extra cost of wind electrical generation made some sense in order to develop wind to see how it worked in practice. Given the hard times we are having it makes sense to phase out the subsidy for wind so that wind turbines are installed only where they make economic sense. The same goes for solar and all the alternative energy subsidies. They are a job killers.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Energy Twaddle

I don't agree that global warming is a problem. The globe has been cooling for the last 8 or 10 years and solar scientists are predicting that the cooling could go on anywhere from 10 to 80 more years. However, this video is a good primer on the energy it takes to run a modern civilization.

I like fusion power. And the best hope we have in the near term with respect to quick development and low cost fusion energy is Polywell Fusion. It is not a sure thing but neither are the ITER experiments. The one thing Polywell has going for it is that the development path is short (5 years for proof of concept vs 30 years for ITER) and the cost of energy from such a plant would be less than the cost of coal.

Bussard's IEC Fusion Technology (Polywell Fusion) Explained

Why hasn't Polywell Fusion been fully funded by the Obama administration?

Having Doubts

Mr. Obama is big into alternative energy. Wind. Solar. Geothermal. However, even his supporters have doubts about his energy plans.

I like Barack Obama but I have doubts about his presidency when I hear him saying that the US will “double the amount of energy that comes from renewable sources by the end of my first term." He should know that that’s not possible. But instead, during his State of the Union speech, he proclaimed that we’ll reach that goal in three years, not four.

Most anyone who has studied the energy situation must wonder about Obama's, or his advisors', energy experience. Presented with the numbers from the table (see below) he would realize that the majority of the renewable power comes from hydro and from wood, about 154 gigawatts. Readily available data show that the 6 percent for hydro and bio is pretty much all we can hope for. Trying to increase those yields we would have to ask: Where shall we find the extra rivers to dam? Lease the Amazon? And where do we find the extra land to double the wood and corn production? Annex Canada? Ukraine?

Understanding those limitations, Obama apparently relies on direct solar, wind, and geothermal energy growth. All three sources are presently producing about 19 GW. To reach the goal of generating 2 x (154 + 19) = 346 GW by 2012 (or 2011), the output of the three sources would have to increase nine-fold. That implies building many times more wind mills, solar plants, and geothermal stations in three years than have been installed in the previous decades.

The cost of these projects, projects that will provide extraordinarily expensive electricity (five to ten times more than coal or nuclear) is enormous even on the scale of the anticipated deficit spending, pardon me, stimulus package. While the cost would be prohibitive, the real question is whether the four-year, now three-year, deadline is at all realistic. Before we look into that, perhaps a comparison with past prophesies will give us a hint.

During the 1970s, Jimmy Carter committed the US to derive 20 percent of its energy from renewable sources by the year 2000. Let's check: The proportion of renewable energy production today, 9 years after the deadline and almost 40 years from inception, is essentially the same as during Carter's presidency. Worse yet, the percentage has declined recently from 7.5 to 6.7 percent over the past 10 years.

In 1978, Ralph Nader said “Everything will be solar in 30 years.” Notice that the 30-years mark just passed; the production is somewhere between 0.08 percent and 0.11 percent – depending on what is meant by “everything.”

The Union of Concerned Scientists, projected for the millennium end: “Wind farms will provide 0.68 quads of electricity” (the amount was 94 percent less than predicted), “direct solar 0.60 quads” (the amount was 87 percent less).

I have my doubts too. There is a limit to the amount of intermittent energy sources the electrical grid can absorb. Some think it is ten percent. Some of the more optimistic folks think it is twenty percent. No way is it anywhere near 100%.

Our biggest wind resource is the upper Mid West. There is no where near enough transmission capacity to bring that resource to the loads in the lower Mid West and the coasts. And there is no way that transmission capacity can be built in three years when the permits haven't even been applied for. And that does not even include the NIMBYs and the Ultra Greens who will fight additions to the grid tooth and nail.

Evidently neither Mr. Obama nor his new Energy Secretary have run the numbers. That is no way to do engineering. Or as many of us like to say: Hope is not a plan.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

A Policy Of Fascism

Here is an interesting article from about 6 months ago about wind power in Germany. It discusses what the German government was paying individuals for solar and wind power installations. And then it gets into politics.

Now I have nothing against wind power or solar power. I do have problems with articles that gush and fawn over something without clearly explaining the cost tradeoffs. In fact I wonder if the CSM article had the numbers right, a commenter to the article points out that Germany pays something more like $0.66 a kwh to PV power generators. The commenter also says the German power rates are something like $0.29 per kwh. What is even more disturbing is when the commenter says, “Each Renewable Energy source has different rates of support (Wind, Geo-thermal, Wave, Ocean Current, Bio-fuels, organic farming, Eco-friendly material production, etc).” Boy, you can see the handouts were more designed to increase the size of the bureaucracy than do any sensible energy policy. The tragedy of this German policy is that the government, about the most technically incompetent bunch of people you can find anywhere, is picking winner and losers. Oh, I am sure they can point to mountains of paper studies that supposedly lead to the various hand-out rates for the different energy sources, but the real deal is like with politicians everywhere, each industry put their brown envelopes under the table, or reminded the commissar about that “incident” at a party back in college twenty years ago, or just schmoozed an laughed at jokes until they got their handout allocation.

This is not energy policy, this is fascism. Having a strong central government working “in partnership” with big business is not democracy and it is never good, look at the two trillion dollars that our government is shoveling to Halliburton and its cronies. If you want to subsidize alternative energy you should set a fixed handout- 20, 30, 40, cents a kwh and let us technical types figure out the best way to get there. This is just a modern-day version of the farm handouts and dairy handouts and wheat handouts and a host of other subsidies that governments use to concentrate benefits (and brown envelopes) while diffusing costs. You are not doing anything sane if you tax the entire population and hand out incentives for people that want to put windmills up. The government is distorting the market and they are wasting the resources. But politicians always prefer to have the money sent to them and then doled out to their deadbeat relatives and favorite cronies.

The question is - why subsidize power generation at all? Put the money into research so the costs of alternative energy can come in below the costs of current sources. Of course research is not very expensive and it doesn't allow the government much leeway to hand out billions (is it now trillions?) to their favored cronies with the size of the packets in the brown envelopes making the difference as to who the politician's "real" friends are.

The author of the article goes on to equate the current craze for alternative energy with Mao's Great Leap Forward.

I find it amusing that the same people who love centralized government demand decentralized business. They want a huge government that takes all our money and then hands it out in small dollops to make us behave the way the ruling elite wishes. In Red China Mao loved to see little steel mills in everybody’s back yard. The new advocates of big government now want us all to have wind generators and solar panels in our back yard. I agree with people that say we have to take away subsidies for big oil, but lets not then go on to hand them out to the folk-energy people. Either one is a betrayal of the public’s trust.

Well our new Great Leader will surely do the right thing by us. Just ask him.

The $20 Laptop

India thinks it needs a $20 laptop to educate its population.

India is planning to produce a laptop computer for the knockdown price of about $20, having come up with the Tata Nano, the world’s cheapest car at about $2,000.

The project, backed by New Delhi, would considerably undercut the so-called “$100 laptop”, otherwise known as the Children’s Machine or XO, that was designed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology of the US.

Electronic Design News has some interesting views on the subject:

There were no details available in the story about just how the Indian designers intended to hit that price point. But apparently it's not vaporware. The story claims that a prototype will be available on display at an education conference tomorrow. There appears to be no commercial backer to build the design in quantity yet, however.

None the less, and even if the project ultimately proves too ambitious, there is an important message here. When we are addressing the developing-world market, we cannot afford to make the assumptions that we in the US don't even recognize as assumptions any more.

Such as? For instance, take the assumption that a computer necessarily implies an Intel/Microsoft computer, or even an x86-based CPU. Clearly, if you consider the tasks necessary for e-mail, facebook, google, or distance learning, nothing from the Intel or Microsoft camps can be even remotely justified. A sufficient CPU costs pennies, lodged in the corner of an SoC that costs a few dollars. A sufficient amount of memory costs a few dollars more. Take out the mediocre mechanical keyboard and the pointless mouse, replaced by a cheap membrane keyboard, and the bulk of the bill-of-materials cost of a really lean netbook design will go into the display and power supply.

But all these costly components are things we assume must be in a notebook PC, and therefore in a netbook as well. When we do so we are wrong. The message here is not that Intel and Microsoft are soaking the industrial economies for a fortune in unnecessary costs (although that might be an interesting discussion. Please feel free with your comments.) The point is that when we approach a developing-world market, we must reason from first principles. And those principles are based on the actual user's needs, not on how we would do it in Silicon Valley or Cambridge.

OK. Where would I start? With the processor. The SeaFORTH chip looks like a good start. About 25 billion operations a second. At 360 milliwatts of power. And that is peak. it goes down to 360 microwatts while the processor is waiting for something to do. And it only uses the power required for what ever process is running. Automatically. What would I do different? Add more RAM to each of the processors (there are 40 of them), go to a 32 bit address bus and a 32 bit data bus (at least for external access), and go to the next size smaller semiconductor lithography process node to shrink it all. Put it in a cheap package - 100 pins would be nice. Maybe 128 if it eliminates other hardware. Four external interfaces. USB, wireless, microphone jack, earphone jack. A keyboard and a touch screen display. FLASH to take the place of a hard drive. Maybe 1 G byte. Maybe 1/4 of that. RAM of about the same size.

In the classroom: Custom designed server with 40 USB connectors. Several 1 T byte hard drives in a RAID configuration. For student use and for local storage of info to reduce Internet bandwidth required to support classes.

The server could be multiprocessor if that was a convenient way of getting it up faster. Ultimately server power must be reduced. If each of 40 laptops consumed 1/2 watt on average it would be nice to have a server that averaged 40 watts or less. All powered by a solar/wind power plant capable of 2,000 watt hours a day. At 6 hours a day charging time a 500 watt array should be able to keep a 100 Amp-hour deep cycle 12 volt battery charged up without any trouble most of the year. That should suffice to keep the server up and to charge the laptops as well. A solar array on the cover of the laptop might be interesting as well. I wonder why no one is doing that? Which kind of reminds me of something I had worked on earlier with somewhat more grandiose ends in mind. The Neighborhood Development Package. Evidently they want to start smaller. Which is probably a very good idea.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Biodiesel Stalls Bus

Cold weather is the bane of alternative energy. Wind turbine blades ice up, solar panels get covered with snow, and biodiesel congeals.

In January 2007, a bus stalled in the middle of the night on Interstate 70 in the Colorado mountains. The culprit was a 20 percent biodiesel blend that congealed in the freezing weather, according to John Jones, the transit director for the bus line, Summit Stage. (Biodiesel is a diesel substitute, typically made from vegetable oil, that is used to displace some fossil fuels.)

The passengers got out of that situation intact, but Summit Stage, which serves ski resorts, now avoids biodiesel from November to March, and uses only a 5 percent blend in the summertime, when it can still get cold in the mountains. “We can’t have people sitting on buses freezing to death while we get out there trying to get them restarted,” Mr. Jones said.

Winter may pose even bigger safety hazards in the vicinity of wind turbines. Some observers say the machines can hurl chunks of ice as they rotate.

“It’s like you throw a plate out there and that plate breaks,” said Ralph Brokaw, a cattle rancher in southeast Wyoming who has 69 wind turbines on his property. When his turbines ice up, he stays out of the way.

The wind industry admits that turbines can drop ice, like a lamppost or any tall structure. To ameliorate the hazard, some turbines are painted black to absorb sunlight and melt the ice faster. But Ron Stimmel, an expert on small wind turbines at the American Wind Energy Association, denies that the whirling blades tend to hurl icy javelins.

Which would tend to indicate that at this stage of alternative energy development that cold weather is a hazard to energy production. Not to mention life and limb.

This could be a difficult problem especially for wind which produces its highest output in winter when the winds are the strongest.

...as renewable energy becomes a bigger part of the nation’s power mix, the seasonable variability could become more of a problem. Already, power developers are learning that they must make careful plans to avoid the worst impacts of ice and snow.

Trey Taylor, the president of Verdant Power, which has put small turbines in the tidal East River in New York City and plans more for the St. Lawrence River in Canada, said that ice chunks could slide over one another “like a deck of cards,” pushing ice below and harming turbines. That may rule out parts of otherwise promising sites like the Yukon River in Alaska, he said.

Kevin Devlin, the vice president for operations of Iberdrola Renewables, a wind developer, said that winter was probably the hardest time of year to maintain turbines, because workers must go out in snow and ice. Occasionally, he said, the turbines will shut down or set off alarms if it is too cold, and workers must brave the elements to fix them.

For homeowners, the upkeep of their power sources can also be a bother.

Mr. Stankevitz keeps his panels tilted 40 degrees or higher, but they still become covered with snow — and experts say that if even one cell in a panel is covered, the panel will not produce power.

With alternative energy only at about 1% of grid power the variability of the sources with the weather is not a big consideration. However, as the proportion rises the difficulties in maintaining the flow of electricity in all weather conditions will get more serious.

No doubt solutions will be found over time. However, forcing the introductions of these technologies before the problems are solved is a waste of resources. And you know what wasting resources does, don't you? It causes pollution.

H/T My Climate Buzz

Going Whole Hog On Alternative Energy Will Increase CO2 Emissions

Let us do a thought experiment. Alternative Energy is a Good Thing. But the energy it produces costs more than electrical energy from coal fired plants. Now we want to make our alternative energy equipment the lowest cost way possible - so we will have to burn coal to make the equipment - because if we used the alternative energy equipment to make alternative energy equipment it would raise the price. Which is bad for market penetration.

Now a certain amount of loss (How much? YMMV) is necessary for advancement. It is called research and development. But if we push alternative energy too far ahead of the learning curve we will actually worsen one of the problems it is purported to solve. Actually several of those problems. So maybe the push for change is not actually about solving problems. Maybe it is more about satisfying religious impulses. Where costs and profits hardly matter. Where doing the right thing has its own value and results don't count.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

No Subsidy No Market

Makers of solar voltaics are in trouble. Without government subsidies they can't stay in business.

Amid uncertain markets and policies, solar panel makers are gearing up factories with an objective of pulling down costs to a competitive level.

One market watcher said she will review her forecasts for solar panels according to the financial crisis in the U.S., along with uncertainty about renewal of federal tax credits and a pullback of major solar plans in Spain.

"Without incentives, we don't have a market," said Paula Mints, principal analyst, Navigant Consulting, speaking at a solar event sponsored by the IEEE.

Other speakers also gave their insights about a lack of federal funds for research in solar energy. Tim Anderson, associate dean of research at the University of Florida, said he hopes this scenario will change soon.

"The impact in the academic community is that no one goes to do research in photovoltaics because there's no funding available," he added. "But the promise of more money to come is out there, and people are adjusting to take advantage of this," he noted.

On the commercial level, a group of companies is expanding production of solar cells toward driving mainstream costs. "We're building the equivalent of a large scale nuclear power plant per year," said Richard Swanson, president of SunPower Corp., one of the top 10 solar panel makers.

SunPower has recently completed a second plant capable of employing 400,000 wafers a day and has plans for plants in Malaysia that will use as many as a million wafers a day. "We know how to produce panels that cost $1.50 per watt by 2012, and we have detailed quarterly plans to achieve it," said Swanson.

I think subsidies should be rolled back to zero over a ten year period, giving the industry time to adjust. BTW $1 per peak watt is the price point where the industry can fly on its own. We are a ways from that. A declining subsidy will make it happen faster than maintaining a subsidy or cutting it off cold.

The New Alternative

This is a response to a post and the subsequent comments about AL Gore's plan for powering America with alternative energy in ten years.

First:

Al Gore is an idiot.

Second:

He is a promoter. He stands to get very rich if he can persuade Congress to implement his schemes.

Third:

Solar scientists are predicting a little ice age. How many solar scientists are on the IPCC? Hint: less than one.

Fourth:

Al is totally ignorant of logistics. Just making all the solar cells required in 10 years is not possible. The best place to put them is the desert. Not many power lines in the desert. What is the total world solar cell production capacity? We can make maybe 100 MW (peak electrical output) per year. We need to make 500 GW or so just for America (and that just covers the power when the sun is shining). Wind power is more promising and the upper Mid West is the best place. Problem? Power lines.

Fifth:

The longer we put off going solar the better the technology will be. So what should be done now is what is economically feasible. No subsidies or mandates. Same for wind.

Sixth:

The #1 problem with alternative energy is storage. Al says nothing about that.

Seventh:

To make all this come together we will need 2 MV DC power lines. How many 2 MV DC power lines are there any where in the world? Zero. Who is currently planning on building any? No one.

Did I mention Al Gore is an idiot?

Well maybe not so much. He has conned a lot of rubes after all.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

What Is The Rush?

Commenter Pastorius commenting on my article on Moore's Law suggested I have a look at this article by Ray Kurzweil on the accelerating rate of the rate of change.

...a serious assessment of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential. In exponential growth, we find that a key measurement such as computational power is multiplied by a constant factor for each unit of time (e.g., doubling every year) rather than just being added to incrementally. Exponential growth is a feature of any evolutionary process, of which technology is a primary example.

One can examine the data in different ways, on different time scales, and for a wide variety of technologies ranging from electronic to biological, and the acceleration of progress and growth applies. Indeed, we find not just simple exponential growth, but "double" exponential growth, meaning that the rate of exponential growth is itself growing exponentially. These observations do not rely merely on an assumption of the continuation of Moore's law (i.e., the exponential shrinking of transistor sizes on an integrated circuit), but is based on a rich model of diverse technological processes. What it clearly shows is that technology, particularly the pace of technological change, advances (at least) exponentially, not linearly, and has been doing so since the advent of technology, indeed since the advent of evolution on Earth.

Yep. Change is happening much faster than when I was a kid (50s). We have so much more capable technology than we had then and so many more capable technologies.

What does this mean in terms of solving humanity's technical problems? Say energy for instance. It says we should put off implementing a solution for as long as possible because better solutions are just around the corner. Al Gore's idea that we need to rush to fix our reliance on fossil fuels chop, chop, double quick, is flat out wrong. It would be much better for us to rely on current technologies for as long as possible (at least until the alternatives become economically competitive) because the solutions we will have available in five or ten years will be so much better than the ones available today. The important thing is to avoid, through any kind of government program, getting locked in or promoting any given technology.

In the home computer market that is pretty much what we do. If we assume a doubling of capability every two years replacing your home computer every four to six years makes a lot of sense. In four years your "old" machine will have 25% of the power of what is currently on the market. In six years the "old" machine will have 12.5% of the capacity of the latest and greatest. Its economic value at that time (six years after purchase) will be around zero. Which is why if you go out on garbage day looking for a computer you will generally find machines about five to eight years old. Business is a little different. They can't afford to get too far behind in technology. Which is why they get new computers on a three year schedule. They can't afford to give up more than a factor of three to their competition.

Here is another example (based on hypotheticals). Suppose we do a big push on solar and then some kind of nuclear fusion "magic" comes along reducing the price of electricity by a factor of 10X? Under those circumstances the less we spend on alternative energy at today's prices the better off we will be. Given the accelerating rate of change we are bound to come up with some new kind of "magic" of one sort or the other.

It all depends on the learning curve of a particular technology. I'm not sure what the learning curve for solar is but I can guarantee that what we can do in five years will be much better and more cost effective than what we can do today. Kurzweil estimates that the rate of technological change in 2100 will be around 20,000 times the rate of today. That is pretty damn fast. How fast? Changes that we would see in five years at todays accelerating rate will happen in a day around 2100. (I haven't done the math so that number is just an estimated representation to give a feel for what is happening).

What does this tell us in general? Forcing change is wasteful. Real environmentalists (who inherently are conservative) will resist change until the market provides economic solutions, because forcing change increases waste. We saw this in the solar boom in the Carter era. It didn't work out. Because of government subsidies there was a huge amount of waste. Or as that most wise of sages once said:

Patience grasshopper.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Better Than Printing Money?

EDN Magazine reports on a new technology for making solar cells. Printing them.

This week, Nanosolar put up a video of its 1GW (in annual production) solar ink coating machine, which the company says costs $1.65M. The coater, which works in a normal factory environment, and coats metal film with a proprietary ink based on a Copper-Indium-Gallium-Diselenide (CIGS) compound, is just a continuous-process printing machine, and is inherently cheaper and simpler than traditional silicon wafer deposition processes used in today’s photovoltaic cells. True, the efficiency of the Nanosolar technology is less: 14% compared to ~25% silicon wafer efficiency. But 14% is still very practical.

So, in essence you have a machine you pay $1.65M for and feed in CIGS ink and metal foil, and at the end of the year you have produced 1GW worth of thin-film solar cells which you sell for about $1/W, or about $1B worth of product. Yeah, I’m beginning to see Nanosolar’s business model.

Here’s another interesting energy number from the Nanosolar site: Energy payback time is the time that a solar panel has to be used in order to generate the amount of energy required to produce it. The energy payback time for a Nanosolar panel is less than two months. A typical silicon wafer solar panel has an energy payback time of around three years, and a typical vacuum-deposited thin-film cell has one of 1-2 years.

I'm wondering if this might not be a Pony Express situation. Where the solar guys have figured out how to start getting into the market in a big way and then are derailed by something like this: World's Simplest Fusion Reactor Revisited. Just as the Pony Express was derailed by copper wires. At least the solar stuff is a sure thing. Even at my most optimistic I still have to say that fusion as of now is not a proven technology. It is still just promise. In any case the choices are widening. Now if we could just get the NIMBYs and their politician enablers out of the way.


Cross Posted at Classical Values

Big Solar Cells

Abu Dhabi is buying solar cell manufacturing plants from the US in order to make solar cells 2.2 meters by 2.6 meters (7 ft 2 1/2in by 8ft 6 3/8 in).

As part of its drive to become a world leader in alternative energy, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates-based Masdar PV announced this week it will invest more than $2 billion in thin-film photovoltaic solar technology in a three-phased strategy to produce thin-film photovoltaic (PV) modules.

Masdar’s phase one includes a $600 million investment for manufacturing facilities in Erfurt, Germany and Abu Dhabi. The Erfurt facility is expected to be operational by Q3 2009, and the one in Abu Dhabi will begin initial production by Q2 2010, for combined annual production capacity of 210 megawatts.

Concurrently, as part of the Masdar Initiative, the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Co has placed an order with Applied Materials Inc for three of its SunFab thin film lines for manufacturing solar modules, which are expected to annually produce modules with a targeted capacity of up to 210 megawatts (MW) – sufficient energy to power approximately 70,000 homes.

While Applied declined to confirm the size of the deal with Masdar, it appears that the deal could be for $600 million, given Masdar’s earlier announcement.

The equipment is of course huge. As you can see by the picture in the article. And what about AppliedMaterials a leader in nanomanufacturing and nanomaterials? They are a Silicon Valley Company. That should help our balance of payments. Not to mention that Abu Dhabi is doing something useful with its oil money. I think the Emirates were always smarter than the Saudis. This is further proof.

Cross Posted at Classical Values