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Wind power set to decline under Obama?
Posted by Jerome a Paris on January 31, 2009 - 11:04pm in The Oil Drum: Europe
But for reasons linked to the inconsistent regulatory framework until now, and to the ongoing credit crisis, 2009 is likely to be a bad year for wind, with a decline in installations and, possibly, layoffs.
Of course, Obama is not to blame for that situation, which he inherits, but it will be a pretty bad signal to see wind power decline significantly this year - and it would be an inexcusable one if that decline continues into 2010. The current stimulus plan does include measures to support the industry, but these seem oddly unambitious given the context of economic crisis and wind's proven ability to create jobs and economic activity, to provide cheap power and to eliminate both carbon emissions and fossil fuel imports.
Earlier diaries: Windpower series
WIND ENERGY GROWS BY RECORD 8,300 MW IN 2008The U.S. wind energy industry shattered all previous records in 2008 by installing 8,358 megawatts (MW) of new generating capacity (enough to serve over 2 million homes), the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) said today, even as it warned of an uncertain outlook for 2009 due to the continuing financial crisis.
The massive growth in 2008 swelled the nation's total wind power generating capacity by 50% and channeled an investment of some $17 billion into the economy, positioning wind power as one of the leading sources of new power generation in the country today along with natural gas, AWEA added.
(...)
The new wind projects completed in 2008 account for about 42% of the entire new power-producing capacity added nationally last year, according to initial estimates, and will avoid nearly 44 million tons of carbon emissions, the equivalent of taking over 7 million cars off of the road.
(...)
About 85,000 people are employed in the wind industry today, up from 50,000 a year ago, and hold jobs in areas as varied as turbine component manufacturing, construction and installation of wind turbines, wind turbine operations and maintenance, legal and marketing services, and more.
(...)
Wind power's recent growth has also accelerated job creation in manufacturing, where the share of domestically manufactured wind turbine components has grown from under 30% in 2005 to about 50% in 2008. Wind turbine and turbine component manufacturers announced, added or expanded 70 new facilities in the past two years, including over 55 in 2008 alone. Those new manufacturing facilities created 13,000 new direct jobs in 2008.
Massive job creation; large turnover (44% of capacity installation means more than half of turnover of the power construction industry, given that wind MWs are more expensive than gas-fired one to build - which does not mean that electricity is more expensive, as there is no need to buy gas to produce it...); significant carbon displacement. What's not to like?
A very recent European study suggested that wind creates 15 jobs per MW built in the year of construction, and 0.4 permanent job per MW installed:
You'll note that the US, with 85,000 jobs, was close to catching up on Europe, in just a few years; with a lot more room to build more (and cheaper) wind farms onshore, there was no reason why the industry could not power ahead in coming years.
However, two things are endangering this: regulatory uncertainty, and the credit crisis.
As the above graph shows, the lack of consistency in the regulatory framework in the US has already killed the industry 3 times over the past decade: the PTC (production tax credit), the main federal scheme to support wind, has been mishandled to a criminal extent - by being renewed much too late each time it was due to lapse.
This happened once again this year, with the PTC for projects built in 2009 becoming law only in November (as part of the Paulson TARP). Given that you need a number of months to build a windfarm, all projects that could not be completed before the end of 2008 - ie basically all projects for which construction could not start before last summer, were stopped until investors were sure that the PTC would be in place at the time of completion (because the PTC drives the level of revenues for the first 10 years of production of a windfarm). Construction decisions taken after the November resinstatement will only lead to projects being put in line much later in 2009.
But, in addition to this instability, the credit crisis is creating additional difficulties, in two ways.
- The first one is that the PTC was turned into money to build the wind farm thanks to investors willing to provide future tax payments from which the PTC could be deducted; the most active investors in that market were the big invesmtent banks like Lehman or Morgan Stanley, who have either disappeared or have seen their profits (and thus their ability to cash in PTCs) disappear. This has been solved to some extent by allowing utilities to get the PTCs, something they were prevented from doing until now, but it requires tweaking to investment structures that had been put in place.
- The second issue is, of course, that the credit crisis has made lending a lot scarcer. Wind, where most of the costs are upfront, in the initial construction investment, relies to a large extent on debt financing to make it possible to spread that investment cost over very long term power production volumes. Such debt is a lot harder to find, and when available, is more expensive than it used to be. There is no easy solution to that, although the proposal in the current stimulus plan to authorise projects to convert the PTC into an "ITC" (ie a direct investment subsidy paid upfront) will be a major help.
So the situation now is that we have an industrial activity which provides a lot of good things, but is handicapped in the short term by the consequences of past bad government and the credit crunch. 2009 will be a mediocre year, that much is pretty much certain by now, given that minimal lag time for projects, but it would be rather incomprehensible if 2010 did not show a massive turnaround.
This does not require massive subsidies, but a few small things:
- an acknowledgement that wind is a large-scale solution (not a silver bullet, not the only solution, but a good part of the solution to a number of problems) that needs to be taken seriously and not just as a bone given to green groups to appease them;
- in turn, all that wind needs is a stable regulatory framework. The PTC works, but it needs to remain in place for more than a year or two at a time. State RPS (renewable portfolio standards, ie obligations for utilities to produce a given % of their power from renewables within agreed timeframes) work, but they create a patchwork of different rules across the country. There is a need to provide a simple, consistent and permanent set of federal rules. Personally, I think that a feed-in tariff (ie a fixed price guaranteed to reneable energy producers) would be best: it works, as demonstrated in Europe, and it actually reduces electricity costs for consumers when wind penetration gets high enough (in the 5-10% range);
- the main flank of federal action will be a long term plan to reinforce the power grid in a coherent and systematic way, in order for wind to be better absorbed into the system: this fits perfectly well with Obama's discourse to invest in infrastructure. But it needs to be done on a scale that makes sense - not just a few billion sprinkled here or there.
Just to avoid ad hominem attacks: I finance wind power and am not a disinterested party. However, I don't finance wind in the US, only in Europe and I don't just finance wind: I finance all energy sectors, including oil&gas, traditional power and nuclear. My job is to identify risks and weaknesses of projects and we would not be financing wind if we thought that it was not inherently sound to do so; do note in that context that subsidies can make a project economically viable but they do entail political risk which we also have to take into account, especially when subsidies are high or politically contentious. This is a minor risk for wind.
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My electric car has 28kwh of electrical storage. Along with massive numbers of new wind generators, we need a large fleet of electric vehicles to store this energy.
I built my electric car in a 2 stall garage in 6 months time. If we wait for the auto companies to solve this problem we are all going to die of lung cancer first.
Wind and solar combined with electric vehicles could go a long way to solving our energy problem. See my web site for a picture of my solar charge station.
http://www.zevutah.com/
(I went to your site)
KJD kudos, You impress me , big time. If you pull your mind together even more, you can really "pull it off" commercially in some fashion .. good luck man :-) Way to go.
Nice Gear, K!
I've got a couple of the KC-130 Panels as well, looking to get more. Outback and Xantrex.. those are still on my wish list. Good Equipment!
Bob
Add in high efficiency heat pumps and electricity can meet all our energy demands, let people buy a share of the renewable capacity as an investment / pension and you have a massive source of funding available.
And if you don't have KJD's mad skills, you can always buy the quite affordable and immediately available ZENN! We have been quite pleased with ours. It's no TESLA, but it gets us most places we need to go in the city (that we can't walk or bike to easily).
www.zenncars.com
And keep in mind that other methods to store wind energy are being developed by major players in the industry:
http://www.startribune.com/business/34372864.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEy...
One of the problems with electric power from renewables is storage. If batteries became, for all intents and purposes, lifetime batteries, how would that change the economics of wind, solar, etc?
That is, what if you didn't need to replace the batteries AND could get more from the batteries you have AND could buy old batteries that don't hold a charge well or at all?
How does this affect the economics and the EROEI (given no replacement of batteries)?
http://r-charge.com/index.html
Cheers
In addition to tax credits, upfront subsidies, feed-in tariffs and green certificates there are also direct carbon penalties. This could be a tax, tradeable permits (like the EPA SOx auction) and portfolio emissions standards for utility companies. A major administrative lever is that whatever the form of the carbon penalty if the company didn't meet it they could be shut down by Federal order. Admittedly this could lead to strange results like if the wind didn't blow for a week then coal plants would also have to be shut down to keep the balance right. That would mean buying in wind power from someplace else thus requiring a bigger continental build.
With incentives for new transmission as opposed to generation there has to be a proviso that it actually transmits 'green' electricity and not coal fired. With these kinds of conditions wind power could be quite profitable and the big money will gravitate towards it. The problem is nobody wants to raise electricity prices while times are tough.
Actually, no, the coal plants don't get shut down to "keep the balance right" if "the wind didn't blow for a week". CO2 emissions are a long term problem, not a short term conventional air pollution problem where the particle count of soot, VOCs, SO2, etc, are making a local smog problem that the EPA is upset about and the schools are cancelling sport activities because they want the kids to breath as little as possible for a few days.
"Spare The Air" days and global warming are not closely related.
The low carbon rule might have to be averaged over a year. However if say the requirement was 20% and the utility was close to that near the end of the year they may not risk fines if the wind decreased.
There seem to be plenty of reasons to lapse back to coal
- bad people control the gas pipeline
- drought dried up hydro dams
- heatwave/cold snap increased demand
- system component failure.
A low carbon rule should offer few excuses. If the utility can't make its own green electricity then it should buy it for resale.
You are right, they really could make a special law that capped coal at a max of 20% (to minimize greenhouse warming) and a minimum of 19% (to preserve jobs for coal miners), so that people would suffer a 10,000% tax on coal based electricity if it went over 20% exactly.
Perhaps they will. We've done other stupid things in the past.
I'd like to say you were a troll looking to make nitpicking objections, but I know too much history to say that you are wrong. We've done things that were stupider. Trust me, we've done things that were way, way, stupider.
Jerome,
If the average new wind capacity is maintained around 8GW/year to 2020, the US could be generating as much electricity from wind(110Gw x0.33 capacity=33GWa) as is being generated from hydro.
Even allowing for a very modest average growth of 10% per year( with a few dips), that could be 16GW/year by 2016, 24GW/year by 2020(total 230GWcap=80GWa) about the same electricity as produced by NG. The US is going to need that grid upgrade!
It is NOT correct that wind energy is mor expensive to built than gas fired.
Here in Germany we have only 3 types of wind turbines these are off the shelf products. It is also not correct that wind energy creates jobs because engineering and planning and maintenance
is less than for an individually planned gas fired .
The key to success of renewables is smart grids.
As the utilities are also the owners of trunk grids they have successfully lobbied
versus smart grids.
So the first thing to do to make renewables successfull is to separate power cos from trunk grid cos.
That will create lots of qualified jobs which cannot be outsourced and will foster the breakthru of renewables.
The smart grid companies are just wholesale distributors they buy energy where and when there is oversupply and hence cheap. Not on long range contracts
but on a spot market.
Natural gas in America is fairly reasonable priced. The new superfrack jobs in the tight shales are keeping prices lower than they otherwise would be. Wind and gas aren't that different, but gas is still cheaper.
The cost per MW of wind is higher than the cost of MW of gas-fired electricity. That makes capacity more expensive, NOT electricity (cost per MWh).
And it is also a fact that you require more jobs per MWh of wind power - you need more labor and less fossil fuel to produce the electricity, which can probably be seen as a good thing today.
Such a calculation is incomplete. It assumes infrastructure at no cost.
For ex. the north stream gas pipeline roughly estimated cost is Euro 5 bn.
Of course this is to be paid by EU taxpayers.
All cost comparisons published by utilities is always exclusive infrastructure cost.
Not so with wind power. That is the reason
why power companies claim wind energy is expensive. Yes it is but not for the tax payer.
If electrical energy generated by nuclear fission had not been so heavily subsidized
in EU it were, by simple arithmetic, not competitive.
Given that the largest part of the cost of natural gas is infrastructure, it certainly IS included in the price of gas. Nordstream will not be paid by taxpayers, it will be paid by Gazprom (and, in practice, deducted directly from the payments for bas by Ruhrgas & al) via an agreed tariff per volume transports and/or a capacity charge.
I don't know why we are having this argument: I certianly agree that wind is cheaper than gas for power generation, without subsidies, but that does not mean that the calculations should be done wrong, and the fact remains that a MW of gas-fired power plant (which does not include the cost of gas, and thus does not include the cost of the gas infrastructure) is cheaper to build than a MW of wind - it will simply be a lot more expensive to use.
No argument. I just want to put the actual variables and constants in place.
The EU is supposed to subsidize north stream with Euro 5 bn in addition to investment by Gazprom and E.On.
German chancellor has just today called EU to support this subsidy ( I hope it will be rejected)
If you were to built a shopping mall you have to provide infrastructure including
new roads parking lots etc.
Of course this cost is part of building cost not of operating cost. The cost of maintenance is operating cost.
The same applies for a gas fired power plant.
Don't get me wrong I do not argue against gas fired in fact modern facilities have an overall efficiency of 60% but I argue against the propaganda and lobby work of
the all too mighty power companies.
For ex. Gazprom is about to built a 400 MW gas fired power plant somewhere in east germany. That means, the utilities
make still upside profit with already extremely expensive Gazprom gas - more than 2 times the price of Henry hub spot.
The utilities use the pretext of extremely expensive renewables to ever increase energy prices.
The more jobs is better argument is popular with politicians, but is a sign of economic inefficiency.
More jobs simply reflects the fact that you are not relying as much on the input of (non renewable) fossil fuels...
It would be interesting to compare the jobs required to build and operate 100 MW of wind vs. the jobs required to get the gas and build and operate the pipelines for 100 MW of gas-fired.
Indeed. My point is simply that job creation is not a virtue in itself.
It is a virtue - the cost to society of unemployment is quite high (certainly, you're not going to argue that higher unemployment is more economically efficient?). If fossil fuels are replaced by labor, then we have a double-edged sword.
All things being equal, lower jobs/MW will get cheaper power. But that's the problem, all things are not equal. The cost/kWh is important, and is also shaped by capital and fuel expenses. Properly sited wind is affordable so if it has relatively high jobs creation, all the better. Nice gravy when we realize it's the cost of the fuel where the reduction is. Less imports, less externalities.
By contrast, if a technology produces power very expensively, having few jobs/MW, or many jobs/MW, will not matter much.
My point is that there are other important factors to take into account when it comes to economic efficiency.
But maybe that's what you were trying to say as well?
Lets not construct strawmen. Technology that destroys jobs is economically more efficient. Its a simple advance in productivity.
If the jobs displaced aren't created in other industries, thats a systemic problem of the whole economy. Its bad. But a technology that requires more labor isn't good because it creates jobs.
Let's not construct strawmen indeed! What you are saying here is very contradictory. If a technology destroys jobs and doesn't replace as much jobs in other/new sectors, then the economic efficiency gain might well be negated. As I mentioned above, other factors that contribute to the cost of a technology must be taken into account. If these other factors are high then the total cost will be high and even though it may have less jobs it will not be economically efficient. It'd be interesting to see a detailed study that takes various macro economic effects into account for different sources of generation.
So cost/kWh might be considered the single most important measure for economic efficiency, and for wind in a good location it's low. So then the labor intensive nature is a positive. Saying a technology isn't good because it creates jobs is a strawman in itself. A technology isn't good because it creates jobs, but it is better to be jobs intensive than fossil fuel intensive, as long as the levelised cost is reasonable. So for wind it is a positive.
This statement makes me wonder if you realize what a straw man is.
A technology that destroys jobs doesn't create new jobs. Thats up to the rest of the economic environment. In a good market, wealth created by increased productivity opens up more opportunity for capital to hire labor in growing industries. In a bad market, jobs are just destroyed. Insert your favorite economic ideology on what environments create good or bad markets.
I'm entirely agnostic on other arguments. My only position is that as a whole is that labor cost is a liability rather than an asset.
Nope, you were presenting a straw man yourself. Misrepresenting my position - indeed, I tried to make clear that there are other factors involved as represented by eg levelised cost. Maybe you were trying to say this as well but you weren't explicit enough about it.
But your statement also happened to be internally contradictory, since if the societal benefit of economic efficiency is lost in the societal disadvantage of fewer jobs (more unemployment) then the economical efficiency argument is no positive argument at all, since society may be no better off (or even worse off).
It does create jobs related to the new 'destroying' technology; technology without jobs is impossible by definition. This could be a large number of new jobs or a small number but it will always be nonzero. The rest of the economic environment has to be considered as well of course, that's a good point.
Labor cost is part of the levelised cost of energy. If labor costs are high but fuel and capital low (rare) the technology could still be the most competitive with other more fuel and/or capital intensive technologies. If the total of capital and fuel costs are already on the high side, having a relatively high labor cost on top of that could be a liability. Still, jobs are a macro-economical asset even though the cost of this labor is a liability. These have to be quantified and compared with each other.
It's rather an academic argument, since in the case of wind fuel is replaced by labor, and even if the cost is similar the societal advantage will be large (less money flowing out of the national economy, less GhG and air pollutants etc).
Oh dear, apparently we can't communicate at all. I wasn't misrepresenting your position because I didn't reference your position whatsoever. I don't care about your position at all on energy cost or fossil fuel inputs or any other specific instances of a specific case, as I don't have a position on them or their cost relative to the cost of labor at all. The only point I made is that labor cost is a liability and presenting it as an asset isn't correct.
Yeah, we're not really having a genuine discussion are we? If you don't present a position, you're asking for strawmen.
Yes, and as I've argued, a moot point. Labor cost is a liability if you want to call it that. I call it part of the levelised cost of energy. Higher cost is less competitive, so in this way it might be considered a liability. But it's rather a big loaded word, and you have to consider the context: what are the other costs, what is labor replacing? If labor replaces imported fuel then benefits abound.
If labor cost is a liability then jobs are an asset, so it's both, and they have to be quantified and compared with each other. It's important to internalise externalities when societal advantages/disadvantages must be considered.
Economic efficiency is about inputs and outputs, and any assertions about one side of the equasion cannot be comprehensive. Inputs and outputs have to be compared. This has little to do with ideology, just economics 101.
What costs are you talking about? If people who are unemployed become alcoholics and require medical treatment then that treament is a cost. If unemployed people become mentally depressed and require psychiatric treatment, then that treatment is a cost. However, unemployment payments are not a cost to society. It may appear that they are, but this is really not the case. Two kinds of events can result in a cost to society. One is an event which decreases our net productivity. The second is some kind of economic 'bad' (as opposed to economic 'goods') which we have to spend resources on to heal (e.g. alcoholism or mental illness). If people become unemployed because of efficiency improvements in their industry then our net productivity has not declined, so that no one has to become poorer in order to provide the unemployed people the wherewithal to continue purchasing the necessities of life.
In a resource limited world we should be focusing on the creation and maintenance of sustainable wealth, not on job creation per se. It is easy to imagine society benefiting from less production rather than more production. For example if we manufactured a much smaller variety of consumer electronics and designed those fewer products to last for decades, this change would be a benefit to society in a resource constrained world, even though it would mean fewer jobs in the electronics industry.
People who work themselves out of a job for the benefit of the community should not be deprived of the right to consume economic output. Of course we do not want people to remain unemployed for the long term. We need to share the necessary work. We need to create an environment in which people who do the right thing from the perspective of long term resource consumption are confident that the community they are helping will in turn help them. We need to end the "atomized, every nuclear family for itself, I want to preserve my own job no matter how stupid, wasteful, and destructive it may be" point of view which prevails in our current economic system.
Direct costs are social payments of unemployment benefits, which depend on the country. And of course what you mention, healthcare treatments etc.
However, there is also the oppertunity cost of someone who could be working in stead of being unemployed. This is how cost benefit analysis is being done - also for example, when a coal plant emits nasties that makes people sick x days more per year, that loses x amount of productivity through lost work hours.
A similar CBA could be done for the employment benefits and costs of a specific technology (in this case, wind turbines).
I think we should be focusing strongly on measurable wealth, so that we can do cost benefit analysis. Having good mobility can give measurable wealth, but the added measurable wealth of driving a 10 MPG car compared to driving a 50 MPG car is marginal at best, while the extra resource use is large. External effects need to be taken into account as best as possible.
I read articles such as this one. If demand for electricity is actually falling, won't there be less interest in building any type of new infrastructure?
Utilities Scramble as Electricity Bills Fall
One reason demand is falling is the mass replacement of the old style televisions and computer monitors with the new flat panel type. This has been accelerated lately as people junk their old TVs to prepare for digital broadcasting coming on Feb. 17 (if it is not postponed).
Add in the mass replacement of filament light bulbs by the screw in fluorescent type.
This is likely a one time change and may mean demand will not continue to fall.
Luckily FPL's local 180 turbine wind farm is nearly completed. There has been a problem with some of the blades which are being removed, repaired and then replaced. The whole process looks very expensive to me since the huge crane that puts them up has to be moved accross country and lots of man hours are involved.
They are working on a troublesome one in front of our house right now. I counted six men at the site. The normally quiet country road is now like a main highway and 4 wheel drive crew cab trucks are running back and forth all day. Sometimes they work after dark using large portable lighting even in 0-10 degree F temperatures.
The wind farm is partially up and running, but the wind has been very strong here and the temperatures quite cold even for January. The turbines shut down in strong wind and have to be warmed up in the cold if I am not misinformed.
However there still seems to be a lot of turbines standing idle. I'm thinking maybe they are not needed because of low demand. Just speculation.
The migration to more energy efficient LCD monitors and laptop computers in general, I understand. However, I'm not so sure about the replacement of CRT television sets. My old 27 inch SONY uses, on average, 90 to 100-watts depending upon the brightness setting and the image being displayed on screen. My understanding is that a typical plasma TV uses two, three or even fours times as many watts (e.g., http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6475_7-6400401-2.html). Cable decoders, satellite receivers and PVRs often consume 40 to 60-watts even when turned off, so just one cable box could theoretically use more electricity than the household refrigerator and many homes have two or three of these boxes, one per set.
According to CNET's Quick Guide, the 58 inch Panasonic TH-58PZ700U checks in at a whopping 610-watts! That's more than SIX times that of my old XBR.
Cheers,
Paul
That's why I got an LCD TV instead of a plasma TV. Not only would I have to pay for the 610 watts, I'd have to pay the air conditioning bill to get 610 watts of heat out of my house. In Halifax, you want the electric heating.
Robert a Tucson.
If construction is still under way, they may not have connected all the turbines to the transformer station, yet. Once connected, wind turbines have almost zero marginal cost and will always be dispatched by the network operator unless there are curtailment requirements - which are usually grid related. Low demand is highly unlikely to be the reason for tubines to stand idle.
A lot of manufacturing capacity is on reduced output or in some cases stopping completely. Industry uses a large chunk of energy, and any reduction in electricity demand from these sectors will be much larger than from residential sectors IMO.
No wonder the utilities and other PTB tend to damn solar and homegrown energy with such faint praise.
Obama's
Stimulus billScrew the Taxpayer bill is geared towards propping up dying industries and wasteful government bureaucracies because that is where people are employed now. He isn't looking at where people could be employed in the future. Status quo we can believe in.There are two parts to Obama's economic plan. Large scale investment in the new renewable/efficiency industries requires first training large numbers of people to do the job. This is beyond the time frame of the stimulus plan.
Back in the 1970s there was talk of a solar bank that could borrow directly from the Fed for financing solar/wind/etc projects. If we can have a bad bank for toxic assets why not a new green collar bank for good, secure, profitable projects.
I question whether the change agent has any interest in lowering USA unemployment-USA tax law is decidely anti-employment and he has no interest in any change whatsoever in this regard. Unlike the scam bill, changes to tax law would take effect immediately.
Jerome
I agree with your concerns, but... Perhaps you should expand your portfolio, and advocacy, beyond energy provision services to include energy efficiency improvement services.
There's enormous potential in the US, Europe and elsewhere to throw zillions of taxpayer money at projects that pay back in months/low single digit years rather than decades. These can be implemented quickly, create employment (lots), and can be easily targeted to benefit households, businesses and other organisations in greatest need. A political no-brainer. Chu's impressive track record strongly suggests that he gets this - perhaps Obama will get it soon(ish). Meanwhile back in Europe - a Chu-free policy zone - Gordon Brown, SuperSarko and Merkel don't seem to have a clue about energy policy.
The answer my friend is blowing in the wind (once you've insulated and installed the double/triple glazing...).
Colin Moorcraft
Fully agree!
I can write in (what I think is) an informed way on the topic of windpower, but much less so on the topic of energy saving and energy efficiency, but I fully agree that this should be the first priority.
Jerome
You certainly write in an informed way about wind power. I find your combination of a private investor's perspective with an interest in public policy issues very useful.
Unfortunately there is no equivalent on Oil Drum for energy efficiency. There are occasional posts, and there's probably a lot of latent interest - but no "insider" has yet (as far I know) come out of the closet to tell us what it's like to be sitting on energy investment money without being able to direct it at no-brainer energy efficiency projects. This is very important knowledge - if any Oil Drum reader has it, please jump out of the closet. Now!
- Colin Moorcraft
Energy efficiency seems an especially complex mix of R&D, private companies selling efficiency services, {companies, government,and individuals} buying such services, private companies making their products more energy efficient {refrigerators, computers}, and various branches of government acting together (or against each other, sometimes, i.e., CA suing Federal Government often ion last few years!)
I do talk to VC friends who invest, but VC-appropriate investments are only a small slice. I wouldn't claim to be an insider, but following are a few relevant items, of nearby entities.
1) View from Pacific Gas & Electric (Central & Northern California);
CEO Peter Darbee Speaking at UN on efficiency in 2008.
PG&E energy analyzers & audits.
PG&E demand-response programs.
(and many other web-pages linked from there)
2) Chevron Energy Solutions
their home page.
3) Of course, from a government side, there's:
California Energy Commission - Energy Efficiency.
California Energy Commissioner - Art Rosenfeld, whose autobiography is well worth reading. See also the talks linked from there, i.e., take a look at latest ones, whatever the date. Rosenfeld has long been associated with the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (run by Stephen Chu until he took his new job).
4) And from the university/R&D side there's:
(Berkeley represented above, but has others as well).
Stanford Precourt Institute for Energy Efficiency,and recent expansion.
UC Davis Energy Efficiency Center. Davis is a bit unusual for a CA school in having a big interest in agriculture.
Both the green revolution and solar and wind power will not reach their full potential until the Smart Grid comes into its own.
Such an advanced power grid is far more powerful and expensive they most people can imagine. It will take five to ten years just to design the first early phases of its development and deployment.
The smart grid has many of the characteristics of the internet and will be just as wide spread but it will be an order of magnitude more complicated and expensive.
It will take the best part of this century to set it in place around the world.
In the earliest deployment stage, smart meters and smart thermostats will be installed by local and regional electric power utilities.
In the next phase, wind power and solar will be enables by demand side management. Various kinds of smart appliances will be introduced and sold in regions served by the smart grid.
Next, all electric cars will be integrated into the grid and vehicle to grid (V2G) charging and load leveling will emerge. The grid will span the US and extent into Canada and Mexico and then up to Alaska.
Electric generation from water and geo thermal will be retasked from baseload electric power production to load following.
As the Smart Grid progresses, it will be standardized by international treaties and agreement and an international control agency will be established.
Next, a robust multi-trunk superconducting HVDC power transmission network will cross the Bering Strait from Russia to the North American grid.
By mid-century, Russian gas will be all but gone. Russia, not fearing nuclear power, will turn to multiple massive 20 Gigawatt molten salt reactors sited in the frozen wastes of Siberia and export power to China, North America and Europe through the smart grid.
Iceland will also export prodigious amounts of geothermal electric power to the European continent and then through the grid around the world.
With a world wide smart grid, demand side management will be a thing of the past. The base load power producing countries on the dark side of the planet will supply the peak load demands of those countries on the day side.
Finally, by the end of the 21st century the grid will extend into the third world of Africa and South America.
What the internet has done for international communication and commerce the world wide Smart Grid will do for world wide energy production and consumption.
The 21st century will be known as the century of the Smart Grid.
The question is, "With peak oil apparently here already, and the world getting poorer, will we really be able to put the Smart Grid in place?"
"With peak oil apparently here already, and the world getting poorer"
Oil plateaued from 2005 to 2008, yet world growth continued absolutely unaffected at (IIRC) 5%+. Right now growth is estimated to be continuing at a lower level of roughly 2.5%.
The problem wasn't peak oil, it was peak sub-prime mortgage collateral. Moderate income home-owners were borrowing directly from OPEC and Asia, and that didn't work so well. Now, programs like TARP are attempting to transfer that debt to the US gov. If OPEC countries are smart (and the US is dumb) they'll keep buying T-bills until the oil runs out.
"will we really be able to put the Smart Grid in place?"
Sure. We don't really need a massive amount of HVDC. Smart meters, and DSM (primarily of PHEV/EV charging) will take us most of the way.
I'm wondering if we will see some massive civil engineering projects to build tidal pumped storage, sea defence and deep water ports.
Frequency response technology is incredibly simple and can be included in many space heating / cooling application with minimal cost and maximum flexibility.
Improving the thermal mass and insulation of buildings would also turn each one into a heat battery.
You make a good point but I'd like to offer another opinion
We don't need the grid to be in perfect shape to expand..we just need people to be aware it has to be improved (and the funds available). You use the internet as an example and it's a good example. To the outsider, the internet seems like a world of wonders..when in fact it's a mash of wires that look like spaghetti. It's improving & money has been put into it, but the infrastructure has always been playing catch up to the demand. The electrical grid could do the same
Most of you have no idea how thin the line is before this whole internet thing goes down. It wouldn't take much..but it's still there and we still use it. Same for the electrical grid. By PUSHING for wind power, the grid will improve..because it has too. Not the other way around
“It is difficult to believe, but it is, nevertheless, a fact, that since time immemorial man has had at his disposal a fairly good machine which has enabled him to utilize the energy of the ambient medium. The machine is the windmill. Contrary to popular belief, the power obtainable from wind is very considerable. Many a deluded inventor has spent years of his life in endeavoring to “harness the tides,” and some have even proposed to compress air by tide- or wave power for supplying energy, never understanding the signs of the old windmill on the hill, as it sorrowfully waved its arms about and bade them stop. The fact is that a wave- or tide motor would have, as a rule, but a small chance of competing commercially with the windmill, which is by far the better machine, allowing a much greater amount of energy to be obtained in a simpler way. Wind-power has been, in old times, of inestimable value to man, if for nothing else but to cross the seas, and it is even now a very important factor in travel and transportation. But there are great limitations in this ideally simple method of utilizing the sun’s energy. The machines are large for a given output, and the power is intermittent, thus necessitating the storage of energy and increasing the cost of the plant.
When I began the investigation of the subject under consideration, and when the preceding or similar ideas presented themselves to me for the first time, though I was then unacquainted with a number of the facts mentioned, a survey of the various ways of utilizing the energy of the medium convinced me, nevertheless, that to arrive at a thoroughly satisfactory practical solution a radical departure from the methods then known had to be made. The windmill, solar engine, the engine driven by terrestrial heat, had their limitations in the amount of power obtainable. Some new way had to be discovered which would enable us to get more energy. There was enough heat energy in the medium, but only a small part available for the operation of an engine in the ways known. Besides, the energy was obtainable only at a very slow rate. Clearly, then, the problem was to discover some new method which would make it possible both to utilize more heat-energy of the medium and also to draw it away at a rapid rate…. As the first step toward this realization I conceived the following mechanism. Imagine a thermopile consisting of a number of bars of metal extending from the earth to the outer space beyond the atmosphere. The heat from below, conducted upward along these metal bars, would cool the earth or the sea or the air, according to the location of the lower parts of the bars, and the result, as is known, would be an electric current circulating in these bars. The two terminals of the thermopile could now be joined through an electric motor, and theoretically , this motor would run on and on, until the media below would be cooled down to the temperature of the outer space.
Having recognized this truth, I began to devise means for carrying out my idea, and, after long thought, I finally conceived a combination of apparatus which should make possible the obtaining of power from the medium by a process of continuous cooling of the atmospheric air.”
N. Tesla
I pinned down a "Green Energy" telemarketer the other day on what I thought was a reasonable question (there was a good five minutes of "we buy credits and all that..." first)...
Melbourne (Aus) consumed around 10,000MW yesterday - the temp reached 45deg (106far or so). How many megawatts came from wind farms?
More fodder, a supervisor's voice in the background, and in the end no answer. I didn't know either, still don't, and I simply presumed it was bugger all.
I just found it curious I'd been the first to ask this so-called "Green Energy Distributer" such a question.
Oh well, back to BAU.
Regards, Matt B
More pessimistic than optimistic.
If you want to be sure of staying cool in a heat-wave, the solution is to expand the 500MW Bass_Link, as Tasmania had an extra 2,000MW of hydro power that could have been used if the Bass Link had been built to have the capacity.
The role of wind is to replace coal or hydro power when the wind is blowing to reduce GHG or to save hydro power to be used for peak power demand.
Not sure about this hydro power when the Tassie dams are 29% full and dropping fast. There is currently no pumped storage but I believe there are at least two suitable sites. As you point out wind nameplate could overtake hydro in the US and ditto Tasmania if the money was available. For example restarting the mothballed 250 MW Heemskirk wind farm (named after the 1642 Dutch ship) could employ many of the miners laid off from zinc and nickel mines.
Deputy premier David Llewellyn suggested a second underwater HVDC cable for this purpose (green power to the mainland) but was ridiculed. Note the current cable didn't strictly fail but was closed twice by operators when the inverters overheated.
Boof,
Because almost all electricity in Tasmania is generated by hydro and there is a surplus capacity of >1,000MW, they do not need pumped storage, can sell power to VIC during peak times for 20-10,000 cents/kWh and buy back in evening at 2 cents/kWh( saving the same amount of water or even more than would have been used during peak times).
If the Bass-Link was increased to say 1000MW or 2000MW then VIC would have a securer supply and TAS could well benefit from having pumped storage. I am not familiar with any studies done in TAS as to suitable sites. Tasmania seems to have a complex system of dams, lakes and diversions so pumped storage could be more than 100% efficient by pumping water that may not have been used to generate electricity into dams connected to generators.
That situation of almost all hydro is fast receding because of HVDC. The State stationary energy mix was 92% hydro 8% gas until 2006. As of early 2009 imported electricity (read 'coal fired') is 20% and growing. This is consistent with Gail the Actuary's principle 'bad drives out the good'.
I don't think the cable can be pulled up now. It also contains fibre optic and an earth return in case it gets snagged by trawlers or drilled by gas rigs. It also looks like the Tassie end inverter can't cope with 700 MW in hot weather.
The Hydro make no apology of their sell high buy low policy eg sell peak hydro for up to $10 a kwh and import brown coal (lignite) power for 3c. That's some profit margin! More bonuses for execs. Shame 50 or so pensioners had to die a lonely death in the heatwave due to blackouts.
The northern and western coastline of Tasmania could produce gigawatts of windpower. Apart from lack of transmission and lack of capital for windpower the Rudd govt has effectively exempted brown coal from emissions trading in 2010. So why change? Our political mentors evidently don't see any problem.
What's the prospect of wind farms to grab power from the Roaring Forties winds?
Assessments I've seen appear to be incomplete. The Hydro sold 50% of its Roaring 40s subsidiary to China Power and Light and most of their activity is in that country. Essentially all the wind exposed coastline could be dotted with turbines as I can't recall the wind dropping below 30 kph on any visit there. Could be why there are whale strandings just about every week. I think 10 GW capacity could be installed with a mass building program which would also require bigger HVDC cables to export the power. Pumped storage appears possible where mountain rivers come out to sea.
The irony is that the Vestas factory closed down to make mining machinery now that's in trouble. There are several hundred laid off miners on the west coast who are keen to work on any wind power revival. The Australian government talks green but actual policies seems to favour the coal industry.
Boof,
You are being overly pessimistic, TAS has the two things necessary for long term wind development, lots of high value wind and lots of hydro capacity nearby. That's a winning combination that is going to be developed. In time TAS will be exporting 10GW during the peak demand periods(2-6pm) to SE Australia, but probably always importing some power during off-peak as it will always be on sale at margin production costs. The brown coal carbon concessions will eventually go when renewable energy is capable of displacing all FF.
I hear you but I dunno if the bean counters can until the rules change eg hard renewables targets and proper carbon penalties. I suspect at best only a few hundred MW could be converted to virtual baseload via pumped storage.
Obama urged not to backburner climate change
DAVOS, Switzerland – Don't put off action on global warming just because times are lean — that's the message Al Gore, world environmental leaders and U.S. executives sent Friday to President Barack Obama.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090130/ap_on_re_eu/davos_forum_climate_change
I wish folks would just bite the bullet on renewable wind and solar. What I mean is we need to stop sqwaking about converting most solar and wind intermittent electricity to hydrogen gas to regenerate back into steady grid electricity.
Conceptually this is very simple for the wind/solar rich US.
US has 330 GW of coal producing 2000Twh of grid electricity and 105 GW of nukes producing 800Twh, that's baseload.
Then there is 450 GW of natural gas producing 800 Twh and 77GW of
hydro producing 270 Twh of hydro, that's the peak loaders.
We need to aim at producing a whopping 2TW of solar and wind producing 4000 Twh of unstorable electricity and 1000 Twh of continuous grid electricity.
The efficiency of wind/solar to hydrogen by electrolysis-compression is 50% and the conversion from hydrogen to grid electricity by fuel cells or high temp. gas turbines is 50% so the overall efficiency is 25%, so 4000 Twh-->1000 Twh of grid electricity plus 1000 Twh of more or less wind/solar directly
fed into the grid=2000Twh of electricity; equal to all the coal fired plants in the US.
2TW=1 million 2MW wind turbines, etc. Is 50,000 wind turbines,etc. per year($100 billion dollars per year?) for 20 years unreasonable?
In 20 years 83% of the CO2 produced by electrical generation(coal) would go away.
If Obama only produces massive wind at those very high rates we will be in good shape in 4 years. Build wind/solar as much and as fast as possible--if all tech fixes fail, go to low tech hydrogen for peaking. Forget about a 'theoretical hydrogen problem', we know it works!
Wind is a total no-brainer.
Stop worrying and get busy!
Hydrogen's low cycle efficiency is difficult to justify in the presence of viable alternatives. Especially when some of those alternatives happen to be superiour on virtually all other grounds as well.
Battery electric plugin hybrids and electrified lightrail give good bang for the buck, for starters.
Bang for the buck?
Only if you gloss over the storage-intermittency factor and consider grid electricity equivalent to other forms of energy.
Consider a plug-in car, the Chevy Volt with a 16 kwh 10 year battery(9.0 kwh usable) in it, costing $10000 as a 'gold plated gas tank' that lets you drive 40 miles a day in electric mode.
If you only look at the grid electricity at 10 cents per kwh you are paying $.022 per mile for fuel. Now add in the $10000, 150000 mile battery, that's another $.066 per mile for $.088 per mile total.
Compare to a 30 mpg similar build compact car at $2 per gallon gas, that's only $.066 per mile.
Light rail running on continuous grid energy(mainly coal) is not very energy efficient; it averages 3500 Btu per passenger mile
or 1kwh/pm, but actually light rail operating costs are almost always much more than $.20 per passenger mile.
http://www.lightrailnow.org/facts/fa_lrt02.htm
And a new light rail line costs about $35 million per mile and up. However in congested cities, mass transit becomes necessary.
" add in the $10000, 150000 mile battery"
Ah, but there's no basis for $10,000. That's just media speculation. It's very likely to be $4-5K.
Not sure, but the advanced nano lithium technologies are costed at a dollar per Watt hour or something, which puts a 16kWh pack at 16k. Regular lithium ion is cheaper.
I have not been paying attention to battery pack costs lately. Maybe costs have come down since?
" the advanced nano lithium technologies are costed at a dollar per Watt hour or something"
That's for very small cells, at low production levels. Automotive traction batteries will be much larger and cheaper formats, and in much larger quantities (there's a lot of hand construction now). 2nd gen li-ion (advanced nano lithium) generally use cheaper materials than 1st gen.
Tesla pays $400/KWH for 1st gen li-ion - 2nd gen should be cheaper. See: http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/005905.html , including the comments.
All hydrogen fuel cell technologies are a large factor more expensive than your Volt battery pack estimate. Granted, hydrogen fuel cells have an excellent learning rate. But it's not nearly enough even then. Indeed, even optimistic long term cost projections for hydrogen fuel cells are over USD 150/kWe which brings a 100 kWe vehicle (same as the Volt powertrain) to USD 15,000 just for the fuel cell system. Then you have to be optimistic about fuel cell life - 10 year fuel cell life is definately not proven for automotive applications. Durability may add more costs, and who knows whether or when the cost projections pan out? Right now a hydrogen fuel cell equivalent in power to the Volt would cost well over USD 100,000 probably a LOT more, and that's without considering the rest of the vehicle plus electrolysers etc.
Electricity at 10 cents per kWh will be cheaper per mile in an efficient plugin hybrid than in an inefficient hydrogen powered vehicle. Even at the thermodynamic limit, electrolyser-fuel cell hydrogen doesn't get close to advanced battery efficiency. Since hydrogen fuel cells and electrolysers are also very expensive compared to direct battery charging and discharging, you have no argument whatsoever.
Hydrogen fuel cells are not affordable even with optimistic long term projections so what will happen is hydrogen ICE which is even more ineffient, it is a total non-starter. The macro economics of inefficiency are dismal, in fact it is one of the major reasons why we are in trouble right now.
Hydrogen will also be nearly useless as V2G (although it may have use as G2V) considering the low cycle efficiency makes the economics dismal. This could be a serious future negative although most people haven't considered this.
You are not seriously suggesting light rail even with low average passenger utilisation uses more electricity than hydrogen powered automotive vehicles per passenger mile? Since plugin hybrids are cheaper to buy and cheaper to run and more efficient than hydrogen powered automitive vehicles, this doesn't make sense in the first place.
Hydrogen will not get much bang for the buck. More like a little poof. And then we're all screwed since we put all our money in an incredibly marginal technology.
US DOE has a current 2005 price of $125/Kwe, so for a 100Kwe car that's $12500 for a fuel cell but is looking for $30/Kwe in 2015 or $3000. That gets you a 200 mile 'gas tank'.
http://www.nrel.gov/hydrogen/pdfs/39104.pdf
http://corporate.honda.com/environment/fuel_cells.aspx?id=fuel_cells_fcx
The media is reporting a $10000, 150000 mile warranty battery for what you get a 40 mile 'gas tank'. What basis do you have to claim the battery price will be much lower?
http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/new_cars/4257460.html?series=19
I must say it is childish of you to say that grid electricity is INFINITELY more efficient than hydrogen.
Ulf Bossel says that
100 kwh of 'renewable' electricity( except only 8% of grid electricity is in any sense renewable and if you want to increase that number significantly you will need hydrogen energy storage) produces 23 kwh of car power while batteries produce 69 kwh of car power( three times more efficient per Ulf).
Yes, you are more efficient for the 40 mile range of the Chevy volt but what if you want to go ANOTHER 150 miles, do you buy another car?
OMG, Cyril!
I AM saying that!
Let's say it costs $.2 per kwh to produce hydrogen(50% efficiency) and a fuel cell(gas tank)which gets .5kwh/mi.
[Honda's FCV gets 57 miles/GGE x 1 GGE/33.4 kwh=1.7 miles/kwh]. Divide into hydrogen cost and you get $.2/kwh/1.7 kwh/mi= $.12 per mile which is the almost the SAME as the 1 kwh/pm (3500 Btu/pm) of light rail running at $.1 per kwh.....$.1 per mi.
EXCEPT...that cars average ~1.5 passengers(per USDOT)so in fact the fuel cell car is 20% more cost efficient than the LRT ($.12/1.5=$.08 per pm).
But LRT's operating costs are far higher than a mere $.1 per pm as LightRailNow say that operating costs in their selected cities(2001)
run on average about $.47 per pm--almost 5 times higher than the $.1 per pm for electricity( 10 cents per kwh,3500 BTU/pm).
http://www.lightrailnow.org/facts/fa_lrt02.htm
That's an interesting reference; things must be going faster than I thought. Where can I buy 125/kWe fuel cells? Unless we have a real product we can't say if the estimated system cost is correct. Not that it matters, since practical efficiencies are extremely low, and even the theoretical efficiency is low.
I did not claim this at all. That's Nick. I'd believe even $ 20,000 per pack for the first round of Volt production. What interests me is the learning rate of these advanced battery technologies (ie cost reduction potential curve). You're being inconsistent in your methodology, assuming large learning curve improvements for fuel cell systems but zero learning for advanced batteries like those in the Volt. Don't get me wrong, I think the fuel cell cost targets can be met, given sufficient incentives to achieve deployment (scale). But assuming that and not assuming improvements and economies of scale for batteries is biased at best.
I did not claim this either. Stop putting words in my mouth.
Don't be absurd. Hydrogen stores zero grid energy. Even if it were cheap it's cycle efficiency is so low the economics are going to be dismal non starting. Increasing renewables % is easy even with little storage. See the Decarolis and Keith study on wind and, oh, a couple of hundred others. Pumped hydro is way easier than hydrogen storage and way more efficient.
Nope, you use liquid fuels/gaseous fuels. It's the first miles that get you the most reduction, after that there are diminishing returns. That's why the plugin hybrid is such a good compromise between cost and liquid/gaseous fuel savings.
Netherlands light rail company claims energy use per km per passenger as 40 Wh/km. You can play around with passenger utilisation and other assumptions all you want, but you'd have to be pretty biased to claim that light rail uses more energy per km per passenger than hydrogen FCVs. The latter use 625 Wh/km according to your estimate. With 1.5 person per vehicle that's 417 Wh/km. Still an order of magnitude more than for light rail with good utilisation.
Other very low light rail per passenger per km energy use estimates on Wikipedia (under trains):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_efficiency_in_transportation
Of course not all geographies are optimal for light rail, when utilisation is low the economics and energy use is high. But most urban areas are suitable. A clever combination of light rail, busses, and plugin-hybrids gets us a long way. Hydrogen just wastes perfectly good electricity.
In case this has not been mentioned
http://greenwombat.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/02/03/china-the-new-wind-s...
Problem of unemployment is different in mainland China than in EU or US because of the sheer size of population and the vast environmental damages that reduce agrable land and yield of edibles. That is less income meets higher food prices.
Further as a result of air and water pollution the rate of newborns with severe deformations rises precipitously.
It is interesting to know how many qualified jobs were created in China by
windpower.
Your Dutch light rail claim seems too high.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_efficiency_in_transportation#Trains
In the reference the East Japan Railway light rail company has a low figure of .35 MJ/pkm which is 0.15 kwh/pass-mile. A 40 mile range electric car gets about 0.25 kwh/mi or with 1.5 passengers per car, 0.16 kwh/pm.
A 200 mile range FCV at 0.39 kw/pm if there are 1.5 passengers in it.
The difference between 0.15 kwh/pm(LRT-Japan) and .39 kwh/pm(FCV) is not a MAGNITUDE 10x, it is only 2.6 times.
Since LRT at 0.15kwh/pm is no more efficient than electric cars at 0.16kwh/pm, why build expensive LRT?
Since people would rather go 200 miles in a hydrogen FCV at 0.39kwh/p-mile(total cost=$15.60, 7.8 cents a mile) than go 40 miles in an electric car( 1.5 cents a mile) or 200? miles by streetcar at $1? per mile. At $2 per gallon an average car would cost about 10 cents per mile.
Again, this depends on utilisation factor - how many passengers on average per train. If it's very high then lightrail makes sense, if it's very low then the energy use and overall economics are dismal.
It's not a question of either/or. In rural areas lightrail is typically a loser on energy and economic grounds. In densely populated urban areas it can be a saviour.
Busses also make sense - and typically at lower densities. They could be hydrogen busses if they become competitive.
That's a factor of 2.4 difference between EV total efficiency compared to hydrogen total efficiency. Your 25% cycle efficiency compares to over 90% for an advanced battery, even with electric grid losses (assuming hydrogen has no transport/infrastructure losses!) a state of the art electric vehicle can still get over 80% cycle efficiency. This is more like factor 3.2 difference. Your numbers are questionable anyway; the Honda FCX uses over a kWh of electricity per mile, compared to state of the art EVs such as Tesla roadster at under 200 Wh/mile, easily a factor 5 difference. More persons per vehicle won't change the balance between FCV and BEV since they are both the same vehicles.
More considerations here:
http://www.evnut.com/fuel_cell.htm
"You can think of a fuel cell as an inefficient battery"
When was the last time you drove 200 miles? Most people drive very short distances, if you google you'll get something like 20-40 miles average US car trip distance for over 80% of trips. That's why plugin hybrids are such a good compromise. They are also affordable, much cheaper than hydrogen FCV. Sure, cost of hydrogen FCV are projected to come down - but this must be compared with the cost reduction potential for plugin hybrids. Right now, cheap PEMFC is wishful thinking. Cheap PEMFC will only happen if the gov't sinks billions in in to get the deployment for learning. And that will not be justified if the cycle efficiency is crap. Which happens to be a fact of entropy.
If hydrogen would be cheap, it may be good as a backup generator for battery electric plugin hybrids, to replace the last bit of liquid fuel. This will depend on advancements in battery tech and cost, since there's a huge commercial market pushing this technology (micro-electronics, powertools etc) and hydrogen has almost none, things are not looking bright for hydrogen transportation. It is not at all surprising that GM abandoned hydrogen for batteries.
I am skeptical of vast increases in battery efficiency. There has been a huge research in batteries since they were discovered in 1800. It was be very surprising if suddenly
batteries at .72MJ/kg operated as efficiently a storage medium as gasoline at 46.4 MJ/kg or hydrogen gas at 143 MJ/kg.
A fuel cell is like a battery but uses protons instead of electrons. Contrary to your statement, it hasn't been massively funded and is still in development; after all there is still plenty of electricity and gasoline about.
Actual here in the USA we drive over 40 miles frequently. An average US driver does about 22000 miles per year or 60 miles per day. It takes 3 hours to recharge a Chevy Volt at 240v. It takes about 5 minutes to refill.
http://blogs.consumerreports.org/cars/2007/06/honda_fcx_conce.html
IMO, people won't be satisfied with electrical cars or streetcars and the biomass of the planet isn't adequate to fuel all our driving. All that's left is hydrogen fueled cars using fuel cell technology. Fuel cells can also power heavy trucks, tractors, trains and buses. If it is simply a matter of producing enough hydrogen there is no barrier--we have enough renewable solar wind to make it happen.
"An average US driver does about 22000 miles per year or 60 miles per day"
Ah, no, the average is about $12K, for an average of 33 miles per day. A PHEV-40 would reduce fuel consumption by about 90%, vs the average US light vehicle today. That's enough.
Fuel cell vehicles are also electric, with batteries. The only question is how large the battery will be.
PHEV's can use either ICE's or fuel cells for their backup generator - it doesn't matter much, because with a decently large battery the generator will be used very little.
12000 miles per car, about 22000 miles per household. What we are really talking about is car trips in a day. I don't think plug-ins will save much electricity.
Here's a field study that shows that these cars run on electric mode only 30% in city driving and 7% on the highway. A 50 mpg hybrid saves 60% of the gas of a 20 mpg car
and a plug-in hybrid driven as above would save 70%--no big deal(for a hefty additional price)!
http://avt.inl.gov/pdf/phev/HymotionPriusV2GreenAllRpt.pdf
The only reason I support plug-in hybrids (and I do) is because they are hybrids.
You're being silly again. Plugins don't save electricity, they use it, the point is that EVs use 3-6x less electricity per mile than hydrogen fuel cell vehicles powered by electrolysis.
70% is a lot. You can't seem to get the fuel cell cost point I made earlier. Let me repeat. Your NREL study is hypothetical; it is assuming massive learning plus scale deployment. Reality is that today's retail rate for automotive grade PEMFC is in the thousands of dollars per kWe range, a large factor more expensive than 5-15k advanced battery packs. For more info and difficulties see here:
http://www.ika.rwth-aachen.de/r2h/index.php/Hydrogen_Pathway:_Cost_Analysis
As you can see the total fuel cell system cost is over 4000 USD/kWe. A Volt power fuel cell vehicle would cost 100kWe x 4000 = 400,000 dollars. If we can believe Ballard's recent contract, the cost would still be around 600/kWe or 60,000 dollars. Going down, but still very expensive.
You're assuming massive cost reductions for PEMFC but today's cost of advanced batteries. This is not consistent methodology, and you can't make any argument about it unless you make the same learning curve assumptions for various different battery pathways. Don't get me wrong, I think cheap fuel cells are plausible, just not a given, and you have to make the same assumptions to be fair.
An obvious slip, I meant save much GASOLINE.
And going from a 60% savings to a 70% savings in gasoline savings is small potatos. Spending $10000 to extract 55 gallons of gasoline savings per year is nuts.
Read your source again.
It says $5000 for a 10 KW system or $500/KW(transportation). And they expect the price to drop to $50/KW(versus DOE $30/KW).
Therefore a 'commercial' 100 KW system would cost about $50 x 100 = $5000 while in a current Honda FCV(no such thing as a Volt fuel cell vehicle) the fuel cell(car engine) probably costs around $50000.
As far as the potential for the Chevy volt or similar EVs to save the world goes I think I am being fair. The range is limited, the performance is severely limited.
The advantage is that you can use the same carbon dirty grid power we have now to save a small amount of gasoline. For example,
given the fact that in city driving you use the electric battery 33% of the time the car would consume about 1000 kwh per year and produce .712 tons of CO2, while burning 55 gallons of gasoline you 'saved' would produce .48 tons of CO2.
Expect, expect, expect. The advanced batteries are also expected to go down to 200/kWh in high volume production.
That is cheaper than the 5000 dollar fuel cell automotive system expected price. An ICE generator for the Volt style hybrid is cheap and efficient (50 MPG in backup gasoline driving) so we're not talking about a big difference in cost when projections pan out.
It says 5500 per kWe for a 10 kWe system and 3800 per kWe for a 200 kWe system. Such a 200 kWe system, although cheaper per kWe, would cost 200x3800 = 760,000 dollars. Half that price is still 380,000 dollars for a 100 kWe system.
Other claims are different since they depend on sales volume assumptions. You have to show me a real contract to be convincing. Since I cannot buy a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle anywhere as a consumer, we cannot really be sure of the retail cost. Ballard has a contract for around 600 dollars per kWe, if goes through, costs are clearly declining nicely, close to the 500 per kWe claim, but we're not quite there yet, and retail evidence is lacking since hydrogen FCVs are not commercial products.
Chevy Volts won't save the world, but that's a strawman. I don't believe any (one) technology can 'save us'. But for pluginhybrids, the cost/savings is excellent, good bang for the buck, and the technology is practical with no infrastructure required, and offers an incremental route to more battery electric by increasing the battery portion of the vehicle as the tech gets cheaper and oil prices go up further.
We haven't nearly discussed all major problems that hydrogen has. Example. Forget home electrolysers, if you want them cheap you need big centralized plants, requiring difficult and expensive and lossy infrastructure, and even then it is not clear whether learning will be achieved. If you read the reference, there's a whole bunch of other problems just on the economics side for hydrogen; infrastructure, storage, generation etc etc.
Good that you mention that. Since electrolytic hydrogen production is far more expensive than using natural gas and coal derived hydrogen, and will be for years even if electrolyser cost goes down since electricity is worth more/GJ than raw FF like natural gas an in particular coal, the advantage for hydrogen is that you can use the same dirty fossil fuels we have now, and use a hell of a lot more of it due to systemic inefficiency compared to battery-electric. Not surprisingly fossil fuel interests are in hydrogen advancement. Unfortunately, this fossil fuel hydrogen competitiveness is not in the interest of society, since as you mention we want to use less FF and emit less CO2 in the process, and electrolysis hydrogen fails inherently here, because of it's little entropy problem.
Because hydrogen is more expensive right now than BEV and PHEV, and will not likely be significantly cheaper in the future, and is also more expensive to drive because it's less efficient by thermodynamics which leads to more CO2 emissions, and being less reliable, having greater safety issues (which cost even more money to solve), more risk of fossil fuel lock in, resulting in more dependence and even more CO2 emissions, has more storage and infrastructural issues, I see no merit in a hydrogen grand plan over a battery electric grand plan. It is an open question whether such megalomania is useful anyways.
Hydrogen would become an attractive option if cost effective non-electricity sources are found for generation, such as algae that produce hydrogen, or direct solar photoelectric splitting with eg titanium catalysts, etc. None of these things are near commercial viability, but if they become available, it would improve the prospects of hydrogen a lot; it would no longer have to compete with it's own energy source.
Hi Nick,
It's even better than that because that 33 miles involves several trips with opportunities to plug in for example during an 8h work shift. None the less there will be occasional longer trips that's why a PHEV will be preferable to a BEV for most people. For those who drive more will probably have vehicles with extended battery range after the first generation of PHEV's. Others may choose to have a smaller battery if they only go short trips, and keep the extended range as insurance against a flat(battery) just like we keep a spare tire.