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Nanotech’s Outsized Energy Impact

I think Richard Smalley would have appreciated my article “Realizing Lithium Battery Potential” which headlines MIT TechReview.com today. The Rice University chemist – who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of soccer ball-shaped carbon cages called buckyballs – believed that nanotechnology could multiply the efficiency of the myriad energy devices upon which modern human society relies and, as such, had a central role to play in cleaning up our energy systems.

I relied on Smalley’s vision to wrap up a 2004 feature story for Tech Review – “Solar-Cell Rollout” – on plastic solar cells, which represent a radical, nanotech-enabled departure from the high-performance silicon crystal materials that still dominate the photovoltaics industry. Smalley’s belief in the rather anemic, flimsy plastic cells’ potential to someday be rooftop-ready lent crucial authority. (Doesn’t seem so crazy now. Just yesterday a German R&D agency decided the technology’s performance warranted a €2.5-million investment in improving its stability.)

In the same breath I passed along Smalley’s plea for bold investments in physical sciences research:

Nanotech could help solve the energy problem, Smalley contends, by providing new tools and materials that make widespread use of solar cells economically viable. But he believes it will take billions of dollars in funding and the focused efforts of the world’s top chemists and physicists to make that happen. So for the past two years, he has been crisscrossing the United States, evangelizing for nothing short of a modern-day Manhattan Project to use nanotech to deliver a sustainable energy system.

Smalley died from leukemia in 2005, but the vision he championed continues to spread and the advances he foresaw are being realized. My article on TechReview.com today presents nanotech-fueled advances that could multiply the energy storage capacity of lithium batteries. The immense potential of lithium batteries is the inspiration for today’s renaissance in electric vehicle development. But auto industry analysts say their cost will constrain EV expansion through 2020; see for example these uninspiring growth curves from PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ Calum MacRae. More potent batteries should help by extending EVs’ range and thus improving their value proposition.

Nanotech, by the way, is already improving the lithium battery. Boston-area technology developer A123, for example, coats its batteries’ positive electrodes with nanoparticles of iron-phosphate to boost safety and reduce cost relative to conventional laptop-style batteries. A123 is believed to have lost its bid to supply GM’s Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid vehicle, but as TechReview editor Kevin Bullis points out recently A123 has plenty of other EVs to bid on.

This post was created for Energywise, IEEE Spectrum’s blog on green power, cars and climate

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December 3, 2008December 9, 2008 by pfairley

Probing for Fluff in Europe’s Supergrids Vision

Last month the European Commission (EC) called for construction of regional power transmission grids that would ultimately merge into a supergrid distributing Mediterranean solar energy and offshore wind energy across Europe. Today, in MIT’s Technology Review, I test the political reality of sharing power across Europe (see “Europe Backs Supergrids”) and show that the EC just might pull it off.

Why be skeptical? Because for over a decade the EC has been pushing the liberalization of the European electricity market. Whereas, given the limited capacity for exchange of power between many European countries one could fairly question whether a ‘European market’ for electricity even exists.

Wind power developer Eddie O’Connor, for example, told me that his priority – building an offshore grid to connect tens of gigawatts of North Sea wind farms to be installed in the coming decade – would remain a dream so long as the European states and their politically powerful utilities control tranmission planning. “The utilities are the enemy,” says O’Connor, founder of wind developer Airtricity and CEO of Mainstream Renewable Power. “Even at this stage they’re still the enemy.”

What my report for TechReview shows, however, is that change is possible. The best example is a French-Spanish agreement this summer — under intense prodding from the EC — clearing the way for a much-needed second powerline across the Pyrenees. A special envoy appointed by the EC broke what had been a 15-year impasse complicated by local environmental concerns, Catalan fury, and diverging interests of the utilities involved.

Even O’Connor is optimistic. He believes that new international institutions must be created to conjur up the supergrid Europe needs to carry renewable energy. But, says O’Connor, both are possible: “I believe the building of the supergrid is imminent.”

Stay tuned for more on the EC’s energy envoys.

This post was created for Energywise, IEEE Spectrum’s blog on green power, cars and climate

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December 2, 2008December 2, 2008 by pfairley

Nukes, Gas, Oil and Coal All Losers in EU Energy Strategy

The European Commission issued its Strategic Energy Review yesterday, proposing energy efficiency investments, a shift to alternative fuel vehicles to end oil dependence in transport, and more aggressive deployment of renewable energy and carbon capture and storage to “decarbonise” the EU electricity supply. Figuring prominantly among its first six “priorities essential for the EU’s energy security” are the North Sea offshore electric power supergrid that Energywise covered in September and the Mediterranean Ring electric interconnection of Europe and North Africa that I’ve been harping on this week.

The EC energy strategy not only endorses the MedRing, but views it as a component of a future supergrid traversing Europe and stretching beyond the Mediterranean to Iraq, the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa.

How would this new vision (and $100/barrel oil) alter the complexion of European energy consumption? The energy review projects that by 2020 total energy demand drops from the equivalent of 1811 metric tons of oil in 2005 to 1672 MTOE in 2020. Demand met by renewables such as wind, solar and hydro more than doubles in real terms from 123 to 274 MTOE, while their share of total demand leaps from 6.8% to 16.4%. Imported renewables – with the MedRing delivering North African wind and solar power – jump 10-fold from 0.8% in 2005 to 8.8% in 2020.

Oil, gas, coal and nuclear, meanwhile, all see a diminished role, both in real terms and as a share of European energy demand. Interestingly the role of natural gas – the low-carbon fossil fuel – drops the most, from 25% to 21%, reflecting EU concern over dependence on gas imports from Russia. Nuclear’s share drops the least, from just slightly over to slightly under 14% of demand; this assumes that nuclear phaseout plans, particularly Germany’s, are followed through.

How to make it all come true? Accompanying the EC review is a ‘green paper‘ (the EU’s unbleached alternative terminology for what we’d call a ‘white paper’) outlining a variety of new regulatory and financial mechanisms. The EU is already a world leader in terms of incentives for lower carbon energy with strong price supports for solar and wind and a carbon cap and trade program up and running (though still lacking teeth as my Energywise colleague Bill Sweet notes). However, the energy review warns that the primarily national-level financing that drives energy projects today are inadequate to drive infrastructure that is pan-European or larger. A perfect example is the massive investment in high-voltage dc lines needed to turn the MedRing into a bulk power mover (see the second half of our feature on MedRing: “Closing the Circuit”).

Even less viable under existing financing mechanisms are those projects that entail considerable “non-commercial risks” such as threats of political instability or terrorism. Did someone say North Africa?

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This post was created for Energywise, IEEE Spectrum’s blog on green power, cars and climate

November 14, 2008April 18, 2024 by pfairley

Power Struggles and the Mediterranean Ring

‘The Mediterranean Ring’ would make a fitting title for a high-voltage action thriller where cut-throat crime gangs vie for control in the labyrinthine medieval medina’s of North Africa. Alas it is no such thing. And yet this project to connect the power grids of North Africa and Europe does boast a potentially destructive internal power struggle that could stymie its promise — clean power supplies for Europe, economic development for North Africa, and a much needed bond between neighbors.

MedRing’s power struggle spilled into the daylight on November 21, 2005 when power engineers activated a key electrical circuit linking Tunisia and Libya in a key test of the MedRing. For a moment nearly all of the AC power systems of North Africa operated synchronously with those of Europe. Power plants, transmission lines and controls from Syria to Morocco were in electrical conversation with those of the mighty UCTE, whose 240,000 kilometers of high-voltage lines connect 26 European countries. Add links to Turkey and the MedRing would have been complete.

Seven minutes later the grids had broken apart and the test had failed.

It was a tug of war between North African grid control systems that broke the synchronicity. Understanding why isn’t straightforward. Bear with me as I try because the failure of this early trial exemplifies the challenge inherent in connecting a robust power system like the UCTE’s — the world’s biggest — to much weaker grids such as those of North Africa.

Continue reading “Power Struggles and the Mediterranean Ring”

November 12, 2008November 12, 2008 by pfairley

Solar PoweRING the Mediterranean

Engineers working in the teeming cities and lonely deserts of North Africa are creating the last links in a power grid that will ring the Mediterranean Sea. Sharing electricity over this ‘Mediterranean Ring’ could secure Europe’s power supply with clean renewable energy, accelerating North Africa’s development and knitting together two worlds that seem to be racing apart — those of Muslim North Africa and an increasingly xenophobic Europe.

We make the case for all this unabashed optimism in Closing the Circuit – a feature story in this month’s issue of Spectrum. Closing the Circuit is the product of two years of on-again, off-again research that came to fruition with on-site reporting in Libya and Morocco this summer.

The timing is fortuitious: North African countries – in many ways among the most progressive in the Muslim world – face a rising threat of Islamic fundamentalism, including increasingly deadly attacks by Al Qaeda-aligned militants. Economic development and democratization are the best hope for a North African renaissance. At the same time Europe’s growing dependence on Russian oil and gas and desire to slash carbon emissions has intensified interest in North Africa’s energy resources.

The scale of the potential exchange is immense: Analyses by the German government estimate that solar power generated in scorching North Africa could meet Germany’s entire electricity demand. No wonder then that the Union for the Mediterranean launched by French president Nicolas Sarkozy this summer to spur cooperation between Europe and North Africa is fleshing out a “Mediterranean solar plan” as one of its first actions.

The geopolitical and social import could be bigger. Consider what Dominique Maillard, President of French grid operator Réseau de Transport de l’Electricité, said when asked last month what the Mediterranean Ring represents during an interview last month for the European Energy Review. Maillard began his response by noting that the electrical interconnections between the European countries got started in 1951 – well before the signing of the Treaty or Paris, which created a European coal and steel market, and before the Treaty of Rome in 1957. “At the dawn of Europe, energy – and even electrical energy – had therefore already preceded politics,” says Maillard.

The implication by extension is clear: Electrical interconnection can be the forerunner for peaceful codevelopment among the countries of the Mediterranean, even including Israel. Call it informed optimism.

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This post was created for Energywise, IEEE Spectrum’s blog on green power, cars and climate

November 9, 2008May 1, 2023 by pfairley

Democracy and Climate Change

Here’s some elegant prose on the hopes that rest on the Obama Administration to come from R.K. Pachauri, director general of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in New Dehli and Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the UN body that seeks and sells scientific consensus on climate science and policy. In a statement released yesterday Pachauri elegantly explains why the election is a cause for optimism:

The presidential elections in the US have vindicated the power of democracy as the most responsive form of government of the people, by the people and for the people. In respect of policies related to climate change, there was obviously a major divergence between the position of the Federal Government and that of the people at large, state governments and the cities in the US.

President-elect Barack Obama has not only been very clear in emphasizing the need for the US to engage in global solutions to meet the challenge of climate change but also in respect of bringing about a major shift in US energy policy.

The US now has a unique opportunity to assume leadership in meeting the threat of climate change, and it would help greatly if the new President were to announce a coherent and forward looking policy soon after he takes office. There is every reason to believe that President Obama will actually do so. This should please people across the globe, because US leadership is critical for mounting global efforts to meet this threat effectively. For this reason itself, apart from several others, the election of Mr Obama is a development that should generate optimism all-round.

Pachauri’s statement was forwarded to members of the Society of Environmental Journalists by Arul Louis, a fellow at the International Center for Journalists in Washington, DC.

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This post was created for Energywise, IEEE Spectrum’s blog on green power, cars and climate

November 6, 2008November 6, 2008 by pfairley

China’s Explosive and Inadequate Wind Power Boom

China’s dramatic jump into wind power installations and manufacturing provides a glimmer of hope amidst what is otherwise a terribly polluted picture of unsustainable environmental devestation driven largely by coal-fired power generation. But just a glimmer.

Cambridge, MA-based consulting firm Emerging Energy Research affirmed the wind sector growth last week, issuing an analysis that puts China on track to hit 135,000-megawatt of wind capacity in 2020; EER expects China to lead the world in annual wind installations by 2011. EER’s 135-gigawatt prediction for 2020 marks a big jump up from the already optimistic prediction by Chinese Wind Energy Association secretary general Haiyan Qin that closed our May 2008 reporting on China’s wind sector — namely that his members would have no trouble doubling the official 30 GW national goal for 2020.

And still the wind sector remains dwarfed by the heft and growth of China’s coal-fired power sector. In 2006 alone, China commissioned 102 GW of new coal-fired power stations, a power bloc that exceeds the United Kingdom’s entire electric power system. In other words it will likely take a decade of world-leading growth in wind power installations before China’s total installed base of wind turbines can put out more power than the coal plants it added in 2006.

Factor in the intermittent output from the wind turbines and the comparison looks that much more lopsided (averaged out over a year, wind turbines produce at their peak capacity only 30% of the time). The result is toxic air that probably kills upwards of a million people per year in China, and is a leading contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions.

Cleaning up the coal-fired plants provides a more likely handle for cutting the local air pollution. According to a survey of coal plant operators issued by MIT’s China Energy Project in August — Greener Plants, Grayer Skies? — China’s coal-fired power plants have the means to capture acid rain and smog forming pollutans, as well as particulates. The authors determined that most of the new plants being added in China employ decent technology, including pollution controls. The problem, they conclude, is that these controls aren’t turned on.

Why break the law and leave pollution-trapping scrubbers and baghouses lying dormant? They consume energy, which cuts into revenues, and China’s inadequate environmental enforcement is incapable of enforcing compliance.

Could Beijing’s extension of controls on auto traffic post-Olympics signal the new ethic of environmental protection needed to activate those scrubbers and start detoxifying China’s air? One that could even, some day, include carbon capture to start trimming China’s world-leading greenhouse gas emissions? Those may sound like terribly hopeful notes, but they’re at least as realistic as relying on wind power to do the job.

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This post was created for Energywise, IEEE Spectrum’s blog on green power, cars and climate

October 27, 2008November 13, 2008 by pfairley

Peter Fairley

Author: pfairley

Nanotech’s Outsized Energy Impact

Probing for Fluff in Europe’s Supergrids Vision

Nukes, Gas, Oil and Coal All Losers in EU Energy Strategy

Power Struggles and the Mediterranean Ring

Solar PoweRING the Mediterranean

Democracy and Climate Change

China’s Explosive and Inadequate Wind Power Boom