pfairley

Garbage to Gas

$PlascoEnergy\'s Waste Gasfication Process$ Rising costs of energy and other commodities have silenced erstwhile critics of municipal collection of plastic, paper and glass for recycling. Critics of converting trash into energy may be the next to go, if developments in Ottawa are any guide. Last week Ottawa’s city council unanimously approved a proposal by local technology developer PlascoEnergy to build an innovative 400-m.t./day waste-to-energy facility within city limits. If built, it would be the first such plant in North America in over a decade.

PlascoEnergy CEO Rod Bryden says the plant’s technology is key to public acceptance. “There wasn’t a single person who attended the council meeting to object. There’s no chance that would happen with a landfill or an incinerator,” says Bryden.

Rather than simply tossing trash into a giant furnace, PlascoEnergy’s design employs superhot electric plasma torches to first gasify municipal waste. Gasification eases the subsequent removal of contaminants such as mercury and produces a clean-burning ‘synthesis gas’ amenable to combustion in high-efficiency engine generators; net power exports to the grid will be about 21 megawatts. At the same time the plant will cut the equivalent of 2.1 m.t. of CO2 for every tonne of waste, thanks largely to avoided methane emissions from Ottawa’s landfill.

More gasification-based waste treatment is on the way, and not just to generate electricity. In April General Motors-based cellulosic ethanol firm Coskata, which plans to make ethanol from syngas, announced plans to integrate its first demonstration plant with an existing waste gasification pilot plant in Pennsylvania.

For more on the trash gas trend, see “Garbage In, Megawatts Out” on MIT’s TechnologyReview.com.

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July 2, 2008July 4, 2008 by pfairley

Dark Clouds Over Clean Diesels

$GM-Opal\'s turbo-diesel Agila © GM Corp$ Diesels are returning to auto showrooms nationwide. Major automakers will offer them from this fall for the 2009 model year, equipped with vastly improved emissions control devices that make them a lot cleaner than the diesel image. But their main attraction — fuel economy — is rapidly fading. The cost of diesel is rising more rapidly than gasoline, while there is increasing skepticism about their impact on climate change.

I explore the environmental implications of diesel in “Dark Clouds Over Clean Diesels”, a web-exclusive news piece on Spectrum.com. The short take: diesels still emit more soot than gasoline-fueled vehicles and the bad news on soot just keeps getting worse. Estimates of mortality from breathing fine particles is still rising, and there are top climate scientists who believe that soot is also a serious contributor to global warming. It could be second only to CO2, even outpacing methane.

Interestingly, while the U.S. and Canada prepares for a new generation of diesel cars and light trucks, European car buyers are moving in the opposite direction. A German automotive research center recently forecast a sharp decline in diesel’s share of the European car market over the coming decades, thanks to the cost of adding tailpipe controls and tough competition from gasoline-powered engine technology. From a current market share of 53% (compared to 3% in the U.S.), the study predicts diesels to drop to 38% of Europe’s car market in 2015 and to 30% in 2020.

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June 12, 2008June 12, 2008 by pfairley

China ‘Gets It’ On Green Jobs

Threatened American jobs and higher gas prices were the points of attack that deep-sixed the latest effort to put a price on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions — a cap-and-trade bill that died in the Senate on Friday. This defensive posture, seeking to preserve energy-intensive transportation and industries, is short-sighted in light of the transition to alternative forms of energy underway worldwide.

China gets it. Not only is it racing to implement renewable energy (ie setting a nationwide renewable portfolio standard for utilities, installing enough wind power in just the last two years to edge out wind-energy pioneer Denmark for fifth place in the Global Wind Energy Council’s annual capacity rankings, and building a photovoltaics export business essentially overnight). China designs these initiatives to favor the development of domestic industries.

In a recent article for Spectrum magazine I show how China’s dramatic installation of wind power parks is occuring despite rock-bottom pricing — a situation that analysts say favors local players. See China Doubles Wind Watts in Spectrum’s May 2008 issue.

Note that while John McCain and Barack Obama both claim to get it on both green jobs and climate change, neither bothered to show up for Friday’s vote.

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June 9, 2008June 9, 2008 by pfairley

A Steadier Platform for Floating Wind Power

$The Norwegian North Sea site for StatoilHydro\'s first floating wind turbine$ Those of you who mistook CN’s April 2 post Wind Power That Floats for a belated April Fool’s joke will want to consider last month’s project launch by Norway’s StatoilHydro. The North Sea oil and gas giant has teamed up with engineering conglomerate Siemens AG to anchor a full-scale commercial wind turbine in over 200 meters of water off Norway’s southwest tip.

StatoilHydro and Siemens plan to take a different tack from the startups profiled in the April 2 piece. As I show today in Wind Power Moves into Deep Waters at TechnologyReview.com, these big players are selecting components conservatively to prove that the concept of floating wind turbines is workable rather than trying to engineer the optimal floating system from the start.

Consider the turbine itself. Tech startup Sway is designing a downwind rotor, and rival Blue H Group is building a two-bladed rotor with hinged blades. Both designs could reduce the forces on the machine and thus reduce the weight of the entire system–including the super-pricey counterweights required to anchor giant buoys to the seabed. But both designs were also left behind as the commercial wind power industry went mainstream in the mid to late 1990s and coalesced around the less elegant but more durable upwind three-bladed rotors now universally used on utility scale turbines.

StatoilHydro and Siemens will use a well-tested Siemens three-blade upwind machine, thus simplifying both their design process and their demonstration of the floating wind concept. As StatoilHydro’s vp for wind power notes in my story, if the demo fails in any way they’ll know that it’s not the turbine itself that’s to blame.

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June 4, 2008June 5, 2008 by pfairley

Solar Squabble Tops Renewable Energy Podcast

Carbon-Nation returns today from a month-long hiatus that took editor Peter Fairley on a fact-finding mission to North Africa. More to come on that. For instant gratification we refer you to the latest installment of Renewable Energy World’s Inside Renewable Energy podcast, released this morning. Topping this week’s podcast is an interview with C-N’s editor on the growing acrimony within organic photovoltaics research over the credibility of recent reports touting record power output from this promising next-generation approach to solar power.

Call it another friendly effort to pop the solar bubble before unrealized hype damages the entire industry. Akin to lancing a wound to stem a life-threatening infection.

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May 29, 2008May 29, 2008 by pfairley

Anticipating Wind Power’s Uncontrollable Ebbs and Flows

Two months ago, on the evening of February 26, power grid controllers at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) found themselves in an uncomfortable position: they were rapidly running out of power. As consumption outstripped supply the frequency of the alternating current — nominally 60 hertz — began to slide, threatening to damage utility and customer equipment. At 6:41 pm the grid controllers declared a grid emergency and began ‘shedding load’ to restore the grid frequency. Which is to say, they shut off the power to some customers.

These customers had agreed in advance to participate in such “demand-response” situations and would be compensated for their trouble. Nevertheless, saying no to a buyer is as much a measure of last-resort for the power industry as for any other.

Wind power got the blame early on, because wind turbines in West Texas were delivering less power than their operators had projected. But subsequent studies showed that other factors were more important. In the 40 minutes leading up to the emergency conventional power plants delivered 350 megawatts less than they had promised, while wind generation slipped just 80 megawatts relative to plan. At the same time consumption rose by a whopping 1,185 MW more than ERCOT had forecast. ERCOT’s report to the Public Utility Commission of Texas highlights that electric load growth as a key cause.

Still, smarter integration of Texas’ wind power could have prevented the trouble. As ERCOT’s report shows, an independent wind power forecast prepared for ERCOT on February 25 under an ongoing pilot project predicted the February 26 wind power drop with “good fidelity.” Unfortunately ERCOT’s grid operators never saw the forecast and hence could not take steps in advance to ensure that alternate power supplies were available.

My story on TechReview.com today, Scheduling Wind Power, shows that grid controllers increasingly get the message: Integrating wind forecasting into grid planning is not only key to reliably accomodating much greater levels of wind power. It will also maximize the pollution reductions achieved in the process.

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April 17, 2008April 17, 2008 by pfairley

Wind Power That Floats

Wind farms continue to inspire considerable opposition from neighbors and bird lovers. None more so than the proposal by Boston-based Cape Wind to erect 130 wind turbines in Nantucket Sound in what would be the first offshore wind farm in U.S. waters. Ted Kennedy, senior senator from Massachusetts, has led the charge against the proposal, claiming this industrial intrusion would mar the view from his family’s seaside compound and, by extension, harm Cape Cod’s leading industry: tourism.

To form your own view of Cape Wind’s visual impact, check out the computer-generated graphics prepared by the developer to simulate the wind farm’s appearance from the surrounding shores 5-13 miles away.

Now, into these contested seas sails a new developer with a proposal designed to please all: Blue H Technologies, which has staked out a parcel of seabed for a wind farm 23-miles off Nantucket, well beyond the sight of sling-sipping vacationers. And the technological solution enabling Blue H to site a wind farm in water 167 feet deep? Floating wind turbines.

Blue H’s proposal struck some partisans of the Cape Wind debate as a fraud. See this rant from Cape Cod Today, for example, suggesting the Blue H is an underhanded scheme by Ted Kennedy and other politicos to protect their waterfront viewscapes.

However, as my report headlining MIT TechReview.com today shows, Blue H is for real. The Dutch firm is well on the way to demonstrating a novel application for conventional oil and gas platform technology, and it has competitors just as intent on proving the economic and energy potential of deepwater wind.

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April 2, 2008April 2, 2008 by pfairley