Category: Renewable Energy

UK Rejects Tidal Barrage, but Smaller Tech May Endure

The UK government has shelved schemes to build a tidal barrage across the Severn estuary, West of London, that could have supplied 5% of the UK’s power needs. What reports are missing is the endurance of more nimble tidal turbines and other marine power devices–distributed energy devices that the UK is helping to nurture.

Barrages are essentially hydro dams that capture each high tide and generate electricity from their outflow.The first large barrage and largest currently operating crosses the estuary of the Rance River on France’s Atlantic coast, generating a peak of 240 megawatts–the scale of a large wind farm. Five competing proposals for a Severn barrage were to generate up to 40 times that much from the region’s 14-meter tides. Continue reading “UK Rejects Tidal Barrage, but Smaller Tech May Endure”

by pfairley

Europe and Turkey’s High-Power Embrace

Ethnic and economic tensions may have stalled Turkey’s longstanding bid to join the European Union, but electrical circuits can be color blind. As of September the alternating current on the Turkish power grid will flow in synchrony with Continental Europe’s, according to the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E), which took control of Europe’s power grids last summer.

Yesterday’s announcement means that Turkey can trade electricity with Europe and benefit from the bigger grid’s stability, in turn helping to stabilize the lines in neighboring Bulgaria and Greece. The link will run for at least one year, with power exchanges ramping up in stages.

Turkey’s integration provides hope for would-be regional developers in the Mediterranean, who face rising protectionism, ethnic tensions, and seemingly endless diplomatic bombshells from Israel and the Palestinian territories. The Middle East troubles caused the Union for the Mediterranean organized by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to delay a second summit scheduled to convene in Barcelona yesterday until November, according to the AP. Continue reading “Europe and Turkey’s High-Power Embrace”

by pfairley

Life’s a ‘Paternoster’ (and then you fly)

Solon SE’s new paternoster lift. Credit Kevin Matthews / ArchitectureWeek.

“Don’t leave the planet to the stupid.” The corporate tag line from German solar module manufacturer Solon SE screams: ‘We reject complacency’ (not to mention gentility). It’s a slap-in-the-face warning to expect the unexpected, so I was looking for something completely different when I visited Solon’s one-year old Berlin headquarters on an architectural tour of Germany last week. I was not to be disappointed. What I found is probably the first cyclic elevator system installed anywhere in decades.

No pressing a button and waiting for a lift with this modern incarnation of a late-19th-C elevator design! In a cyclic elevator a string of passenger cars run by in a continuous loop. One simply steps into one of the open cars scrolling up or down through its adjacent elevator shafts and takes off. To your weary Canadian correspondent, presently immobilized in Berlin by an angry planet, the hassle-free transport offered by Solon’s cyclic lift was a source of almost drunken pleasure.

Unfortunately, it may also be quite stupid (so to speak). Continue reading “Life’s a ‘Paternoster’ (and then you fly)”

by pfairley

No Joke: Solar’s Energetic Lease on Life

A notorious economics joke has optimistic implications for solar energy and its decades-long dreams of matching the cost of the electricity now flowing on power grids — the vaunted grid parity that is most renewable energy advocates’ image of the singularity that will free us from climate change and the anti-democratic effects of centralized power. In the joke an economist, physicist and chemist are stranded, starving, on a remote island when a can of soup washes ashore. Continue reading “No Joke: Solar’s Energetic Lease on Life”

by pfairley

China’s Grid-Limited Wind Energy Potential

China’s wind power industry barely noticed the international financing crisis, doubling installations in 2008  for the fifth year in a row. Readers of Carbon-Nation shouldn’t be surprised, as we have already documented the state and market share-driven industry’s insensitivity to quaint financial targets such as profitability. What may ultimately check China’s seemingly unstoppable wind power surge is the capacity of its power grids to absorb the resulting energy.

China wind capacity-factor projection. Credit Michael McElroyThat conclusion emerges when one examines a report in Science last week by researchers at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Beijing’s Tsinghua University, which combines meteorological and engineering models to predict that wind farms could meet all new electricity demand in China through 2030 at reasonably low cost. My coverage of the report, published yesterday by MIT’s Technology Review.com, concludes that China’s grid is the key hurdle to realizing this bold prediction, noting hopefully that China is already leading the world in the development of high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission technology — the sort needed to share variable renewable energy sources such as wind power on a trans-continental scale, thereby minimizing the power supply’s vulnerability to regional weather patterns.

Analysts, however, doubt that China can build such renewables-ready supergrids fast enough to replace anticipated additions of coal and nuclear power, as projected by the Harvard-Tsinghua report. Caitlin Pollock, who prepares Asia wind market forecasts for Cambridge, MA-based consutancy Emerging Energy Research, says grid challenges make the growth level proposed “unfeasible and unlikely.” She notes that grid integration already lags wind-farm installation: “While China’s wind market has indeed doubled for the past two years, approximately 30% of this new capacity remained unconnected to the grid at the end of each year.” Continue reading “China’s Grid-Limited Wind Energy Potential”

by pfairley

China’s Wind Surge Ignores Financial Mess

The global wind power industry is bottoming out thanks to the global financing crisis. Everywhere but China, that is, according to a research update issued this week by consultancy Emerging Energy Research (Cambridge, MA).

EER adds up the impact of “a steady flow of wind industry CAPEX reductions, project postponements, order cancellations, and corporate downsizings on a scale never seen before in this relatively young segment of the energy sector.” They forecast a 24% decline in megawatts installed in the US this year over 2008, and a 19% decline in Europe.

Then there’s China, which EER calls “the only major market left standing in the face of the crisis.” EER projects a 59% jump in megawatts added there in 2009 — enough to make up for the U.S. and European losses.

Carbon-Nation readers will recall our June 2008 reporting on China’s wind sector that was already, then, notable for (a) its “endurance in the face of below-cost pricing” and, (b) low quality assurance that had even its trade association calling for slower growth. Looks like its too late for the latter.

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

by pfairley

Deciphering Big Oil’s Retreat from Renewables

road_tanker_refuelling_credit-bpA New York Times article this week concludes that major oil and gas companies are, as the headline roared, “Loath to Follow Obama’s Green Lead.” Such stories bashing Big Oil’s slim investment in renewable energy tend to fall short by failing to consider how renewables intersect with an oil major’s core business, and this one is no exception.

As the Times ably demonstrates, big oil is freezing or cutting investment in renewable energy and doing so from a relatively small base. It notes that Shell, which has frozen spending on wind, solar and hydrogen energy, has invested just $1.7 billion on alternative energy projects since 2004 compared to $87 billion to keep its oil and gas flowing.

That should come as little surprise since Big Oil’s insubstantial and fickle commitment to renewable energy goes back decades. Following the 1973 oil shock, for example, U.S. oil majors of the time such as Mobil and Chevron embraced photovoltaics, only to dump the projects when oil prices crashed and OPEC’s power waned a decade later. British Petroleum’s promise to go “Beyond Petroleum” already looked weak five years ago when it ditched production of next-generation cadmium-telluride thin-film photovoltaics — the technology that Tempe, AZ-based First Solar has since ridden to the top of the world PV market.

Continue reading “Deciphering Big Oil’s Retreat from Renewables”

by pfairley