How Far Have We Really Gotten With Alternative Energy

[notsonice + 1,069]

6 hours ago, Boat said:

Iowa’s use of renewable energy sources is the highest in the country, according to an American Clean Power Association report released Monday.

About 57.6 percent of electricity generated in Iowa came from renewable sources, according to the report.

No other state had more than half of its electricity come from renewable sources.

Kansas was the next highest state with 43.4 percent, followed by Oklahoma with 35.5 percent, South Dakota with 32.9 percent and North Dakota with 30.8 percent.

 

Look, no deaths at over 50%. I bet Trump will be pissed. He don’t like the wind. 

Iowa will surely catch up with Ireland ?????

Irish grid primed for 75% variable generation
Ireland and Northern Ireland power system is the first in the world to reach this level, says EirGrid 7 April 2022

https://www.eirgridgroup.com/newsroom/electricity-grid-to-run-o/

Up to three quarters of the electricity flowing onto the Irish grid at any point in time can now come from variable renewable sources, according to a study by national grid operator EirGrid.

 

The Ireland and Northern Ireland power system is the first in the world to reach this level, overcoming “major technical challenges” associated with integrating electricity from wind farms, solar farms and interconnectors that link it with other countries.

 

EirGrid had previously imposed a cap of 70% on the amount of variable renewable generation on the grid at a given time. 

This has now been raised to 75% following a successful 11-month trial.

 

The grid successfully ran at between 70% and 75% variable renewable energy for a total of 232 hours during the trial period.

 

There were several new all-island wind energy records set during the 11 months, including the current record of 4584MW on 5 February 2022.

 

Wind, solar and interconnectors have very different technical characteristics to conventional fossil-fuel powered generation.

 

This creates challenges in maintaining the stability and security of the power system forcing EirGrid to limit the amount of variable renewables on the grid.

 

Liam Ryan, EirGrid group chief innovation officer, said: “This is a hugely significant milestone and a critical step in the decarbonisation of the electricity sector on the island of Ireland.

 

“It marks the culmination of an 11-year programme of work by EirGrid and its partner SONI in Northern Ireland, as well as by stakeholders from right across the industry.”

 

Since the inception of the programme in 2011, EirGrid has increased the limit from 50% to 75% in a series of five steps.

 

Work will now begin on increasing the figure to 95% by 2030 in order to achieve Government renewable energy targets.

 

This will be achieved through the delivery of EirGrid’s Shaping Our Electricity Future programme of work.

[Boat + 1,315]

Dosent it seem weird so many are worried about intermittency when it appears skilled engineers have already cracked the code for a pretty high percentage of renewables. Iowa is interesting because batteries and solar are not big players. I say it seems financially prudent to add more renewables. Nat gas shows even when the US is independant from the rest of the world we still get world market prices. That puts them out of the long term market in my view. Nat gas pricing is not reliable enough. Putin through nat gas will send the world into recession. At today’s FF prices an electric economy seems the most reasonable solution. 

[NickW + 2,714]

16 hours ago, Eric Gagen said:

I had no idea there were that many plants still available - looks like they CAN substitute coal for gas to a great degree presuming they can get enough coal. I know quite a few were decomissioned, but I didn't know so many were still out there. 

Many of those plants are pretty old but are an alternative to gas. As you say how elastic supply of coal is remains to be seen. 

[Jay McKinsey + 1,489]

China new energy passenger vehicle sales in March were 461,000 units, up 117 percent year-on-year. Among them, battery electric vehicle (BEV) sales were 373,000 units, up 111.8 percent year-on-year, and plug-in hybrid (PHEV) sales were 87,000 units, up 142.6 percent year-on-year.

Passenger NEVs continued the momentum of rapid growth, with a market share of 25 percent in the world's largest car market.

Edited April 12, 2022 by Jay McKinsey

[Boat + 1,315]

Jay, you know a site that estimates demand destruction in barrels? Barrels not needed per million cars for example. 

[Eric Gagen + 713]

8 hours ago, nsdp said:

They can get it from the US, South Africa, Brazil, and in a pinch Australia which is in a tiff right now with China. Germany is decommissioning nuclear plants not coal.  Their coal plants also have Natural gas and #6 oil burners as well and had been burning NG.  Britain can burn #6 instead of coal which is what happened back in 1984 during the coal strike.  Low load in spring is  good time to do a turnaround to optimize for coal.

Right now coal available for export is pricy and transport is tight, because China has ramped its imports up.  The EU used to import most of its coal from Russia and has embargoed that source, so if they want to buy more than token amounts of coal in general, it’s not going to be as simple as signing contracts with major exporters of coal. 

[Michael Sanches + 187]

Before comparing growth rates in different countries, remember that the per capita use of electricity is different in each country.

United Kingdom = 5,130 KWh hour per capita

United States = 12,994 KWh hour per capita

If the US build renewables at twice the rate as the UK, the US will fall behind.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC

Germany = 7,035 KWh hour per capita.

It seems the US will be slower to adopt renewables.

Outside the Middle East, only Canada and Finland match the US.

Iceland is crazy at 53,832 KWh hour per capita.

China (3,905) and India (804) means FF will be around for a long time as they catch up. Even now, India has told Biden to go screw himself and is buying all the sanctioned Russian oil.

[Jay McKinsey + 1,489]

6 hours ago, Boat said:

Jay, you know a site that estimates demand destruction in barrels? Barrels not needed per million cars for example. 

sorry I don't

However it really only takes knowing how much oil the average car uses per year and how many cars in the fleet have been replaced. 

Edited April 12, 2022 by Jay McKinsey

[Jay McKinsey + 1,489]

2 hours ago, Michael Sanches said:

Before comparing growth rates in different countries, remember that the per capita use of electricity is different in each country.

United Kingdom = 5,130 KWh hour per capita

United States = 12,994 KWh hour per capita

If the US build renewables at twice the rate as the UK, the US will fall behind.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC

Germany = 7,035 KWh hour per capita.

It seems the US will be slower to adopt renewables.

Outside the Middle East, only Canada and Finland match the US.

Iceland is crazy at 53,832 KWh hour per capita.

China (3,905) and India (804) means FF will be around for a long time as they catch up. Even now, India has told Biden to go screw himself and is buying all the sanctioned Russian oil.

Yet Iceland is 100% renewable electricity, Finland 52% and Canada 67% and India doesn't use oil to make electricity.Electricity use per capita is not related to renewable uptake.

In fact your post is self contradictory, you say the US will be slow to renewables because of high use per capita and that China India will be slow because of low use per capita.

 

Edited April 12, 2022 by Jay McKinsey

[Michael Sanches + 187]

I believe that by 2100, +/-40 years, we will have an electric, renewable economy and lifestyle.

Anyone who says they can narrow the time frame is as stupid and arrogant as those here who forecast Peak Oil.

[Michael Sanches + 187]

46 minutes ago, Jay McKinsey said:

Yet Iceland is 100% renewable electricity, Finland 52% and Canada 67% and India doesn't use oil to make electricity.Electricity use per capita is not related to renewable uptake.

In fact your post is self contradictory, you say the US will be slow to renewables because of high use per capita and that China India will be slow because of low use per capita.

 

No. China and India simply have further to go. You also have t0 figure in the HUGE corruption.

You DID figure 90& waste in your India figures, right? Not doing so is the height of stupidity. 

Build a windmill. Better budget $20 million per windmill, at least

The person in charge needs assistants and he has 20 relatives nearby. Of course, they all need a new Mercedes to get to work.

Unless you have lived in Asia, you cannot understand the corruption. Nepal had electricity 8 hours per day until a new minister was elected and found out that the energy minister was selling most of Nepals electricity to private parties for profit.

Now, Nepal has electricity 24 hours per day. Yet, you say that renewable energy is important when the renewable energy will be wasted and the common man will still have to use the big gas cylinders.

After the earthquake, Nepal received millions in donations. Eventually, they proudly announced they used all the funds to build 100 houses. They hired so many relatives at high salaries and bought them a car, that they park their new cars in giant tents to hide them.

[Jay McKinsey + 1,489]

18 minutes ago, Michael Sanches said:

I believe that by 2100, +/-40 years, we will have an electric, renewable economy and lifestyle.

Anyone who says they can narrow the time frame is as stupid and arrogant as those here who forecast Peak Oil.

If we have an electric, renewable economy and lifestyle in 2060 then peak oil will have occurred quite sometime before that. 

[Michael Sanches + 187]

Like Trevor Noah says, South Africa (and all Asia) need to learn how to do functional corruption.

If you get the money to build 10 bridges, build 9 and steal one. Don't steal 10 and build zero.

Please explain how many years it will take India to get to all renewables, by building zero plants per year, while corrupt beauruacrats steal the money. How many zero do you have to add up to get to 100?

[Jay McKinsey + 1,489]

3 minutes ago, Michael Sanches said:

No. China and India simply have further to go. You also have t0 figure in the HUGE corruption.

You DID figure 90& waste in your India figures, right? Not doing so is the height of stupidity. 

Build a windmill. Better budget $20 million per windmill, at least

The person in charge needs assistants and he has 20 relatives nearby. Of course, they all need a new Mercedes to get to work.

Unless you have lived in Asia, you cannot understand the corruption. Nepal had electricity 8 hours per day until a new minister was elected and found out that the energy minister was selling most of Nepals electricity to private parties for profit.

Now, Nepal has electricity 24 hours per day. Yet, you say that renewable energy is important when the renewable energy will be wasted and the common man will still have to use the big gas cylinders.

After the earthquake, Nepal received millions in donations. Eventually, they proudly announced they used all the funds to build 100 houses. They hired so many relatives at high salaries and bought them a car, that they park their new cars in giant tents to hide them.

So corruption only happens with renewables but not FF? I model equivalent corruption for both. India needs more electricity, they will pay the same in corruption whether they build it from renewables or FF.

[Michael Sanches + 187]

4 minutes ago, Jay McKinsey said:

If we have an electric, renewable economy and lifestyle in 2060 then peak oil will have occurred quite sometime before that. 

The use of oil to make plastic and nylon will continue to rise. 

[Jay McKinsey + 1,489]

Just now, Michael Sanches said:

The use of oil to make plastic and nylon will continue to rise. 

Those uses account for a minor fraction of demand compared to transportation.  Green hydrogen will also be entering the market.

[NickW + 2,714]

25 minutes ago, Jay McKinsey said:

Those uses account for a minor fraction of demand compared to transportation.  Green hydrogen will also be entering the market.

Quite - once you have hydrogen its easy to make ethylene which is the feedstock for a large amount of plastic manufacturing. 

[Boat + 1,315]

1 hour ago, Michael Sanches said:

I believe that by 2100, +/-40 years, we will have an electric, renewable economy and lifestyle.

Anyone who says they can narrow the time frame is as stupid and arrogant as those here who forecast Peak Oil.

How can taking a stab at Peak Oil timing be stupid or arrogant. It’s a guess. Do you even know what peak oil is? If we go into WWIII peak oil may have already happened. Maybe using words like “anyone who says” without exactly defining what they are talking about is the disruptive kinda square yellow buss slow one. Your guess/ estimate of a renewable economy and lifestyle is wrong. Individuals/families live that way now. 

[Eric Gagen + 713]

5 hours ago, Jay McKinsey said:

sorry I don't

However it really only takes knowing how much oil the average car uses per year and how many cars in the fleet have been replaced. 

There is one other factor, and that is the point that at least in China, and probably quite a few other places, an electric car is the first vehicle someone purchases/has ever purchased, thus increasing the share of the population which owns automobiles, as opposed to displacing demand from some other fossil fuel vehicle.  This prevents increases in oil usage each year rather than displacing oil from somewhere else.

[Eric Gagen + 713]

4 hours ago, Michael Sanches said:

I believe that by 2100, +/-40 years, we will have an electric, renewable economy and lifestyle.

Anyone who says they can narrow the time frame is as stupid and arrogant as those here who forecast Peak Oil.

It's already happening MUCH faster than that.  Even a simple straight line extrapolation from current trends indicates that we will be 90%  there by 2050 or so.  Why do you think technology and development will slow down so much in the next 30 years compared to the last 30?

 

IMHO it isn't 'stupid or arrogrant' to forecast it any longer, because the time horizon is short enough to make it reasonable to extrapolate.  In 2000 I might have agreed with you, but a lot has happened since then. 

Edited April 12, 2022 by Eric Gagen

[Eyes Wide Open + 3,539]

7 hours ago, Jay McKinsey said:

Yet Iceland is 100% renewable electricity, Finland 52% and Canada 67%

Where does Canada get most of its energy?

More than half of the electricity in Canada (61%) is generated from "hydro sources". The remainder is produced from a variety of sources, including natural gas, nuclear, wind, coal, biomass, solar, and petroleum (Figure 2).

https://cubetoronto.com/canada/does-canada-get-67-of-its-energy-from-renewable-energy/

 

In 2015, the total electricity consumption in Iceland was 18,798 GWh. Renewable energy provided almost 100% of electricity production, with about 73% coming from hydropower and 27% from geothermal power.

https://www.government.is/topics/business-and-industry/energy/

 

Electricity prices hit record high in Finland in 2021

https://english.news.cn/20220115/2ddb2eb1f2424010aae71380f1d8313d/c.html

Edited April 13, 2022 by Eyes Wide Open

[Jay McKinsey + 1,489]

4 hours ago, Eric Gagen said:

There is one other factor, and that is the point that at least in China, and probably quite a few other places, an electric car is the first vehicle someone purchases/has ever purchased, thus increasing the share of the population which owns automobiles, as opposed to displacing demand from some other fossil fuel vehicle.  This prevents increases in oil usage each year rather than displacing oil from somewhere else.

I'm not sure I agree. The world vehicle fleet has been rather steady for the past seven years. if someone's first car is EV instead of gas then they have displaced what would have been a new ICE car in the fleet. This is especially true for China where used cars are not a thing. The average age in their fleet is just 5 years. People buy a new car, drive it for 10 years and scrap it.

Even with more than 270-million vehicles in circulation, China has long lagged behind developed markets in used-car trading. Annual sales of second-hand models are just over half the volume of vehicles fresh off the production line. That’s a huge difference from countries like the US and Germany, where purchases of pre-owned cars can typically be double those of new ones.

There have typically been two major reasons for the disparity. China’s car market is still developing, and a 2019 McKinsey study showed that only 173 in every 1,000 people owned a vehicle, compared with 837 in the US. There’s also previously been a cultural factor too, with the purchase of a new car seen as a visible indicator of social status.https://www.businesslive.co.za/bloomberg/news/2021-12-13-chinas-used-car-market-slowly-starts-to-take-off/

Edited April 13, 2022 by Jay McKinsey

[NickW + 2,714]

11 hours ago, Eyes Wide Open said:

Where does Canada get most of its energy?

More than half of the electricity in Canada (61%) is generated from "hydro sources". The remainder is produced from a variety of sources, including natural gas, nuclear, wind, coal, biomass, solar, and petroleum (Figure 2).

https://cubetoronto.com/canada/does-canada-get-67-of-its-energy-from-renewable-energy/

 

In 2015, the total electricity consumption in Iceland was 18,798 GWh. Renewable energy provided almost 100% of electricity production, with about 73% coming from hydropower and 27% from geothermal power.

https://www.government.is/topics/business-and-industry/energy/

 

Electricity prices hit record high in Finland in 2021

https://english.news.cn/20220115/2ddb2eb1f2424010aae71380f1d8313d/c.html

Because gas prices which provide the remainder went through the roof.

Edited April 13, 2022 by NickW

[Jay McKinsey + 1,489]

A new heat engine with no moving parts is as efficient as a steam turbine

The design could someday enable a fully decarbonized power grid, researchers say.

 

Engineers at MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have designed a heat engine with no moving parts. Their new demonstrations show that it converts heat to electricity with over 40 percent efficiency — a performance better than that of traditional steam turbines.

The heat engine is a thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cell, similar to a solar panel’s photovoltaic cells, that passively captures high-energy photons from a white-hot heat source and converts them into electricity. The team’s design can generate electricity from a heat source of between 1,900 to 2,400 degrees Celsius, or up to about 4,300 degrees Fahrenheit.

The researchers plan to incorporate the TPV cell into a grid-scale thermal battery. The system would absorb excess energy from renewable sources such as the sun and store that energy in heavily insulated banks of hot graphite. When the energy is needed, such as on overcast days, TPV cells would convert the heat into electricity, and dispatch the energy to a power grid.

With the new TPV cell, the team has now successfully demonstrated the main parts of the system in separate, small-scale experiments. They are working to integrate the parts to demonstrate a fully operational system. From there, they hope to scale up the system to replace fossil-fuel-driven power plants and enable a fully decarbonized power grid, supplied entirely by renewable energy.

“Thermophotovoltaic cells were the last key step toward demonstrating that thermal batteries are a viable concept,” says Asegun Henry, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “This is an absolutely critical step on the path to proliferate renewable energy and get to a fully decarbonized grid.”

Henry and his collaborators have published their results today in the journal Nature. Co-authors at MIT include Alina LaPotin, Kevin Schulte, Kyle Buznitsky, Colin Kelsall, Andrew Rohskopf, and Evelyn Wang, the Ford Professor of Engineering and head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, along with collaborators at NREL in Golden, Colorado.

Jumping the gap

More than 90 percent of the world’s electricity comes from sources of heat such as coal, natural gas, nuclear energy, and concentrated solar energy. For a century, steam turbines have been the industrial standard for converting such heat sources into electricity.

On average, steam turbines reliably convert about 35 percent of a heat source into electricity, with about 60 percent representing the highest efficiency of any heat engine to date. But the machinery depends on moving parts that are temperature- limited. Heat sources higher than 2,000 degrees Celsius, such as Henry’s proposed thermal battery system, would be too hot for turbines.

In recent years, scientists have looked into solid-state alternatives — heat engines with no moving parts, that could potentially work efficiently at higher temperatures.

“One of the advantages of solid-state energy converters are that they can operate at higher temperatures with lower maintenance costs because they have no moving parts,” Henry says. “They just sit there and reliably generate electricity.”

Thermophotovoltaic cells offered one exploratory route toward solid-state heat engines. Much like solar cells, TPV cells could be made from semiconducting materials with a particular bandgap — the gap between a material’s valence band and its conduction band. If a photon with a high enough energy is absorbed by the material, it can kick an electron across the bandgap, where the electron can then conduct, and thereby generate electricity — doing so without moving rotors or blades.

To date, most TPV cells have only reached efficiencies of around 20 percent, with the record at 32 percent, as they have been made of relatively low-bandgap materials that convert lower-temperature, low-energy photons, and therefore convert energy less efficiently.

Catching light

In their new TPV design, Henry and his colleagues looked to capture higher-energy photons from a higher-temperature heat source, thereby converting energy more efficiently. The team’s new cell does so with higher-bandgap materials and multiple junctions, or material layers, compared with existing TPV designs.

The cell is fabricated from three main regions: a high-bandgap alloy, which sits over a slightly lower-bandgap alloy, underneath which is a mirror-like layer of gold. The first layer captures a heat source’s highest-energy photons and converts them into electricity, while lower-energy photons that pass through the first layer are captured by the second and converted to add to the generated voltage. Any photons that pass through this second layer are then reflected by the mirror, back to the heat source, rather than being absorbed as wasted heat.

The team tested the cell’s efficiency by placing it over a heat flux sensor — a device that directly measures the heat absorbed from the cell. They exposed the cell to a high-temperature lamp and concentrated the light onto the cell. They then varied the bulb’s intensity, or temperature, and observed how the cell’s power efficiency — the amount of power it produced, compared with the heat it absorbed — changed with temperature. Over a range of 1,900 to 2,400 degrees Celsius, the new TPV cell maintained an efficiency of around 40 percent.

“We can get a high efficiency over a broad range of temperatures relevant for thermal batteries,” Henry says.

The cell in the experiments is about a square centimeter. For a grid-scale thermal battery system, Henry envisions the TPV cells would have to scale up to about 10,000 square feet (about a quarter of a football field), and would operate in climate-controlled warehouses to draw power from huge banks of stored solar energy. He points out that an infrastructure exists for making large-scale photovoltaic cells, which could also be adapted to manufacture TPVs.

“There’s definitely a huge net positive here in terms of sustainability,” Henry says. “The technology is safe, environmentally benign in its life cycle, and can have a tremendous impact on abating carbon dioxide emissions from electricity production.”

This research was supported, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy.

https://news.mit.edu/2022/thermal-heat-engine-0413

[Jay McKinsey + 1,489]

An even better sounding thermal battery:

Molten-salt storage with a 12-week battery life

It relies on a new "freeze-thaw" design.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The battery’s energy is stored at a materials cost of about $23 per kilowatt-hour, measured before a recent jump in the cost of nickel,” study members said. “The team is exploring the use of iron, which is less expensive, in hopes of bringing the materials cost down to around $6 per kilowatt-hour, roughly 15 times less than the materials cost of today’s lithium-ion batteries," they concluded. 

Study abstract: 

"Grid-level storage of seasonal excess can be an important asset to renewable electricity. By applying the freeze-thaw thermal cycling strategy, here, we report Al-Ni molten salt batteries with effective capacity recovery over 90% after a period of 1–8 weeks as a proof-of-concept. 

https://interestingengineering.com/molten-salt-12-week-battery

Edited April 13, 2022 by Jay McKinsey