Archive for December, 2008

by Richard Stuebi, BP Fellow for Energy and Environmental Advancement
as posted on CleanTechBlog.com

Although not popular to many in the environmental community, one low/zero-carbon energy supply alternative that has to be at least put on the table for serious consideration is nuclear energy.

Yes, yes, we know the litany of concerns about nuclear energy: runaway fission leading to explosive catastrophes like the one that occurred in 1986 at Chernobyl, long-lived and extremely toxic waste products, and the use of fuels that make for scary weapons-grade materials for terrorists to exploit.

The U.S. nuclear industry hasn’t completed a new nuclear power generating unit in many years — though it’s generally not for the reasons listed above. Rather, the main damper on the U.S. nuclear industry has been high cost: to achieve economies of scale, the optimal nuclear unit size has long been thought to be greater than 1000 megawatts, which given the capital intensity of nuclear technologies (a November 2007 article in Nuclear Engineering suggests construction costs of at least $4000/kilowatt), implies minimum investments of several billion dollars. Given the massive market and regulatory uncertainties facing electric utilities, few have been willing to step up to the nuclear plate and lay down such a huge bet.

In recent weeks, I’ve seen not one but two articles — “Neighborhood Nukes” in Forbes and “Mini Nuclear Plants to Power 20,000 Homes” in The Guardian – covering the investigation of small-scale nuclear power generating units. Both articles prominently feature the New Mexico company Hyperion Power Generation, which claims to be developing a hot-tub sized unit of 25 megawatts capacity.

Spun out from Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Hyperion design is intended to overcome many of the obstacles associated to date with nuclear energy.

As The Guardian article summarizes, “the miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.”

From Forbes: “Hyperion’s design uses uranium hydride instead of traditional uranium with control rods. The reactor gets rid of heat using thermal conductivity, which eliminates the big water-cooling systems and their containment bulwarks.”

Stunningly, Hyperion promises an installed cost of $1000/kw, and claims a sales backlog of $2.5 billion, with 100 firm orders.

So, maybe there’s a renaissance of nuclear energy in the offing. Steve Martin may have had it right, after all: “Let’s get small.”

But, before you get too excited, remember that the nuclear industry has been down this path before: in 1954, Lewis Strauss, then-Chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, hinted that nuclear energy would in the not-too-distant-future make electricity “too cheap to meter.” We’re still waiting.

by Richard Stuebi, BP Fellow for Energy and Environmental Advancement
 as posted to CleanTechBlog.com

If you want to quickly gain a good overview of the smart grid, check out “The Smart Grid: An Introduction.” A slick 48-page wire-ring bound primer developed for the U.S. Department of Energy, one can find several juicy data tidbits, such as:

1. The U.S. power grid consists of 9200 electric generating units connected by 300,000 miles of transmission lines — of which only 668 miles were added since 2000.

2. Between 1988-98, U.S. electricity demand increased by nearly 30%, while transmission capacity grew by only 15%. (What about since then?)

3. In the U.S., there were 41% more outages affecting more than 50,000 customers in the second half of the 1990’s than in the first half of the 1990’s. (Again, what about since then?)

4. The average age of a substation transformer on the U.S. power grid is 42 years — two years more than their expected life span.

5. 10% of all generation assets, and 25% of distribution infrastructure, are required for less than 5% of the hours of the year.

All of this, plus a great picture of Dr. Zachary Smith (the inimitable Jonathan Harris) and the robot from “Lost in Space.” What more could you want?

Earlier this month, I had the privilege of joining a delegation led by Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson to visit Baden-Wurttemberg, the southwestern-most state in Germany. The aim of the trip was to begin building stronger commercial bridges between the Cleveland area and Baden-Wurttemberg – two heavy industrial economies of similar size. I was there to represent our region’s interests and activities in advanced energy, in an aim to identify and explore potential collaborations in the academic, civic and private sectors.

As part of our tour, we spent a day in Freiburg, a delightful university city nestled in the corner where Switzerland and France abut Germany. And in their lovely city hall, we had the privilege of meeting with Freiburg’s dynamic mayor, Dr. Dieter Salomon, and the city’s environmental minister, Dr. Dieter Worner.

Though I had previously heard of Freiburg, the two Dieters opened my eyes to what Freiburg had been able to accomplish – and, alas, what also remained to be accomplished – in the realm of sustainability with their Freiburg Green City plan.

Freiburg frequently hosts public sector leaders from around the world to learn how to put a city on a low-carbon trajectory, as it is widely recognized to be the foremost green city in Germany, which in turn is widely recognized to be the country farthest down the sustainability path in Europe, which in turn is widely recognized to be far ahead of other continents in dealing substantively with the climate change threat.

We were humbled by what we learned. Way back in 1996, before climate change was much of a concern in the U.S., Freiburg officials decreed that it would aim to reduce CO2 emissions by 25 percent by the year 2010. To achieve this, Freiburg pursued two priorities:

First, it established very ambitious building energy efficiency standards – 20 percent below already-stringent German national levels. Yes, building professionals (architects, engineers, contractors) initially objected to this stance as being too hard or too costly.  However, over time, the building community learned how to meet these tough standards at a minimal 1 percent cost premium over conventional buildings not meeting the standard. Now the Freiburg-based businesses have a substantial competitive advantage in the German building marketplace. This goes to show that good policy can drive private sector innovation and subsequently economic health of a key sector of the economy.

Second, Freiburg seized upon its natural advantage – it is the sunniest place in all of Germany – to become the leading player in the soon-to-be-booming German solar market. With a major investment to establish the Fraunhofer Institute of Solar Energy, affiliated with the University of Freiburg, the city became Ground Zero for R&D on new solar technologies.  This, in turn, spawned many businesses – either spun-out from Fraunhofer or founded by people who worked or studied in Freiburg – that were able to catch the wave as the solar market in Germany took off.

The net result: Freiburg now lays claim to an environmental business cluster of 1,500 companies employing 15,000 people and generating more than 500 million euros of annual revenues. For a city of roughly 200,000 population, this is green economic development writ large.

We were also surprised by what we learned: namely, that Freiburg was really struggling to achieve significant emission reductions. Despite strong mechanisms to drive reduced emissions in the economy, Freiburg had only been able to achieve a 7 percent reduction in CO2 emissions since 1996. Freiburg readily admits that it won’t be able to attain the 25 percent reduction target it had set for itself by 2010.

So Freiburg is finding out it’s not so easy to be as green as it wanted to be, as we all need to be.

That being said, I did take heart in noting that Freiburg wasn’t giving up in the face of adversity, as it is ratcheting its goal for 2030 to reduce CO2 emissions by 40 percent.

I also noted that a key reason for Freiburg failing to achieve its emission reductions was economic/population growth. Although aggregate CO2 emissions had only fallen by 7 percent, on a per capita basis, CO2 emissions had declined by about 30 percent. In other words, Freiburg’s population had grown substantially, one of the few places in Germany to experience population growth.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Freiburg’s environmental posture and ambitions are key attractors for this growth. The best and the brightest of Germany seem to be flocking to Freiburg to be part of the vanguard in moving to a low-carbon economy.

Lastly, I am inspired by Freiburg’s civic motto. By my transcription (and excuse my lack of knowledge of German), Freiburg’s credo is “Gut leben stadt viel haben,” which translates approximately to “A good life is more important than lots of possessions.”

A lovely city, Freiburg is living proof that one can live a good life and be at the forefront of sustainability.

As posted on CleanTechBlog.com

The challenges associated with climate change are so daunting - so much emission reduction to achieve, so much money to invest in energy efficiency and low-/zero-carbon energy technologies and infrastructure, and so little time to do it - that we’re going to have to be awfully creative.

I’ve blogged previously about geoengineering the planet, putting stuff up in the atmosphere to block incoming solar radiation, thereby reducing the energetic input to the planet from the sun. This week, I take note of an article titled “Eating Carbon” in the Nov. 15 issue of The Economist.

It appears the Earth is endowed with massive reserves of a particular type of rock called peridotite, which seems to be able to react quickly with carbon dioxide to produce carbonates. One thought is to grind up the peridotite and expose it to exhaust streams, but a new approach profiled in a paper (see abstract) in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Peter Kelemen and Juerg Matter of Columbia University involves injecting carbon dioxide in mass quantities (e.g., from power plants) into the peridotite strata, leaving inert byproducts in-situ underground.

The big challenge appears to be depth: the peridotite is 20 km down. But the upside appears to be substantial, with seemingly much more carbon dioxide sequestration capacity than the caverns and reservoirs mainly being considered in the carbon capture/sequestration community - and with no potential for leakage.

Apparently, peridotite is not the only rock that “eats” carbon, as researchers are now investigating volcanic basalt, as well. With luck, perhaps geologists can find a good rock type that is quickly reactive, highly plentiful and dispersed on the planet, and relatively cheap/easy to access.

As posted on CleanTechBlog.com

The news seems everywhere these days that ethanol is dead as a doornail:

October 21, Financial Times: “Investors Suffer As U.S. Ethanol Boom Dries Up”
November 5, Bloomberg: “VeraSun Doomed; Goldman Stops Ethanol Stock Coverage”

It’s easy to pin the tough times for ethanol on the left-right combination of precipitous declines in oil/gasoline prices and the global credit crunch. True, ethanol plants are capital-intensive, and a reduction in product price is never a good thing for any producer.

But I believe the issue is less about fuel prices and capital markets than about corn.

Many have long been skeptical about corn-based ethanol purely from an economic perspective. Of course, as has been amply documented, corn ethanol has been the beneficiary of some pretty substantial subsidies without which much less ethanol would have made it to market. But earlier this year, even when oil was nearing $150/barrel and gasoline was over $4.00/gallon, a number of U.S. ethanol producers were having financial difficulties.

Why? Because corn prices were rising even faster than fuel prices. Remember: these refineries make money as a function of the spread between feedstock and product price, not of the product price itself. If the feedstock price is rising faster than the product price, then even if the product price is at historical highs, producers can be squeezed.

Until ethanol demand surged in recent years (propelled by increasing government mandates), the linkages between corn and fuel prices were weak. However, as a recent article by columnist Doug Saunders of Canada’s Globe and Mail points out, “food is no longer just food.” In Saunders’ terms, “there has been a ‘bushels-to-barrels-to-Btus convergence.’” After all, both oil and bread have calorific content, and technologies now are allowing one to be swapped for the other, depending upon which is more economic in a particular market.

This then leads to the other “black mark” against (corn-based) ethanol: the so-called “food vs. fuel” debate. To many observers, it is unethical to be using products fundamental to human food consumption as a substitute for petroleum-based fuels, as this added demand for foodstuffs bids up prices and makes eating more expensive - especially problematic for the world’s poor (see 2007 article on this topic by C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer in Foreign Affairs). This has led Jean Zigler of the United Nations to declare recently that biofuels are a “crime against humanity.”

A strongly argued counterpoint is offered by Robert Zubrin and Gal Luft. With pretty significant substantiation, they claim that increases in the price of corn have not been driven by any push to produce ethanol. Instead, they find that all of the increase in corn prices has been due to the combined factors of increased natural gas prices (thereby raising the price of fertilizer), increased transportation and processing costs (due to higher gasoline/diesel prices), and increased demand for corn in massive, rapidly growing, developing economies (e.g., China). In short, according to Zubrin and Luft, ethanol is not to blame for woes facing corn consumers.

That may or may not be so. But it seems inarguable that corn is to blame for the woes facing ethanol.

President-Elect Obama may be a “supporter” of ethanol, but unless and until cellulosic ethanol technologies become viable, ethanol will have a hard time becoming - and staying - a major player in the transportation fuel game.

This is especially the case when factoring in the massive investment required to convert the U.S. infrastructure of distribution, retailing and vehicle tanks from gasoline to ethanol-capable. And this is even more so the case considering that biofuels innovators are actively working on technologies that enable biogasoline - gasoline from bio-feedstocks.

With all these strikes against ethanol, it’s no wonder all the obituaries are being written.