The
future has arrived with the solution to our world's energy needs. The
Aerodynamic Air Turbine Engine (AATE), aptly named "The Crystal Ion", will be
the energy revolution we have been waiting for. Clean energy utilizing the force
of nature to create powerful and sustainable motion with no detrimental
environmental impact is here. The air we breathe is the same air that drives the
AATE; no wind required. This is not a perpetual motion machine. When I first
learned of Rockwell Scientific Research L.L.C. (RSR) and the AATE, I was very
skeptical. The more I thought about it the more my feelings mixed. Can this be
real? My thoughts torn between my disbelief and belief. I became more
exhilarated as the myriad of potential uses flooded my neuron pathways; an
engine that runs on ambient air, without any air tanks, combustion or fuel
cells, producing no exhaust. The thoughts thrilled me to no end. I just had to
see the engine for myself.
I will forever remember the day I actually saw the engine
running with my own eyes. As unbelievable as it first appeared my skepticism
quickly turned to enthusiasm that was so totally overwhelming I nearly wet
myself. Here was the future, right before me. The engine hummed along at 30k
plus RPM without any fuel or exhaust. The clear design of the casing afforded a
detailed view of the interior. There were no electronics inside except for the
LEDs. As the throttle revved the engine up and down it was clear to me that this
was genuine and not a hoax.
What really boggled my mind was the fact that there were no investors beating
down the door to become a part of this new energy revolution. Here was the
absolute answer to the energy crisis we are currently facing. What is wrong with
Americans today? Why would everyone be so willing to continue down the pathway
paved by oil, coal and nuclear technologies when that path results in torturing
common citizens, reaching deep into their pockets? Why are so many of our fine
young men and women dying needlessly for the right to oil? Why are billions of
dollars being spent trading Carbon Credits and where is all that cash going? Are
people really concerned about their living environment? Politicians are quick to
blame industries for what is really political failure.
So how was the AATE re-born? In late April 2005 Ron Rockwell, of RSR, was
invited to meet with inventor Haskell Karl who claimed to have built an engine
powered only by air. Ron met with Haskell in person and after reviewing all his
material (consisting only of photographs, drawings and sketches) and detailed
phone discussions. Ron decided to rebuild the engine using current technology. I
am sure that skepticism reigned high. However, Ron believed this technology had
substantial merit and invited his trusted colleague, friend and fellow machinist
Cliff Cruz, to join his team in re-creating the engine. Through twelve years of
research and development of various devices in the high tech industry, RSR has
developed the AATE.
In the early
1960's, Haskell took the original engine he built for testing to Wyle Testing
Laboratory. They could not figure out how it worked and requested that he leave
it with them so they could further analyze the engine. Haskell refused and
headed home with the invention. The AATE was scheduled to be presented to
President Kennedy at a special meeting. Before this presentation could take
place, the people who worked with Mr. Karl on the engine mysteriously
disappeared. Shortly thereafter, the engine also disappeared. There was also
talk that China was willing to pay 100 billion dollars for the engine but the
deal fell through when a key individual died from a massive heart attack.
Haskell Karl went into hiding, keeping with him the documents, original
drawings, and numerous photos of how he built the engine. Now 40 some years
later, the engine is re-born.
Although the concept and science behind the engine (Vortex Air Implosion
Technology) was not fully understood at that time, the determination was made
that a new prototype based on discussions, drawings and photos, could be built.
The task was undertaken.
The machine shop of RSR started the initial construction in May of 2005. Work
was arduous. Unique parts needed to be manufactured. In order to do so, new
tools also needed to be machined in order to manufacture these parts. There was
no manual, guidebook or instructions. Instead Ron and his team had to rely on
their knowledge, ingenuity and creativity to build the engine. With the latest
technology available today, Ron was able to redesign and improve things that
could not be done back in the 60's. Through trial and error (not much of the
latter) and 3 million dollars later, they finally completed the first
functioning prototype in the fall of 2006.
Ecstatic with the results, arrangements were made to travel to Washington DC
to present the engine to the Department of Energy in hopes that they would
embrace this unprecedented technology. Unfortunately, Mr. Rockwell and Dr.
Beverly were met with bureaucratic indifference. Need more be said? The people
needed to know that a solution to the world's energy was available and a press
release was issued in November to over 200 newspapers and magazines. Again there
was huge indifference by the press who were more focused on news of the war and
elections. Case in point. That day in Washington at Fox News Channel 5, they
spoke with a woman named Sheila who said "unless [they] had a story about the
Iraq war or the upcoming elections that Fox probably wouldn't run a story on
it", "those [are] the 2 most pressing issues that people wanted to hear about".
Unbelievable! It is this kind of attitude and indifference towards true
solutions for peace and clean energy that have prevented this country and our
world from realizing its full potential.
As with any technology that promises huge gains, security is an issue. There
have been several security breaches over the course of development. Thankfully,
they were discovered early enough to thwart them. One lengthy breach occurred in
the summer of 2007 when 2 individuals (referred to as "vultures") attempted to
"take-over the technology". They began contacting Haskell, eventually coercing
him to denounce Mr. Rockwell and promising him quick profit. They also contacted
Ron's chief machinist and met with him several times to engage him in assisting
them to develop the engine without Ron. Despite
knowing that they were being videotaped, they continued their discussion
with Cliff to bring him on board and away from RSR and the engine project. These
individuals are under criminal investigation. The result of this breach caused a
serious delay in the completion of the engine. Security is now tighter than
ever.
A number of individuals came forward claiming to be investors, venture
capitalists and personally wealthy. Many of these individuals were not investors
but brokers, agents or individuals that knew someone who wanted to invest and
really had nothing to offer. This was also a source of lost time.
The purpose of seeking investment was to develop, market and support
innovative cost-effective clean energy devices, products and services;
especially those made available through its proprietary technology designs. RSR
will offer the Ultimate Solution to the growing world energy problem. The end of
fossil fuel use, preserving natural resources, create low cost clean energy
(zero emissions), create independence from foreign oil use, non-degenerative and
non-destructive energy forces from the technology use, while creating worldwide
demand for this Ultimate Solution.
Ron and his team made some substantial technical discoveries and potential
problems with the current design and proceeded to re-build the AATE with new
specifications. Noise level was substantially reduced and overheating was no
longer any concern. Haskell met the improvements in the design with great joy.
What remains to be done is more testing and validation from a government source
(Wyle Testing Laboratory) that the AATE performs as described and is
sustainable.
In early 2008 there had been an invitation by a government
department to apply for a number of grants that were available only for new
energy projects. Sounded more promising than the first encounter with the
government. The applications were arduous and requested very specific and
detailed specifications of the engine. It was not acceptable to provide the
government with those specifications. Another individual with high status in the
Mexican Government offered to set up a meeting with the President of Mexico. At
first it sounded very good to Ron. As the time approached, the meeting was
postponed and Ron began to feel something was not right. This trip did not
happen either. As it turned out, this individual was in a financial bind and
planned no introduction to President of Mexico. The promised trip to Washington
was actually a scheduled NAFTA meeting not a special meeting for Ron.
So what exactly is the AATE? It is a mechanical device built to spin at high
revolutions without the need for any fuel, combustion or compressed air. This
device is a sophisticated application of a simple scientific principle long
known in the alternative energy field, Vortex Implosion Air Technology (VIAT).
Viktor Schauberger first discovered the principle of the Vortex and developed
technology for moving water more efficiently. The same principle can be applied
to airflow. The RSR AATE runs on ambient air; the very air we breathe, using no
air tanks and no other power source other than air. A tornado is created in the
engine that implodes on itself which actually speeds up and sustains the airflow
back into the tornado.
We see what is wrong with our energy policies every time we go to the pump,
buy groceries, pay our bills and of course all the news that bombards us daily.
Perhaps it is a good thing that huge caverns (many times the size of the Grand
Canyon) are being created beneath the earth surface. When the current trend of
melting glaciers and icebergs continues, the land will cave in and fill those
caverns. We will not have to worry about flooding the land we live on.
Enough is enough America. Take the time to contact your politicians and let
them know that you know the time for positive change is now. Forget those hybrid
cars, wind generators and solar cells. The costs of implementing these
technologies will never be recovered in your lifetime but you and your children
will be paying for them without any true benefit.
Anton Bernhardt July 1, 2008 For
info on the Aerodynamic Air Turbine Engine contact: Dr. Bob Beverly
702-715-3996 drbobbeverly@hotmail.com
2)
Looking for an Endless,
Clean Fuel Source?
---
Warning: This article deceives the public by failing to
mention the CO2 emissions that hydrates create. - Ed
Note ---
Most of
us don't have an appreciation for sea slime, (AKA sea floor sediment), but we
should.
Why? At
certain depths and temperatures, much of the sediment on the bottom of the
world's oceans becomes rife with a substance called gas hydrate, which is a
fascinating material that could potentially power many of our planet's crucial
systems. Research into this naturally occurring phenomenon could yield bountiful
alternative power solutions.
Gas
hydrate, also known as gas clathrate, is crystalline structures, resembling ice,
found in sediment and formed by a mixture of low-temperature, pressurized water
and various low-weight natural gasses, most commonly methane. The water
molecules form a type of “cage” around the gas, trapping it in pockets of
sediment. Gas hydrate is believed to form when natural gasses escape from fault
lines throughout the ocean and mix with the sediment and cold, pressurized ocean
water. When the hydrate material is burned, little residue is left behind other
than faintly salty water, so it's considered a much cleaner potential fuel than
currently extracted fuels in use today.
In many places, the ocean floor, at approximately 1600 feet in depth,
contains astronomically large areas of gas hydrate that spreads out for miles
and includes large mounds, pockets, veins, and layers of the material. Gas
hydrate is also found in land locations with permafrost, but the greatest
concentrations are in the sea floor. Because sea sediment changes viscosity when
gas hydrate is present, studying the phenomenon might also answer questions
about other sea floor technologies, such as drilling, bridge design, wells, and
pipelines.
So, how
much gas hydrate is there? The TAMU Oceanography Web site states that,
“Estimates of the total energy reserves trapped ... vary considerably, but ...
the resource potential of methane in gas hydrate exceeds the combined worldwide
reserves of conventional oil and gas reservoirs, coal, and oil shale by a wide
margin.”
And, from the Science Daily Web site, “USGS estimates that the nation's
gas hydrate deposits contain 200,000 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of natural gas.
Compare this with a known recoverable natural gas resource of approximately
1,500 Tcf. If just 1 percent of the gas hydrate resource could be rendered
producible, our nation's natural gas resource base would more than double.”
The real
challenge is in harvesting (or manufacturing) the hydrates. Because gas hydrate
degrades into its base components -- gas and water -- and disperses when brought
up from the depths, special containers are required to get the material to the
surface for study. And, experiments to create the hydrate have resulted in
molecularly similar compounds, but none as ingenious as the real stuff. The
laboratory grown hydrate never reaches the correct consistency and texture.
Growing
hydrates in ocean settings have yielded some success, but again, getting the
material to a point where it can be preserved long enough to wring fuel from it
is the challenge. Up to this point, no real-world, practical method has been
developed to stabilize gas hydrate so that the substance can be converted into
usable, liquid fuel. The research goes on.
Much of
the sediment on the bottom of the world's oceans contains vast deposits of gas
hydrate, which with further study and testing, could yield an alternative energy
solution for our power-hungry species.
Studying
and testing the phenomenon is the charter of several prominent institutions,
such as the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), the TAMU
Oceanography organization, and the U.S. Geological Survey, among many others.
Initial studies indicate that gas hydrates are an exceptional source of clean
fuel and leave little residue behind once burned. This could potentially provide
a much cleaner, greener fuel for use in all kinds of applications.
Liz
Casey of ButterFat Writing Services, Inc.(www.butterfatwriting.com) provides
robust copy and technical writing for clients who want their written collateral
to effectively communicate and make them money. She is a member of the Redwood
Technology Consortium (www.redwoodtech.org).
SMOKESTACKS, cooling towers, reactor domes and gas installations are defining
features of our modern landscape. Each is a key component in electricity
generation, but perhaps not for much longer.
Sprinkled over every continent are the totems of a new era of power: wind
turbines and solar energy collectors. So far they are few and far between, but
that's about to change. Plans for huge solar power plants have been drawn up in
the US, Spain and Portugal, and it seems barely a month goes by without a new
wind farm springing up.
In the past decade, the amount of electricity generated from renewables
worldwide almost doubled, according to the International Energy Agency, and by
2006 they accounted for 2.3 per cent of the 19 million gigawatt-hours of
electrical energy the world produced.
This is set to rise even further in the next few years. In January, the
European Union set targets for its member states that would require 20 per cent
of its electricity to come from renewable sources by 2020. China plans to reach
15 per cent by the same year. Some US states have introduced similar
targets.
On paper, the amount of recoverable renewable energy available globally could
serve our needs several times over (see Earth, wind and fire). So could
we meet all of our energy needs from renewable sources?
It's a tricky question. One problem is that the more energy provided by
renewables, the more unstable national electricity grids become. Unlike nuclear,
coal or gas-fired power plants, renewable generators only produce electricity
intermittently: when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. So as things
stand we will either have to accept more frequent outages, or have to rely on
back-up from fossil-fuel or nuclear generators.
With up to 20 per cent from renewables, the problem is manageable -
operators already keep back-up plants running to smooth out such fluctuations.
It is easily affordable too. Meeting this target with wind alone would add just
50 cents per month to the average US household bill, states a report from the
Department of Energy, published in May.
Going beyond this brings more challenges. "At around 30 per cent
penetration of renewables it will start causing problems for the utility
grids," says Georgianne Peek, an energy researcher at Sandia National
Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And the further you go, the worse it
gets. "We are used to being able to flick the switch and having the lights come
on," Peek says. "That won't happen with 100 per cent renewables."
So to make a high level of renewables workable, you need to do more than just
install wind turbines and solar panels. Something will also have to be done by
the consumer. We are already seeing hints of how this will work in fridges and
aircon units that switch themselves off when the electricity supply is
overstretched. Similarly, smart metering can dynamically change the price of
electricity to encourage people to use power-hungry devices at times when demand
is low (see Will the lights stay
on?).
Renewable sources can also generate excess power when demand is low. Finding
efficient ways to smooth out the peaks and troughs is a top priority (see Saving up for a windless day).
Finally, high-voltage direct-current "supergrids" linking areas with significant
renewable resources across thousands of miles could shift power more efficiently
to regions that need it (see Edison's revenge).
Put all these together, and there is no technical reason that we could not
get close to 100 per cent of our electricity from renewables, says Samir Succar,
at the Princeton Environmental Institute at Princeton University, who studies
energy storage and transmission systems. "I don't see intermittency as an
insurmountable obstacle."
Some communities have already managed to make the switch (see From dream to reality). Isn't it time the
rest of us followed suit?
* * *
Read all the articles in our special issue on renewable energy:
Energy and Fuels - Learn more about the looming energy crisis in
our comprehensive special
report.
What's a watt worth?
A watt is a measure of power - the rate of flow of energy. A typical TV set
has a power consumption of 150 watts, so for an hour's viewing it will consume
150 watt-hours of energy. A large, 10-megawatt wind turbine should produce at
least 10,000 megawatt-hours of energy in a year, enough to meet the needs of
1000 average American homes.
IN A laboratory in Italy, 100 fridges sit quietly monitoring their
electricity supply. It's an odd thing for fridges to do, but these are no
ordinary fridges. They are part of an experiment that, if successful, could
transform the reliability of supplying electricity from renewable sources.
One of the key problems with renewables is their intermittent availability.
You can only generate energy from the wind when it is blowing, or from the sun
when it's shining. Critics argue this is why we will never be able to rely on
renewables for the majority of our electricity generation. But that criticism
may soon be silenced. Researchers are developing new ways to balance supply and
demand so that interruptions to the supply at a power station are unnoticeable
to the consumer.
For example, the idea behind the fridge experiment exploits the peculiar way
the power grid responds when demand exceeds supply. In Europe, the frequency of
the alternating current on the grid hovers close to 50 hertz, in North America
it is 60 hertz. If demand increases, or the supply drops - as might happen, for
example, if the wind stops blowing at a large wind farm - the frequency will dip
below this level by up to 1 hertz as the remaining generators struggle to keep
up. If it dips further, to around 48.8 hertz in Europe, the grid operators must
shed some of the load, and parts of the country are disconnected from the grid
and blacked out.
The Italian fridges are connected to a network that simulates this kind of
power crisis, but instead of relying on a central control room to switch out the
load, it is the fridges themselves that respond. As the frequency drops, a
built-in controller in each fridge detects the change, checks the temperature of
the fridge, and calculates how long it can stay chilled without drawing any
power. It then switches the fridge off for as long as is safe. A similar system,
developed by the the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory in Richland, Washington, was successfully tested last year in 150
specially modified tumble-dryers.
If the technology, called dynamic demand, were fitted to
enough fridges and air-conditioning units it could go a long way to smoothing
out the fluctuations caused by the intermittent nature of renewable energy
supplies. A report last year by the UK's Department for Business, Enterprise and
Regulatory Reform said the dynamic demand controllers would cost no more than £4
per appliance, a cost easily offset by the market value of the balancing
services each fridge provides, estimated at around £30 over its lifetime.
Fitting all the UK's 30 million domestic fridges with dynamic demand controllers
would slice 2 gigawatts off peak demand, which could mean that two fewer
coal-fired power station would be needed, according to Andrew Howe, CEO of
RLTec, the London-based company that developed the dynamic demand software being
tested in the Italian fridges. If industrial and commercial fridges were also
included, dynamic demand could compensate for the sort of fluctuations expected
if 20 per cent of the UK's electricity were supplied from renewables, Howe
says.
Dynamic demand is not the only way to tackle these fluctuations. In a
contrasting approach, known as smart grid systems, an operating system run by
the utility company is in two-way communication with controllers in consumers'
appliances. Using information fed in by the appliances, combined with
predictions of renewable power output based on local short-term weather
forecasts, the operating system can balance demand to match supply by telling
non-essential appliances to switch themselves off. "We can turn off a compressor
in somebody's air-conditioning system for 15 minutes, and the temperature really
won't change in the house," says Karl Lewis, chief operating officer of
GridPoint in Arlington, Virginia, a company that designs smart grids.
By providing homes with smart meters to monitor their energy
use, such systems can also help smooth out demand by encouraging consumers to
set their washing machines for cheaper, off-peak times, for example.
GridPoint is working with Minnesota-based Xcel Energy to test the
technology on a city-wide basis in Boulder, Colorado. In August, Xcel began
equipping homes in the city with smart meters and remotely controlled devices.
Next year, it plans to introduce solar and wind energy generators onto the grid.
The hope is that the project will pave the way for cities of the future to be
powered largely by electricity from renewables.
Read all the articles in our special issue on
renewable energy
Energy and Fuels - Learn more about the looming energy crisis in
our comprehensive special report.
Saving up for a windless day
Keeping the electricity flowing will take a battery the likes of which
you've never seen
When you need it there's not enough, and when you don't there's too much. All
too often, that's the story with renewable energy. So finding a way of storing
the excess generated when demand is low and releasing it for use at peak times
is a priority if renewable electricity is ever going to be as reliable as fossil
fuels.
At the moment, the preferred option for handling peak demand is to turn on
gas-turbine generators, something that can be done at almost a moment's notice.
But as gas has become more expensive, electricity companies have become
increasingly interested in energy storage as a way of dealing with the peaks,
says Dan Rastler, an energy storage specialist at the Electric Power Research
Institute (EPRI) in Palo Alto, California.
To store the quantities of electrical energy needed to keep the grid
supplied, conventional batteries like the lead-acid cells used in cars just will
not do. One of the alternatives being developed is the sodium sulphur battery.
Another option is the vanadium flow battery, which can store large amounts of
energy in chemical form in electrolyte solutions stored in large tanks. When fed
into the battery proper, the electrolyte's chemical energy is converted into
electricity, and the spent solution is passed onto a holding tank. Then, when
surplus power is available, the process can be reversed to regenerate the
electrolyte. A 2-megawatt (MW) vanadium flow battery with an energy capacity of
12 megawatt-hours (MWh) is due to be installed next year at the Sorne Hill wind
farm at Buncrana in County Donegal, Ireland. It will cost $6.3 million.
Another promising alternative is to use spare capacity when demand is low to
store compressed air. Electricity from a wind generator, for example, is used to
compress the air, which is stored underground in aquifers or salt domes. When
electricity is needed, the compressed air is released and fed into a gas
turbine.
The turbine is fuelled with natural gas, so the process is not
emissions-free, but because a large proportion of the fuel consumed typically
goes into compressing the air before it is mixed with the gas for combustion,
the turbine will use up to 50 per cent less fuel. This results in carbon dioxide
emissions of 86.5 kilograms per megawatt-hour, compared with 222 kg/MWh for a
conventional gas turbine. "It is one of the few options we have for storing
large amounts of energy, and acting like a shock absorber on the system," says
Rastler.
EPRI plans to build a 300-MW demonstrator plant, and estimates that
compressed-air energy storage (CAES) plants like this will cost around $600 or
$750 per installed kilowatt to build, compared with $1850 to $2150 per kilowatt
for sodium sulphur batteries. Coal-fired power stations cost $476 per kilowatt
to build, while more efficient, integrated gasification combined cycle plants,
in which coal is converted into synthetic gas and impurities are removed before
combustion, cost a whopping $3593 per kilowatt.
A group of municipal utility companies in Iowa is planning to build a $214
million, 268-MW CAES facility that will be used to store electricity from a
75-MW wind farm. It should be operating within five years. The technology is not
new - a CAES plant was first built in Huntorf, Germany, in 1979. But unlike the
Huntorf plant, the Iowa installation will capture exhaust heat from the turbine
and use it to preheat the compressed air before combustion, increasing
efficiency.
Meanwhile, a project funded by the European Commission is developing an
advanced CAES plant which will not consume any natural gas, and so emit no
CO2. When air is compressed it releases heat, and in CAES plants like
that in Iowa, this heat is lost to the environment. In the European system, the
heat will be stored in a honeycomb of ceramic bricks. To recover the energy, the
compressed air is passed over the bricks to absorb heat, and then used to drive
a modified steam turbine.
PETER HOPE'S job is to break the blades of wind turbines. Standing in a huge
shed on the coast of north-east England, he describes how he uses a set of
heavy-duty winches to bend them until they snap with a loud bang. He tests the
designs to breaking point to ensure they can withstand the wildest gales. Once
he tugged the tip of a 42.5-metre blade 11 metres off its axis - bending it by
15 degrees - before it failed. "We've broken every blade we've tested," he
says
Hope is head of one of the world's most advanced turbine blade testing
facilities, run by the UK New and Renewable Energy Centre (NaREC) in Blyth, near
Newcastle. Next year he is looking forward to starting tests on what will be the
longest blade yet made - a 75-metre monster being developed by the California
wind power company Clipper, http://www.clipperwind.com/, designed
to generate 10 megawatts (MW) of electricity.
After that, the blades are likely to get even bigger. The European Union is
funding research into 20-MW machines, which could have 130-metre blades. In
theory blades could be larger still but economic factors and the practical
problems of construction and installation will come into play long before that
limit is reached.
The time and money being spent on wind power is perhaps not surprising when
you consider that, based on global average annual wind speeds, worldwide there
is the potential to generate 106 million gigawatt-hours of electricity per year
from wind - five times the total amount of electricity generated globally today.
Recent estimates put the cost of generating electricity from wind at €0.04 to
0.08 per kilowatt-hour, comparable with nuclear power, and electricity from gas
turbines with natural gas at today's prices.
The dramatic increase in the length of turbine blades - mostly for offshore
wind farms - mirrors the rapid expansion of wind farms worldwide. Between 2006
and 2007 global capacity leapt by over 25 per cent to 94 gigawatts (GW) -
equivalent to around 90 average-sized coal-fired power stations - that's a
ninefold increase on the 10.2 GW generated from wind just 10 years ago. By
comparison, total global electricty generation from all sources increased by
just 30 per cent.
All indications are that this booming growth in wind energy capacity will
continue. The Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC), based in Brussels,
Belgium, predicts that the global wind market will grow by over 15 per cent from
its current size to reach 240 GW of total installed capacity by the year 2012.
By then, wind energy will be producing more than half a million gigawatt-hours
of electricity a year, pushing its share of the global total from 1 per cent in
2007 to 3 per cent. How has wind gone from being a quaint afterthought to such a
significant contributor to global electricity generation in such a short space
of time?
The biggest influence on wind generation has been the huge investment in a
few key European countries that are rich in wind resource and driven by
ambitious targets to cut CO2 emissions. Germany leads the world, with
19,460 turbines in 2007 capable of generating 22.25 GW, which can supply 7 per
cent of the country's electricity. To encourage the shift to renewables, all
suppliers of electricity from renewable sources are paid a premium "feed-in"
tariff for the first five years they supply power to the grid.
But Germany may soon be toppled from its wind power throne. The GWEC predicts
that in 2009 the US will overtake it and become the world's biggest producer of
wind-powered electricity. China, which has succeeded in doubling its capacity
every year since 2004, is not far behind. The Chinese Renewable Energy Industry
Association forecasts it will reach around 50 GW by 2015.
A leading US expert on wind power, Walt Musial from the National Renewable
Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, compares the state of wind technology
today to that of the car industry in 1940. There are many ways to improve the
technology, he says, which could make turbines even more efficient, more
reliable and more powerful.
But he warns that these improvements come at a cost. For example, using
carbon fibre to make lighter turbine blades would mean turbine makers having to
compete with aircraft makers for the raw material. Making the blades longer will
make torque on the drivetrains among the largest of any piece of rotating
equipment ever constructed, putting immense strain on the materials used.
Clipper's answer to the torque problem has been to develop a gearing system
it claims reduces the load from the blades to one-quarter that of an equivalent
conventional turbine.
To identify and overcome potential pitfalls for the next generation of giant
10-megawatt turbines, in 2006 the European Union launched a five-year €22.3
million research project involving over 40 partners from 14 countries. Known as
UpWind, it has already come up with some useful ideas.
A team led by Martin Kühn, from the University of
Stuttgart in Germany, has suggested attaching big turbines to the
seabed via tripods at depths of between 35 and 50 metres. For water deeper than
50 metres, they suggest floating turbines on platforms anchored to the
seabed.
Another group, led by aerospace engineer Harald Bersee from the Delft
University of Technology in the Netherlands, has been investigating "smart
blades". Inspired by research into helicopter rotors, he envisages sensors
controlling a series of wing flaps along the trailing edges of turbine blades
that would unfold in light winds to expand the blade's surface area and so
improve its performance.
UpWind researchers are also studying the possibility of a 20-MW turbine. They
have concluded that although technological barriers could be overcome, it is
doubtful whether such large machines are economically viable. This is because of
what wind engineers call the "square cube law".
A turbine's power output is proportional to the square of the length of its
blades, making it attractive to lengthen them. But its volume and weight are
proportional to the cube of its dimensions, meaning the price of a turbine
climbs faster than its power output as its size increases. This suggests there
will be an optimum size for a wind turbine, though so far no one has calculated
what that will be.
There are those who believe size isn't everything. Peter Jamieson from the
wind consultants Garrad Hassan in Glasgow, UK, says the advantage of scaling up
has "rarely been demonstrated". Instead, he suggests it would be more economic
to build lots of small cheap, lower-power turbines. There is also growing
interest in high-altitude wind power in
which kites attached to winches tap the higher wind speeds available up
there.
But Jamieson is in a minority. For now, when it comes to turbines, bigger is
broadly accepted as better. Back in Blyth's big shed that is certainly the way
Peter Hope expects things to go. He's clearly looking forward to bending
100-metre blades until they break. "They'll make a big bang," he says.
Read all the articles in our special issue on
renewable energy
Energy and Fuels - Learn more about the looming energy crisis in
our comprehensive special report.
From issue 2677 of New Scientist magazine, 08 October 2008,
page 32-35
WELCOME to the Bay of Fundy in eastern Canada, home to the highest
tides in the world. Here, 100 billion tonnes of Atlantic seawater flow in and
out of the 270-kilometre-long bay every day. The sea level at Fundy rises by an
average of 11 metres, reaching a maximum of 17 metres at the narrowest point,
twice a day without fail, thanks to the moon's gravitational pull. Could this
tidal movement be used to generate power?
The unwavering predictability and scale of the tides in some parts of the
world make them an attractive renewable energy source. The World
Energy Council estimates that Fundy's tides alone could generate 17,000 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of energy per year. Some estimates put the energy in the world's tides at as
much as 1 million GWh per year, or about 5 per cent of the electricity generated
worldwide, though only a fraction of this is likely to be exploited due to
practical constraints.
With so much to gain, it is little wonder that in recent years interest in
tidal power has risen and investment has flowed in. Yet it is an enterprise
fraught with engineering and environmental challenges. In addition, tidal energy
is unevenly distributed across regions and countries, with local geography
determining whether it will be economically viable in any given area. Still,
there are plenty of researchers, small companies and would-be entrepreneurs
vying to harvest the ocean's bounty of "blue energy".
One method for harvesting tidal energy is the use of barrages - dams across a
bay or river mouth that are opened as the tide comes in, allowing the bay to
fill with water. At high tide the barrages are closed and later the water
empties out through hydroelectric turbines, generating electricity. The roughly
12-hour tidal cycle ensures that this process occurs without fail twice a
day.
The poster child for tidal energy is in Brittany, France, where a tidal
barrage sits astride the Rance estuary. In operation since 1966, the La Rance plant provides 70
megawatts (MW) of power on average and has long since paid for itself. According
to French electricity company EDF, which runs the plant as well as other power
stations, La Rance's tidal energy costs ¬0.20 per kilowatt-hour, which is less
than the company's average cost.
Similar barrages are in operation in Canada, Russia and China, albeit on a
much smaller scale. Meanwhile, South Korea is building the world's largest tidal
power plant at Sihwa Lake, 25 kilometres south-west of Seoul. Scheduled for
completion next year, the plant will have a capacity of 254 MW, enough to power
the nearby city of Ansan.
La Rance and Sihwa Lake will look like puddles if two ambitious projects
proposed by Russia are realised. Engineers are planning to build a 15-GW
barrage at Mezenski Bay on the White Sea and an 8-GW plant in Tugurski Bay in
the far east of the country, to help power nearby industry.
The barrage approach has many detractors, however. Environmentalists claim
that the water trapped in the bay or estuary by the barrage floods tidal plains
and mudflats, displacing wildlife such as the shorebirds which rely on them for
food. Barrages could also have more far-reaching effects. Computer models of the
Bay of Fundy have shown that a large barrage would affect the tides as far away
as Boston, 500 kilometres to the south.
However, studies at La Rance reveal that the area now has greater
biodiversity than before the barrage was installed. It also draws a quarter of a
million tourists every year, helping to boost the local economy.
Barrages draw the most fire, though, because they are huge infrastructure
projects that require many years of work and enormous investment before they
produce any juice. For example, the Severn estuary in the UK enjoys the world's
third-highest tidal range with an average of 7 metres, rising to over 14 metres,
which could provide up to 17,000 GWh of electrical energy per year.
Proposed Severn barrage schemes have met with resistance, though, because they
would cost upwards of £15 billion and require decades to complete.
There is a potentially cheaper way to exploit tidal energy that is also
kinder to the marine environment: use currents to drive turbines. In essence it
is the same idea as a wind farm, but under water. This approach has already been
shown to work, having provided energy to the northern Norwegian town of Hammerfest since 2003. In the US, Verdant
Power has provided energy from a small tidal-current project in the
East River, New York, to a supermarket and parking garage since 2006.
Recent months have seen a spurt of activity on a grander scale. In August, UK
company Marine Current Technology used tidal currents in
Strangford Lough, Northern Ireland, to provide power to the national grid. The
firm hopes the scheme will be at its full 1.2-MW capacity by next month. In
March, Lunar Energy, another UK company, signed a £500 million
deal to build a 300-turbine farm off the South Korean coast - the largest of its
kind yet proposed. In New Zealand and India, small pockets of interest are
slowly developing into prototypes and tentative energy-production deals.
The idea is not limited to tidal estuaries. Currents in large rivers and the
open ocean could also do the job. Frederick Driscoll's team at Florida Atlantic
University, Dania Beach, is spearheading an effort to capture energy from
the Gulf Stream as the tide passes through a narrow channel off the Florida
coast. The team is using a prototype 20-kilowatt turbine.
Estimates for the eventual cost of electricity from these tidal current
schemes vary widely, primarily because the technology is unproven on a large
scale. A report commissioned by the Carbon Trust, an organisation
set up to help UK businesses develop low-carbon technologies, puts the cost of
energy generated by tidal currents at between 12 and 15 pence per kilowatt-hour,
making it four times as expensive as large wind farms.
However, Roger Bedard of California's Electric Power Research
Institute believes that the cost will fall steeply as more turbines
are installed. The tidal current industry shares so much technical know-how with
the wind industry, the innovation costs should also fall.
So can tidal energy provide us with boundless clean energy? Perhaps. It could
meet a substantial chunk of a country's electricity demands but, as it depends
on geography, only for a lucky few.
Read all the articles in our special issue on
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Catching the waves
There's energy aplenty in the oceans' waves - taming them is the tricky
part
Moored 5 kilometres off the coast of northern Portugal is the world's first
wave farm. Built by UK company Pelamis Wave Power (PWP), the
farm comprises three enormous floating cylinders connected by articulated
joints. As the articulated structures bend with the waves, they drive hydraulic
pistons which in turn operate turbines capable of generating up to 2.25
megawatts (MW) of power.
Worldwide, waves could provide anything from 1000 to 10,000 gigawatts of
power, according to the World Energy Council. This means that waves could
provide far more energy than the tides. Harvesting that energy is the tough
part.
There are widely varying designs among the 60 or so proposed solutions to the
wave power challenge, says Stephen Wyatt, an expert in marine energy at the UK's
Carbon Trust. "What we haven't seen yet are any clear winners." Unlike with wind
and tidal power, there has been no convergence of technology and it doesn't look
like happening any time soon. Many seemingly good ideas haven't gone much
further than the bar napkins on which they were conceived.
Some trends are emerging, however. Articulated structures like the PWP
machines are one option. Another approach uses an oscillating water column, in
which a cylinder tethered to the seabed is fitted with a piston connected to a
buoy floating at the surface. As the buoy rises and falls with the waves, it
moves the piston up and down, which drives water through turbines, generating
power.
Vancouver-based company Finavera Renewables plans to use
this approach to build a demonstration wave machine in Humboldt county,
California. The company has signed a deal with California utilities giant
Pacific Gas and Electric to provide a 2-MW wave plant that will plug into the
grid in 2012.
Other approaches simply collect water from waves crashing over them. As the
water flows back towards the sea it is channelled through turbines that generate
power. A Danish company called Wave Dragon has successfully
trialled prototype devices.
The trouble with waves is that their height and frequency vary hugely
depending on the weather and geography. A technology designed to work best for
metre-high waves arriving every few seconds will be inefficient for smaller,
more frequent ones. What's more, wave farms have to withstand storms and freak,
giant waves, and this makes them expensive to build. Like tidal power, location
is paramount.
AT FIRST glance, geothermal energy seems almost too good to be true. It's
clean, inexhaustible, provides predictable 24-hour power and you can get it just
about anywhere. A 2006 report by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology estimated that there is enough geothermal energy in the US alone to
meet the country's energy needs 2000 times over. According to the Geothermal
Energy Association (GEA), based in Washington DC, the best sites can generate
electricity for as little as 5.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared with 8 or 9
cents per kilowatt-hour for natural gas plants.
There is a snag, however. Outside of geologically blessed places like
Iceland, Japan and New Zealand, where volcanically active rocks are close to the
surface, the Earth's heat is locked away under several kilometres of rock. Now,
though, new developments are making these depths easier and more cost-effective
to reach, and the world is beginning to realise the potential of geothermal
energy.
The key to tapping this resource is a relatively recent technology called
enhanced geothermal systems (EGS), which can create a geothermal hotspot pretty
much anywhere. The process involves fracturing hot rocks, then injecting water,
which heats up as it circulates through them. It is then pumped back to the
surface and passed through a heat exchanger, which drives a turbine, generating
electricity.
A number of EGS projects have recently come online. The world's first
commercial plant in Landau, Germany, was commissioned in 2007 and already
produces 22 gigawatt-hours of electricity per year. A 1.5-megawatt (MW)
pilot plant in Soultz, France, began operating this June and a test plant at
Groß Schönebeck, Germany, should be online by the end of next year. In southern
Australia, a 1-MW demonstration plant should be producing electricity by
January.
In the US, meanwhile, the Department of Energy has invested over $5 million
to add an EGS system to a conventional geothermal well - where water is pumped
through naturally hot rocks - east of Reno, Nevada, in the hope of increasing
its productivity.
Sites like these are proving to be worthwhile investments, but that's mainly
because, as existing oil, gas or conventional geothermal sites, their geology
was already well understood. Some even had boreholes that could be adapted for
EGS. Elsewhere, though, the costs of finding and tapping geothermal energy
remain high.
Drilling, in particular, is costly - at Soultz it ate up 60 per cent of the
investment. Clearly it is more cost-effective to drill where hot rocks are
shallowest, but a lack of survey data means that these places are hard to find.
"What they're mostly doing now is blind drilling where we see hot water coming
out of the ground. It's the equivalent of the oil industry in the 1800s," says
Karl Gawell of the GEA.
In fact, rocks at the necessary temperatures of between 150 and 250 °C are
often 3 kilometres down or more. "The deeper you go, the more expensive it
gets," says Jared Potter of California-based Potter Drilling. So, together with
Jefferson Tester of MIT, Potter is developing a hydrothermal drill to try to
change that equation.
The team has designed a system that replaces conventional drill bits with a
high-pressure jet of steam at 800 °C. There is no solid cutting edge, so there
is very little wear on the equipment. That means longer uninterrupted drilling
times, fewer delays and significant savings. At the moment it costs up to $100
million to drill past 9 kilometres, says Potter. A 2006 study by Tester and
colleagues estimated that reaching the same depth using the new drill could be
up to an order of magnitude cheaper. "If these savings can be realised, EGS
would become viable basically everywhere," Potter says. Even a savings factor of
2 or 3 could make it more widely workable. Potter and Tester hope to have a
prototype ready for field testing next year.
Not everyone is convinced, however. "Our wells are more expensive than oil
and gas wells because the product we're getting out isn't very valuable until we
get a lot of it, and all at once," says Susan Petty of EGS development company
AltaRock. The prices of the steel and cement used in well casings are soaring,
she adds. "A new drill bit isn't necessarily going to fix this."
There are other ideas to make EGS projects more efficient. One is to replace
the water sent through an EGS reservoir with "supercritical" carbon dioxide -
CO2 at a temperature and pressure high enough to give it the
properties of both gas and liquid. CO2 becomes sequestered in the
rock in the process. The idea, developed by Donald Brown at Los Alamos National
Laboratory, New Mexico, in the 1990s, would increase heat outputs because
supercritical CO2 can move faster and more easily through the system
than water. According to models this could increase heat extraction rates by 50
per cent and would sequester about 3.6 tonnes of CO2 for every
megawatt-hour of electricity it produced. A state-of-the-art coal power plant
produces around 0.8 tonnes of CO2 per megawatt-hour.
As well as financial considerations, there are practical obstacles to
overcome before EGS is ready to go mainstream. For a start, injecting fluid into
hot, dry rocks occasionally triggers earthquakes. An EGS project in Basel,
Switzerland, was suspended in 2006 after it triggered a 3.4-magnitude quake.
Researchers are trying to understand what exactly causes these quakes and how to
prevent them.
In Iceland, by contrast, the viability of geothermal energy isn't a problem -
over half the country's energy comes from geothermal sources. Even so, one
project is hoping to prove that there's no such thing as too much green energy.
The Iceland Deep Drilling Project (IDDP), which began in 2000, aims to take
geothermal beyond steam by drilling into a reservoir of water which has been
heated to 450 °C by a magma chamber below and is in a supercritical state. It's
tricky stuff to handle - generally geothermal engineers try to avoid these
reservoirs as they can cause dangerous and expensive blow-outs. "Supercritical
fluids are not very predictable - there is the risk of explosion," says Ragnar
Asmundsson, coordinator of the HITI project, a spin-off of the IDDP that is
currently drilling towards one of these unusual reservoirs. The risk may well be
worth it, though. If they can tame the fluid, the wells could each produce an
order of magnitude more power than a conventional geothermal borehole.
Similarly explosive geothermal conditions can be found in underground
reservoirs where gas-saturated liquids are trapped in deep sedimentary
formations. These "geopressured" reservoirs could yield not only heat from the
fluid itself, but also chemical energy from the dissolved natural gas, and
hydraulic energy from the extreme pressure. Germany and Australia are currently
looking into ways to exploit these resources.
Interest in geothermal is at an all-time high, but while there is no shortage
of heat, the same can't be said for funds. A healthy injection of investment -
and government subsidies - is desperately needed if geothermal power is to
achieve its potential. In the US, the Department of Energy has proposed the
creation of a national geothermal database to help interested parties strike
heat. This August, Google.org, the charitable arm of the internet giant,
announced a $10 million funding package for projects to map geothermal resources
or make drilling more cost-effective. There's still a way to go, but according
to Dan Reicher, director of climate and energy initiatives at Google.org, geothermal - and EGS in particular - is
going to be big. "[It] could be the 'killer app' of the energy world," he
says.
Read all the articles in our special issue on
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Sunny side up
There's much more to solar power than photovoltaic cells
Photovoltaic cells are currently the fastest growing energy technology, with
production increasing by around 48 per cent each year. By 2015 the price of
electricity from PV cells is expected to match that of conventional energy
generators. (For a detailed account of the state of the art in photovoltaic
cells see New Scientist, 8 December 2007, p
32.)
But photovoltaic cells aren't the only way to capture the power of the sun.
Large-scale concentrating solar power (CSP) systems are all the rage in the
energy-hungry US. Last June, the 64-megawatt (MW) Nevada Solar One CSP plant
switched on near Boulder City. Since then, over 1.6 gigawatts of new CSP
capacity have been announced in neighbouring California.
In the past year or so, the US Bureau of Land Management has received more
than 30 planning requests to develop large-scale CSP plants across the US. The
situation is similar in Europe, where around a dozen plants are under
construction with at least 24 more proposed in Spain alone.
Sound economics lie behind this enthusiasm. At the moment, electricity
generated by large-scale solar concentrator systems costs around 12 US cents per
kilowatt-hour. Though this is around four times the price of electricity from a
coal-fired power station, it's half the price of electricity produced by
photovoltaic cells. What's more, this technology offers an advantage that could
prove decisive in the longer term: the ability to store energy for hours or days
at a stretch.
Rather than converting sunlight directly into electricity, a CSP system uses
arrays of mirrors to focus sunlight onto tubes filled with water or oil. The
fluid is heated under pressure to around 400 °C and is then circulated to a
steam turbine to generate electricity. By replacing the water or oil with molten salts, typically a mix of
sodium nitrate (NaNO3) and potassium nitrate (KNO3), and
storing this hot mixture in insulated tanks, it is possible to use energy
collected during daylight hours to generate electricity at times of peak demand
- day or night.
"With this system you can make electricity when you want," says Massimo
Falchetta, an engineer at the Italian National Agency for New Technologies,
Energy and the Environment, in Rome. That means the energy can be sold for a
higher price than stuff from wind generators or PV cells.
Solar concentrators are nothing new. The Solar Energy Generating
Systems (SEGS) plant has been operating in California's Mojave desert
since 1985. Made up of nine energy farms capable of generating a total of 354
MW, SEGS is the largest solar concentrator system in the world.
During the 1980s and 1990s, US engineers tested various designs, including
power towers - mirrors arranged around a vertical pipe system - and systems with
molten salts. However, the US Department of Energy halted research in 2000 after
the US National Research Council suggested that any further gains in performance
would be insignificant.
Development continued in Europe, and later this year the first commercial
molten salt-based solar collector system is due to be switched on at Guadix in
Andalusia, Spain. Andasol-1 has over 500,000
square metres of parabolic mirrors and will generate 50 MW of power. With large
storage tanks for the salt solution, it will be able to continue generating
electricity for more than 7 hours after sunset.
In April, the Electric Power Research Institute in California released a
report suggesting that adding up to 9 hours of energy storage with molten salts
to a solar concentrator plant can reduce the cost of its electricity by up to 13
per cent.
This cost could fall further if new experimental fluids containing
nanoparticles outperform salts, says Mark Mehos, who manages the solar thermal
power programme at the National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colorado. "It's
early days but this has the potential to be revolutionary," he says.
Ben Crystall
Power plants
With so much plant waste around, it should be easy to bring biomass into
the mainstream. So what's the problem?
Biomass is plentiful enough. You can burn wood, manure and more or less any
other kind of plant material. Indeed, it provides around 11 per cent of the
world's energy, mainly as heat, although in most industrialised nations it
yields just 1 or 2 per cent of their electricity at best. And despite a growing
enthusiasm for all things green, biopower faces some distinct challenges if it
is to move from the margins to mainstream production.
The problem is, biomass doesn't actually yield much energy. Felled trees and
energy crops are only a quarter as energy dense as bituminous coal - biomass
generally yields around 7 gigajoules per tonne - so right now biopower is
struggling to break even economically. In Sweden, which generates around 4 per
cent of its electricity from biomass, the break-even figure for willow
plantations is 12 to 16 tonnes of dry wood biomass per hectare each year. A recent study at Lund University suggests that only
along its wet western coast can Sweden exceed this, with annual yields of up to
17 tonnes per hectare.
Yet biomass does have some advantages. For example, Canada's forestry
industry faces a serious threat from the mountain pine beetle, a pest that has
already devastated more than 130,000 square kilometres of Canadian forests
(New Scientist, 18 December 2004, p 16). Beetle-infested timber is
useless as lumber, but it could be good news for biopower, argues Amit Kumar at
the University of Alberta in Edmonton. The infested wood could support three
300-megawatt (MW) power stations, providing around 1 per cent of Canada's
electricity needs.
It's telling that Canada, with over 400 million wooded hectares, has no
healthy forest to devote to biopower. The lumber and paper industries monopolise
it and, as Kumar suggests, biopower can succeed only by feeding on their scraps.
This problem is even more apparent elsewhere. In the US, biopower has become the
single largest provider of renewable electricity, thanks primarily to waste
biomass from the paper industry. That resource is now fully exploited, though,
and the US Department of Energy estimates that future biopower growth will slow,
providing around 1.7 per cent of the country's electricity by 2030.
So where can we find biomass to feed the power stations? Fortunately,
untapped resources exist in many parts of the world, including waste from
sugar-cane processing in Brazil and waste palm oil and rice hulls in Asia. In
the US, livestock produce over 1 billion tonnes of manure annually, most of
which is left to rot. Why not collect the stuff, convert it to methane in
anaerobic digesters and use it in power stations? Michael Webber at the
University of Texas in Austin calculates that US manure could generate 68 million megawatt-hours each
year - almost 2 per cent of the annual US electricity demand
(Environmental Research Letters, vol 3, p 034002). The infrastructure to
collect and transport manure would incur its own costs, so local-scale
operations might be key to maximising profits.
With that in mind, plans by Finnish company Wärtsilä to build small combined
heat and power plants attached to two breweries in the north of England could be
a sign of things to come. Using spent grain from the brewing process to generate
power, their output will be modest - around 3.1 MW of electricity each. That's
plenty to power the breweries' operations, though, and any excess will be sold
to the grid.
Colin Barras
Edison's revenge
When electricity has to travel thousands of miles you need a different
kind of grid
Sometimes newest isn't best. A technology dismissed as obsolete a century ago
could turn out to be the key to building a power grid fit for delivering
electricity generated from renewable sources.
Nearly all of the world's power lines carry alternating current (AC). The
reasons for this go back to an epic argument in the late 19th century between
two of the biggest names in the history of electricity: Thomas Edison, the
inventor of the light bulb, and the engineer Nikola Tesla. Edison argued that
direct current (DC) was the right way to transmit power over long distances,
because with AC this can only be done if the voltage is stepped up to lethal
levels. He even built the first electric chair to demonstrate his point. Edison
lost the "war of currents" because Tesla's AC transmission system proved more
practical, and so it remained through the 20th century.
But Edison may yet be vindicated. Unlike conventional power plants, which can
be built close to where their electricity is needed, renewable energy sources
are not always near population centres, so this power must be transmitted over
long distances. Over a distance of 1000 kilometres, AC transmission lines become
increasingly inefficient, losing over 10 per cent of the energy pumped into
them, whereas a high-voltage DC line would lose just 3 per cent. When you factor
in conversion from DC to the AC supply that consumers need, the additional
losses are 0.6 per cent at most. In all, at distances of about 800 kilometres
and above, DC transmission becomes cheaper than AC.
This has led supporters of renewables to call for a new generation of
high-voltage DC "supergrids" linking regions rich in wind, solar or other
renewable energy sources with populated areas thousands of miles away.
In May, the environmentalist Robert Kennedy Jr called on the next US
president to build a high-voltage DC grid to transport electricity from the
"wind corridor" that stretches from the Texas panhandle to North Dakota, and
solar power plants in the Southwest, to all major US cities.
In Europe, Gregor Czisch, an energy systems expert at the University of
Kassel in Germany, has calculated the costs and benefits of a supergrid
stretching from western Siberia to Senegal and providing 1.1 billion Europeans
with 4 million gigawatt-hours of electricity a year from renewables. The grid
would link onshore and offshore wind farms, hydropower resources and solar
concentrator power plants with major European cities. The sheer extent of a grid
like this would do a lot to smooth out the energy supply, Czisch says.
Not only would the electricity this provides be clean, it would also be
reasonably cheap. At 2007 prices, a European supergrid would deliver wholesale
electricity at a cost of ¤0.047 per kilowatt-hour, says Czisch, compared with
¤0.06 to ¤0.07 per kilowatt-hour for electricity from gas-fired power
plants.
Helen Knight
From issue 2677 of New Scientist magazine, 08 October 2008,
page 37-40
WHAT do a small Italian village, a
community of millionaires in Oregon and a town in Austria have in common? Nearly
all of their electricity needs are supplied by renewable energy. They are by no
means the only ones. A growing number of communities are working towards using
only electricity generated by renewables.
At the same time, many of the largest cities around the world have set
themselves ambitious targets to cut carbon dioxide emissions to less than half
present levels in the coming decades, and they will be relying heavily on
renewable energy sources to do this. For example, London aims to cut its
emissions by 60 per cent of 1990 levels by 2025 with the help of renewables.
While no country - except geothermally blessed Iceland - gets all of its
electricity from renewables, some resource-rich, sparsely populated countries,
including Austria, Sweden and Norway, aim to get between 60 and 90 per cent
of their electricity from renewables by 2010.
One of the first towns to adopt a predominantly renewable supply, without
compromising on its wealthy residents' modern lifestyle, was Three Rivers in
Oregon. "We have everything - the internet, satellite TV, a washer and dryer -
there is nothing I do without," says Elaine Budden, who has lived in Three
Rivers for 12 years.
Ever since the mid 1980s, when the town's first permanent houses were built,
Three Rivers has used solar power. The nearest power lines are several
kilometres away and extending the grid would cost hundreds of thousands of
dollars. So instead, Three Rivers residents decided to purchase their own
photovoltaic panels and battery storage packs. The panels provide up to 2
kilowatts (kW) of power, enough for 80 to 95 per cent of each household's
electricity needs. The rest is supplied by propane or diesel generators.
One community in Italy has got around the intermittent nature of solar power
without the help of fossil fuels. In 2002, Varese Ligure, a village of 2400
people in northern Italy, became the first municipality in Europe to get all its
electricity from renewable energy. Instead of relying entirely on one source, it
uses a mix of solar, wind and small-scale hydropower. Four wind turbines on a
ridge above the village provide 3.2 megawatts of electricity, 141 solar panels
on the roofs of the town hall and the primary school provide 17 kW, and a small
hydro station on a nearby river provides an additional 6 kW. Together, these
sources now provide more than three times the community's electricity needs.
If renewable energy is going to play a significant role worldwide, however,
it will need to be employed on a much larger scale. Gussing, a town of 4000 in
eastern Austria, recently went 100 per cent renewable in electricity
production with a highly efficient 8-megawatt biomass gasification plant fuelled
by the region's oak trees. By 2010, Gussing plans to use biomass to provide
electricity to the rest of the district's 27,000 inhabitants.
Meanwhile, larger communities are also beginning to make the switch.
Freiburg, a city of 200,000 in south-west Germany has invested €43 million in
photovoltaics in the past 20 years and has set a goal of reducing CO2
emissions to 25 per cent below 1992 levels by 2010. And if all goes well, Masdar
City, a planned development in Abu Dhabi that will be home to 50,000 people,
will get all its electricity from the sun, wind and composted food waste when it
is completed in 2016.
New Zealand, which like Iceland also relies heavily on geothermal energy and
hydropower, now gets 70 per cent of its electricity from renewables and,
with the help of additional wind power, aims to increase this figure to 90 per
cent by 2025.
From the smallest village to an entire nation, the evidence is already out
there that powering our world with renewables can be more than a pipe dream. Now
all we need is the investment to make it a reality.
Read all the articles in our special issue on
renewable energy
Energy and Fuels - Learn more about the looming energy crisis in
our comprehensive special report.
From issue 2677 of New Scientist magazine, 08 October 2008,
page 41
+++ Provided as a public service from www.IntegrityResearchInstitute.org
where the Third International Conference on Future Energy will be held
Oct. 9-10, 2009 at the Washington Hilton - save the
date+++
WELCOME to the Bay of Fundy in eastern Canada, home to the highest
tides in the world. Here, 100 billion tonnes of Atlantic seawater flow in and
out of the 270-kilometre-long bay every day. The sea level at Fundy rises by an
average of 11 metres, reaching a maximum of 17 metres at the narrowest point,
twice a day without fail, thanks to the moon's gravitational pull. Could this
tidal movement be used to generate power?