Archive for the ‘Electricity’ Category

Federal Stimulus and Cleantech Infrastructure

Friday, May 1st, 2009

No doubt, cleantech companies were upbeat when the White House stimulus package allocated 13 percent of the total $104 billion stimulus package for green technology. Much of the economic stimulus will flow to cleantech infrastructure, but exactly where will it go?
Cleantech sectors, which were big winners, include smart grid technology with $4.5 billion, energy efficiency for federal buildings with $4.5 billion and wind and solar with $6 billion for new loan guarantees.
It’s an unheard of sum for cleantech. And a recent survey of technology experts by Changewave Research sheds some light on where the impact will be felt most. Changewave surveyed 409 members of the Changewave Research Network, people who work for companies involved in infrastructure projects. The March 12-17 survey covered infrastructure spending in the transportation, electricity/smart grid and broadband sectors. But for this blog I’m going to focus on the results for the smart grid.

Industry respondents were asked which infrastructure areas they think will benefit most from the U.S. economic stimulus package in the next 12 months. Not surprisingly, transportation infrastructure (62 percent) was the winner, followed by alternative energy (44 percent). Electricity/smart grid (29 percent) and water infrastructure (11 percent) also stood out.
In terms of outlook on areas expected to experience the most growth over the next 12 months, electric powerline projects were viewed by surveyed experts as being strong, accounting for 36 percent of the growth. Control systems like generators, switches and circuit breakers registered only 22 percent. On the smart grid side, the investment in smart meters or meter infrastructure registered 37 percent.
What are the companies most likely to benefit from the uptick in spending on the electric grid infrastructure? The survey identifies General Electric and Siemens AG as well-positioned grid infrastructure suppliers. ABB and EMCOR are seen as the prime beneficiaries in the area of powerline infrastructure.
How about the downsides? Those surveyed indicated the biggest barrier to the upgrading of the electric power grid as not-in-my-backyard issues (NIMBY, 43 percent). The other barriers cited included too much bureaucracy (41 percent) and not enough funding (37 percent).
Those barriers will be challenging but the need for an overhaul to the 40-year-old infrastructure is long overdue. –Lee Bruno

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Smart Grid on Your Radio

Friday, March 6th, 2009

The electric grid has been on the sideline as digital innovation has made many other systems smarter and more agile. Yes, the grid is one complicated mesh of interconnects but it’s about time it got some attention.

The Obama stimulus package promises to do that. Of the $104 billion going to green tech, there’s roughly $4.5 billion allotted to help the grid get smart. How it’s going to happen is still uncertain but at least the grid is now in the game.

One startup making a run at the smart grid is e-Radio. The company, based in Los Altos, is an angel-backed venture that has developed what it claims is a low-cost and highly reliable smart-grid communication system.

Its system employs the FM RDS radio standard widely used in the automobile industry to allow suppliers to pass along pricing and grid status to customers. It’s intended to work with the new class of smart-grid devices like communicating thermostats and air-conditioning load-control switches.

As for the competition, it’s fierce and heating up with Cannon Technologies, Gridpoint and Comverge offering hardware and software systems. But E-Radio maintains its system costs less and offers better signal and reception features.

E-Radio operates a network of FCC-licensed FM radio stations using subcarrier broadcasting signals to provide one-way delivery of data content to smart-grid devices containing an e-Radio receiver.
Research by UC Berkeley determined FM RDS to be a reliable, low-cost and ubiquitous communication system for demand response and better than competing technologies. It would complement the LAN smart-grid technology Zigbee, which is currently used in utility sensors for home and business.

The California Energy Commission is pursuing adoption of an FM RDS receiver module in smart-grid devices on a statewide basis for demand response beginning in 2009. The e-Radio product is going to be available first quarter 2009 and the company is currently seeking a $3 million A round. We’ll see if e-Radio can bring some smarts to our senile electric grid. –Lee Bruno

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Low-Hanging Fruits of Efficiency

Monday, February 9th, 2009

The push to reduce energy consumption is broad and deep. And for homeowners who are looking to reduce their energy costs, there are standard practices, such as turning down the thermostat, changing out light bulbs and purchasing energy-efficient appliances.

But the U.S. building sector’s energy consumption is still expected to increase by 35 percent between now and 2025 and commercial energy demand is projected to grow at an average annual rate of 1.6 percent, reaching 25.3 quads (1015 Btu) in 2025.

That translates into a critical need to develop and deploy emerging energy-efficient technologies that can deliver reliable energy and peak-demand reductions throughout the lifespan of a building. And we all know we like energy savings right alongside the comfort of a home that is reflective of our lifestyles and concerns for our environment.

What’s the urgency and why push for energy efficiency?
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Arun Majumdar, professor of department of mechanical engineering and materials science and engineering at UC Berkeley puts climate change and energy efficiency into perspective.

“We are sitting on the Titantic and takes three miles to turn the ship to avoid the iceberg, which is 2.5 miles in front of us,” Majumdar said recently at the JUNBA Symposium in San Francisco. “And some are shuffling the deck chairs.”

“Energy efficiency is the lowest hanging fruit you can find,” Majumdar said recently at the JUNBA symposium in San Francisco. “We need to look at the demand side and the energy efficiency side of the picture.”

There’s an assortment of low-tech innovations that can address this need in buildings, which are energy sieves. Experts say that automated technologies such as motorized roller shades and daylight-controlled dimmable fluorescent lighting systems have big upside potential.

That’s because those technologies principally target two of the largest categories of energy consumption in commercial buildings: lighting and space conditioning (cooling/ heating). Keep in mind this last figure about buildings and energy: some 40 percent of the energy used in California is consumed by buildings. And some 12 percent of energy goes into the actual building of the structure.

Recently, the New York Times built its new headquarters in Manhattan and decided to invest in an assortment of these energy efficient technologies showcased on Lawrence Berkeley National Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division.

The performance data helped convince the owners that these technologies were the right stuff for a 21st century building. It will take time to convince a broad base of companies about the costs and merits of putting these technologies into practice. In the long run, the data and case studies revealed on the above reference website should be enough of a testimonial to convince those sitting on the fence. –Lee Bruno

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Posted in Buildings, CleanTech, Electricity, Energy, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Upgrading the Electric Grid

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

For years engineers and utilities have been waxing on and on about the future of the utility grid and the economic importance of having a smarter, more flexible infrastructure for distributing electricity. But the conversation goes silent when it comes to the price tag: $1.5 trillion.

There’s no doubt that a radical improvement needs to be made to the aged infrastructure that carries electricity from generation plants to homes and businesses. Some places on the grid, like stretches between L.A. and San Diego, are as congested as the freeways at rush hour.

This is where energy intelligence comes in. Energy intelligence is often defined as a subsector of traditional energy efficiency, focused on utility-scale distribution, grid connectivity and two-way communication with end users and devices. It becomes part of the nervous system that helps connect and make the grid more sentient.

By using energy intelligence technologies, grid-connected utilities and providers will be able to manage their generation and supply in accordance with end-user usage patterns. And that means power is distributed more intelligently to minimize load and enable active power-distribution management to optimize resources.
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It may cost the U.S. $1.5 trillion to upgrade to a smart grid.
(Source: Federal Energy Regulatory Commission)

With the new infrastructure in place, customers can make informed decisions about their energy use, so they can purchase it at times when it’s cheapest. The way to make much of that happen is with smart meters and power management dispatched to homes and businesses where they will deliver savings and improved efficiency.

Trouble is, the next phase of bringing solar and wind energy sources online will require more engineers trained in power electronics. Unfortunately, power electronics was taught widely at universities 20-30 years ago but now few teach it.

“Power electronics is really going to be the critical area, along with interface technologies for converting AC current to DC and vice versa,” says Dick DeBlasio, laboratory program manager for electricity programs at the National Renewable Energy Labs in Boulder, Colorado.

It is part of an evolutionary process that aims to bring a grid built on 50-year-old analog technology up to speed with the 21st century shift to digital. “Interoperability is really the big part of the focus for researchers and engineers,” says DeBlasio. Part of the problem is where to place sensors in buildings and on the distribution system.

The control and monitoring of the smart grid it is not easily done, as an estimated 10-15 percent of energy is lost in delivery. Another critical item for the future of the grid is storage and government R&D in this area has been abysmal for a long time.

The targeted areas for smart-grid R&D activities are in four basic categories: architecture and communication standards; monitoring and load-management technologies; monitoring and control for demand-side management; advanced components and operating concepts. . “We have a chance to be an early adopter of this technology,” said John Kunhart, managing director and co-founder of American River Ventures in Roseville, CA., at a recent panel discussion on Energy Intelligence: Investment, Risk and Regulation for Advanced Connectivity and Infrastructure sponsored by the VC Task Force.

Standardized architectural designs and interfaces are important to stimulate developments toward a smart grid. As part of that effort, universal standards have been proposed, like the IEEE 1547 series of standards on interconnecting distributed resources with electric power systems by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

So what will it take for energy intelligence to reach its potential and simultaneously reward investors? Successful growth in this area will require a detailed understanding and navigation of the complex interplay of risk mitigation, regulation and regulatory influence, and infrastructure development. –Lee Bruno

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Green Energy After Dark

Monday, September 29th, 2008

One big problem of converting to solar generated electricity is what to do when the sun goes down. To ensure electrical current on the grid doesn’t sharply fall off, requires an industrial-scale electrical storage system to smooth out short term fluctuations. It’s a problem at the heart of realizing a renewable energy economy.

There’s an added urgency for storage systems when considering the California Public Utilities Commission recently mandated that retail sellers of electricity purchase 20 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2010, and the New York Public Service Commission is mandating 24 percent by 2013.

The quest for a large-scale electrical storage system is a complex and challenging proposition. Being able to stockpile electricity for later use has been an area of active research projects for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Basic Energy Sciences. There are six promising energy storage technology research areas being pursued: pumped hydropower, compressed air energy storage, batteries, flywheels, superconducting magnetic energy storage and electrochemical capacitors. Because of the wide range of applications, there’s no one storage technology that’s suitable to span the power requirements from the low end of hundreds of kilowatts to ten gigawatts.

This proposed compressed air storage solution
will store any surplus electricity from the grid.
(Photo: Argonne National Labs)

 

And there are several start ups like EEStor, AltairNano and A123 trying to crack open the problem with varied approaches for industrial scale storage device that connect to the grid.

What to do now in terms of storing energy?

Massachusetts Institute of Technology chemist Daniel Nocera and his postdoctoral student Matthew Kanan devised an innovative, low energy approach for extracting oxygen and hydrogen from water using small amounts of electricity, common chemicals and a room temperature glass of water. Removing these elements from water is no simple feat. It typically requires lots of energy and lots of maintenance to make it work.

The beauty of the MIT scientists’ discovery is the elegant simplicity of the science at work. The researchers announced their discovery recently in the journal Science.

It’s a given that oxygen and hydrogen are energy rich fuels. So it makes sense that some research efforts have focused on using solar electricity to spit water into those elements. That would generate an energy source, which could be stored long after the sun has set.

Here’s how it works.

To generate oxygen, the researchers had room temperature water and then mixed in cobalt and phosphates. In that mixture, they inserted a glass electrode that conducts electricity. When a current was applied to the mixture, a dark film formed on the electrode and tiny bubbles of oxygen started to appear. The two researchers analyzed the film on the electrode and determined that the cobalt-phosphate mixture was present.

Nocera and Kanan think this mixture acts as a catalyst to break water molecules apart and thus creating oxygen gas. What’s especially intriguing about the water splitting effort is that hydrogen nuclei are released during the process as protons and pick up electrons which allows them to convert back to hydrogen at a partner electrode. It’s this release of hydrogen which has tremendous potential for generating one of the most abundant and cleanest forms of energy known to man.

The MIT researchers also found evidence that the cobalt and phosphates catalyst mixture seems to regenerate itself. That bodes well for a far simpler system for oxygen extraction, but needs further experimentation to confirm.

The catch is there’s still a good deal of work to do. And it will take several years to scale the bench-top science research into industrial scale systems and test them. But the researchers believe they have the right stuff to help power a sustainable energy system, green and efficient for future generations.

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