Renewable Energy - An Update

(11/03/2009) - Last summer, with gasoline selling well above $4.00 a gallon and the presidential campaign in full swing, energy policy was the rage.  From chants of “Drill, Baby, Drill!,” to advertisements by T. Boone Pickens for a natural-gas and wind-led future (now on indefinite hold due to a collapse of financing and commodity prices), to a boom in investing in solar, wind, biomass, and tidal energy sources, energy was everywhere you look. 

I know that I still think about these things a lot, but like the war in Iraq, it all seems to have left the front page.  Its last year’s news.  But like Iraq, the war is still on, and plenty of companies, researchers, and politicians are working to solve problems presented by global warming and other future energy-related problems we’ll probably have to deal with (of course, the extent of these problems is still very much within our power to change).

I recently received a copy of the North American edition of Renewable Energy World.  I thought that I’d pick out some interesting news to share, and show that things are still very much alive in the energy revolution.

-Electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid electric hybrids (PHEVs – cars that go a limited distance on electricity and then have a gas engine to power the car after that) are going to be hitting the market world-wide over the next several years.  I’ve already written quite a bit about Better Place, which plans on rolling out networks of electric-only vehicles in Israel, Denmark, Australia, and Hawaii over the next several years (though I’d be surprised if they don’t have sizable delays given the nature of their project).  Though I haven’t written about them as much PHEVs will probably have a much greater impact here in the United States over the next 5-10 years, while helping foster the infrastructure required for electric vehicles.  Nissan, for example, has chosen my home of Portland, OR, as the first market they’ll release their PHEV.  Chevrolet is also still working on their longer-range Volt, though its still unclear how ready or affordable it will be.   

-According to the EIA, 4.2% of electricity produced in the United States came from “non-hydro renewable” sources.  The fact that this statistic surpassed the Senate’s 2013 goal of 3% highlights the need to set higher goals at the national level and pass laws that will help us get there. 

-A tid-bit from a dull article: Unlike PV solars (i.e. solar panels), solar energy can be transformed into electricity by using its heat to boil water and drive a conventional steam generator.  The cost of developing even a large solar thermal plant is still quite high, however: $3-$4 per watt capacity (it would need to be less than $1/watt to be competitive with coal without the help of tax cuts).  What I didn’t know, however, is that they’ve developed a molten salt that heats up and transfers the energy from the point of concentration to the generator.  Even if stored overnight, this molten salt loses less than 1% of its thermal energy, which solves the main problem with solar energy – the sun doesn’t always shine.  Well, it still doesn’t solve the problem of the sun not shining for a week, but it’s a start. 

-Installed utility-scale solar capacity in the U.S. is currently about 940MW, 757MW of which is in California.  New capacity in the works totals over 7400MW, the vast majority of which is planned for... California.  Why California?  Besides for having a lot of sun and a lot of demand for electricity, you should read this article for some answers.

-I’m glad to see that as a publication, Renewable Energy World doesn’t seem to cover hydrogen.  This recognizes something that doesn’t tend to be covered in 95% of mainstream (i.e. publications that don’t focus on energy or “green” issues) publications – that hydrogen is not renewable, and if it was, it probably wouldn’t be efficient for most uses.  There are two ways to “create” hydrogen gas in large volume – by reacting methane (either from natural gas or another hydrocarbon) with water or from electrolysis (running an electrical current through water).  The first creates just as much carbon dioxide as burning hydrocarbon directly (not counting the fuel it takes to drive the process), and the second is much less efficient than just using electricity as fuel for your car or whatever.  So while using hydrogen in a fuel cell might be “clean” at the point of use, it is much more wasteful than the alternatives.