Solar Power slowly consolidating

Looks like another solar power company is shuttering the solar power business as Bosch gave up earlier today. The 2.6 billion dollar investment just didn't pay off, especially since the industry is being flooded by lower cost chinese components. This is not very surprising as the overall solar panel industry is one with small incremental efficiency gains, no enormous technological leaps, just consistent, small improvements in processes. This model leads to locations with cheap manufacturing and lower labor costs eventually overtaking the market.

The real take here is that China is going to be the primary manufacturer of solar panels on a cost basis until someone else can make a technological breakthrough. The question to ask though...is this a bad thing? Yeah solar panels are a good 'green' field, but at the root its a messy, pollution oriented manufacturing business, not a paragon of green energy. I say let China make the panels, we'll buy them and work on research for better systems..

But that's my 2 cents

Huh???

Just because Washington DC was starting to get to extreme, it looks like Oregon wants to up the tax lunacy with a fuel efficient vehicle tax. Turns out that fuel efficient vehicles mean you use less gas, insert sarcastic O RLY cue the internal What the Fuck, or WTF. 

This is because you use less gas and therefore there are lower gas tax revenues collected, so now if you have an efficient vehicle(over 55 mpg) you get to pay a few cents PER MILE, to drive your car. I'm not sure where exactly I got confused at first, but this is just sloppy legislation, and an even sloppier commision report. There is an easy solution to road usage and repair costs, its called a toll. It's used all over, and people pay it to use a service. Or to go old school, say income taxes, property taxes or the standard ones vice a per mile fee to drive your car. 

Saving Data

One of the things I most definitely am is a data junkie. I like it raw, filtered, in charts...graphs, or even all over my screen at work. Data is what drives everything, and preserving it is even more important. One of the most important parts of energy modeling is having statistically significant data, and enough of it to have the mathematical support for your bayesian analysis. This little blurb though is just to show why you always preserve data, from NASA no less. Ok, IEEE did the work but NASA generated the data

The article focuses on the deceleration that occured in Pioneer 10 and 11 as they reached the outer solar system, subsequently befuddling scientists the world over for the last 30 years. IEEE has an article on how the pioneer data was looked at again by some people with thermal modeling expertise to explain, with some confidence, that the deceleration was due to excessive thermal radiation, about 60W total...or as the article says "about the same as the backward push your car experiences in reaction to the photons spit out by its high-beam headlights'

Hyundai Tucson FCEV

I tend to ramble on about infrastructure quite a bit, mainly because the geographical layout of the US, primary resource generation vs utilization drives both the economic engine and the energy usage. As mentioned a few posts ago, the eventual, highest potential with current technology, next generation energy source is Hydrogen. Will Hydrogen supplant gasoline in my lifetime...I'll go with a qualified maybe, but it will be increasing in utilization, most likely doubling in usage every few years for the foreseeable future. 

One of the main reasons is the forthcoming introduction of the hydrogen car, primarily Hydrogen fuel cell car/bus/truck etc, by the major automakers. The current leader in the rush to market is Hyundai with a Fuel Cell Electric vehicle, or FCEV, based on the Tucson platform slated for limited release in 2012 through a first run production test of 1,000, in Europe. So if you live in Europe, near a Hydrogen fueling source and have an extra $44K lying around....GO FOR IT.

The Tucson has been the development platform from hyundai for the past 8-10 years and there has been extensive development and integration of the fuel cell powertrain into the existing vehicle. Hyundai is pushing this for the stated reason of beating Toyota into the field that they(Hyundai) lost out to Toyota in the hybrid market. 

So why infrastructure again? Well, above I noted Europe, and that's because there isn't a distributed Hydrogen infrastructure here in the US. In Europe(Western), because the continent is both smaller and more densley populated, there isn't a need to have a vast distribution network of H2 fueling stations for early adopters to use the vehicle. The attached map shows the existing refueling stations in Europe, meaning that there is already a network in place that allows for the owner of a FCEV vehicle to hold a relatively normal driving pattern between refueling. 

Contrast that image with the map of North America where there are both fewer stations, and those stations are more spread out, meaning any early adopters are stuck with a centralized fueling system. That centralized fueling requirement would discourage most people from adopting(like myself) since the nearest station may be upwards of 500 miles away, only 85 in  my case but still too far away for this to be a good investment. 

So as mentioned the lack of Hydrogen infrastructure, and hence the decentralized Hydrogen generation concept discussed earlier, and one I'll come back to again. 

Also though, why all the talk about FCEV's? I'll tackle that one later as I still have a passion for the technology, even though I'm not longer actively working in the field, but two words cover it...thermodynamic efficiency. Look it up if you're bored.

US National Pipeline Map

Since a few posts ago I put up the national electric grid, I figured I should do some digging to find the US national pipeline map because it plays into any and all energy analysis for the US. The map is shown below, with blue being interstate lines and red being intrastate lines.

For anyone interested in the history of Oil in America, you can basically see where it was discovered in the US based upon where the red intrastate routes are. Those routes were built before the technology to control interstate lines was available, and there wasn't the need. Everyone can thank Henry Ford for creating the need for extra pipelines.

You can also notice the regions where the Gulf oil comes into, as well as many of the regional refineries based upon the high pipeline density in certain regions.

But more importantly the gas is clustered in specific regions, same as solar energy, and same as wind. Just like the two alternative sources, the population of the US is not in the same regions. The chart below shows the population density by county, heat map style, sourced from Residual Analysis

Again, our country has an abundance of resources, but those resources tend to be concentrated in areas where people do not live, so we must transport energy away from the source. Unfortunately, any time you transport something from point a to point b you utilize energy to accomplish that, losses from electrical power due to resistance or electrical power used in pumps for no other purpose other than to transport energy.

But as always, more to come, specifically I'd like to overlay some of the data laying around to a composite energy generation/usage map.

Tower of Power...aka Solar Chimney

Prototype Tower from Manzanares, Spain

Recently I stumbled upon a cool, or at least I think cool, renewable power source called the Solar Chimney, or Solar Tower. This system relies on an artificial temperature gradient at the base of the collector due to the installation of mirrors/glass at the base. Those collectors sit on top of tunnels, that just take in air from ground level, that is subsequently heated up. The heating of the air increases the localized pressure, think PV=nRT, since the volume is held 'constant' which in turn forces the air to flow up through the chimney.

By putting a turbine in between the heat source and the tower, you can capture the energy via the flowing air, and convert it to electricity.  Obviously the execution of a functional and economical power plant is a lot harder than my short description indicates, but that's why engineers get paid the big bucks. 

Source: www.geek.com

As expected, this system requires an area with ground heating, lots of sun and I'm willing to bet lower pressure at the chimney exhaust, ie not a pre-existing pressure gradient so the inversion effect wouldn't require a higher air pressure. The last item is a thought i have that is currently unsubstantiated by math, but a reason that one hasn't been put in LA, Salt Lake City or Vegas yet, even though they meet the other requirements.

This is another technology that wouldn't work well in densely populated areas as currently designed/envisioned due to the high cost of land(ie USD/acre or USD/sq ft in cities) and the need to have a strong understanding of the local winds. The inability to install in populated regions, coupled with the issues in transferring energy from areas where this technology could work(such as Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada) to the areas where the energy is needed on the coasts due to the grid issues highlighted in the last few posts. 

Hydrogen Infrastructure thoughts

Going back a post or two, an astute reader, and maybe even astute blogger other than myself might have noticed that there is a dearth of power lines crossing the country. Going back to my college days; I believe my Powers professor mentioned there are only 5 lines that can carry the cross country load links. This is a problem in its own right...but this isn't a doomsday blog post, so enough about that. 

What this does mean though is the abundant Green energy resources surrounding the Rocky Mountains, such as wind, hydro power and solar, cannot easily transmit the generated power to the more populated coastal regions, thus relegating power generation to Natural Gas, Coal or Nuclear sources which have natural resources co-located, or easily transportable by rail or pipeline. Utilizing trucks is just not cost effective for long hauls only short distribution, similar to the spoke and hub model of air travel, no matter how frustrating it is.

So why does this matter? Simple, this infrastructure issue prevents the adoption of alternative energy technologies, you can't easily transfer solar energy across the country as light(even though it's being researched) and canned wind only works in cartoons, or if its air from Paris. You could build massive power transmission lines..but that's probably not cost effective, at $3-5 million/mile, or a pipeline of something that stores the energy(whatever that would be is TBD but efficiency would probably be low due to thermal loss. The 'solution' a lot of people in academia and Energy research have reached, and one I personally advocate is the idea of a Hydrogen Infrastructure. 

The reason for a Hydrogen infrastructure is that it is a near ideal energy carrier, and can be used for combustion, electrochemical reactions or raw chemistry to increase the energy value of a secondary fuel, ie refining crude to gasoline. The other reason is that Hydrogen is highly compressible and can be easily generated via various means, albeit inefficiently at this time, or transferred via pipeline. Wikipedia has a short blurb on this concept, but i personally believe that the use of a pipeline is missing the point, specifically that Hydrogen can be made as long as you have electricity and water. Some technologies such as Photoelectrochemical (PEC) splitting even utilize light to convert hydrogen directly, without the need to generate electricity, and other methods such as biological utilize algae and decay, so why restrict to a pipeline based system? I'll get into side thoughts later but as always, a hybrid electrical grid increase and pipeline coupled with existing systems will probably be the best solution...or at least for the sake of my grad project I hope it does.

Pipes work, but if we're going to come up with a whole new energy infrastructure why would we repeat the mistakes made in the past by restricting to a hub based system which inherently has a single point of failure, that always fails at the worst time or on purpose. Examples of the former are Hurricane Sandy and the single pipeline to NYC and the latter is Russia's control over the Gazprom line that can shut the flow off to the Ukraine at will, but again just a thought exercise, and a lead in to the next post on PEC advances...who wants to generate H2 on your roof?