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?

More about the grid

If you're more interested in learning about the power grid, I would greatly recommend reading The Power Makers. It covers the history behind both power generation, transmission and the battle between Edison and Westinghouse over DC or AC power. It will help explain also why there are various voltage levels from a less technical basis than an engineering text would, or asking the local electrical engineer who would talk your ears off for hours.

National Power distribution grid, High Voltage

Since I posted about the Maryland high voltage map yesterday, I figured throwing one up for the national grid was appropriate. So without further ado, the national map is shown below

The color code in the key on the lower left shows the distribution Voltage level and just looking at the map shows some significant issues. First off there are very few East West trunks at a higher voltage level, which is a major reason land based wind power is not more economical in North America, ie all the ares with wind have lower voltage distributions, leading to more loss.

The second is how the grid is clustered in the upper midwest, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and then leading across PA with only a few lines. This tight coupling, with fewer lines, and older infrastructure is what drove the blackout of 2003, with First Energy in Ohio being the root cause of a cascading blackout due to a sudden surge on the lines. What was the eventual root cause, a sagging power line touching a tree in northern Ohio, that caused confusion due to a bug in the load balancing s/w, causing an overload on three other lines that then took out everyone.

Can this happen today? Most likely, because while the infrastructure has been upgraded slightly, it is still a massive undertaking and the political and commercial impetus is not there due to the expense of laying HV lines and the associated siwtchgear, roughly $2.0 Million/mile for a 345 kV line, with higher amounts in mountainous terrain(ie Rocky Mountains, hence lower voltage transmission lines cross that region.

So take a look, ask some questions, I'll come back to the issue with wind later in the week after I can dig up an overlay of the US wind map, and solar intensity maps over the national grid to try and show some of the difficulties relating to the grid. More importantly, where do you live and what power plants are there? Now you can see what those enormous towers really carry. 

Maryland Power Grid

Greetings all! It was a great day today and while running I decided I'd embellish on my post from yesterday a little bit, this will probably be a two part post to keep it short.

Yesterday I mentioned that the positioning of the solar plant in southern maryland was in a great position to support the high voltage distribution system by providing electrical energy during peak hours in the summer. By that I mean there is a high degree of correlation, yes correlation is not causation, but I'll dig up the analysis i have from previous work if necessary, to high temperatures and increased electrical usage. Specifically in summer months when both the sun is intense and the heat is as well, everyone has heard of brownouts, and that is the cause. The solar plants location would thus allow it to act as an electrical support structure, inline, that helps the source power plant absorb the excess load during that time.

To support that I did a little internet searching to find the actual map of the maryland transmission line system. The link will take you to the source, but the modified version shown below shows the solar plant location, outlined in blue.

Maryland HV Distribution Lines > 115kV

 The location is approximate, mainly b/c this is a cartoon map vs georeferenced, but gives the key points needed. The solar plant is right near a gas fired plant located on the St Mary's side of the patuxent river(the black dot at the bottom of the circle) which then drives to a substation in hughsville. The maroon lines are from the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Plant, primarily wired to feed the DC metro area. I drew in the arrows, showing the support directions, missing the one line leading to Southern Maryland.

There is one line missing, a 115kV line, I believe based upon counting the line isolators on the lines I run by, running to the Patuxent River Naval Base, but it may be a smaller line and I'll check that this week. This is the line that will generate the most support, other than the segment running towards the coal plant on the east side of the Potomac, where rte 301 crosses the river, primarily because the other lines are all double structured with dual generation sources, indicating a built in redundancy.

So in summary, the plant is in a great location, will help the grid in southern maryland a lot b/c we do summer brown outs on hot days, and rate limiting when necessary. In the long run this should lower costs for energy as well, once the plant is paid off, b/c of the extreme increases in the $ per kWh in the summer months as part two of this post.

Since I got going on the grid a little bit, the next post will talk a little about the US distribution grid, which will probably be a few posts as well.

Policy having some use

Being that I live in Southern Maryland, all my electricity comes from SMECO, the Southern Maryland Electric Co-Operative. Recently they started, and are nearly done with a new solar plant in Hughsville, right along 235 near the Harley store and across from Randy's Ribs. The impetus for this was the need to have at least .1% of its energy from solar sources to retain a license in the state of maryland, and this plant will now generate 5.5MW, or 0.2% of the total energy produced.  This means that the entire plant was driven by state requirements, ie policy.

The land in use was an old tobacco farm that has since been given up to feed corn production, and has been poorly maintained, being far from any local water sources or active watering, but receiving a lot of sun. My source for this is solely that i used to drive by this field every day on my way to work for 2 years before moving closer to my office, so its recent data. But in truth this field was basically wasted, and in a great location for a solar plant, so much that I've commented before to people that it would be a good spot due to the orbit of the earth around the sun coupled with the onshore flow(due to location relative to the ocean) generating clear skies in the summer, and here the summer sun is intense.

Another point would be how this will help support the local grid during the summer months, but I'll need to do a thorough analysis of the main power line routing to make this conclusion. This thought is drawn from the explosive growth in the California, MD area and the main trunk lines not coming across from the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear plant, but from DC down Rte 4 and 5 and how the summer months now require a lot of AC.

In summary, looks like SMECO came to the same conclusion and threw a solid support plant in place to mitigate both the policy concerns as well as supporting the explosive growth in Southern Maryland, while also taking ill used farmland and making it useful. Great Job!