In the West, water kills coal, not carbon

An insightful, if short, post on the real bane of power generation in the arid Western United States - water.  Solar and wind have a big leg up on any combustion-based power plants, because all of them (and nuclear) require significant amounts of water for cooling.

What's my peak electric load?

Google simplified web searches and now they're hoping to demystify electricity use in the home.  They are currently piloting a program called Power Meter that will give people a real-time assessment of their electricity use. 

Hat tip to Triple Pundit for their coverage and the nice chart.

Advice to Obama on energy

I don't necessarily always agree with Robert Rapier, but he's one of the most cogent and comprehensive thinkers on U.S. energy policy and he has an open letter to President-elect Obama on his energy plan.  The highlights:

A 4-point program
1). Minimizing per capita energy usage
2). Finding sustainable, affordable alternatives
3). Managing the down side of the production peak such that severe shortages are avoided.
4). Communicating to the public the nature of the problem, and explaining why sacrifice is needed.

Rapier's criticisms of Obama:

• We will need more domestic fossil fuel production in the near term to bridge the gap between fossil fuel and renewables (windfall profits taxes will kill exploration)
  
• Prices must rise to constrain consumption [YES]
  
• Reliance on ethanol to supplant oil means long-term unsustainability - corn farming depletes soil nutrition, fertilizer comes from natural gas, and irrigation (and ethanol production) deplete aquifers [true, we need a next-generation biofuel, but mostly we need plug-in hybrid cars]
  
• We need nuclear to help bridge between coal-fired electricity and (capital-intensive and often rural) renewable electricity [NO - for what nuclear costs, we could probably build enough renewables with battery storage]
  

Rapier's agreement with Obama

• Plug-in hybrids
• Incentives for wind, solar, geothermal,
• Weatherizing homes
  

Flat panel TV helps global warming?

If it wasn't enough to find out that LCD televisions are power hungry beasts, now we find out that you're helping contribute to global warming, too.

Manufacturers use a greenhouse gas called nitrogen trifluoride to make the televisions, and as the sets have become more popular, annual production of the gas has risen to about 4,000 tonnes.

As a driver of global warming, nitrogen trifluoride is 17,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide, yet no one knows how much of it is being released into the atmosphere by the industry.

 I guess my old TV set is just fine...

Only $30 million for our energy future?

The U.S. spends $30 billion a month on oil imports, but only ponied up $30 million (with an 'm') to research plug-in hybrid cars, our best chance to reduce our reliance on oil.

Hmm. Nothing to do but count the days.

Getting over 100 MPG!

An Ontario blogger got to borrow a plug-in hybrid Prius over the last week and he regularly got over 100 mpg! Driving on electricity is the way to go!

Electricity: an addition to fueled power plants

Why do we go to so much effort to find, process, and combust or react fuels to generate heat for electricity when all that heat is already provided? This nice essay reflects on the follies of power generation from fossil fuels and nuclear when there's an abundance of free heat (read: geothermal) underground to meet all our water boiling (for steam turbine) needs. Here's a taste:

An even more popular way to boil water with fuel is to blast the tops off of mountains and then dig out the carbon that was sequestered by nature eons ago. We then crush and wash this carbon and store the poisonous residue in ponds. We hope to find a way to safely dispose of this waste someday too, but the rest of the poison, the sulfur, mercury, and heavy and radioactive metals fly out of the smokestack when we burn the coal to boil water. Every ton of carbon we burn unites with oxygen atoms from the air to go up the stack as 3.7 tons of CO2. Since this CO2 has been causing nasty climate problems, we are working on a way to hide it in underground caverns. Unfortunately hiding this much CO2 costs a lot of money so we're spending $407 million next year hoping for a breakthrough idea.

Five things our next president must do on energy

From Robert Rapier at R-Squared

1. Raise gas taxes by $2 a gallon, offset by income tax rebates
   
2. Rebates for high-efficiency vehicles, penalties for low-efficiency ones.
3. Find renewable energy substitutes that do not rely on fossil fuel inputs.
4. Extend tax credits for solar, geothermal, and other pure renewables.
5. Increase funding for research on converting to an electric-driven transportation system.
   

The savings in a smarter electric grid

Washington State has been trying a so-called "smart grid," where people have their major appliances wired to the grid to reduce electric use during peak demand times, lowering electric costs.

For example, when high demand drove prices up (as utilities have to turn on "peaking plants" to generate extra electricity), special electronics turned off the heat element in the dryer or the water heater, helping to level demand.

This system is a combination of price monitoring and time-of-use pricing, and it lowered household electricity demand at peak times by 15%. During extended periods of heavy demand, the system lowered usage by as much as 50%.

In general, the system only intervened about 1% of the time, but cut 15% off the owners' electric bill. Not bad for a one-time $1000 investment.

Energyville: what's your energy mix?

Want to try your hand at developing a practical and environmentally-sound energy mix for a city of the future? Check out Energyville, a simulation by Chevron. You can select from several conventional and renewable power sources and the game rates your selection by its economic, environmental, and security impact.

Hydrogen vehicles - fair and balanced

The original post linked to a fairly biased article (reflecting to some extent my own skepticism) and we've seen the reply from Curly. So what's the real scoop on hydrogen for automobiles?

How it works
Hydrogen would most likely supply a fuel cell, basically generating electricity to power a vehicle. A fuel cell is like a battery that carries a recharging source (hydrogen, in this case), so it's range can potentially be greater than simply a battery powered car.

The efficiency problem
The primary means of getting hydrogen - which does not occur naturally - is to use electrolysis to separate water into H and O2 (many proponents believe nuclear power will supply the electricity). This process is only about 30% efficient, so 70% of the electricity used is lost in the process. If that electricity instead went right into a battery for an electric-driven car, we don't lose that energy. Zfacts has a nice illustration of this:

Here are two ways to drive on wind power.
1. Wind => electricity => Battery => motor turns wheels
2. Wind => electricity => hydrogen => Fuel Cell => motor turns wheels

Hydrogen just adds an extra step. And if you've seen Who Killed the Electric Car, you know that we can already produce an electric vehicle to serve most American drivers.

The supply problem
As noted, hydrogen doesn't naturally occur in a harvestable form (unlike oil - our primary vehicle fuel). Hydrogen must be extracted electrically (from water) or chemically (from natural gas). The latter means pointless dependence on fossil fuels, so let's focus on the electrical derivation. A lot of people note that we can eventually electrolize water to get hydrogen using renewably-generated electricity. But less than 10% of U.S. power generation capacity is currently renewable (and only a quarter of that is non-hydro). That's not counting the additional electricity we'll need to generate to make hydrogen.

On the other hand, an electric car can be powered off the existing grid. In fact, some studies have shown that it would be possible to convert almost every American car to electric without having to substantially expand electric generating capacity by simply charging cars during off-peak hours (at night). From Celsias:

A new study for the Department of Energy finds that “off-peak” electricity production and transmission capacity could fuel 84 percent of the country’s 220 million vehicles if they were plug-in hybrid electrics.

To be fair, a plug-in hybrid still has a backup combustion engine. But the gasoline reductions are still dramatic:

According to EPRI (Electric Power Research Institute), half the cars on U.S. roads are driven 25 miles a day or less. Consequently, a plug-in hybrid with a 25-mile all electric range could eliminate gasoline use in the daily commute of tens of millions of Americans.

The Size/Weight Problem
From Zfacts again, the problem with hydrogen fuel cells compared to conventional batteries:

The advantages of fuel cells might be that they hydrogen tank and fuel cell combination needed to drive 300 miles could be smaller cheaper and lighter than a battery pack needed to drive 300 miles. Right now, it's the other way around. (emphasis mine)

And every pound needed to move the car uses more energy.

The Infrastructure Problem
As Curly noted, hydrogen filling stations are the chicken/egg problem. Do you build thousands of stations first and then wait for cars to show? Or do you get a critical mass of cars? Such investments aren't cheap in any case. This study estimated it would cost between $100 and $500 billion to create the fueling infrastructure.

Contrast that with electricity, which is already present at every existing filling station in the country.

Summary
There are two major reasons why I'm a hydrogen opponent:
1) It takes resources away from readily available solutions to consumption of foreign oil and carbon emissions. Plug-in electric and then all-electric vehicles can be powered off existing electric capacity and the technology is already commercial.
2) It's outrageously expensive/wasteful. Even if we only need to convert 8-10% of filling stations to hydrogen to get critical mass, it would eventually require that we convert all stations. That's a big waste when we already have electricity everywhere. We also lose energy converting water to hydrogen with electricity, when we could use the electricity directly.

Saving the Planet? Or easing your conscience?

This story from the Minneapolis Star Tribune is meant to highlight how average people can help reduce carbon emissions and conserve electricity. And it's the perfect illustration of the incompatibility of the American way of life with living sustainably.

Susan Levere's 4-day-old refrigerator looks great in her family's newly remodeled kitchen. The stainless steel gleams, and the French doors are great for the occasional wide tray of food.

How about the fact that it uses only $1 a week in electricity?

"I don't want to be too sanctimonious about it," said Levere

I should hope not. That energy efficient model touted in the article is a behemoth at 25 cu. ft. Whirlpool, a company that sells refrigerators, says that "For an average family of four, 19-22 cubic feet is ideal." By why go small when you can go large? (note: Levere has one child at home - that's a family of three).

Shrinking the fridge down to the "ideal" size would mean a reduction in energy use from 562 kWh per year to 445 kWh, a 20% decrease.* Since Minnesota gets two-thirds of its electricity from coal, that's a significant decrease in carbon emissions.

Showering praise on folks who buy "efficient" oversize appliances is like the federal policy of providing tax credits to buyers of hybrid SUVs. This is energy policy?

*Computed from the average energy use figures for models in each size class on the Energy Star list.

Are energy monitors the key to conservation?

From sph, a story on a proposal in the United Kingdom to distribute energy monitors to most households. These monitors would display current energy use, apparently broken down by individual appliance (though the story doesn't explain the mechanics of that). Monitors are not the same as smart meters, which I discussed previously.


Energy consumption is very nebulous thing to most people and getting hard data like this is essential to helping people understand what activities use the most energy. It's the first step in helping people connect that 3 TVs and 2 computers running all night actually uses a lot of electricity.

However, the one way to improve the meter would be to have it display price information. I'd love to see the meter say, "Your energy use is costing $XX per hour." Of course, since a typical American residential electric rate is around 11 cents/kWh, and Americans use an average of 1.2 kW per hour, it might not phase folks much to see that they're spending 13.2 cents an hour on electricity.

While the impact might be small, another hope for increasing consumer knowledge of electricity use is to create demand shifting. Electric use in most places peaks in late afternoon in summer, when air conditioners are cranked up as people arrive home from work. One of the big keys to reducing emissions from power generation is time-shifting demand so that power consumption is more level. A large proportion of electric generation (as much as 25%) is invested in so-called "peaking plants" that are only turned on a couple times a year during peak demand. If power consumption was more level, these plants would a) not be used and b) may not be built at all.

It's a lot to ask from an energy monitor, but it's a good first step.

CFLs: higher efficiency, but a little Hg

Compact fluorescents are the new sliced bread of energy efficiency, with Wal-Mart committed to selling 100 million in the next year. But as I mentioned in that post on Wal-Mart, the Wall Street Journal Energy Roundup discusses the one drawback in mass producing CFLs - they contain mercury.

Mercury is toxic, which means that CFLs should not be discarded and landfilled (or incinerated) but should be recycled. But that's a big change for a population used to discarding burnt out bulbs.

The good news is that the CFL tends to reduce overall mercury emissions into the environment because reducing electricity use tends to reduce coal burning, which also releases mercury. But we still shouldn't be trading one mercury emission for another.

Update 10:23: For Anagram, who likes his solutions on a silver platter, some possible ways to deal with the mercury in CFLs:
1) Make a CFL without mercury (although one manufacturer says that's not possible)
2) Create an aggressive CFL recycling campaign
3) Your idea here, smarty pants
4) Pay for (1) - (3) with a small tax on light bulbs based on the quantity of toxic material

Daylight savings won't save energy?

Part of the justification for extending Daylight Saving Time (DST) in the United States was a reduction in energy costs by adding more daylight in the evening hours when citizens are home watching TV and otherwise being sloth-like and inactive (sorry, a little anti-TV prejudice eeking out). The legislation foresaw energy savings as much as 1% (a large number when averaged over all households and businesses in the country).

However, a recent study by two doctoral students at the University of California Energy Institute suggests that energy savings may be at best overstated and at worst nonexistent. Examining a DST-extension that took place surrounding the Olympics in Australia, the two students found that most models of energy savings vastly overstated the actual changes in energy use.

While DST extensions might not save energy, I'm definitely enjoying my "extra" hour of daylight in the evenings. Sunset today: 7:16pm!

Getting to zero on climate change

Combating global warming is an enormous and nebulous task, but a few good folks over at Energista have decided to enlighten the rest of us on how we could achieve the Kyoto targets of 1990 carbon emissions in the United States by 2025, almost entirely through the electric sector. Energy efficiency gets the largest chunk, but nuclear, cleaner coal and renewable generation also contribute a substantial portion (there's a nifty chart showing how each technology could help).

The most challenging strategy might be the use of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) - grabbing the CO₂ from emissions and storing it underground - which is theoretically possible, but to date practically infeasible. The problem isn't getting the carbon, it's figuring out how and where store it (my vote is for Yucca Mountain...)

Overall, scientists suggest that a reduction in emissions of 80% is going to be required to stabilize the climate, and that might take even more action than suggested here. However, it's a good start and is achievable by 2025.

Forget batteries, just use a freezer

One of the ongoing liabilities of wind power is its intermittency. When the wind doesn't blow, you don't have electricity. Battery storage systems are still much to expensive or inefficient to store electricity during the sometimes long periods when the wind doesn't blow. But the Netherlands may have come up with a solution - using refrigerated warehouses to store energy.

These massive buildings often store food and other perishable products and are already dotting the landscape of industrialized society. By having the warehouses drop the temperature by a single degree Celsius in the evening (when the wind blows but grid demand is low) and letting the temperature rise one degree Celsius in the daytime, the warehouses essentially act like large batteries, storing the energy from onsite wind turbines and reducing demand during peak daytime periods.

While initially cool to the idea, rumor has it that the warehouses are warming to it.

But does it produce 1.21 gigawatts?

Scientists at Purdue have developed a mobile electricity generator that can run on biomass and garbage. Thanks to generous funding from the U.S. military, this portable generator is also "tactical." Using a digester and a gasifier, the system creates a crude biofuel that can power a diesel generator. Mr. Fusion is here!

When capitalism meets electricity

For many years, so-called free marketers have insisted that the key to driving costs down, creating competition, and generally improving efficiency in the electric market means deregulation of energy companies. Of course, the Enron debacle and the 2000-01 California energy crisis have provided a sharp education that deregulation is not the best way about bringing free markets to electricity consumption.

Instead, it's time to try smart meters on a large scale. By allowing consumers to see the exact price they are paying for electricity at any given time, smart meters allow customers to tailor their electricity usage to off-peak hours, when utilities generally have excess capacity. The difference between peak and off-peak rates is 10 cents per kilowatt-hour for one Colorado utility, but can be as much as 40 cents per kwh (the average retail rate for electricity is around 11 cents/kwh).

In other words, consumers can choose to do laundry, wash dishes, or charge portable electronics at night, when rates are very low, and minimize their use during the day. Not only do households save money, but utilities can more effectively balance their load, reducing the need for new power plants. That's a win-win.

More on phantom load

Here's another blogger who took a Kill A Watt electricity use tester around his house in search of phantom load.