Oh, we already have done that! Yes, it’s call heat storage (in molten salts). Of course we need to heat it up with solar power towers… This is where the research needs to go, to figure out how to make the heliostats on robotic assembly lines. We already know how to make the efficient Brayton gas turbine, like duh…

Sure, governments are needed to kick start things like the freeway system but they need to crank out storage in the cheap… or industry will never adopt. Unless we put a high price on carbon which may, instead, throw us into the next dark age.

These people are supposed to be smarter than that… C’mon!

Oh, we already have done that! Yes, it’s call heat storage (in molten salts). Of course we need to heat it up with solar power towers… This is where the research needs to go, to figure out how to make the heliostats on robotic assembly lines. We already know how to make the efficient Brayton gas turbine, like duh…

Sure, governments are needed to kick start things like the freeway system but they need to crank out storage in the cheap… or industry will never adopt. Unless we put a high price on carbon which may, instead, throw us into the next dark age.

These people are supposed to be smarter than that… C’mon!

http://www.renewablesbiz.com/article/10/03/no-city-limits

http://www.renewablesbiz.com/article/10/03/no-city-limits

http://www.renewablesbiz.com/article/10/03/no-city-limits

http://www.renewablesbiz.com/article/10/03/no-city-limits

Unlike other commenters, I think your points are thoughtful and well-put. However, I disagree with you. Utilities are not private companies in the traditional sense. They have been granted the right of monopoly by the government in return to allowing themselves to be heavily regulated by that same government. Thus it’s a fallacy to say that government has no right to regulate or mandate changes in the utility industry. In the end, it’s the utilities that have the most to gain from storage (other solutions to the problems presented by intermittent renewable energy are usually more expensive). Thus an RPS for storage helps the utilities as much as it hurts them.

One other point on the ethanol issue: Ask an economist about the impact of ethanol on food prices and you would be very surprised by his or her answer. Ethanol production and the 2007 spike in food prices (along with a spike in almost every commodity) were correlative but not causative. We produce as much ethanol today as we did in 2007 and yet food prices are down by 30-50% from that year’s highs. I’m not a proponent of corn ethanol (I would argue vociferously against expanding its production beyond what we make today), but it’s wrong to say that ethanol caused the food price spike in 2007.

Unlike other commenters, I think your points are thoughtful and well-put. However, I disagree with you. Utilities are not private companies in the traditional sense. They have been granted the right of monopoly by the government in return to allowing themselves to be heavily regulated by that same government. Thus it’s a fallacy to say that government has no right to regulate or mandate changes in the utility industry. In the end, it’s the utilities that have the most to gain from storage (other solutions to the problems presented by intermittent renewable energy are usually more expensive). Thus an RPS for storage helps the utilities as much as it hurts them.

One other point on the ethanol issue: Ask an economist about the impact of ethanol on food prices and you would be very surprised by his or her answer. Ethanol production and the 2007 spike in food prices (along with a spike in almost every commodity) were correlative but not causative. We produce as much ethanol today as we did in 2007 and yet food prices are down by 30-50% from that year’s highs. I’m not a proponent of corn ethanol (I would argue vociferously against expanding its production beyond what we make today), but it’s wrong to say that ethanol caused the food price spike in 2007.

As far as not being convinced about health risks, well, it’s really just common sense. You don’t pour mercury into your drinking water, do you? You don’t inhale the gases from your tailpipe, do you? Why not? Ah, because it would make you sick. So why is it OK to disregard mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants or emissions from our cars? It’s not.

As far as externalities, the liquidation of natural capital is very real too.

Ecosystem services have a real value. Despite the fact that it would be nearly impossible to put a price tag on them. Which is the reason people like you often question externalities. I can’t imagine how anyone wouldn’t be convinced that things like regulation of atmosphere and climate, the cycling of nutrients and water, pollination, control of pests and diseases, and the maintenance of biodiversity are worth trillions annually. And I suspect you would be perfectly happy to never see this value reflected on a balance sheet. Which, for the most part, it never has.

At the end of the day, there is absolutely nothing I could possibly say to convince you that your wrong on this issue. I could show you a ton of data, and you still wouldn’t be convinced. Because you don’t want to be. But feel free to do your own research. If you legitimately want to know the truth, you will find it. But I’m not going to entertain this any longer. I’m very busy furthering the progress of our new energy economy. Which, whether you like it or not, will be heavily weighted in clean, economically-superior renewable energy.

As far as not being convinced about health risks, well, it’s really just common sense. You don’t pour mercury into your drinking water, do you? You don’t inhale the gases from your tailpipe, do you? Why not? Ah, because it would make you sick. So why is it OK to disregard mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants or emissions from our cars? It’s not.

As far as externalities, the liquidation of natural capital is very real too.

Ecosystem services have a real value. Despite the fact that it would be nearly impossible to put a price tag on them. Which is the reason people like you often question externalities. I can’t imagine how anyone wouldn’t be convinced that things like regulation of atmosphere and climate, the cycling of nutrients and water, pollination, control of pests and diseases, and the maintenance of biodiversity are worth trillions annually. And I suspect you would be perfectly happy to never see this value reflected on a balance sheet. Which, for the most part, it never has.

At the end of the day, there is absolutely nothing I could possibly say to convince you that your wrong on this issue. I could show you a ton of data, and you still wouldn’t be convinced. Because you don’t want to be. But feel free to do your own research. If you legitimately want to know the truth, you will find it. But I’m not going to entertain this any longer. I’m very busy furthering the progress of our new energy economy. Which, whether you like it or not, will be heavily weighted in clean, economically-superior renewable energy.

In the absence of public policy supporting renewable energy, there would be no renewable energy, despite the many imperfections in policy. I’m all for making policy the best that it can be, but focusing on technical issues alone is a common and understandable mistake of technical experts in any field. Political constraints are real and they matter a great deal. But just because the political constraints result in a technically suboptimal policy doesn’t mean the policy has no benefit.

I’m an economist, not an engineer. But it seems to me that while energy storage may not be needed now or in the near future, it will eventually be needed. At some point the variability of energy entering the grid from renewable sources won’t be manageable using price alone (in principle it could be if we allowed extreme variations in price, but again there’s politics — the political system will not tolerate extreme variations in price, quite understandably).

So if storage is eventually going to be needed, how do we fund development of storage technologies and gain practical experience in their application? Ideally, the federal government would fund basic science and a gradual increase in a carbon tax would create the economic incentive for utilities to do more applied R&D. But the federal government has checked out, so that’s not possible. Some policymakers in CA would like to do something, but CA is also fairly dysfunctional. A policy lever that is available, even though it’s far from optimal, is this type of requirement. It’s imprecise, it will result in some inefficiency, but it will potentially provide an impetus to improve energy storage technology.

Regarding your ethanol example — I think that’s a good example of how a flawed policy still adds value relative to doing nothing at all. Yes, there were unintended consequences, but it was the first awkward step on the road towards making ethanol a potential substitute for gasoline. GM makes cars that can use both gas and ethanol, there is a limited distribution network for ethanol — those are important first steps. The next step will be to move away from food-based ethanol to non-food sources, and that is happening now. That second step could not have happened without the first step. When there’s no chicken, and no egg, trying to cobble together one or the other is a messy process. But it’s still a worthwhile process.

In the absence of public policy supporting renewable energy, there would be no renewable energy, despite the many imperfections in policy. I’m all for making policy the best that it can be, but focusing on technical issues alone is a common and understandable mistake of technical experts in any field. Political constraints are real and they matter a great deal. But just because the political constraints result in a technically suboptimal policy doesn’t mean the policy has no benefit.

I’m an economist, not an engineer. But it seems to me that while energy storage may not be needed now or in the near future, it will eventually be needed. At some point the variability of energy entering the grid from renewable sources won’t be manageable using price alone (in principle it could be if we allowed extreme variations in price, but again there’s politics — the political system will not tolerate extreme variations in price, quite understandably).

So if storage is eventually going to be needed, how do we fund development of storage technologies and gain practical experience in their application? Ideally, the federal government would fund basic science and a gradual increase in a carbon tax would create the economic incentive for utilities to do more applied R&D. But the federal government has checked out, so that’s not possible. Some policymakers in CA would like to do something, but CA is also fairly dysfunctional. A policy lever that is available, even though it’s far from optimal, is this type of requirement. It’s imprecise, it will result in some inefficiency, but it will potentially provide an impetus to improve energy storage technology.

Regarding your ethanol example — I think that’s a good example of how a flawed policy still adds value relative to doing nothing at all. Yes, there were unintended consequences, but it was the first awkward step on the road towards making ethanol a potential substitute for gasoline. GM makes cars that can use both gas and ethanol, there is a limited distribution network for ethanol — those are important first steps. The next step will be to move away from food-based ethanol to non-food sources, and that is happening now. That second step could not have happened without the first step. When there’s no chicken, and no egg, trying to cobble together one or the other is a messy process. But it’s still a worthwhile process.

First, since I neglected to do so in my original post, I’ll point out that I do support development of renewable energy. I sit on an industry body that’s working out how to reliably and cost-effectively integrate wind and solar into the power grid. I also sit on an industry steering group that’s trying to assess the operational impacts of renewable energy production. My position is that the industry has to figure out how to make renewables work in a cost-effective manner because if they don’t, politicians and regulators will. I am not employed by a utility and I like to think I know a thing or two about the power business after working in it for nearly 40 years. However I am opposed to developing renewable energy at breakneck speed without regard to the cost or the impact on service reliability.

Jeff points out that there is no free market in energy. True. However subsidies for plant and equipment in the form of depreciation allowances are equally available to fossil and renewable projects. Fossil fuels are entitled to depletion allowances that renewable resources are not, while renewable projects are entitled to tax credits that are not available to fossil developers. It would be helpful if Jeff could point to analyses that compare the value of depletion allowance and other fossil fuel subsidies with the PTC and ITC subsidies in terms of their impact per unit of electricity production. If there are other points of comparison, I think we’d all be interested in those sources as well.

Jeff, it would also be helpful for all of us if you could provide some specific references to analyses of the costs of externalities and how these values compare for fossil and renewable energy production. I’ve heard the externality argument made for more than 30 years, mostly regarding petroleum. If you cite health risks, I confess I’m going to be very skeptical because these claims are hard to prove in the face of increasing life expectancy without conducting some rather unethical experiments.

One of the reasons I’m opposed to mandates is because they tend to be poorly thought out. A prime example is ethanol in motor fuels. It was originally proposed as a means of reducing our dependence on foreign oil, and who could argue with that rationale? Had policymakers and their advisors been a little more thoughtful, they might have anticipated the worldwide spike in food prices that caused widespread social unrest, and researchers might have had time to understand that using an energy intensive food crop like corn to make ethanol has little or no net impact on petroleum consumption. Rushing into the ethanol mandate has cost consumers and taxpayers billions. Have the results been worth the costs? I don’t think so.

In the case of storage, a portfolio standard might undermine the economic case for electric vehicles and other forms of distributed storage that could be owned by customers rather than utilities or third parties. I don’t think the answer is necessarily straightforward and it ought to be addressed before the California legislature acts rather than later. If you think storage is really necessary, please explain why and provide some analysis to support your claim. I’ll provide an example of the kind of analysis I think is worthwhile by explaining why it might not be necessary and inviting all of you to tell me why I’m wrong.

California will require about 90 billion kilowatthours of renewable energy in 2020 to meet the state mandate. Based on the $1500/kW price of sodium sulfur batteries that are preferred for grid applications, about $4.5 billion in investment will be required to meet the proposed 5% target for storage in 2020, for which customers will pay around $700 million per year in their electric rates. If the investment in storage avoids rejecting 1% of renewable energy production in 2020, the cost amounts to 70 cents per kilowatthour, or about 5 times the average retail price in California. Even solar PV production, which costs around 25 cents per kilowatthour, is a cheaper alternative. Now if the grid operator had to reject 10% of potential renewable output for lack of storage, I might have a different view. And in fact, I hope to find out whether that’s likely to be the case tomorrow.

Charles, I’m aware of the value stream argument. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to sell the same production capability from any supply resource more than once – twice if you include capacity. If storage is providing voltage support, it can’t also sell energy because once it does, the voltage benefit is gone. The same goes for ancillary services – storage output that’s devoted to regulation can’t be used to sell energy at the same time. Therefore, you can only capture the benefit of one value stream at any point in time for a given unit of production capacity. This isn’t unique to storage – the same holds true for thermal plants. Moreover, assuming no losses and under the best economic case I can construct, a device, independent of its technology, that can store six hours of energy has to cost much less than it does today in order to make economic sense.

John, I agree there’s a difference between optimal policy and feasible policy. Where we might disagree is whether politicians and regulators are competent enough to craft either one. When it comes to energy, California has provided some extraordinary leadership, and it has produced an equal number of extraordinary disasters. Having watched the process unfold for more than two thirds of my working life, I’m not optimistic that the proposed legislation has been carefully thought through.

Finally, I would point out that the public eventually has to pay for all of this and they’re not in a paying mood right now. I’ll assert that electricity is priced in a way that encourages waste and discourages efficiency and demand management. Regulators know how to set efficient prices but they are justifiably afraid of a consumer revolt if they move too far too fast. If the planet is in imminent danger of dying, that event is still beyond the time horizon of those who struggle every day to feed, clothe and shelter their families. An optimal policy might require that we fix everything right away, but ignoring public sentiment by moving too fast and without regard to the cost is not economically, politically or socially feasible.

First, since I neglected to do so in my original post, I’ll point out that I do support development of renewable energy. I sit on an industry body that’s working out how to reliably and cost-effectively integrate wind and solar into the power grid. I also sit on an industry steering group that’s trying to assess the operational impacts of renewable energy production. My position is that the industry has to figure out how to make renewables work in a cost-effective manner because if they don’t, politicians and regulators will. I am not employed by a utility and I like to think I know a thing or two about the power business after working in it for nearly 40 years. However I am opposed to developing renewable energy at breakneck speed without regard to the cost or the impact on service reliability.

Jeff points out that there is no free market in energy. True. However subsidies for plant and equipment in the form of depreciation allowances are equally available to fossil and renewable projects. Fossil fuels are entitled to depletion allowances that renewable resources are not, while renewable projects are entitled to tax credits that are not available to fossil developers. It would be helpful if Jeff could point to analyses that compare the value of depletion allowance and other fossil fuel subsidies with the PTC and ITC subsidies in terms of their impact per unit of electricity production. If there are other points of comparison, I think we’d all be interested in those sources as well.

Jeff, it would also be helpful for all of us if you could provide some specific references to analyses of the costs of externalities and how these values compare for fossil and renewable energy production. I’ve heard the externality argument made for more than 30 years, mostly regarding petroleum. If you cite health risks, I confess I’m going to be very skeptical because these claims are hard to prove in the face of increasing life expectancy without conducting some rather unethical experiments.

One of the reasons I’m opposed to mandates is because they tend to be poorly thought out. A prime example is ethanol in motor fuels. It was originally proposed as a means of reducing our dependence on foreign oil, and who could argue with that rationale? Had policymakers and their advisors been a little more thoughtful, they might have anticipated the worldwide spike in food prices that caused widespread social unrest, and researchers might have had time to understand that using an energy intensive food crop like corn to make ethanol has little or no net impact on petroleum consumption. Rushing into the ethanol mandate has cost consumers and taxpayers billions. Have the results been worth the costs? I don’t think so.

In the case of storage, a portfolio standard might undermine the economic case for electric vehicles and other forms of distributed storage that could be owned by customers rather than utilities or third parties. I don’t think the answer is necessarily straightforward and it ought to be addressed before the California legislature acts rather than later. If you think storage is really necessary, please explain why and provide some analysis to support your claim. I’ll provide an example of the kind of analysis I think is worthwhile by explaining why it might not be necessary and inviting all of you to tell me why I’m wrong.

California will require about 90 billion kilowatthours of renewable energy in 2020 to meet the state mandate. Based on the $1500/kW price of sodium sulfur batteries that are preferred for grid applications, about $4.5 billion in investment will be required to meet the proposed 5% target for storage in 2020, for which customers will pay around $700 million per year in their electric rates. If the investment in storage avoids rejecting 1% of renewable energy production in 2020, the cost amounts to 70 cents per kilowatthour, or about 5 times the average retail price in California. Even solar PV production, which costs around 25 cents per kilowatthour, is a cheaper alternative. Now if the grid operator had to reject 10% of potential renewable output for lack of storage, I might have a different view. And in fact, I hope to find out whether that’s likely to be the case tomorrow.

Charles, I’m aware of the value stream argument. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to sell the same production capability from any supply resource more than once – twice if you include capacity. If storage is providing voltage support, it can’t also sell energy because once it does, the voltage benefit is gone. The same goes for ancillary services – storage output that’s devoted to regulation can’t be used to sell energy at the same time. Therefore, you can only capture the benefit of one value stream at any point in time for a given unit of production capacity. This isn’t unique to storage – the same holds true for thermal plants. Moreover, assuming no losses and under the best economic case I can construct, a device, independent of its technology, that can store six hours of energy has to cost much less than it does today in order to make economic sense.

John, I agree there’s a difference between optimal policy and feasible policy. Where we might disagree is whether politicians and regulators are competent enough to craft either one. When it comes to energy, California has provided some extraordinary leadership, and it has produced an equal number of extraordinary disasters. Having watched the process unfold for more than two thirds of my working life, I’m not optimistic that the proposed legislation has been carefully thought through.

Finally, I would point out that the public eventually has to pay for all of this and they’re not in a paying mood right now. I’ll assert that electricity is priced in a way that encourages waste and discourages efficiency and demand management. Regulators know how to set efficient prices but they are justifiably afraid of a consumer revolt if they move too far too fast. If the planet is in imminent danger of dying, that event is still beyond the time horizon of those who struggle every day to feed, clothe and shelter their families. An optimal policy might require that we fix everything right away, but ignoring public sentiment by moving too fast and without regard to the cost is not economically, politically or socially feasible.

http://inspiredeconomist.com/2009/05/12/ge-to-open-100-million-sodium-battery-plant-in-ny/

Dan Sweeney

Yvonne Sweeney

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o The State of the Industry – part I

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Week of June 28, 2009

Submitted by Dan Sweeney on Mon, 2009-07-06 19:57.

My other venture is building to a crescendo. We have received funding on our advanced energy storage project and we are filing a new patent. We are also working on a proof of concept prototype which will determine the feasibility of the basic approach.

Our prospects appear good. We have identified a solid electrolyte which has a voltage breakdown of several tens of kilovolts per millimeter and a dielectric constant of over 50 at all charge levels up to breakdown. We have also found an electrode capable of high voltage operation which presents a succession of smooth surfaces and which has hundreds of times the surface area of a flat plate per the same dimensions of length and width and which has a thickness of a fraction of a millimeter. If we can achieve an intimate connection between the solid electrolyte and the electrode we should be able to exceed the energy density of a lithium sulfur battery, the current state of the art, while still maintaining enormous power densities. Furthermore, our storage capacitor should be capable of sustaining hundreds of thousands of full charges and should have recharge time of only a few minutes provided a high current industrial charging circuit is available.

There may be some reason why the concept won’t work. Nobody has ever succeeded in making a capacitor with very high capacitance operating at very high voltages except for some rather impractical designs utilizing cryogenic dielectrics. Then again not many people have tried.

http://inspiredeconomist.com/2009/05/12/ge-to-open-100-million-sodium-battery-plant-in-ny/

Dan Sweeney

Yvonne Sweeney

Contact Us

Sponsored Ads:

* News Archives

o Announcing the Quiddity Research Group

o Complete Idiot’s Guide to Motorcycles

o News and Musings

o The Universe of Alternative Fuels, Part I

o Zero Emissions Gasoline – Part II

o OPEC and Peak Oil

o Startups, Make Yourselves Heard

o Pond Scum Refineries

o The State of the Industry – part I

o Last Call for Ethanol

o Methanol in China

o Stepping Out

o The Energy Watch Group on Peak Oil

o The GreenVest 2007 Investment Conference

o Vertigro’s Algae Farm

o What Will Come

o Is Chicken Fat an Alternate Fuel?

o More on Chicken Fat as a Biodiesel Feedstock

o The Altcar Expo

Week of June 28, 2009

Submitted by Dan Sweeney on Mon, 2009-07-06 19:57.

My other venture is building to a crescendo. We have received funding on our advanced energy storage project and we are filing a new patent. We are also working on a proof of concept prototype which will determine the feasibility of the basic approach.

Our prospects appear good. We have identified a solid electrolyte which has a voltage breakdown of several tens of kilovolts per millimeter and a dielectric constant of over 50 at all charge levels up to breakdown. We have also found an electrode capable of high voltage operation which presents a succession of smooth surfaces and which has hundreds of times the surface area of a flat plate per the same dimensions of length and width and which has a thickness of a fraction of a millimeter. If we can achieve an intimate connection between the solid electrolyte and the electrode we should be able to exceed the energy density of a lithium sulfur battery, the current state of the art, while still maintaining enormous power densities. Furthermore, our storage capacitor should be capable of sustaining hundreds of thousands of full charges and should have recharge time of only a few minutes provided a high current industrial charging circuit is available.

There may be some reason why the concept won’t work. Nobody has ever succeeded in making a capacitor with very high capacitance operating at very high voltages except for some rather impractical designs utilizing cryogenic dielectrics. Then again not many people have tried.

I’m not sure that this legislation is the best way to go about the process – I’m sure some of the utilities, that might otherwise support storage, may not like something forced upon them. And, we need to define “energy storage” carefully – should it cover chilled water, compressed natural gas, diesel tanks – or should it be an electricity in / electricity out technology?

I hope the introduction of this legislation will start the discussion at a serious level. Considering energy storage for wind / PV makes more sense than building more fossil fueled generators.

I’m not sure that this legislation is the best way to go about the process – I’m sure some of the utilities, that might otherwise support storage, may not like something forced upon them. And, we need to define “energy storage” carefully – should it cover chilled water, compressed natural gas, diesel tanks – or should it be an electricity in / electricity out technology?

I hope the introduction of this legislation will start the discussion at a serious level. Considering energy storage for wind / PV makes more sense than building more fossil fueled generators.