Ask Not For Whom The Wind Blows...  

As is usual in recent years, the Europeans are leading the way towards our clean energy future. The Economist has an excellent report on a "grandiose plan to link Europe's electricity grids that may recast wind power from its current role as a walk-on extra to being the star of the show".

I know Olduvai Cliff theory fans don't think much of this idea, but our grids are going to become more interconnected and smarter, and the mix is going to shift towards wind, solar, geothermal and tidal/wave energy (often from remote regions) that supplements and slowly replaces old school energy sources like coal, oil, gas and nuclear. Get used to it.

The article also mentions some of my favourite hobby horses - the global energy grid (aka GENI) and harnessing the solar resources of the Sahara and the tidal energy of Siberia. I wonder what blogs those guys read...

PLUG in your toaster—or your television or your vacuum cleaner—and the electricity that surges through it is an alternating current. The question of whether the world would be powered by direct current (DC), in which electrons flow in one direction around a circuit, or by alternating current (AC), in which they jiggle back and forth, was decided in the 1880s. Thomas Edison backed DC. George Westinghouse backed AC. Westinghouse won.

The reason was that over the short distances spanned by early power grids, AC transmission suffers lower losses than DC. It thus became the industry standard. Some people, however, question that standard because over long distances high-voltage DC lines suffer lower losses than AC. Not only does that make them better in their own right, but employing them would allow electricity grids to be restructured in ways that would make wind power more attractive. That would reduce the need for new conventional (and polluting) power stations.
AC/DC/PC

Wind power has two problems. You don't always get it where you want it and you don't always get it when you want it. According to Jürgen Schmid, the head of ISET, an alternative-energy institute at the University of Kassel, in Germany, continent-wide power distribution systems in a place like Europe would deal with both of these points.

The question of where the wind is blowing would no longer matter because it is almost always blowing somewhere. If it were windy in Spain but not in Ireland, current would flow in one direction. On a blustery day in the Emerald Isle it would flow in the other.

Dealing with when the wind blows is a subtler issue. In this context, an important part of Dr Schmid's continental grid is the branch to Norway. It is not that Norway is a huge consumer. Rather, the country is well supplied with hydroelectric plants. These are one of the few ways (but not the only way, see article) that energy from transient sources like the wind can be stored in grid-filling quantities. The power is used to pump water up into the reservoirs that feed the hydroelectric turbines. That way it is on tap when needed. The capacity of Norway's reservoirs is so large, according to Dr Schmid, that should the wind drop all over Europe—which does happen on rare occasions—the hydro plants could spring into action and fill in the gap for up to four weeks.

Put like this, a Europe-wide grid seems an obvious idea. That it has not yet been built is because AC power lines would lose too much power over such large distances. Hence the renewed interest in DC. ...

Dr Schmid calculates that a DC grid of the sort he envisages would allow wind to supply at least 30% of the power needed in Europe. Moreover, it could do so reliably—and that means wind power could be used for what is known in the jargon as base-load power supply.

Base-load power is the minimum required to keep things ticking over—the demands of three o'clock in the morning, or thereabouts. At the moment, this is supplied by traditional power stations. These either burn fossil fuel and thus contribute to global warming, or use uranium, which brings problems such as how to get rid of the waste, as well as political opposition.

Though wind power has its opponents, too, its environmental virtues might be enough to swing things in its favour if it were also reliable. Indeed, a group of Norwegian companies have already started building high-voltage DC lines between Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Germany, though these are intended as much to sell the country's power as to accumulate other people's. And Airtricity—an Irish wind-power company—plans even more of them. It proposes what it calls a Supergrid. This would link offshore wind farms in the Atlantic ocean and the Irish, North and Baltic seas with customers throughout northern Europe.

Airtricity reckons that the first stage of this project, a 2,000 turbine-strong farm in the North Sea, would cost about €2 billion ($2.7 billion). That farm would generate 10 gigawatts. An equivalent amount of coal-fired capacity would cost around $2.3 billion so, adding in the environmental benefits, the project seems worth examining. Such offshore farms certainly work. Airtricity already operates one in the Atlantic, and though it currently has a capacity of only 25 megawatts, increasing that merely means adding more turbines.

Nor is this the limit of some people's vision. The Global Energy Network Institute, based in San Diego, California, reckons high-voltage DC lines could be used to bring solar energy to market from places such as the Sahara. Wind and geothermal power could be gathered from as far afield as South America and Siberia. Such a globalised market has its attractions. Whether the world is ready for the Organisation of Electricity Exporting Countries to take over from OPEC, though, remains to be seen.

The WSJ Energy roundup reports that European comapnies are starting to take their renewable energy expertise to the US - "Spain Sees Gold on U.S. Rooftops".

Some of Spain’s biggest renewable-energy companies have recently planted their flag in the U.S., with big deals by utility Iberdrola SA, energy conglomerate Acciona SA, and wind turbine maker Gamesa SA. They all consider the U.S. market to be an underdeveloped goldmine.

Acciona, which has already bought U.S. wind farm developers and opened its own wind turbine factory in Iowa, just completed financing for another deal, this time in solar power. On Tuesday, it secured $266 million in financing from Spanish and Portuguese banks for its Solar One project in Nevada, the world’s third-largest solar plant.

On Wednesday, the shoe will be on the other foot. Privately-held solar technology company SolFocus Inc., Mountain View, Ca., has reached an agreement to acquire a Spanish company specializing in a key technology that makes solar power more efficient. The terms of the deal weren’t be disclosed.

Madrid-based InSpira makes solar trackers, mechanical telescopic arms that follow the sun across the sky and focus the sun’s rays onto all sorts of solar power devices, making them more efficient. Trackers can boost yields by 40% — a huge difference when most commercial solar panels only get between 10% and 25% of the sun’s energy. Trackers are especially crucial to the most advanced kind of solar power devices, known as concentrators: if the sun’s rays are off by more than 1-2 degrees, no power is generated.

For SolFocus chief executive Gary Conley, the deal will kill two birds with one stone. He will get access to a leading maker of tracker technology, boosting SolFocus’ bid to make cost-efficient solar power, though he vows to honor InSpira’s supply deals with rivals such as Germany’s Concentrix Solar GMBH. He will also get a bridgehead in Europe, where subsidies and government support for solar power and other renewable energies are far ahead of the U.S.

“The U.S. is a sleeping giant for solar power,” Mr. Conley says. He hopes to make his concentrating photovoltaic machines cost-competitive with electricity generated from natural-gas fired turbines by 2010 by using one-one thousandth the amount of silicon in traditional solar cells and boosting their efficiency with the new trackers.

“You’ve got to nail down the economics first and foremost. You can’t rely on subsidies forever,” he says.

The NSW state government has thankfully dumped plans for a new coal fired power plant but is instead backing a plan for a new gas fired plant, apparently under the impression that coal seam methane supplies will be plentiful over the lifetime of the plant, which might be a dodgy bet I suspect. It would be less risky to be building wind farms along the ranges and some solar thermal plants on the other side of the divide if you ask me (although I'm sure no one will).

THE NSW Government has indicated it is willing to use gas for its next power station, moving away from coal for the first time. The about-turn is the Government's first response to plans for a national carbon trading regime. In a speech today, the Premier, Morris Iemma, will outline the case for the move to gas to supply the next so-called "baseload" power station, which will operate 24-hours a day. ...

Coal is the cheapest energy source by far, although a carbon trading regime, which the Federal Government is planning from 2011 or 2012, threatens to make coal much more expensive. The problem for NSW in recent years has been a lack of sufficient gas reserves to supply prospective electricity industry demand.

"There may well be a sufficient gas supply to make gas-fired baseload generation an alternative to coal," Mr Iemma will tell an infrastructure conference today. The Owen inquiry examining the state's electricity industry is to be completed by the end of this month. "The dates and load requirements [of new capacity] will be contained in Professor Owen's report but it is abundantly clear that we will need to increase our supply of electricity in the medium term. Secondly, while demand management and renewable energy will be part of the solution, they alone cannot obviate the need for new coal or gas-fired generation.

A third theme to emerge from the inquiry was the prospect of sufficient gas reserves to give the Government the chance to use gas for baseload power capacity.

In today's speech, Mr Iemma will argue that the job of securing the state's energy supply "is being made more difficult than it should be thanks to the Commonwealth's dithering and delay in addressing climate change and spelling out the detail of its proposed carbon trading scheme". "John Howard's failure to give a clear signal about a carbon price is like putting a blindfold on industry," Mr Iemma will tell the conference. "The Commonwealth must guarantee that any power station project that has reached financial close prior to the start of any carbon trading scheme must qualify for permit allocation."

The emergence of gas as a viable option in powering the state's energy needs follows optimism about the prospects for coal seam methane as a gas source. This is gas trapped in uneconomic coal seams which is being tapped increasingly in Queensland. Several large gas-fired power stations are already on the drawing boards of state-owned power companies, most notably Delta Electricity which is working on plans for gas-fired power plants near Nowra as well as at Marulan.

Nigel Wilson at The Australian has a report on Woodside's bid to push the $12bn Pluto project.

WOODSIDE chief Don Voelte has creatred an interesting conundrum with the go-ahead for the $12 billion Pluto LNG development. While that investment is for an initial single processing train, 4.3 million tonne annual production facility, Mr Voelte waxed lyrical on the potential for the Burrup LNG Park to take two more trains with various combinations of ownership structures.

The rationale for Pluto, about which Mr Voelte has been ear-bashing everyone for the past two years, is that its output meets a specifically defined situation in which the supply of LNG cannot meet known demand. That situation, we are told, will have expired by 2014, with the coming onstream of new LNG developments, including some in the Browse Basin north of Broome in which Woodside and its North West Shelf partners have a substantial interest.

There will be other global players, including Qatar and probably Nigeria.

Pluto and the Browse developments are key components of the Australian Government's strategy of making Australia the world's second largest supplier of LNG (after Qatar) by the end of next decade. The aim is to lift Australia's annual LNG output from about 14 million tonnes now (the existing NW Shelf project and the ConcocoPhillips Wickham Point plant in Darwin) to about 60 million tonnes. That framework does not include an expanded Pluto, mainly because until last Friday Mr Voelte had not outlined the growth scenario.

It does include the expansion of the NW Shelf to more than 16million tonnes a year (processing train five), the 10 million tonne annual production capacity approved for the Chevron-ExxonMobil-Shell proposal for Gorgon, lifting Wickham Point to 10 million tonnes a year and delivering about 20 million tonnes a year from the Browse Basin and the Timor Sea. The target predates recent developments on the east coast proposing the use of coal-seam methane to supply export LNG ventures.

John Hirjee, Deutsche Bank equity research's Woodside expert, said the Burrup LNG Park was bold and compelling but "requires successful execution of Pluto in an unpredictable cost environment".

The project was also a springboard for commercialising not only Woodside's reserves but those of its neighbours, he said. Woodside had indicated that established customers in North Asia -- say Japan -- and potential customers in North America had shown strong interest in Pluto because of its potential size, its commercial flexibility (through Woodside's 100 per cent ownership) and Woodside's acknowledged LNG experience as the operator of the NW Shelf venture. "Woodside believes there is a good case to justify an LNG plant with a capacity of up to 12 million tonnes a year," the Deutsche man said.

It follows that, as we have not factored an extra 7 million tonnes into the forward supply estimates, an expanded Pluto will have to displace other developments (possibly Gorgon, possibly in the Browse) or be built extremely rapidly to meet the supply shortfall. ...

Another report in the hard copy version of The Australian (but nowhere to be found online) is an analysis of the impact the Japanese earthquake that knocked out the world's largest nuclear reactor (hint: don't build nuclear reactors near fault lines of any sort) is going to "ignite global gas demand", noting that spot market supplies are short and any free capacity in North West WA is being vigorously sought after by TEPCO. The plant is expected to be out of action for at least a year (and probably forever if they have any sense). The Japanese should help the Russians develop those Siberian tidal projects and build a connector (although being dependent on Tsar Vladimir for your power isn't without risks either). Other reports on the TEPCO fiasco at the BBC, IHT, Scientific American and San Luis Obispo.com.

Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) expects a significant slump in full-year profits after the closure of a key nuclear plant following an earthquake. Radiation leaks from the plant after the quake on 16 July led to it being closed in order to meet safety rules.

As a result, Tepco, the largest power producer in Asia, has cut its net profit forecast by 79% to 65bn yen (£268.9m), for the 12 months to March. Tepco's shares have dropped around 15% since the earthquake. The firm plans to buy other sources of nuclear power and to use a hydro power plant in order to meet peak summer demand.

Japan is a heavy user of nuclear energy and the firm's Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant was meant to answer more than 3% of the nation's energy needs. But the government - under pressure from the International Energy Agency to examine the plant - has demanded it should be closed until it is proved that safety requirements can be met.

Continued purchase of substitute sources of energy including expensive oil and coal are expected to add to the firm's costs.

The Australian also reports that GeoDynamics is about to drill its first commerical geothermal power hole out in the desert. Other energy news from The Australian - Paladin a tempting target, Temasek plugs into Basslink, NZ crude flowing for AWE, Santos ups stake in Bayu Undan and Energy giants in collusion probe.

THE hopes of Australia's nascent hot rocks power industry were yesterday riding on the successful drilling of a 4km-deep hole in the far northeast of South Australia. Drilling will soon commence on the well and, if successful, it is expected to generate Australia's first commercially available geothermal energy by the end of 2010.

Australia's leading geothermal energy start-up, Brisbane-based Geodynamics, has put its money where its mouth is, paying $32 million for a 960-tonne rig and shipping it out from Texas in June to do the job. At a ceremony at the remote site near Innamincka yesterday, Geodynamics chief executive Adrian Williams said drilling of the company's third well, Habanero 3, was an historic moment for the Australian industry.

If the well succeeds, Geodynamics plans Australia's first commercially viable geothermal power plant, a 40MW plant delivering power into the national grid by the end of 2010. Geodynamics was expected to be the first of up to 20 Australian geothermal companies to produce power. There are more than 100 exploration sites in Australia being examined for geothermal power potential.

Industry-watchers say the sector will need a carbon tax imposed on coal-fired power stations to be competitive. They predict geothermal energy will account for about 25 per cent of new power generation by 2020.

TomDispatch has an interesting post from Chip Ward on "Diesel-Driven Bee Slums and Impotent Turkeys" - looking at the value of resilience. I'm often surprised at how many dodgy risks organisations and societies take on in the name of efficiency (or sometimes simply laziness). There should be more technocrats in the policy making arena who have had to put in place full failover and DR environments for mission critical systems - the way you think tends to change a lot when you always have to keep the idea of how to handle disaster scenarios in mind when you are building something.

Resilience. You may not have heard much about it, but brace yourself. You're going to hear that word a lot in the future. It is what we have too little of as our world slips into unpredictable climate chaos. "Resilience thinking," the cutting edge of environmental science, may someday replace "efficiency" as the organizing principle of our economy.

Our current economic system is designed to maximize outputs and minimize costs. (That's what we call efficiency.) Efficiency eliminates redundancy, which is abundant in nature, in favor of finding the one "best" way of doing something -- usually "best" means most profitable over the short run -- and then doing it that way and that way only. And we aim for control, too, because it is more efficient to command than just let things happen the way they will. Most of our knowledge about how natural systems work is focused on how to get what we want out of them as quickly and cheaply as possible -- things like timber, minerals, water, grain, fish, and so on. We're skilled at breaking systems apart and manipulating the pieces for short-term gain.

Think of resiliency, on the other hand, as the ability of a system to recover from a disturbance. Recovery requires options to that one "best" way of doing things in case that way is blocked or disturbed. A resilient system is adaptable and diverse. It has some redundancy built in. A resilient perspective acknowledges that change is constant and prediction difficult in a world that is complex and dynamic. It understands that when you manipulate the individual pieces of a system, you change that system in unintended ways. Resilience thinking is a new lens for looking at the natural world we are embedded in and the manmade world we have imposed upon it.

In the world today, efficiency rules. The history of our industrial civilization has essentially been the story of gaining control over nature. Water-spilling rivers were dammed and levied; timber-wasting forest fires were suppressed; cattle-eating predators were eliminated; and pesticides, herbicides, and antibiotics were liberally applied to deal with those pesky insects, weeds, and microbes that seemed so intent on wasting what we wanted to use efficiently. Today we are even engineering the genetic codes of plants and animals to make them more efficient.

Surprise Happens

Too often we understand the natural systems we manipulate incompletely. We treat living systems as if they were simple, static, linear, and predictable when, in reality they are complex, dynamic, and unpredictable. When building our manmade world on top of those natural systems, we regularly fail to account for inevitable natural disturbances and changes. So when the "unexpected inevitable" occurs, we are shocked. Worse, we often find that we have "all our eggs in one basket," and that the redundancy we eliminated in the name of efficiency limits our options for recovery. This applies to manmade systems, too.

Our efficient energy and food systems are perfect examples of how monolithic and brittle our infrastructure can become. Political turmoil in the Middle East, storms ravaging offshore oil wells, refinery fires, terrorism, and any number of other easily imaginable, even inevitable disruptions send gas prices soaring and suddenly our oil-dependent economy is pitched into a crisis. Because there is no readily available alternative to how we fuel our way of life -- no resilience -- our dependence on fossil fuels leaves us especially vulnerable to crisis. Our food system is likewise vulnerable, since it is so dependent on oil-based fertilizers and pesticides and relies on cheap and consistent supplies of gas for farm machinery and shipping.

Redundancy -- alternative energy sources, for example -– would have left us options to fall back on in a time of such crisis. We did not develop those options, however, because they weren't considered "competitive." That is, if one energy source is cheaper to produce than others -- ignoring, of course, all the associated and unacknowledged environmental and health costs -- then that is the predominant energy source we will use to the exclusion of all others. Decades ago, oil and coal were cheap and so we constructed an entire energy infrastructure around those resources alone. (Nuclear squeaked through the door only because it was so heavily subsidized by government.) Solar and wind couldn't compete according to the rigid market criteria we applied, so those sources hardly exist today. We are still told that we will get them only when they become more competitive.

Our focus on efficiency in building manmade systems has been short-sighted because it fails to anticipate change over the long run. Resiliency is eliminated at each turn by owners, managers, and planners steeped in the cult of efficiency and trained to cut out profit-reducing redundancy whenever it appears. In organizations, this usually works well -- at least for a while. But our attempt to maximize the use of natural systems has, in this regard, been an unmitigated disaster.

Most of the technological means we use to overcome nature's inefficiencies seem clever and beneficial until the long-term drawbacks dawn on us. In the Northwest, for instance, dams seemed like a great way to produce electricity and make rivers navigable until, that is, the salmon began to die and an entire Northwest ecosystem that depended on salmon began to unravel. Until they broke under the power of Hurricane Katrina, the levees in New Orleans seemed to be a neat alternative to those messy coastal wetlands and inconvenient barrier islands we had wiped out for keeping storm surges in check. ...

Chip also did a piece for TD on how the homeless in the US came to live in public libraries.

The inadequacy of existing resources and the absurdity of the conditions they endure are just part of the landscape, a given for social workers. Public librarians can cooperate with (and learn from) them, but we understand that they are overwhelmed and often unavailable. So, like it or not, we are ushered into the ranks of auxiliary social workers with no resources whatsoever.

Local hospitals are also uncertain allies. They have little room for the indigent mentally ill for whose treatment they often can't get reimbursed. So they deal with the crisis at hand, fork over some pills, and send the hopeless homeless on their way.

A manager at a shelter-clinic told me that he keeps a stash of petty cash handy because sometimes a taxi arrives at his door from one of the city's hospitals, carrying an incoherent patient without ID or any possessions other than the hospital gown he or she is wearing. When that happens, clinic workers are instructed to rush for the cab before it can unload its passenger and pay the driver to return to the hospital, puzzled cargo still in hand.

Throughout the fragmented system of healthcare for homeless people, from rehab to hospitals to jails, there are few ground rules or protocols for discharging the mentally ill and next to no communication between healthcare providers, police, social workers, and shelter managers in this archipelago of despair. Public librarians are out of the loop altogether; our role in providing daytime shelter for the homeless is ignored. When, in an attempt to build my own useful network, I attended conferences on homeless issues, I was always met with puzzlement and the question: "What are you doing here?"

"Where do you think they go during the day?" I would invariably answer.

"Oh, yeah, I guess that's right -- you deal with them, too," would be the invariable response, always offered as if that never occurred to them before.

Paramedics are caught in the middle of this dark carnival of confusion and neglect. In the winter, when the transient population of the library increases dramatically, we call them almost every day. Once, when I apologized to a paramedic for calling twice, he responded, "Hey, no need to explain or apologize." He swept his arm towards the other paramedics, surrounding a portable gurney on which they would soon carry a disoriented old man complaining of dizziness to the emergency room. "Look at us," he said, "we're the mobile homeless clinic. This is what we do. All day long, day after day, and mostly for the same people over and over."

The cost of this mad system is staggering. Cities that have tracked chronically homeless people for the police, jail, clinic, paramedic, emergency room, and other hospital services they require, estimate that a typical transient can cost taxpayers between $20,000 and $150,000 a year. You could not design a more expensive, wasteful, or ineffective way to provide healthcare to individuals who live on the street than by having librarians like me dispense it through paramedics and emergency rooms. For one thing, fragmented, episodic care consistently fails, no matter how many times delivered. It is not only immoral to ignore people who are suffering illness in our midst, it's downright stupid public policy. We do not spend too little on the problems of the mentally disabled homeless, as is often assumed, instead we spend extravagantly but foolishly.

And the costs could grow far beyond the measure of money. If an epidemic of deadly flu were to strike, if an easily communicable strain of tuberculosis or some other devastating disease emerges, paramedics will be overwhelmed by their homeless clients who are at high risk for such illnesses. People who drink until they pass out tend to aspirate and choke, and people who sleep outdoors at night breathe cold, damp air. People who sleep in crowded shelters breathe each other's air.

Serious respiratory problems among the chronically homeless in a shelter are as common as beer guts at a racetrack. If an epidemic strikes, the susceptibility of the homeless will translate into an increased risk of exposure for the rest of us and, eerily enough, our public libraries could become Ground Zeroes for the spread of killer flu. Librarians are reluctant to make plans for handling such scenarios because we do not want to convey the message that America's libraries are anything but the safe and welcoming environments they remain today.

But here's the thing: It's not just about libraries. The chronically homeless share bus stops, subways, park benches, handrails, restrooms, drinking fountains, and fast-food booths with us or with others we encounter daily, who also share the air we breathe and the surfaces we touch. When sick or drunk, they vomit in public restrooms (if we are lucky). Having a population that is at once vulnerable to disease and able to spread microbes widely to others is simply foolish -- and unnecessary -- public policy, but in the library we focus on more immediate risks. We offer our staff hepatitis vaccinations and free tuberculosis checks. We place sanitizing gels and latex gloves at every public desk. Who would guess that working in a library could be a hazardous occupation?

Ultimately, the indigent mentally ill are criminalized. If their presence in our libraries is a common and growing problem that we librarians would like the rest of society to be aware of, acknowledge, and commit themselves to helping us solve, here is a secret we would like to keep to ourselves: We are complicit. No matter how conscientiously and compassionately we try to treat our mentally disturbed users -- and at the Salt Lake City Public Library we work very hard to be fair, helpful, and tolerant -- librarians often have no good choices and, in the end, we just call the cops. ...

Links:

* AP - Oil Settles Above $78, Setting Record
* Washington Post - Losing Forests to Fuel Cars - Ethanol Sugarcane Threatens Brazil's Wooded Savanna
* The Guardian - If we want to save the planet, we need a five-year freeze on biofuels
* WorldChanging - Mainstreaming Clean Energy in Rizhao, China
* Gizmag - Blended-Wing Boeing completes first test flight. "While a commercial passenger application for the BWB concept is not in Boeing's current 20-year market outlook, the Advanced Systems organization of Boeing Integrated Defense Systems' (IDS) is closely monitoring the research based on the BWB's potential as a flexible, long-range, high-capacity military aircraft." Wouldn't fuel efficiency be nice for civilian air transport too ?
* The Australian - Fusion: A future run on star power
* The Age - Brown lays down law on Iraq exit
* Past Peak - Eight Million Iraqis Need "Immediate Emergency Aid
* Open The Future - Geome Engineering
* Harvard Busines Review - Six Rules for Effective Forecasting. Step 1 - Define a cone of uncertainty...
* SMH - New secret search powers
* SMH - Mao's megaphones come to the streets of Sydney
* Past Peak - All About The Data-Mining After All
* ABC News (US) - Survey: Americans Broadly Support Surveillance Cameras.

Everyone repeat after me - "I love you big brother"...

"One day you can tell all this to anyone who's willing to listen. No one will believe you. Despite the fact that anyone who makes the slightest effort can see what is waiting at the future."

Ingmar Bergman's The Serpent's Egg