The Nullarbor Solar Project  

Steve Gloor has a great post outlining a proposal for connecting Western Australia to the rest of the Australian National Electricity Market. As things stand, this wouldn't make any economic sense - unless you built solar thermal plants and wind farms along the length of the interconnector (you could also plugin the new wave of geothermal plants that are going to be constructed in the South Australian desert). Steve also proposes adding energy storage via Superconducting Magnetic Energy STorage (obviously you could alternatively generate hydrogen as per Wind Hydrogen's scheme and/or use the Tasmanian and Snowy Hydro schemes as pumped energy storage facilities too). Steve notes that this would be the modern day equivalent of the original Snowy Hydro scheme as a national engineering project and it would probably also compare favourably cost wise to the Rodent's plan of building nuclear power plants in every Australian city. A giant leap towards the clean energy future..

After studying the excellent information available at NEMMCO I started thinking about how good it would be to have a electricity link right across Australia linking the SWIS to the Eastern States. Then I found out about HVDC and the new high temperature superconducting storage that is becoming available and it all fell into place.

In NSW, Qld, SA and now Tasmania because of BassLink there exists an electricity trading system where supply is matched to demand on a half hourly basis and electricity is treated as a commodity. There are strict rules to prevent and ENRON style manipulation of electricity prices with mandatory reserves that must be in place of 800MW. Western Australia operates it own network call the South West Integrated System (SWIS) and is isolated from the Eastern States despite the advantages of being 2 hours out of phase with the East.

One advantage just of being connected with nothing else done is that the time of peak over here (I live in Western Australia) is of course 2 hours different from the East because of Australia's enormous size that encompasses two time zones.

If you look at the diagram on the right, which is a realtime graph of demand in NSW, you can see 2 peaks one at about 8:00am in the morning and a larger one at 6:00pm at night. Now assuming that Western Australia has much the same peaks and troughs only 2 hours later WA could be using some of it's off peak capacity to supply the Eastern States peak and vice versa. However it is when renewable power is added into the equation that the benefits become more apparent. At 6:00pm in the East there is less solar power available even with daylight saving but as it is 4:00pm in Western Australia, solar thermal plants would be still producing near their peak values and capable of supplying the peak Eastern States time with renewable power.

The problem of course is the distance between Western Australia and Eastern Australia. Expanding the map and using a calculator gives a distance of 2700 km from Perth to Adelaide which is the nearest point where the Eastern States grid is available.

This is a huge distance!!!. If this was done with a AC distributer then there would be all sorts of losses. For more detailed information read this. From this reference "High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC)Transmission Systems" from the World Bank, the largest HVDC power system is the Itaipu HVDC Transmission Project in Brazil with the following characteristics:

Technical Data:
Commissioning year: 1984-1987
Power rating: 3150+3150 MW
DC voltage: ±600 kV
Length of overhead DC line: 785 km + 805 km
Main reasons for choosing HVDC system: Long distance, 50/60 Hz conversion

It has a total length of 800km is less than a third of what Australia requires so our link would be a technical challenge. The cost can be estimated from the same reference - assuming a bipolar OH line with a price per km of 250 kUSD/km, converter stations are estimated to 250 MUSD gives a price for our link of:

2 converter stations $500 000 000 USD
2700 km of cable $675 000 000 USD
Total $1 175 000 000 USD

Which is a lot however considering that a nuclear reactor will cost 4 billion and just supply base load this supply line across Australia will do far more that this. ...

Look on the map and have a look where the link would pass thorough. The desert areas have an average of between 8 and 9 sun hours per day - every day of the year. If Concentrating Solar Power plants where set up along the route of the HVDC link then thousands of megawatts of renewable solar power could be generated and used in both Eastern Australia and Western Australia. Also as explained before the power is 2 hours out of phase. Eastern Australia's solar power plants could supply Western Australia's 8:00 am peak and Western Australia could supply Eastern Australia's 6:00pm peak.

Have another look at the map where the link could travel through. Apart from going across the Great Australian Bight which is a prime wind site where thousands of wind turbines could be situated it also neatly solves the transmission problems for the Hot Dry Rock resource of South Australia. With construction of such a large HVDC link the extra link to the Cooper Basin would be easy to do and then we have a huge baseload of clean geothermal power to draw on.

Finally there exists one more technology that has the potential to change renewable power in Australia linked to the HVDC link and that is Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage or SMES. This is basically coils of High Temperature Superconductor that are wound in a large coil and can store vast amounts of energy with almost no losses. Read this from American Superconductor for working examples. As we are using DC there does not need to be any conversion from AC to DC for storage and DC to DC conversion can be extremely efficient. The wikipedia entry says this for large scale storage:

Size - To achieve commercially useful levels of storage, around 1 GW·h (3.6 TJ), a SMES installation would need a loop of around 100 miles (160 km). This is traditionally pictured as a circle, though in practice it could be more like a rounded rectangle. In either case it would require access to a significant amount of land to house the installation, and to contain the health effects noted below.

Now out on the Nullabor or even near Kalgoorlie you could lose a 160km loop without even trying. Given say 2 of these, one near Perth and one near South Australia we could store 2 or 3 GWh of electricity indefinitely with only small losses and replace the operational reserve that is supplied with fossil fuels with clean storage. This would also allow much greater clean reserves and allow much more renewable power to be connected that would not need as much storage so it would be cheaper. Consider also that at both ends of the link would be advanced power converters, now with access to say 2 GW of storage and unlimited amounts of solar and geothermal generation. These converters can act now as the heart of Australia's generating capacity leading to the possibility of Australia being completely renewable and needing no further coal plants or nuclear power plants for the distant foreseeable future.

The problems of such a link are mainly technical however what a magnificent engineering task it would be - another Snowy Mountains scheme. The enormous advantages of easy large scale storage, connection of vast amounts of solar power in prime sun areas, wind in prime unpopulated wind areas and baseload geothermal power gives the possibility of reaching a 60% reduction in emissions by 2050. For the people without vision there is the nuclear option of 19th century thinking with the attendant problems of cooling water, proliferation, and unsolved nuclear waste disposal or even more of the same old coal with the problem of how do you pump 140 million TONS of CO2 into the ground every year. In comparison the probably huge technical problems of a 2700km electricity distributor seem trivial. At least there are no unsolved problems. We may be also able to attract David Mills back to Australia to build the 1 GW CSP thermal plants along the route.

It might also be possible to plug wave energy farms into this architecture, given that the south coast of the country has a rather large amount of wave energy available courtesy of the ceaselessly churning southern ocean. The geography along most of the Nullarbor plain might pose a problem (huge cliffs the whole way as far as I can recall) but there are parts of WA and SA, not too distant from a possible interconnector route, where this would be feasible. Obviously the more diverse the energy sources plugged in, the less need there is for storage and other techniques for overcoming the intermittency of any one source. Like geothermal power, wave power would be almost continuously available.

Grist has an article on wave power today - while they were not so keen on tidal projects (another massive potential energy source in some regions) for environmental reasons, they seem much more keen on wave power.

Wind hits the surface of the ocean and makes tiny ripples that over distance and time become waves. As contrasted with the tidal technologies we discussed last week, which use the tidal cycles to trap and release water, wave devices use the constant sloshing and swelling of the ocean to generate energy. Wave power technologies come in three broad categories: on shore, near shore, and offshore. And then three more categories: Buoyant Moored Device, Hinged Contour Device, and Oscillating Water Column. I'll give you just a few examples out of the truckloads I found.

Islay, Scotland, has an Oscillating Water Column called the LIMPET (an acronym), a 500 kW onshore wave-power generator. The LIMPET is a concrete bunker on the beach with a large central cavity, into which waves slosh. As water rises and falls within the cavity it displaces air, which exits and returns via a turbine-clogged tunnel. The spinning turbine is attached to a generator that, among other things, powers a Scottish bus.

Offshore devices, in depths above 80 feet, include a long, segmented tube called the Pelamis, after a type of sea snake. The wave-induced gyrations of this Hinged Contour Device drive hydraulic pistons that send electricity to shore through cables on the sea floor. Then you have Buoyant Moored Devices, which look like signal buoys, with a central piston sloshing up and down as the sea swells; this mechanical stroking is connected to a generator as well. A wave farm would be a conglomerate area with several devices, much like a wind farm.

I read only promising information about wave power's capacities. A lot of development is occurring in Europe, where public enthusiasm and government commitment to renewables means funding and research support. Additionally, Western Europe happens to have bountiful wave-rich sites. Wave power is most promising around 40 to 60 degrees of latitude in both the Southern and Northern Hemispheres (there's a map here), particularly on the west coasts of Britain and the United States. I've seen one estimate that wave power could contribute 1 to 10 terawatts of energy worldwide -- the U.S. uses about 3 to 4 TW annually, and the world about 13 TW.

Interesting design problems with wave power include the destructive power of the salty sea -- corrosion and weather and storms and all. Benefits include the relative constancy of power availability, as contrasted with wind and tidal barrages.

Grist also has an interview with Dennis Kucinich, the left's version of Ron Paul - independent and principled, but a very long shot to get elected. Best line - "We need to see the connection between global warring and global warming, and it's oil".

Business 2.0 has an article on a Norwegian company and their "Think" electric car. Its not as sexy as a Tesla Roadster, but I think it will do well in Europe - and they have Vehicle 2 Grid energy storage and Smart Grids in mind right from the start - I'm impressed with how fast all this stuff is taking off - conversion of the transport system and the grid might be a lot quicker than I first imagined. Maybe "peak oil" will end up being an economic phenomenon - the oil industry will simply become irrelevant before we pass the geological limits...

The article is worth a read - the whole philosophy they have shows the vast gap between the traditional car industry and the new electric car companies - these are really technology companies and they could eat big auto and big oil (as per my "Silicon Valley's War On Big Oil" theme) a lot faster than anyone currently imagines.

Did someone kill the electric car? You wouldn't know it on this bright May morning in Scandinavia, where the idea of a mass-produced battery-powered vehicle is being resurrected and actual cars are scheduled to begin rolling off the production line by year's end.

The London VCs are just the latest visitors to make the trek to Think to meet Willums, a onetime oilman turned venture capitalist, sustainability guru, and solar entrepreneur.

Tesla Motors CEO Martin Eberhard flew to Oslo to take a spin and sent back his people to hammer out a deal to supply Think with high-power lithium-ion batteries. An executive from PG&E , the giant California utility, dropped by during his vacation to talk about giving Think a foothold in the Golden State. Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway scooter, paid a visit, became an investor, and is now working on what could be the next breakthrough in automotive technology (more on that later).

Shuttling between Oslo and California, Willums has raised $78 million from Silicon Valley and European investors captivated by the genial, soft-spoken Norwegian's vision of a carbon-neutral urban car. You might spot him at Buck's, the VC hangout in Woodside, or at a tech conference in Napa. Four months after Willums's investment group acquired Think last year, he was hammering out its strategy at a brainstorming session hosted by Google.

Willums's pitch is this: He's not just selling an electric car; he's upending a century-old automotive paradigm, aiming to change the way cars are made, sold, owned, and driven.

Taking a cue from Dell, the company will sell cars online, built to order. It will forgo showrooms and seed the market through car-sharing services like Zipcar. Every car will be Internet-and Wi-Fi-enabled, becoming, according to Willums, a rolling computer that can communicate wirelessly with its driver, other Think owners, and the power grid.

In other words, it's Web 2.0 on wheels. "We want to sell mobility," Willums says. "We don't want to sell a thing called the Think."

That's a lot to ride on one tiny car. And it's a big gamble for consumers, particularly freeway-driving, SUV-loving Americans. But global warming, the boom in green energy, and the changing economics of electric car production -- doing for $100 million what Detroit does for $1 billion -- have unleashed forces that won't be as easy to crush as the EV1 electric car scrapped by General Motors in 2003.

"There is a fundamental shift happening that is going to require new business models," says Ed Kjaer, an electric vehicle veteran who runs the EV program for Southern California Edison. "The timing is right. We are on a path now toward electric cars, and there is no going back." ...

Willums picked up Think, its factory, and Ford's nearly completed design for a new-model City for the fire-sale price of about $15 million. That freed him to think about how to create a 21st-century car company. Much had changed since Ford sold Think: Global warming was dominating the headlines, the Iraq war had Americans on edge about energy security, and governments were beginning to provide generous tax breaks for electric cars.

"We felt it would be more fun and more profitable to think radically different," Willums says.

One week after his offer for Think was accepted in March 2006, Willums happened to be in Berkeley, where he hooked up with Joel Makower, a well-connected Bay Area green business consultant. Through contacts at Google, Makower arranged for Think to hold a brainstorming session at the Googleplex in Mountain View.

The question on the table, Makower says, was this: "If you could build a car company from the ground up, with all we know about the Web and mass customization and social responsibility and localization and sustainability and viral marketing, what would that look like?"

Think's factory in the rural town of Aurskog is more reminiscent of Ikea than of Henry Ford, with its louvered wood exterior, bright open spaces, and shiny surfaces. There's nary a drop of oil or smudge of grease on the factory floor. This is an assembly plant, and the company puts together the Think City much the way a child builds a model car.

"It's a rather low investment," says Think managing director Ole Fretheim. "We can put up new factories quite easily."

He points to the black steel chassis of a City standing on a nearby pallet; it's shipped preassembled from Thailand. At one station, workers attach the car's aluminum frame -- made in Denmark -- and drop in a French motor. At another station, prefabricated rust-and dent-resistant polymer-plastic body panels produced in Turkey are hung on the frame of a nearly completed car.

The modular design means that Think can change body styles -- a prototype of a sporty convertible is parked in one corner of the factory -- without major retooling. It also means that Think can set up shop near its primary markets so it doesn't have to export the finished cars. ...

But better batteries are only the beginning. If Dean Kamen has his way, the Think will change our relationship with the energy grid itself.

When I reach the top of a winding driveway leading to Westwind, Kamen's estate outside Manchester, N.H., I'm greeted by an employee rolling along on a Segway. Then Kamen, dressed in jeans and short sleeves, a smartphone holstered on his hip, comes whipping around a corner on a small black motorcycle that sounds like the starship Enterprise going to warp factor 8. It's an electric scooter equipped with a Stirling heat engine that is charging the vehicle's battery, providing virtually greenhouse-gas-free travel.

The iconoclastic inventor, who made his first fortune developing medical devices, has spent more than $40 million creating Stirling engines that can tap almost any fuel source, from restaurant grease to cow dung. He wants to equip the City with one, extending its range by hundreds of miles.

Kamen met Willums about a year ago and later visited Think in Norway. "He's a fun, gregarious, good guy," Kamen says. "Next thing I know, I'm getting sucked into this, and he's sending me a car, and -- son of a bitch -- I've got this car here and I'm putting a Stirling engine in!"

The navy-blue City is parked next to a 1913 Model T and an 1898 steam-driven car. Kamen opens a panel in the floor of the City's cargo area to reveal a silver cylindrical object -- a larger version of the Stirling engine that powers his scooter.

"You can plug the car into the wall to charge the batteries, or you can plug into this," Kamen says, noting that when it's connected to the City, his Stirling engine will meet indoor air-quality standards.

Kamen takes the City for a drive. "This little sucker will move," he says, talking a mile a minute as he accelerates past his wind turbine and down a hill. Right now this is just a hobby for the inventor, but Kamen thinks the car could be the killer app to move toward his vision of the future: mass-produced Stirling engines powering the world's off-the-grid villages.

If Kamen makes the Stirling work in an electric vehicle, Willums will get another power plant for his open-source car and a way to overcome drivers' fears that they'll run out of electrons in the middle of nowhere.

And that's just the start. Both men see the City as part of a network of mobile generators that can draw energy from the power grid and send electricity back during periods of peak demand. "If you have enough Thinks out there, you would literally change the architecture of the grid," Kamen says.

But for that to happen, you need a partner accustomed to managing vast amounts of data over global networks, a company like the one run by Kamen's pals Brin and Page. A couple of days after my visit to his New Hampshire home, Kamen flies to California to have dinner with the Google guys, carrying the schematics of his Think/Stirling hybrid.

"They're interested," Kamen tells me the next week. "Sergey loved his old Think. He's way enthusiastic about the new car."
Go green. Get rich

Brin and Page took the first step toward Googling the grid on a sunny day in June when the search giant unveiled the vehicle-to-grid charging stations it had built with PG&E in a solar-panel-covered carport at the Googleplex.

While a gaggle of reporters looked on, Brin plugged a retractable power cord into a converted Toyota Prius. When he pressed a key on a laptop, a wireless signal instructed the car to send electricity stored in its battery back to PG&E. "People haven't been thinking of this on a large scale," Page says. "If you have a million of these cars, or tens of millions, it'll have a huge impact."

Wonkette has one from their Department of Political Assassinations - "Who Ordered the Execution of NFL/Army Hero Pat Tillman ?".

It’s almost too depressing to mention again, but let’s recap the Pat Tillman revelations from Army medical examiners and internal Pentagon reports released last week and find out what happens when famous football stars turned Army Heroes become anti-war critics:

* He was shot three times in the forehead at close range with an American M-16.
* This was after he was shot in the chest, legs and hand.
* And this was after he screamed to the “friendlies” that he was Pat Tillman and please stop shooting him.
* But they didn’t; they executed him.
* They were Americans.
* There wasn’t even an “enemy” around; not only was nobody shot by “enemy fire,” no equipment was shot by “enemy fire.”
* “Members of Tillman’s unit burned his body armor and uniform in an apparent attempt to hide the fact that he was killed by friendly fire.”
* Army medical examiners tried to get a criminal investigation opened, but they were shut down.
* The Army brass who conspired to shut down any criminal investigation into the U.S. assassination of Pat Tillman sent “congratulatory e-mails” to each other after shutting down the snoops.
* The Pentagon heavily promoted Tillman’s enlistment and service as both a recruitment tool and a domestic propaganda tool.
* The Pentagon maintained for long after his murder that Tillman died in combat, finally admitting to his family that “friendly fire” killed him — which wasn’t exactly true, either.
* Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Kauzlarich, who commanded Tillman’s base in Afghanistan at the time of his assassination, dismissed Tillman’s family’s attempts to find out what happened. Why? Because Pat Tillman was an atheist, like his family, so they were having “a hard time letting it go.”
* In his writings — Tillman wrote constantly in letters and diaries and e-mails — the NFL star who became an Army Ranger after 9/11 had concluded the Afghanistan War was fake and the Iraq War was a criminal setup.
* The Pentagon still has his diary that he kept with him in Afghanistan, where he was killed, and they won’t release it to his family.
* Tillman had even arranged a meeting with anti-war icon Noam Chomsky about how to go public with a veterans-against-the-war movement.
* Such a movement would’ve had an interesting effect on the Iraq Occupation and the then-upcoming 2004 election; Tillman had already been encouraging his fellow soldiers to vote against Bush.
* Just today, Donald Rumsfeld refused to testify on the subject of Tillman’s assassination before Congress on Wednesday.
* White House Counsel Fred Fielding has, of course, already “refused to issue certain documents to the committee because of executive privilege.”
* What is the White House doing with “certain documents” about Pat Tillman’s murder?
* Says Pat Tillman Sr.: “The administration clearly was using this case for its own political reasons. This cover-up started within minutes of Pat’s death, and it started at high levels. This is not something that people in the field do.”

Links:

* The Australian - Quake ignites global gas demand. The link I couldn't find yesterday.
* The Australian - Woodside sweetens LA LNG deal
* Egoli - Origin Energy Shares Rally on Massive Reserves Upgrade
* TOD Europe - Interview with Jean Laherrère
* WorldChanging - Meet the New Yard: Tropical Plants, Invasive Species and Drunken Trees
* Environmental Science & Technology - Rethinking biochar
* SMH - Iraqi MPs ignore strife for holidays. Still haven't handed over the oil and now the sneaky buggers have all snuck away on holidays for a month or so. That "benchmark" of Bush's is looking a little shaky. The 2 weeks in September after they all get back from holidays is going to be interesting - I wonder what sort of arm twisting is going to be happening...
* TomDispatch - Benchmarking Iraq for Disaster
* Huffington Post - The Cheney and Petraeus Show
* Alternet - Chomsky: There Will Be a Cold War Between Iran and the U.S.
* Open The Future - A Resolute Condoleezza Rice. "I'm a terrible long-term planner"
* PeakOil.com - Big Oil and Big Media vs. Venezuela
* ZDNet - Do antivirus apps ignore US government spyware?. Big brother is watching you.
* Bruce Schneier - Conversation with Kip Hawley, TSA Administrator - 1 2 3 4 5. While a well marketed version of 1984 is the model I usually use when I think of our new police states, I do occasionally wonder if the movie "Brazil" is a better metaphor for what has happened to us. Maybe these guys aren't crazed totalitarians - they are just paranoid and inept fools. Either way, if this guy's lips are moving, he is probably lying...
* Totse - I Can See the fnords!
* Frogview - Mother Of The Year. How to cure a Tiger of depression.