blogwatch
29 Sep 2008
Brave New Energy
Many types of renewable energy are fast becoming mainstream. Now meet some that aren't – yet
At the same time that the US Congress is approving the US$700 billion (AU$840 billion) bailout for the finance sector which may or may not work, the Centre for American Progress has released a report which argues that if the US were to invest just $100 billion dollars over two years in six key areas of green and sustainable development — including advanced biofuels — the result would be the creation of 2 million "high-paying" jobs across nearly all sectors of employment.With this in mind, it seems like the right time to get excited again about renewable energy. Zero-emission energy is (like, actually IS) the future. As this fact becomes more obvious to more people, we thought it might be a good time to explore further, beyond even the proven alternatives that we already know will work, like wind, solar and tidal. This week in Blogwatch we take a look at the most inspiring, bizarre and potentially game-changing technologies in the world of renewable energy.
The Sahara Forest Project has grabbed our attention. The technology combines "Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) and Seawater Greenhouses, to produce renewable energy, water and food in an area of desert known to be one of the hottest places on earth." The revelatory part of this project is that the two technologies "are being used together in the same place, to support each other and optimize their operating capacities to produce energy and water and by proxy vegetation."
This remarkable project will cover 20 hectares of land at a surprisingly modest cost of 80 million euros, and is capable of not only producing some greenery but also significant electricity output — which has caught the attention of investors in Kuwait, Oman, the UAE and France.
The project is an extreme test for technology which the team hopes will be used in areas which have suffered deforestation and the exhaustion of water resources, and it works best in hot climates. Besides all that, it just sounds so cool. (And on the subject of "eco architecture porn" have a look at the new California Academy of Sciences, here.)
Less glamorous perhaps, but just as curious, is the role some people are seeing for algae in reducing carbon emissions from breweries, coal fired power stations (if any survive) or ethanol plants. As they say at Pigs will Fly blog, "All living plants convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, but the difference with algae is that it grows much faster and thrives in a carbon dioxide rich stream of emissions," this has "the ability to convert up to 85 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions [from a coal power plant] into oxygen". (Thanks to newmatilda.com reader "ecoeng" for adding this link on the site last week.)
The stored carbon can then be converted into biofeuls which mimic crude oil or even diesel depending on the species and processes used. The usefulness of the algae doesn't end there, as "residual protein left over after the oil has been extracted can be converted into fishmeal or other feed for livestock...Fishmeal sells for $1200 a tonne...even more than the price of biodiesel. Algae doesn't compete with food sources, it creates them."
Of course, with some of these methods you're still releasing carbon, but there are others innovation that are re-using old principals in emissions-free new ways. One of the most remarkable of these is a generator that resembles biplanes strapped to telegraph poles.
This alternative to wind turbines, named WindWings, uses the same principals as aeronautics, with the wind lifting the wings, whose movement generates electricity. It is a "more efficient energy generator than the propeller turbine (converting 40-60 per cent of wind energy compared to 5 per cent for conventional turbines)," and each costs about one tenth the price of its conventional cousin, according to The Renewable Minute.
The Energy Blog has discovered that the American Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has been working on another solution.
The team will bombard a gold cylinder the size of a ball bearing containing a pocket of hydrogen isotopes "with 192 laser beams simultaneously (containing a total of 1.8 million joules of energy, about 500 trillion watts) for a few billionths of a second", that is 1000 times the generating power of every power plant in the United States bombarding the golden capsule in an instant. The hydrogen isotopes will heat up, fusion will occur, creating a fleeting "miniature star" generating heat "far hotter than the surface of the sun" according to director Ed Moses.
Critics though, believe that fusion may not be a viable energy source, and that US Government investment in the project may more about studying nuclear reactions without detonating a nuclear weapon — a shrewd circumvention of nuclear testing treaties.
Kevin Rudd's $100 million to fund "clean coal" may (or may not) improve the carbon emissions for old technology but many of the new technologies out there are aimed at avoiding these traditional energy sources altogether. This includes an enormous range of ways to more efficiently use the power we're generating. Al Gore has repeated his recommendation of an electranet which encourages home owners and local communities to generate their own power and put excess and unused power back into the grid. Interestingly, Gore has also called for civil disobedience to stop construction of new coal fired plants.
Meanwhile Fort Atkinson School District in Madison, Wisconsin, is currently using geothermal energy. This has been a saving of $40,000 in the past year and a saving of $80,000 is expected this year whilst heating and cooling the school with a geothermal well running below the football field (the swim team's swimming pool is heated using solar panels).
For those playing at home, you can start today by building a solar powered computer.
And finally, as Nathan "Broom-broom" Rees tries to convince debt-ridden NSW to spend $90 million on a V8 racing car competition at Sydney's Olympic Park, perhaps he could do worse than suggest the race goes ahead but for sustainable vehicles only.
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And while all of this whizz-bang technology is being developed, the federal government could be pumping funds into the planting of forests on Aboriginal nads (and by Aboriginal people) to suck the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in the first instance, train Aboriginal people in saw-milling, veneer-fabrication, cabinet- and furniture-making and all the acillary professions (accounting, management, human resource development and mangement, forestry management, etc.)
And we could be talking about planting forsts on a vast scale, ten thousand square kilometres (a million hectares) per year. Across a thousand Aboriginal communities ? Why not ?
Now that there are well over twenty two thousand Indigenous university graduates across Australia, and another fifteen hundred every year, why not assume that some of them may want to go to Indigenous communities, even if they have not come from them, and contribute to their development ? Why not assume that self-determination include economic self-determination ? And productive economic self-determination ?
Yet again, Aboriginal people will save the planet, as they did for forty thousand years !
Joe
Joe, how do tree plantations provide alternative energy?
You can already get grants to plant trees, is there some conspiracy stopping indigenous communities from doing this? Alternatively you can get a carbon offset company to plant trees for you.
Why don’t you actually post a comment related to the article rather than completely divert the discussion to a different topic? Oh, you’ve already done that… again.
Perhaps we could have that car race in Sydney with all the Toyota Camry hybrids Rudd promised to fund in Victoria, what ever happened to that?
Sorry Rachel, I guess in some weird way, I saw some vague connection between finding alternative forms of energy generation, and reduction in greenhouse gases. Sorry, I don’t know what came over me.
Joe
I’m not a scientist but I’m pretty sure you can’t power a house or a car by reducing green house gases with trees. We actually need to reduce green house gas and use renewable/carbon neutral energy. We’re kind of past just planting trees to stop global warming.
Here’s something practical :
One of the energy wasters in households are mobile phones and computers. Why ?
Because you take a big high flow pipe (240v @ 10 amp) and squeeze it down to around 3-5v at a few hundred milliamp (through a transformer dumping the excess as heat e.g a laptop charger/power supply). Intrinsically wasteful.
Here’s and alternative :
http://www.rpc.com.au/catalog/sundaya-starter-p-2585.html
combined with car style charging accessories for phones and laptops.
Certainly not a big saving , but households will only ever represent small incremental savings , industry is the big consumer.
Besides try and convince someone not to use there reverse cycle air conditioner.
Rees,
He thinks being Green is off the planet I think this guy is off with the fairies. Approving this kind of race in these times in Sydney a place that is struggling to make ends meet and then bowling over 140 trees. He has no brains. He hasnt got a clue what carbon capture is all about ieven if it is small. The people min that area really need to ramp up their opposition to this I think.
fluff4
Sydney hosting ANOTHER car race?
They " govt" hasn’t enough to contend with? Reads like "the roman circus’" Has NSW IQ gone to the dogs and need such a circus to entertain the Masses? Prevent revolution, I’m dreaming.
They’re a bloody disgrace a pox on their houses.
fluff4
1. Joe’s forests proposal is a good one - we actually do need to sequester CO2 as well as reduce greenhouse gases. It won’t solve the problem by itself, but it will buy us a little time to get greenhouse gases down. The trick is we need to plant trees across the North on a vast scale, and pretty quickly, and they need to be plantation forests so we harvest and sequester the wood (wood products, biochar to plough into soils, etc) after it’s initial fast growing and fast CO2 consumption phase, and then do it again and again. It would indeed create a lot of jobs in regional areas; we just need a carbon price for plantations, which is proving elusive.
2. But we need eveything else just as quickly. The scale of reductions and sequestration (which doesn’t just mean carbon capture and storage) we have to achieve is massive, and the longer we leave it, as we are doing in Australia, the steeper the cuts we have to make.
3. The Sahara project mentioned above is in fact pretty mainstream and will probably happen. We needs hundreds of these. Sarkozy in France is championing a large EU-proposed program of integrated solar projects in North Africa and around the Mediterannean, and the related DC grid under the Med required to export energy to Europe. One of the reasons it’s attractive is that, under climate change projections, solar energy intensity in North Africa gets higher and higher. It’s meant to be on top of distributed renewable energy projects around Europe.
There are no silver bullets; the scale of the problem is such that we need pretty well every option possible being executed quickly. Or else we give up, as James Lovelock and a new report this week from the UK Govt’s Tyndall Centre has suggested - that it now looks so unlikely the world will get its act together we might be better planning for the catastrophe’s that await us ….
Sean
Sorry Sean, I disagree with "the scale of the problem is such that we need pretty well every option possible being executed quickly".
Here’s my favourite phrase for every proposed activity from technologists, politicians, anybody in fact:
"Is this the best solution to an important problem". And global warming is, to me, not an important problem; it is THE important problem.
We actually don’t really have the time and money to spend too long on obscure and unproductive activities. I have decided to give up trying to harness the hot air rising over the federal opposition benches, for example, no matter how attractive the idea seemed.
So what IS the best solution, or rather, what are the few likely winners? To answer that, you need to match the scale of the energy we are using to the scale of the renewable and GHG-free alternatives. Same idea as if you have lost your $100,000/year job and are looking for alternatives. That $4000/year paper round will get you a morning walk and a bit of fresh air, but it isn’t even going to pay the grocer.
Much as I am sick of the phrase, the elephant in the room HAS to be solar thermal. In 2004, it is estimated the whole of humanity used about 17 terawatts (17,000,000 megawatts). Well, the sun delivers a bit more; about 174,000 terawatts. Catch 0.01% of that, then.
OK, lots of issues. We need electricity; solar thermal can do that, and YES, John Howard (who?) it CAN do base load, by thermal overnight storage. Yes, solar PV (photovoltaic) can capture solar as electrical, but there’s still a bucket load of cost and efficiency work to go, and on related battery work.
Yes, wind has a contribution to make, but some estimates put wind (which is solar-generated) at ~0.25% of solar energy. But don’t forget the massive energy (gas-fired at present) to make the tons of cement to make the towers.
Yes, there is some potential for geothermal in a few places, but don’t forget that estimates place this energy source as oozing about 50 terawatts out of the entire earth’s surface, most of which is ocean. It is impossible to catch more than a tiny fraction of that. In fact, most GT projects will mine energy stored in hot rocks, rather than capture renewable energy. Eventually, most GT projects will wind down after several decades.
Yes, tidal and wave energy projects will bring a return in a few locations. There is a proven 1/4 gigawatt station in Rance, Brittany, that has been serving for decades. How come there are so few others? King Sound, Darby, in WA looks very attractive at first glance, but it has a SWAG of environmental issues.
The only direct renewables are solar, geothermal, and tidal. Everything else is indirect (eg wind) or long term stored (eg coal, oil, gas) with GHG issues.
Solar is HUGELY the biggest renewable source. Focus focus focus.
And clean coal? Hang on, I’ll check that out with the little experts who live at the bottom of my garden.
Rachel,
Of course, of course, of course, a multitude of other actions besides just planting trees- but planting vast plantations of mallee and mulga across the North, Aboriginal people being employed to plant them across Aboriginal land in vast numbers, would be a relatively low-cost option with a relatively short implementation time, a couple of years to get nurseries up and running and the first batches of 25cm trees ready to plant out. Of course, get into wind and solar power, of course, but reforestation as well.
I guess I have other motives in proposing vast plantations on Aboriginal land, planted by Aboriginal people - the trees would belong to the Aboriginal communities, to be harveasted by them down the track, perhaps forming the solid foundation for miling, cabinet-making and other related industries. If this option was taken up, there would not have t obe a single unemployed able-bodied Aboriginal person in the country, urban, rural or remote. And the point is that they would have a huge capital base. Win-win-win !
Joe
To join a few dots from njsharp’s observations solar thermal is certainly the most important technology :
http://www.shpegs.org/
Important to remember that current projects are pioneering efforts . For example the work geodynamics and paratherm are doing on hot fractured rock geothermal , initially uses just the hot water resource , the next stage is outlined on the shpegs site which extends the use of that resource considerably.
Lack of leadership and the amount of captial best raised by governments are holding back renewables .
(or are people still convinced private equity markets are best for capital raising ) :)
Joe’s idea is not only a good one, it’s a sensible one.
It’s logical to attempt to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere by creating as many carbon sinks as is possible. To grow trees is one way of creating a long-term carbon sink.
And business and industry should be encouraged to trade or invest in the creation of forest or bush carbon sinks to reduce their Emissions Tax.
However, due to the speed of acceleration in the daily production of CO2, I would suggest that the fastest growing plants (like flax and hemp) were also used to cope with the intermediate stages (before clean energy alternatives have taken over from coal-fired power stations) to offset fast-rising CO2 emissions.
It also seems that with most of these possible solutions to our pollution and biospheric/atmospheric, chemical and temperature imbalances, it’s back to ‘mother nature’ for inspiration and answers.
Thanks Denise, yes, grow hemp and flax as well wherever they can be grown in broad acres, any sort of crop whic hwill soak up carbon quickly and NOT be processed or used in forms which put that carbon back into the atmosphere. So grow timber to be used (forty years from now) in furniture or building materials, grow hemp and flax for clothing, etc. My interest is in how Aboriginal people can grow those sorts of things on a vast scale and thereby provide employment and secure incomes, PLUS create a long-term economic and capital base, PLUS stay on their land if they wish in prosperity, PLUS take up carbon from the atmosphere. Wins all rond !
Cheers,
Joe
douglas jones
Has no enthusiasm been aroused for Pyrolysis?
Burning in an atmosphere low in O2 carbon containing material, including all our current biological waste, producing gas which can be used to power the process producing charcoal. This sequesters CO2 for years (>1000) which applied to soil does wonders according to research even increasing yield and retaining some N oxides pesticides and more. Added to the soil C which in Australia and elsewhere has been reduced markedly. See the latest quarterly easy by Tim Flannery.