Big Green and the Coming Collapse of Europe

Taken from a previously published article on Al Fin Energy blog

Germany is proceeding along a path that puts it at greater and greater risk of potentially catastrophic power blackouts. Recent changes to German energy infrastructure introduce increasingly dangerous levels of instability which become more and more difficult for power grid managers to control. And the German grid is the power hub of Europe -- if it fails, Europe's grid fails.

Germany is phasing out its nuclear power plants and attempting to replace its infrastructure of baseload power generation with an infrastructure of intermittent unreliable energy sources -- big wind and big solar installations. Germany publicly hopes to provide as much as 50% of its electrical power from wind and solar within the next few decades.

Unfortunately, large power grids grow unstable when big wind and big solar -- intermittent unreliables -- attempt to provide more than 20% of overall power. Going far beyond that level of dependency on intermittent unreliables would place the German gird -- and thus the European grid -- in an untenable position.

More information on the danger of relying on intermittent energy sources
A look at Denmark's unfortunate experience with wind energy (PDF)

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is unrepentant -- and almost boastful -- over her energy plan which commits Germany to invest at least $25 billion to upgrade its power grid.

The high cost of upgrades to the power grid could not come at a worse time for Germany or Europe, already stressed by a banking crisis. But the $25 billion or $30 billion needed to improve the grid systems is only the barest down payment toward the ultimate costs of Merkel's suicidal energy decisions.

Spain was once caught up in the green fantasy of the intermittent unreliables, just like Merkel's Germany. But Spain was forced to admit that it could not afford the green fantasy any longer. Eventually, Germany will be forced to come to the same conclusion. The only question is the price that the German people will have to pay for the stubborn stupidity of its leaders.

Greens are reluctant to admit the problems which intermittent unreliables pose for grid stability, particularly the higher the levels of penetration of the intermittent unreliable sources. But the truth will come out in the most painful ways, and many people will remember who has led them to suffer unnecessarily.

Europe is undergoing a demographic implosion, which is putting increasing -- although still subtle -- pressures on the ability of European nations to maintain technological infrastructures and to pay back large debts. If Europe goes through with this suicidal abandonment of reliable power sources in favour of the intermittent unreliables -- and goes even more deeply in debt in the process -- future generations of Europeans will pay the the price.

Energy Storage: The State of the Art

The state of the art for energy storage leaves a lot to be desired at virtually every scale. Power grids and individual businesses, institutions, and residences are far too vulnerable to power fluctuations and unpredictable outages.

Images via ESA (ht NBF)
For those who are curious about the state of the art, the Electricity Storage Association provides a useful comparison for different methods for electrical energy storage (via Brian Wang).

One significant omission from the ESA list is "Cryonic Energy Storage," which may prove to be the best of the current crop of contenders for now, until "flow batteries" are perfected.

Large -scale stationary applications of electric energy storage can be divided in three major functional categories:

Power Quality. Stored energy, in these applications, is only applied for seconds or less, as needed, to assure continuity of quality power.

Bridging Power. Stored energy, in these applications, is used for seconds to minutes to assure continuity of service when switching from one source of energy generation to another.

Energy Management. Storage media, in these applications, is used to decouple the timing of generation and consumption of electric energy. A typical application is load leveling, which involves the charging of storage when energy cost is low and utilization as needed. This would also enable consumers to be grid-independent for many hours.

Although some storage technologies can function in all application ranges, most options would not be economical to be applied in all three functional categories.

... _ESA

More graphic comparisons from ESA below:

Read the entire ESA comparison sheet for more information.

Cryonic energy storage has far more potential than compressed air storage, given the phase change energies involved.

Among electrical battery storage methods, flow cell batteries are most scalable and versatile in application. Newer approaches to flow cells using more viscous electrolyte media should allow the technology to be used in vehicular power storage applications.

Adapted from an article at Al Fin Energy

"Smart Grid" An Open Door to Hacker Mischief

With the best of intentions, US residential, commercial, and industrial users of electric power are being pushed into an extremely vulnerable situation. With the installation of a "smart meter", your home immediately becomes vulnerable to a malicious hacking attack. Not only could your power be shut off by hackers, but your power use records could be manipulated at will.

Hacking the smart grid is a snap!

Once hackers have access to smart meter codes and programming, they can "talk" to all meters of the same brand over the network. In one simulation, Davis proved that malware set to self-replicate could shut down power for 15,000 homes in 24 hours.

The threat is not just to your home, or to 15,000 homes. The threat is to the entire grid, via self-propagating computer worms that could initiate a cascading power failure over large areas of North America.

Researchers have previously warned that allowing network access to the home opens up a host of security issues. Last year, security firm IOActive found flaws in a smart-meter device that allowed its researchers to insert code into one device and have it spread to others--essentially, injecting a computer worm into a local power network.

"If you could get that meter to talk to its neighbors and those to talk to their neighbors, you could conceptually tell them to turn off and cause a fairly broad power outage," Shaw says. _TR

Chinese spy-hackers have been busy at work, devising ways of breaking into the US power grid's most vulnerable points. The new "smart grid" will only make it easier for them to access every weak area.

Normally, a nation's government would not be so eager to make its citizens and economy so vulnerable to an overseas threat such as Chinese power-hackers. In the case of the Obama-Pelosi reich, however, one can never be sure of the underlying motive. We would like to think the best of our leaders, but the track record of Obama-Pelosi suggests that the current regime is not necessarily looking out for the best interests of North Americans without close O-P connections.

Cross-posted at Al Fin Energy

Chinese Scientists Study to Bring Down US Power Grid

Wang and colleagues at Dalian University of Technology in the Chinese province of Liaoning modelled the US's west-coast grid using publicly available data on how it, and its subnetworks, are connected....Their aim was to examine the potential for cascade failures, where a major power outage in a subnetwork results in power being dumped into an adjacent subnetwork, causing a chain reaction of failures. Where, they wondered, were the weak spots? _NewScientist

An electrical power grid is like a living organism, often delicately balanced between stasis and chaotic activity. Every power grid has its weak points, and those who might wish to bring the grid down -- for whatever reason -- will want to study those weaknesses.

Ian Fells at Newcastle University recommends using Semtex explosive on transmission lines located near a power station, for robust effectiveness in bringing down a power grid. Other enterprising power saboteurs have simply removed the anchoring bolts for the line tower.

Other approaches have included shorting across the different phase lines, shorting out the transformers, and hitting power grid control equipment with an electromagnetic pulse.

Local power outages -- although inconvenient for customers and often expensive to repair for utility companies -- are manageable as long as they are limited in size. Even a larger outage that involved an entire state, province, or region, could be managed over time with assistance from non-involved regions.

A much larger outage that involved multiple regions, including most major cities of North America, would be a hug problem. Particularly since such an attack would almost certainly occur in conjunction with significant conflicts elsewhere on the globe. Such distant conflicts could tie up the US military -- usually one of the first organisations on the scene in a global emergency -- and prevent it from assisting.

Life After Electricity: When Transformers Fail

Large power transformers of 100 MVA or larger can fail singly or en masse. They cost over $2 million each to replace, and can take from 18 months to 24 months to receive a replacement from overseas suppliers. These large transformers begin failing spontaneously after 40 years of service, and a large number of US power transformers date back to the 1960s or earlier. Source

Large power equipment can fail en masse under the assault of an EMP attack or an extreme solar event. An organisation called EMPACT America is holding an EMP conference in Niagara Falls at this time: from Sept 8 2009 through Sept 11 2009. They are discussing ways that the US and Canadian power grids can be hardened against EMP and solar events.

Opinions are divided as to how vulnerable the North American power grid actually is to EMP.

Should some of the roughly 300 transformers that are the backbone of our electrical grid be damaged or destroyed, the interruption to the electrical grid will not be brief. Today, we have few back-ups in place. These large and complex pieces of equipment are all produced overseas and it takes at least a year to take delivery of even one, let alone many.

Dr. William Graham, President Reagan's Science Advisor, estimates that, if the electricity is off in large sections of America (far more than the relatively small part of the country afflicted by Katrina) for as long as a year, the effect will not simply be on the quality of life here. He says as many as nine out of ten of our men, women and children will die from starvation, disease and/or exposure. _CenterforSecurityPolicy

Manufacturers of electrical equipment are a bit more sanguine about the ability of heavy power equipment to withstand power surges of short duration. They are concerned about electronic control systems, however.

External grid monitoring and communication equipment are not normally shielded against EMPs. Advanced meters and syncrophasors are examples of new devices whose microprocessors would be destroyed or damaged by an EMP. Even if the underlying power equipment is operational, an EMP will likely cause failures or misoperation of grid control systems. If remote devices are partially damaged, the central control center may not differentiate between grid fault conditions or misreporting sensors. Special protection systems may deploy inadvertently.

...Some EMP warfare scenarios envision multiple blasts over a short duration. Many fault reclosers are designed to "lock out" if several faults occur rapidly, such as four trips in three minutes. Since an EMP affects all devices over a wide geographic area, multiple EMPs could lock out a large number of reclosers, resulting in islanded areas or lost load. Restoration of transmission paths would require cumbersome manual switching, especially if remote communications are also interrupted. _NEMAblog

There are many ways in which the 3 stages of an EMP could shut down power to part or all of a utilities service area. Your electrical power utility is vulnerable. The question is how long should you expect to be without power, should the EMP scenario ever occur in reality.

Of course, that depends upon how well hardened your utility's power equipment is, and how well prepared the utility is for inevitable failures of electronic control systems. If failures are limited to electronic circuits, and the utility is well-stocked with electronic control replacement parts, re-start may take only a matter of several days to several weeks.

If larger electrical equipment is damaged, the power outage could last for months to years, while awaiting expensive replacements from overseas.

How would you like to live in a city without electricity for a year or two? What if your entire state, province, or region were affected? What if most of North America were without power for weeks, months, or years? What do you think would happen to you and those around you?

Here is one scenario

150 W/cm2? Energy from Waste Heat Revolution

Image Source

Most of the energy from combustion processes such as an automobile's engine, is lost as heat. It seems a lot of waste to pump or dig fuels from the ground, only to lose most of the energy to the atmosphere as waste heat. Consequently, around the world engineers, scientists, and technologists are scrambling to find better ways to re-capture the huge mass of energy that is going missing every year.

Thermoelectrics is a growing and revolutionary method of redeeming waste heat to electricity -- analogous to photovoltaics except converting heat to electron flow rather than light. Brian Westenhaus brings us up to date on Nextreme Thermal, a company at the forefront of efficient thermoelectric conversion.

The thermoelectric field is gathering momentum and increasing efficiency. Many manufacturers are attending to this technology, as it requires no moving parts so the durability and miniaturization prospects look quite good.

For many heat producing power generation kits the excess heat is a nuisance, expensive to dispense with and money simply lost into things like rivers, the atmosphere and simply radiated away warming anything nearby which can be even more expense. From huge power installations generating electricity to automobiles thermoelectric on to microelectronics, thermoelectric conversion should find welcoming places. In the U.S. and Europe automakers from GM to BMW express enthusiasm for the technology to add to the electric output and reduce fuel requirements.

...The breakthrough product seems to be the Thermal Copper Pillar Bump (CPB) design that has applications in electronics where the technology can be used to cool and recover heat back into power. A highly desired goal is application in PC data centers where the operating costs for power to cool the electronics exceeds the power to process the data.

How good have they managed to get? A temperature difference of 60ºC has been achieved across the 60 µm (0.06 mm) high Nextreme CPB by running an electrical current through it. The Nextreme CPB demonstrated maximum power pumping capabilities exceeding 150 W/cm2. When subjected to heat the Nextreme CPB has demonstrated the capability to generate up to 10 mW of power per bump.

150 W/cm2 . . . That seems like a lot of power from a differential of 60ºC. Things are coming along faster than I had expected. _NewEnergyandFuel

Here is another look at the growing field of thermoelectrics, from Brian Wang.

More efficient retrieval and use of waste heat amounts to an energy revolution in its own right. Consider it but one more important piece in the puzzle problem to provide abundant energy to the growing needs of the future.

Cross posted at Al Fin Energy

What Warren Buffett Is Having

Warrent Buffett has purchased Constellation Energy for $4.7 billion in cash.

Billionaire Warren Buffett on Thursday said MidAmerican Energy Co. would buy Constellation Energy Group for $4.7 billion in cash -- a discount of nearly 60% from levels at which the ailing power firm's shares were trading just days ago. _MarketWatch_via_TomNelson

Here is a list of Constellation's energy holdings:

Out of its total 9,614 MW of electric generating capacity in 2005 (0.90% of the U.S. total), Constellation produces 44.2% from nuclear, 28.3% from coal, 13.0% from oil, 8.7% from natural gas, 4.7% from hydroelectricity, 1.2% from biomass, 0.2% from geothermal, and 0.1% from solar. Constellation owns power plants in California, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, and Utah; 59.1% of its generating capacity is in Maryland, and 25.2% is in New York.[3] _Source_via_TomNelson

Looking over the list of energy assetts, fickle wind power is conspicuous by its absence. Wind power is often listed as a great hope of the future--by idiots and airheads like Nancy Pelosi. The Democrats in the US Congress have brought the US to a most perilous and vulnerable energy state.

The recent offshore oil drilling bill is total illusion, meant to impress saps and fools unable to look beneath surface layer news. Yet it is the most that the Democrats have managed to do since they took an iron-fisted control of the Congress almost two years ago. If Obama messiah is elected with a strong Democratic majority in congress, expect US energy to hang by tenuous threads. People such as Buffett may be all that will be left standing between political energy starvation and the people of the US.

The US Democratic Party has fallen into the hands of religious fundamentalists of the faux environmentalist variety--Holy Warmers! Holy warmers believe in human sacrifice to their gods of faux environmentalism, such as climate change and peak oil. By gearing policies around a belief in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, they actually create political peak oil. Holy Warmers specialise in self-fulfilling prophecies, and in falsifying data of the pseudo-scientific variety. Barak Obama is an ideal messiah for Holy Warmers, adored by cultist the world around.

Fortunately, there are places where curious truth seekers can go to understand what is happening behind the media and religious smoke screens blown by politicians and celebrity members of the Holy Warmer Orthodoxy.

Average IQ South Africa: 72 South Africa Declares National Electricity Emergency

South Africa was once the rock of SubSaharan Africa. When Zimbabwe fell apart from incompetent government, there was always South Africa to provide employment, electricity, advanced health care, and other amenities. But reality is catching up to South Africa, as it did to Zimbabwe over a decade ago.

As reported previously here at Al Fin, South Africa's electrical power generation capacity has been stretched to the limits by criminally poor planning at the highest levels.

The government said that power outages would continue for some time: It said it aimed to “minimize… disruptive unplanned outages” and that its measures “will give us much more comfort within a two-year period.”

South African businesses have been crippled by the outages, which usually occur without warning, the AP said.

Neighboring countries Botswana and Namibia, which rely heavily on South African energy exports, have also been badly hit by the disruptions.

The government is proposing the following:

* Promoting solar water heaters and solar-power traffic and street lights.
* Introducing liquefied petroleum gas (LP gas).
* Distributing energy-efficient light bulbs.
* Introducing power rationing.
* Putting pressure on the coal industry, which is exporting its best quality coal, to provide local power stations with a higher quality coal.

Source
Other than output from the California State Government, it is very difficult to imagine a more idiotic list of "solutions" from a supposedly modern industrial country or region. What is South Africa's problem? According to many researchers in human intelligence, a nation with an average population IQ much below 90 cannot maintain a modern industrial technological infrastructure. In some countries, improving health and nutritional levels would raise national IQ significantly. Although heredity strongly impacts IQ, other factors are involved.

In Wikipedia's the IQ and the Wealth of Nations article you can find a tabular portrait of various national population average IQs. Although IQ is not destiny for individuals, for large populations the average IQ is extremely meaningful.
South Africa 72

An earlier Al Fin article explained that some nations can perform "above their weight class" in IQ, if they have a sufficiently talented, market dominant minority. The Smart Fraction Theory discusses that phenomenon. But what happens to such a country when it throws its "smart fraction" out--or removes it from meaningful control of national planning?

The same thing that happened to Zimbabwe and is happening to South Africa. The same thing that happened to Uganda and almost happened to Indonesia.

GNXP's The Coming Collapse of South Africa
Countries such as Haiti, and many sub-Saharan African countries, are perpetually in poverty and violence, as are nations with low population IQs in other parts of the world. Low population IQ correlates well with violence and poverty worldwide. Rather than denying the problem, an enlightened society would address the problem head on. Sadly, science in this area is being suppressed--not by right wing ideologues but by leftist ideologues.

A high technology infrastructure requires abundant energy--including electrical power. The failure of a society--whether in Africa or California--to plan for its future energy needs, is an invitation to future disaster.

For advanced western nations to be able to help the naturally disadvantaged peoples of the world, they have to understand the problems faced by the naturally disadvantaged--and address those problems honestly and directly.

There is currently no educational method, nor nutritional supplements, nor advanced medical procedure, that can make the populations of most the the third world capable of running high technology infrastructures. Perhaps in the next 20 years, such a thing will become possible. I certainly hope so.

For now, we need to deal with what is there, honestly.

Dull Revolutions: HVDC Power Transmission

High voltage DC (HVDC)transmission of electricity has been around since the 1950s. Pioneered by the Swedes, the Swiss, and the Germans, HVDC is more common in Europe than North America. But given the huge advantages of HVDC over HVAC power transmission, expect to see a lot more HVDC projects in this part of the world.

Sea Breeze Power Corp is involved in a project to bring HVDC power across the San Juan de Fuca Strait. The map below shows the Siemens underground/submarine HVDC project to supply power to San Francisco.If you know anything about electricity, you know that high voltage power transmission is more efficient than lower voltage transmission. And since only AC power can be transformed from low to high voltage (for transmission) and back (for residential, commercial, and industrial use), AC has been the "power of choice" for most utilities and transmission companies. But now that power electronics technology is able to rectify and invert AC to DC and back with very high efficiency, we are able to take advantage of the many advantages of HVDC transmission (PDF).

HVDC transmission incurs less than half the I^2R transmission losses that HVAC incurs. HVDC can be more safely and reliably buried underground and laid undersea. HVDC can be used to link large HVAC grids that are not synchronous with each other. And the list goes on and on.

The addition of HT superconducting cable to HVDC would be even better, but we do not need to wait for large scale rollout of superconducting transmission cable to begin experiencing huge savings in our transmission grid. HVDC is a mature technology that can save billions of dollars for electrical utilities and grid systems.

Geothermal--To The Ends of the Earth

Geothermal power has found an unlikely location in Chena Hot Springs, Alaska. Why unlikely? Because Chena's geothermal temperatures only reach 168 degrees F--a temperature generally considered too low for profitable power generation.

When water cooler than 350 F is released from the pressure of a geothermal reservoir, it doesn’t convert to steam efficiently enough to drive a turbine directly. Anything less than 230 F was considered too marginal for the alternative: a binary system that uses water to heat a fluid with a lower boiling point. But that threshold was a product of geography, not technical feasibility, Holdmann realized. A binary system just requires a heat source and sink: 165 F water can produce electricity if the ambient air or surface water temperature is at least 100 degrees lower. While that may be tough to find in the deserts of Nevada, in Alaska cold air and water are abundant resources.

Now all she needed was a plant, built to one important spec: “We need things that work up here,” Holdmann says. “We don’t need a bunch of things that, yeah, you can do in a lab. We need something we can take to a village and use normal people to run it. And run it every day, because we don’t need it only half the time.”...Fortunately, United Technologies Corp. was looking for a partner to collaborate on a pilot project: an air-conditioning unit that had been reverse-engineered to run off geothermal water. Instead of putting in electric power to create areas of high and low temperature, Chena provides the heat differential and the plant puts out electric power.

The technology has the added benefit of solving two remaining hurdles to low-temperature power generation. First, air-conditioning refrigerant operates more efficiently at low temperatures than isopentane and other fluids typically used in power plants. Second, the components are already mass produced, which cuts the cost of a small, modular plant in half....Chena’s two 200-kilowatt modules provide more than enough power for the entire resort and have reduced the cost of electricity from 30 cents a kwh to only 5 cents. With a capital cost of $2.2 million, including exploration and drilling, the project is expected to pay for itself in four to five years.

This fall, Chena and United Technologies received a Department of Energy grant to install a demonstration plant at an oil or gas well in the United States. The nation’s wells produce at least 40 billion barrels of wastewater per year, much of it low to moderate temperature. That’s another 6000 to 11,000 megawatts of potential electricity, according to a study by Southern Methodist University in Texas. “We feel we just need to show that it works,” Holdmann says, “and companies will pick up on it.”___PopularMechanics

The United States is the world leader in geothermal development, with plants producing more than 3,000 megawatts of electricity. California is No. 1, but resources in such other Western states as Nevada, Utah, Idaho and Oregon are being developed. Nevada has been dubbed the "Saudi Arabia of geothermal."

A recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology study found the amount of geothermal power that realistically could be recovered from deep drilling would represent almost 3,000 times the amount of energy consumed in the United States....Petty, who worked on the MIT study, said the intermountain West has emerged as ground zero for geothermal resources. ____Source
New developments in geothermal energy go far beyond geothermal hot springs to "hot dry rock" geothermal power technology. An Australian company, Geodynamics, is helping to blaze the "hot dry rock" energy trail.

Hot dry rock technology was invented to draw energy from deep underground areas where geothermal heat is abundant, but no water exists to carry the heat to the surface. To tap the energy in this hot dry rock, a well is drilled into it and water is injected at high pressure, forming fissures in the rock to create a geothermal "reservoir" consisting of water-impregnated fractured rock. At least one "production" well is then drilled into the reservoir to draw the hot water back to the surface. A completed facility would direct the hot fluid from the production well to a power plant, which would extract the heat from it to produce power, after which the cooled fluid would be injected back into the ground__Technology Newsdaily

Much of the technology for geothermal power development has already been created by the oil and gas industries. Geothermal mining engineers will develop better ways of approaching specific drilling sites as more knowledge and experience with the techniques are accumulated.

The promise of clean, sustainable electric power--which unlike other renewables can be used as baseload power--will be welcomed by most communities that are able to maintain the facilities.

Darkening the Dark Continent: Lights Out!

What do California and South Africa have in common? Neither jurisdiction is willing to upgrade its power generation infrastructure to meet demand--so both jurisdictions are facing serious repercussions and shortages. In the case of South Africa, it is shutting down power to its neighbors, because it cannot generate enough power for its own needs.

South Africa's state-owned electricity company Eskom has stopped supplying power to neighbouring countries because of acute domestic shortages.

Zimbabwe and Mozambique are thought to be the worst affected countries.

A BBC correspondent says the recent daily power cuts have caused chaos and are threatening to have a major impact on South Africa's economy...On Friday, enraged commuters set fire to trains in Pretoria after power cuts caused two-hour train delays...The BBC's Peter Biles in Johannesburg says many small businesses are being crippled by the blackouts.

President Thabo Mbeki on Sunday met Eskom's executives to discuss the power shortages...Mr Mbeki last month admitted the government had been wrong to refuse Eskom's request for more investment in power generation several years ago, reports the AFP news agency..."We were wrong. Eskom was right," Mr Mbeki said.

BBC

Where South Africa leads, can California avoid following? Probably not, given the general atmosphere of immunity from reality exuded by California state government, and by large city governments such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland. Bad government in South Africa, and bad government in California. Different continents, similar results. Lights out?