Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

michaels

Martyn1981 said:

Yet another 'don't hold your breath' potential wave energy breakthrough. But always worth a quick butcher's, as eventually (maybe!) one will work.

And this one is predicting a cost of generation of less than a penny a kWh (~1c/kWh), which would be great, and whilst we can't in the UK, match the US figures for PV, I suspect we do OK when it comes to coastline and waves ....... though ours do seem to like to destroy wave generation technologies.

At 100MW+ per unit, a lot of alarms are going off, and I appreciate that many will be very sceptical like myself. But I'll keep my fingers crossed and send them my best wishes, but not any hard cash.

SWEL Promises Cleanest, Cheapest Energy Ever — We’ll See

Sea Wave Energy Ltd. (they go by “SWEL,” natch) has spent the better part of the last decade developing a floating, wave-riding generator that the company claims will produce a whole lot of tidal energy for not a whole lot of money.

First shown to the world a few years and recently back in the news, SWEL’s floating wave energy device is called the “Waveline Magnet,” and it’s basically a long, modular chain of plastic floats  that are designed to sit on top of the water, lined up perpendicular to the shore (i.e., directly into the waves). As the waves pass below the Waveline Magnet, the floats follow the contours of the water, creating a sort-of “up and down” serpentine motion in the chains of floats that works on lever arms to drive low-cost electrical generators inside the spine units on both their upward and downward motions.

The best part? Waves are free — and the electricity it produces is nearly free, as well!

“One single Waveline Magnet will be rated at over 100 MW in energetic environments,” said the inventor of the device and SWEL’s CEO, Adam Zakheos, “… we can show how a commercial sized device using our technology will achieve a Levelized Cost of Energy (LCoE) less than 1¢€(US$0.01)/kWh, crushing today’s wave energy industry reference value of 85¢€ (US$0.84)/kWh.”

Even 84 us cents per KWH sounds ok in today's market.

However the reference to tidal in the first paragraph rings alarm bells....

Exiled_Tyke

OK. So we've all known about this for a good while.  But great to see the fact it's fully up and running being covered in national news.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-62731923

Martyn1981

Hopefully competition for batteries will ease in a few years, which should be good news for RE as stationary storage will accelerate. The article even suggests a possible excess of LFP battery materials by 2024+, which would be nice!

Just running with the suggestion here, but that could mean a significant shift in the economics, as we'll have another ~5yrs of development and supply side scaling, reducing costs (from about 2020 when things started to get tight), all kicking in, in a few years. I'll be waiting impatiently.

Competition for battery cells between EV and energy storage sectors to ease from 2024, CEA says  

The construction of battery cell factories catering specifically for stationary energy storage means competition for supply with the electric vehicle (EV) sector will cool off in the next couple of years.

That’s according to Cormac O’Laire, senior manager of market intelligence at Clean Energy Associates (CEA), who said a recent uptick in energy storage system (ESS) battery factories in China will ease the current situation.

EVs are on the rise around the world, with even the US now at a 5% rate of adoption for new car sales. Many governments are encouraging or mandating the phaseout of internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles and the growth in demand means battery suppliers often prioritise higher volume long-term contracts with the automotive industry over ESS sector customers.

However, with renewable energy also growing rapidly around the world signaling a need for more stationary storage on the grid, CEA has tracked plans for Chinese manufacturers to add more than 200GWh of annual ESS-specific battery production capacity.

This is likely to be enough to meet global demand in 2025, O’Laire said, and competition between the EV and ESS sectors for cell supply is expected to ease from 2024 onwards.

gefnew

This is something from the past and his book and videos are great just have a look.
Rationing energy is nothing new for off-grid community - BBC News

Martyn1981

The Carbon Commentary Newsletter from Chris Goodall is back.

Industry news

Things I noticed and thought were interesting

Week ending 4th September 2022
 
1, Vehicle-to-grid. More progress on making V2G a central part of the response to fluctuating electricity supply. In Massachusetts, a transport operator said it had continued its experiment with school buses to return power from batteries to the grid at times of stress. The volumes were small – just 7 MWh over the summer – but the experiment provided power on 32 separate occasions. School buses, with their limited daily travel requirements, central garaging and predictable daily electricity use are a near-perfect fit with V2G. German EV charging specialist The Mobility House told us that it is now directly trading the battery capacity of 4,500 EVs on a European power exchange. This resource gives The Mobility House access to about 100 MW of electricity.
 
2, Textile recycling. Sweden’s Renewcell indicated that the world’s first commercial scale clothes recycling factory had begun operations. Eventual output is expected to be 120,000 tonnes a year. The Renewcell process takes used cellulose-based clothes, principally made from cotton, and processes them into a new form of cellulose fibre which can then be turned into a fabric that is itself recyclable. Is the process truly ‘circular’? This excellent article concludes that it is, with some qualifications. 
 
3, EVs. July data suggests that pure electric cars are now capturing more than 10% of the global market for the first time. Plug-in hybrids add another 4%, although sales of this type of car are clearly faltering. Of the total global registrations of all types of EV, the Chinese supplier BYD has a clear lead with over 20% of sales, more than three times the Tesla share. Over a quarter of all car sales in China are now EV. Globally, 14 out of the top 20 cars are from Chinese brands. 
 
4, Recycling steel and cement. A project attached to Cambridge University seeks to recycle used cement in the electric arc furnaces (EAFs) used to recycle steel. If the technology works, it lays the foundation for fully circular building construction. Concrete is ground up and the aggregates removed, leaving a dust largely composed of cement. This dust is used in the EAF to replace the lime normally used on top of the molten steel and experiments so far have shown that the resulting material can then be directly reused as a replacement for new (and highly carbon intensive) cement made from calcium carbonate. (Thanks to Brian Tyler).
 
5, Solid oxide electrolysers. Another well-respected company moves into electrolyser manufacturing. Denmark’s Topsoe, a global leader in the use of catalysts for difficult chemical processes, wrote that it committed to build a 500 MW factory for the production of solid oxide electrolysers (SOEC), an alternative to PEM and alkaline. SOEC’s advantages include a very high energy efficiency in the conversion of electricity to hydrogen. SOEC needs a source of high temperature heat but this is available from many industrial processes, or at a nuclear power station or a geothermal plant (see note 10), for example. Topsoe said it had pre-orders for 500 MW of equipment and indicated the first factory could be expanded up to 5 MW. The world’s largest electrolyser manufacturer, NEL, has a current plan to expand to 10 MW by mid-decade so Topsoe’s entry may represent a significant potential expansion of global capacity.
 
6, Heat pumps. Stiebel Eltron, a family company with about a quarter of the German heat pump market, said it would invest €1bn in adding new manufacturing capacity. The total turnover of the business was only about €800m last year. German heat pump sales are expected to almost double in 2022 to around 300,000 units and Stiebel Eltron expects to maintain its market share. The German government targets half a million installations a year by 2025, a level which now looks easily attainable and which is less than the current French installation rate. 0.5 million units is roughly equivalent to 1.2% of all homes, suggesting that heat pump sales in Germany may eventually reach well over 1m units a year, creating sales of as much as €10bn.
 
7, Climate tech investments. I wrote on the ‘climate tech’ areas which are growing and raising the most money in Europe based on data from Net Zero Insights. Although the low carbon energy supply sector has the most companies that have raised new cash, other areas such as transport and mobility. have had a much higher percentage businesses gaining new funding. I looked particularly at the vital industries of steel, cement, hydrogen and direct air capture (DAC). Although Europe only has a small number of companies in DAC, most of them raised money in the last 18 months whereas only 9 low carbon steel businesses took in new investment. Better news is that H2 Green Steel, the Swedish start-up, said it had gathered another $190m in funding, mostly from existing investors such as Spotify founder Daniel Ek, and told us that 60% of its expected capacity of 5m tonnes a year has now been pre-sold.
 
8, CCS. Yara became the first business to commit to shipping CO2 across international borders for long term storage. It operates Europe’s largest fertiliser manufacturing plant in the Netherlands using natural gas as the source of the hydrogen. Yara will collect and liquefy the CO2 arising from steam reformation of methane and then ship it by boat to Norway for pipeline transmission to the ‘Northern Lights’ storage project in sandstone 2000 metres underneath the North Sea. Yara said it would store 800,000 tonnes of CO2 a year in this way, about one quarter of the total carbon dioxide produced at its Netherlands plant. Northern Lights plans to have the capacity to store up to 5 million tonnes a year underneath the North Sea. This is a tiny fraction of EU emissions, of course, but the Norwegian project can be expanded in future. I remain sceptical whether it makes sense to use natural gas, with the associated CO2 capture requirement, to make fertiliser rather than using green hydrogen, particularly at current gas prices.
 
9, Germany hydrogen supply. Germany wants an extra 100 terawatt hours of hydrogen by 2030. That’s equivalent to about one sixth of the country’s current electricity use and would require about 30 gigawatts of offshore wind to produce, for example. It is scouring the world for projects to source the gas from. Energy-rich countries from Scotland to Australia have received approaches. This week we saw the Chancellor visit Canada to sign an agreement to deliver hydrogen - probably in the form of ammonia - from Newfoundland wind farms and elsewhere. Separately, gas distributors in Denmark and Germany agreed to construct the pipeline network to bring hydrogen from wind in Denmark and the Baltic into Germany. (The most frequent question I get asked when giving talks about hydrogen is whether the gas can be shipped safely by pipeline. The example of this Denmark to Germany project, which will partly use reconditioned natural gas pipelines, should reassure us).  
 
10, Extracting geothermal energy. Temperatures ten kilometres below the Earth’s surface can reach over 500 degrees centigrade. Accessing this heat is difficult because conventional drilling finds the density of the rocks too high and the temperatures too exacting. An MIT discovery suggests that the very high frequency radio waves used to provide the heat for fusion may offer an alternative to use of a drill. Much experimentation needs to be done but Quaise Energy has raised $62m to drill the deepest holes on earth. Geothermal energy has the advantages of continuous power availability and potentially low costs. (Thank you to Daniel Scharf for pointing me to the New Scientist article on this company).   

michaels

100MW from 4.5k cars gives 22kwh per car.

Now imagine what 10m EVs could achieve for grid balancing / peak shaving...

QrizB

michaels said:

100MW from 4.5k cars gives 22kwh per car.
Now imagine what 10m EVs could achieve for grid balancing / peak shaving...

That's more than balancing, it's an entire virtual power system in parallel with the current one.

220GWh available to discharge at 30GW (3kW per car) would let you meet 3/4s (or more) of the whole UK's typical electricity demand for 7 hours.

Spies

I guess we will find out in another 30 years when the government get their act together. 

QrizB

Spies said:

I guess we will find out in another 30 years when the government get their act together. 

I don't think Government will be taking a lead on this, it'll be the more progressive of the energy companies.

Coastalwatch

While many of us struggle to make a financial case for both PV arrays and battery storage Scottish Water make the announcement below six months after giving notice of proceeding with a 5MW Solar array expected to generate 4GW's annually. It would appear that solar plus storage make great companions, even in northern clime's and it's without doubt that we shall need as much energy storage as we can muster in the coming years ahead. If it's any indication of their financial viability then Gresham House Energy Storage who first raised funding in late 2018 have expanded their portfolio considerably since and their initial £1 shares now trading at £1.72.

This is not a recommendation by the way!

Bluestone submits application for three 69MW BESS projects at Scottish Water sites

Bluestone Energy has submitted three 69MW battery energy storage system (BESS) project proposals for Scottish Water sites in Renfrewshire. Image: Scottish Water.

Bluestone Energy has submitted three 69MW battery energy storage system (BESS) project proposals for Scottish Water sites in Renfrewshire.

The proposals, which have been submitted to the Scottish Government, will be situated at Scottish Water’s Laighpark Waste Water Treatment Works (WWTW), Stanely Water Treatment Works (WTW) and Linwood Waste Water Pumping Station (WWPS).

Should the applications be successful, each site would gain 20 battery energy storage system units providing a combined capacity of 69MW.

“Rapid deployment of flexible assets such as battery energy storage are essential in Scotland delivering net zero by 2045,” said Andy MacPherson, managing director at Bluestone Energy.

“The battery energy storage systems could provide low-cost green electricity to consumers and minimise our demand for imported electricity and gas.”

https://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/news/bluestone_submits_applications_for_three_69mw_bess_projects_at_scottish_wat