Guest post by Thomas Fuller
Although I’m a big fan of solar power and think it has a bright future, I must admit that our focus on the Big Three renewable energy sources–solar, wind and biofuels–has been a wasted opportunity, if not a waste of money.
The orientation of our policies to favor the adoption of The Big Three have led to our ignoring proven technologies that could have had an immediate impact and lessened not only our emissions, but reduced our gas bills as well.
The biggest example is with combined heat and power (CHP), also known as cogeneration. Amazingly, this technology that many people have never heard of produces 9% of the world’s primary energy. Here in the States it produces 7% of our energy. But in countries like Finland and Denmark, it produces up to 40% of all energy.
CHP is the simplest idea in the world. A typical power plant producing electricity wastes about 65% of the fuel it burns. CHP plants capture the heat released and put it to good work, heating buildings or even cooling them with the right configuration. It takes the efficiency of the plant from 35% up to as much as 80% in some cases. The very first power plant built in America was a CHP plant, built in New York. Continuing in that tradition, New York’s Con Edison heats 100,000 buildings with district heating powered by CHP.
CHP gets little attention from environmentalists, because it is powered (mostly) by fossil fuels. Most new facilities use natural gas for fuel, but CHP is pretty agnostic about fuel. I say mostly because there are new CHP plants being fueled by wood pellets, which (Ta-da!) makes it renewable.
But we produce less energy today from CHP than we did ten years ago. If we had focused on CHP instead of wind power (which is really starting to annoy me–and a lot of others, I think), and had built our capacity to the level of some Nordic countries, we would already today be close to the level of emission reductions President Obama promised the world we’d reach by 2020. And there’s a whole lot of money we wouldn’t have spent on fuel that we could have spent on other things.
CHP won’t solve all our problems. It is more economically viable in colder regions with expensive energy prices that make the capital investment more attractive, so unless we subsidized it the way we do solar and wind take-up would be slower than ideal. But in the U.S. it is not currently treated like other energy efficiency and renewable energy schemes, with tax breaks and feed-in tariffs and obligated purchases.
So the technology that we know works well, has done wonders in other parts of the world, and could make an immediate difference to our pocketbooks and our emissions is being neglected. While wind turbines are getting more expensive, taking more land and generally turning into a nuisance.
Where are our priorities?
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Efficiency, yes but who defines it. Look at the picture of the Thanet 3MW wind turbine, cost according to the report 7.8 million each (dollars/pounds?)
Now it is designed to provide 3 MW, it certainly will not average that. But, say it did, would that make it 100% efficient. I think not.
Alexander Vissers said: “This is a pretty inconsistent view on energy. It suggests to be an assessment of alternative energy sources but instead focusses on efficiency rather than alternatives.”
Mr Fuller is suggesting that, if CO2 reduction is to be a goal, concentrating on alternative energy supplies that are unreliable and/or not cost effective has been done at the expense of CHP which is reliable and cost effective.
CHP is a pragmatic means to reduce fossil fuel consumption where electricity is being generated whereas solar and wind are dogmatic attempts at eliminating fossil fuel consumption. The latter attract ample subsidies which is why they are currently the favoured solution.
@Robuk says:
September 27, 2010 at 5:16 am ‘So the present is the warmest in a thousand years.’
I’m not entirely clear what point you’re trying to make here, so will make no immediate assumptions. What this report says to me is that it was at least as warm, if not a lot warmer, that millennium ago (or thereabouts) and that the present warming is not unusual over historic time (a concept that Mann et al have desperately tried to cover up).
CHP covers a multitude of technology options, which may or may not be appropriate given individual requirements. In the UK, for micro CHP the Baxi Ecogen’s getting more attractive. That’s a gas powered Stirling engine generating heat and electricity. Cost is a little more than a high efficiency gas boiler, but gives you electricity to use or sell.
UK has electricity problems with shortages in some areas. If a business is planning to develop, lack of electricity can add considerable delays/costs while the electricity infrastructure’s upgraded. CHP could be more useful in those situations and something our supermarkets and some datacentres are already doing, eg Sainsburys “..have cut energy bills at the Cromwell Road store by £20,000 per annum and CO2 emissions by nearly 2,000 tonnes a year.” And they get hot water and heating from 2x 210KW CHP units, and don’t need expensive standby-generators and diesel storage to protect against grid failure. That saves money and administration given POL storage generates lots of health and safety paperwork rather than useful energy.
CHP’s getting more popular in London. We have a slight challenge ahead in 2012 with the energy intensive Olympics. Businesses have been told they may face supply disruption. Installing diesel stand-by generators will cost and may not help because there’ll also be a lot of congestion which may delay fuel supplies. CHP systems may make more sense.
Offices may benefit. They need power, heat, cooling and generate a lot of waste. We have expensive recycling schemes and businesses are charged lots of money to dispose of waste. Even more if it’s sensitive waste that needs secure destruction. Installing a CHP system with incineration may help, especially on a business park if costs/benefits can be shared.
Larger scale systems, people assume waste heat goes to a district heating network. Why not a collocated greenhouse, or other business that benefits from free/cheap steam or hot water?
But ‘greens’ seem to hate incineration. Energy must be wasted to sort, collect, transport, sort again and ‘recycle’ into something there’s often no market for. Recovering useful energy by incineration makes more sense. Older incinerators may have been dirty, newer ones are far cleaner and fewer issues with dioxins or furans. But ‘green’ domestic wood burning is probably emitting more of those anyway, especially if people are burning treated wood and domestic waste.
I’ve been a fan of WOW energies idea to use a secondary closed loop generator to recover waste heat & improve sulfur recovery: http://www.wowenergies.com/WOWGen%20Technology.htm
It fits better with the US in the fact that steam pipes are not as useful as more electricity.
Don’t give up too quickly. Didn’t Churchill say that he had great faith in the Yanks to do the right thing, after first trying all the others?
One of my ancestors helped run the Pearl Street Station, so I was thrilled to read this item. Bear in mind, though, that PSS was not an independent structure. It was built into a block of buildings in NYC, simplifying transmission of heat to other structures.
District heating schemes are old hat, bound by proximity and capital outlay. IMHO a rather more cost effective approach would be domestic heat recovery. There is much focus on insulation levels while air-change losses are overlooked or exacerbated. Example in the UK: Regulations mandating mechanical extraction of kitchens and bathrooms, window trickle ventilation, roof space humidity control, chimneys, etc. to the open air. Much of this is the result of outmoded building technology perpetuated by planning authority criteria and building regulation enforcement.
Cogen is an option, but it’s not the most efficient. For campus loads, it provides great flexibility plus the co generation effort. The problem from my side of the room is the difficulty in producing heating and cooling for comfort conditions for multiple people and applications; unless a good deal of planning is used in the layout and discipline used by the operators, the highest and lowest individual loads dictate the energy requirements of the plant.
If we are talking about clean and efficient then why has the Thorium discussion disappeared?
Another electrical co-generator that needs a fresh look is magnetohydrodynamic generator. This technology transforms thermal or kinetic energy directly into electricity and can be coupled with fossil or nuclear power generators to increase electrical power generating efficiencies.
Sorry for being tardy, here is the Thanet link
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/8025148/The-Thanet-wind-farm-will-milk-us-of-billions.html
It makes rather depressing reading unless you are a Swedish windmill maker.
NJ Assembly passed a bill to allow the creation of ‘energy co-ops’ by expanding net metering. CHP was specifically exempted. NY allows net metering for CHP but NJ does not. Its so stupid….
The efficiency of electricity production in a CHP plant is usually about 35 %. In a normal condensing power plant in can be as high as 44 to 46 %. This is mainly because the steam used for heating has to be hot enough, usually at least about 80 C. A condensing power plant doesn’t suffer from this limitation.
By changing to CHP you can save about 25 % of the primary energy. This is a lot, but not as much you could think. The system is working excellent here in Helsinki, where more than 90 % of all buildings is connected to the district heating network:
Some information:
http://helen.fi/sljeng/kaukolampo.html
http://www.energy.rochester.edu/fi/helsinki/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating
CHP has been BAT-technology (Best Awailable Technology) in the past. The total efficiency can be as high as 85 to 90 %. I can be BAT even today in some cases. About half of all buildings in Finland is heated by district heating. The energy is produced mainly in CHP-plants by coal, peat, natural gas and wood. The energy used for district heating yearly is about 30 TWh.
In many cases a better way is to use condensing power plants to produce as much electricity as possible and to use heat pumps for heating. This way the total efficiency can be much more than 100 %, and no district heating network is needed.
David MacKay has a chapter about CHP in his book:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c21/page_145.shtml
JohnL says:
September 27, 2010 at 5:12 am
This approach has been around for more than a century. The challenge is proximity. You can distribute the electricity over a long distance. Not the recovered heat. The large power plant solution only works in a major metro area with a concentrated need for heat and AC. All of those opportunities have been exploited.
The long term solution is distributed power. Ultimately a unit small enough to support a single home.
I’m a big supporter of IPower Energy Systems (ipoweres.com). They build relatively small units that run on anything from natural gas to swamp gas (at a landfill). I’m convinced their engineers could run them on shoe polish if needed. To date they are cost competitive down to the level of a small office building. A single home unit may not be too far off.
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John L., I agree with your message!
Capstone is an impressive supplier of cogen equipment, including microturbine units small enough for a single home:
http://www.capstoneturbine.com/
Both centralized power and heat production are vulnerable to transmission losses….we might be better off with a very distributed generation system using microturbines, burning natural gas. Capstone’s vision was to have every home equipped with a very small microturbine set that would heat water, and run the power meter backwards during off-peak or high-demand times.
However, the Big Coal Industries and their political puppets wouldn’t like this!!
Four words: ground source heat pumps. Otherwise known as solar power generation without using rare-earth metals.
The best argument against subsidising solar and wind energy schemes is that the subsidies assume those are the most useful technologies. In fact, the subsidies just stack the deck against the possibility of more efficient solutions coming through totally new routes instead of through evolution of existing technologies.
Ontario has put a lot of money (Billions $$) into Wind Turbines and other renewables. So far they have provided insignificant amounts of power on an intermittent basis.
See:
http://ontariowindperformance.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/chapter-3-1-powering-ontario/
Smart meters are another issue. They have also had very little effect on demand so far as it is truly difficult to change your life style in our extreme climate that in many areas has a temperature swing from +30 to -30 from summer to winter and in some areas may have temperature swings much greater. We have less extreme areas — particularly on the west coast — but much less need of air conditioning and heating. We have much less opportunity to control discretionary power usage (say air conditioning) than the southern USA.
When I grew up heating and air was through open windows in the summer and a wood or coal fired stove in the winter. The toilet was an outhouse. I now have central air because its better and a lot less work and I don’t have to store or chop or carry my fuel. Replace the current energy source with something as much better as central air over the coal fired stove or fire place or the campfire and if I can afford it I will buy it. Until then don’t make me suffer with half measures that don’t work very will. And why do I no longer have an outhouse. Anyone who has used one and has modern plumbing knows the answer to that. I could go on and on from well water to plowing behind a horse and the work involved in that but you get the picture.
Forget the big, bureaucratic, central-control options.
micro-CHP, for example, from Honda and Freewatt. Depending on local utility costs, it makes financial sense — the relatively cold NE USA seems to be one region.
Or for regional, local institutions, the ultimate renewable energy source — micro-nukes, “nuclear batteries”.
I looked into CHP in the UK. http://www.chpa.co.uk/ The cost is outrageous and would not be paid back in my lifetime. Besides, look at Chris Huhne, the cretin who advocates it. He is such a buffoon. I would not micturate on him, even if he were on fire.
I buy candles from Ikea for both light & heat. They work because really good insulation is not overly expensive and heat saved is heat earned. I don’t dust, because when dust get to be an inch thick it doesn’t seem to get any deeper. I bathe only in summer, whether I need it or not. As for food, I do this. http://paleodiet.com/
As it happens, I am telling as many porkies as Jones & Mann, but you ain’t paying me and I don’t have to tell the truth. What are their exuses? They need the moola. Well, so do we all, but we also have principles. They have nowt, especially not decent reputations.
For what doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world & suffer the loss of his own soul? Matthew 16:26
The Life of Brutus:
Finally, he [Brutus] spoke to Volumnius himself in Greek, reminding him of their student life, and begged him to grasp his sword with him and help him drive home the blow. And when Volumnius refused, and the rest likewise … grasping with both hands the hilt of his naked sword, he fell upon it and died.
No comment.
Earth to Thomas Fuller …… Say Tom; I almost hate to broach the subject; but your “Big Three” there Solar, Wind and Bio-Fuels.
Where do you get “wind” and “bio-fuels” from; well absent the sun of course; that would be solar wouldn’t it.
There are NO renewable energy sources apart from solar; unless of course you regard fossil fuels and geo-thermal as renewables. Well “fossil fuels” coal, petroleum, natural gas; are either solar; or of geologic origin.
But wind/waves/plants/whatever are all forms of renewablew soalr energy; which means they all have that magic 1366 W/m^2 TSI limit on them. (less losses).
You might want to check out WSJ’s 2010 Technology Innovation Awards article, specifically the “Energy” category winners under: The Winners, Category by Category
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703904304575497473735761294.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsFifth
But if by “Solar Power” you mean solar cells here on the surface I have to disagree about their potential. Having followed cell and solar cell systems technology development since their beginnings, and even with the innovation of Enphase Energy’s Microinverter (DC directly to AC as mentioned in the write-up) overall cost to benefit ratios are so negative that the amount of time required to derive the technology required to overcome that deficit is so great, that some other “system” will come into existence first. A system such as:
Space-Based Solar Power (from the same article under the heading- “And Tomorrow’s Winners Will Be…)
“Space solar power could (I predict “will”) transform the Earth’s economy.”
The idea is for satellites in geostationary orbit to collect the sun’s energy and convert it into radio(?) waves for transmission to surface stations, where it will be converted into electricity for local power grids.
Manhattan Beach, Calif.-based Solaren Corp., which last year reached an agreement to sell 200 megawatts of electricity a year to California’s largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric Co., for 15 years, starting in 2016. Solaren says it plans to test key systems and deployments in space in 2014, and launch its Space Solar Power Plant into geostationary orbit in 2016. A competitor, Switzerland-based Space Energy Group, says it hopes to launch a test satellite within three years, assuming it gets expected funding.
However, I do agree that other (numerous) simpler systems have been ignored that if 1/1000th of the amount of money spent on proprietary technology would have been spent on them, would we would even be talking about energy “shortages”? No. But if large sums of money can not be made (or even recovered from development) because the technology is already in existence AND “open source” AND the systems that would use that technology are so easy AND inexpensive to build that anyone could in their backyard….. putting the power companies out of business…. or getting rid of BP, or Shell, or Exxon in the case of a simple vehicle propulsion system….. forget it! Heck, the modern day IC engine is a perfect example of a “created” complexity. And what is the major roadblock to simple systems happening? Do I even have to say it?
“”” hell_is_like_newark says:
September 27, 2010 at 7:09 am
NJ Assembly passed a bill to allow the creation of ‘energy co-ops’ by expanding net metering. CHP was specifically exempted. NY allows net metering for CHP but NJ does not. Its so stupid…. “””
I really like your handle; I once had the distinct privilege of having a flight from New York to San Francisco; that originated from the Newark Airport; following an Electro-Chem Society convention. My flight to SFO didn’t leave till four hours after I had turned in my car at the airport; after having been checked out of my Manhattan hotel at whatever hour that is (11:00).
I waited around the airport for maybe an hour by which time I was all wound up and convinced I was actually in bombed out Berlin.
Finally the heebie jeebies got to me so much, that I went back to the ticket counter with my ticket and asked if I could change my ticket. “Well we don’t have an Earlier flight to SFO” they told me.
So I said to the lady (who was very nice) “Get me on the next plane that leaves this airport going to anywhere else !”
Well I do have a flight to Dallas/Fort worth; that will close up to leave in five minutes and you can catch it at the closest gate just down there.
So I changed the ticket; got on the plane to Dallas; found a connecting flight to SFO and got home 2 1/2 hours before my sheduled arrival from Newark. Never been to NJ ever since.
I have specified and designed systems with Capstone microturbines; while not the answer for all our energy ills, they are very useful. My applications have used waste gas from industrical process that are too dirty to be used for anythingelse and the relatively small size of the turbines makes them perfect for energy capture; however, since it can be claimed they are not “CO2 neutral” I guess those of the AGW crowd aren’t their biggest fans.
CRS DR.
Another major advantage of every home generating its own power, is security. No power stations to knock out or threaten.
The way to go……….