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?
A high school in California several years ago installed a tri-gen system (electric power, heat, and chilled water) using natural gas in three piston engines with each engine driving a generator. Exhaust heat is recovered to make hot water. Hot water does double duty: some goes directly into the school’s hot water heaters for showers and kitchen use, the rest goes to a thermal chiller system. The thermal chiller creates chilled water that is used instead of conventional air conditioning. The school has approximately 100,000 sq. ft. of structures. The thermal chiller rejects heat via a small dedicated cooling tower system.
A significant part of the funding for this installation was from the local utility company.
1. In comparing the efficiency of central utility plants, remember that typically 9% of the electricity produced is lost in transmission. On-site generation does not have these losses. 2. A big problem with on-site chp is that heat and electricity are not necessarily required at the same time. The solution is to parallel with the grid and use the grid as energy storage. 3. Comfort heating is not the only thermal load. Domestic hot water which can be stored is an excellent load even in summer. 4. Small absorption air conditioners are also an excellent thermal load. 5. For high efficiency gas turbines, look to recuperated, intercooled cycles. Ford demonstrated the 705 gas turbine in the sixties at 37%. With today’s technology, it would be 42%.
So many excellent ideas and observations here. I like the look of the capstone microturbines.
I did some more digging on Geothermal, it looks awesome and can be used in a lot of unexpected places.
Seems a typical hole generates 20mw which would cost approx usd 40,000 per day. An expensive hole costs around usd 2,000,000, so payback is 50 days. tie that to super efficient reliable turbines and state of the art generators and you have a powerful package that provides constant power 24/7/365.
Grey,
Just so others don’t get them mixed up, I was talking bore holes for gorund source heat pumps; completely different from the bores for geothermal power. (I don’t want some one thinking I can get them 20 MW out of my A/C system ;)).
[snip – and we don’t care what poison snarkist Ben Lawson has to quip about it ~mod]
Just a note on the big picture: as more efficient uses of natural gas are found, the demand decreases and thus the price. Windmills and solar, however, depend on high natural gas prices in their economics – unless they are to be forever subsidized.
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/windmills-make-cheap-natural-gas.html
“””” Grey Lensman says:
September 28, 2010 at 10:31 am
So many excellent ideas and observations here. I like the look of the capstone microturbines.
I did some more digging on Geothermal, it looks awesome and can be used in a lot of unexpected places.
Seems a typical hole generates 20mw which would cost approx usd 40,000 per day. An expensive hole costs around usd 2,000,000, so payback is 50 days. tie that to super efficient reliable turbines and state of the art generators and you have a powerful package that provides constant power 24/7/365. “””
Hold on there pardner; not so fast.
So you bore a hole in the ground, and hot steam comes zipping out; so you put a lid on it, and hook it up to a well understood Steam Turbine, and there you have it free clean green geo-thermal power. Shut down your dirty nukes and coal, and bore holes in the ground.
Back 50 years ago, they bored a hole in the ground In New Zealand, and got hot steam came zipping out. Well they weren’t too sure if it would still be coming out through the weekend, or into next week, so they just let it fly straight up in the air; what’s a little steam added to the air, even though it is a green house gas.
Well actually they let it run for several years; just to make sure it was for real.
Well it was for real, and you could tell that when you drove by on the main road , because the surrounding countryside had all gone white; because that free clean green hot steam wasn’t quite as clean as they had in mind, and along with the free green hot steam they got a lifetime supply of pumice dust. I suppose that is some kind of limestone rock; and it sprayed all over the place and made it all white, including your car as you went by; everybody needs a new coat of limestone paint on their car.
People complained that this free clean green hot steam was a pain in the A***.
So the engineers decided to fix that by diverting the steam along the ground away from the road, so it wouldn’t gum up anybody’s carburettor.
So they designed and built this whacking great steel curved mirror, that they could put on top of the pipe and direct the steam along the ground. By the way, the noise was something fierce too, and you could tell you were getting close, when you were miles away from the place.
So all they had to do was lift the mirror on a crane and lower it down over the steam and the pipe, and throw a few bolts into some holes and bolt the whole thing in place. Pretty simple operation once you got the plate past the steam so it was going up through the hole.
And they came THIS close to getting all the bolts in place and nicely tightened down with the steam jet now cleverly directed along the ground and away from the road.
Then suddenly Whooosh !! there was their familiar steam jet going straight up in the air again. No it didn’t blow the bolts off and toss the steel mirror aside; that sucker was heavy and about two inches thick of special alloy tough steel.
Another common name for pumice is “grinding powder”, and the energised pumice dust coming out with the free clean green hot steam, simply cut itself a hole through that turning mirror almost as soon as they had the thing set in place.
The steam also had a lot of just hot water in it; which was not so good either.
This is at a place called Wairakei; and it is still there; in fact it is an operating geothermal energy plant. but it took a coon’s age to get that steam under control and get the grinding powder out of it so they could pipe it to some useful generating equipment.
Geothermal is not as simple as just boring a hole in the ground.
Yes a number of places do it successfully; NZ happened to tap into a rather unpleasant supply of steam compared to Iceland and Italy.
Worth doing if you have the right location and the right sort of steam; but it is no panacea.
Thomas,
” If we had focused on CHP instead of wind power (which is really starting to annoy me–and a lot of others, I think)”
Your comment in parenthsesis may be paraphrased by a Briton, such as myself, viz. “which (wind power) has gone straight up my nose, and produced no more than a fart”. That is the sum total of wind power (so-called); no wind, no power, and at a colossal expense to the tax-payer, it being subsidised. Another anomaly, not often mentioned, is that if the prevailing wind is too strong, as often happens in the North Sea for example, then the whole kit and kaboodle has to be shut down, “for safety reasons”. The last phrase is in apostrophes because I cannot be bothered to check with our Elf ‘n Safety jobsworths, but know it to be true.
The Daily Telegraph now suggests that UK is a world exponent in wind power, having installed so many of the white elephants, but also adds that this country does not actually manufacture them, thus spreading the brown envelopes further afield.
What a stench. And it comes not from the Thompson’s feedlot in WA!
Chris
Djozer
Understood and I like heat pumps,
George Smith
Thank you for the crazy story of New Zealand. Typical and a good example of “oh its not so easy”. Well you dont do it that way. Despite the corporate mantra, “Time is Money”. Have they not heard of scrubbers, relative cheap for simple steam. Entrained rasping solids, Use a bit of simple materials science and knowledge. I am an Oil Man for my sins but at least we are taught that if there is a problem, fix it.
There is an agenda here, how many references have you seen to holes running dry, problems, not so easy. Do you think every oil well is a success, dead easy, does not cause major problems.
Look at the Icelandic power stations. Two things grab me, you can use them as art galleries and secondly they are way way too big. A garden shed would do.
“”” Grey Lensman says:
September 28, 2010 at 7:43 pm
Djozer
Understood and I like heat pumps,
George Smith
Thank you for the crazy story of New Zealand. Typical and a good example of “oh its not so easy”. Well you dont do it that way. “””
Well Grey, somewhere in that story, I could swear I said it was about 50 years ago they did that. And yes they did have the experience of Iceland and Italy to guide them.
Evidently those places; specially the Italian site I believe are not recent violent volcano areas; well Iceland is in part. BUt Wairakei is right in the heart of the Rotorua geothermal area that is the Yellowstone park of NZ, and the surrounding land is limestone rock for as far as anyone has been able to drill I think.
To this day the natural geysers still emit pumice along with the steam. So yes they realized once they got into the project that their steam source was a horse of a different color.
I haven’t kept up with the development of the place; but they have not gone around boring holes all over the Wairakei valley to enjoy a lot more of their bonanza.
The scale of these things including the unreal pressures of the gulf deep drilling sites just boggles my mind; and istill can’t comprehend how you guys do that stuff. The idea of tapping into some place that has thwe whole weight of several miles of the earth’s crust pushing down on it; just does not register in my mind.
@ur momisugly Anton September 27, 2010 at 5:06 am:
Yes, with insulating materials presently available. But there is one insulating material that will fix this – except it is taking forever to get to market.
See the following YouTube video, about Maurice Ward and Starlite insulating material, on the UK show “Tomorrow’s World” from 1993:
I saw this back then and wondered what the heck happened to it. Pretty much the same thing that happens to a lot of small inventors: Some large concern wants to get it and give him nothing for it.
Two really good moments:
1. When the guy takes it directly away from the torch and holds it in his hand and says, “…and it feels just a little bit warm.”
2. When he breaks open the egg.
In R&D I worked with some REALLY good insulating materials, and all of them were REALLY REALLY expensive. 20 years ago a cylinder 4″ diameter x 12″ long cost $1300 – and it couldn’t hold a candle to Starlite. I can VERIFY that, YES, you can hold the right material in your hand if it is a good insulator.
Most people think it is temperature that burns you. NOPE. It is heat flow. I have held a 500°C piece of insulating plastic in my bare hand – and didn’t feel a thing – not even warm. And I first ran across that when I worked for a subsidiary of the company that made the space shuttle tiles. I saw a photo of a man holding a red hot shuttle tile in his bare hand. I was stupified. But it is true.
This material – Starlite – would revolutionize much of our world. We assume that heat HAS to be lost. 1 mm of this material would insulate a heating duct against any outside temperature.
For anyone interested, in this mp3 audio
http://www.stevenrinehart.com/uploads/MauriceWard-Starlite.mp3
Ward talks about the travails he has had, working with Boeing and others, where they were trying to rape him and leave him with nothing.
If he can ever get his own terms – 51% of profits – he will deal with any company. Any takers? Before he dies and takes the formula to the grave?
Starlite would allow us so much energy savings, in all KINDS of applications. Along with CHP it would save us maybe 50% of our heat energy used. (A wild guess)