Solar Endowment

June 10, 2009

Learning last week that an entire sports stadium in Taiwan is to be powered by solar made me dig up an concept from way back in 2003 (when renewables weren't really on the public radar yet) to put solar in a performing arts center project. The only occasionally used public facility is the perfect venue for the net plus facility (net plus being a building that exports power, whereas the zero energy building aims to not import power). Here's the bones of the concept:

Solar-Powered Sports Coliseum Gets Net A-Plus

May 31, 2009

Here's an idea for a power plant: the solar-powered sports coliseum. What if you skinned an entire stadium with solar such that it could satisfy its own ginormous appetite for power when filled with spectators, but when idle (which is usually often) its solar panels could still be at work, making and feeding electricity to the grid? Sports facility as power plant. A colossal idea not likely to be done anytime soon; a rich fantasy beyond the pale.

The Big Payback

May 13, 2009

    

David and Barbara Spires are now enjoying electricity made by solar panels that hang over a shade pergola at the back of their house. In Texas. Where electricity is cheap and you don't see much solar. But with new utility rebates and federal tax credits, solar is starting to make sense in Texas. Here's how David explained their cost:

"Our 3500W system ... cost about $25,000, or about $7.15 per rated watt, including installation.  That's gross costs.  The Oncor rebate amounts to $2.46 per watt, reducing the net to about $16,500.  The federal tax credit of 30% further reduces the net to about $2.60 per watt...about $9,000."

The Wide Angle: Wet Energy

March 09, 2009

The solution is so obvious: water. 

Water, water everywhere. The earth's surface is seventy percent ocean. Half the world lives within fifty miles of (but not on) the oceans. More live near (but not on) lakes and rivers and streams. This represents a lot of energy laden water, located exactly next to people, that is not burdened by terra firma's messy eminent domain issues.

There's a lot of water-borne energy prototyping going on now, seeking to capitalize on the various ways water creates and releases energy:  current, vortex induced vibration, offshore wind (well, wind actually happens above water, but when it does so over the flatness and openness of the ocean, wind gets bigger and thus more attractive), salinity gradient, ocean thermal, wave, tidal.

With all of this going on in the water, could we not cordon off sections of the ocean for energy production, staking out areas best suited to tap water's multiple energy offerings? Imagine an ocean farm with wind turbines and solar panels topside, and hydrokinetic and other water based solutions on and below the surface. The farm's total production curve would be much smoothed by the different things happening at different times: wind blowing, sun shining, tides and currents moving, temperatures differing. Yet the variously contributing energy sources each get to attach to the common, costly structure that anchors them in place, and they each get to ride the same expensive transmission line to the end user (making expensive oceanic structure and transmission, pro rata, less expensive).

Whereas we've been thinking about renewable solutions like solar and wind since the 1973 oil embargo, water based renewable energy solutions are just getting started (see Walt Musial's PowerPoint here). What if a big, fat, juicy solution was there beside us all along, and we're just now catching on that all along we had a big, fat, juicy solution right there beside us?

Photo: Joan Gomez on flickr

Forward Looking Infrastructure

December 23, 2008

   

We're getting ready to do lots of infrastructure. But exactly what "infrastructure" is has become a loosely defined, elastic territory at the critical juncture of being made firm. And while the shovel ready stuff is needed to create jobs quickly, more important for long term success is the transformative undertakings listed below. Some don't create lots of jobs right away, but they don't require as much capital either, and it makes sense to get them (and their big, long lead times) rolling now.

Here are some good bets for infrastructure that could unleash untold (and as of yet unimagined) waves of innovation and progress by creating abundant energy and transport (as computing and the internet created easy, abundant information):

• Smart Grid
• Urban renewables (to include enhanced geothermal)
• More transmission from the sunny, windy and watery places that can produce industrial scale solar and wind power
• Infrastructure needed to implement the Mileage Fee
  • at Gas Stations
  • the standard inclusion of GPS in vehicles
• the Electric Recharge Grid
• Batteries for hybrid and electric vehicles, at production scale
• Electric Rail

Photo: Steve Kelley on flickr

I've Got Some Swampland to Sell You

December 17, 2008

Ever ponder the "swamp" of industrial roofs that stretch to the horizon as you fly into some big city? A wasteland of real estate hung at roof level. Or, maybe instead, a vast, virgin territory to be claimed on the bold frontier of distributed power generation. Utilities like Edison and Duke are rolling out programs where the utility owns and operates photovoltaic (PV) systems, and rents otherwise vacant rooftop real estate from commercial building owners. This rooftop real estate has the uncanny knack of being exactly where electricity is used, while PV has a knack for making electricity exactly when it is needed most (and is thus most expensive to produce).

It appears utilities are driven primarily by state renewable portfolio standards (RPS), not the opportunity to make a buck, but a little time and effort might yield "the hidden economic benefits of making electrical resources the right size" (subtitle of the seminal Small is Profitable, the 2002 Amory Lovins book that delves into 207 reasons why distributed generation makes business sense). Small gets into some pretty arcane stuff, like Reason Number 8: "Smaller, more modular capacity not only ties up less idle capital, but also does so for a shorter time (because the demand can "grow into" the added capacity sooner)" and Reason Number 130: "Distributed resources' reactive current, by improving voltage stability can reduce tapchanger operation on transformers, increasing their lifetime." But amidst the arcanity Small offers big insight into why solar on the roofs of commercial buildings can create economic benefit for utilities.

If utilities can use a Small is Profitable type lens to evaluate the swamp RPS has driven them into, they may find themselves after all in tall cotton.

Photo: Nigel on flickr

Dawn of the New Energy Order

October 26, 2008

How will America change the way it uses energy? Last month we offered a draft speech that would let the new US President to tell us how. Here's the speech updated with the most excellent insights of our readers.

Black Silicon's Accidental Discovery

October 17, 2008

If Dr. Eric Mazur of Harvard had stuck to his original research proposal working with metals, there would have been no great breakthrough. But driven by concerns over funding, Mazur made an important shift, and the rest, as they say, is history. As he told it to the NYT:

I got tired of metals and was worrying that my Army funding would dry up. I wrote the new direction into a research proposal without thinking much about it — I just wrote it in; I don’t know why.

While Black Silicon's final value to mankind remains unknown, it's been poked and prodded (and repeated) enough to prove it's no cold fusion. But like Percy's LeBaron's unintended discovery of the now ubiquitous microwave oven while working on radar, Black Silicon is a happy accident. If it turns out to be the major boost to solar power efficiency some are claiming, we may come to thank our lucky stars that Mazur got metal fatigue.

Photo courtesy of Sergio @ Flickr

A Replacement for Black Gold: Black Silicon

October 13, 2008

It's not going to change the world overnight (though improved night vision is one of its applications).  But by providing a massive boost in light sensitivity over current silicon, this technology has the potential to change everything, including our reliance on oil to power our lives. Check out Massachusetts-based SiOnyx for more info. Or read the article on TreeHugger.

And kudos to Harvard ... here's one new alt energy breakthrough that didn't come from their pocket-protected, 3 letter rival down the street.

Photo courtesy of Eric Mazur, Harvard University

More from Kurzweil @ MIT: Exponential Growth for Solar, Biofuels

September 16, 2008

Dr. Raymond Kurzweil was part of a Sustainable Energy X-Prize kick-off last week at MIT, and used his time on the stage to draw a distinction between systems that undergo linear improvement, vs. those, based on information technologies, that progress exponentially.

He immediately called out what first sprung to folks' minds: Moore's Law and the rate at which CPU processing power doubles (every 18 months or so), but then continued with other familiar examples of exponential growth: magnetic data storage, DNA sequencing costs, DNA sequencing data, internet data, the decrease in size in certain mechanical devices. He noted that not all technologies can become information technologies, but said that medicine is on the verge.

As is solar. Said solar has been doubling both in watts generated and adoption every 2 years, and that this rate was about to increase as nano technology practices transform solar into an information technology. That's good, because he began his talk by reminding us that we need 10,000,000,000,000 watts to power human activities on earth. So that's only 9 more doublings ... piece of cake.

Photo courtesy of Aaron LeMay @ Flickr