Posted by Max Dunn
Wed, 27 Aug 2008 03:35:06 GMT | no comments
It is so incredible it is a little hard to get my brain around. Several months ago, without any fanfare, Nanosolar showed off its new production tool that can produce 1GW (gigawatt) of solar cells per year.
To put this in perspective, most plants produce less than 100 MW (megawatts) per year, less than 1/10 of Nanosolar’s 1GW machine. For instance, here is a Masdar plant being built in Germany that will produce 70MW a year and cost $230 million. So it would take 14 of these plants to equal the output of one of the Nanosolar machines.
The cost of the Nanosolar machine? $1.65 million! This is 2,000 times less than the Masdar plant! (While this is a comparison of a production tool to an entire plant, it is still an astounding difference.)
Posted by Max Dunn
Sat, 23 Aug 2008 04:19:44 GMT | no comments
So how much does it cost to clean the CO2 from a coal-fired electricity power plant? The numbers of FutureGen’s clean-coal project at the 275 MW Matoon Illinois plant gives an indication. The DOE pulled back on the project last December over the concerns of cost overruns that would likely propel FutureGen’s $1.5 billion cost estimate to $1.8 billion or higher.
Let’s look at the numbers here to see how much this carbon capture would cost. Over a 30 year lifetime, if the plant was operating 80% of the time, it would log 210,000 hours (24 * 365 * 30 * 0.8). So the 275 MW (megawatt) plant would produce 58 billion kWh of electricity over this time. (275,000 * 210,000). So the $1.8 billion cost would add about $0.03 to each kWh of electricity produced (1.8 / 58). Since a coal power plant produces electricity at about $0.03 to $0.04 per kWh, this would effectively double the cost of the electricity it produces. And this doesn’t take into account any ongoing costs of sequestering the carbon.
So with all this talk about clean-coal, we have yet to see an implementation of it at a utility scale power plant and it appears that the cost of carbon capture at a coal-fired power plant using today’s technology would make it uneconomical.
Posted by Max Dunn
Fri, 27 Jun 2008 22:45:42 GMT | no comments
There are many ways to distort the truth. One of them is to suggest something as a possibility and then let uncritical minds repeat it as a fact. This is what is happening with Al Gore’s look at a 20 foot sea level rise.
Posted by Max Dunn
Sat, 07 Jun 2008 02:06:37 GMT | no comments
ZOOM: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future by Vijay Vaitheeswaran
I wanted to like this book – I really did. With a name like "Zoom" and the promise to show the car of the future, I was excited to read it. But in the end, the book turned out to be at best a dud, and at worst misleading and harmful to the future of transportation.
Posted by Max Dunn
Sat, 07 Jun 2008 00:24:48 GMT | no comments
Sometimes you will hear that electric vehicles produce more CO2 than gas vehicles, however, this isn’t true. Let’s look at an easy CO2 calculation to see why.
Burning a gallon of gas creates 20 lbs of CO2. So a car that gets an average of 20 MPG produces 1 lb of CO2 per mile. Ok so far?
Electric cars get an average of 3 miles per kWh and 1 kWh creates an average of 1.3 lbs of CO2. So an electric car produces about 0.4 lbs of CO2 per mile. So electric cars produce only about 40% as much CO2 as gas cars. Easy, right?
Posted by Max Dunn
Fri, 30 May 2008 04:10:09 GMT | no comments
There was an interesting talk at the Woods Energy Seminar at Stanford yesterday by Dr. Gavin Conibeer about 3rd generation photovoltaic (PV) devices.
The 1st generation are the PV cells we have now that cost around $6/watt and are around 20% efficient. The 2nd generation are the thin film cells which cost around $1/watt but are only about 12% efficient. The 3rd generation cells will use quantum dot technology created using thin-film manufacturing methods, so they will be a lot less expensive than 1st generation devices but will also use a variety of techniques to boost efficiencies up to 65% which will drive the cost down to $0.20/watt.
This sounds pretty great! However, the catch is that when asked when these 3rd generation PV cells would start going into production, his answer was “It is still a long ways away.”
Posted by Max Dunn
Wed, 28 May 2008 19:47:27 GMT | no comments
All of the major electricity generating systems in use today have a fairly steady output. Whether they are powered by nuclear, coal, hydro or natural gas, the electricity output will be fairly constant unless there is a malfunction. However, solar and wind systems aren’t consistent – clouds can dramatically affect the output of solar systems, and lulls and gusts can affect wind systems.
In our electrical grid, it is important that the supply of electricity consistently matches its demand. This will become more challenging once solar and wind systems are producing a larger percentage of the total electrical power, and there are currently no good ways to smooth out these fast fluctuations. Spreading the solar and wind units far apart helps so that clouds and gusts won’t affect all the units at the same time. Also pumped hydro (where water can be pumped up into a dam using electricity as well as letting it out to produce electricity) can help smooth things out as well as using natural gas spinning reserves.
However, we will still need more regulation that is much faster than these, and this is where Vehicle-to-Grid can help. If we can reach a level where a significant amount of electric vehicles are hooked up to the grid with fast command communication, they will be able to quickly smooth out the electrical surges and lulls from solar and wind systems. Otherwise, we will likely run into severe regulations problems with these systems due to clouds and gusts.
Posted by Max Dunn
Thu, 01 May 2008 15:51:51 GMT | no comments
Thomas Friedman, author of ‘The World is Flat just wrote a very intelligent op-ed piece for the New York Times titled: ‘Dumb as We Wanna Be’. Here are some edited excerpts:
Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy – this is money laundering. The idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away.
Good for Barack Obama for resisting this shameful pandering.
The McCain-Clinton proposal is a reminder to me that the biggest energy crisis we have in our country today is the energy to be serious — the energy to do big things in a sustained, focused and intelligent way. We are in the midst of a national political brownout.
Posted by Max Dunn
Thu, 01 May 2008 14:55:26 GMT | no comments
Yesterday, I shook the hand of the man whose company might just save the world.
He is Martin Roscheisen, CEO of NanoSolar. He alluded that they are producing solar panels at about $1 per watt with a complete system cost of $2 watt when installed in municipal scale of 1MW to 50MW. This is about the same cost as a coal-fired power plant!
Furthermore, their panels can be installed at the rate of 1MW per day, and need 5 acres per MW, which means a municipal sized system of 50MW can be installed in about two months. This contrasts with coal-fired plants that can take 4 years or more to build.
Drawbacks? Their German plant is producing only about 420 MW of solar capacity per year and their San Jose plant which will open in 2009 will produce about the same.
While this is very high by normal PV standards, it would help the world greatly if this went up by several orders of magnitude.
Just think – instead of building more coal plants we can start building clean solar power systems at about the same cost!
Posted by Max Dunn
Tue, 29 Apr 2008 17:49:49 GMT | no comments
Wind power can now produce energy as cheaply as coal, about 5c per kilowatt hour (kWh). Solar power is almost to the point where it can produce energy at the marginal electrical rate of about 10c kWh. So with oil prices over $100 barrel, natural gas prices doubling, and all the concern about CO2 and other noxious emissions from coal plants, why aren’t more wind and solar projects being built?
