20% Wind Power?

The DOE has published a 248 page document “20% by 2030″ providing a technical background of wind power and a roadmap for creating 20% wind energy supply in the US electrical energy mix.  At last week’s Renewable Energy conference there was an update from three of the consulting firms that have been providing input for the Department of Energy.  The firms are highly qualified engineering and technical firms with excellent credentials in the electric generation industry.  The update included trade-off analyses based on the cost trends over the next ten years and how the mix of costs will impact the US energy picture.  Another topic was to identify supply chain issues in the wind energy sector so that the needed resources will be available to produce horizontal wind turbines.

The studies were all quite well done and very informative.  The top line result is this; in order to achieve 20% wind power by the year 2030 we will need to create 280,000 megawatts of new wind power.  If the projected average size machine is 2.6 megawatts, then that means 108,000 horizontal wind turbines will be needed over a ten year period.  That’s a lot of turbines.  And good news for GE and Siemens.  Maybe not so good for US workers if the majority of the turbine content is sourced outside the US.

At today’s cost for land based wind power, $2.47 million/megawatt, it will cost  $691.6 BILLION dollars over twenty years.  And if wind turbines actually produced their rated power, that might be OK.  But the fact is they do not.  The industry average is in the 22-28% range of productivity, with some hope of achieving 35% due to forecast improvements in the technology.  The utility factor takes into account the number of hours per year of wind blowing, down time losses, parasitic losses, etc.  The utility factor is also impacted by the poor system efficiency at anything other than the ideal wind speed.

If the electronics industry ran at this level they would have shut down years ago.   In response to this, the wind industry is moving offshore.  Why? Because offshore winds blow more frequently.  So the expectation is that by moving the wind turbines to the sea, the utilization factor will increase to 65%.  Great!

One small problem.  How do you make one of these things float?  Are they safe during a hurricane?   It’s like putting up a drilling platform, only harder because instead of drilling down, you have to go up with 20 tons of equipment suspended 250 feet above the platform.  The best estimates  for this feat of engineering put the cost at $5.94 million per megawatt.  Pushing the price tag for 20% wind power to $1.66 TRILLION.  And we haven’t begun to find out about the technical problems at sea compared to the problems we are discovering in land based wind power.

But here’s the scary part; you’ll never get to vote on it.  US energy policy is being implemented without Congress or legislative oversight.  The DOE has paid for a road map and by virtue of it’s $9 Billion per year budget, is spending that money and incentivizing businesses with matching grants.  R&D resources are being committed to achieve a goal that is, at best, very controversial.  We’ve had a lot of press, a lot of campaigning, but no real discussion and no real performance review.  But the DOE seems committed to the wind power roadmap, regardless of the cost or how long it takes.

Creating policy with your tax dollars.  With no input from you and me.  Now that’s scary!

Future Power 2010

Just visited the Renewable Energy World Conference.  Lots of really interesting topics to consider.  Lots of companies making progress in so many areas, it’s hard to sort everything out. Solar Power, tracking systems, Wind Power, engineering companies, geothermal systems.  All trying to define their role in the new energy economy.

Several companies, notably including Honeywell, are offering small wind packages.  These are systems with varying sizes of equipment that will generate electricity from wind.  Small wind can be defined as sized for operation of a single family home.  In the case of the Honeywell system it is designed to eliminate 18% of annual electrical power required.  With a target selling price around $4500 it will take a while for this unit to pay for itself.  And that is the difficult part about small wind.  There are many systems out there, from 2500 watts to 10,000 watts maximum output.  But the wind blows when it wants to, so it’s hard to tell what the payback will be for a small residential system.

A really “hot” topic is energy storage.  The demand for power does not follow the ability to produce power when wind or solar sources are being used.  So there has to be an intermediate storage capability to help the system manage the difference.  Anybody got a storage cell?

Well, as a matter of fact, A123 batteries who has been leading the lithium storage race, does have a storage cell.  They have a lot of them.  Some 2 Megawatt storage systems that fit inside a semi trailer.  Pretty impressive stuff.  They call it an APU, Auxilliary Power Unit.  Just like a diesel generator, only no smoke, no noise and no moving parts at all.  Pretty impressive.  And there’s more.

A123 has a technology migration path that they believe will create significant improvements over the currently available product.  The current wave of nanoscale processes applied to lithium battery chemistry will lead to decreasing costs and increasing energy density even further.  Both critical aspects of the business since competition for high energy density battery technology is coming from all over the world, including China and North Korea.  So if we want to hold onto this product technology and all the markets it applies to, we need to keep pushing the cost and performance envelope.

One interesting aspect of all this technology development is that we may see choices as consumers of power.  The current model of energy delivery being a highly centralized industry is going through a transformation of sorts.  This change may come quickly, and may have huge repercussions in our economy as the current group  of utility companies are forced to change their operating model.  What if everyone went off the grid?  What would the role of utility companies be? They might cease to exist, or become maintenance and operations experts keeping everything running.

What will the future of the power industry be?

Motor and Drive Combinations

There is a subtle premise that often escapes us as we talk about motors and the controls that run them.  It is that the motor and controller operate as a package.  In most situations, a customer specification is for input voltage and output torque and speed.  That’s all that is important.  How you get there doesn’t matter a great deal.

But ironically, most motor manufacturers are predominately mechanical engineering centered.  And most drive electronics companies are electronics centered.  And they have very little in common with each other.  Except that their products must work together.  And oftentimes, that’s where the trouble starts.

The drive manufacturer warrants that his drive will produce current and voltage.  But the the motor can have very complex constraints to deal with in response to the excitation of the electronics.  How accurately a 6 step approximation of the sine wave performs, for example, can result in overheating in the motor depending on the loading of the system.  And as the motor winding heats up, the resistance in the motor can change dramatically, especially in the low inductance windings that are common in many specialty motors available today.

Then there are the cabling issues for connecting the motor and drive electronics.  The ac drive industry found out quickly that long wire runs can result in stored energy in the wires themselves.  Standing wave phenomena could cause higher voltages than expected and blow holes in the winding insulation in the motor.

Power semiconductor prices have fallen considerably in the last few years creating situations where it is sometimes cheaper and more reliable to put in parallel devices than to attached single power devices to large heat sinks.  This leads to some serious new options for packaging the electronics.  How about drive circuits in the end bell or junction box attached to the motor?  Actually, some models of the GE ECM motor (now owned by Beloit) are ac fan motors with variable frequency drives and intelligent controls built directly into the motor end bell.  You may have one in your main air handler in the air conditioning system of your home.  I was surprised to find out that I did.

I used to think that thermodynamics of these systems would be impossible to manage.  But the fact is that the drive efficiencies are getting really good.  One team I worked with was producing a 500 Watt brush drive that only shed about 20 Watts of loss at full load.  That’s some incredible efficiency.  So the notion of integrating motors and drive electronics is much more reasonable than it used to be.  And there are stepping motor packages that have been doing it for years.

So where is this all heading?

The fact is that the motor and drive electronics must work together as a package.  There is an increasing need, and an opportunity to create further performance enhancements, by the two technologies working more closely together.  More innovation will lead to better energy efficiency and new design opportunities and a chance to recharge (pun intended) an industry that has been losing share to offshore competition in the last few years.

Wind Energy Equipment Testing

Some friends were discussing the recent visit of Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chiu to Clemson University to deliver a check for $45 million to start a test facility for horizontal wind turbine gearboxes.  It seems that there have been a number of gearbox failures in recent years that suggest a wider problem that will need to be solved in order for wind energy to become as reliable and cost effective as promised.  Gear boxes are failing in the range of 10 years of operation, and occasionally, sooner than that.

This is not difficult to understand.  The forces acting on the gearbox are huge.  On the input side you have 3 blade propeller with blades that are now approaching 200 feet in length.  I don’t care how light weight they are, carbon fiber epoxy or Kevlar or whatever, the forces are tremendous.  In addition the blades have to rotate to take them out of the wind when the wind is too fast for the system to operate.  So there are actuators at the base of the blades adding to the weight and mechanical complexity.

Then there is the intermittency of the wind itself.  This can manifest itself as bursts of wind or winds of different speeds hitting the same rotor.  Which can lead to all kinds of impulse loads on the gearbox.  Gear teeth becoming momentarily unloaded and loaded in response to the wind.  This is actually one of my favorite “Stump the Band” questions for mechanical engineers; what is the formula for the shock load of gear tooth reversal?  It’s big, whatever it is.  And the shock load of the propellers is driving the gearbox against a high inertia load, the generator.  So there is a lot of resistance to overcome.

But the really scary part is that the gear systems are often in the range of 30,000 pounds in weight.  And they are mounted on metal masts at heights of 1.5 times the blade length.  So that would be 300 feet up in the air in the case of a system with a 200 foot blade.  Making the replacement of a failed gearbox a bit more complex than dropping the transmission out of a car, for example.  Especially since most wind farms are in very remote locations where the land is cheap and the wind blows some of the time.

This lead the Department of Energy to put out requests for proposals to address the technical question of providing the industry with a resource to help in the design of gearbox systems with much higher reliability than the current designs.  Total cost of this effort, approximately $100 million dollars.  The proposed test facility is targeting 20 megawatt power handling capability, or approximatley 27,000 horsepower depending on the exact rpm of the system.  This is an incredibly big piece of machinery.

Clearly, gearbox technology has to get better for the wind industry to continue to prosper.   I wonder if we are putting a band aid on a technology that is fundamentally flawed.  Maybe we need to be concentrating on the next generation of the technology and improving the cost performance by an order of magnitude.  Surely we can do better.

Scientists Create First-Ever Circuit Powered By Light

For the first time, scientists have created a circuit that can power itself, as long as it’s left in a beam of sunshine. Created by scientists from the University of Pennsylvania, the world’s first photovoltaic circuit could eventually power a new line of consumer devices or even model the human brain.

Right now the creators can only coax minuscule amounts of electricity from their photovoltaic circuits, far too little to power consumer electrical devices, although those amounts could quickly skyrocket.  There are plenty of other ways they say that they can squeeze more electricity from light. Right now only about 10 percent of the photovoltaic circuits on a glass side work. Increasing that number will boost the power output.  Another way to get more power is by turning their 2D structures into 3D structures. Stacking multiple layers of light-collecting and electricity-using circuits would also boost power.

The photovoltaic circuit is a scientific breakthrough, not a technological one. These new circuits will most likely never replace their silicon counterparts.

Photovoltaic circuits could be ideal for other applications, however, such as powering tiny robotic devices or running computer calculations at the speed of light.  Far into the future, these circuits could even be used to set up as artificial neural networks that could model the brain.

At their most basic, computers represent data as on or off, a “0″ or a “1.” Using light instead of electrons, these photovoltaic circuits could store data from, say, one, two, three or four. Each number would correspond to a certain wavelength or color of light — red, green, blue and yellow, for example. To model the human nervous system, each color of light could correspond to a different neurotransmitter, say red for dopamine and blue for serotonin.

The potential applications of the technology are huge, but will take years to develop into any kind of practical equipment.

www.news.discovery.com

Magnetics 2010 and Motion, Drive & Automation

There is a small industry conference that takes place every year with a lineup of industry experts that is top notch by any standard.  It’s called the Motion, Drive and Automation Conference put on by E-Drive magazine.  This year it is located at the Disney Hilton Resort in Orlando and is taking place on January 28 & 29.   The conference includes a wide range of industry experts from many fields of advanced electric motor design, advanced motor control concepts, power semiconductors and state of the art motor testing system.  There will be a lot of technical and product presentations that showcase leading edge technology in electric motors, precision gear reducers, new technology for motion sensing, and a number of improved power semiconductor devices for the motor control industry.  This is a great place to get up to date on the latest technology that will impact of motor and control technology across many industries over the next few years.

In addition, the Magnetics 2010 Conference will be running concurrently at the same venue.  Magnets are a strategic material without which many motors would simply not operate.  In the ever-changing motor industry, there is always a new design that seeks to make an enhancement over previous solutions, or introduce a new solution to old problems.  Declining prices for Neodymium Iron Boron magnets over the last few years have created a number of novel design shifts which have been instrumental in bringing more varieties of permanent magnet machines into the forefront of motion control and mechatronic technology.  To the point where over the last two years a resurgance of permanent magnet rotor designs have been created to improve the energy denisty and lower the cost of specialty motors in washing machines and air conditioning compressors.

This last development, combined with the forecast increase of hybrid electric car sales coming this year, are expected to increase the sale of permanent magnets by 10-15 percent by 2011.  That’s a staggering jump in a market that is almost exclusively supplied by China.  And there is no assurance that China can meet the forecast production.

The US Department of Commerce usually has a say in the sale of products or businesses to foreign countries that are deemed to be strategic or sensitive technology.  In fact, I got stuck in a situation where my employer was told specifically that we could not sell a CNC controller to a Korean customer.  That’s pretty small potatoes compared to controlling the supply of permanent magnets which influences billions of dollars worth of electric motors manufactured and sold all over the world.  So it strikes me as a little odd that the sale of Magnequench to its current owners, Neo Materials, was completed without a much discussion. leaving the US without a domestic magnet supplier.

There will surely be a lot of discussion about this situation at the conference, and I will be in attendance to get the latest information on the subject.  So look forward to a review of the conference in an upcoming post.

The Road to Recovery

Economic recovery, job creation, whatever you want to call it, everyone is trying to figure out how to get employment numbers back up and get the economy back on track.  Seems that the situation is pretty severe, and we’ve managed to export it to all of our trading partners.  But there is controversy over the information being reported.  The news is in the position of impacting the tone, so they can make things sound bad, or not, depending on who’s data they use and how they phrase their comments.

Many analysts have commented that the reporting of employment data in the US has been manipulated over the last few years and, for example, there is a whole category of people who are unemployed and are not being counted because they are assumed to have quit looking for work.  (How’s that for cynicism)   And China has been accused of artificially holding it’s currency value low in order to minimize the impact of decreased exports.   Interestingly, US exports are up significantly due to the weak dollar, so there’s at least some silver lining to the clouds of an economic downturn.

But the real road to recovery is based on real value.  Technology is great, it enables a lot of new product concepts that make our lives more convenient.  But the root is in the value that is delivered.  That value can be something compelling, like the iPod, which offers the convenience of incredible portability and simplicity in delivering entertainment media, or a major improvement in the energy storage capacity of batteries which makes hybrid cars possible.  The value that a product delivers is what makes it attractive and drives a customer to own it.

This means that technology cannot be dissociated from it’s economics.  The electric car is still a challenge because a cup (about 20 cents worth) of gasoline contains enough energy to move a 2 ton car down the road to the gas station when you’ve run out.   Which is a very cost effective exchange instead of you and several of your friends pushing your SUV to the next station to fill up.  So an electric car should cost about the same to operate as a gasoline car unless there are many people who are willing and able to pay a premium to drive electric.  And it’s getting there, and there are quite people who will pay the premium.  About 300,000 a year now.

But there is no product on the market that is immune to improvement.  So the thing that will really get the economy moving, and get people working, is product development.  Any improvement that enhances the value of a product is important to the success of the US as a nation.  That means everything.

That’s why the current dialog in the alternative energy sector is so important.  Significant improvements such as direct drive generators in the wind market and lower cost tracking technology in solar offer big advantages in the overall economic performance of these technologies.  This will reduce the amount of tax dollars that have to be used to subsidize the emerging industries.  And I’m betting there are a lot more improvements to come.

So the road to recovery is improving value.  In any product, in any market.  And that’s change we can really count on.

Energy Future – Reinventing the Power Company

It seems trite to say it, but the world around us is changing quickly and in some unanticipated ways.  The venerable electric power companies invented by Thomas Edison over a hundred years ago are going through some tough times.  In a seeming contradiction, demand for electricity continues to rise, but revenues and profits are declining as more alternative energy projects are coming on line.

As a former resident of Colorado, the Public Service company provided electricity and natural gas throughout the region.  In Texas there are many power companies, Austin Energy being the company in the area where I live.  In both cases the State Legislatures run the utility companies.  So there is a strange mixture of a commercial enterprise selling a product in a broad commoditized market, with the assumed objective of making a profit.  Utility companies used to be considered very secure investments, if somewhat low return.

But being a government run enterprise, they are subject to legislative regulation, and in recent times the mandated goals and  balancing the books appears to be in conflict.  Both Colorado and Texas have passed legislation requiring that the utility companies put up wind farms and solar projects.  In spite of studies that reported the cost for alternative energy would be greater than the cost of coal fired electricity. In addition, the legislators have required that the utility company pay customers rebates to help underwrite the cost of solar installations.  And the utility companies are required to buy the excess generated electricity from the customer.  How are the utility companies supposed to survive under these conditions?

The cash squeeze got so bad that Austin Energy had to notify over 150 customers with solar projects that were already approved that they didn’t have the money to pay for them.  And further, the utility company said it projected a need to increase rates over the next few years as the cost of wind power and solar power projects that were being added to the electric power mix are coming on line.  Exactly as predicted by the industry consultants.

Utility companies are in the business of providing reliable, low cost energy.  Utility companies are not typically in the business of developing new power generation technology.  This has lead some several companies to look at their opportunity to fulfil the operation and management role across all the power technologies available.  And initial projections support the idea that this is a direction that will sustain the role of the utility.

Our standard of living and our manufacturing base depends to a certain extent on a low cost of electricity, just as transportation costs are dependent on the cost of fuel.  Maintaining good supplies of both and keeping costs low are foundational to a strong economy.

Jobs 2.0

As a former Colorado resident I was aware of the growing wind industry resources in the area.  North of Denver near an old regional airport there is a lot of land that is “underdeveloped” and some of it is being used for testing wind turbines.  Which is a pretty tricky business because of the massive scale of current wind turbines.  Propeller blades of gargantuan proportions, huge bearing systems, wind tunnel testing.  It’s impressive.

And as I recently reported in this blog site, the American Solar Energy Association, which happens to be headquartered in Boulder Colorado, did a widely quoted report which claims (among other things) that the State of Colorado increased employment by 10,000 jobs in the Green Energy sector.  It’s not coincidence that the report focused in some detail on the activity in Colorado, since, being in Boulder, there is direct access to information   Denver also has a major National Renewable Energy Laboratory campus where thousands of people are employed, many of whom work on solar , wind and many green related technologies.  So there is a lot of local activity that ASEA is aware of directly.

The State of Colorado had mandated the use of wind and solar power in the energy mix of the local power utility.  And there is a fairly significant wind farm being built in Northern Colorado.  So for several years, while the wind farm is under construction, there will be quite a few hundred workers involved in that construction project.  But like all projects, it will be completed in a couple of years and those jobs will have to move on.

But the 10,000 jobs number included government workers hired by NREL and temporary construction jobs on the wind farm. The actual private sector estimate is less than half of the 10,000.  Worse is that the private sector estimate includes guys who put insulation into your attic, and a percentage of all appliance industry workers on the basis that some fraction of that labor is focused on energy efficiency.  So this gets to be a very difficult number to pin down.

The bigger problem is putting the green jobs, however many, in proper context.  The State of Colorado is currently trying to help 120,000 unemployed people with unemployment assistance.  And Colorado is in relatively good shape compared to other parts of the country which are much harder hit.  Based on some recent editorial commentary, the national unemployment numbers may be under reported because of manipulation of the reporting basis, and that government claims about the impact of green energy on the economy are similarly exaggerated.  And that is bad news all around.

But what I find shocking in the Colorado situation is that two years ago several major Oil & Gas companies were “shovel ready” to mine and refine shale oil resources in remote parts of the state which would have had a significant impact leading to thousands of new jobs.  But Interior Secretary Ken Salazar (D), a Colorado Senator and resident, decided that permitting shale oil recovery would be inconsistent with the goals of land management.  Maybe it wasn’t “green” enough.

But right now, we could sure use the business.

Could This Be The Wheel of the Future?

Most typical males constantly worry about our cars.  “Is my oil low?”, “what is that ‘clunk’ing noise?”, “Did my wife put premium unleaded in this like I told her?”, “Why is my ‘check engine’ light on again?”.  They even occasionally check the tires to see if they look low on air, and make sure to change them to studded tires for brutal winters.  But what if you didn’t have to ever change the tire again dependent on the weather? What if you could buy one tire that would be designed to change  to the weather?  Yes, there may be a new kid in town in terms of cars and transportation; the Pumplon wheel could be tire of the future.

The Pumplon wheel, which resembles the shape of a pumpkin, or even a melon depending on its shape (hence the name Pumplon), is designed to change shape to whatever the road conditions call for through a rotary mechanism.

Living in a climate where you get to experience the four seasons to their extreme, you can get wet & rainy springs, 100-plus degree summers, chilly and colorful falls, and blistering cold winters.  If you were to install the Pumplon on your car, according to Pumplon, you would not need to change them for any weather reason or road condition.  Say for instance it was spring-time and there was a heavy rainstorm, by switching the Pumplons to the skinnier shape, it would increase contact pressure, cutting through the water on the road, allowing you to more safely arrive at your destination.  Or if the road is flooded, switch the tires to the widest setting to make the car amphibious.  In the summer, one may just want to hit the highway and cruise with the top down and feel the find in their hair, and for that they would change the Pumplon to the normal, or “ball”-look setting.  For the fall and winter, when you may be trudging through mud or snow (intentionally or not), you will need as much surface area out of my tires as possible.  You would consequently set the tire to its “melon” shape to get as much grip and surface area as possible, hopefully getting yourself unstuck in the mountain, or get you through the snow-packed roads to grandma’s house for Christmas.

With the world “going green”, it has brought about some rather interesting, very innovative ideas and concepts, and this one is no exception. The green benefits can be very numerous, from reducing travel times to increasing fuel efficiency.

The Pumplon wheel is the creation of Osmar Vicente Rodriguez, a native of Brazil, also a professor of industrial design at RCA Innovation.  His intention for creating the Pumplon was primarily for solving transportation problems for farmers in developing countries where the majority of roads are either unkempt and in very bad condition.

How does it work, you may ask?  The secret to the Pumplon is a steel shaft that can expand and retract by means of a rotary mechanism, pneumatic or hydraulic, adjusting rings which makes the wheel deformation wider or narrower.

The material of the tires has been the subject of special consideration. According to Rodriguez, “initially they were steel, but we replaced it with a thermoplastic material, which is easier to produce, lighter and cheaper, and is recyclable. The cover is of vulcanized rubber, similar to that used in tires conventionally, but more flexible to allow changes in size.”

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