Dr. S. Gomathinayagam, CWET's director, in front of the solar panel carport.
While in South India a few months ago I had the chance to visit the charming offices of the Centre for Wind Energy Technology, the Indian government’s brain trust on wind power. The headquarters is a clean-energy oasis in the middle of a disheartening landscape of concrete-block houses and potholed roads, a gust of hope for something cleaner than the smoggy air that many Indians have to endure these days.
My guide was Dr. S. Gomathinayagam, the head of the institute. (See him on YouTube here.) From a massive desk flanked by a table that holds various awards his agency has won — some of them in the shape of wind turbines — he directs efforts to understand India’s “wind resource,” certify that turbines meet certain standards, and help to train the next generation of wind engineers.
Wind power is becoming a pretty big deal in India. The country is the world’s 5th-largest wind energy producer and is home to Suzlon, one of the world’s leading wind turbine manufacturers. Of the 17 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy that India is now producing, 13 GW come from wind. (But with India’s gross production of electricity approaching 600,000 GW, wind is still a tiny player.)
India's wind power map. Source: CWET
One of CWET’s most important jobs is to figure out where the wind blows best and how much energy might be harvested from it. The agency produced this map to guide the siting of wind turbines. To date they have identified 233 sites of which 90 percent have been built. Further developments may require moving offshore.
But the most engaging thing about a visit to CWET is the proud but ramshackle feel that is unmistakably Indian. After the security guard solemnly directed me to sign into the guest book, I was led to the main building. Towering over it were two smallish wind turbines, partners to the windmill by the street that pumps water. The turbines, along with the solar panels that shade one of the parking areas, produce about 3.5 kilowatt-hours of power at peak output — not nearly enough to power the building, but perhaps sufficient to supply the three air conditioners that keep Dr. Gomathinayagam’s office a little too chilly.
A wind turbine spins above the headquarters of CWET in Chennai, India.
By the entrance to CWET is an educational room for groups of schoolkids that has little models of how wind turines work. In the large, empty hallway outside, a group of cleaner-women in saris assemble bunches of straw into hand brooms. By the back exit, an “acoustic wind profiler” chirps every few seconds; the sound waves that bounce back reveal how strongly the wind blows. Surrounding it is an extensive garden of corn, and papaya and banana trees, kept by and for the employees of CWET. If a sanctuary of clean energy exists in India, this little campus may be it.
The ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit took place last week just outside Washington, D.C., and the show floor was filled with projects that promise to advance the United States as a force in clean energy. Most of the exhibiting companies were very young and in possession of early-stage technologies that are difficult to explain. But a few offered a clear glimpse of the future.
A little background: ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy) is a new federal agency created by the Obama administration and originally funded with money from the 2009 stimulus package. It is the Energy Department’s answer to DARPA, the military’s extraordinarily successful research program that formed the basis for the stealth fighter, GPS and the Internet. ARPA-E is funding environmentally-friendly solutions like smart buildings, carbon capture from coal plants, electrofuels and improved solar and wind power.
At the summit, Nth Degree Technologies made the debut of what it calls Printed Illuminated Paper. The company embeds paper with thousands of tiny LEDs, each the size of a white blood cell, to make sheets of light that can be cut to any shape or size.
The company had two kinds of demos on hand: One was two light bulbs, or rather pieces of illuminated paper cut into the shape of light bulbs. (See the video.) However, Mark Lowenthal, the company’s vice president, told me that these were just attention-grabbers and that the final product will be based on a different technology and will bear more resemblance to the piece of paper in the photograph to the right. This light was far brighter and used 8 watts of electricity. The next generation of illuminated paper, Lowenthal said, will consume a quarter the wattage and be 50 to 100 times brighter.
Seawater Transmission) is to deploy an array of oceanborne devices that capture wave energy and store it for later use, all while creating better fishing grounds. How is such a trifecta possible?
WEST creates its power from a sort of tug-of-war. A series of buoys (the yellow items in the graphic) float on the surface. Underwater, each buoy has a tail equipped with a series of toggles that creates a huge amount of drag. Between the buoy and the tail is a pump that is activated with each passing swell. That pump sends seawater through a hose to a central floating platform, where it operates an air compressor. That compressor, in turn, routes through a hose to the ocean floor, where the air is stored in bladders.
Those bladders are the invention of an ARPA-E awardee, Bright Energy Storage Technologies. (Atmocean isn’t an awardee, by the way, but was one of several companies whose presence on the show floor was a tacit endorsement by ARPA-E.) Bright Energy has realized that air, trapped in the pressurized environment of deep water, is an efficient way to store energy. A pneumatic tube connects the bladder to shore, where the air expands in volume and can be released to spin a turbine whenever the energy is needed.
Now about that fishing thing: Atmocean’s CEO, Philip Kithil, told me that his initial tests have shown that the toggle-and-buoy system creates an upwelling of cold water, which if it were borne out would make the area around the buoys into a nutrient-rich ground for fish.
3. Refrigeration Anywhere: Xergy Inc.
Xergy uses the principles of a fuel cell to create cooling in a much smaller space than a traditional air conditioner, while consuming a fraction of the power and without using refrigeration fluids that are harmful to the atmosphere. “We are using hydrogen as a working fluid and pumping it across a membrane using electricity,” says Bahmad Bahar, the company’s president and an Iranian engineer who grew up in the family’s refrigeration business.
The company was a finalist in ARPA-E’s BEETIT (Building Energy Efficiency Through Innovative Thermodevices) category and is a finalist in GE’s Ecoimagination contest.
With no moving parts and a simple design, Bahar thinks Xergy’s air conditioners could be scaled to cool an environment of almost any size, from a computer’s CPU to a full-size building. And since it takes up less space, a unit could be inserted where air conditioners have never gone before, like the wall of a building or the door panel of a car.
One of the biggest problems with renewable energies like wind and solar is that the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. General Compression is one of several companies funded by ARPA-E that is figuring out how to take these intermittent sources and make them into something that can provide “baseload power” that is available 24/7.
When the wind blows or the sun shines, a renewable-energy plant often produces more electricity than the grid can presently use. General Compression takes that extra power and uses it to make compressed air, which is stored in a salt cavern underground. Then, when night falls or the wind dies, the air can be released to spin turbines and create electricity.
There’s just one problem. When that stored air is released, or un-compressed, it becomes so cold that it’s difficult to handle. Other companies contend with this problem by burning some fossil fuels to heat the air. General Compression’s answer is to trim the cold temperatures (and also the heat from the initial compression) by venting it to a pool of water on the surface.
I just returned from India, where the country’s energy predicament hits a visitor with great clarity. India is nothing like the United States: for one thing, it’s population of nearly 1.2 billion is almost four times larger than ours, and it has 18 official languages to our one. But what if India’s energy problems existed in America? The answer might help an American understand how energy-starved India really is.
An American visitor is most likely to start out in one of India’s biggest cities, such as Mumbai, New Delhi or Kolkata, where the electricity gulf between the two countries is mostly hidden. These large Indian cities have electricity 24/7 — but even that is not abundant. Drive at night through Chennai, the country’s fifth-largest city, and you’ll notice that the street lights are sparse and that entire office buildings are blacked out to save power. The smaller cities have a “peak deficit” of 12 percent, meaning that power outages are a daily occurrence.
To put this in the American context, this would mean that only perhaps seven cities — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia and San Antonio — could keep a refrigerator cold for 24 hours straight. The residents of dozens of other large cities and thousands of suburbs would experience several hours a day where the kitchen lights and A/C didn’t work, food spoiled, and the computer was dead.
In India, forty percent of the population is off the grid and has no electricity at all. This is due to the fact that the country is overwhelmingly rural — 72 percent of the population, compared to just over 20 percent in the U.S. Still, what would life be like in America if 40 percent of the population were in this predicament?
This part of the thought experiment is especially hard to get one’s mind around. This 40 percent of the population’s lack of electrical juice is almost total. We’re not talking the occasional blackout; in the Indian context, we’re talking about 460 million people who have never had any electricity, ever. That’s more people than live in the U.S., Canada and Mexico combined.
The United States from space at night. Source: nightearth.com
For light, most of these megamillions rely on kerosene lanterns. While inexpensive, these lanterns produce low-quality light, lots of dirty emissions, and are a constant risk for fire and burns, especially night after night in close quarters. For heat and cooking, the fuel comes from cheap or scavenged materials like firewood or dried cow dung.
To bring our comparison back to American shores, this would be as if the population of our six most populous states — California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois and Pennsylvania — were huddled in smoky huts in the dark. Not only would these people not have power; they would never have even used an electrical bulb.
Imagine how difficult it would be to do business — not to mention your laundry — in a country like that.
Take a look at this video. Can you guess what force it is that makes the pistons go up and down?
Anyone? Anyone? OK, here’s the baffling answer: Vortex Induced Vibration. I ran across it while researching a column on tidal energy and learned that it isn’t a gas or electric motor that moves the pistons, but strange properties of the water itself. VIV, as it’s known, is starting to be tapped as an energy source that one day might electrify entire cities. But the phenomenon has intrigued and bedeviled engineers since Leonardo da Vinci.
In the 1500s da Vinci noted “Aeolian Tones,” the sound that wind makes when passing over a wire, and that vortices swirl beneath the pilings of bridges. What was a curiosity for him has turned out to be the bane of engineers in the mechanical age. VIV is complex reaction that occurs when vortexes in a fluid (water or air) cause a structure to oscillate back and forth, causing fatigue and sometimes startling destruction. Engineers have taken great pains to design around it in everything from fishing nets to flagpoles to nuclear cooling towers and undersea oil rigs. They remember all too well the lessons that VIV taught in 1940, when the newly-built Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington started thrashing in the wind like a beast possessed. It collapsed four months after opening, one of the marquee design failures of all time. Ever since, footage of the bridge’s collapse has been played in engineering classes like a top-ten greatest blooper.
It wasn’t until 2004 that Professor Michael Bernitsas at the University of Michigan realized that this terrific force could be brought over from the dark side and recruited to create electricity. Along with a graduate student, he placed cylinders in a water tank similar to the one in the video above. When he started the water flowing, he recalls, the result was startling:
When the impeller was turned on and water flowed through the tank…something amazing happened. The cylinders started to move up and down through the water, and then they began to move in sequence, almost as if they were part of a four-piston reciprocating engine. The motion, first up, then down, was so forceful that it was evident that the cylinders were tapping into some large supply of energy.
A traditional tidal turbine. Source: goodcleantech.com
Recent years have seen an explosion of new designs for capturing the power of flowing water that have a much lighter footprint than your traditional hydroelectric dam, which inundates valuable land and blocks the migration of fish. But most of these designs have turbines and blades resembling those of a traditional wind turbine. Some worry that they will kill fish in the same way that wind turbines threaten birds and bats.
Bernitsas’ VIVACE (Vortex Induced Vibration for Aquatic Clean Energy) generator may avoid that problem because it has no turbine. Best of all, it can operate at speeds lower than other hydroelectric turbines, which require a water flow of five or six knots. In the video above the water is moving at a lazy 2.6 knots, which is about the speed of many of the world’s large and medium-sized rivers.
VIVACE also boasts a high power density: It produces a substantial amount of power in a small amount of space. Bernitsas compares it to the Horse Hollow wind farm in Texas, which covers 190 square kilometers and is one of the world’s largest. When he adjusts for the superior density of water (830 times more dense than air), and the fact that rivers flow all the time while wind is intermittent, he claims that VIVACE’s power density is 14,600 times greater than that of a wind farm.
A vortex as photographed in Bernitsas' lab.
One concern about renewable-energy technologies like wind and solar is that they occupy vast amounts of space, eating up much of the lovely landscape that the environmentalists hoped to spare in the first place. Bernitsas says near the end of this video that a farm of his devices 100 meters square in a river moving at three knots could create a megawatt of electricity, enough to power 1000 homes, and would be capable of producing three to 10 times more power than other marine energy generators.
The science and economics of tidal and river turbines are still just coming into focus, but VIVACE is one concept worth keeping an eye on.
Tidal currents in Cobscook Bay on the Gulf of Maine. Courtesy University of Maine
My latest “Innovate” column explores the mysteries of gathering electricity from the tides. Tides are in a category by themselves as a source of energy; they exert themselves in every ocean, but only in a few locales do they get moving fast enough to spin a turbine. In the U.S. some of those places are the East River in New York, Puget Sound in Washington State, the Gulf of Alaska, under the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Gulf of Maine. The pulses of the Gulf’s Cobscook Bay are shown at the left in all their beguiling glory.
Cobscook Bay. Image credit: The Nature Conservancy
I got turned on to the Gulf of Maine when I found my interview subject, Dr. Huijie Xue of the University of Maine (and creator of this graphic). A specialist in modeling of tidal currents, Xue is monitoring the very first turbines to be placed in the Gulf by the Ocean Renewable Power Company. Specifically, she’s trying to figure out if a bank of turbines on the bay floor will harm the bay’s extraordinary ocean life.
It is a breathtakingly difficult question to answer, mostly because no one has ever tried to study tides to this level of granularity. In the 20th Century only commercial reasons to measure tides were shipping and boating. Tell a fisherman when to expect the surface tide will turn and how fast, and that’s all science needed to answer. Now Xue is among a new generation of oceanographers attempting to decipher the tidal action from bay floor to the surface at locations like Cobscook Bay, with its torturously complicated shape. Then she needs to determine what effect a turbine might have on, say, the transportation of lobster larvae. Not so easy.
In the column I also look at cool designs for tidal turbines, which I will explore more deeply in my next post.
America is at a “Sputnik moment,” Energy Secretary Stephen Chu said today, and the government’s next moves will determine whether the country leads the global clean-tech race or loses it to China.
“This is the threat that I see,” Chu said in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. “The U.S. still has the opportunity to lead in a new industrial revolution. It is a way to secure our future prosperity, but I believe our time is running out.”
I attended Chu’s presentation and feel I witnessed a historic moment: Many in the cleantech field have been waiting for the Obama administration to invoke the space race as an analogy for the cleantech race. The two races share a sense of mission, aspiration and patriotism. The words really ought to have come from the lips of Obama himself in an Oval Office address, but I gather that the budget crisis and all those victorious Republicans are making the president a little shy in his proclamations.
The timing of the speech was no accident. It came as new global climate talks got underway in Mexico and as President Obama prepares to sit down for talks with the new Republican leadership in the House of Representatives.
When the U.S.S.R. launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, it shook the American industrial and military establishment; few knew the Russians were capable of such a feat. Eleven days afterward, President Dwight Eisenhower announced a new commitment to scientific R&D that led to decades of American technological dominance.
That today’s announcement was made by a cabinet secretary and not Obama just begins to state the differences between 1957 and 2010. Eisenhower faced a clear enemy at an emphatic historical moment. He wasn’t saddled with a $13.7 trillion national debt or an opposing political party whose top priority was denying him another term in office.
To fend off likely Republican opposition, Chu steered away from divisive issues like climate change and instead turned his attention to the threat from China. He cited figures from a report about China’s rising scientific prowess, designed to scare even the most angry and penny-pinching Tea Party congressman.
In the last 15 years, Chu said, China has gone from 15th place to 5th in international patents and from 14th place to 2nd place in published research articles. Of fifty or so nuclear reactors under construction around the world, thirty are in China. China just surpassed the U.S. with the world’s fastest supercomputer, has a 220-mph rail line that is the fastest in the world, and has broken ground on a rail network almost four times larger than the next most developed rail country, France. The U.S. is just sketching out its plan for high-speed rail.
Furthermore, Chu cited figures that eight of the ten global companies with the largest R&D budgets have set up research facilities in China and/or India. And then there’s the fact that U.S. tech giant Applied Materials has built the world’s largest private research facility — in China.
Chu remained upbeat that the U.S. could win the energy race by building on investments the Obama adminstration has made so far, notably through the Energy Department’s ARPA-E program that gives seed funding to promising energy technologies. ARPA-E has set ambitious targets, like a car battery that can go 500 miles on a single charge, synthesizing fuels from sunlight, and reducing the cost of photovoltaic solar by a factor of four, so it can compete with coal.
“Let’s seize this opportunity,” Chu said. “We can’t afford not to.”
RIP, Energy Bill: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced he didn’t have the votes to pass a climate-change bill that puts a price on greenhouse gases. With that statement one of Obama’s major campaign promises crashed to earth, along with hopes for slowing global warming or using cleantech to jump-start the U.S. economy. In place of a real energy bill is an “energy bill” that gives homeowners efficiency rebates and regulates deepwater oil drilling. But with a midterm election in the offing and more Republicans likely heading to Congress, the notion of cap-and-trade is, well, cap-and-dead.
BP Plugs the Spew in Gulf, Boardroom: Having capped its oil spill for what might be for good, BP replaced its foot-in-mouth CEO Tony Hayward with Robert Dudley, an American who says he’ll make safety his top goal. Meanwhile, while no one was paying attention, Obama became the first president to take a stab at managing the oceans.
LEAF is Cheaper, Volt Goes Farther. Who Wins? General Motors finally named a price for the Chevy Volt: $41,000, or about $8K more than its electric rival, the Nissan LEAF. In its defense, Chevy argues that the Volt can go 340 miles with its “extended range” gas engine, while the LEAF’s battery dies after 100 miles. Who will go the distance with buyers? Time will tell.
Take the NASA Quiz: This week, NASA unveiled snazzy maps that reveal the answers to two not-so-trivial questions: Where are the tallest trees in the world, and where are the biggest dead zones in the ocean? Let’s tackle the second question first. The U.S. East Coast and Northern Europe have the largest dead zones, victims of too much chemical fertilizer leaking off the farms. The tallest trees (which sequester the most carbon) are in Southeast Asia and in the U.S. Pacific Northwest.
On Wednesday I have an interview at the Pentagon with Jackalyne Pfannenstiel, who is in charge of a hugely ambitious program to green the Navy. What should I ask her?
Though I have my own questions, I’d like to know yours. Reply by either sending me an email or, even better, making a comment on this post.
I first saw Ms. Pfannenstiel (pronounced “fan-in-steel”) when she gave a presentation at a 25×25 conference last month. She spoke about the Navy’s plans to transform its relationship to energy and fuel — especially ambitious considering the Navy’s vast size and reach. The U.S. Navy is bigger than the next 13 navies combined, and is the second-largest consumer of energy in the U.S. government. Any organization that uses 30 million barrels of oil a year has the chance to exert enormous influence over its contractors, suppliers and competitors.
The stakes are high: 30 military installations are at risk from rising sea levels, and the Navy risks lives and spends vast resources protecting the flow of oil from volatile countries to the U.S., and to supply the military’s planes, ships and bases around the world. Also, higher-ups have realized that renewable energy and efficiency can save the Navy a boatload of money.
Pfannenstiel didn’t rise through the ranks, but won her appointment in March after a long career with Pacific Gas & Electric in California. Her boss, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, is one of the most zealous advocates in the armed forces for reducing energy use and deploying renewable energy.
The Navy's ambitious energy-reduction goals.
His marching orders for the Navy are detailed in this slide below from Pfannenstiel’s presentation. To recap, Mabus wants to have a green strike group in local operations by the end of this year and deployed by 2016; reduce use of petroleum in vehicles by 50 percent by 2015; have half of all shore-based operations powered from renewable sources by 2020, and in that same year have 50 percent of the Navy’s installations be carbon neutral.
To emphasize just how Herculean this task is, compare the Navy’s goals to those of California, where Pfannenstiel served as chair of the state Energy Commission. California’s legislature is struggling to agree on a goal for utilities to gather just 33 percent of their electricity from renewable energy by 2020.
Laughable or laudable? What more do you want to know? Hit me back.
‘Toyotla’ Plans an Electric RAV4: Toyota and Tesla said they’ll resuscitate an electric version of the popular small SUV. Meawhile, GM sought to quell range anxiety in the electric Chevy Volt by offering a giant warranty.
Meat-Eaters: Be Very Scared. For his next trick, superstar scientist Pat Brown will make you stop eating meat whether you like it or not. “Eating one 4-ounce hamburger is equivalent to leaving your bathroom faucet running 24 hours a day for a week,” he said. “We can’t go on like this.”
Take that, Icarus: Quick on the heels of last week’s record-breaking manned solar flight, the unmanned Zephyr flew for seven days and isn’t even close to coming down. Perhaps someday we’ll even have a hybrid jet.
It is July in Washington D.C., and my new lawn is scorching to death. Watering it seems unfair because the problem isn’t a lack of water: the problem is that the water is in the wrong place. The air has a lavish, abundant 86 percent water content that makes sweat burst from my brow when I open the door to get the mail. It just refuses to fall on my lawn.
Meanwhile, eight feet below ground, my basement is suffering the opposite problem. A deep, dank moisture greets my nostrils every time I open the basement door — a smell somewhere between musty and moldy and if not quite evil then full of foreboding. I pick up a piece of paper on the floor and it is wet to the touch just from existing in the basement. A little leather stool in the corner is dotted with mold. The wetness creeps into everything. By August , I imagine it will rot my guitar case, rust my bike chain, and wrap its mossy tentacles around everything until the journals turn to goo and all my photos stick together.
I lament this situation to my lady Anjali. “This city is supposed to have been built on a swamp. Doesn’t grass grow in a swamp? The front lawn is dry as a pizza oven, but the air in the basement is wet as a — as a — ” I search for the right metaphor for really, really wet.
“Isn’t that what a dehumidifier is for?” she says.
I paused. Anjali has a way of getting to the point. “Uh…right!” I say.
I get online and buy a DeLonghi dehumidifier that is ENERGY STAR rated and plug it into the outlet in the basement. I program it to 60 percent humidity, which is an approximate 40 percent reduction from the existing basement atmosphere. Less than a day later it shuts itself off; it has already sucked up a bellyful of water.
Now the basement smells a little less Gollum-like. I carry the tank upstairs and pour it in the sink. Eighteen hours later the reservoir fills up again. I picture little water molecules levitating out of my surfing wetsuit, being free-thrown off of my old AYSO participation ribbons.
Much as I enjoy this little swamp reclamation project, something still feels off. I can’t put my finger on it. When I pour all that water down the sink, I feel a twinge of regret.
Then, as I reluctantly water the lawn one night, aiming the hose at the biggest swatches of brown, I realize what is wrong with my disposal system:
I can take the water from my basement and pour it on the lawn!
So now I regularly visit my little basement friend, pull out its collection basin and wrestle it up the stairs, through the front door and into the soupy D.C. heat. I shake all 45 pints on the deadest patches of grass. This is ridiculously satisfying.
That I can attack the source of the gnawing evil in my basement — snatch it right from the air! — and redistribute it, Robin-Hood-like, onto my starving lawn — well, it feels noble, heroic even. It is so 21st Century to be engaged in this kind of re-using. Or is it reducing?
Or — wait a minute — is it recycling … down into the earth and back into my basement?
