Green Tech

If you need more evidence that energy storage is much more than lithium ion batteries, take a look at the latest smart-grid utility storage projects.

The Department of Energy on Tuesday announced that $620 million in stimulus funding is going to 32 smart-grid programs, which will be coupled with another $1 billion in private money. A total of $770 million from government and industry sources in the next few years will go to energy storage, giving a number of storage technologies a dose of real-world experience. (See this PDF for details.)

(Credit: PG&E)

Notable in the list is the prominence of compressed-air energy storage and flow batteries, two technologies rarely discussed just a few years ago. Also in the mix are flywheels and using batteries for distributed energy storage in communities.

It's unlikely that all the DOE-aided projects will immediately prove to be commercially viable. But storage has clearly emerged as a key component in the vision of the smart grid. A number of start-ups are developing technologies they hope can address a specific storage application or undercut pumped hydro, considered the cheapest form of utility storage, on price. With pumped hydro, water is pumped uphill and released at peak times to run a generator. But its use is limited by geography.

Many of the 16 Energy Department power storage grants were focused on storing wind power, which is a variable source of energy. In California, for example, utility Pacific Gas & Electric plans to store the power generated by wind turbines at night, when turbines are most productive in underground caverns. During the day, when grid demand is higher, the air is released and passed through a turbine to make electricity.

The advantage of underground compressed air storage is that it can be cheaper than batteries and can store many hours worth of energy. PG&E forecasts that its Kern County, Calif., project can deliver 300 megawatts of power for 10 hours, enough to supply tens of thousands of homes.

Another novel technique is using metal tanks to store compressed air, a technology being developed by a Dartmouth College spin-off SustainX. The compressed air is released to run a hydraulic motor that drives a generator to make electricity.

Flow batteries, meanwhile, use tanks of liquid electrolyte solutions. When the two liquids interact, there is a chemical reaction that creates a flow of electricity.

An advantage of this approach is that store large amounts of energy and discharge relatively quickly, according to the Electricity Storage Association. One project will use technology from Premium Power, which makes tractor trailer-size zinc flow batteries to maintain a steady frequency on the grid and supply power during times of peak demand.

Different strokes
The variety of technologies points to the range of energy storage applications. Flywheels from award winner Beacon Power, for example, can absorb and discharge megawatts' worth of power to the grid but only in 15-minute bursts. Still, flywheels are getting more attention because they are a nonpolluting replacement to the natural-gas plants now used to smooth out short-term fluctuations in grid frequency, according to the company.

Click on the image for a slide show of different energy storage technologies.

(Credit: AEP)

Large batteries, too, will be further tested for grid storage. Duke Energy plans to use multiple battery types for 20 megawatts' worth of power delivery at the Notrees Windpower project in Texas. The "hybrid" battery system is being designed for two tasks: to smooth out short-term grid fluctuations and to supply hours' worth of power during the day, according to a Duke Energy representative.

Utility Portland General Electric in the next two years plans to install five batteries from auto battery supplier Ener1 to supply enough juice to power 400 homes for about an hour. Alternative chemistries, including lead carbon batteries from East Penn Manufacturing, will also be used.

One project will test the viability of used car batteries for grid storage. Lithium ion plug-in car batteries from A123 Systems will be used to supply 25 kilowatts for two hours in 20 community energy storage projects. The performance of lithium ion batteries degrades after many years in a car, but there is still sufficient storage and power for grid applications, utility executives say.

California on Tuesday released draft rules for its landmark greenhouse gas cap-and-trade plan that will be the most ambitious U.S. effort to use the market to address global warming.

State law requires California to cut its carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. Measures will range from clean vehicle and building rules to the cap-and-trade system that lets factories and power companies trade credits to emit gases that heat up the earth.

Federal rules under debate by Congress could eclipse and preempt regional plans, but California and other local governments see themselves as the vanguard of addressing climate change, especially in light of slow national action and setbacks for international talks scheduled in Copenhagen next month.

The draft released on Tuesday shows California, seen as an environmental trend-setter, may take on even more than expected in its first round of cap-and-trade, which will start in 2012.

Gasoline and residential heating fuel suppliers could be included in the first cap-and-trade phase, which had been expected to focus on big pollution sources like power plants and refineries.

"California is the first out of the box," state Air Resources Board Chair Mary Nichols told reporters on a conference call. The draft rules kick off a comment period that will lead to final regulation next fall.

A less comprehensive northeastern U.S. regional trading system is already under way, focusing on carbon dioxide emissions by big emitters. California by contrast plans to include nearly every source of emissions to reach its goal.

California businesses regularly criticize the plan as going too far too fast--and costing too much. Whether the net effect of the plan will be a new green economy or disaster for overburdened businesses is still hotly debated.

New estimates of plan costs, including suggestions on how much support to give industry, won't be available until an independent advisory group issues a report next year.

The draft avoids what may be the toughest issue--how much to rely on auctions of credits, which would require power companies and the like to buy permission to pollute. The emitters want allowances given to them, especially early on.

But Nichols said California had shown a strong preference for moving to auction as quickly as possible and that its 2006 global warming law provided clear guidance while politicians in the U.S. Congress were still raising support for a bill.

"Congress started this, you know, as a political exercise to see how many allowances you had to give out to which groups to get them to buy into the program. They didn't have a climate bill," she said.

"We know how many emissions we have to reduce. The question is how do we do it in a way that costs less," added Nichols, whose Air Resources Board was appointed by state law as the main regulator deciding on how to cut greenhouse gases.

The cost of a ton of carbon dioxide initially could be around $10, based on how other programs operated, she said. That is about half the current European price. The average American has carbon production of about 20 tons per year, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The cap-and-trade system will account for only about a fifth of California reductions but it draws outsize attention, in part because the state, with the largest U.S. economy and population, is part of the 11 member Western Climate Initiative, which includes U.S. states and Canadian provinces.

China, too, will watch California's action, partly by virtue of the state's partnerships with Chinese provinces, said Environmental Defense Fund California Climate Change Director Derek Walker.

"In many ways this is similar to what you are hearing from international circles now. Everybody is coming to the table with their opening bets," he said. But unlike most, California has committed to cuts and now is working out the details.

Story Copyright (c) 2009 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

The Department of Energy on Tuesday awarded $620 million in smart grid projects, the second major wave of government-led funding to modernize the electricity grid.

The money will come from the stimulus package and be matched by commercial companies, making the total spending $1.6 billion spread across 32 demonstration projects in 21 states. A total of $8.1 billion in smart-grid spending from public and private sources was announced late last month.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced the awards at Ohio-based utility AEP, whose GridSmart program is considered one of the more technically advanced.

The bulk of the DOE awards--$435 million--will be aimed at adding communications to the transmission and distribution grid through the installation of two-way meters, sensors on the transmission lines, and in-home energy displays.

This is a large megawatt storage device already on AEP's grid. Click on the image to see a photo gallery of power grid storage technologies.

(Credit: AEP)

By networking devices along the grid and adding digital controls, utilities can more easily locate and fix outages and use their energy supply more efficiently. For consumers, in-home displays will allow them to get a real-time readout of their electricity usage to help ways to cut down consumption. Some utilities also offer programs where consumers can get cheaper rates to shave power use during peak times.

The rest of the DOE funding will go toward testing a range of energy storage technologies, including flow batteries, flywheels, and compressed air storage. With storage, utilities can more easily use solar and wind power by better managing the flow of energy on the grid.

The Oyster in the waters off Scotland is the only hydro-electric device producing power, according to its maker.

(Credit: Aquamarine Power)

Wave energy got a boost with the connection of the Oyster hydro-electric device to the electricity grid in Scotland last Friday.

Aquamarine Power activated the connection of the Oyster in the waters off Orkney, marking one of the few ocean power devices to be producing electricity.

The device is a hydraulic pump operated by a "hinged flap," where a large metal piece moves back and forth from the motion of the waves. The movement moves a hydraulic piston that pumps water underground to a hydro-electric turbine that drives a generator to make electricity.

The peak power output of the Oyster 1 is about two megawatts, depending on the location. The company, which received research funding from the U.K. government, is now working on a second-generation device.

There are a number of technologies being pursued to convert wave or tidal energy into electrical energy, including underwater generators. The advantage of the pump design is that it's relatively simple and many components, such as gear boxes and generators, are not exposed to the water.

Twenty Oysters, which are attached to the seabed at about 10 meters of water, could produce enough electricity to power 9,000 homes in the U.K., according to Aquamarine Power.

In the U.S., the Seadog Pump uses a similar approach of pumping water offshore to a hydro-electric turbine to make electricity.

The Oyster was tested at the European Marine Energy Centre. In the U.S., there is an effort to establish an ocean power research center in southern Massachusetts.

Norway opened on Tuesday the world's first osmotic power plant, which produces emissions-free electricity by mixing fresh water and sea water through a special membrane.

State-owned utility Statkraft's prototype plant, which for now will produce a tiny 2 kilowatts to 4 kilowatts of power or enough to run a coffee machine, will enable Statkraft to test and develop the technology needed to drive down production costs.

The plant is driven by osmosis that naturally draws fresh water across a membrane and toward the seawater side. This creates higher pressure on the sea water side, driving a turbine and producing electricity.

"While salt might not save the world alone, we believe osmotic power will be an interesting part of the renewable energy mix of the future," Statkraft Chief Executive Baard Mikkelsen told reporters.

Statkraft, Europe's largest producer of renewable energy with experience in hydropower that provides nearly all of Norway's electricity, aims to begin building commercial osmotic power plants by 2015.

Here is the company's illustration of how the plant works.

(Credit: Statkraft)

The main issue is to improve the efficiency of the membrane from around 1 watt per square meter now to some 5 watts, which Statkraft says would make osmotic power costs comparable to those from other renewable sources.

The prototype, on the Oslo fjord and about 40 miles south of the Norwegian capital, has about 2,000 square meters of membrane.

Future full-scale plants producing 25 megawatts of electricity, enough to provide power for 30,000 European households, would be as large as a football stadium and require some 5 million square meters of membrane, Statkraft said.

Once new membrane "architecture" is solved, Statkraft believes the global production capacity for osmotic energy could amount to 1,600 to 1,700 terawatt hours annually, or about half of the European Union's total electricity demand.

Europe's osmotic power potential is seen at 180 terawatts, or about 5 percent of total consumption, which could help the bloc reach renewable energy goals set to curb emissions of heat-trapping gases and limit global warming.

Osmotic power, which can be located anywhere where clean fresh water runs into the sea, is seen as more reliable than more variable wind or solar energy.

Story Copyright (c) 2009 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--The first crack at vital smart-grid technical standards are due next year and some companies are already gumming up the works by pushing their own networking technology, according to the government official shepherding the process.

The need to hammer out interoperability standards is urgent and the task is extremely complex, said George Arnold, the national coordinator for smart-grid interoperability at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) who gave a presentation at a seminar organized by the IEEE here on Saturday. There will eventually be hundreds of standards covering many areas, from cybersecurity to how meters talk to plug-in cars.

"We've never tried to anything of this magnitude before," Arnold said. "It's more complicated than the Internet and Internet standards have been evolving for over 20 years."

By contrast, smart-grid standards need to be agreed on quickly, with the next phase of a multiyear process due next to begin year. Technical interoperability through standards is supposed to safeguard various players, including consumers and utilities, against technical obsolescence and wasted investment. About $8.1 billion of federal, state, and industry money will be spent on upgrading the electricity grid in the next three years.

The smart grid touches a number of different devices in a home and on the electricity grid. There's a push to establish the technical blueprints and standards certification by late next year.

(Credit: Electric Power Research Institute)

In the case of smart appliances, Arnold said he is ruffling feathers by pushing networking companies to sort out a dizzying number of options.

With two-way meters installed in people's homes, a meter can send a message that higher electricity prices have gone into effect. For example, during a hot summer day when the air conditioning load on the grid is high, utilities may look to "shed load" and have some of its customers volunteer to lower their consumption.

An appliance, such as a dishwasher or clothes dryer, equipped with a chip should be able to receive the message from the meter and go into energy-saving mode. A "smart" appliance could receive the message and perhaps do a job in an hour instead of half an hour to use less power. That handshake between the appliance and meter needs to be standardized to make sure that consumers can buy products from different suppliers.

The problem is that there are multiple methods for passing energy-related information around the home and the companies involved are pushing their own technology, creating a "mess," said Arnold. There are wireless protocols Zigbee and Wi-Fi and at least six powerline communication protocols that use a home's wiring to move data.

"We're trying to accelerate the normal process and gravitate to a few market solutions, which normally takes years," he said after his talk. "Proponents of various communications standards all have a role but at the end of the day, there has to be some assurances for consumers."

Whirlpool last month announced that it would make 1 million "smart energy" clothes dryers by the end of 2011. That commitment, however, was contingent on standards being cooked by the end of 2010 and changes to regulations to reward consumers, appliances makers, and utilities to shave peak-time electricity use.

General Electric's appliance division, too, is making a complete line of demand response appliances.

But appliance manufacturers will be reluctant to support multiple protocols in their networking chips because that could raise the price of these grid-aware white goods.

Internet as a model
The situation with home-area networking is just one instance playing out among the dozens of technology providers, utilities, regulators, and standards bodies. Conflict over standards is common in the tech industry because betting on a failed standard can be costly. But the situation is more complex in the smart grid given the number of groups with a stake in the process.

NIST was given authority over smart-grid standards in 2007 and in September released a framework and roadmap for interoperability. (Click for PDF.) Arnold said that there has been strong industry support for the effort. But given that a number of smart-grid trials are already under way, NIST is focusing on accelerating the process, which will result in a testing and certification next year.

In some ways, NIST is looking at the Internet standards as a model for how the process should be operated. Last week, there was an event called Grid-Interop where a governing panel was created specifically to focus on interoperability.

"Over time this organization (called the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel) is going to become something like the Internet architecture board," said Arnold. "It's not being set up to develop standards. It's really being set up to develop the overall architecture and select which standards should be used."

Internet pioneer Vint Cerf is on the governing board of the panel, he added.

Home energy displays show you the juice (photos)

In its framework document, NIST identified eight priority areas where there is a lack of standards, which includes networking communications, security, and plug-in vehicles. But it is relying heavily on existing standards, including international standards, wherever it can to expedite the process, Arnold said.

That means coordinating among several standards organizations because the smart grid touches so many pieces of hardware and software. For example, to standardize plug-in electric vehicles requires coordination among upwards of 10 different organizations to cover national electric safety codes and standards for car batteries, networking, energy storage, and smart meters.

One of the principles that NIST is pursuing is that standards-based products should be backward-compatible since standards will continue to evolve for many years, Arnold said. He added that communications protocols over time should be based on the Internet Protocol.

Sun Catalytix, a company that's trying to develop a revolutionary clean-energy system, has finished a round of seed funding and secured a technology license from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based company was formed about one year ago to commercialize research from MIT professor Daniel Nocera in which he attempts to mimic the process of photosynthesis.

Polaris Ventures finalized a $3 million seed round of funding for Sun Catalytix and expects to raise a series A round next year, said Polaris' Bob Metcalfe, who is also on the board.

Sun Catalytix is pursuing a breakthrough system that would use cheap solar panels to produce hydrogen, which would be stored and then used to produce electricity in a fuel cell.

(Credit: MIT)

The core of the company's technology, which Nocera has sought to patent, is a low-cost catalyst for an electrolyzer, a device that splits water to make hydrogen. That hydrogen can be used with a fuel cell to make electricity. Or the hydrogen could be combined with other materials to store energy in a liquid fuel, such as methanol or ammonia, Metcalfe said.

Nocera envisions that homes would be equipped with solar panels to produce hydrogen from water during the day. At night, the stored hydrogen could power a home without releasing carbon emissions.

The key difference with the Sun Catalytix electrolyzer is that it is being designed to be made with cheap materials and work with all sorts of water, said Metcalfe.

"Splitting water to make hydrogen is as old as the hills. The breakthrough here is that it's dirt cheap. They operate in dirty water like water from the Charles River and they've used salt water from the Boston Harbor," he said.

The catalyst that splits the water molecules uses cobalt phosphate, which is cheap and abundant compared to expensive metals such as platinum, Metcalfe added. So far, the five-person company has built a number of prototypes made from PVC plastic.

A fully functioning system would take a number of years to develop and depend on other components being cheaper, including solar panels and hydrogen storage, Nocera has said.

But Metcalfe said that Polaris believes the company can commercialize the technology "in the short attention span of a venture capitalist." Typically, venture capitalists expect to generate a big return in five to seven years.

U.S. electric-car maker Tesla Motors plans to go public soon, two sources familiar with the matter said, amid growing interest in green technology and battery-powered vehicles.

An IPO filing from the 6-year-old start-up, best known for its $109,000 all-electric Roadster, is expected any day, said one of the sources. The person did not give a specific time frame, although IPOs typically take several months.

Tesla spokesman Ricardo Reyes declined to comment on what he called "rumor or speculation."

Tesla Model S

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET)

Tesla would mark the first public offering from a U.S. automaker since Henry Ford's Ford Motor debuted its shares in 1956. The IPO represents a landmark in the resurgence of electric-car technology that most carmakers had dismissed as impractical until recently.

The company's chairman Elon Musk said early last year that an IPO was a possibility in either late 2008 or 2009.

But the financial market turmoil following the collapse of Lehman Bros. in the latter half of 2008 virtually shut down the IPO market. The appetite for IPOs has picked up since mid-September this year with a robust pace of new filings.

Tesla's IPO would follow the successful debut of lithium ion battery maker A123 Systems, whose shares rallied 50 percent on their first day of trading on September 25.

Analysts have said that the success of A123, the first green-technology IPO this year, would encourage more venture capital-backed green companies to go public.

Tesla will compete with established automakers like Ford, General Motors, and Nissan Motor, all of which are racing to launch electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles. Tesla, by contrast, is a small player with a high-end market and limited production.

A combination of factors has driven the recent interest in developing electric, or partially electric vehicles, including the Obama administration's push to have 1 million rechargeable vehicles on U.S. roads by 2015 and low-cost Department of Energy loans for manufacturers.

Venture funds back green cars
The carmaker is developing a second, lower-cost model, an electric sedan known as the Model S, which will have a base price of $49,900.

Tesla said in September it delivered 700 Roadsters since February 2008. The Roadster, which is built on a Lotus frame, can go from 0 to 60 miles an hour in less than four seconds, making it faster than a Porsche 911 or a Ferrari Spider.

The electric-car start-up was offered $465 million in low-cost loans by the U.S. Department of Energy to help build the new Model S. Tesla said it will build the new car in California.

Tesla's investors include Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

Other investors include Daimler; Abu Dhabi-based Aabar Investments, which owns a stake in Daimler; and venture capital funds Valor Equity Partners, Technology Partners, The Westly Group, and Compass Venture Partners.

Tesla said it had achieved overall corporate profitability in July with about $1 million of earnings on revenue of $20 million.

But like established automakers, survival in the hyper-competitive U.S. automotive market has not been easy for Tesla. The company had to face cost overruns and production delays for the Roadster.

Story Copyright (c) 2009 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

BEIJING--Lorry driver Zhang Jianwei isn't worried about cleaner fuel requirements that come into force in China next year, raising the price of motor fuels--he will just keep buying cheaper, dirtier diesel at smaller stations.

Zhang's example underscores the cautious approach the world's second largest oil consumer is taking to introducing tougher diesel and gasoline specifications, and shows why there will be little initial impact on China's fuel trade.

Motorists across China will switch to 150 parts-per-million (ppm) sulphur gasoline from January 1, 2010, from 500 ppm, and a lower content of benzene, a carcinogen, three years after the specifications were first announced.

The changes, a hard sell to motorists already facing record pump prices, won't bring China's fuel standards into line with even stricter Western market benchmarks, tempering the risk of Asia's leading gasoline seller flooding export markets with still more fuel.

"It will not allow them to break into advanced markets yet, but I don't think they aimed for that anyway," said Al Troner, managing director of AP Energy Consulting, and an expert on Asian fuel specifications.

But its start to move Chinese oil firms beyond their traditional role of being self-sufficient toward being more like aggressive exporters in South Korea and more recently, India. For example, 150-ppm gasoline will probably help boost Chinese sales into Australia, which uses a similar grade.

Also from January 1, China is launching automotive diesel with a sulphur content of 350 ppm, to differentiate from the 2,000-ppm general diesel used by its vast rural and industrial sectors. However an 18-month "transitional" period is allowed before the specification becomes mandatory.

One significant change in diesel quality is the cap on polyaromatics, a main contributor to urban smog. That requires refiners to use costly hydrocracking and hydrotreating units, instead of traditional catalytic crackers.

Oil duopoly Sinopec and PetroChina have in the past decade or so been spending heavily on units that strip sulphur and crack heavy residues into motor fuels, as China imports a growing share of sour and heavy crude oil.

The new specs mean the cost of fuel is set to rise further, a challenge for refiners like Sinopec to pass on to Chinese drivers already paying record pump prices.

"It's Sinopec's chance to showcase our strength in technology. But as it costs to build and run hydrocrackers to meet the specs, we will expect a premium price for premium quality," Sinopec's spokesman, Huang Wensheng, said.

The diesel factor
The formal introduction of automotive diesel specs highlights the oil industry's focus on meeting the rapid growth in road freight traffic in an economy that is heavy on manufacturing and as the country swiftly expands its highway networks.

China's demand for automotive diesel overtook gasoline in absolute volumes a couple of years ago, and is poised for strong growth in the coming years, analysts said.

Automotive diesel now makes up more than half of China's total diesel use of some 3 million barrels per day, against a third previously.

"The improvement in auto diesel standards in the past has been slowed in part because of China's massive use of rural diesel by tractors. Auto diesel is growing rapidly," said Lu Changjiang, Sinopec's fuel quality and efficiency chief.

China's environmental watchdog wants to fast track the more stringent standards, and Sinopec says it has the technical ability to produce Euro V motor fuels with sulphur content of 10 ppm and steeper cuts in polyaromatics.

"We're aiming to catch up with European standards (V) by around 2015/2016," said Tang Dagang, head of vehicle emissions control of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, adding that mationwide specifications for 50-ppm gasoline, already in use in Beijing and Shanghai, are expected to be announced soon.

For the country's swelling fleet of private car owners--car sales in China recently passed those in America to make it the world's top market--the mandatory shift to cleaner petrol of 150 ppm will put China in the league of clean fuel markets like Japan and Australia.

And the cut to 1 percent from 2.5 percent of benzene places China at the top of the moderately high quality ranks, said AP Energy's Troner.

But both the government and oil firms will need to gauge if users like lorry driver Zhang are going to pay up, after a doubling of prices in the past five years and a dwindling of China's exports, which has heightened competition among truckers.

To cut the bills for his 1,000-liter tank, Zhang says he may stop more often at gas stations near his mountainous hometown in Fujian, where cheaper and lower-grade fuels are popular, before hitting the 4-lane interprovincial highways dotted by petrol outlets run by state giants Sinopec and PetroChina.

"If it can save me 300 to 400 yuan ($45 to $60) per trip, I will not hesitate to refuel at the smaller stations," said Zhang.

Story Copyright (c) 2009 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.