Posted on April 24, 2009 @ 06:15:00 AM by Paul Meagher
We have been so focused on cleaning up our energy supply that we haven't given our distribution system the attention it deserves. Our current electric grid is stupid. To move in a serious way towards a greener energy system we will need to make the grid smarter in various ways. Tom Raftery gives us a glimpse of what this smart grid might look and why we need it.
Posted on April 16, 2009 @ 05:52:00 AM by Paul Meagher
According to Wikipedia, "Black Liquor is a byproduct of the kraft process, (also known as kraft pulping or sulfate process) during the production of paper pulp. Wood is decomposed into cellulose fibers (from which paper is made), hemicellulose and lignin fragments. Black liquor is an aqueous solution of lignin residues, hemicellulose, and the inorganic chemicals used in the process. The black liquor contains more than half of the energy content of the wood fed into the digester".
The controversy arises because U.S. companies are just starting to receive an alternative energy tax rebates for using black liquor to produce energy and heat in their production process. The rebate is huge. According to Embassy magazine:
On March 24, Memphis-based International Paper announced it was the first firm to collect the tax credit. In a press release, International Paper said it had received its first cheque from the Internal Revenue Service. The company received $71.6 million (US) for the one-month period of Nov. 14 to Dec. 14, 2008. Deutsche Bank estimates International Paper will receive some $860 million (US) annually as a result of the tax credit.
The size of these rebates has the potential to make the relative cost of production for U.S. companies considerably lower and allow them to flood the market with lower-priced product. Canadian companies call this a "game changing subsidy" and are looking for the federal government to respond either by invoking trade law or offering a similiar subsidy.
My own opinion is still not fully formed yet. It appears that paper mills using the kraft process can potentially become self-sufficient by using black liquor to generate heat and energy. Also, the recovery process involved in using black liquor allows the mills to re-use the chemicals used to separate the lignin from cellulose fibres thereby reducing pollution levels and increasing production efficiency even more. Given these benefits, it could be argued that developing processes that fully utilize black liquor represents a significant advance in paper making technology and that the U.S. tax rebate is stimulating a significant move towards more environmentally friendly paper making production processes. It could be argued that Canadian companies are worried because they not receiving similiar levels of government help to modernize their production processes.
I'm not sufficiently knowledgeable about black liquor and how it is being used in the paper production process to know how critically important it is to the future of the paper making industry. This controversy has piqued my interest to learn a bit more about the potential of this mysterious substance called "black liquor" and the role it is actually playing in the production processes of companies receiving these tax rebates.
Posted on March 26, 2009 @ 07:01:00 AM by Paul Meagher
I find the book, Tar Sands (2008), by Andrew Nikiforuk a fascinating but troubling book. Many people in the East Coast of Canada (where I hail from) have gone to work in the Alberta Tar Sands and part of the reason for reading the book was to know more about this massive project. The book is mostly focused on discussing the many environmental issues associated with the Tar Sands - huge toxic tailing ponds, air quality worse than China's in some areas, huge draw-downs of water threatening water levels, large amounts of industrial waste seeping into the Athabasca river and threatening the third largest fresh water basin in the world, cancers among natives living downstream from these projects, permanent destruction of land and biodiversity, etc.... Andrew does not have much positive to say about the Tar Sands.
The U.S. is also hugely affected by the tar sands. The number 1 supplier of oil to the U.S. is Canada with most of this oil coming from the Tar Sands. Actually, it is mostly raw butimen that is being exported to the U.S. Bitumen is a very dirty form of oil that has to be upgraded in the U.S. refineries where it is being exported to. While many Canadians are upset at the prospect of not "adding value" to bitumen by upgrading it in Canada, they should arguably be happy to leave that job to which ever country wants to do it because it comes at a huge environmental cost in the form of toxic waste, huge water draw-downs of fresh water that can affect water levels, extreme air pollution in the vicinity of the upgraders, increased regional incidences of cancer and asthma, destruction of water sheds and agricultural lands, etc... Few of these environmental costs will actually be paid by the oil companies making the money.
The amount of raw bitumen flowing into the U.S. is projected to increase significantly as pipelines are built to more upgraders in the U.S. and existing refineries are retrofitted to upgrade raw bitumen. In 2015, the U.S. will be upgrading the equivalent of all the tar sands bitumen that is currently being produced. The scenarios for 2030 suggest that this amount might even be doubled because of the huge investments being made to increase production in the tar sands. The tar sands are actually the largest capital investment project on the planet right now.
As I've indicated before, a green entrepreneur can't just focus on the negatives but should be looking at potential green opportunities in this environmental catastrophe. Because the list of negative impacts is long, the list of corresponding opportunities to green the Tar Sands is also long. A couple of obvious opportunities are:
The tailing ponds are not settling out as quickly as engineers had hoped they would. Unless they can figure out a process to decontaminate these toxic tailings ponds, they will remain a long term liability to the companies or, more likely, tax payers. This is a good area to apply some green chemistry or find some biological process that might help solve the problem. The tailing ponds themselves offer plenty of room to be engineered better.
Oil companies are mandated to reclaim the land after they are done with it. When the book was done, only a laughable 247 acres had been officially declared as being reclaimed. After devastating the land to harvest the bitumen, the oil companies are finding that it is not so easy to kickstart a sustainable ecosystem again. For example, seeds that are planted are not germinating because of the acidic salty chemistry left over after the harvest. Some hybrid poplars and barley appear to be able to grow in this environment but a landscape of stunted poplars and barley is hardly a "reclaimed" landscape. There are huge opportunities for extreme landscapers who know how to make things grow again on decimated landscapes.
One of the maddening aspects of Tar Sands is how terrible the environmental monitoring is. The mentality appears to be that what the governement and oil companies don't know, they are not responsible for. I'm not sure that you will get much money from the government or the oil companies to conduct such environmental monitoring but it is clearly needed. This is another area where there is opportunity but you will need to be creative in where you obtain the money for such monitoring and how you insinuate yourself into the system so that you can obtain accurate samples of what is going on.
Posted on March 6, 2009 @ 09:31:00 AM by Paul Meagher
I'm hoping to finish off a book this weekend called "Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines" (2008) by Richard A. Muller. I had some initial reservations about this book because I thought it was just a trendy way to sell a book, however, I now believe that it is a book that presidents should read not only because it offers useful scientific background on topics ranging from terrorism, energy, nukes, space and global warming; but also because it offers a fairly objective and balanced perspective on these topics which a president should arguably be aware of so that s/he can rationally defend policies in these areas.
I've only read the sections on terrorism, energy, and nukes so far (not space and global warming yet) and even though I considered myself somewhat educated on these topics, the book has revealed large holes in my knowlege base on these topics. Not just errors of fact and knowledge, but also errors of perspective. Again, the book is not simply useful because of the science it provides, but also because of the perspective on the science it discusses.
The physics that a president should know is also the physics a citizen should know. I heartily recommend this book because I think it will help make us better citizens and also because it is well written, packed with interesting easy-to-read science on major issues of the day, and a perspective on that science that is worth considering.
On a final note, I am classifying this blog under the "Energy" category because the book is particularly useful in understanding the physics of different energy sources (oil, coal, solar, wind, etc...) and the energy/power aspects of terrorism, nukes, space, and global warming.
Posted on February 19, 2009 @ 07:43:00 AM by Paul Meagher
Below is a Jan 2009 talk by Saul Griffith called "Climate Change Recalculated". Saul is essentially trying to address the issue of where our future energy will come from in light of the fact of climate change. Offers some sobering numbers on the speed and scale of work required to replace existing fossil fuels sources of energy with renewables. He adds his voice to a growing list of voices who would like to see the auto industry bailout money used to help them retool to manufacture and assemble the components needed for renewable energy infrastructure. Modern areodynamic windmills, for example, requires about 8000 machined parts and we need to start cranking these out at a very fast rate over a long period of time if we hope to avoid some climate change doomsday scenarios. We currently lack the industrial capacity to develop the required number of windmills fast enough. Detroit's industrial capacity should be applied to addressing this capacity issue. Micheal Moore has made the same point.
Posted on January 30, 2009 @ 08:00:00 AM by Paul Meagher
One often hears people fantasize about generating power and selling some back to the grid. The idea that the power company should be paying them a fee seems very attractive. I don't dispute the idea that this is a valid business model in some cases, but selling power back to the grid can also be a signal that you lack the entrepreneurial skills to use that energy more productively than the power company can.
Companies that can generate the power required to run a business have the potential to to create businesses with long-term cost structures that are more competitive than business dependent on ourside sources of energy to power their business. Self-powered businesses, especially if the power is green, will arguably become more attractive to do business with because they demonstrate leadership, self-reliance, and an eye on the future.
The typical way businesses are setup today involves first thinking about building or leasing a place of business, running that business for awhile, and, if it becomes profitable, make investments in green energy to power the business. What if we instead developed policies to help business finance green energy for their business at startup to help lay the groundwork for the long term?
In some ways, what I am suggesting is the mentality of permaculture applied to business:
The characteristic that typifies all permanent agriculture is that the needs of the system for energy are provided by the system.
~ Bill Mollison, Permaculture: A Designers Manual, p. 6
Are we really building permanent businesses if they are totally dependent on a reasonable price for oil, gas, and electricity to make them viable? This probably depends upon whether you think new technology will be able to provide future businesses with the same amount or more energy to consume even when fossil fuels begin to deplete. There are some who believe that when our reserves of high quality energy in the form of gas and oil begins to deplete, that we will have to simply adapt to existence with less available energy per person to utilize - unless you locally supply the energy for your business operations.
Posted on January 1, 2009 @ 08:50:00 AM by Paul Meagher
The Britian From Above website was developed by the BBC to provide information about Britian using a novel web interface. This interface is currently getting some buzz in the Rich Internet Applications (RIA) community.
One of the video-clips that the site hosts concerns the Black Law Windfarm, located in Scotland, which is the largest windfarm in Britian (serves around 200,000 homes). What I found interesting about this project was the idea of putting windfarms on the site of old mining operations. Before the Black Law Windfarm project could proceed they needed to "reclaim" the land so that the wind could blow unobstructed over grasslands into the propellors. This is what they have today and, to me, this seems a much better outcome than the "reclaiming" the mining companies would have done.
Siting a windfarm on the site of old mining operations is a win-win proposition but it seems like you can never please some people who will always object to having windfarms as the dominant feature of a landscape. The ugliness objection in this case is weak because the alternative is a blight on the landscape as well. At least this blight provides clean energy to 200,000 homes in Britian and is producing a highly significant reduction in green house gas emissions in a country that still uses alot of coal to produce electricity.
Posted on October 31, 2008 @ 09:44:00 AM by Paul Meagher
Lately, I've become more convinced that the solution to many of our problems lies in the devolution of power to the local level. Connecting a green energy source to the power grid can be a very expensive undertaking which often requires the approval of multiple levels of government, not to mention the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of the energy industry to retain their fossil-fuel monopolies.
The paradigm shift I think we will need if we want to modernize our power systems is to design our energy futures in such a way that 100% of the power is generated and consumed locally with a large chunk of the financing for local power generation initially coming from municipal taxes. These municipal taxes would be reduced as revenues from local power consumption flows into the municipal level of government. There is no reason why the municipal power system can't be financially self-sustaining as green power technology improves and costs go down. Going local with our power systems would also be a stimulus to consumers to monitor their power consumption so that your community as a whole can try to eventually achive 100% sustainable power.
A sustainable local power system would be a great legacy to leave our kids rather than the truely spooky future (war, disease, famine) that Jared Diamond predicts we will be facing within 20 years if we proceed on our present course.
Posted on September 12, 2008 @ 08:00:00 AM by Paul Meagher
In a TheStar.com interview, well-known venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, claimed that an important investment area would be "next-generation, ultra-high-voltage DC transmission technologies and infrastructure".
In his mind, getting off coal and other fossil fuels means playing to our clean-energy strengths and connecting our energy sweet spots to a large, trans-national grid that can efficiently carry power over long distances.
Such a grid would mean that renewable energy from solar and wind power sources, for example, would still flow throughout the country when one part of the country has decreased solar or wind inputs. Scaling up means the sun always shines and the wind always blows.
It will be interesting to see how the grid for solar power evolves over the next few years. In a press release for the Massachussett's Green Communities Act, they nod in the direction of rooftop solar power grids:
The measure also authorizes utility companies to own solar electric installations they put on their customers’ roofs – a practice that was previously prohibited – up to 50 MW apiece after two years. If utilities take full advantage of this new opportunity, it will poise Massachusetts to meet Governor Patrick’s goal to harness 250 megawatts of installed solar power by 2017.
An ultra-high-voltage DC transmission infrastructure allows ones to imagine a solar-house in Boston collecting the renewable energy required to provide lighting for a clouded over solar-house in Minneapolis and vice versa.
Posted on August 11, 2008 @ 07:15:00 AM by Paul Meagher
I recently talked to a person who buys energy for a utility in Prince Edward Island. I knew the utility was moving heavily towards generating energy from wind so I was suprised to find out that he wasn`t too positive about this form of power. From his point of view the problem was that it didn`t replace any existing power plants owing to its intermittent nature so for him it wasn`t a solution. He still needs to buy coal and operate existing power plants for days when the wind does not blow. He would like to see some of these power plants shut down but reliance on wind power won`t do it.
Nevertheless, PEI is moving aggressively towards generating energy from wind. I recently read that a new blade design is being tested here - one that draws its inspiration from nature. The fins of a humpback whale have ridges on them. The professor in Pennsylvania realized that if he put similiar ridges on the propeller it might help the wind turbine run more by reducing the likelihood of turbine stalls. The data has not come in yet, but one estimate is that it will allow the propeller to run 1% more of the time.
