"Dirty" Wind and Solar lose a Power Generation award to "Clean" Natural Gas Powered Generation? How can that be?
Well it can be, even more so, if the bidding process is transparent, provided the evaluation process is consistent and both disposal and remediation costs occurring after project life are factored in. (which is not always the case).
Where ever Big Wind gets built, one fact is certain these days, you can bet MORE Natural Gas fired generation will be built, to "fill in the gaps" Big Wind creates when its not operating. Not a story the climate changer proponents want to hear but nonetheless true.
In some bid cases these days, Wind's hidden dirty little "disposal" secret is being revealed, more often than not.
What is clear is the general public, are led to believe by the vendors and proponents (Climate Change Evangelists) of the pair, Solar and Wind are much cleaner than any of the other non-renewables, Coal & Nuclear being the big ones "everyone" 'rails' about.
Well I am not "everyone".
For the record, I am not a proponent of any of the power generation options, in the current form, all which are in "my books", badly 'antiquated', especially given the recent advances made in every category of power generation, renewable and otherwise.
For example, Wind could fix it's dirty disposal problem quite easily by changing from fibreglass to bio-materials flax and hemp combined with green bio-resins and hardeners. I could go on and on, about Solar too, but that is not the point of this post.
Blockchaining the bids will let true innovation surface and win... for Power Generation & Energy Storage Projects
#IOTA's "Blockchain" a Directed Acyclic Graph 'DAG' distributed public ledger
Investment in applied research and commercialization will help bring these recent "break-thrus" into the various power generation market segments (non-renewable and renewable) , provided the visibility and transparency is there during the project bidding process via the blockchain, to transparently validate the true LCOE "Levelized Cost of Energy" and expected ROI of the project under bid. Putting the bids on Blockchain is not technically difficult. There are several distributed public permissionless ledger offers in the "blockchain" world which can get the job done, tailored perfectly. So why are we not doing it?
Frankly the real 'trick' to get such innovations to market quickly, at scale, is to finance these innovations WITHOUT a government "boat anchor" subsidy.
Finding the right VC group with the "nads" to finance a power generation project these days without a ratepayer subsidy, is really tough.
Most VCs, or Independent Power Producers "IPPs" these days expect the government (tax payer/rate payer) to chip in, either directly with a grant subsidy through some government department (the communist/socialist way) or get the "hand out" via a higher rate payout to the IPP "Independent Power Producer" bringing the innovation to market in the form of a PPA "Power Purchase Agreement" priced 25% to 50% over the established market rate for power. Hmm.
If this type of government participation and subsidy were also transparently mounted on the public Blockchain, rate payers would be well served and be more likely to pay attention.
So what to do about lowering the cost of NEW technology innovation for power generation so the rate payer/tax payer doesn't take it "in the shorts"?
Energy Storage anyone? Transparency in the Bidding Process? Can you hear the current power generation incumbents laughing? ;)
First, a few Energy Storage "101" basics: What the heck does "Prime Mover" mean, etc.,
Each power generation market segment is different when it comes to "Energy Storage".
Renewables (Big Wind and Big Solar) function today largely without some form of energy storage and as such, are relegated essentially to intermittent, unreliable power generation delivery. If there is storage, both Wind and Solar are assigned to a "battery charging" role, where the battery becomes the "Prime Mover" 'behind the fence' and/or to the public power grid.
Renewables generally are branded and accepted by the public as "clean" ('green' is so out these days as a branding term) thanks to the marketing spin doctors and climate change believers.
As a result Wind and Solar can and do stay "in the game" and 'scrape by' with average ROI results (provided nothing goes wrong, ie- a lightning strike destroying a turbine blade, or a huge snow storm covering all the solar panels, the likelihood of both being an annual event these days, so bye, bye ROI.)
TK Note- We always seem to forget about Geo-thermal, at scale some of us might know about Iceland running their electricity needs almost entirely from Geo-thermal, although IMO sitting on a volcano does have its down sides. Even fewer of us are aware about the cost effective way we can tap/drill into the earth and cycle fluids (usually water, sometimes injected with chemical salts to improve heat retention) to regulate the heating and cooling of our homes, offices and operational plants. So let's not forget about Geo-thermal, which is most times cheaper, depending on the drilling effort (dirt or clay vs. hard rock) and generally "cleaner" than any of the others. At a three foot depth below the frost line in extreme northern and southern latitude climates the earth is warm , actually about 55 degrees Fahrenheit or 12.77 degrees Celsius, good enough to pre-heat the cold air, and pre-cool the hot air entering the dwelling which can easily save 35% of your heating and cooling cost year round)
Hydro, Coal, Nuclear and Natural Gas all have some form of "feed stock" Energy Storage. However all are universally "shat upon" as dirty, or at least the proponents of the above would have you believe it to be true. This is not always the case and in direct comparison to Wind and Solar, where batteries are used a Primer Mover, it really is not possible for Wind to beat out NG, if you accept the PPM "Parts per Million" pollutant levels NG generates for N, S, C elements to be acceptable, that is IF you are ok with the ground level Ozone build from NG generation exhausts killing everything green within 50 or 100 metres of the NG power generation plant, IF the Ozone hangs around '24X7X365', year after year for the life of the project (as in a continuously run medium to large scale NG Turbine fired plant of 50 MW NP "nameplate" or more)
Coal has made some advance to clean up, and Gasification of Coal technology has improved to the point its now more viable than ever.
Nuclear fission itself has morphed in micro form to be much less costly to build and more easily deployed with much safer systems using lower radiation substances with much shorter 1/2 lives and lower disposable costs, which are much much safer.
For the record, I am not a big fan of Nuclear in its current form, that said, we wont be weening ourselves of nuclear in mass too soon, AND it is changing. Fusion, while the darling of this industry, still has along way to go, and frankly is not going to make it in my life time on this planet, for along long time... For base load in the public grid, nuclear, coal and hydro are tough to beat, relying on a central generation topology with big transmission and distribution designs skewed in their favour. Only large Gas Turbine Plants can compete in this base load space effectively.
Combined Heat Power generation systems or so called CHPs have proliferated in the small to medium range both attached directly to the gird and in a dual role powering energy needs behind the fence. Natural Gas and sometimes Solution Gas (married to a large/tall particle dispersion stack) is the feed stock, and more often than not an ORC 'Organic Rankine Cycle' driven heat recovery systems is used to drive a second impeller driving the permanent magnet aux. or complimentary power generation from heat. Heat is extracted from heated surfaces and can be hot process pipes wrapped in with coolant delivering pipes, and/or the gas powered combustion manifold jacket, oil pan & radiator can all be cycling coolant to heat and pressurize the coolant flow driving the impeller, and thereby being cooled by the cooling towers and pumped back towards those heat sources in a closed loop process.
CHP can compete effectively with NG only power generation and win most days, provided the disposal costs of the various materials and coolant are clearly costed in the disposal phase of the project. CHPS have many more parts and can be complex, so accounting for them on eh blockchain will require more data fields not unlike a coal fired generation plant or a nuclear fired generation plant, where as NG generation has far fewer parts, as does Wind.
Full Disclosure: I like Wind and design Wind Powered Electricity Generation & Battery Charging Systems but...
it does not make wind, especially small wind the right decision. Material use is key to lower disposal costs, and so is wind flow acceleration. a Single rotor wind turbine cannot possibly deliver any more than 40% of the capacity factor on land in the windiest of locations consistently (coastal or flat prairie, or partly up a hill) Off shore systems do have higher capacity factors upward of 60%, however they cost twice as much to build. go figure. Current wind design are generally screwed as subsidies open and hidden disappear, as government legislatures remove them in a bid to make them more cost effective. It's never going to happen for Wind in the tech's current form.
Myself, I do develop small scale wind power generation equipment to act as a charger of "Prime Mover" batteries, used behind the fence and sometimes connected to the grid. Some of the solutions involve the use of integrating ICE "Internal combustion Engines" to generate electricity to also charge the battery, which is always in the "Prime Mover" role.
Wind works, however a huge rate-payer subsidy is still required, indirectly by one of my licensees, to be effectively competitive with ICE only power generation in the mobile power trailer part of the power generation market. If disposal and remediation costs are factors in, it gets even harder for Wind and Solar to compete with NG Natural Gas fired. The rate payer subsidy is embodied in a FIT "feed in tariff" the socialist/communist word of the day. If you like and vote for this type of model, well Ontario, California or Minnesota are the states you want to live.
If you are in Alberta, Canada, like me, where the power generation market is de-regulated, and prices offered range from CAD $ 10 to 200/MW/hr in 15 minute adjusted increments (see AESO for public data) depending on 'aggregated' wind speeds across the province, when the Wind is blowing hard everywhere, no small gas fired generation is operating when the Wind blows big across the province, they need CDN 65.00/MW/hr to make any money at all using OTS "Off the Shelf" ICE "Internal Combustion Engine" power generation tech ( turbine or reciprocating piston/cylinder engines are used) . Worse yet the price drops to CAD $ 10 or 15/MW/hr routinely where no Big Wind player can survive with that type of return price, so Big Wind will shut some of their fleet down to bid the price up over CDN $45.00 so they can make some money, even with their "built in" subsidies. (SR&ED Tax Credits included)
Given current technology offers Wind's capacity factor is in a word "abysmal". Solar is even worse. Are they clean? not really when you factor in disposal and remediation of the site. The problem for both Wind and Solar is material use and the processes used bonding the materials together which creates a big COSTLY disposal problem. Natural Gas does not have a disposal problem. All parts of the NG generation plant are easily recycled.
Hydro has a big reservoir of water behind the dam waiting to be directed down the sluice ways driving the generators, Coal fired generation has big piles of coal nearby, Nuclear has "ready-made" rods waiting for deployment and Natural Gas, has pipelines chock full of compressed gas, all of them can be turned on fairly quickly, with Natural Gas and Hydro having excellent response times able to (more or less) accurately deliver what is needed given demand for power in the regions they serve.
In this "front loaded " energy storage way Non-renewables differ hugely with today's renewables Wind and Solar.
Wind and Solar, being intermittent sources of power can only use Energy Storage AFTER the generation phase, which is why recent US legislation is so important to improving the efficiency of the public power grid, by adding energy storage to the edge of the gird, close to the "source of use".
Can Wind be fixed to improve capacity factor to 60% to compete with NG? Yes. Coming soon in 2020
Flow Acceleration technology is finally advancing from the early 1970s designs and a few new Accelerated Wind Flow Systems with 60%+ capacity factors and a decent ROI pay back period of 5 years or less will hit the market in 2020, so watch for that. I am working on one from v3wind.com based in Dallas, Texas, so I know of what I speak. ;)
Can Wind solve the material bonding= costly disposal problem. Also Yes. WIP and coming a bit later, say 2022.
This will come a bit later as vendors finally realize the dream of Henry Ford to use bio-composites in parts to dramatically reduce the disposal cost. Industrial Hemp fabric sheets (woven) mixed with flax roving used in the part pultrusion process employing green bio-resins and hardeners makes the most sense. This combination can be broken down during disposal by melting the component at relative low temperatures to separate fabric, roving and epoxy , where all three can be re-used in new parts, or the former can be burned as a feed stock for power generation. So chemistry is solving some big problems blended with new growing techniques to create the right plant stock consistency (stalk thicknesses and length for easy processing).
Energy Storage: "The Hold Grail" of Efficient Power Delivery and Use? Really?
Ok, we can spend a lot of time on this and get nowhere fast. So I won't go there.
Suffice it to say, Energy Storage proponents have finally pushed aside the detractors ( Hydro and non-renewable incumbents with feed stock storage), at least in the US, where they are about to update existing legislation to allow any type of energy storage connect to the grid to apply for an ITC "Investment tax Credit". That's right bi-partisan political unity on energy storage for the public power grid.
But what about "Behind the Fence"? What if you or I or someone else wants to run their own Energy Storage, and sell at peak price when power is most needed?
How do you do that?
The short answer in today's market is "Not easily" AND each market has its own set of poodle hoops and hurdles like any circus has, each with their own "gotchas".
Looking at it from a "Blockchain" perspective, this problem is relatively easy to solve in a new low cost manner.
Enter "Blockchain": Distributed public and private ledgers will make Energy Storage pay for itself, QUICKLY (so the theory goes)
How you might ask? The How is simple in premise, get rid of the current settlement system between IPPs and the ISO "Independent Service operator" paying the IPP for power, looking for the best rate payer deal. It doesn't work. Deals are set in stone over long periods and make it hard to introduce new technology innovations which will lower rates paid by the consumer and business.
Initially, I was focusing on a project called "EnerSettle" which would see IOTAs "permissionless" public distributed ledger be used as the information interchange to settle the IPPs receipts with the ISO (get paid for producing power) quickly without disputes to improve the "velocity of money" (always a good thing, keeps the main street economy growing nicely.)
The problem with the above approach? Wind Powered Electricity Generation is intermittent, so the price fetched from the ISO by the IPP (measured in MW/hr "MegaWatts per hour") is not always ideal for the IPPs shareholder (translated the IPP ROI can and will suck big time, most of the time in the real world over a 10 or 15 year PPA).
The better approach, now being incorporated into the Enersettle project is to integrate "Prime Mover " Energy Storage into that same model, where any type of generation can be used to 'charge' the Energy Store, in this case large container sized batteries. (take your pick , Lithium or Flow batteries dominate the space, with Zinc Air starting to emerge as the low cost winner in the space, given in inhales and exhausts Air, and doesn't blow up when heated, nor is it really dangerous when putting the battery together as is the case with most flow batteries).
Once you model power delivery where Energy Storage is ALWAYS the Primer Mover, its finally possible to evaluate how clean (or dirty) each type of power generation really is in a truly objective, transparent manner, and place all any tendered Power Generation Project on the Blockchain to protect rate payers and guarantee them the lowest cost for power. (The main job of ANY Power Authority, in theory.)
Blockchain: The "New playing field" for Primer Mover Batteries feeding Power Grid. Rate Payer Nirvana.
I have put a little chart together of how each power generation type compares "cradle to grave" using LCOE "Levelized cost of Energy" as the calculation method.
The up front takeaway is both Hydro and all non-renewable generation types, must factor in their own cost of "feed stock" energy storage into the cost equation in terms of environmental clean up cost as well as pollution clean up cost. Since Hydro is not going to restore any Valley "drowned" to soon, there is a one time upfront cost to the environment which is hard to calculate. Do you use lost "board feet of timber" over the life of the project lost arable land, lost flora and fauna (forever), roads lost, additional highway and rail construction because of the obstruction. You get the picture, determining the true cost to the rate payer of Hydro is not an easy task.
Even more difficult is "ferreting out" the hidden subsidies found in all non-renewable projects, many of them hidden long ago as 'cost overruns" during the build phase, or recently in the renovation phase, with the lame excuse "we under-estimated" (oh yeah we low balled the bid, then 'shafted' the rate payer later.., etc. )
The big cost missing UPFRONT at project "bid time", for most all non-renewable power generation projects (past and present) which should always be in LCOE calculations, are the "Missing in Action" MIA "Disposal" and "Remediation" costs of the project.
Time and time again, these costs are missing, the project bid is always 'low balled', and given the time frame of the project, those people (and even companies) bidding and winning the project are long gone, when it comes time to decommission the project. Essentially your kids and grandkids get to "foot the bill". It's a "Kick the can down the road" game which deploys the most capital on earth measured in TRILLIONS.
Blockchain to the Rescue of Rate Payers
Ok so what if bids where placed on the distributed "permissionless" public ledger variant of blockchain (ie IOTA Tangle )? What if the winning bid had to operate "in plain sight" ALL the time, for the benefit of the rate payer. What if settlement was automatic without dispute you see where I am going?
Most importantly, what if the grid did employ Energy Storage as the PRIME Mover (Its going to happen in the US) first), and the only prime mover, so all generation of any type renewable and non-renewable could be evaluated and compared on the blockchain, transparently, before selecting the winning bid?
Your power bill would drop, big time. (And your disposable income would rise. Nice.)
https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/ways-keep-money-pocket-57872/
Put Power Project Bids on the Blockchain, Enable Ratepayer Rights Protection with 100% Bid & Project Transparency
It's not a "Pipe Dream". We can do "Level the playing field" today and make all generation types compete openly on the Blockchain during the bid process, however the political will is nascent right now to do so, given the kickback/favour entanglement in existing deals by such types in most rate payer jurisdictions. (Maybe this is where kevlar and a big "protection detail" come into play and can make the difference? ;) )
The recent US vote in the house an senate is a huge game changer we are only now better understanding, where Batteries and Energy Storage as the dominant "Primer Mover" on the public power grid will finally usher in an era of rate payer protection most of us thought was a practical impossibility.
Power Generation is a commodity and should be treated as such , where jurisdictions and Power Authorities must be able to compare the different types of power generation offers and their operation consistently and openly. The permissionless distributed public ledger , like IOTA is the first step in the right direction.
Being able to select your choice of power generation and pay for it on demand in a pay as you play way via micro-payments on permissionless distributed public ledgers have already been demonstrated and are now entering the public power markets in the EV space in Europe like ELAAD enabled by IOTA with mobile device apps enabling friction-less transaction completion using cryptocurrencies.
As EnerSettle starts to shape up in 2020 with this new Primer Mover is Energy Storage model managed on the blockchain, please be sure to check it out on github, here. The "blockchain tech from #Hyperledger and #IOTA is falling into place nicely, All we need is IOTA's #Qubic for public smart contract support to ship later in 2020 and we are there.
Finally, do we really need a Tax on Plant Food? Co2.
No. the carbon tax and carbon credit game is a ruse to "line the pockets" of a few players who have successfully lobbied for the tax in Canada and elsewhere, positioning the carbon tax as what will save the planet through the financing of clean power generation projects. Climate change is our only constant on this earth, the climate is always changing. The magnetic field of the earth and its poles are quite unstable at the moment and on the move,it happens every 20,000 years or so with a degree of regularity the geologists have confirmed. Don't fall for the climate change backed carbon tax sell, even if it does run on the blockchain. The fact is the Sun's energy reaching the atmosphere and surface is more intense and or climate has more temperature high and low records every year. The climate is more turbulent, CO2 is not the problem.
What is the problem is pollutant emissions from power generation and the "end of project life" disposal process.
No one likes breathing dirty air or having their eyes water constantly because the PPM Particles Per Million are too high and when ingested contributed to cell inflammation of the body. Cell inflammation is the breeding ground for cancer of all types. Cleaning up our feed stocks used in non-renewables and improving the exhaust scrubbing capabilities of same is the right answer. Also using the right combination of materials which can be cost effectively, cleanly and safely recycled in our power generation and energy storage projects is also a big part of the answer making our world a cleaner place to live in.
As far as rate payers are concerned, all should now know Blockchain for Power Generation Project Bid and Operation Management Rules. :)
Stay tuned, thanks for reading, :)
TK Over and out.
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