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Page added on March 14, 2014
Technology Emerging in 2014 with Potential to Reshape the Energy Space
Technology is the main driver for change – i.e. optimization, which leads to finding promising technological solutions for pressing global challenges – and for increased productivity in the modern world. However, for mankind to continue along this trajectory, appropriate investment is often dependent on the public’s understanding and awareness of promising technologies’ potential, as well as their application. In order to put promising technological breakthroughs on the public’s radar the World Economic Forum publishes a list of Top 10 Emerging Technologies annually. Among the key trends in technological change identified in the latest World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies report are also technological breakthroughs relevant in the energy realm such as grid-scale electricity storage and nanowire lithium-ion batteries.
In general, modern electric power companies face the challenge to integrate intermittent renewable power sources such as the sun and wind into an existing power grid originally designed for base load fossil-fuel power sources and nuclear. Every time a vast supply of electricity is produced – during peak sun hours – and is met with comparatively little demand to consume this sudden spike in electricity supply, power suppliers not only face the problem of finding buyers for this excess electricity but, most importantly, this also elevates the risk of overwhelming a power grid designed on the traditional premise of predictable and flexible base load fossil-fuel power generation. So, any renewable energy integration into the traditional grid complicates supply and demand balances and constitutes transformation towards a more decentralized power generation system. Picture the spread out individual solar PV-based electricity “producers” – often called distributed generation – feeding their excess power into the grid while simultaneously relying on the grid during times of insufficient solar electricity generation.
Source: Wholesale Solar
The following chart illustrates the above situation; namely, that “Integration means Transformation”. This is one of the main findings in the IEA’s new report titled “The Power of Transformation – Wind, Sun and the Economics of Flexible Power Systems” published in February 2014.
Source: IEA
Instead of viewing renewables as forced into the remaining system without adaptation, the entire electricity system should be perceived as being re-optimized. This is where promising grid-scale electricity storage technology comes into play.
The World Economic Forum describes the technology and its intellectual premise as follows:
“[The] development of grid-scale electricity storage options has long been a “holy grail” for clean energy systems. To date, only pumped storage hydropower can claim a significant role, but it is expensive, environmentally challenging and totally dependent on favourable geography. There are signs that a range of new technologies is getting closer to cracking this challenge. Some, such as flow batteries may, in the future, be able to store liquid chemical energy in large quantities analogous to the storage of coal and gas. Various solid battery options are also competing to store electricity in sufficiently energy-dense and cheaply available materials.
Newly invented graphene supercapacitors offer the possibility of extremely rapid charging and discharging over many tens of thousands of cycles. Other options use kinetic potential energy such as large flywheels or the underground storage of compressed air. A more novel option being explored at medium scale in Germany is CO2 methanation via hydrogen electrolysis, where surplus electricity is used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, with the hydrogen later being reacted with waste carbon dioxide to form methane for later combustion – if necessary, to generate electricity.“
Given the rate of new technological advancement in this field, the World Economic Forum expects a fundamental breakthrough in the near term stressing that “storage potential will have high economic value in the future.” Those who succeed at producing scalable and economically viable energy storage solutions have much to gain.
20 Comments on "Technology Emerging in 2014 with Potential to Reshape the Energy Space"
Davy, Hermann, MO on Fri, 14th Mar 2014 11:44 am
“Breaking news” the economy is set to correct and there will be no money for breaking news. Unfortunately if the breaking news would have happened 20 years ago without the corresponding 20 years of debt, sprawl, and mal-investment we could be closer to a resilient and sustainable world albeit with climate instability, food, water, and energy problems. This is more of the tired “lobby of plenty and human exceptionalism” talk. You can tell there is unease with these folk by how much squawk you hear out of them recently. You can tell they are a spent force by the talk of fusion, reshaping energy space, and shale energy growth. I will admit a few years ago the fantasy looked on the surface possible to these folk but now even they are worried. Cognitive dissonance? Maybe? The bellow clip sound like the promise fusion offers too except now it is storage for the nearly nonexistent AltE global energy sources:
Given the rate of new technological advancement in this field, the World Economic Forum expects a fundamental breakthrough in the near term stressing that “storage potential will have high economic value in the future.” Those who succeed at producing scalable and economically viable energy storage solutions have much to gain.
Please,,,,at least they mention scalable and economically viable which is a subconscious indications this is nothing more than happy news meant to make the “lobby of plenty and human exceptionalism” folks feel warm and fuzzy. It is a dead end friends. We need to focus the top down with what little remaining economic wealth we have on small, low cost, and low tech AltE for residential and small communities. At least from the top down strengthen the grid with steps to avoid grid shut downs. This includes maintenance and decoupling of markets so grid failures don’t spread like wild fire. We need to increase efficiency anywhere possible especially with fossil fuel use. On the bottom we need to build lifeboats of attitude, knowledge, skills, and organizations to adapt, adjust, and mitigate both a failing economy, climate instability, food crisis, water crisis, and energy crisis. These articles are just clouds in their coffee
meld on Fri, 14th Mar 2014 12:40 pm
Technlogy! Technology! Big Jpeg with lots of arrows and bullet points!, Graphs, zones, buzzwords! look BAU!! BAU!! INVEST!! BUY MORE!! BE HAPPY! ….
*foams at the mouth before masturbating furiously onto a herons beak *
Chris Hill on Fri, 14th Mar 2014 2:12 pm
If wishing only made it so, we’d have solved these problems already.
bobinget on Fri, 14th Mar 2014 5:13 pm
Before reading below comments it was easy to predict
their content.
You folks posting with the help of this marvelous
TECHNOLOGY called ‘the internet’ are failing to see any resemblance between tech you all seem to take for granted and a similar grid, tied to various types of storage designed to match supply with the other thing.
Without ‘storage’ none of you worriers couldn’t send so much as Tweet, much less the fun picture of your cat eating the child’s pet hamster.
Chris Hill on Fri, 14th Mar 2014 5:16 pm
Unfortunately, the electrical storage problem is neither cheap nor easy to solve. People have been trying to do it for over a hundred years, no reason to expect major advances this year. It would be nice, but wishing it doesn’t make it so, neither does throwing money at it. If you think wishing it could make it so, just look at controlled nuclear fusion.
J-Gav on Fri, 14th Mar 2014 6:11 pm
Yes, if something new, scalable and affordable comes along concerning storage, that would be news. For the moment we’re still waiting …
“underground storage of compressed air”? For real?
andya on Fri, 14th Mar 2014 6:45 pm
“underground storage of compressed air”? For real? This is actually one of the most realistic options. I looked into storage a few years ago, and underground compressed air is viable and currently being used in a few places in the US, maybe elsewhere too.
The fantasy is that we can keep consuming resources at increasing rates, and lifestyles don’t need to change.
I don’t think they seriously believe this crap. RE needs storage, that doesn’t mean storage exists.
drwater on Fri, 14th Mar 2014 7:35 pm
I don’t think new battery technology will ever be cost effective at grid scale because of basic physics and energy density considerations. Why not much more flexible generation? Natural gas peaking plants already do this. Molten salt thorium reactors can also power up and down nicely to match loads. Since thorium reactors were developed and proven decades ago, it just requires a will to move that direction rather than unproven technological breakthroughs.
Joe Clarkson on Fri, 14th Mar 2014 8:12 pm
In 2008 I went to a Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) conference in San Francisco to try and sell my ultra-cheap thermal energy storage system. All of the big players in CSP were there and none of them were interested. The reason then was that the near term future grid penetration of solar was to be so small that storage had no economic value. That is still mostly the case today, although a little bit of storage is now creeping in to some of the thermal plants.
Unlike electricity, it is very easy to cheaply store huge amounts of thermal energy. It is very possible to make CSP into a base-load energy system by adding enough storage to allow for weeks of cloudy weather. Why isn’t this happening? Because CSP still can’t compete with fossil fuels as a source of cheap heat. I doubt that it ever will, since none of the drawbacks of fossil fuels are included in their price.
Considering that the technology needed to convert our energy supply to solar has been around for over 100 years, it is not a lack of technology that is preventing the conversion. Rather, it is our desire to ignore the consequences of using fossil fuels. While fossil fuels are admittedly cheaper in the short run, they are finite and are also destroying the climate, two obvious drawbacks that should have prevented us from using them as we have.
So we are now about to reap what we have sown. It will be a bitter harvest.
GregT on Fri, 14th Mar 2014 9:04 pm
Electric power generation requires fossil fuels. Without fossil fuels we would have no solar, wind, hydro, or nuclear electric power generation. Without fossil fuels we would not have transformers, transmission towers, or even transmission cables. Even if we had another source of energy to build out electric power generation infrastructure (which we don’t), all of the above also require finite resources, and have their own environmental concerns. The biggest being human population overshoot.
We are about to reap what we have sown, and part of the problem was electric power generation. Relying on finite resources to maintain our societies, is also not sustainable.
Meld on Fri, 14th Mar 2014 10:00 pm
@ bobinget – My god you’re right! I had never noticed that before!
/sarc
The internet isn’t that great you know, it’s just a 100 year old infrastructure (built with fossil fuels)with a fancy new face lift. You know the majority of people only go on about 2 or 3 websites now, facebook, twitter and amazon I only go on about 4 and I won’t miss it when it’s gone one bit. 🙂
PapaSmurf on Fri, 14th Mar 2014 11:36 pm
You kids only fail to see the improvements (lowering) of storage costs because you have your heads up your asses.
Costs are falling.
http://inhabitat.com/teslas-lithium-ion-battery-gigafactory-to-reduce-battery-costs-by-more-than-30/
Yeah, I already know what you twits are going to say in response.
“too little, too late”
“it takes fossil fuels”
“complex systems are doomed to fail”
Seriously, you people are all imbeciles. Just put a bullet in your heads and put yourself out of your misery.
PapaSmurf on Fri, 14th Mar 2014 11:43 pm
And once Tesla does it, you can be sure that other battery manufacturing companies will do it also.
Panasonic, Johnson Controls, EnerSys, etc. They all have the capital and incentive to do the same thing.
J-Gav on Fri, 14th Mar 2014 11:44 pm
I don’t tweet, facebook or play video games on the internet. Hit about 10-15 sites daily, 30 or more intermittently and would miss it quite a lot if it suddenly disappeared. But then I’d just have to go on about things otherwise, wouldn’t I? Sort of like I did before the 1980s when I first got computerized …
Makati1 on Sat, 15th Mar 2014 1:32 am
J-Gav, like anyone on here over 30, we have seen tech come and go. Especially those of us at the other end of the trail. We would miss them, but life would go on, at least I hope so.
Go back to old movies when ‘cell phones’ were the size of bread loaves and only the military and a few others had them. Tubes, transistors, chips: all will be history soon.
Like you, I read 10-20 sites daily and visit maybe 20 more randomly. As I am retired and not on the farm yet, I have lots of time to feed my curiosity about many things. For that reason, I am glad for the internet. But, I know it is just a passing phase in our history. I fully expect to wake some morning and see that the web is ‘down’ and will never come back up.
Some here say that is impossible. No, it is probable. The more intricate a system is, the more likely it is to fail and spectacularly. Another system in trouble is the banking system that allows globalization. Etc.
High tech is a child of the hydrocarbon age and will die when the ability to produce abundant, cheap energy fades away. We are seeing that currently, aren’t we? Are you getting prepared for that new world?
DMyers on Sat, 15th Mar 2014 1:47 am
After our grand discoveries and inventions: steam engines, trains, planes, jets, electricity, radio, Corvettes, 409’s,tv, very large athletes, computers,…the whole litany, in the end we are stuck on batteries, the apparent ceiling of our advancements. With little expertise on this subject, I am left to channel an unknown spirit.
Batteries make an interesting final frontier of techno physicality. Because with a battery, the techno (in this case, chemistry)is bound right into the physicality. Our wish is to be able to channel digital protons, mass produced and infinite, into an anxiously awaiting anode, for current on demand, sort of like protonic QE with zero percent interest. The battery of our dreams, in other words, at some point would require a marginal quantity of something for nothing.
Therein lies the problem, which turns out to be the same problem the battery is intended to solve in the first place.
Davy, Hermann, MO on Sat, 15th Mar 2014 11:43 am
Gav said – I don’t tweet, facebook or play video games on the internet. Hit about 10-15 sites daily, 30 or more intermittently and would miss it quite a lot if it suddenly disappeared. But then I’d just have to go on about things otherwise, wouldn’t I? Sort of like I did before the 1980s when I first got computerized …
You cornucopians remind me of when I was a kid and they talked about colonizing space and unlimited nuclear power. Please tell me where we are today with these ideas? Yes, Pooper Smurf:
“too little, too late”
“it takes fossil fuels”
“complex systems are doomed to fail”
Gav, I actually went offline for 40 days in 2004. I got rid of my cell phone, off internet, no telephone, no radio/TV, no electricity. It was a fantastic liberating experience. I quit my job at them same time. I lived close to nature on my farm. My wife and family had a fit. I eventually returned to the prison we live today. I am online and Iphoned to the max because of the productivity it allow. This is especially the case for me because I live a rural life and I avoid car usage. I hit maybe 15 sites regular and research with google daily. I treat the internet like food. When I go to the store I think about every product I put in my basket. It is mental preparation for what will not be there soon. I have a big garden cattle, and other sources of food. I am learning prep skills. I fast twice a week for food insecurity.
Arthur on Sat, 15th Mar 2014 1:58 pm
Unfortunately, the electrical storage problem is neither cheap nor easy to solve.
Indeed, neither cheap nor easy, but all the technology and methods to do it are available for decades now:
http://deepresource.wordpress.com/2012/10/17/norway-wants-to-become-europes-battery/
It is a matter of vision, choice and long-term investment. Large-scale hydro-storage (mostly in Norway) is part of the European renewable energy super-grid strategy. But even Europe is simply too late to accomplish BAU; we could have had that if we had taken the Club of Rome seriously in 1972. Now we are braced for a dive, that’s possibly going to take decades before we reach the bottom and can climb again.
meld on Sat, 15th Mar 2014 5:26 pm
@ Arthur – Just because something is doable doesn’t mean it’s economically viable, which simply means it is of no use to the survival of a human being.
@Papasmurf – sounds like you have a big case of cognitive dissonance. What kind of person hangs around and posts on articles he apparently knows are false and responds to other commenters who he wished were all dead. You have some serious serious issues there mate
Arthur on Sat, 15th Mar 2014 11:45 pm
meld, what’s the alternative for the European Supergrid + mass hydro storage in Norway?