Tag: energy

Mechanochemistry

This sounds very promising, both for refinery purposes as well as gas storage. Still not convinced that hydrogen is a good fuel though.

The team found a super-efficient way to mechanochemically trap and hold gases in powders, with potentially enormous and wide-ranging industrial implications. Mechanochemistry is a relatively recently coined term, referring to chemical reactions that are triggered by mechanical forces as opposed to heat, light, or electric potential differences. In this case, the mechanical force is supplied by ball milling – a low-energy grinding process in which a cylinder containing steel balls is rotated such that the balls roll up the side, then drop back down again, crushing and rolling over the material inside. This process could separate hydrocarbon gases out from crude oil using less than 10% of the energy that’s needed today. Distillation is responsible for 15% of global energy use.

The gas separation use case would be a pretty huge advance all by itself, but by storing gas securely in powders, the team believes it’s also unlocked a compelling way to store and transport hydrogen, which could play a key role in the coming clean energy transition. The powder can store a hydrogen weight percentage of 6.5%, which is 2x the current record.

Ukraine

Collecting a few pointers to how this might play out in the longer term. It seems clear that this will accelerate the move away from petro-kleptocracies towards renewable energy as a national security matter.

Europe can stop buying Russian gas. Russia might have trouble selling it because you can’t build new pipelines overnight. Russian oil will find a home somewhere else by boat, rail, or truck. It turns out a ban isn’t necessary anyway. Oil and natural gas supply and demand curves are inelastic. Small changes in supply or demand move prices dramatically. It costs money to produce oil and gas. Reducing the price by 40% might reduce profits by 80%-90%. And a 2%-3% demand decrease might be enough to do the trick. Focus on lowering the profits. Oil is a global market in a way natural gas is not. Europe has to do the heavy lifting for natural gas. There are many economical options available, especially for substitution. Increasing oil and gas supply requires massive changes in the law for European countries. Europe has to keep investing in new gas supply and reducing demand to prevent future price spikes. Eventually, new technologies that create synthetic gas or shift industrial processes to electricity will pick up the slack. Maybe even a few nuclear power plants will get built.

The optimal end to this war is for Russian leadership — generals, spymasters, oligarchs, and politicians — to simply remove Vladimir Putin from power, form a new government, and withdraw Russian troops from Ukraine. The whole war can be blamed on Putin, and Russia and the West can quickly go back to having good relations.

The current sanctions give them a number of incentives to do this. The fall in the ruble, the crashing of the Russian economy, the cutoff of economic relations with the West, and sanctions against Putin-allied individuals all mean that the globetrotting comfy lifestyle Russian leaders have gotten used to over the past two decades is no longer available. If the war ends, these sanctions will presumably be reversed, and something like the old normal can be restored.

And this needs to be made explicit. EU leaders and Biden need to announce clearly and repeatedly that if Russian troops pull back from Ukraine, the sanctions will all be quickly dropped. The part about removing Putin from power doesn’t need to be stated; it will be implicit.

But in fact, the EU and US need to promise Russia much more than this. The reason is that all the stuff I described in the last section — the long-term replacement of Russia’s economic lifeblood with renewable energy — is going to happen anyway, war or no war. The threat of climate change, and the rapid progress in solar, wind, and storage technology, mean that the world’s days of dependence on oil and gas are numbered. Russia is in big long-term trouble no matter what it does.

This gives the EU and US an additional lever — the promise of a Marshall Plan to help the Russian economy retool. Dropping sanctions will restore Russian oil and gas revenue in the short term, but in the long term Russia needs things like infrastructure investment, FDI in manufacturing industries, trade agreements to facilitate European and American purchases of Russian-made goods, and so on. The EU and the US can provide all this. We can make numerical guarantees and specify sectors — railroads, roads, aerospace, IT, whatever.

Agrivoltaics

Using vertically mounted bifacial modules allows for more arable land. And if you don’t know what bifacial solar panels are, they can collect solar energy from both sides of the panel. This type of installation would work particularly well in areas that suffer from wind erosion, since the structures reduce wind speeds which can help protect the land and crops grown there. The bifacial panels also can generate more power per square meter than traditional single faced panels and don’t require any moving parts. Then there’s also the option of mounting panels on stilts, which allows farming machinery to pass underneath. In this design you have to maintain a certain clearance between rows to protect the stilts from the machinery, so there is a modest arable land surface loss, usually 3-10%.

2022-09-14: A similar thought process is to combine solar with dams.

Utilizing even small tracts of water can yield outsized benefits. EDP’s Alqueva array, for instance, takes up just 0.016% of the reservoir total surface area. The relative footprint is even smaller when taking into account the reduced need for transmission infrastructure, as the project can plug into the dam’s pre-existing lines.

Moreover, panels and water can have a symbiotic relationship. Modeling the effects of floating panels on water reservoirs found that floating solar panels could reduce evaporation of the water beneath them by 42%. Conversely, solar panels lose generating capacity as they heat up, and the water helps keep panels cool — and 10% more efficient.


2023-06-26: Luminescent Solar Concentrators strike a good balance of energy / agricultural performance.

The idea of Agri-LSC is to allow visible light that crops use for photosynthesis to pass through the panel, while capturing wavelengths of light that are unusable for plants, like infrared and ultraviolet, and converting them into electricity or even transforming them to aid with crop growth. UbiGro is a transparent film that implements a method of LSCs to increase yield for everything from strawberries to cannabis by 20%. They recently teamed up with the solar module company Heliene to add UbiGro film to solar panels, simultaneously generating electricity from low light while aiming to increase plant yield.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?ww-_U7_oQbY?t=325

Transforming Civilization

We’re on the cusp of the fastest deepest most consequential transformation not just of any 1 sector yes but also of civilization. Over the next 10 years we’re going to have a convergence that is going to disrupt the 5 foundational sectors of the economy.

Disruption happens when there is a convergence of technologies. That convergence opens up a new possibility space. 11 years ago Tesla and other companies came into the ev space and solar companies and so on. That’s when the opportunity space opened up.

In 2014 I projected the cost of lithium-ion batteries out to 2030. I’m told that that looked insane: $150 per kWh by 2021 is not going to happen. I was told that 100s of times. Guess what, it ended up being a little conservative, it’s actually below that.

In 2014 I said that by 2020 there would be 300 km electric vehicles that would be cheaper than the median new car in America, which of course at the time sounded insane, not going to happen. Folks were predicting 2040s, 2050s before that would happen. Guess what, it did happen.

Internal combustion engine automobiles are going to be wiped out in the 2020s. 95% of passenger km will be electric by about 2030.

If we start today and we finished by 2030 in America it would cost less than $2t to build a 100% solar wind and battery system. Over 10 years that’s less than 1% of GDP.

Milk is 3% solid proteins. All you need is to disrupt that 3% to disrupt the dairy industry. By 2030 the cost of proteins which are brewed locally will be 80% lower than animal proteins so we expect the dairy industry to be pretty much bankrupt by 2030 and livestock meat will follow.

If we put together 3 disruptions, there are dramatic implications. Because the cost of all of these foundational sectors are going down by up to 10x over the next 10-15 years. The cost of the “American dream” in terms of what we consume for energy, transport, food and so on will be $250 a month. This will give us an opportunity to end poverty, inequality, environmental degradation and so on.

Switched Reluctance Motors

The switched reluctance motor (SRM) is an electric motor that runs by reluctance torque. Unlike common brushed DC motor types, power is delivered to windings in the stator (case) rather than the rotor. This greatly simplifies mechanical design as power does not have to be delivered to a moving part, but it complicates the electrical design as some sort of switching system needs to be used to deliver power to the different windings. They are 50% more efficient, and if deployed in the US, would save enough carbon to equal 1 Amazon forrest

Solar Panel Windows

Classified as a Building Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV) system, ClearVue’s solar PV windows are integrated within a building’s envelope, as opposed to conventional PV systems where modules had to be mounted on the top of existing roofs. This has a dual benefit: clear solar glass serves as an energy-efficient window product for any building, but also generates electricity for on-site use or export to the grid. This can provide savings in materials and electricity costs, reduce pollution, and add to the architectural appeal of a building.

2022-11-12: ultrathin organic solar cells hit new efficiency records

Organic photovoltaics (OPVs) are 10x lighter than silicon panels and cost 50% as much to produce. Some are even transparent, which has architects envisioning solar panels not just on rooftops, but incorporated into building facades, windows, and even indoor spaces. “We want to change every building into an electricity-generating building”. OPVs reach 9% efficiency. Prototypes have reached efficiencies of 20%, approaching silicon and alternative inorganic thin-film solar cells, such as those made from a mix of copper, indium, gallium, and selenium (CIGS). Unlike silicon crystals and CIGS, where researchers are mostly limited to the few chemical options nature gives them, OPVs allow them to tweak bonds, rearrange atoms, and mix in elements from across the periodic table. Yet, stability and high efficiency still won’t be enough. To make it in the market, solar cells also need to prove reliable for decades. Under intense exposure to the ultraviolet (UV) in sunlight, the organics in solar cells can degrade, much as our skin burns during a day at the beach.

Microwave boilers

Arrays of these devices beam microwaves into water in a boiler, heating it up. The pipes that carry the water are also made of microwave-sensitive materials, as is the insulation that lags them. And a heat exchanger recycles residual waste warmth. The upshot is a boiler that is 96% efficient. The best existing gas boilers rarely exceed 90%.