Mighty Wind: U.S. Wind Turbine Capacity Now Equals 11 Nuclear Plants

This week, Hurricane Isaac delivered yet another lesson of wind’s wild ways. Properly employed, however, wind is a powerful aide. The American Wind Energy Association said this month that U.S. wind turbines can produce 50 gigawatts of electricity, the same amount as 11 nuclear power plants or 44 coal-fired plants. Wind energy now powers the equivalent of nearly 13 million American homes. States like South Dakota and Iowa get 20 percent of their electricity from wind. GE workers have designed and built many of the wind mills rising from fields, farms and seas in the U.S. and abroad.

Starting a decade ago, GE injected its nascent wind business with a heavy dose of engineering and manufacturing know-how, materials science, and advanced technologies from GE Global Research.

There are now 18,000 high-tech GE wind turbines installed around the world, generating 60 million megawatt-hours of renewable electricity every year, enough to power the equivalent of New York City. The wind energy unit has generated $30 billion in revenues. “The wind business might be one of the best investments we’ve made and Global Research has the technology and to keep it strong,” says Mark Vachon, GE’s vice president forecomagination.

GE has many kinds of wind turbines in its portfolio, both on-shore and off-shore, some standing 40 stories tall. The company has spent $2 billion on wind innovation over the last decade. Last year, GE received 184 clean energy patents, the most among corporations in the United States. The wind business received the vast majority, 152 patents in total.

The benefits of wind power are obvious. Consider that just one coal plant emits roughly 3,700,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually. The offset CO2 emissions from U.S. wind is equivalent to taking 14 million gasoline-powered cars off the roads. More

 

DON'T WORRY, DRIVE ON: Fossil Fools & Fracking Lies

In recent months we've seen a spate of assertions that peak oil is a worry of the past thanks to so-called "new technologies" that can tap massive amounts of previously inaccessible stores of "unconventional" oil. "Don't worry, drive on," we're told.


We can fall for the oil industry hype and keep ourselves chained to a resource that's depleting and comes with ever increasing economic and environmental costs, or we can recognize that the days of cheap and abundant oil (not to mention coal and natural gas) are over.

Unfortunately, the mainstream media and politicians on both sides of the aisle are parroting the hype, claiming — in Obama's case — that unconventional oil can play a key role in an "all of the above" energy strategy and — in Romney's — that increased production of tight oil and tar sands can make North America energy independent by the end of his second term.

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Salt-and-water battery could help plug renewables gap

Australian researchers have developed a sodium-ion-based battery which, they say, has the potential to solve one of sustainable energy’s greatest challenges – storing energy cheaply ‘offline’ after it has been generated.

Dr Manickam Minakshi and Dr Danielle Meyrick from Western Australia’s Murdoch University point out that, while the efficiency of wind and solar technologies has improved rapidly, the problem of storage has yet to be solved.

‘The central obstacle facing sustainable energy is unreliability. Wind turbines don’t turn on a still day. Solar doesn’t work at night and can be hampered in the day by cloud, dust or snow coverage,’ Dr Minakshi said.

‘To provide power at non-generation times, excess energy needs to be stored in batteries, but storage technologies now being considered, such as molten salt or molten sulfur, work at high temperatures, making them expensive and impractical.

‘Our water-based sodium-ion battery has shown excellent potential for affordable, low-temperature storage.’

Dr Minakshi said he was drawn to sodium because its chemical properties were similar to lithium, the element that powers most portable electronic devices. While lithium ion batteries are common in today’s consumer electronics, they require inbuilt safety mechanisms that can affect efficiency; as well, lithium batteries tend to fail after a few years.

The Murdoch University researchers say the main challenge they faced in developing a sodium-ion battery was finding cathode and anode materials capable of accommodating sodium’s ionic size – which is 2.5 times larger than that of lithium.

‘Ions travel out of the cathode and into the anode to form a current. As an imperfect analogy, you can think of [electrodes] as mesh filters that ions pass through. We had to find materials with larger gaps in their mesh,’ Dr Minakshi said.

After testing various metals and phosphates, Dr Minakshi’s team eventually found success with manganese dioxide as the cathode and a novel olivine sodium phosphate as the anode. The result is a safe, cost-effective battery with high energy density. More

 

Saudi Arabia - America’s Real Strategic Petroleum Reserve?

As oil prices ticked above $115 per barrel last week, a White House leak revealed that President Barack Obama may dip into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), the United States' 695 million barrel stockpile of emergency fuel supplies.

The leak might have been a signal that Washington wants Gulf countries to take action to lower oil prices. It might also have been an attempt to wring the risk premium out of current prices by reassuring the market that America won't let a potential war with Iran shut off the spigot. The one thing we can say for sure is that the announcement highlights two interrelated problems with U.S. energy policy: that every president since Ronald Reagan has used Saudi Arabia as his de facto SPR and that there exist no clear standards for when to dip onto the actual SPR. Both problems have the potential to bite us -- badly.

Over the years, the United States has been surprisingly reluctant to release SPR during times of crisis, preferring instead to let Saudi Arabia handle the problem by simply increasing its production. For decades, in fact, U.S. presidents have been able to count on the Middle Eastern petro giant to pre-release oil in anticipation of times of war. For example, Riyadh flooded the market ahead of the first Gulf War and, though many do not remember, it also put extra oil on the market ahead of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Saudi Arabia even increased its oil production after the 9/11 attacks, which badly strained U.S.-Saudi relations. Likewise, this spring, when the Obama administration was debating whether or not to release the SPR ahead of the tightening of sanctions against Iran, Saudi Arabia helpfully boosted its production above 10 million barrels per day, causing oil prices to fall more than $10 a barrel and eliminating the need for the White House to make a firm decision.

But relying on Saudi Arabia, while politically convenient, is not without risks. The most obvious is that the Saudis have come under increased pressure -- both internal and external -- as a result of their longstanding oil-for-security alliance with Washington. Iran has warned its fellow Gulf producer not to make up the slack resulting from American and European sanctions, threatening direct retaliation if it does. Saudi Arabia isn't taking any chances. In recent months, it has arrested prominent Shiite dissidents -- always suspected of possible ties to Iran --and doubled the number of Saudi National Guard forces in the Eastern Province, home to the vast majority its 2 million-plus Shiite citizens as well as the close to 90 percent of its oil production.

America's ability to fall back on the Saudis is further imperiled by the inherent instability of the kingdom's political and economic system, and is the elephant in the desert that no one talks about.

Oil markets might have taken solace in Saudi preparedness until rumors surfaced of an assassination attempt aimed at the kingdom's intelligence chief, a move purported to be a revenge killing by Iranfor similar assassinations of senior military leaders in Syria. The rumors proved to be false, but like much of the region's murky political intrigue, it moved markets and served as a reminder that a tit-for-tat game of high level assassinations is not out of the realm of possibility. The oil implications of this unpredictability are clear: It will be hard to keep global oil markets calm in the coming weeks and months. Deaths of rulers can change dynamics overnight virtually anywhere in the region, and Israel's defense policy remains an ever-present black swan. Saudi Arabia's own rumoredpursuit of new nuclear-style ballistic missiles from China adds an additional layer of uncertainty about a nuclear arms race in the region.

America's ability to fall back on the Saudis is further imperiled by the inherent instability of the kingdom's political and economic system. Saudi Arabia is going to need more and more oil revenue just to keep its population from growing restive. Riyadh-based Jadwa Investment predicts that Saudi Arabia will be forced to run budget deficits from 2014 onwards, even at a break-even price forecast of $90.70 per barrel in 2015. Other forecasts are even bleaker in the medium term, estimating the breakeven price at $110 a barrel in 2015. Either way, the kingdom's thirst for cash is likely to mean that U.S. and Saudi interests diverge. The oil-for-security deal between the two countries has destabilized the kingdom in the past by igniting support for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and it could be used again by agents of internal opposition groups. Moreover, the recent pro-democracy upheavals in Egypt, Syria, and above all Bahrain are bound to influence U.S.-Saudi relations over time in ways that are hard to predict. More

 

Energy expert says world's oil production has peaked

Every year in August there is a weeklong event, the Oil & Gas Conference. It’s in Denver and draws an international audience. By most accounts EnerCom is the best on the schedule.

This year 121 companies were scheduled to make presentations. If I were allowed to hear only one presentation, and attend one breakout session, I’d choose Core Labs — hands down.

“The maximum yearly oil production of the planet is taking place now!” That came from the CEO of a Netherlands-based company that has 70 offices in 50 countries worldwide. Their business is analyzing drilling results for all major companies and hundreds of smaller firms in the global energy-finding industry.

The company, Core Labs (NYSE: CLB $121), has a unique view of the big picture that few, if any, others could envision. As a byproduct of their normal business activities, CLB accumulates data about the current status of all major oil and gas basins on the planet. Annual revenues are $1 billion.

While an exploration company is drilling, CLB evaluates the rock samples and evaluates the potential of finding oil and gas below. After an oil or gas field is producing, CLB helps the well operators to extract the maximum amount of hydrocarbons from the reservoir. Information that extensive about all the major energy basins in 50 countries is a unique collection of data.

Never very bashful in the breakout session, CEO Dave Demshur readily offered his thoughts about the big energy picture. When queried about predictions of increased oil availability he took the under in most cases. Basically he looks for flat, or lower, future oil generation from Mexico, Iraq, Iran, North Sea, Russia, and the shocker Saudi Arabia. More

 

Making clean energy pay off by storing it as squeezed air

A stumbling block to increasing our reliance on electricity from cleaner energy sources such as solar panels and wind farms has always been figuring out how to efficiently store the energy for use when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. Danielle Fong could make clean energy significantly more practical on a large scale by introducing a novel way to use tanks of compressed air for energy storage. “It could radically reorient the economics of renewable energy,” she says.

Danielle Fong

The idea of using compressed air to store energy is not new. Electricity from solar panels or wind turbines can turn a motor that’s used to compress the air in a large tank, and the air pressure can then be converted into power to drive a generator when the power is needed. The problem is that during compression the air reaches temperatures of almost 1,000 °C. That means energy is lost in the form of heat, and storage in conventional steel vessels becomes impractical.

Fong stumbled on a possible solution while skimming through a nearly century-old book: water spray is great at cooling air. She asked, why not spray water into the air while compressing it, so that the air stays cool? To make the process practical, she developed a technique for separating the heated water from the compressed air and diverting the water into a tank, so the heat can be recaptured to minimize energy loss. The process is about as efficient as the best batteries: for every 10 kilowatt-hours of electricity that goes into the system, seven kilowatt-hours can be used when needed.

Fong founded a company called LightSail Energy in Berkeley, California, to develop the technology. Initially, she planned to produce compressed-air-powered scooters. But backer Vinod Khosla of the venture capital firm Khosla Ventures convinced her to go after the much bigger market of electricity for the power grid.

Batteries are the current state of the art in storing excess wind and solar energy, but Fong says the LightSail system will cost less to purchase and will last for a decade or more. Over the long term, she says, the system could cost as little as one-tenth as much to own and operate as batteries do. A single system, which is about the size of a shipping container plus a car-size unit, will store the energy generated by a one-megawatt wind turbine running for three hours. More

 

Peak cheap oil is an incontrovertible fact

If the looming global oil crunch has been postponed for another decade or two as widely alleged, this is far from obvious in today’s commodity markets.

Brent crude jumped to $115 a barrel last week. Petrol costs in Germany and across much of Europe are now at record levels in local currencies.

Diesel is above the political pain threshold of $4 a gallon in the US, hence reports circulating last week that the International Energy Agency (IEA) is preparing to release strategic reserves.

Barclays Capital expects a “monster” effect this quarter as the crude market tightens by 2.4m barrels a day (bpd), with little extra supply in sight.

Goldman Sachs said the industry is chronically incapable of meeting global needs. “It is only a matter of time before inventories and OPEC spare capacity become effectively exhausted, requiring higher oil prices to restrain demand,” said its oil guru David Greely.

This is a remarkable state of affairs given the world economy is close to a double-dip slump right now, the latest relapse in our contained global depression.

Britain, the eurozone, and parts of Eastern Europe are in outright recession. China has “hard-landed”, the result of a monetary shock and real M1 contraction last winter. The HSBC manufacturing index fell deeper into contraction in July.

The CPB World Trade Monitor in the Netherlands show that global trade volumes have been shrinking for the last five months. Container shipping volumes from Asia to Europe fell 9pc in June. Iron prices have fallen by 30pc since April to $103 a tonne.

So we face a world where Brent crude trades at over $100 even in recession. Fears of an Israeli strike on Iran may have spiked the price a bit, though Intrade’s contract for an attack is well below levels earlier this year. More