Today the US electorate will go to the polls in the mid-term elections. All the signs are that many intend to us this opportunity to wreak vengeance on a fallen idol. Harmless Sky is not concerned with American or any other variety of party politics, but in this case the outcome of the vote may have far reaching consequences for the climate debate. Already there are dark rumours of Republicans planning investigations by Congressional committees into the science that has led to concern about global warming. And Congressional hearings are not the genteel, and perhaps ineffective, talking shops that House of Commons Select Committee hearings seem to have become in recent years.
Roy Spencer has an excellent scene setter on his blog here:
Global Warming Elitism, Tomorrow’s Election, and The Future
The first part of this article also has resonance for a post that I put up a while back about A very convenient network.
H/t to Bishop Hill
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For as long as I can remember, a breakthrough in battery technology that will soon provide a small, cheap and light means of storing large amounts of energy has been just around the corner. Although the demand for better batteries to power laptops has led to some improvement, the state of the technology still falls far short of what the electricity generation industry needs if it is ever going to be possible to iron out the problems created by intermittent supplies from alternatives like wind.
A newspaper report of a bright new idea caught my eye recently. This involves using surplus generation capacity when demand is low, but supply is high, to chill air to -196o C, which liquefies it. This is stored, and when demand is high and there is a shortfall in supply, then the liquefied air can be reheated, causing it to expand by a factor of 700. The ensuing oomph can be used to drive turbines.
This would seem to be one of those ideas that are either completely barmy – the developers only claim 50% efficiency – or just possibly a remarkable breakthrough. It would be interesting to hear an engineer’s view. I’ve put the text of the article here.
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This letter appeared in the Sunday Times last weekend:
Sir – Last week DFID [Department for International Development] hosted an event for its staff on “Putting gender at the heart of climate change adaptation and mitigation”.
I am delighted that it is concentrating so effectively on its mission t fight poverty.
Maurice Taylor, Bristol
How long, Oh Lord! how long? will it be before MSM news editors start asking questions about his kind of thing in leading articles rather than leaving it to contributors to their letters pages?
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(About ten days ago I hinted that there was an astonishing post concerning Ofcom and the Dimmock Case in the pipeline. It still is; perhaps it’ll be ready by the end of this week.)
These are not rumours (dark or otherwise). Here is a quote from The Hill on September 23rd: “House Oversight and Government Reform [Committee] ranking member Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is promising to give a “careful relook” at climate change science in the wake of last year’s “Climategate” scandal if Republicans take over the House.”
The Committee contacted me earlier this year, about concerns of fraud.
TonyN said
“Although the demand for better batteries to power laptops has led to some improvement, the state of the technology still falls far short of what the electricity generation industry needs if it is ever going to be possible to iron out the problems created by intermittent supplies from alternatives like wind.”
I must have bought my first solar powered device 25 years ago (a light) I last bought a solar powered light two years ago. It worked in the summer-when you didn’t need light-but it switched on well after everyone had gone to bed. In the winter however it just wouldn’t charge up at all so in effect it was useless for its purpose. Something of a metaphor here for other renewables-wind mills that stop turning as a winter high settles over us bringing cold and no wind.
Both solar and wind are highly expensive so therefore have to be subsidised. I do hear tell of batteries being developed that would be capable of holding a charge that would make the intermittent power from solar and wind useful as it could be stored until needed. But, like you, I have been hearing such things for years.
We need power. Preferably cheap, as the economy is built on it. We dont need mad cap schemes that, by taxation policy, force away our heavy industries-such as steel and cement-to less efficient countries that then get carbon credits paid for by us.
Has the West gone collectively mad?
tonyb
Doug Keenan, #1:
That’s very interesting news indeed.
I was being cautious, but at this stage even the Newsnight coverage from Washington seems to hold out no hope for a Democrat majority in the House. And the impact on Cancun?
TonyB
Sure looks like it, Tony.
Max
It may be worth asking if the USA has gone collectively (is that word permissable these days?) mad? It sure looks like it to me.
Are we going to have McCarthyite witch hunts? Are you now, or have you ever been, of the opinion that CO2 is a Greenhouse gas?
Peter
Your observation reminds me of that Monty Python sketch sbout the Spanish inquisition rather than McCarthy :)
tonyb
TonyB,
I was think more “Spot the Looney”. However, its not too difficult to do that at the moment.
Treat the “frozen-air energy store” as a black box – instead of looking too closely at the technology inside the box.
For storing wind-generated electricity you would need a black box that could store electrical energy over a long enough period of time.
The best existing black box is pumped water storage – noted in the aticle as 70% efficient.
A new black box would have to be better in some way than the existing black boxes.
It could be cheaper capital costs, higher efficiency, more flexibility.
The newspaper story is, cough, unscientific. The idea itself seems odd – there are dozens of questions like where the heat goes when you cool the air and where to get the heat to evaporate the air again.
It’s borderline whether its an April 1 type story.
Jack, TonyN, looking online for information about the frozen-air energy storage idea, I found the Highview Power Storage website here, and another site mentions that the company were awarded a grant of £1,109,768 from DECC this year.
At first, I thought this seemed to have a little too many “Office” connotations to be an entirely serious story (I then recalled that the boss in The Office was called Brent, not Brett)! Gareth Brett is real, though, and appears to have some very solid engineering and managerial credentials and experience.
According to their website, Highview Power Storage hope to “be running a fully integrated pilot plant during early 2011”. It does look like a genuine outfit; whether it will succeed commercially is another matter, though, I suppose.
Alex, they’ve already succeeded commercially: the endgame was to get the grant by sounding plausible.
Alex:
I don’t doubt that it is a serious outfit, although one might wonder whether the £1.1m input from DECC is any guarantee of that. What did interest me was the reference to the government funding being supplemented by private finance. I wondered why? But the answer seems fairly obvious. If full scale trials go ahead they will have to be subsidised, whether they succeed or fail. What do the investors have to loose? And they might just be a nose ahead of the competition if the technology really is a goer. What is worrying is that this subverts the normal commercial process where a potential investor would assess a project on the likelihood of it becoming viable, rather than its ability to yield subsidies.
Jack – you’re right, I hadn’t thought of that.
TonyN, I think I see what you mean with this – government and private finance together “picking winners”, as it were.
What’s wrong with a big flywheel? It would need to be really big (a mile across, say) but it could store an awful lot of kinetic energy, and the losses should be low enough. Not sure about the gyroscopic effects, though!
James P The big flywheel is a great idea in theory but frictional loses would render it useless. We are already seeing problems with the largest of the wind turbines with gearbox and bearing issues because of the huge weight. We know these behemoths cannot be left idle when there is no wind and must be kept turning to avoid the central support shaft from bending. Just remember even what we may consider a solid and immoveable will bend over time.
Peter
Do you have any views on whether the frozen air idea makes sense?
TonyN,
If 50% efficiency is really achievable it could be a possibility.
I’d put my money on batteries in the longer term
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=storing-the-breeze-new-battery-might-make-wind-power-reliable
But there is this one too
http://www.lockergnome.com/theoracle/2010/03/11/storing-wind-power-underground/
and flywheels
http://www.energymatters.com.au/index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=991
On the face of it compressed air is an attractive possibility for cars too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_car
But the possible efficiencies aren’t that good due to the nature of the gas laws. Compressed air get hot. Expanding air cools etc.
But I agree that energy storage is a key issue. If governments are looking to spend a bit of money to stimulate the economy I’d rather they put it into energy storage than yet another multi-billion dollar missile or military jet fighter program.
By now you’ve all heard, (through the wonderful inventions brought to us through the power of fossil fuels), that Republicans have achieved a landslide victory in the US midterm elections.
Cap & Tax is now, officially………DEAD.
A complete rejection of Barrack Hussein Obama, his goofy Socialist policies and the generally Leftist policies of the current (for two more months) US Congress………well done America………well done.
Brute,
It looks like the Fed are getting in quick – while they still can!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11678022
The Aust dollar is now worth more than a US$ !
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/11/04/3057559.htm?section=justin
But it takes more than a couple of years to change the course of the US economy. President Obama has done well to stabilise the situation there. If your lot had had there way, unemployment would be double what it currently is.
Part of me would like to see the Tea Party put their policies into action. A second US civil war would be an interesting spectacle.
Is that right Pete?
Please provide evidence.
Brute,
Well you ask for evidence. Well let just look at the facts. In Jan 2009 when President Obama took over, US unemployment was 9.1% having been just 5% a year previously. It was rising at 4% per year. At that rate of increase another two years would have seen it increase to over 17%. At is was it reached 10.1 % and has since fallen slightly to 9.2%. OK 17% isn’t quite double but its not far off!
Unemployment is a lagging indicator of the state of any economy. In other words it reflects what was happening previously not right now.
http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=usunemployment&met=unemployment_rate&tdim=true&dl=en&hl=en&q=unemployment+usa
Obama has only been President for two years. It just wouldn’t be possible for anyone to fix things in that short period of time
But the anti-Obama Tea Party movement isn’t about unemployment or even the state of the economy. That’s just a stick with which to beat him. The issues are much more fundamental than that.
Peter G
“gearbox and bearing issues”
You may well be right. I was thinking a horizontal one with a big thrust bearing below, thus eliminating any bending moment on the axle, but I haven’t really considered the scaling issues. It would certainly need to be a hefty bearing!
TonyN
It’s very hard to make a judgement on frozen air as an energy recovery concept as we are not privy to any of the facts and figures, and unlikely to be if they are commercially sensitive.
However I would make these observations:
The process of driving a turbine with expanding gas is not new and is in fact how a jet engine or any other gas turbine works. There is an inherent inefficiency with gas turbines which is why they are not used in road transport, although for aviation they offer size and weight and mechanical complexity reductions combined with very attractive power density that outweigh these factors, so it would be interesting to see for a given input of power what the output is.
What is not explained is what they do to separate out the oxygen as it would be very dangerous I image to have a recovery turbine running with LOX.
This solution cannot be cheap and it would seem to me the low capital cost they claim is a bit misleading even though they may be able to sell the LOX and some of the L N2 commercially.
I can’t help but feel that this is a solution to a problem that is only a tiny part of the larger problem; that the wind doesn’t blow anywhere as much as we think, and that the wind turbines are just plain inefficient full stop and that this is good money after bad. Notwithstanding this these plants may be attractive for “other” commercial reasons and we may be being sold a smokescreen.
Let’s face it; our power grid every day produces excess power without the stupid wind turbines. If this solution was any good then it would already be in use. But to add it to capture excess power just from renewable sources is to me a bit of marketing to counter the very real issues being raised about renewables. So we build a wind farm, back it up with a gas thermal station then build a Cryoenergy recovery system to recover unused energy??? Do me a favour!!!!!
I can’t help but get the feeling there is a simpler solution to all this.
James P
The thrust bearing would be something to behold.
For such a large flywheel I’m sure such things as aligning it with the direct of rotation of the earth would need to be taken into consideration as well as its mass would be huge just so that it could be kept a the correct speed. Also a series of moveable weights would be needed to shift mass as energy is feed in then power is taken out. It becomes complex doesn’t it. Just like the wind turbines what seems a simple solution is a complex nightmare.
Pete,
Re: #20
So, Obama spends 3.4 TRILLION dollars to create jobs and the unemployment rate goes up?
Good policy and money well spent……..
Beside that Pete you’re wrong about the rate when Obama-dinejad took office….the rate in January of 09 was 7.7%.
http://metricmash.com/unemployment.aspx?code=LNS14000000