Utter Tosh from Frost & Sullivan !
May 12, 2010
Please someone pinch me ! I’ve just read this article on the Renewable Energy Focus website, which usually has some good pointers to decent reports, but this press release is just stoopid.
Apparently HVDC is the only viable transmission system for offshore wind (which its not) but it suffers from being too expensive at short distances (which it does) and apparently AC doesn’t work under water (?!?).
Now, news aggregators like REF can’t check everything. Its simply not economic to do so. But when a press release starts with a direct contradiction to existing reality (quote “Underwater electricity transmission is not possible with alternating current”) you have to at least have a flirt with checking the source.
I couldn’t get a hold of the report that this press release is publicising. Frost & Sullivan don’t give away their “research” for free, but if the report is of a similar quality to the press release I don’t want to read it !
For the record ALL the UK’s current offshore wind installations use AC transmission. HVDC is hampered by its expensive transformer/rectifier costs which mean that you need to have a cable run over about 30km before it’s better performance in terms of lower transmission losses outweigh the extra upfront expense in hardware.
Yes, its true that with more installations that cost will come down, but it will always remain as long as the onshore grid is AC. If you take the extreme example of Scroby Sands, 2.5km off Gt Yarmouth’s seafront. That wind farm just plugs straight into the grid through a small sub-station with no need for extra rectification kit. If it were forced to use HVDC you would need a rectifier at either end to gain virtually nothing in decreased transmission losses over 2,500m of cable.
So Mr Frost & Sullivan. Your report is wrong. Your press releases are misleading. How’s business ?
FIT Company breaks cover
February 28, 2010
The UK’s Feed in Tariffs for low carbon energy production are about to come into effect and in a bid to steal a march on any potential competitors one specialist supply company has broken cover.
Ownergy seems to have a business model eerily similar to one that I suggested last June in my post Energy Ideas Part Two. Not only is it going to do all the technical assessment, design and installation, but its also offering management and finance for the installations and will be covering all technologies that attract an FIT.
The guy who is running it, Phillip Wolfe, is a big cheese in the Renewable Energy Association and seems to have had a big hand in the design of the FITs in the first place, so I doubt that he’s a regular reader of this blog. Who says that only the major energy companies can capture government policy mechanisms 
Superconductors – Part Four A New Hope
January 11, 2010
Superconductors have been around in the labs for decades now. They have been a mainstay of high-end scientific research and niche medical applications for decades, but on the industrial scale they have always been a bit to expensive to run in mass market applications, like the energy sector. Theirs has been a story of potential energy efficiency boosts, power savings, zero transmission losses and all the first order energy system changes that no-one is against. Its time to take a look at them a little closer since I dismissed them so off-handedly in my previous post regarding the North Sea super grid.
Crash course
Superconductivity was discovered 99 years ago.
Different materials become superconductors at different temperatures.
HTS (High Temperature Super-Conductors) are defined as having a transition temperature above 30K (-243C), and the highest temp superconductors have a validated operating temperature around 135K. The boiling point of liquid nitrogen is 77K, so this has made HTS much more accessible and practical as nitrogen is commonly used as a liquified gas.
However, recently an HTS material that operates at 254K (-19C) has been claimed. This would clearly be a massive leap forward as standard compression-cycle refrigeration techniques could be used rather than immersion in liquified gas. Obviously these are lab findings and there is no guarantee that production of these materials could be scaled up to industrial quantities (they use some relatively commonplace elements, so there shouldn’t be any resource availability problems for once). The standard 10 years+ from first publication warning applies here i.e. no field application will arise from a lab discovery within 10 years of first publication.
So industrially we are looking at the 135K materials, which is still OK, but not the massive jump that we’d all like to see.
Energy Applications
Cabling – Zero transmission losses over long distances, or high capacity transmission without the current massive infrastructure (overhead pylons) are the main lures.
Power:Weight improvements – instead of copper conductors, using HTS in motors greatly increases their power:weight ratio. The applications in electric vehicles are obvious, so I won’t labour that point, but also consider all those static motors in air-conditioning units, factory assembly lines, and my personal favorite the conveyor belt. The infrastructure to hold these in place could be smaller and lighter, their maintenance quicker and safer as well as their operating costs lower.
For ‘motors’ also read ‘generators’ and you see the application for wind turbines and other renewable generating technologies. Smaller lighter nacelles means smaller lighter towers, means cheaper generating capacity and lower maintenance costs.
Renewable Energy Focus has done this two parter (Part One & Part Two) which covers all these much better than I ever could. You’ll need to subscribe for free to access the full articles, but its worth it.
The take home from these two articles is that super conductors should be on the shopping list of industry. I was too quick to dismiss them for the North Sea grid. With 150 times the carrying capacity per unit weight and 1/3 of the transmission losses superconducting cabling should be the first option for mega projects, not the last.
When/if those properly room temperature super-conductors reach the supermarket shelves a revolution will take hold.
Big Wind Movements
January 9, 2010
Round three of the UK offshore wind tender process totaled 32.2 GW of nameplate generating capacity. That’s a lorra lorra windmills and well above the expected 25GW power output. Lets be middle of the road and say for the sake of convenience that 3.22 MW turbines exist, that’d be 10,000 turbines located between 22km and 190km from the nearest landfall.
The London Array has started to hand out contracts. Nexans, the submarine cable specialist, has won the power export (windfarm to shore) cable contract. It is 100M Euro for 4x 53km long 150kV capacity copper cables to carry up to 1GW of power from 175 turbines.
If we do a quick bit of maths on that for 32 times the power, roughly twice the distance and 57 times the number of turbines, if the Round Three windfarms use the same technology as the London Array, the export cables alone should cost in the order of 6.5bn Euros (not including inflation or commodity risk). Using my previous estimation of the intensity of copper use in wind power, 10,000 offshore turbines and their associated cabling will use around 310,000 tonnes of conductor grade copper. Copper’s current price is around US$7,200 per tonne giving an embodied copper cost today of US$2.23bn. By the time these windmills get built, that figure looks cheap to me.
Perhaps that’s why the North Sea Supergrid got a bunk up the probability ladder by the nations next to the water. For an estimated one-off cost of 30bn Euro you get a ‘local’ connection, cutting the need for those expensive connections to shore and you get the ability to load balance using Norway’s hydro power excess.
If I had an extra billion or two I’d be looking at building a submarine cabling capacity right now. Not just the cable factory but the cable laying vessel and some upstream capacity in copper recycling. It’d be nice to think that we’d be at super conducting cables for this job, but at 6,000km total length and multi-GW capacity I’m not sure that the tech will be with us in time. Looks like HVDC instead, shame.
Carbon Capture & Snorage UK
November 15, 2009
With the big nuclear announcement now out of the way for the UK the nascent UK CCS sector is hoping to get some kind of caffine jolt to wake it up.
The competition to get 4 pilot plants up and running has gone off the boil. Big players have dropped out and the anticipated cross-Europe rush to start burying CO2 has lost some momentum. Lets look at why.
Demand
The recession has hit demand. No doubt about it. UK manufacturing (what was left of it) has gone into hibernation and is not expected to get back to 2007 levels for another 2 or even 3 years. That means the forward demand curves have all been shifted by up to 5 years backwards from where they were in 2008. This really works against the shorter lead times in building new coal, compared with nuclear. The big wind projects that have already been approved, but are waiting for finance or grid connections, have been given £1.3bn in loan guarentees and a new planning regime to work under, further eroding the argument for new coal with CCS as a stop gap until the baseload new nuclear is online. DECC has ruled out any new coal without CCS.
Simply put, why try and prove up the new CCS systems to plug a supply gap that is no longer really there when the proven wind and nuclear options will provide much, if not most, of the mid-term replacement capacity ?
This is very much a UK specific situation and the case for CCS in the UK, to my mind, hinges on quick deployment. Any delays will reduce the potential for a self-sustaining CCS industry in the UK.
From this perspective it looks like new gas-powered peaking plants (or possibly biomass) will be needed to bridge the gap between baseload nuclear and intermittent wind, unless the UK can raise its efficiency substantially over the next 5 years or so.
Enhanced Oil/Gas Recovery
One of the big supporting economic arguments for developing CCS in the UK is its potential to replace the oil and gas industries as a major technology and skills exporter. I think that this is a justified argument as far as it goes. Having worked offshore myself I can see most of the skills being transferable between the two industries and there are a lot of workers looking to CCS as a way to sustain their livelihoods until oil and gas are no longer a mass market source of energy.
One of the ways that oil companies in the US and Canada have been coupling the two industries is by Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR). Pump CO2 down into the oil reservoir and the additional pressure and viscosity drop (increased runniness of the oil) increase total recovery. The amount of the increase is very dependent on the age of the reservoir and its extraction history. For example a brand new oil field that has CO2 pumped into it from its very first production could give up as much as 50% more oil than without the addition of CO2. Older fields that have had a prior history of water injection may only give up an additional 10% or so.
This is a problem for the UK. Most of the North Sea fields are old meaning that the application of CO2 for EOR is limited. That means that returns are limited in both time and amount, which in turn means that the majors don’t see the 20-30 year profit lines they need in order to support their administrative and development burdens. The mid-tier and junior oil companies were excluded from the UK’s competition by the requirement to prove that finance was available for full development of the pilot plants and allied storage sites.
So the big guys are too flabby to be able to operate CCS at a profit in UK waters and the smaller guys can’t finance it. Bit of a hitch there.
There is a slightly bigger issue with CO2-EOR. Well spacing. Where Canada and the US (and Saudi, and others) have onshore oil fields where well spacing can be very close and access is not a major issue, the North Sea is not a location that allows close well spacing. This will push EOR to the limits technically and it will not be as effective as in onshore oil fields. Developing the new technologies in this challenging environment would be worth it for a permanent industry, the way we saw North Sea oil in the 70s as providing a new frontier, but not for an industry that has only ever been seen as a stop-gap we have to question what that new frontier is for when considering CO2-EOR and CCS together. Investing in an industry that will migrate away from the UK within a generation, or possibly two at the outside, doesn’t seem like a sound long-term strategy to me.
Intellectual Property and Licensing
If CCS is to be implemented in the North Sea, with or without EOR, the current oil and gas fields are the logical place to start. That means using IP from the oil and gas companies to fast-track development. Unfortunately the mechanisms for doing this are not yet in place. Likewise licensing is only just getting beaten into shape after the recent EU directives to allow CO2 storage under the seabed. Previously it would have been considered as the dumping of waste at sea.
So while those things are eminently do-able, they take time. They will be challenged and discussed, and re-drafted. Go around that loop a couple of times and you’ve lost a year to bureaucracy. That essential quick deployment doesn’t look so achievable and the investment risk escalates. The investors get more and more nervous and we see a situation where even the syndicates left in the UK’s competition start to ask whether its worth carrying on.
So, while I’m sure we will see a demo plant or two on the east coast of the UK in 5-10 years time, I’m starting to doubt whether the North Sea will be centre of a new industry. If I were an investor looking at CCS, I’d be looking at countries that are wedded to coal and that had large onshore sedimentary basins (for example USA, Canada, China, Germany, Poland & Australia, possibly South Africa). I would not be looking at countries that have mulitple energy sources, those with a big commitment to nuclear or those without large onshore sedimentary basins (for example the UK, Norway, Japan, France, Benelux, South Korea).
Update
The new UK Energy Bill 2009 (read on the 19th Nov 2009) includes enabling legislation for CCS in the UK. It allows financial aid for CCS development, without specifying limits, and it provides for DECC to provide regulation for the industry. So either Ed Milliband reads this blog and his officials at DECC are really quick off the mark or I wasn’t the only one to notice that things had gone a bit quiet. I’m not taking bets on the former.
