Energy Economy

The city of Wilmington, North Carolina uses its fiber network to turn the lights off at sports parks at night. Cameras have been placed at every sports and recreation field, along with remote control light switches. A single city employee can quickly check the cameras to see if anyone is still at a field, and if not, a couple of mouse clicks turn off the lights. The city expects to save $800,000 per year on electricity costs. That will build a lot of fiber.

The Scuderi Group have announced a new internal combustion engine that sure looks like a game changer. At this point, I can guess some of you have already started to yawn, as a whole host of "game changing" internal combustion engine designs over the past thirty years have made than claim (can anyone spell "adiabatic?").

But the Scuderi split cycle engine design is the result of more than twenty U.S. patents, and for engine buffs, the detailed descriptions of the engine, how it works, and why it works is jaw-dropping.

Researchers have discovered a massive geothermal hotspot in West Virginia that could be used to generate green electric power. A review of previous data collected from a large number of oil and gas wells found that the temperatures had not been calculated correctly. Areas as hot as 200 degrees Centigrade were identified only five kilometers deep--shallow enough to tap for energy generation.

DefenseTech reports that a virus has been found in some SCADA systems. SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) is the software used for managing electric power grids, water and sewer systems, and other utilities. So far, the infections have been found in utility departments in the Far East, where the SCADA computers are older and not well maintained. What is worrisome is that someone, or some organization, is targeting SCADA systems. There is a reason why the U.S.

Here is an article that alleges that Boulder, Colorado's SmartGridCity project is in deep trouble. The article has a long laundry list of problems, but what jumped out at me is the list of so-called "partners." If you look at the SmartGridCity Partners page, you can see the root problem of this project is too many cooks.

An automobile took down a large Amazon EC2 data center when it crashed into a utility pole near the facility and broke the power line. In a cascading failure, the Amazon data center's backup power system also broke, and the backup power did not work.

This Scientific American article discusses something I and others have been saying for years--the 100 year old electric grid we use for residential and business power was not designed for electric cars, which have extremely high amperage power draws. It is not so much that the grid can't handle one or two electric cars in a neighborhood; it can, and the load is not much different than things like welders or potter's kilns.

Two different approaches to electric vehicle design hint at the changes we are going to see in the coming years as the price of fossil fuel heads up again. Segway has designed a more practical version of its two wheel all electric vehicle; the Puma lets you sit down instead of standing up, and has a cover that will provide at least minimal wind, sun, and rain protection.

This is an idea that seems so obvious that you wonder why it took so long for someone to actually develop it into a product. Fast food restaurants use hundreds of gallons of fry oil a week, and it used to be just hauled to the dump. Lately, it has been possible to sell it to owners of biodiesel vehicles, but that has not been convenient or easy.

This just might work. Walmart may sell an inexpensive electric car. The company already has a car parts department and a car repair department with garages and lifts, so taking on service and maintenance of one or two cheap electric cars would not be a stretch. I think that over the next five or six years, as older second cars in families wear out, many will opt for a cheap electric for around town errands.

A new report says more workers are employed in the wind-based power generation business than in the coal industry. Bad news for coal? Not necessarily, as coal will continue to be an important alternative to imported fossil fuels. Coal and nuclear will be important to support base load electric generating capacity, as wind and solar can't provide reliable 24/7 power.

Here is a report from a northern California homeowner who installed a large array of solar panels on his home six months ago, and has been carefully tracking energy usage since then. Not surprisingly, the panels generated a lot of power during the summer months, and output has been much more variable as the angle of the sun has changed during the winter (meaning less power). More cloudy days in the winter also affects output.

LED lights are slowly improving, and a new manufacturing process using silicon instead of more expensive sapphire may bring down the cost of LED "light bulbs" within two years. Like record players, CD players, and VCRs, light bulbs will seem quaint and horribly old-fashioned to the next generation of kids, who will have grown up with LED lighting as normal.

A newly-developed nano-engineered coating that can be applied to solar cells decreases reflectivity and allows the solar cell to use almost all of the sunlight hitting the surface--over 90% efficiency. In comparison, the best previous record for solar cell efficiency is about 60% utilization of light hitting the surface. The coating also allows cells to be mounted in a wider variety of orientations and still generate significant power.

Up in New Hampshire, a new electric vehicle is undergoing road tests. New Hampshire is not normally counted as one of the big auto-producing states, but the move to electric vehicles is likely to bring some new players into the field. As a side issue, the government might have more impact by giving a few million dollars to every firm in the U.S. working on electric vehicle technology rather than trying to bail out the high cost Detroit manufacturers.

Electric utilities and electric car manufacturers are beginning to sit down and talk to each other. At the Austin Alt Car Expo, representatives from the two groups shared opportunities and concerns. One very big concern is how the electric grid will handle the additional power load represented by electric cars.

New Mexico continues to roar far ahead of the rest of the country with a wide ranging mix of game-changing economic development strategies. The state seems to be successfully attracting the brightest and best entrepreneurs and businesspeople in the country, and economic developers in the state are greasing the skids with investments in space, energy, and entertainment.

Google's power hungry servers continue to send the company out to look for cheaper sources of electric power. According to this article, the search giant is studying the idea of putting massive banks of servers on giant barges tethered in the ocean, where wave energy would generate the power needed for the servers.

Zap electric cars will be built in Kentucky. They have been built in China, but the cost of hauling them from China has become too expensive. So manufacturing is moving closer to customers, and the Energy Economy is going to unfold much like this--getting energy and energy saving devices as close to customers as possible.

The New York Times has a story about an emerging problem with wind power: the power grid can't handle it. Putting massive new energy generation sources out in the middle of nowhere won't work if you don't have high capacity power lines that can carry the electricity to where it is needed. So one of the hidden costs of wind power (or solar, or any other new generation source) is getting the power to the right place at the right time.