Last week Al Gore challenged us to get off of carbon based fuels in 10 years, comparing the challenge to the Manhattan Project or Kennedy’s challenge to go to the moon. So I started thinking about that, wondering if it’s possible.
In comparing it to going to the moon, we are probably closer to getting off of oil than we were to going to the moon when Kennedy made his challenge. So I’m going to assume that it is doable. It’s just a matter of will, which was what Gore was trying to inspire. And I think that anyone who sees what’s going on in the world would agree that the scope of the problem makes the goal worthy.
Technology Required
Obviously, to make this happen, we have to assume that the solution will look very different than today’s power distribution. It will have to be a product of newer technology that is built on a paradigm shift and based on new existing technology as well as emerging technology. Here’s a partial list of the emerging technologies I think we need to focus on.
- Super Capacitors
- Advancements in High Voltage High Current Power Control Semiconductors
- Development of new high voltage insulation materials
- Converting the Grid to High Voltage DC
- Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistors
- High Voltage Underground DC in the Megavolt ranges
- Running Cars on Super Capacitors instead of Batteries
- Capacitive energy storage in a DC grid.
- Making Cars run on Super Capacitors
- Using Cars to store and move Electricity
These ideas are my own. They are not complete and although I have a good understanding of a lot of the material presented here, I’m not an expert. The idea here is to present a plausible overview that the experts can get excited about then go do it right. So if I’m off track on something or have missed a better way – fine. Build on the ideas.
The Power Grid of the Future
One of the important pieces of a new energy plan is a different kind of electrical power grid. Because of the simplicity of transformers, AC power was a natural choice and, for the most part, the only choice. But now that has changed with new semiconductor and computer technology. Although DC is still more expensive than AC now, in the future that won’t be true. And here’s why …
DC has a lot of advantages over AC. DC requires only 2 conductors instead of 6 or 7 as in 6 phase AC. DC also doesn’t have the inductive and capacitive losses that AC does. And this is especially important when you go underground.
I think underground DC is the future of the gird. Underground has several important advantages. It’s protected from the weather; ice, wind, rain, hurricanes, tornadoes and solar mass ejections. In the future, solar flares are going to be a major problem as Earth is starting to go through magnetic reversal, so if power is already underground, then that will reduce the problems. Underground uses less real estate and looks better.
DC also doesn’t have the problem of having to match phase and frequency in order to interconnect systems the way AC does. That allows for better control of energy distribution and of power.
If we can also develop new high voltage insulating materials, we can increase the voltage, reduce the cost and move more power further. The new grid is going to need to be higher capacity to be able to move energy from where it is to where it needs to be.
What I see happening is that a hybrid grid is formed with the addition of a high voltage DC backbone added to the AC grid with parts of the high voltage AC grid being replaced with underground DC. AC would be used for regional distribution as it is now. The grid will also connect continents eventually allowing power to be moved from the parts of the world with power to the parts of the world that need power. More on that soon.
Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistors
One of the things that makes the DC grid possible are advances in semiconductor technology. A new device called an insulated gate bipolar transistor allows high voltage DC to be converted to AC very efficiently. This is a revolution in the way we should be thinking about the grid. In the past AC has been popular because of the ability to use low tech transformers to step voltages up and down. DC couldn’t be converted efficiently, but now it can and we should be thinking in terms of a new grid based on direct current.
Super Capacitors
Super capacitors from companies like EEstor and Maxwell are capacitors with storage capacities thousands of times the energy capacity of today’s capacitor. Super capacitors are very new and still in development but because of their capacity, it changes the entire electrical paradigm. Super capacitors can be used to be the batteries of electric cars and they can be used to add an energy storage component to the energy grid.
Super Capacitor Powered Electric Cars
Not just because of the high capacities being achieved, but also because of the far faster charging rate, super capacitors are what I think is the future of electric powered vehicles. Super capacitors can be recharged in 5 minutes at special charging stations. Zenn Motor Company in Canada is going to have (as they claim) an electric car out in 2009 that goes 280 miles on a charge and has a top speed of 80mph.
In the next 10 years we need to switch to electric powered cars. Bio fuels are still carbon based. It’s liquid that has to be hauled in. Electricity can be moved all over the world through wires rather than pipes and trucks. And you can move it at the speed of light. It allows wind blowing in Texas to power cars in California.
Super Capacitors and Grid Energy Storage
The current power grid is for the most part a real time system where power generated is used immediately. This requires that power generation match power consumption. But with super capacitors, electricity can be generated and stored for later use. This allows power to be generated at night, for example, in Texas wind farms and then be shipped over the DC grid to power charging stations for cars at night so that in the daytime when cars “fill up,” they can use nighttime wind energy.
Super capacitors can also be used to move electricity into areas where it is anticipated that it is going to be needed. For example, the weather forecast predicts a heat wave in Atlanta and electricity use for air conditioning is going to be high. With an energy storage grid, power generated the night before can be moved to the area and pre-positioned for use the next day. Energy storage would allow a whole new way of thinking about electricity distribution.
Using Cars as Grid Storage
The car of the future might become part of the electricity grid. As the capacities of super capacitors increase, cars will be able to store far more electricity than they need. Most cars are driving less than 2 hours a day which means that the car sits parked for 22 hours a day. And with tens of millions of cars just sitting there, they could be configured to provide power back to the grid when parked.
Not all cars would be part of the system, however people can have charging units in their garage or car port that automatically connect to the car when at home, parked at work or parked at public transit parking garages. These connection would allow power to be transferred in both directions. It can fill the car with power or tap power from the car to help the grid meet the energy needs of the local grid. Thus the car can be charged at night when the grid load is low and the power used in the daytime when the grid load is high.
The fully charged car is driven to work where it is again connected to the grid. While the car sits there, it is either charged or discharged depending on the needs of the grid. Each car would have a computer with a setting as to how much power the car is willing to share so that the grid doesn’t take too much power. The system would make sure that the car has plenty of power left over to get home or wherever the car needs to go later.
Cars that share power in this way would get energy credits for being allowed to be used to power the grid. So if a car is charged at night and gives back power in the day, the owner might get enough energy credit to get free power making their commute to work at virtually no cost. Cars that are constantly on the road during peak power times would pay a higher rate for electricity.
In Conclusion
If we are going to solve the energy problem sooner rather than later, we have to change our way of thinking from what we are doing now to what we will be doing 20 years from now. That is going to take new thinking and vision; thinking in revolutionary terms rather than evolutionary terms.
The suggestions here aren’t perfect, have mistakes and can be improved upon. It is also just one piece of the energy puzzle, but it is the core of energy distribution. Electricity is one of the most efficient means of energy distribution. It doesn’t require energy to be hauled on trucks, trains or through pipes. It is a universal interface connection – generation of power with the consumer of power.
The new elements in this paradigm is the energy storage part. Super capacitors are an emerging technology. High voltage DC is also fairly new, not that it hasn’t been tried, but new technology is making it more cost effective. As inverter technology improves, DC power will become more affordable. As new materials for insulators becomes available, the voltages can be increased and the cost of underground cables will decrease. As more cars convert to super capacitors, the grid will adapt to using them as mobile batteries to power the electricity infrastructure.
There are other technologies on the horizon as well. If we invent high temperature superconductors we can store power in magnetic fields and create magnetic bearings for flywheel storage of power. Carbon nanotubes will also play an important part in the future as well as other types of nano-technology used in advanced materials to create technologies that we haven’t yet though of.
So I invite readers of this to spread the word and use this article as an example of using new ideas and new thinking to achieve Al Gore’s challenge of getting off of carbon based fuels in 10 years. And if someone has a better idea – go for it.
It is possible in 10 years but, not using the mix of power sources Gore wants.
What? No getting the government to set up giant Tesla-coil based electrical distribution systems?
I mean, he pretty much succeeded on a small scale, but just ran out of money, no?
DC doesn’t suffer from voltage drop problems over distance like AC either. It will the means of choice, for example, for offshore tide/wind/wave-based generation.
Using cars as grid storage is a bad idea unless you can be sure that you will leave the car parked.
I don’t know what tech will work and neither does anyone else. Spending more money on finding out may be a good idea but sometimes breakthroughes come at their own pace.
The worst thing that could happen is a go to the moon a bomb type project. Those were do it a few times at any cost and we need to do it millions of times a day at low cost. The money needs to be spread out a lot more with a lot more ideas tested.
I disagree, deowll. We need a way to push the public into accepting and converting in a short time frame to a new transportation system. Historically if you don’t have that large push by the government and private individuals to prime the pump, inertia keeps corporations and individuals from working on the big ideals because of the scope of change required. And smaller governments’ unwillingness to take a chance (how many muni-wifi cities and towns do we have?)
There has to be someone(s) willing to envision and then to guide or do the actions needed. Though we Americans tend to like our individualist “I’ll do it my way” attitudes, we do great things as a country with a guided goal.
That being said, I have to say the idea of cars holding extra power for the grid wouldn’t work very well for the individual case. However, FLEET and GOVERNMENT vehicles could do this. The Government could mandate that all government vehicles be electric and grid-linked, and that no further gas/diesel vehicles would be purchased. That right there is a huge chunk of the market. Larger businesses (car rentals, some companies) could do the same and get free access to the government’s power grid stations for the effort.
I also think converting our long-haul transport trucks to heavy electric vehicles would help immensely.
DC longhaul wiring would be more efficient, but require a huge initial investment by private and government agencies. Probably in the 50-100 billion range. Government HAS to spearhead such an effort, otherwise you’ll get a mishmash of different standards, non linkable, arguing about who is better and unwilling to select anything not patented by the individual companies.
Perhaps have the government and industry pool applicable patents into a single group agency or company, give the owners free access to the grid for their giving up their patent rights for the country.
At least we’d have a path to work on, rather than right now , which is a hodgepodge of random attempts at change without any real backing by the populace.
How about more nuclear power plants? Isn’t that doable in ten years?
I don’t understand the fixation on cars providing energy back to the grid. They presumably drew power in the first place, so you’re just shuffling some energy around. Any place that needs the energy could just have its own storage capacitor.
If it does not make sense to move energy around in trucks, then it does not make sense to move energy around in cars. A better idea is to make the charging stations into storage facilities.
It’s my understanding the DC power can only be transmitted about 50 miles. And it’s one of the reasons power is transmitted as AC power.
Generating power at night isn’t cheaper if you are using wind and solar energy…
http://tinyurl.com/grsnid
It isn’t that DC is limited in distance. The issue has been that AC can be raised to high voltage which allows for greater distances.
What has changed is that DC can now be converted to high voltage and back again. And DC doesn’t have the problems that AC does with regard to capacitive and inductive losses.
50 miles can cover some pretty large areas.
MikeN
This is just an article about new ways to move power, not where the power comes from. Nuclear would be able to be moved and stored as well. Nuclear could charge cars at night that would allow the grid to meet peak power demands in the daytime.
The main point of this article is to talk about a DC grid with electrical storage. That’s good for all power sources, including nuclear.
This sounds like a typical discussion at http://theoildrum.com
No one has mentioned the use of trains. Modern locomotives are already electric (with diesel generators) and rails can be electrified, eliminating the need for the diesel.
Trains are also far and away the most fuel efficient transportation available (except river barges, but they don’t go everywhere). In the not too distant future, trains are going to be the only long distance freight hauling method available, with trucks just going the last few miles.
Perkel has put a lot of thought into this and has some excellent ideas.
My caveat to this would be: Build up the system using what we have today with an upgrade path for HVDC and supercapacitors which can be brought online as the technology and manufacturing makes it feasible.
Today we have reasonable battery technology for electric cars, to be replaced with supercapacitors when they become available. I bet they could even be designed as a drop-in replacement!
Start with AC for now but replace sections of the grid with supercapacitors running HVDC with powered by wind, solar, and even nuclear as needs and the situation dictate.
In other words, it would be perfectly reasonable to have an end game plan such as Perkel outlined, with an upgrade path on how to get there which would make going carbon free both affordable and reasonably painless.
Create a standard, small, reliable, pebble bed nuclear reactor that be mass produced and implemented all over the grid.
Just like Southwest Air only fly’s Boeing 737’s. It allows them to swap parts and keep training, operations, and maintenance expenses to a minimum. PBR’s use gas instead of water for cooling. No corrosive oxygen in in the cooling loop.
Then spend all the money on figuring out ways to dispose of the nuke waste by hauling it to space and shooting it into the sun. Burying it under a mountain for 10k years is stupid.
These changes should make electricity cheap enough to make people buy electric for their next car.
Also, buy biofuel from the hot, wet, tropical nations, Brazil, Vietnam, Congo for home heating in the cold northern states.
>There has to be someone(s) willing to envision and then to guide or do the actions needed. Though we Americans tend to like our individualist “I’ll do it my way” attitudes, we do great things as a country with a guided goal.
Liberal fascism you can believe in.
#12, OK I got thrown off when you started with Al Gore’s challenge. I still don’t get the fixation on cars as the storage mechanism.
The reason is cars as storage is that they will all have large capacitors capable of driving a car hundreds of miles on a charge. Because they are just sitting there 22 hours a day they become a huge resource for storing energy to be used for peak demand periods and to preposition power regionally in anticipation of demand.
We could also buy the same number of capacitors as in 100 million cars to do the same thing but why bother when they are already there and connected to the grid.
The idea being that people will want to do this because they can save on power costs by participating in the storage grid.
Storage allows power to be generated and held till it’s needed. It would change everything.
But the cars aren’t generating any extra energy. They have to go somewhere to be filled up. Unless you are anticipating that people drive somewhere to get there home energy charges, I don’t see a benefit. If you drain the car, you just have to fill it up that much sooner.
They would fill up at home at night and fill up in the parking garage at work or the parking garage at the electric train stations. And when they are connected to the grid they will be able to take a charge or give power back as needed.
I’m not talking about these cars producing power – just storing it. Storage is the key concept here in that it allows electricity to be used at a different time and place than it is produced.
Also keep in mind that capacitors can be charged much faster than batteries. And I’m envisioning that these capacitors will be able to eventually store far more power than a car would use in a day. Maybe over 500 miles worth of power.
If it’s done right your car might be able to power your house if there is a local power failure.
I hate to be a spoilsport but I can’t see any of this happening as long as the giant, greedy corporations are running this country.
All the push for electric cars is fine but don’t electric cars need to be charged and that requires electricity? And every time you convert energy from one form to another there is an efficiency factor to consider.
That means that you lose a given amount of energy when you convert any fuel to electricity, then you lose a little more when you transmit that energy over any distance, and you lose a little more when you convert the voltage down from the high voltage transmission line to a lower voltage that is safe for Mr. Everyday User. And guess what the lost energy is converted to? Heat. So what do we do about all the heat that is generated by the losses?
Electric cars are not a ‘new’ idea. If you study history you know that electric cars were tried 100 years ago. And Thomas Edison tried to convince us to use DC power over 100 years ago, how far did that idea go?
We talk like cars are the only energy users. What about the lighting, cooling, heating, etc. in our homes and businesses? Heaven forbid that anyone might actually sweat a little in July or put on a jacket in December.
The idea that wind is a limitless source of power is also flawed. Every time the wind passes through a wind turbine the wind has to give up some energy to turn the generator. Put up enough wind generators in Kansas and the wind will stop blowing in Texas.
When will we learn that there is no free lunch?
I am all for finding some really new solutions but it really does not matter whether it is a gasoline powered pig or an electric powered pig, putting lipstick on a pig ain’t going to make it pretty.
Sorry folks, all I see so far is a lot of lipstick and no really new ideas.
# 3 moss said:
“DC doesn’t suffer from voltage drop problems over distance like AC either.”
Sorry to quibble, but that is incorrect. Remember the old equation (Ohm’s Law): E=IR. E is Electromotive Force, measured in volts. I is current, measured in amperes. R is Resistance, measured in ohms. Power is measured in watts and is calculated as volts times current. Transmission losses are calculated from the resistance times the _square_ of the current, I^2R. This is why the power is stepped up to high voltages for transmission. You can send the same amount of power at a lower current. Since the losses mount as the _square_ of the current, great savings are made.
That said, DC current suffers the exact same losses as AC going through the same transmission lines. Resistance is resistance, whether for AC or DC.
/quibble
# 22 – Marc Perkel
Would it be sufficient to power a web site? If so, I volunteer my old truck to power dvorak.org.
RogerDucky re Tesla: “he pretty much succeeded on a small scale, but just ran out of money, no?”
No. He didn’t. That claim is nothing more than urban myth coming from ignorant Tesla deists with zero understanding of the physical world.
Tesla’s “wireless power” experiment involved high frequency AC (read: RF) exciting fluorescent lamps at a modest distance. His notes document the same phenomenon we know know as the inverse square law. It works close up, but the farther you get away from the source, the quicker the power drops to nothing. No amount of money can change the laws of physics.
If Tesla had really discovered a way to beat physics using 19th century technology, it certainly would have been rediscovered a dozen time over by now.
7. Running Cars on Super Capacitors instead of Batteries
9. Making Cars run on Super Capacitors
wtf
DAR
I used to own an EV store (electric scooters) and have been watching the EV industry for some time. I would be VERY skeptical of claims regarding fantastic ranges “in the future.” We have over 100 years of such claims and 99% of the time they have been false. The current Zenn car referred to above uses lead acid batteries, has a pitiful 35 mile range and only gets that while going at a limited snail speed of 25 mph. Going faster uses vastly more energy and drops range quickly. Going faster also brings in a whole host of other regulations (air-bags, crash tests etc.) and it is not clear a little company like Zenn could even get through those hurdles even if they could get their car up to speed for a useful range.
The capacitor idea may be useful but we may not want them in the hands of consumers. I suspect they would make abosolutely fantastic bombs if you short them out (which would be incredibly easy to do, even by accident).
Toyota has talked about their plug in hybrids being able to provide back up power for a house but I don’t see this happening en mass as mentioned above. EV’s will inevitably have some kind of (chemical base) battery technology and you always lose when you transfer energy in or out. Smarter to put the energy in a car and use it rather than move it around.
D.
The fascists seem to be toying with the idea of attacking Iran. They never seem to mention the way the old Persian technology can reduce our air conditioning costs. I do not hate the Persians. In fact, I find their eco-friendly cooling systems quite admirable.