Power to the People: 7 Ways to Fix the Grid, Now
By Brendan I. Koerner 03.23.09
Photo: James Day 7 Ways to Fix the Grid, Now:
Generate Electricity Everywhere
Deliver Clean Energy to Distant Cities
Store Power in Super Batteries
Monitor the Electrons in Real Time
Trade Electricity Like Pork Bellies
Think Negawatts, Not Megawatts
Make Conservation Simple (and Easy)
Filthy coal-fired power plants spew carbon into the air. A mish-mash of 9,200 generators streams vital electrons along 300,000 miles of aging, inefficient transmission lines and one untrimmed tree in the wrong place could plunge a quarter of the country into darkness. This is our electric grid. A whopping 40 percent of all the energy used in the US—be it oil, gas, wind, or solar—is converted into electrons that travel over these wires. Any attempt at energy reform must begin here.
But this keystone of our 21st-century economy has yet to advance much beyond its 19th-century roots. Considering how wasteful, unresponsive, and just plain dumb the grid is, it isn't surprising that outages—which have been increasing steadily over the past quarter century—cost us $150 billion a year. The real shock is that the damn thing works at all.
Now consider what we will ask the grid to handle in the near future: Demand for electricity is expected to increase by as much as 40 percent in the next two decades—more than twice the population growth rate. To meet that need, we will have to generate an additional 214 gigawatts, a feat that would require the construction of more than 357 large coal plants. We also want to plug in dozens, if not hundreds, of gigawatts of wind and solar power harvested from the most remote corners of the country. And we will want to recharge millions of electric vehicles every night, without fail.
That is why we must fix the grid—reinvent it to be reliable, efficient, responsive, and smart. Washington is already on the case: President Obama has called a new energy agenda "absolutely critical to our economic future," and his stimulus package directs more than $40 billion toward that goal—the largest single infusion of government capital to the energy sector in US history, more than half of which will go to grid-related projects. In the short term, this bonanza aims simply to create jobs. But in the long term, it lays the groundwork for the grid of the future. (About $400 million will go to fund ARPA-E, a sort of Darpa for energy research.) And this is just the beginning: Congress is considering additional legislation in the hope of remaking our energy infrastructure.
Private enterprise is on board as well. Just take a spin through General Electric's Smart Grid Lab in Niskayuna, New York, which will simulate an entire electric system—complete with the kind of state-of-the-art meters, software, and communication tech that will enable a smarter grid. Or check out Google's new PowerMeter, a Web app designed to give consumers instant information about their energy usage.
But technology alone won't solve this mess, because fixing the grid is not a technology problem—it's a system problem on the broadest scale. Political gridlock, broken markets, and shortsighted planning have created a slew of bottlenecks that can't be solved with a bunch of smart meters and fancy routers.
Here, we show how utilities and businesses have begun to tackle those obstacles—from installing new transmission lines to empowering consumers. If we're serious about remaking our energy infrastructure, we'll need to encourage these kinds of fixes and replace our current system of misplaced incentives. Right now, that system encourages everyone involved—customers, utilities, and private industry—to neglect the grid. We have to give those stakeholders new reasons to turn on, engage, and transform.
Go ahead, blame Edison. He's the guy who invented the business model that got us into this mess. Edison Electric Light, founded in 1880, was a vertically integrated monopoly that controlled everything from generation to distribution. (It even owned the bulbs in customers' homes.) As utilities sprouted across the country, they saw no reason to deviate from Edison's successful blueprint.
For its first century, then, the electricity industry was a simple affair. Most states anointed a single utility to provide all the power to its citizens. These utilities owned the plants that generated the electricity, the transmission lines that carried it to substations, and the wires that distributed it to customers. When more power was needed, they simply built another coal-fired plant and spliced it onto the grid. Rates had to be approved by a public-service commission, but otherwise the utilities were autonomous. (They linked their systems to neighboring grids, but mostly for backup.) Electricity was inexpensive and abundant, and the system's reliability was the envy of the world.
What it wasn't? Efficient. Since the utilities had a captive market and seemingly unlimited access to cheap fossil fuels, they had no incentive to upgrade their leaky old plants. No one complained as long as energy was seen as plentiful and harmless. Then came the fuel crisis of the 1970s, along with the rise of environmentalism. In 1978, Congress began chipping away at the utilities' dominance by forcing them to buy electricity from independent generation companies that met efficiency goals. Fourteen years later, the government went much further, ordering the utilities to open their transmission lines to all comers.
The result was utter chaos. Many utilities got out of the generation business and morphed into middlemen, shopping for the cheapest power—often from areas with low labor costs and lax environmental oversight—and transporting it hundreds, even thousands, of miles to their customers. This meant using the links between grids, which hadn't been designed to accommodate such heavy traffic. The grids of distant states thus became closely intertwined, so that an outage in one rural county could affect millions of far-flung customers.
Though power companies were demanding more from the grid, they had no incentive to upgrade it. Every penny a utility spent on grid improvement would potentially benefit plants owned by rivals. And states that exported cheap energy resisted plans for costly new transmission projects, fearing they would lead to higher in-state rates—and angry voters.
As a consequence, the grid has fallen into disrepair, with few major efforts to fix it. Today, utilities allocate just 2 percent of revenue to research. "For God's sake, we contribute less to R&D than the pet food industry does," says Jeffrey Byron of the California Energy Commission. So the grid remains hobbled by unreliable electromechanical switches and analog controllers. During the early minutes of the Northeast blackout of 2003, the Ohio utility whose damaged hardware started the cascade couldn't even monitor its own wires; employees had to phone a regional overseer and beg for updates. By that time, it was too late.
Regulators, meanwhile, have done a terrible job of mandating grid upgrades. Maybe that's because nobody is really in charge. The industry-run North American Electric Reliability Council appoints eight regional agencies to manage grid standards, but they clash with state agencies, which constantly angle for more authority. Adding to the muddle are the quasi-governmental independent system operators and the regional organizations responsible for ensuring open access to transmission lines. Meanwhile, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, created in 1977 to supervise regional and national electricity sales, has proven inept at mediating interstate disputes. This thicket of regulation and competing interests strangles any ambitious initiative. As a result, despite ever-increasing electricity demand, fewer than 700 miles of interstate transmission lines have been built since 2000.
To fix the grid, then, we don't need another layer of oversight. We need to tweak the system so that companies are rewarded—not punished—for investing in the grid. Take the case of Duke Energy. Like most utilities, the North Carolina company is not known for its environmentalism. (It has been accused of flouting the Clean Air Act, for instance.) But in 2006, Duke announced its Utility of the Future initiative. This billion-dollar program is designed to smarten up Duke's portion of the grid by deploying customer meters and network-level gizmos that facilitate speedy, two-way communication. It's exactly the sort of upgrade that will help make the grid stable enough to handle wind turbines and plug-in hybrids.
How did the giant utility come around to embracing the smart grid? Probably not out of the goodness of its corporate heart. The costs of building new generation facilities—and the tumbling prices of plug-and-play gadgets—likely made raising the grid's IQ a more efficient way to improve Duke's long-term prospects. Look at the company's recent push toward IP-based open standards for all its grid hardware. Open standards will help operators communicate with one another regardless of utility—turning the grid into an Internet-like ecosystem rather than a scattered network of proprietary islands. But there may be another reason for Duke to become an evangelist of the approach: Open standards would make it easier for the large utility to gobble up and incorporate smaller rivals, since their systems could be integrated with minimal effort.
Duke isn't the only utility to grasp the financial upside of smart-grid projects. Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy is building SmartGridCity, a $100 million effort in Boulder, Colorado, that will allow customers to monitor their electricity consumption via the Web, as well as pump wind and solar energy into the grid. If SmartGridCity is a success, Xcel hopes to persuade public utilities nationwide to invest in similar systems.
This type of investment benefits the grid tremendously and must be encouraged at every turn. According to Roger Anderson at Columbia University's Center for Computational Learning Systems, tweaking the grid's communications capabilities can increase transmission efficiency by 50 percent—no additional wires necessary.
Self-interest has a long, noble history of spurring some of America's greatest infrastructure projects. But it must often be nudged along by cleverly crafted government incentives. The transcontinental railroads, for instance, got a crucial boost from a federal land grant program. These grants, often located in barren quarters of the western US, weren't worth much at the time; the railroad companies laid track through the land in hopes of increasing property values. Energy regulators already have some experience creating similarly ingenious carrots. In the early 1980s, states began to realize that utilities wouldn't become more efficient until their revenue was no longer tied directly to the sheer amount of energy produced. So regulators in dozens of states began to implement decoupling, a policy that rewards utilities for coming in below generation targets. Suddenly, companies could profit by promoting efficiency.
With similar policies, we can push energy companies to make the grid better for everyone. For example, utilities have not been eager to incorporate renewable power from customers' rooftop solar panels or backyard wind turbines. They would be more likely to do so if they were allowed to hike rates or were given tax breaks for making the necessary accommodations.
The grid took more than a century to grow into the unwieldy beast it is now. Given the urgency of climate change, energy independence, and economic demands, we have only a fraction of that time to fix it. But the solution won't spring forth fully formed. This, the greatest engineering challenge of our era, must be solved the same way it was created—piece by piece, with utilities and consumers acting in their own interests. For too long, those interests have been misaligned. It's time for a reset.
Contributing editor Brendan I. Koerner (brendan_koerner@wired.com) writes Wired's Mr. Know-It-All column and blogs at microKhan.com.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
7 Ways to Fix the Grid, Now- Wired article
Deliver Clean Energy to Distant Cities
By Bryant Urstadt 03.23.09
7 Ways to Fix the Grid, Now:
Power to the People
Generate Electricity Everywhere
Store Power in Super Batteries
Monitor the Electrons in Real Time
Trade Electricity Like Pork Bellies
Think Negawatts, Not Megawatts
Make Conservation Simple (and Easy)
Problem
Building wind turbines and solar farms in the middle of nowhere sounds great. But it's not easy to move all that clean energy to the people. Obama just signed into law $6 billion in loan guarantees for energy projects, including new transmission lines. But constructing those lines will require the approval of landowners and city planners, who want the electricity but not the unsightly high-voltage wires strung across their property.
Solution
Go underground—or underwater. The Trans Bay Cable will link San Francisco to 400 megawatts of power—some from the Altamont Pass wind farms near Livermore, California, and the rest from other sources throughout the state. Set to open in 2010, it's a $500 million project that everyone in the area wanted built ... somewhere else. As a result, the planned route looks like the path an escaped convict would take if he wanted to minimize contact with humans, especially of the activist and bureaucratic kind.
By Bryant Urstadt 03.23.09
7 Ways to Fix the Grid, Now:
Power to the People
Generate Electricity Everywhere
Store Power in Super Batteries
Monitor the Electrons in Real Time
Trade Electricity Like Pork Bellies
Think Negawatts, Not Megawatts
Make Conservation Simple (and Easy)
Problem
Building wind turbines and solar farms in the middle of nowhere sounds great. But it's not easy to move all that clean energy to the people. Obama just signed into law $6 billion in loan guarantees for energy projects, including new transmission lines. But constructing those lines will require the approval of landowners and city planners, who want the electricity but not the unsightly high-voltage wires strung across their property.
Solution
Go underground—or underwater. The Trans Bay Cable will link San Francisco to 400 megawatts of power—some from the Altamont Pass wind farms near Livermore, California, and the rest from other sources throughout the state. Set to open in 2010, it's a $500 million project that everyone in the area wanted built ... somewhere else. As a result, the planned route looks like the path an escaped convict would take if he wanted to minimize contact with humans, especially of the activist and bureaucratic kind.
Wired article
Problem
Establishing local-scale power near end users ranks high on everyone's spec list for Grid 2.0. That's one reason Obama's stimulus plan contains a grant that will reimburse property owners for 30 percent of the cost of a solar energy system. But utilities—former monopolies, after all—are reluctant to give up control over their antique, accident-prone grid. And people with enough rooftop real estate to squeeze out serious juice balk at the hassle.
Solution
Create a new class of energy service providers that act as middlemen between power companies and large commercial facilities with big rooftops. For instance, SunEdison builds and maintains solar plants on the rooftops of operations like Wal-Mart, Whole Foods, and Kohl's in eight states. It's a win-win arrangement: Electric companies get a trusted partner in power generation, and businesses get green energy at a fixed, competitive rate—without additional investment. The secret sauce isn't photovoltaic panels; it's the networking gear, sensors, and software that let a SunEdison control room in California manage hundreds of solar sites cost-effectively. And that means it's suited for scaling up. Says Mark Culpepper, a veteran of Cisco Systems who is now CTO of SunEdison: "Generating power anywhere you can fit a panel totally changes the dynamic of the energy market."
Establishing local-scale power near end users ranks high on everyone's spec list for Grid 2.0. That's one reason Obama's stimulus plan contains a grant that will reimburse property owners for 30 percent of the cost of a solar energy system. But utilities—former monopolies, after all—are reluctant to give up control over their antique, accident-prone grid. And people with enough rooftop real estate to squeeze out serious juice balk at the hassle.
Solution
Create a new class of energy service providers that act as middlemen between power companies and large commercial facilities with big rooftops. For instance, SunEdison builds and maintains solar plants on the rooftops of operations like Wal-Mart, Whole Foods, and Kohl's in eight states. It's a win-win arrangement: Electric companies get a trusted partner in power generation, and businesses get green energy at a fixed, competitive rate—without additional investment. The secret sauce isn't photovoltaic panels; it's the networking gear, sensors, and software that let a SunEdison control room in California manage hundreds of solar sites cost-effectively. And that means it's suited for scaling up. Says Mark Culpepper, a veteran of Cisco Systems who is now CTO of SunEdison: "Generating power anywhere you can fit a panel totally changes the dynamic of the energy market."
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Babysitting Co-ops Flourish
updated 11:32 a.m. ET, Tues., Aug 18, 2009
When Jenny Iverson and her husband left Utah last year, they didn't just lose a tight-knit community of relatives. They lost their network of free baby sitters.
To make occasional "date nights" with her husband affordable, Iverson made a pitch to her new friends in Massachusetts: If you watch my kids, I'll watch yours.
Six months later, a baby-sitting co-op with four other families is flourishing, with each set of parents taking a slot in the rotation for a Saturday night, saving them the cost of a baby sitter. Iverson estimates she's saving $100 per month and gaining time for hikes and inexpensive dinners. "As a stay-at-home mom, my job is to make the money stretch as far as I can."
As parents face reduced work hours, lower wages, layoffs and uncertainties stemming from the recession, a growing number of families are turning to baby-sitting swaps to reduce what they pay local teenagers and college students to look after their children.
To be sure, parents have partnered to share the load of child care for years, but the economy has broadened the appeal. Traditional baby sitters say business is down and some offer to work for lower rates to encourage parents seeking savings during the recession to use their services. But co-op costs can be hard to beat. Baby sitters often charge $10 per hour or more.
Gary Myers of Smart Mom's Babysitting Co-op says the lingering economic downturn triggered a spike in requests for a free guide that his Tacoma, Wash.-based groups offers to parents seeking to set up new groups. Traffic on his Web site has also doubled.
"Most moms have one or two people that are good friends, that are sitters, and a co-op is just like having 10 or 12," Myers said. "The important things for a mom is that her kids are watched, and are safe and it's a good care environment."
Co-ops sometimes are formed casually, among friends. But an increasing number are cropping up in online parent forums, local moms groups and through online postings on such sites as BabysitterExchange.Com or Craigslist.com.
Point system
And while money is not exchanged, there is often a system of earning or spending points to ensure parents involved with various co-ops are treated fairly.
A sitting parent, for example, might earn one point per each child, with a sliding scale for more kids. Some co-ops offer extra points for baby-sitting late into the night, picking up a child or traveling to another home. Others restrict the number of points awarded after children fall asleep.
Mary Pugh, a stay-at-home mom of two and a member of Iverson's co-op, said the creative arrangement has helped her avoid the hassle of finding reliable baby sitters and given her family financial breathing room.
"Just that sense of relief that there's just one thing we don't have to budget for, we don't have to worry about," Pugh, 27, said. "This is nice because we still have so many student loans and lots of things to pay off."
During a recent baby-sitting gig, Pugh had a small group, just her 3-year-old son, Jack, 1-year-old daughter, Marian, and 3-year-old Eva, whose parents dropped her off with a hot dog, apples and other snacks to tide her over for the 3 1/2 hours they would be away.
Pugh admitted she was initially intimidated by the idea of feeding, pacifying and playing with up to eight children in the co-op until 8:30 p.m., but she gave it a try.
Follow the rules
The rules and restrictions on co-ops vary. Those among close friends can be informal, while others can be detailed, particularly regarding child safety.
Some require sitters to disclose whether there are guns or swimming pools in the home. Others require parents to indicate if a child has allergies, offer details for each kid's bedtime routine, what it takes to calm them down if they cry and to disclose whether there are pets or smokers in their home.
Other co-ops require references and house visits, said Naomi Hattaway, a mother of three and member of a Cleveland-based group.
The group has rejected multiple applications because none of the existing members could vouch for the applicants, said Hattaway, 33.
"During the summer of last year, we probably had two or three new members each week that requested to join," said Hattaway, who says she saves at least $200 a month. "People have used it more as the economy has gotten worse."
For years my sister was a single Mom and traded babysitting with her friends and neighbors so that she could get free babysitting once a week or so. One friend would mind the kids on Friday night and the other on Saturday night. She got some time to actually have a social life with her friends, or date, as did her friends.
When Jenny Iverson and her husband left Utah last year, they didn't just lose a tight-knit community of relatives. They lost their network of free baby sitters.
To make occasional "date nights" with her husband affordable, Iverson made a pitch to her new friends in Massachusetts: If you watch my kids, I'll watch yours.
Six months later, a baby-sitting co-op with four other families is flourishing, with each set of parents taking a slot in the rotation for a Saturday night, saving them the cost of a baby sitter. Iverson estimates she's saving $100 per month and gaining time for hikes and inexpensive dinners. "As a stay-at-home mom, my job is to make the money stretch as far as I can."
As parents face reduced work hours, lower wages, layoffs and uncertainties stemming from the recession, a growing number of families are turning to baby-sitting swaps to reduce what they pay local teenagers and college students to look after their children.
To be sure, parents have partnered to share the load of child care for years, but the economy has broadened the appeal. Traditional baby sitters say business is down and some offer to work for lower rates to encourage parents seeking savings during the recession to use their services. But co-op costs can be hard to beat. Baby sitters often charge $10 per hour or more.
Gary Myers of Smart Mom's Babysitting Co-op says the lingering economic downturn triggered a spike in requests for a free guide that his Tacoma, Wash.-based groups offers to parents seeking to set up new groups. Traffic on his Web site has also doubled.
"Most moms have one or two people that are good friends, that are sitters, and a co-op is just like having 10 or 12," Myers said. "The important things for a mom is that her kids are watched, and are safe and it's a good care environment."
Co-ops sometimes are formed casually, among friends. But an increasing number are cropping up in online parent forums, local moms groups and through online postings on such sites as BabysitterExchange.Com or Craigslist.com.
Point system
And while money is not exchanged, there is often a system of earning or spending points to ensure parents involved with various co-ops are treated fairly.
A sitting parent, for example, might earn one point per each child, with a sliding scale for more kids. Some co-ops offer extra points for baby-sitting late into the night, picking up a child or traveling to another home. Others restrict the number of points awarded after children fall asleep.
Mary Pugh, a stay-at-home mom of two and a member of Iverson's co-op, said the creative arrangement has helped her avoid the hassle of finding reliable baby sitters and given her family financial breathing room.
"Just that sense of relief that there's just one thing we don't have to budget for, we don't have to worry about," Pugh, 27, said. "This is nice because we still have so many student loans and lots of things to pay off."
During a recent baby-sitting gig, Pugh had a small group, just her 3-year-old son, Jack, 1-year-old daughter, Marian, and 3-year-old Eva, whose parents dropped her off with a hot dog, apples and other snacks to tide her over for the 3 1/2 hours they would be away.
Pugh admitted she was initially intimidated by the idea of feeding, pacifying and playing with up to eight children in the co-op until 8:30 p.m., but she gave it a try.
Follow the rules
The rules and restrictions on co-ops vary. Those among close friends can be informal, while others can be detailed, particularly regarding child safety.
Some require sitters to disclose whether there are guns or swimming pools in the home. Others require parents to indicate if a child has allergies, offer details for each kid's bedtime routine, what it takes to calm them down if they cry and to disclose whether there are pets or smokers in their home.
Other co-ops require references and house visits, said Naomi Hattaway, a mother of three and member of a Cleveland-based group.
The group has rejected multiple applications because none of the existing members could vouch for the applicants, said Hattaway, 33.
"During the summer of last year, we probably had two or three new members each week that requested to join," said Hattaway, who says she saves at least $200 a month. "People have used it more as the economy has gotten worse."
For years my sister was a single Mom and traded babysitting with her friends and neighbors so that she could get free babysitting once a week or so. One friend would mind the kids on Friday night and the other on Saturday night. She got some time to actually have a social life with her friends, or date, as did her friends.
Beer makers turn waste into fuel
Beer makers turn waste into fuel
Researcher: Brewers can recover 50 percent of energy costs from leftovers
LiveScience
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• Human Lifespans Nearly Constant for 2,000 Years
SPCA exec's dog dies after being left in hot car
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Without Kennedy, no Senate dealmaker
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By Charles Q. Choi
updated 1:17 p.m. ET, Fri., Aug 21, 2009
After beer is made, the waste from breweries could help generate power, researchers now suggest.
One problem brewers face is what to do with the thousands of tons of grain left over at the end of the brewing process. In the past, they just sold the waste to farmers who either fed it to their animals or spread it on their fields as fertilizer. However, in Europe, given reductions in cattle breeding and stricter regulations on what waste is allowed on land, neither option is as easy anymore.
"We reached a situation in 2000 where breweries even had to pay to dispose of their spent grain," said researcher Wolfgang Bengel, the technical director of BMP Biomasse Projekt, a German biomass company.
Instead of a headache, Bengel saw a business opportunity. He had previously taken waste from rice and sugar cane and produced energy from it in China and Thailand, and thought a similar process could be developed for brewery leftovers. Such energy could help fuel the breweries themselves.
"Beer making is energy intensive — you boil stuff, use hot water and steam and then use electric energy for cooling — so if you recover more than 50 percent of your own energy costs from the spent grain, that's a big saving," Bengel explained.
The wet grain and wastewater is put into a fermenter loaded with bacteria that break down organic compounds to generate methane. The biogas and dried sludge from the fermenter are then burned to boil water and produce high-pressure steam, which in turn drives a turbine to generate power.
Methane deposits offer promise and peril
Shrimp cocktails may help make biodiesel
Chicken feathers could store fuel
Using this process, "a modern energy efficient brewery may regain 60 percent of their total energy demand," Bengel told LiveScience.
Extra cleaning and filtering equipment were added to meet high European standards for combustion emissions.
The partners are now trying to attract commercial contracts from those wanting to become greener beer makers. Breweries could pay for and install the equipment themselves, or perhaps waste management firms could make the investment on the machines in return for selling the energy back to breweries. A number of interested companies have been shown around their test plant, Bengel noted.
Researcher: Brewers can recover 50 percent of energy costs from leftovers
LiveScience
• Powerful Ideas: Wind Turbine Blades Change Shape
• Ancient Arthropods Used Borrowed Homes
• Freak Hurricane Wave Strikes Maine
• Robot Cats Purrrrfect for Elderly
• Human Lifespans Nearly Constant for 2,000 Years
SPCA exec's dog dies after being left in hot car
Dominick Dunne, author of crime stories, dies
Kennedy funeral set for Saturday in Boston
Jon mocks Kate for staying mum on Larry King
Without Kennedy, no Senate dealmaker
Most viewed on msnbc.com
Ariz. woman finds taxi driver is a kidney match
Is PSA about texting while driving too graphic?
Cop: Mom, son hysterical after gang rape
Argentine court: No prison for pot use
FBI director rips release of Lockerbie bomber
Most viewed on msnbc.com
SPCA exec's dog dies after being left in hot car
Dominick Dunne, author of crime stories, dies
Watermelon could be source of ethanol fuel
Blood tests detect heart attacks quicker, better
The last of the great Irish dealmakers
Most viewed on msnbc.com
By Charles Q. Choi
updated 1:17 p.m. ET, Fri., Aug 21, 2009
After beer is made, the waste from breweries could help generate power, researchers now suggest.
One problem brewers face is what to do with the thousands of tons of grain left over at the end of the brewing process. In the past, they just sold the waste to farmers who either fed it to their animals or spread it on their fields as fertilizer. However, in Europe, given reductions in cattle breeding and stricter regulations on what waste is allowed on land, neither option is as easy anymore.
"We reached a situation in 2000 where breweries even had to pay to dispose of their spent grain," said researcher Wolfgang Bengel, the technical director of BMP Biomasse Projekt, a German biomass company.
Instead of a headache, Bengel saw a business opportunity. He had previously taken waste from rice and sugar cane and produced energy from it in China and Thailand, and thought a similar process could be developed for brewery leftovers. Such energy could help fuel the breweries themselves.
"Beer making is energy intensive — you boil stuff, use hot water and steam and then use electric energy for cooling — so if you recover more than 50 percent of your own energy costs from the spent grain, that's a big saving," Bengel explained.
The wet grain and wastewater is put into a fermenter loaded with bacteria that break down organic compounds to generate methane. The biogas and dried sludge from the fermenter are then burned to boil water and produce high-pressure steam, which in turn drives a turbine to generate power.
Methane deposits offer promise and peril
Shrimp cocktails may help make biodiesel
Chicken feathers could store fuel
Using this process, "a modern energy efficient brewery may regain 60 percent of their total energy demand," Bengel told LiveScience.
Extra cleaning and filtering equipment were added to meet high European standards for combustion emissions.
The partners are now trying to attract commercial contracts from those wanting to become greener beer makers. Breweries could pay for and install the equipment themselves, or perhaps waste management firms could make the investment on the machines in return for selling the energy back to breweries. A number of interested companies have been shown around their test plant, Bengel noted.
Islands for energy and water
Islands for energy and water
Some scientists and engineers are looking out to sea with fresh eyes, focusing on an old idea for generating electricity from the temperature difference between warm surface waters and cold water at depth. A few pilot projects were attempted in the 1930s and late 1970s, but were abandoned due to high costs and technical limitations. Improved structural engineering and more favorable market conditions are spurring backers of the Energy Island concept shown here to try again with a more integrated approach.
It goes like this: Warm surface water is evaporated in a vacuum, producing steam to drive a turbine that generates electricity. Cold water pumped up from depth causes the steam to condense as desalinated water. Wind turbines, solar cells and wave energy converters kick in additional juice. A few islands linked together could produce enough energy to power a small city and desalinate a tanker’s worth of water a day, the company says.
Some scientists and engineers are looking out to sea with fresh eyes, focusing on an old idea for generating electricity from the temperature difference between warm surface waters and cold water at depth. A few pilot projects were attempted in the 1930s and late 1970s, but were abandoned due to high costs and technical limitations. Improved structural engineering and more favorable market conditions are spurring backers of the Energy Island concept shown here to try again with a more integrated approach.
It goes like this: Warm surface water is evaporated in a vacuum, producing steam to drive a turbine that generates electricity. Cold water pumped up from depth causes the steam to condense as desalinated water. Wind turbines, solar cells and wave energy converters kick in additional juice. A few islands linked together could produce enough energy to power a small city and desalinate a tanker’s worth of water a day, the company says.
Wacky Green Ideas That Might Work
Artificial leaves and trees?
Leaves, observers will note, convert sunlight into energy efficiently to stay alive through photosynthesis. Now scientists are racing to create artificial leaves and trees to power our lives as well. A team at Imperial College London is trying to build leaves that mimic photosynthesis to generate clean fuels such as hydrogen and methanol, The Guardian newspaper reports.
Another company, London-based SolarBotanic, is in the R&D stage of building artificial trees fitted with "nanoleaves" that generate electricity from sunlight and heat. In addition, piezoelectric generators capture energy from the wind, sound and rain. In theory, the trees will blend in with their surroundings, providing an aesthetically appealing source of energy.
Leaves, observers will note, convert sunlight into energy efficiently to stay alive through photosynthesis. Now scientists are racing to create artificial leaves and trees to power our lives as well. A team at Imperial College London is trying to build leaves that mimic photosynthesis to generate clean fuels such as hydrogen and methanol, The Guardian newspaper reports.
Another company, London-based SolarBotanic, is in the R&D stage of building artificial trees fitted with "nanoleaves" that generate electricity from sunlight and heat. In addition, piezoelectric generators capture energy from the wind, sound and rain. In theory, the trees will blend in with their surroundings, providing an aesthetically appealing source of energy.
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