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‘Missing Link’ Offers Unique Boost to Renewable Energy Generation

December 13, 2024 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

In a well-ordered laboratory in Owings Mills, a suburb of Baltimore, an engineer has been perfecting a device that might be called the missing link in renewable energy.

Now, it is ready to begin its transformative role in electric generation, bringing electricity to the remotest places in America and adding it to the grid.

It is an invention that could cut the cost of new wind turbines, make solar more desirable, and turn tens of thousands — yes, thousands — of U.S. streams and non-powered dams into power generators without huge civil engineering outlays.

The company is DDMotion, and its creative force is Key Han, president and chief scientist. Han has spent more than a decade perfecting his patented invention, which converts variable inputs into a constant output.

In a stream, this consists of taking the variables in the water flow and turning them into a constant, reliable shaft output that can generate constant frequency ready to be fed to the grid. Likewise with wind and solar.

Han told me the environmental effect on a stream or river would be negligible, essentially undetected, but a reliable amount of grid-grade electricity could be obtained at all times in all kinds of weather.

He has dreams of a world where every bit of flowing water could be a resource for many power plants, and the same technologies would be essential in harnessing the energy of ocean currents.

A further advantage to Han’s constant-speed device is that it has a rotating shaft, which is a source of what in the more arcane reaches of the electrical world is known as rotational inertia. Arcane, but essential.

This is the slowing down of something that was once moving briskly, like stopping a car. In power generation, this can be a few seconds, but it is necessary to enable an electrical system to keep its output constant — 60 cycles per second in America, 50 cycles per second in Europe and parts of Asia. If that varies, the whole system fails. Blackout. Then, the system must be re-calibrated, and that can take days or several weeks for the entire grid.

Electricity needs rotational inertia. This isn’t a problem with fossil-fueled plants: There is always rotational inertia in their rotating parts.

Wind power loses its inertia, which is there initially as the wind turns a shaft, but is lost as the power generated is groomed for the grid. It passes through a gearbox, then to an inverter, which converts the power from direct current to grid-compatible alternating current.

Han says using his technology, the gearbox and the inverter can be eliminated and inertia provided. Also, most of the remaining hardware could be on the ground rather than up in the air on the tower, making for less installation cost and easier maintenance.

Loss of inertia is becoming a problem for grids in Europe, where wind and solar are approaching half of the generating load. Germany, particularly, must create ancillary services.

Han told me, “DDMotion-developed speed converters can harness all renewable energy with benefits. For example, wind turbines can produce rotating inertia, therefore ancillary services are not required to keep the grid frequency stable, and river turbines without dams can generate baseload, therefore storage systems, such as batteries and pump storage are not required.”

DDMotion has been supported primarily by Alfred Berkeley, chairman of Princeton Capital Management and a legend in the financial community. He served as president of Nasdaq and later as its vice chairman.

Han, who holds patents relating to his work on infinitely variable motion controls, began his career at General Electric before founding DDMotion in 1990. A native of South Korea, Han attended college in Montana to fulfill his dream of becoming a professional cowboy. His resume includes roping and branding calves one summer.

If DDMotion succeeds as Han and his supporters hope, their missing link will vastly enhance the value of renewable energy and bring down its cost to the system and consumers.

Tennessee Firm Makes Fresh Water From Air

February 2, 2018 by Llewellyn King 1 Comment

Cape Town, South Africa, one of the most beautiful and green cities in the world, will run out of water in April. On “Day Zero” (April 16 by the latest calculation), municipal water supplies from the six dams that feed the city will be exhausted and only hospitals and other vital institutions will have piped water. Everyone else will be scrounging.

Already, there have been long lines and fights at the city’s two natural springs. Bottled water is being hoarded. The prognosis is grim — and very dry. The first hope for rain is June, a traditionally wet month. But the weather has been so aberrant that nobody knows when it will rain and how much will fall.

Cape Town is not alone but it is one of the most dramatic of the water crises, occasioned by climate change. That change has been most brutal in Africa. Droughts have millions starving and drinking putrid water. The same story in the Caribbean, after the double whammy of two hurricanes.

Much of Africa is in pitiable condition from drought and potable water is just not there for many. Two lasting memories of Africa for me are women walking great distances with water containers on their heads and men with bundles of sticks for cooking fires on theirs. Marry the water with the firewood and a warm meal may be possible.

The Western approach to these problems, since the colonial era, has been big infrastructure: central power stations, dams and water pumped great distances from one of Africa’s big rivers. (It should be noted that Africa has few of these.) Sadly, that solution favors mega-cities over towns, towns over villages and villages over farms.

That is why I was gripped with excitement hearing about a new product that, if deployed widely over the next half century, could help Africa immensely, but in short order can help the stricken Caribbean.

“This cold storage product uses advanced technology to create water from air. It utilizes the air molecules along with the power of the sun to create safe and clean drinking water.” – From the Aldelano website

It is a Swiss Army knife of a power unit, made with off-the-shelf components, that harnesses solar energy to wring water out of the air and make electricity. Anyone who has had to empty a dehumidifier daily knows how much water there is in the air; the more humidity, the greater the water resource.

Aldelano Corporation, an imaginative, minority-owned company with manufacturing in Jackson, Tenn., is making the units. Although there are other air-to-water systems using solar, generally these are small and aimed at single family use. Aldelano is integrating water, power and even ice production in a Solar WaterMaker — a 40-foot-long box with an industrial design life of 20 years.

Al Hollingsworth, CEO of Aldelano, has been providing solar-powered cold rooms for food processors as part of the company’s business in packaging for decades. Hollingsworth founded the company in 1967 and its clients are biggies like Kellogg’s and Procter & Gamble.

Now he is in the midst of shipping the first 100 water-makers to buyers in the hurricane-ravaged islands of the Caribbean: Antigua and Barbuda, and the British Virgin Islands. Puerto Rico, where 30 percent of the inhabitants, mostly rural, are without power and clean water is a candidate but has not yet ordered any units.

Hollingsworth told me that each unit produces up to 1,000 gallons a day and can produce electricity to light seven homes. This gives “off- the-grid” a new dimension.

I have been writing about energy for decades, and longer than that about Africa, and here is a melding of old products into a new one, which is something that can make a difference there. The technology of the window air conditioner meets the technology of solar arrays, batteries and the latest compressors.

Much of the world has looked to ease its potable water shortage with seawater desalination. There are two big problems, though: It takes a lot of power to do it — whether with reverse osmosis or flash boiling — and, the biggest problem, its by-product is salt. Millions of tons of the stuff presents a potential environmental catastrophe.

Where there is sun and humidity, there can be safe drinking water. Few things are more needed and the World Health Organization says 2 billion people are without it.

The people without clean drinking water are the same ones without electricity. Water from air and electricity from solar will not solve the problem but can help, one light bulb and one glass of water at a time.

The Aldelano website can be found at http://solarcoldbox.com/

Nuclear Teetering on the Economic Precipice

December 12, 2014 by Llewellyn King 8 Comments

This will be a bleak Christmas for the small Vermont community of Vernon. It is losing its economic mainstay. The owner of its proud, midsize nuclear plant, which has sustained the community for 42 years, Entergy, is closing the plant. Next year the only people working at the plant will be those shuttering it, taking out its fuel, securing it and beginning the process of turning it into a kind of tomb, a burial place for the hopes of a small town.

What may be a tragedy for Vernon may also be a harbinger of a larger, multilayered tragedy for the United States.

Nuclear – Big Green – is one of the most potent tools we have in our battle to clean the air and arrest or ameliorate climate change over time. I've named it Big Green because that is what it is: Nuclear power plants produce huge quantities of absolutely carbon-free electricity.

But many nuclear plants are in danger of being closed. Next year, for the first time in decades, there will be fewer than 100 making electricity. The principal culprit: cheap natural gas.

In today’s market, nuclear is not always the lowest-cost producer. Electricity was deregulated in much of the country in the 1990s, and today electricity is sold at the lowest cost, unless it is designated as “renewable” — effectively wind and solar, whose use is often mandated by a “renewable portfolio standard,” which varies from state to state.

Nuclear falls into the crevasse, which bedevils so much planning in markets, that favors the short term over the long term.

Today’s nuclear power plants operate with extraordinary efficiency, day in day out for decades, for 60 or more years with license extensions and with outages only for refueling. They were built for a market where long-lived, fixed-cost supplies were rolled in with those of variable cost. Social utility was a factor.

For 20 years nuclear might be the cheapest electricity. Then for another 20 years, coal or some other fuel might win the price war. But that old paradigm is shattered and nuclear, in some markets, is no longer the cheapest fuel — and it may be quite few years before it is again.

Markets are great equalizers, but they're also cruel exterminators. Nuclear power plants need to run full-out all the time. They can’t be revved up for peak load in the afternoon and idled in the night. Nuclear plants make power 24/7.

Nowadays, solar makes power at given times of day and wind, by its very nature, varies in its ability to make power. Natural gas is cheap and for now abundant, and its turbines can follow electric demand. It will probably have a price edge for 20 years until supply tightens. The American Petroleum Institute won't give a calculation of future supply, saying that the supply depends on future technology and government regulation.

Natural gas burns cleaner than coal, and is favored over coal for that reason. But it still pumps greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, though just about half of the assault on the atmosphere of coal.

The fate of nuclear depends on whether the supporters of Big Green can convince politicians that it has enough social value to mitigate its temporary price disadvantage against gas.

China and India are very mindful of the environmental superiority of nuclear. China has 22 power plants operating, 26 under construction, and more about to start construction. If there is validity to the recent agreement between Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Barack Obama, it is because China is worried about its own choking pollution and a fear of climate change on its long coastline, as well as its ever-increasing need for electricity.

Five nuclear power plants, if you count Vermont Yankee, will have closed this year, and five more are under construction in Tennessee, South Carolina and Georgia. After that the new plant pipeline is empty, but the number of plants in danger is growing. Even the mighty Exelon, the largest nuclear operator, is talking about closing three plants, and pessimists say as many as 15 plants could go in the next few years.

I'd note that the decisions now being made on nuclear closures are being made on economic grounds, not any of the controversies that have attended nuclear over the years.

Current and temporary market conditions are dictating environmental and energy policy. Money is more important than climate, for now. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate