White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

New Iron Age of Electricity Storage Is at Hand

electricity

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Since electricity was first deployed, there has been a missing link: storage.

The lead-acid battery was first developed in 1859 and has been refined to the effective, utilitarian box we have in cars today. Gone are the days when you sometimes had to top up the car battery with sulfuric acid and, often, distilled water.

These batteries, these workhorses, never made it far beyond their essential role in automobiles. Although early car manufacturers thought the future of the automobile would belong to electricity, it was the internal combustion engine that took over.

While battery research continues unabated – especially after the energy crisis which unfolded after the fall of 1973 — it wasn’t until the lithium-ion battery arrived in the 1980s that batteries became a transformative technology. From cell phones to Teslas, they have upended the world of stored electricity.

Lithium-ion was the clear winner. It is light and suitable for transportation. It has also been the primary battery for utilities which have been installing them at breakneck speed. But they are costly, and lithium is at the end of a troubled supply chain.

Batteries are essential to realizing the full potential of electricity generated from wind and solar. They provide power when the sun has set or the wind isn’t blowing. They can capture surplus production in the middle of the day when states like California and Arizona already have overproduction of solar power and it becomes negative energy, wasted.

Enter iron-air batteries. That is right: Iron with an “r,” which is the basic material in steel and one of the most plentiful elements on Earth.

Iron-air batteries use rusting as their central technology. In an iron-air battery, iron, water and air are the components. The iron rusts to discharge power and the rusting is reversed to charge the battery.

Form Energy, headquartered in Somerville, Massachusetts, will be shipping these revolutionary batteries to utilities late this year or early next from their manufacturing plant at the site of the old steel mill on the Ohio River in Weirton, West Virginia. This means transportation infrastructure for heavy loads is already in place.

Form Energy got started with two battery experts talking: Mateo Jaramillo, the head of energy storage development at Tesla, and Yet-Ming Chiang, a professor at MIT who devoted his career to the study of batteries, primarily lithium. Indeed, he told me when I met with him in Somerville, that he fathered two successful battery companies using lithium.

But clearly, iron-air is Chiang’s passion now — a palpable passion. He is the chief scientific officer at Form Energy and remains Kyocera professor of ceramics at MIT.

Chiang, Jaramillo and three others founded Form Energy in 2017. Now it has contracts with five utilities to provide batteries and appears to be fulfilling the dearest wish of the utilities: a battery that can provide electricity over long periods of time, like 100 hours. Lithium-ion batteries draw down quickly — usually in two or four hours, before they must be recharged.

An iron-air battery is capable of slow discharge over days, not hours. Therefore, it can capture electricity when the sun is blazing and the wind is blowing — which tends to drop in the afternoon just when utilities are beginning to experience their peak load, which is early evening.

Iron is very heavy so the use of iron-air technology would appear to be limited to utilities where weight isn’t a problem and where the need for long, long drawdown times are needed; for example, when the wind doesn’t blow for several days.

Jaramillo told me the company is well-set financially. It has raised $860 million and was given $290 million by the state of West Virginia,

The smart money has noticed: Early funders include Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Is a new Iron Age at hand?

Cyberattack on the Infrastructure Alarms Petraeus, Coats

Electric power lines and pylons against a blue sky with clouds.

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War always goes for the infrastructure: take out the bridges, cut off the electricity and water supplies. All that used to be done with artillery, tanks and bombs.

Going forward, it will be done by computers: Cyberwar.

Every day the early skirmishes — the tryout phase, if you will – are taking place. There are tens of thousands of probes of U.S. infrastructure by potential enemies, known and unknown, state and non-state. A few get through the defenses.

Jeremy Samide, chief executive officer of Stealthcare, a company which seeks to improve cyberdefenses for a diverse set of U.S. companies, sees the cyber battlefield starkly. He says the threat is very real; and he puts the threat of serious attack at 83 percent.

Jeremy Samide is chief executive officer of Stealthcare.

As Samide looks out across the United States from his base in Cleveland, he sees probes, the term of art for incoming cyberattacks, like an endless rain of arrows. Some, he says, will get through and the infrastructure is always at risk.

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats issued a warning in July that the alarms for our digital infrastructure are “blinking.” He compared the situation to that in the country before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The situation, he told the Hudson Institute in a speech, is “critical.” Coats singled out Russia as the most active of the probers of U.S. infrastructure.

Samide says probing can come from anywhere and Russia may be the most active of the cyber adventurers.

A common scenario, he says, is that the electric grid is target one. But considerable devastation could come from attacking banking, communications, transportation or water supply.

Retired Army Gen. David Petraeus, a former director of the CIA and current chairman of KKR Global Institute, in an article coauthored with Kiran Sridhar and published in Politico on Sept. 5, urges the creation of a new government agency devoted to cybersecurity.

Samide and others endorse this and worry that the government has much vital material spread across many agencies and not coordinated. Behind Petraeus’s thinking is one of the lessons of 9/11: Government departments aren’t good at sharing information.

Conventional wisdom has it that the electric grid is super-vulnerable. But Politico’s cybersecurity reporter David Perera, who consulted experts on the feasibility of taking down the grid, somewhat demurs. In a Politico article, he concluded that the kind of national blackout often theorized isn’t possible because of the complexity of the engineering in the grid and its diversity.

The difficulty, according to Perera, is for the intruder to drill down into the computer-managed engineering systems of the grid and attack the programable controllers, also known as industrial control systems — the devices which run things, like moving load, closing down a power plant or shutting off the fuel supply. They are automation’s brain.

Perera’s article has been read by some as getting the utilities off the hook. But it doesn’t do that: Perera’s piece is not only well-researched and argued but also warns against complacency and ignoring the threat.

John Savage, emeritus professor of computer science at Brown University, says, “I perceive that the risk to all business is not changing very much. But to utilities, it is rising because it appears to be a new front in [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s campaign to threaten Western interests. While I doubt that he would seek a direct conflict with us, he certainly is interested in making us uncomfortable. If he miscalculates, the consequences could be very serious.”

Samide warns against believing that all probes are equal in intent and purpose. He says there are various levels of probing from surveillance (checking on your operation) to reconnaissance (modeling your operation before a possible attack). Actual attacks, ranging from the political to the purely criminal, include ransomware attacks or the increasing cryptojacking in which a hacker hijacks a target’s processing power in order to mine cryptocurrency on the hacker’s behalf.

The threats are global and increasingly the attribution — the source of the attack — concealed. Other tactics, according to Samide, include misdirection: a classic espionage technique for diverting attention from the real aim of the attack.

The existential question is if cyberwar goes from low-grade to high-intensity, can we cope? And how effective are our countermeasures?

Today’s skirmishes are harbingers of the warfighting of the future. — For InsideSources

Misadventures of Howard Hughes Can Teach Electric Utilities

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By Llewellyn King

Howard Hughes, a pioneer in movie making and aviation (which informed his cantilevered underwire bra design for actress Jane Russell), was blindsided by disruptive technology. Electric utilities might want to heed Hughes’s history as they deal with future shock.

Hughes believed that his 1930 silent movie “Hell’s Angels” — which has some of the finest flying sequences ever shot — could make it even as the age of talkies was dawning. But he was in error; he had remake the movie with a sound track at huge expense.

Something similar happened to Hughes with the H-4 Hercules, the giant, wooden flying boat — nicknamed the “Spruce Goose” by the press — which he built during World War II. Eight reciprocating engines were no match for the potential offered on the horizon by jet engines. And spruce was no match for the superior aluminum alloys that had been developed during the war.

Leaders in the electric utility industry know full well that times are changing. But are they making brilliant silent movies when the talkies are around the corner, so to speak?

Dealing with change is especially hard for utilities because they are in a real-time business. The juice must flow 24-7, which means the new has to integrate seamlessly with the old. Shutting down to retool, as Hughes did with “Hell’s Angels,” is not an option.

Yet in the 46 years that I’ve been writing about the utility industry, I’ve never seen such upheaval, ergo such challenges. There is no aspect of the industry which isn’t beset by technology at the gate: computing and artificial intelligence; drones for line surveillance and security; 3D printing (additive manufacturing) for repairs; superior data from smart meters; and aggressive growth from competitors on the roof – in the form of solar panels — and in the marketplace.

But, to my mind, the most-daunting challenge facing the industry is flat or declining electric demand. For investor-owned utilities, which provide 80 percent of the nation’s electricity, this challenge, this reality has been masked by the good performance of their stocks on Wall Street, which owes a lot to low interest rates and volatility in the market, not to the long-term prospects for investor-owned companies. For now, it is the utility paradox.

The industry, through the Edison Electric Institute, has built a superb lobbying arm that can seek legislative remedies for its troubles — as it did when dividends were under attack. But there are no legislative fixes for an industry in market turmoil, abetted by technological disruption.

There is more hope for relief from regulators. Increasingly, the industry is focused on state commissions: it wants relief from the downside of rooftop solar; relief from intrusive and misleading marketers of solar products; and, above all, protection of the grid’s existing infrastructure.

Additionally, not all technology is disruptive. Utility solar farms are an economic and technological success. Storage is attracting innovators and may yet get a breakthrough. There is the hope that new load may come through electric vehicles — although growth there could be stunted by cheap oil. It behooves the industry to push for better recharging, particularly inductive charging, and to advertise more electric consumption as a remedy for air pollution from the automobile tailpipe.

In 1974, I worked with the then chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, the late Dixy Lee Ray, on an energy study for President Richard Nixon. The study advocated more electrification of transportation – and we had railroads in mind first and foremost. The United States has a few miles of electrified railway in the Midwest and the Amtrak corridor from Washington to Boston – far less electrified railway than other developed countries.

The railroads got away from the electric utilities, and they won’t be corralled now. But there is a powerful environmental and social case for electrifying cars; creating a moral imperative to drive electric, if refueling is solved — and I don’t mean hanging an extension cord out the kitchen window. South Korea has buses that refuel through induction-charging plates at bus stops; smaller batteries, frequent charging.

It will be a lot easier for utilities to argue for regulatory relief to protect their social and shareholder responsibilities if they are extending their social value. — For InsideSources

Washington Can’t Save the Utilities from the Solar Onslaught

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Time was when New York dominated the collective and individual efforts of the electric utility industry. When the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) was founded in 1933, there was no question but that it would be located in New York. Likewise the Atomic Industrial Forum, which has morphed into the Nuclear Energy Institute, was founded there in 1952.

At least one large utility, American Electric Power, had its headquarters on Wall Street. In the early 1970s, I would travel from Washington to New York to interview AEP’s legendary chairman, Donald C. Cook. He believed in coal, and as the one-and-only fuel for electric generation. So much so that he kept a large piece of it on his desk. It was big and shiny and luminously black. In a twist of irony, Cook is remembered by his company through its only nuclear plant being named after him.

Electric utilities believed they had to be in New York because that is where they had raised their money — and they had needed to raise enormous quantities of money from the time of the first power plant.

Many myths attended the raising of capital. One was that to keep up with the blistering pace of electric demand, 7.5 percent per year at the end of the 1960s and the beginning the 1970s, utilities would drain the capital markets; take all the available money. It was said that Britain could not privatize the Central Electricity Generating Board because there was not enough liquidity in the London market to afford such a giant offering. (In reality, the public offering was oversubscribed when it was listed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.)

It was clear by the 1970s, even before the energy crisis in the winter of 1973, that the U.S. government was going to be a bigger player in the future of the industry than the banks and investment houses. So gradually the trade associations moved to Washington, and the utilities moved their headquarters back into their service territories.

Washington was becoming all-important. It probably started with the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, which was interpreted by the courts as having wide application. This was a lesson learned by the nuclear industry when it claimed exemption from NEPA under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954. No way, said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Afterward, the electric power industry realized that it had to be pro-active with legislation; it had to be in Washington and it had to lobby — and lobby hard.

The result has been that EEI, particularly under its well-liked president Tom Kuhn, has become one of the most effective trade association lobbying Congress. Its role was to prevent damaging legislation, to educate members of Congress, and to divert campaign funds to those who saw things its way.

Gradually, the whole industry came to look to Washington for redress; to ask for favors and stall damaging legislation. Its last great victory was in preserving dividends — so important to utility stockholders — from the taxman.

Now the industry is in a new crisis; a crisis that has arisen not because of policy, but of technology. Call it “the solar onslaught.”

The industry is fighting for its identity, its profitability, and its traditional role as the monopoly supplier of electricity. Solar rooftop installations are fraying the very fabric of the utilities and their business models and, for the first time in a long time, the powerful lobby that is EEI cannot help.

This is not a battle which will be fought in Washington. This is a state issue, and there are strange alliances ranged against the traditional utilities: the Tea Party with the greens, evangelicals with politically-correct Democrats.

Sadly, it is a battle in which the odds — as in journalism and telephony — are on the side of the new. Disruptive technology is at the gate. When rooftop solar is aligned with a really serviceable battery (the new Tesla offerings do not do the job yet), the utilities will feel like the makers of silent movies when the talkies came along.

The great star, Rudolph Valentino, did not survive the new technology. What of today’s utilities?  — This column was previously published in Public Utilities Fortnightly.

 

 

The Uber Effect on Electricity

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Leon Trotsky said, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” The same thing might be said about disruptive technologies.
The U.S.. electric system, for example, may not be interested in disruptive technology, but disruptive technology is interested in it. What Uber and Lyft have done to the taxi industry worldwide is just beginning to happen to the electricity industry; and it could shock consumers – particularly the less affluent – as surely as though they had stuck their finger in an electrical outlet.
The disruptive revolution is not only happening here, but also in Europe, as Marc Boillot, senior vice president at Electricite de France (EDF), the giant French utility, writes in a new book.
Ironically, here in the United States, disruption of the otherwise peaceful world of electric generation and sale last year was a bumper one for electric stocks because of their tradition of paying dividends at a time when bond yields were low.
The first wave of disruption to electric generation has been a technology as benign as solar power units on rooftops, much favored by governments and by environmentalists as a green source of electricity. For the utilities, these rooftop generators are a threat to the integrity of the electrical grid. To counter this, utilities would like to see the self-generators pay more for the upkeep of the grid and the convenience it affords them.
Think of the grid as a series of spider webs built around utility companies serving particular population centers, and joined to each other so they can share electricity, depending on need and price.
Enter the self-generating homeowner, who by law is entitled to sell excess production back to the grid, or to buy on the grid when it is very cold or the sun isn’t shining, as at night. The system of selling back to the electric company is known as net metering.
Good deal? Yes, for the homeowner who can afford to install a unit or lease one from one of a growing number of companies that provide that service. Lousy deal for the full-time electricity customer who rents or lives in an apartment building.
There’s the rub: Who pays the cost of maintaining the grid while the rooftop entrepreneur uses it at will? Short answer: everyone else.
In reality, the poor get socked. Take Avenue A with big houses at one end and apartments and tenements at the other. The big houses — with their solar panels and owners' morally superior smiles — are being subsidized by the apartments and tenements. They have to pay to keep the grid viable, while the free-standing house – it doesn't have to be a mansion — gets a subsidy.
It's a thorny issue, akin to the person who can't use Uber or Lyft because he doesn't have a credit card or a smartphone, and has to hope that traditional taxi service will survive.
The electric utilities, from the behemoths to the smallest municipal distributor, see the solution in an equity fee for the self-generating customer's right to come on and off the grid, and for an appreciable difference between his selling and buying price. Solar proponents say, not fair: Solve your own problems. We are generating clean electricity and our presence is a national asset.
EDF's Boillot sees the solution in the utilities’ own technological leap forward: the so-called smart grid. This is the computerization of the grid so that it is more finely managed, waste is eliminated, and pricing structures for homes reflect the exact cost at the time of service. His advice was eagerly sought when he was in Washington recently, promoting his book.
While today’s solar may be a problem for the utilities, tomorrow’s may be more so. Homeowners who can afford it may be able to get off the grid altogether by using the battery in an all-electric car to tide them over during the sunless hours.
The industry is not taking this lying down: It's talking to the big solar firms, the regulators and, yes, to Elon Musk, founder of electric-car maker Tesla Motors. He may be the threat and he may be the savior; those all-electric cars will need a lot of charging, and stations for that are cropping up. There’s a ray of sunshine for the utilities, but it's quite a way off. Meanwhile, the rooftop disruption is here and now. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

War on the Roof: Solar Power Is Encroaching

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A warning light is flashing for the nation's electric utilities — and it is getting more persistent.
 
The utilities, big and small, for- and not-for-profit, are facing serious disruptive technology. The old business models are in danger.
 
The unlikely disruptive technology that is causing the trouble is rooftop solar power.
 
Back in the energy turbulent 1970s, solar was a gleam in the eye of environmentalists who dared to dream of renewable energy. It looked like a pipe dream.
 
Very simple solar had been deployed to heat water in desert homes since indoor plumbing became the norm. Making electricity from the sun was many orders of magnitude more complex and it was, anyway, too expensive.
 
The technology of photovoltaic cells, which make electricity directly from the sun, needed work; it needed research, and it needed mass manufacturing. Hundreds of millions of dollars later in research and subsidies, the cost of solar cells has fallen and continues to go down.
 
Today, solar certainly is not a pipe dream: It is looking like a mature industry. It is also a big employer in the installation industry. It is a player, a force in the market.
 
But solar has created a crisis for the utilities.
 
In order to incubate solar, and to satisfy solar advocates, Congress said that these “qualifying facilities” should be able not only to generate electricity for homes when the sun is shining, but also to sell back the excess to the local utility. This is called “net metering” and it is at the center of the crisis today — particularly across the Southwest, where solar installations have multiplied and are being added at a feverish rate.
 
Doyle Beneby, CEO of San Antonio, Texas-based CPS Energy, the largest municipal electric and gas utility in the nation, said, “The homes that are installing solar quickly are the more affluent ones.” The problem here, he explained, is that the utility has to maintain the entire infrastructure of wires and poles and buy back electricity generated by solar in these homes at the highest prevailing rate — often more than power could be bought on the market or generated by the utility.
 
Steve Mitnik, a utility industry consultant, said that 47 percent of the nation's electric market is residential and the larger, affluent homes — which use a lot of electricity, and generally pay more as consumption rises — are a critically important part of it. Yet these are the ones that are turning to solar generation, and expect to make a profit selling excess production to the grid.
 
But who pays for the grid? According to CPS Energy's Beneby, and others in the industry, the burden of keeping the system up and running then falls on those who can least afford it.
 
The self-generating homes still need the grid not only to sell back to but ,more importantly, to buy from when the sun isn't shining and at night.
 
For some in the utility industry, net metering is just the beginning of a series of emerging problems, including:
 
  • Big investments are needed in physical security after the sniper attack last October at PG&E Corp.'s Metcalf transmission substation, which took out 17 huge transformers that provide power to California's Silicon Valley.
 
  • New investment is needed in cybersecurity.
 
  • Improved response to bad weather is a critical issue, especially in some Mid-Atlantic states.
 
Beneby believes the solar incursion into the traditional marketplace might be the beginning of more self-generation — such as home-based, micro-gas turbines — and utilities will and must adjust. He is something of a futurist and points out that in telephones, once a purely utility service, disruption has been hugely creative.
 
Environmentalists are as disturbed as the utilities. Some are calling the imposition of a surcharge on rooftop generators, as in Arizona recently, an attempt by the greedy utilities to stamp out competition. But many are seeking alternative solutions without a war over generating, and without punishing those unable to afford their own generation.
 
Brian Keane, president of SmartPower, a green-marketing group with solar-purchase programs in Arizona and many other states, has looked for cool heads to prevail on both sides of the issue. “I don't have an answer,” he said, calling for dialogue. Also the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group, has been talking with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
 
It isn't your father's electric utility anymore, or your hippie's solar power. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate




 

Sorry, but There Are Areas Where We Need More Government

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Who is going to finance advanced drugs? Who is going to guarantee the electric supply in 30 years? Whisper this: It will be the government.
 
In these two areas and others, the risks are now so large that private enterprise — so beloved in so many quarters — can't shoulder the risk alone. When development risks run into the billions of dollars, the market won't sanction private companies taking those risks.
 
Drug companies, among the richest of corporations, are running up against the the realities of risk. To develop a new drug, the pharmaceutical industry — known collectively as Big Pharma — has to commit well over a billion dollars.
 
It is a long and risky road. A need for the drug has to be established; a compound developed, after maybe thousands of failed efforts. Tests have to be conducted on animals, then in controlled human trials. If the drug works, the developers have to get it certified by the Food and Drug Administration. Then they have to market it and buy hugely expensive insurance — if they can get it — because it is almost a rite of passage that they will be sued.
 
Under this regime complex diseases, that may require multiple drugs, get short shrift not because the developers of drugs are greedy, but because they honestly cannot afford that kind of research.
 
The result is that the pharmaceutical companies increasingly look to universities and individual researchers — sometimes in teaching hospitals — to find new therapies; research that is paid for by the government through grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control, even from the Department of Defense. Even so, drug research is lagging and NIH is turning down eight out of 10 grant requests.
 
In electricity supply, too, there is trouble ahead.
 
The electric utilities, since deregulation, have become risk averse. Only two utilities, the Southern Company of Georgia and Scana Corporation of South Carolina are building new base-load nuclear power plants. These may be the last of the large nuclear power plants to be built in the United States. They are both located in states where electric utilities are regulated and where they can anticipate their costs being recovered in the rates, even during construction. The states are taking some of the risk.
 
For the rest of the country, and particularly the Northern and Western states, deregulation has had an unintended result: It has increased the risk of new construction and in so doing has set the utilities down the path of least resistance. They have turned to natural gas and — because of subsidies and tax breaks — to wind power, which has meant more gas power has to be installed to compensate for variance in the wind.
 
Coal is being edged out of the market for environmental reasons. So the electric utility industry is being pushed into a strategic position it has always said it wanted avoid: over-reliance on too few sources of power.
 
A kind of gas euphoria has gripped the nation as supplies from horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have shot up. When the 99 reactors now operating go out of service, as they get to the end of their lives, there will be nothing comparable to replace them.
 
Many companies, some of them small, are working on new reactor designs that would put the United States back into world leadership in nuclear, while answering criticism of the big light water plants of today. Most of them would even burn nuclear waste.
 
In a time of deficits, the government tends, both with new electrical generating systems and in medical research, to scatter money in the hope that this will lead to the huge private commitments that are needed.
 
Sadly, this creates a dynamic in which companies rush in to consume the seed money without being able to bring the product to to fruition. It is a push rather than a pull dynamic.
 
Government works well, even efficiently, when it establishes a pull dynamic, as in the space program and in supercomputers, or most military procurement. The Pentagon does not issue funds for companies to experiment with weapons systems: It commissions them.
 
The government may have to commission new drugs and new power technologies in the high-risk future. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate