White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

‘Missing Link’ Offers Unique Boost to Renewable Energy Generation

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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.

Coming Electricity Crisis Will Test Trump and Musk

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I would like to lay before you two powerful myths that are very present in the United States in this post-election hiatus.

The first is that business people, because they have had a record of making money, will be good at running the government.

The second is that because one has been a successful inventor, one can fix everything.

No president, including Donald Trump in his first term, has been able to apply the harsh lessons of business to the infinitely complex task of taking care of all of the people.

Equally, inventors can’t invent the nation out of every challenge; they fail more often than they succeed. If Elon Musk had launched his Boring Company before Tesla, he likely wouldn’t be known today.

No one should underestimate the genius of the man. Just think of the engineering feat of Musk’s SpaceX “catching” the first-stage booster of its Starship megarocket as it returned to the launch pad after a test flight.

But that doesn’t mean Musk is qualified to overhaul the government or that he will have a simpatico relationship with Trump for long. Trump has suggested that Musk will be the architect of a new streamlined government. Maybe.

The Trump-Musk entwining  of two myths isn’t likely to endure.

Trump, always used to getting his way, will come into office with the knowledge of where he failed the first time. He will take control as though he had won the nation not at the ballot box, which he assuredly did, but in a takeover battle, and he will do with the company he has bought what he will. He found that hard to do the first time, but he is better-equipped this time with a substantial mandate that he will employ.

Even though he has been designated by Trump as an agent of change, Musk is unlikely to last.

Musk won’t bow to Trump for long. He is like Rudyard Kipling’s cat: He walks by himself, alone and capriciously. He embodies many of the strengths and limitations that marked the late Howard Hughes: vision and willful eccentricity.

Trump has disparaged electric cars and renewable energy, two of the cornerstones of the Musk empire. Musk is a man who dreams of a future that he can invent, with automated cars, space habitation, and solar power dominating electric supply.

Trump’s vision is not soaring. It is a backward look to a time that has passed. It is a vision which recalls the Reader’s Digest view of America in the heyday of that magazine, wholesome, patriotic, simple but fundamentally unreal.

The first crisis that might divide the two men, and challenge the Trump administration, is energy.

An electricity shortage is bearing down on the nation and there are no easy fixes. Trump has laid out an energy policy that would emphasize oil and gas drilling and environmental controls and curbs on the rate of wind generation deployment.

None of that will get us through the impending crisis as the demand for more electricity is surging. It is driven by more electric vehicles, greater use of electricity in manufacturing, and by the huge and seemingly limitless demands of data centers being built across the country to serve the needs of a data-driven, AI economy and its relentless electricity demand.

The fixes for the electricity shortage are all just over the horizon: new nuclear plants, more solar and wind, more transmission, and a more efficient use of the generation we have at hand.

The most immediate fix is a so-called virtual power plant which coordinates energy saving with new sources, like rooftop solar and surplus self-generation at industrial facilities, under the rubric of distributed energy resources. That is already underway and beyond that looms the potential of blackouts.

California and Texas, along with parts of the Midwest, are precariously balanced. Any severe weather interruptions, like extreme heat or extreme cold, and the electricity supply could fail to meet demand.

Trump is likely to react with fury and to lash out at renewable energy (solar and wind) and electric vehicles. In a way, he will be blaming his new best friend, a principal creator of the current electric landscape, Elon Musk.

The myths will unravel, but the underlying truth is that we are going to have five or more years of acute electric shortage without a quick fix, from an inventor or a businessman.

The Case for Saving Nuclear Is Not the Case for Saving Coal

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Coal and nuclear power have been yoked together for decades. Nuclear power and nuclear science have both paid the price for this double harness. Now it looks as though nuclear will pay again.

The electric utilities in the 1950s and 1960s were faced with runaway demand for electricity as air conditioning was deployed and new home construction boomed. This was before acid rain became a problem and when global warming was just a minor scientific theory.

As the utilities struggled to deal with electricity demand that was doubling every 10 years, nuclear appeared as the brave new fuel of the future. They loved nuclear, the government loved nuclear and the public was happy with it.

So, utilities went hellbent into nuclear: In all, starting in the 1950s, utilities built over well over 100 reactors for electricity production.

Then opposition to nuclear began to appear, at first in the late 1960s and then with intensity through the 1970s.

Horror stories were easy to invent and hard to counter. Being anti-nuclear was good for the protest business. The environmental movement — to its shame — joined the anti-nuclear cavalcade. Indeed, in the 1970s and 1980s, environmentalists were still hard against nuclear. They advocated advanced coal combustion, particularly a form of coal boiler known as “circulating fluidized bed.”

For their part the utilities defended nuclear, but never at a cost to coal. They were worried about their investments in coal. They would not, for example, sing the safety, reliability and, as it was then, the cost-effectiveness of nuclear over coal.

They said they were for both. “Both of the above” meant that the nuclear advocates in the industry could not run serious comparisons of nuclear with coal.

Now the Trump administration is seeking that history repeat itself. To fulfill the president’s campaign promises to the coal industry and to try to save coal-mining jobs, the administration is invoking national security and “resilience” to interfere in the electric markets and save coal and nuclear plants, which the utility industry is closing or will close.

The predicament of these plants is economic; for coal, it is economic and environmental.

Both forms of electric generation are undermined by cheap natural gas, cheap wind power and cheap solar power. In a market that favors the cheapest electricity at the time of dispatch, measured to the second, these plants do not cut it financially. The social value or otherwise is not calculated.

The fight between coal and nuclear, and more realistically between nuclear and natural gas, misses the true virtue of nuclear: It is a scientific cornucopia.

Nuclear science is reshaping medicine, enabling space travel and peering at the very nature of being. In 100 years, nuclear science will be flowering in ways undreamed of today. A healthy nuclear power industry grows the nuclear science world, brings in talent.

Even without the science argument, there is a case for saving the nuclear plants: They produce about 20 percent of the nation’s electricity without hint of carbon effluent, which gas cannot say.

A fair market allows for externalities beyond the cost of generation and dispatch at that second. Clean air is a social value, scientific progress is a social value, and predicting the life of a plant (maybe 80 years) is a social value.

Natural gas, the great market disrupter of today, does not meet these criteria.

As electricity is unique, the national lifeblood, it deserves to be treated as such. That cries out for nuclear to be considered for a lifeline in today’s brutal market.

If it embraces a long-term solution through carbon capture and use, then coal may hold a place in the future. But the industry is cool to this solution. Robert Murray, CEO of Murray Energy Corporation, denounced it to me.

The administration has put money into a new nuclear through incentives and subsidies for small modular reactors even while linking established nuclear to the sick man of energy, coal.

Electricity is a social value as well as a traded commodity. The administration is working against itself with its coal strategy.