GE sized electricity innovations....

Today's post: Wednesday, 7-14-2010

We need an 80% reduction in fossil fuel use by 2050 to avoid the worst global warming effects. And, practically speaking, we need to also double our electricity generation and double the useful work done per unit of electricity & other energy sources as well during that same time to have a decent economy.

At some point, the oil that we’ve been using to power much of our economy will begin to run low enough that our world economy will shrink due to lack of supply or excessive costs or both. Kuwaiti scientists recently predicted peak oil in 2014 – just 4 years from now.

And, once the demand for oil picks up again with the apparent economic recovery or supply begins to plateau or drop, the prices will again go back up. That will cause more hard times economically unless we have enough alternative sources of energy to turn to.

Today’s post:

GE sized electricity innovations:

GE just announced a $200 million dollar program to improve the way we create, connect, and use power.

One GE & its venture partners in this pick company ideas to back, apparently the ones that work will then get the entire GE company to help upgrade and sell them.

There will be many technology submissions for this program. Hopefully some will make a truly powerful difference.

Here are some lower tech but GE sized business ideas that have that much potential or
more.

If GE, existing companies that fit, and a new company to co-ordinate and expand them work together on these projects from a pilot project funded by this program we could have some truly large scale effects.

1. Massive development of solar thermal and large scale photovoltaic plants in Mexico.

Mexico is blessed with far more solar potential, particularly for solar thermal electricity generation than all of the United States.

Companies from the United States could set up manufacturing in Mexico using this electricity; and so much solar thermal power would be generated that much of it could be sent to the states on the border, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. This would create a way to give far greater economic development and income to Mexico and add jobs for the people who want to immigrate the United States by giving them jobs in Mexico. The companies would have to create training programs in some cases; but with the jobs and electric power available from this solar thermal build up that should be workable.

This also might be able to bypass the problems now happening in siting solar thermal plants in the United States.

AREVA Solar is a company that would make an excellent partner for this effort as they have the solar thermal technology.

Also, once the new development of new power lines to bring this power to these states begins and brings new jobs to those states, I think it will also act as a catalyst to further solar thermal and new power lines to develop it within the United States.

2. Clean coal integrated with new technology to make using coal dramatically less polluting to the air, more efficient, better able to help replace foreign oil within the United States, and produce less net CO2.

Roughly the Eastern two thirds of the United States now gets most of its electricity from burning coal directly. Those states pay for this with the resulting health effects of the air pollution generated.

Also, coal is heavy and must be transported to the locations where it is burned to produce electricity. (This is also a very big problem now in China I’ve read.)

There are a set of things that could make this far more beneficial and less harmful with new technologies.

If a pilot project could be done to develop an economically viable way to integrate these pieces it would help coal companies and the states that contain them move to a more sustainable future without costing them jobs. That in turn would allow them to support clean energy bills for things like solar thermal far more than they do now. By giving them tax credits for these pollution reduction effects to offset them, they might even support taxes on carbon or cap and trade laws to reduce carbon use.

Here are the pieces to make that work. Some of the needed technologies exist now or technologies exist that may be up to the job with some development.

a) Instead of moving coal to a far away location to be burned, use it at the mines or very near them to make methane or propane with as little resulting onsite pollution as possible or use it to make synthetic gasoline as the Germans once did. Those fuels can be transported by pipeline far more efficiently than coal can be transported now.

b) The methane or propane can be used to make electricity with virtually no air pollution and high efficiency using Bloom Energy’s new fuel cell technology. There would be no particulate pollution or sulfuric acid, or mercury pollution at the sites where electricity is generated. There IS now; but that could be eventually stopped as these new power plants come online. Also, the process is enough cooler from what I know of it that it would sharply cut back or eliminate the production of oxides of nitrogen that fossil fuel burning methods create.

c) Feed most of the resulting CO2 into tanks of algae to make biofuels to replace gasoline and diesel fuels that are made from petroleum. This will cushion the economic shock from peak oil and reduce the run up in petroleum and fuel prices as more economic development simultaneously increases demand. This would reduce our imports of oil from outside the United States as well.

And, it will reduce CO2 emissions below what they would have been otherwise.

Aurora Biofuels, Solazyme, and Amyris Biotechnologies are just three of the companies working in this area. And, there are many others.

d) The major oil companies extract petroleum to make fuels. But they also sell and distribute these fuels. If these biofuels can be brought down in cost to below what it begins to cost the oil companies to do things like drill deep water wells with tons of safeguards, they might even partner with this effort.

3. Provide a mortgage financing arm to make loans, possibly with federal backing, to the people who did energy efficiency upgrades and added solar power and added the cost to their property tax bills. It seems that Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and their federal boss have all chickened out on doing so. GE was in financing before. This could be a big dollar growth area – and a safe one if it was done right.

4. Provide an enabling company to help businesses and some homeowners build solar photovoltaic canopies over parking lots and unused yard space.

Often a business or shopping center will have far more square feet of parking lot than they do buildings. So, if they had canopies over the parking lot with photovoltaic collectors, their onsite solar electric potential would more than double.

Not only that; but the people who use those parking lots now use a lot of power running air conditioners in their cars to cool them off after parking in those lots. This is particularly the case in hot, sunny weather. Businesses with such covered parking lots would be preferred by many customers over those that do not have this amenity.

And, though the solar would be less in rainy weather, the people parking in the lots would appreciate being able to get into and out of their cars under such canopies without getting themselves or their belongings wet.

This is already being done on a small scale in some places. It would create a LOT more solar electricity if it was done virtually everywhere there are such parking lots. The potential is there.

5. Create a permit expediting specialty company for people installing solar or wind power and for building new solar “farms” either thermal or photovoltaic – and for new power lines.

Since it often takes far longer now to get permitted to build these things than it does to build them, this could be a huge upgrade from what we have now.

Such expediting is both a learned skill and a talent. You have to know the laws, how the laws might be changed, how to get variances. It helps to know how to work with regulators, city councils, and politicians. And being able to stay courteous and easy to work with when people seem to be -- or are -- deliberately blocking your way or not getting to your case while being very resourceful and determined to get things done is not a common skill set.

But in many communities and construction companies people exist with that knowledge and those skills. And, they DO usually speed up the process sometimes by more than five to one over what the time it otherwise would have taken to get done.

A large multi-part company that specialized in such expediting of clean energy projects, could help us get a LOT more clean energy installed and much sooner.