Just wanted to let you know I’m retiring Unmassed.com. It’s time to branch out, move on, up sell, down shift, crank it up, ratched it down.

You can follow my energy podcasting at Tech2Energy.com. Interviews, news, lively debate. Join the discussion!

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Joel

While talking to my fellow hi-tech geeks, I’ve found that many have a desire to understand energy, but aren’t quite sure where to start. Over the past few years, I’ve been writing about energy here and there and see a need for a discussion that brings geeks into energy in a way that eliminates the speedbumps. Energy is the largest market in our economy and we as consumers of energy need innovation. The hi-tech crowd senses this and wants to innovate in the field, but need a leg up. I’m hoping tech2energy.com becomes that leg up. Won’t you take a listen?

Bob Metcalfe: Internet History Applied To Solving Energy

Images from The Austin Model and Ze Frank on Twitter. Thanks, guys.

Once upon a time, the tobacco industry told us how safe their cigarettes were. Many people believed them. Or, maybe they didn’t question them enough. Either way, they smoked and smoked. Then one day, a few states sued the tobacco industry because they were paying the healthcare costs of smokers. Why? Tobacco as an industry perpetrated a fraud on the US public when they insisted that their product was healthy and did not cause cancer. The result? The tobacco industry settled the case with what’s known as the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement.

There were far ranging consequences:
- The industry now pays medicaid costs to the states, in perpetuity.
- The industry pays for the American Legacy Foundation, which promotes smoking cessation.
- The industry’s documents are available online for anyone to see how they perpetuated their fraud.

All this because they promoted their product as clean…I mean ‘safe’…even though they knew it wasn’t.

Enter Clean Coal

Today, we’re seeing a similar PR campaign from the coal industry called “Clean Coal.” When it burns, coal releases soot. Traveling in many European cities shows the effects of a 100 years of coal: dirty buildings. Indeed, one nickname for London is “The Smoke”.

So the question is: can coal ever be clean, even if it’s cooked to release gas, rather than burned?

The coal industry would like you to think so. If you do, then you’ll support more coal burning electricity power plants–we’re already using coal to generate about half of all the electricity in the US– and possibly federal subsidies for converting coal to a liquid fuel for cars. To help you think their way, they had a presence at both the Democratic and Republican Conventions this past summer. Indeed, some observers see the candidate’s term “Clean Coal” as evidence of the success of the coal industry’s campaign and lobbying efforts.

But, is the coal industry overreaching with Clean Coal? Is it surprising anymore when the CEO of American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, Steve Miller, refers to the coal industry as a “green industry”.

Or, will we look back in 20 years and find that attorney’s general have sued the coal industry for the same reason they sued tobacco?

I see three possibilities for the industry’s campaign:
- the coal industry actually has solved the problem of burning coal cleanly (although, it’s interesting to note that as of today, there are NO carbon sequestration plants in operation).
- the coal industry is ignoring recent history and moving blindly into a position of increased litigation.
- the coal industry is knowingly ignoring recent history and sees litigation as a cost of doing business that will be far outweighed by more coal burning power plants.

The reality is, we’re not going off coal any time soon. Indeed, the electricity industry weaned itself off of oil beginning in the 1970′s so we wouldn’t be shocked by the volatility of oil prices. Coal expanded to fill oil’s place.

The problem with Clean Coal is that it smacks of The Big Lie.

The coal industry is spending money but squandering good will. So what should the coal industry do?
- Get real. Discuss the issues in a straightforward manner instead of greenwashing the discussion.
- Encourage debate with real information. Instead of sniping at other forms of electricity generation because it’s “too expensive,” or, “not reliable enough,” discuss the issues. At this point in the conversation, coal’s ability to be clean sounds almost like wind and solar’s ability to store energy: it’s all on the drawing boards, but there are no utility level working examples. Coal’s cheap now, but what’s it going to cost with carbon sequestration and other forms of improvement?
- Instead of a faux grass roots greenwashing campaign, they should spend their PR dollars encouraging a discussion about energy in general at a local level. How? Many different ideas, including: creating discussion materials for schools and civic groups about energy use in the US; paying for coffee and promoting discussions in coffee houses around the US. Funding an NGO to do the same. Etc. There’s real value in facilitating a real conversation.

While the coal industry can be commended for using social media as a communication medium, more transparency and real debate would go much further in enhancing their credibility than their current efforts. And, it just may keep them out of court.

But I’m no lawyer and this is not legal advice.

Take a listen, here.

to take the survey.

Great news, Stanford Ovshinsky gave the morning keynote. As he agreed to an on camera interview, I found him very approachable and open to discussing his work with non-scientists, especially his plans for a one gigawatt solar plant that’s produce electricity cheaper than coal.

My original post is on TheEnergyRoadMap.com. Click here to read it. I go into more detail and provide a transcript there. Or, view the interview here:

It seems like everyone I talk to about the future of energy who is even remotely paying attention has heard of the documentary, “Who Killed the Electric Car.” “Plug-in Hybrids” is written by a board member of the group that produced the documentary.

If you start at the bottom of the rung in terms of effectiveness, lead-acid batteries, the type you find in every car in the US to turn the starter that starts the engine, you’ll find that the battery really hasn’t improved much since the 1890′s. The packaging has, but the basics and performance have not. The proof? The electric vehicles produced in the 1890s as electric taxicabs in Manhattan have roughly the same range that enthusiasts get today when they convert gas automobiles to electric automobiles using the same lead-acid battery technology: roughly 25 miles. That’s 110 years of no progress with that battery chemistry.

Even Thomas Edison knew how badly lead-acid batteries sucked, which is why he was working on a nickle-metal battery for an electric vehicle when his labs were destroyed by fire in 1914, taking his plans up in smoke.

Back to today. To bracket the discussion with the high end, lithium ion batteries that power our cell phones and notebook computers are being used by companies like Tesla motors to power their electric vehicles. But, LiONs use a rare metal that some experts say don’t have enough supply to power the number of electric vehicles that need to be put on the road if we’re going to make a dent in energy independence and global warming. Also, LiON batteries are expensive. To compare the lowest energy density battery with the highest energy density battery:

Lead acid batteries cost roughly $7.50 per amp hour
LiON costs roughly $17.60 per amp hour

And now, even GM in their own way admits that batteries suck. According to GM’s Facts and Fiction “blog”, or, more correctly, PR campaign:

“The EV-1 program ended due to the lack of suitable batteries. “

Which is one very interesting data point on the suckage of batteries. I see two possibilities here. 1) either the statement is true, or 2) if the statement is not true, then at least the GM PR machine knows enough about the suckage of batteries that they can lay the blame for the demise of the EV1 at the feet of batteries and have credible deniability. Either way, it doesn’t bode well for batteries.

Another interesting data point is the fact there there are no utility size battery storage mechanisms. Unlike other utilities like water, which get stored in tanks for on demand use, there are no electricity “tanks” (ie, batteries) at a utility level. All the electrons we use when we plug into the grid are being set in motion at the electrical generations stations; they’re not coming from storage. It’s fascinating to me that utilities are looking at Plug-in Hybrid Electrics as a battery storage mechanism, when they don’t currently have a viable storage option today.

In a nutshell, here are quick pros and cons of types of battery chemistries:

Lead-acid pro: cheap, fairly robust
Lead-acid con: heavy, small capacity per weight ratio

NiCAD pro: ability to handle high currents, lighter than lead acid, can handle high charge rates for quicker charging.
NiCAD con: memory effect (you need to completely discharge the batteries before recharging, which is totally doable with a smart charger), uses toxic cadmium

NiMH pro: lighter than NiCADS, uses more plentiful metals
NiMH cons: can’t charge as quickly as NiCADs, can’t handle high discharge rates as well as NiCADs, more adversely affected by heat (doesn’t seem to a problem in EV’s in the bay area, but I live in Texas and the NiMH AA rechargeable cells I leave out on my back porch in the summer get clobbered by the heat and only recharge up to half their rated capacity), Chevron/Cobasys is suing Toyota and Panasonic to prevent them from supplying EV quality batteries.

LiON pros: lighter than NiMHs, more energy dense, quicker charging
LiON cons: lithium is a rare metal, LiON’s are even more sensitive to high current drain than NiMHs (I imagine much of the engineering around LiON packs for EV’s is dealing with this limitation), high price, need for on board electronics to control charging and discharging.

What’s to be done?

More research into hydrogen development and storage to get us better fuel cells.
More research into super conductors.
More research into better battery chemistries.
Tax incentives for these companies in order to jump start the market.

Clearly, successful electric vehicles will be a combination of batteries, fuel cells, and super capacitors because they all have pros and cons, but the total system makes sense. However, it’s interesting to me that battery enthusiasts bang on hydrogen, but never discuss the energy loss in charging up batteries.

Don’t take my rant against batteries as a rant against a electric vehicles. I think it’s time we take a cold, hard look at how much batteries really do suck, not so that we kill the idea of the electric vehicle, but so that we can shore up its weaknesses and move forward with it sooner.