From Science Alert: “The UK Just Switched on an Ambitious Fusion Reactor – and It Works”

Science Alert

1 MAY 2017
FIONA MACDONALD

Tokamak Energy

First plasma has been achieved.

The UK’s newest fusion reactor, ST40, was switched on last week, and has already managed to achieve ‘first plasma’ – successfully generating a scorching blob of electrically-charged gas (or plasma) within its core.

Tokamak Energy

The aim is for the tokamak reactor to heat plasma up to 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit) by 2018 – seven times hotter than the centre of the Sun. That’s the ‘fusion’ threshold, at which hydrogen atoms can begin to fuse into helium, unleashing limitless, clean energy in the process.

“Today is an important day for fusion energy development in the UK, and the world,” said David Kingham, CEO of Tokamak Energy, the company behind ST40.

“We are unveiling the first world-class controlled fusion device to have been designed, built and operated by a private venture. The ST40 is a machine that will show fusion temperatures – 100 million degrees – are possible in compact, cost-effective reactors. This will allow fusion power to be achieved in years, not decades.”

Nuclear fusion is the process that fuels our Sun, and if we can figure out a way to achieve the same thing here on Earth, it would allow us to tap into an unlimited supply of clean energy that produces next to no carbon emissions.

Unlike nuclear fission, which is achieved in today’s nuclear reactors, nuclear fusion involves fusing atoms together, not splitting them apart, and it requires little more than salt and water, and primarily produces helium as a waste product.

But as promising as nuclear fusion is, it’s something scientists have struggled to achieve.

The process involves using high-powered magnets to control plasma at ridiculous temperatures for long enough to generate useful amounts of electricity, which, as you can imagine, is far from simple.

Over the past year there have been some big wins. Scientists from MIT broke the record for plasma pressure back in October, and in December, South Korean researchers became the first to sustain ‘high performance’ plasma of up to 300 million degrees Celsius (540 million degrees Fahrenheit) for 70 seconds.

MIT Bob Mumgaard/Plasma Science and Fusion Centre

Michel Maccagnan/Wikimedia Commons

In Germany, a new type of fusion reactor called the Wendelstein 7-X stellerator has been able to successfully control plasma.

Wendelstein 7-AS built in built in Greifswald, Germany

But we’re still a long way off being able to put all those pieces together – finding an affordable way to generate plasma at the temperatures required for fusion to occur, and then being able to harness it for long enough to generate energy.

ST40 is what’s known as a tokamak reactor, which uses high-powered magnetic coils to control a core of scorching plasma in a toroidal shape.

The next step is for a full set of those magnetic coils to be installed and tested within ST40, and later this year, Tokamak Energy will use them to aim to generate plasma at temperatures of 15 million degrees Celsius (27 million degrees Fahrenheit).

In 2018, the team hopes to achieve the fusion threshold of 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit), and the ultimate goal is to provide clean fusion power to the UK grid by 2030.

Whether or not they’ll be able to pull off the feat remains to be seen.

But the company is now one step closer, and as they’re not the only ones with a tokamak reactor in development, it will hopefully only speed up the race to get a commercial fusion reactor online.

Watch this space.

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From NYT: “A Dream of Clean Energy at a Very High Price”, a Now Too Old Subject

The New York Times

MARCH 27, 2017
HENRY FOUNTAIN

Source: ITER Organization Mika Gröndahl/The New York Times

SAINT-PAUL-LEZ-DURANCE, France — At a dusty construction site here amid the limestone ridges of Provence, workers scurry around immense slabs of concrete arranged in a ring like a modern-day Stonehenge.

It looks like the beginnings of a large commercial power plant, but it is not. The project, called ITER, is an enormous, and enormously complex and costly, physics experiment. But if it succeeds, it could determine the power plants of the future and make an invaluable contribution to reducing planet-warming emissions.

ITER, short for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (and pronounced EAT-er), is being built to test a long-held dream: that nuclear fusion, the atomic reaction that takes place in the sun and in hydrogen bombs, can be controlled to generate power.

First discussed in 1985 at a United States-Soviet Union summit, the multinational effort, in which the European Union has a 45 percent stake and the United States, Russia, China and three other partners 9 percent each, has long been cited as a crucial step toward a future of near-limitless electric power.

ITER will produce heat, not electricity. But if it works — if it produces more energy than it consumes, which smaller fusion experiments so far have not been able to do — it could lead to plants that generate electricity without the climate-affecting carbon emissions of fossil-fuel plants or most of the hazards of existing nuclear reactors that split atoms rather than join them.

Success, however, has always seemed just a few decades away for ITER. The project has progressed in fits and starts for years, plagued by design and management problems that have led to long delays and ballooning costs.

ITER is moving ahead now, with a director-general, Bernard Bigot, who took over two years ago after an independent analysis that was highly critical of the project. Dr. Bigot, who previously ran France’s atomic energy agency, has earned high marks for resolving management problems and developing a realistic schedule based more on physics and engineering and less on politics.

“I do believe we are moving at full speed and maybe accelerating,” Dr. Bigot said in an interview.

The site here is now studded with tower cranes as crews work on the concrete structures that will support and surround the heart of the experiment, a doughnut-shaped chamber called a tokamak. This is where the fusion reactions will take place, within a plasma, a roiling cloud of ionized atoms so hot that it can be contained only by extremely strong magnetic fields.

By The New York Times

Pieces of the tokamak and other components, including giant superconducting electromagnets and a structure that at approximately 100 feet in diameter and 100 feet tall will be the largest stainless-steel vacuum vessel ever made, are being fabricated in the participating countries. Assembly is set to begin next year in a giant hall erected next to the tokamak site.

At the ITER construction site, immense slabs of concrete lie in a ring like a modern-day Stonehenge. Credit ITER Organization

There are major technical hurdles in a project where the manufacturing and construction are on the scale of shipbuilding but the parts need to fit with the precision of a fine watch.

“It’s a challenge,” said Dr. Bigot, who devotes much of his time to issues related to integrating parts from various countries. “We need to be very sensitive about quality.”

Even if the project proceeds smoothly, the goal of “first plasma,” using pure hydrogen that does not undergo fusion, would not be reached for another eight years. A so-called burning plasma, which contains a fraction of an ounce of fusible fuel in the form of two hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium, and can be sustained for perhaps six or seven minutes and release large amounts of energy, would not be achieved until 2035 at the earliest.

That is a half century after the subject of cooperating on a fusion project came up at a meeting in Geneva between President Ronald Reagan and the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev. A functional commercial fusion power plant would be even further down the road.

“Fusion is very hard,” said Riccardo Betti, a researcher at the University of Rochester who has followed the ITER project for years. “Plasma is not your friend. It tries to do everything it can to really displease you.”

Fusion is also very expensive. ITER estimates the cost of design and construction at about 20 billion euros (currently about $22 billion). But the actual cost of components may be higher in some of the participating countries, like the United States, because of high labor costs. The eventual total United States contribution, which includes an enormous central electromagnet capable, it is said, of lifting an aircraft carrier, has been estimated at about $4 billion.

Despite the recent progress there are still plenty of doubts about ITER, especially in the United States, which left the project for five years at the turn of the century and where funding through the Energy Department has long been a political football.

The department confirmed its support for ITER in a report last year and Congress approved $115 million for it. It is unclear, though, how the project will fare in the Trump administration, which has proposed a cut of roughly 20 percent to the department’s Office of Science, which funds basic research including ITER. (The department also funds another long-troubled fusion project, which uses lasers, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.)

Dr. Bigot met with the new energy secretary, Rick Perry, last week in Washington, and said he found Mr. Perry “very open to listening” about ITER and its long-term goals. “But he has to make some short-term choices” with his budget, Dr. Bigot said.

Energy Department press aides did not respond to requests for comment.

Some in Congress, including Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, while lauding Dr. Bigot’s efforts, argue that the project already consumes too much of the Energy Department’s basic research budget of about $5 billion.

“I remain concerned that continuing to support the ITER project would come at the expense of other Office of Science priorities that the Department of Energy has said are more important — and that I consider more important,” Mr. Alexander said in a statement.

While it is not clear what would happen to the project if the United States withdrew, Dr. Bigot argues that it is in every participating country’s interest to see it through. “You have a chance to know if fusion works or not,” he said. “If you miss this chance, maybe it will never come again.”

But even scientists who support ITER are concerned about the impact it has on other research.

“People around the country who work on projects that are the scientific basis for fusion are worried that they’re in a no-win situation,” said William Dorland, a physicist at the University of Maryland who is chairman of the plasma science committee of the National Academy of Sciences. “If ITER goes forward, it might eat up all the money. If it doesn’t expand and the U.S. pulls out, it may pull down a lot of good science in the downdraft.”

In the ITER tokamak, deuterium and tritium nuclei will fuse to form helium, losing a small amount of mass that is converted into a huge amount of energy. Most of the energy will be carried away by neutrons, which will escape the plasma and strike the walls of the tokamak, producing heat.

In a fusion power plant, that heat would be used to make steam to turn a turbine to generate electricity, much as existing power plants do using other sources of heat, like burning coal. ITER’s heat will be dissipated through cooling towers.

There is no risk of a runaway reaction and meltdown as with nuclear fission and, while radioactive waste is produced, it is not nearly as long-lived as the spent fuel rods and irradiated components of a fission reactor.

To fuse, atomic nuclei must move very fast — they must be extremely hot — to overcome natural repulsive forces and collide. In the sun, the extreme gravitational field does much of the work. Nuclei need to be at a temperature of about 15 million degrees Celsius.

In a tokamak, without such a strong gravitational pull, the atoms need to be about 10 times hotter. So enormous amounts of energy are required to heat the plasma, using pulsating magnetic fields and other sources like microwaves. Just a few feet away, on the other hand, the windings of the superconducting electromagnets need to be cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero. Needless to say, the material and technical challenges are extreme.

Although all fusion reactors to date have produced less energy than they use, physicists are expecting that ITER will benefit from its larger size, and will produce about 10 times more power than it consumes. But they will face many challenges, chief among them developing the ability to prevent instabilities in the edges of the plasma that can damage the experiment.

Even in its early stages of construction, the project seems overwhelmingly complex. Embedded in the concrete surfaces are thousands of steel plates. They seem to be scattered at random throughout the structure, but actually are precisely located. ITER is being built to French nuclear plant standards, which prohibit drilling into concrete. So the plates — eventually about 80,000 of them — are where other components of the structure will be attached as construction progresses.

A mistake or two now could wreak havoc a few years down the road, but Dr. Bigot said that in this and other work on ITER, the key to avoiding errors was taking time.

“People consider that it’s long,” he said, referring to critics of the project timetable. “But if you want full control of quality, you need time.”

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From DLR via phys.org: “Scientists switch on ‘artificial sun’ in German lab”

German Aerospace Center

phys.org

March 23, 2017

In this March 21, 2017 photo engineer Volkmar Dohmen stands in front of xenon short-arc lamps in the DLR German national aeronautics and space research center in Juelich, western Germany. The lights are part of an artificial sun that will be used for research purposes. (Caroline Seidel/dpa via AP)

Scientists in Germany are flipping the switch on what’s being described as “the world’s largest artificial sun,” hoping it will help shed light on new ways of making climate-friendly fuel.

The “Synlight” experiment in Juelich, about 30 kilometers (19 miles) west of Cologne, consists of 149 giant spotlights normally used for film projectors.

Starting Thursday, scientists from the German Aerospace Center will start experimenting with this dazzling array to try to find ways of tapping the enormous amount of energy that reaches Earth in the form of light from the sun.

One area of research will focus on how to efficiently produce hydrogen, a first step toward making artificial fuel for airplanes.

The experiment uses as much electricity in four hours as a four-person household would in a year.

n this March 21, 2017 photo engineer Volkmar Dohmen stands in front of xenon short-arc lamps in the DLR German national aeronautics and space research center in Juelich, western Germany. The lights are part of an artificial sun that will be used for research purposes. (Caroline Seidel/dpa via AP)

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DLR is the national aeronautics and space research centre of the Federal Republic of Germany. Its extensive research and development work in aeronautics, space, energy, transport and security is integrated into national and international cooperative ventures. In addition to its own research, as Germany’s space agency, DLR has been given responsibility by the federal government for the planning and implementation of the German space programme. DLR is also the umbrella organisation for the nation’s largest project management agency.

DLR has approximately 8000 employees at 16 locations in Germany: Cologne (headquarters), Augsburg, Berlin, Bonn, Braunschweig, Bremen, Goettingen, Hamburg, Juelich, Lampoldshausen, Neustrelitz, Oberpfaffenhofen, Stade, Stuttgart, Trauen, and Weilheim. DLR also has offices in Brussels, Paris, Tokyo and Washington D.C.

From Caltech: “New Materials Could Turn Water into the Fuel of the Future”

Caltech

03/06/2017

Robert Perkins
(626) 395-1862
rperkins@caltech.edu

Scientists at JCAP create new materials by spraying combinations of elements onto thin plates. Credit: Caltech

John Gregoire tests the properties of newly created materials. Credit: Caltech

Researchers at Caltech and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have—in just two years—nearly doubled the number of materials known to have potential for use in solar fuels.

They did so by developing a process that promises to speed the discovery of commercially viable solar fuels that could replace coal, oil, and other fossil fuels.

Solar fuels, a dream of clean-energy research, are created using only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide (CO2). Researchers are exploring a range of target fuels, from hydrogen gas to liquid hydrocarbons, and producing any of these fuels involves splitting water.

Each water molecule is comprised of an oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen atoms are extracted, and then can be reunited to create highly flammable hydrogen gas or combined with CO2 to create hydrocarbon fuels, creating a plentiful and renewable energy source. The problem, however, is that water molecules do not simply break down when sunlight shines on them—if they did, the oceans would not cover most of the planet. They need a little help from a solar-powered catalyst.

To create practical solar fuels, scientists have been trying to develop low-cost and efficient materials, known as photoanodes, that are capable of splitting water using visible light as an energy source. Over the past four decades, researchers identified only 16 of these photoanode materials. Now, using a new high-throughput method of identifying new materials, a team of researchers led by Caltech’s John Gregoire and Berkeley Lab’s Jeffrey Neaton and Qimin Yan have found 12 promising new photoanodes.

A paper about the method and the new photoanodes appears the week of March 6 in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The new method was developed through a partnership between the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) at Caltech, and Berkeley Lab’s Materials Project, using resources at the Molecular Foundry and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC).

LBL NERSC Cray XC30 Edison supercomputer

NERSC CRAY Cori supercomputer

“This integration of theory and experiment is a blueprint for conducting research in an increasingly interdisciplinary world,” says Gregoire, JCAP thrust coordinator for Photoelectrocatalysis and leader of the High Throughput Experimentation group. “It’s exciting to find 12 new potential photoanodes for making solar fuels, but even more so to have a new materials discovery pipeline going forward.”

“What is particularly significant about this study, which combines experiment and theory, is that in addition to identifying several new compounds for solar fuel applications, we were also able to learn something new about the underlying electronic structure of the materials themselves,” says Neaton, the director of the Molecular Foundry.

Previous materials discovery processes relied on cumbersome testing of individual compounds to assess their potential for use in specific applications. In the new process, Gregoire and his colleagues combined computational and experimental approaches by first mining a materials database for potentially useful compounds, screening it based on the properties of the materials, and then rapidly testing the most promising candidates using high-throughput experimentation.

In the work described in the PNAS paper, they explored 174 metal vanadates—compounds containing the elements vanadium and oxygen along with one other element from the periodic table.

The research, Gregoire says, reveals how different choices for this third element can produce materials with different properties, and reveals how to “tune” those properties to make a better photoanode.

“The key advance made by the team was to combine the best capabilities enabled by theory and supercomputers with novel high throughput experiments to generate scientific knowledge at an unprecedented rate,” Gregoire says.

The study is titled Solar fuels photoanode materials discovery by integrating high-throughput theory and experiment. Other authors from Caltech include JCAP research engineers Santosh Suram, Lan Zhou, Aniketa Shinde, and Paul Newhouse. This research was funded by the DOE. JCAP is a DOE Energy Innovation Hub focused on developing a cost-effective method of turning sunlight, water, and CO2 into fuel. It is led by Caltech with Berkeley Lab as a major partner. The Materials Project is a DOE program based at Berkeley Lab that aims to remove the guesswork from materials design in a variety of applications. The Molecular Foundry and NERSC are both DOE Office of Science User Facilities located at Berkeley Lab.

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The California Institute of Technology (commonly referred to as Caltech) is a private research university located in Pasadena, California, United States. Caltech has six academic divisions with strong emphases on science and engineering. Its 124-acre (50 ha) primary campus is located approximately 11 mi (18 km) northeast of downtown Los Angeles. “The mission of the California Institute of Technology is to expand human knowledge and benefit society through research integrated with education. We investigate the most challenging, fundamental problems in science and technology in a singularly collegial, interdisciplinary atmosphere, while educating outstanding students to become creative members of society.”

From MSU: “Construction begins on MSU solar array project”

Michigan State University

March 6, 2017
Katie Gervasi
Infrastructure Planning and Facilities office
(517) 432-3629
kgervasi@ipf.msu.edu

Sarina Gleason
Media Communications office
(517) 355-9742
sarina.gleason@cabs.msu.edu

Construction on a new solar array project – a venture that could save the university $10 million over 25 years and help keep tuition in check – has started at Michigan State University.

“The obvious advantage of this project for our students, faculty and staff is cleaner air due to the emissions-free generation of electricity,” said Wolfgang Bauer, a University Distinguished Professor in physics who is assisting with the project. “However, there are significant other benefits such as reducing the university’s utility costs over time. This, in the end, will have a direct effect on keeping tuition rates as low as possible.”

Arrays are a collection of solar panels that are linked together and can act as an additional energy source.

At MSU, solar array carports are being constructed at five different parking lots across campus. The structures will cover most of the parking spaces in each lot and provide partial protection from inclement weather for most cars including taller vehicles, such as RVs, for weekend tailgating. The same number of parking spots that existed before will be available after construction is completed.

“In the summer, the solar carports will provide protection from direct sunlight and prevent parked cars from heating up too much,” Bauer said. “And in the winter, the parked cars will be protected from snowfall.”

In all, the alternative energy structures will produce power to campus during the daytime hours when demand is typically at its highest and will generate more than 15,000 megawatt hours of power per year – about 5 percent of the electricity used on campus annually.

Bauer added that the new arrays offer an opportunity to conduct research as well.

“Student teams from the College of Engineering are already working in collaboration with our faculty and infrastructure employees on using the arrays to research topics such as new power inverter technology,” he said.

This type of renewable energy technology looks at ways to change how electricity is delivered.

Three lots located south of the railroad tracks on campus will be the first to undergo construction. Work on the remaining parking areas will follow, with all lots projected to be completed by the end of the year. During construction, portions of each lot will remain open for parking.

The MSU Board of Trustees in September 2015 approved a power purchase agreement for the project, which is being developed and will be owned by Inovateus Solar, LLC, a solar-energy supplier in Indiana, and Alterra Power Corp., an independent power producer and renewable-energy developer in British Columbia, Canada. The plan supports the university’s Energy Transition Plan to improve the environment on campus, invest in sustainable energy research and contain energy costs.

The partnership will allow MSU to purchase electricity produced from the solar arrays from Inovateus and Alterra at a fixed price for 25 years. MSU will also cover the cost of connecting the arrays to the university’s power grid for about $2.5 million. Project investors will pay all other construction and maintenance costs projected to be about $20 million.

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Michigan State University (MSU) is a public research university located in East Lansing, Michigan, United States. MSU was founded in 1855 and became the nation’s first land-grant institution under the Morrill Act of 1862, serving as a model for future land-grant universities.

MSU pioneered the studies of packaging, hospitality business, plant biology, supply chain management, and telecommunication. U.S. News & World Report ranks several MSU graduate programs in the nation’s top 10, including industrial and organizational psychology, osteopathic medicine, and veterinary medicine, and identifies its graduate programs in elementary education, secondary education, and nuclear physics as the best in the country. MSU has been labeled one of the “Public Ivies,” a publicly funded university considered as providing a quality of education comparable to those of the Ivy League.

Following the introduction of the Morrill Act, the college became coeducational and expanded its curriculum beyond agriculture. Today, MSU is the seventh-largest university in the United States (in terms of enrollment), with over 49,000 students and 2,950 faculty members. There are approximately 532,000 living MSU alumni worldwide.

From LBNL: “New Projects to Make Geothermal Energy More Economically Attractive”

Berkeley Lab

March 1, 2017

Julie Chao
JHChao@lbl.gov
(510) 486-6491

California Energy Commission awards $2.7 million to Berkeley Lab for two geothermal projects.

Berkeley Lab scientists will work at The Geysers, the world’s largest geothermal field, located in northern California, on two projects aimed at making geothermal energy more cost-effective. (Credit: Kurt Nihei/Berkeley Lab)

Geothermal energy, a clean, renewable source of energy produced by the heat of the earth, provides about 6 percent of California’s total power. That number could be much higher if associated costs were lower. Now scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have launched two California Energy Commission-funded projects aimed at making geothermal energy more cost-effective to deploy and operate.

“There is huge potential for geothermal energy in the U.S., and especially in California,” said Patrick Dobson, who leads Berkeley Lab’s Geothermal Systems program in the Energy Geosciences Division. “The U.S. Geological Survey has estimated that conventional and unconventional geothermal resources in the western U.S. are equivalent to half of the current installed generation capacity of the U.S.; however, commercial development of these resources would require significant technological advances to lower the cost of geothermal deployment.”

The first project will test deployment of a dense array of seismic sensors to improve the ability to image where and how fluids are moving underground. The second project will develop and apply modeling tools to enable geothermal plants to safely run in flexible (or variable) production mode, allowing for better integration with other renewable energy sources. The California Energy Commission’s Electric Program Investment Charge (EPIC) program has awarded Berkeley Lab a total of $2.7 million for the two projects.

California renewable energy generation by resource type (Credit: California Energy Commission)

California is looking to geothermal energy to help in reaching its goal of getting half of its electricity from renewable sources by the year 2030. Geothermal plants are possible only in locations with particular geological characteristics, either near active volcanic centers or in places with a very high temperature gradient, such as parts of the western United States. Thanks to its location on the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” California has a vast amount of geothermal electricity generation capacity.

Seeing fluid flow with seismic sensors

While geothermal technology has been around for some time, one of the main barriers to wider adoption is the high up-front investment. “A large geothermal operator might drill three wells a year at a cost of approximately $7 million dollars per well. If one of the wells could provide twice the steam production, a savings of $7 million dollars could be realized. That’s where we come in,” said Lawrence Hutchings, a Berkeley Lab microearthquake imaging specialist who has worked in geothermal fields around the world.

In a project led by Berkeley Lab scientist Kurt Nihei, a dense network of portable seismic recorders (about 100 recorders over a 5 square kilometer area) will be installed to demonstrate the ability to perform high-resolution tomographic imaging. “The goal is to image where steam and fluids are going using geophysics,” Nihei said. “We will improve the spatial resolution of the imaging using a dense array and demonstrate that this can be done cost-effectively in an operating geothermal field.”

The demonstration will take place at The Geysers, the world’s largest geothermal field, located north of San Francisco in Sonoma and Lake Counties. Wells there—some deeper than two miles—bring steam to the surface. The steam is converted to electricity while water is injected into the underground rock to replenish the steam.

Berkeley Lab scientists at The Geysers (Credit: Pat Dobson/Berkeley Lab)

Berkeley Lab scientists currently run a network of 32 seismic recorders at The Geysers to monitor microearthquakes. With the dense network of 100 inexpensive seismic recorders, they will be able to improve the resolution of seismic imaging sufficient to track fluid movement as it moves through the network of fractures that intersect the injection wells.

“Similar to what is done in medical ultrasound tomography with sound waves, we will record seismic waves—both compressional waves and shear waves—from which we can extract information about rock properties, fluid properties, and changes in the subsurface stresses,” Nihei said. “We think these images will allow us to get a clearer picture of where fluids are going and how stresses in the rock are changing in time and space between the injection wells and production wells.”

Having a better understanding of fluid flow in fractured geothermal reservoirs would be a big benefit for well placement as well as cost-effective operation. “If they can increase the likelihood getting a productive well every time they drill, it would be huge,” said Hutchings. “More than 10 percent of California’s total renewable energy capacity comes from geothermal, so the potential impact of this technology is exciting.”

Lowering the cost of renewables

In the second project, led by Berkeley Lab scientist Jonny Rutqvist, the goal is to enable the conversion of geothermal production from baseload or steady production to flexible or variable mode. Flexible-mode geothermal production could then be used as a supplement to intermittent renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, which are not available around the clock, thus significantly reducing the costs of storing that energy.

The technical challenges are considerable since grid demands may require rapid changes, such as reducing production by half within tens of minutes and then restoring full production after a few hours. Such changes could lead to mechanical fatigue, damage to well components, corrosion, and mineral deposition in the wells.

“A better understanding of the impacts of flexible-mode production on the reservoir-wellbore system is needed to assure safe and sustainable production,” said Rutqvist.

Berkeley Lab will adapt a suite of their modeling tools for wellbore and geothermal reservoir integrity, including T2WELL, which models fluid flow and heat transfer in wells; and TOUGHREACT, which simulates scaling and corrosion. These tools will be integrated with geomechanical tools into an improved thermal-hydrological-mechanical-chemical (THMC) model to address the specific problems.

“This will provide the necessary tools for investigating all the challenges related to flexible-mode production and predict short- and long-term impacts,” Rutqvist said. “The advantages to California are many, including greater grid reliability, increased safety, and lower greenhouse gas emissions.”

In both projects, the Berkeley Lab researchers will be working with Calpine Corporation, which has the largest commercial operation at The Geysers. Calpine will contribute data as well as access to their sites and models. The projects build on a wide variety of prior research at Berkeley Lab funded by the DOE’s Geothermal Technologies Office.

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A U.S. Department of Energy National Laboratory Operated by the University of California

From COSMOS: “How solar cells turn sunlight into electricity”

COSMOS

25 January 2017
Andrew Stapleton

Some solar power plants contain more than a million panels. But how do they convert the sun’s energy to electricity? Rolfo Brenner / EyeEm / Getty Images

Renewables have overtaken coal as the world’s largest source of electricity generation capacity. And about 30% of that capacity is due to silicon solar cells. But how do silicon cells work?

A silicon cell is like a four-part sandwich. The bread on either side consists of thin strips of metallic electrodes. They extract the power generated within the solar cell and conduct it to an external circuit.

Just like a sandwich, it’s the filling which is the most interesting part – this is where photons from the sun are converted into usable electricity. The filling of a solar cell consists of two different layers of silicon: negative and positive silicon, or n- and p-type silicon.

Credit: COSMOS MAGAZINE

Creating positive or negative types of silicon is relatively easy. The silicon is impregnated with elements known as dopants. Dopants replace some of the silicon atoms in the crystal structure, allowing the number of electrons present in each layer to be manipulated.

For instance, phosphorus is used to create n-type silicon while boron is used to create p-type silicon. Phosphorus has one more electron than silicon. When substituted into the silicon structure, the electron is so weakly bound to the phosphorus that it can move freely within the crystal, creating a negative charge.

On the other hand, boron has fewer electrons than silicon and sucks up silicon’s electrons. This creates “electron holes” – regions of mobile positive charge in the crystal structure.

At the interface of the p- and n- type silicon, the positive electron holes and the electrons combine. It’s not a simple electrostatic interaction, but the upshot is that you get a slightly positive charge in the n-type silicon and a slightly negative charge in the p-type silicon at the interface of the n- and p- type silicon – the opposite of what you might expect.

Photons from the sun pass between the strips of the top electrode and strike silicon atoms in the crystal structure. Like the strike of a cue ball, the colliding photon gives some of the silicon electrons enough energy to escape from their parent silicon atom.

The “free” electrons move to and accumulate within the n-type silicon.

Once free electrons have accumulated in the n-type silicon, it’s time to put all the free electrons to work. In order to use their energy, the electrodes must be connected via an external circuit. Electrons flow through the electrodes and the external electric circuit from the n-type to the p-type. The p-type silicon acts as an electron sink. Without it, the electron flow would clog up.

It is this flow of electrons that creates the electrical current we can use to power appliances or charge batteries for when the sun isn’t shining.

See the full article here .

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From NYT: “America’s First Offshore Wind Farm Spins to Life”

The New York Times

DEC. 14, 2016
TATIANA SCHLOSSBERG

The Block Island Wind Farm’s turbines off the coast of Rhode Island in August. They began spinning on Monday and will deliver electricity to Block Island, a community nearby. Credit Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times

Until this week, all of the wind power generated in the United States was landlocked.

But in a first for America, the ocean breeze is now generating clean, renewable power offshore — electricity that will supply a small island community off the coast of Rhode Island. Renewable energy, including from offshore wind, is crucial to the effort to avoid some of the worst effects of climate change, according to environmentalists and some elected officials.

On Monday, the country’s first offshore wind farm, developed by a company called Deepwater Wind and helped along by the state’s political leadership, started spinning its turbines to bring electricity to Block Island, a vacation destination with few year-round residents that had previously relied on diesel-fueled generators for power.

“This is a historic milestone for reducing our nation’s dependence on fossil fuels, and I couldn’t be more thrilled that it’s happening here in the Ocean State,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island and co-founder of the Senate Climate Action Task Force, said in a statement from Deepwater Wind.

Though the Block Island Wind Farm is small — made up of five turbines, which were built by a division of General Electric, and capable of powering about 17,000 homes — it is the first successful offshore wind development in the United States, and it sets up the possibility for offshore wind projects elsewhere along the coast.

According to a spokeswoman for Deepwater Wind, about 90 percent of the island’s needs will be met by the wind-generated power, and more will go back to the grid. Current estimates are that the wind farm will supply 1 percent of the state’s electricity, the spokeswoman said.

Despite its modest size, the wind farm, which cost about $300 million to build, still represents a significant reduction in carbon dioxide emissions — about 40,000 tons per year.

Deepwater Wind will receive a federal tax credit for the project, and first-year rates for Rhode Island customers of National Grid, the utility company laying one of the cables to the wind farm, may be higher than what customers currently pay.

Environmentalists, members of the Obama administration and government officials in several states see significant potential for offshore wind energy, given that winds over the ocean usually blow stronger and more steadily than those on land.

Earlier this year, the Obama administration announced a lease for a wind farm off the coast of Long Island, and the Department of Energy has said that if wind farms were built in all of the suitable areas, including in the Great Lakes, they could provide up to twice as much electricity as the country now uses.

In the past, offshore wind farms have faced significant opposition in the United States for a few reasons: high costs, complicated rules about who gets to build on the seafloor and what they build, and complaints from people who do not want their ocean view obstructed.

In Europe, however, thousands of wind turbines have sprouted up along the coast, and an additional 3,000 megawatts of wind power were added last year (about 100 times the amount of power provided by the Block Island Wind Farm).

There has been some opposition to offshore wind projects in Europe, including from President-elect Donald J. Trump, who unsuccessfully fought to block construction of a wind farm off the coast of Scotland near one of his golf courses.

Mr. Trump has expressed skepticism of wind power, saying in an interview with The New York Times that “the wind is a very deceiving thing.” And an email written by Thomas J. Pyle, who is running the Department of Energy transition for the president-elect, said that the Trump administration might be looking to get rid of all energy subsidies.

Mr. Trump has also been accused of exaggerating the harmful effects of wind turbines on bird populations, which Mr. Pyle also addressed in the email, writing, “Unlike before, wind energy will rightfully face increasing scrutiny from the federal government.”

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From Seeker: “Massive US Solar Farms Will Deliver Power to Millions”

SEEKER

California Energy Commission Blog

A recent report by the U.S. Department of Energy finding that U.S. solar power capacity will have nearly tripled in less than three years by 2017 is a milestone not only as a technology whose time has come but also as a major shift where the embrace of solar power is a result not just of environmental principle but of practical necessity.

Ten percent of total U.S. energy consumption comes from renewables, and solar currently makes up 6 percent of that segment, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and is among the fastest-growing sources of energy.

Once a cottage industry of small-scale producers, the solar energy landscape has grown and seen a number of major projects go online in recent years. Based on the recent Major Solar Projects List by the Solar Energy Industries Association, last updated in September, combined solar capacity for the more than 4,000 projects currently operating, under construction or under development stands above 72 gigawatts. To put that number in perspective, a single gigawatt, the equivalent output of two coal-fired power plants, can power 750,000 homes.

“Consumers are now starting to demand more from their energy providers and are beginning to play a more active role in their interaction with the grid, which is ultimately changing the way utilities are serving them,” John Berger, CEO of Sunnova, told Seeker. “As a result, we are currently witnessing the beginning of the greatest shift in the electricity industry that we’ve seen during its 100-plus year existence. It’s also the biggest shift we’ve seen in the energy industry since oil started to be used in transportation 100 years ago.”

States like California provide solar energy companies the political and geographic advantages to operate and expand. Last year, the Solar Star project (in Los Angeles and Kern counties) was completed, bringing online a 579-megawatt solar plant. The Desert Sunlight Solar Farm, a 550-megawatt solar power station in the Sonoran Desert, was also finished in 2015. The year prior, the Topaz Solar Farm, a 550-megawatt solar plant San Luis Obispo Count, became fully operational.

The solar energy market in Hawaii, a state that generates more solar electricity per capita than any other state in 2015, is “one of the shining lighthouses of what’s possible on a state-level basis,” Alan Russo, senior vice president at REC Solar, tells Seeker. Solar energy adoption rates in Hawaii are among the highest in the nation, Russo adds, in large part because the utility costs are so high. Hawaii traditionally has had to import most of its energy and is the first state to legally commit itself to generating 100 percent of its energy from renewables in 2045.

But solar is even growing in states with competing energy interests from traditional sources. Take Texas, for example. “Texas, a traditionally oil and gas state and subsequently a wind state, is leading the way in new utility-scale solar projects,” Berger notes of the Lone Star state, where Sunnova is based. “Texas is currently the fastest growing utility-scale solar market in the country, and by the end of 2016, the state’s total installed solar capacity is expected to more than double.”

The reason for the growth of solar isn’t simply one of environmental conscience but also cost. “Solar costs just a small fraction of what it did even a few years ago,” notes Eli Hinckley, head of the energy group at Sullivan & Worester. “In addition to the absolute price drop, the cost is certain, basically just the price of installation.”

As the spread between the price of renewables like solar closes with that of traditional energy sources like oil and coal, the decision to move to solar power becomes more enticing to both consumers and businesses, the latter of whom have the added benefit of touting their green credentials to the former.

“Kind of like the IT transformation back in the ’90s versus where it is today, solar is going from — or renewables in general are going from kind of an esoteric, technology-driven decision to a mainstream provider of business value,” Russo said. “With that, it’s becoming less a matter of ‘Do I do it?’ vs. ‘How much do I do it?’ ‘When do I do it?’ and ‘How do I do it?'”

And it’s not just in the United States where the cost of renewables is becoming more competitive. Take the example of Abu Dhabi, whose government just received bids for the construction of a large solar farm. “Prices were as low as 2.42 cents per kWh,” Hinckley said. “That is less than it costs to generate power from some coal and gas plants that are already built and is a fraction of what it would cost to build and operate a new fossil fuel plant.”

The move by Abu Dhabi, a major player in energy markets, has chosen solar over natural gas, of which it controls nearly 5 percent of global reserves, represents “an enormous shift in the perception of solar as the future of energy,” Hinckley said.

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From Science Node: “From greenhouse gas to usable ethanol”

Science Node

19 Oct, 2016
Morgan McCorkle

ORNL scientists find a way to use nano-spike catalysts to convert carbon dioxide directly into ethanol.

In a new twist to waste-to-fuel technology, scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have developed an electrochemical process that uses tiny spikes of carbon and copper to turn carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, into ethanol. Their finding, which involves nanofabrication and catalysis science, was serendipitous.

Access mp4 video here .
Serendipitous science. Looking to understand a chemical reaction, scientists accidentally discovered a method for converting combustion waste products into ethanol. The chance discovery may revolutionize the ability to use variable energy sources. Courtesy ORNL.

“We discovered somewhat by accident that this material worked,” said ORNL’s Adam Rondinone, lead author of the team’s study published in ChemistrySelect. “We were trying to study the first step of a proposed reaction when we realized that the catalyst was doing the entire reaction on its own.”

The team used a catalyst made of carbon, copper and nitrogen and applied voltage to trigger a complicated chemical reaction that essentially reverses the combustion process. With the help of the nanotechnology-based catalyst which contains multiple reaction sites, the solution of carbon dioxide dissolved in water turned into ethanol with a yield of 63 percent. Typically, this type of electrochemical reaction results in a mix of several different products in small amounts.

“We’re taking carbon dioxide, a waste product of combustion, and we’re pushing that combustion reaction backwards with very high selectivity to a useful fuel,” Rondinone said. “Ethanol was a surprise — it’s extremely difficult to go straight from carbon dioxide to ethanol with a single catalyst.”

The catalyst’s novelty lies in its nanoscale structure, consisting of copper nanoparticles embedded in carbon spikes. This nano-texturing approach avoids the use of expensive or rare metals such as platinum that limit the economic viability of many catalysts.

“By using common materials, but arranging them with nanotechnology, we figured out how to limit the side reactions and end up with the one thing that we want,” Rondinone said.

The researchers’ initial analysis suggests that the spiky textured surface of the catalysts provides ample reactive sites to facilitate the carbon dioxide-to-ethanol conversion.

“They are like 50-nanometer lightning rods that concentrate electrochemical reactivity at the tip of the spike,” Rondinone said.

Given the technique’s reliance on low-cost materials and an ability to operate at room temperature in water, the researchers believe the approach could be scaled up for industrially relevant applications. For instance, the process could be used to store excess electricity generated from variable power sources such as wind and solar.

“A process like this would allow you to consume extra electricity when it’s available to make and store as ethanol,” Rondinone said. “This could help to balance a grid supplied by intermittent renewable sources.”

The researchers plan to refine their approach to improve the overall production rate and further study the catalyst’s properties and behavior.

ORNL’s Yang Song, Rui Peng, Dale Hensley, Peter Bonnesen, Liangbo Liang, Zili Wu, Harry Meyer III, Miaofang Chi, Cheng Ma, Bobby Sumpter and Adam Rondinone are coauthors on the study.

The work was supported by DOE’s Office of Science and used resources at the ORNL’s Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, which is a DOE Office of Science User Facility.

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