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Chaotic Motion Device Aims for Scalability, Portability

Nov 30th, 2015
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http://insights.globalspec.com/article/1773/chaotic-motion-device-aims-for-scalability-portability

The world is full of “chaotic motion,” in other words, continuous but non-uniform types of physical excitation that are nevertheless pervasive and commonplace. Ocean waves are a naturally occurring example. So is the movement of people as they walk or run in everyday life. What almost all have in common is that they represent a nearly limitless source of energy if only a means could be found to convert them into a reliable form of electric power generation.

Methods of doing so have long been a focus of engineering research. A UK-based company has come up with something different: a single type of device that could be scaled to provide useful, usable power from a few watts to hundreds of kilowatts depending on the scale of the motion source.

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The company is WITT Energy based in Plymouth in South West England and founded by a husband and wife team, Martin and Mairi Wickett. Their aim was to find a means of converting bi-directional movement to rotation. Their initial idea has now been embodied into the design for a device that goes by the name Whatever Input to Torsion Transfer (WITT). It is claimed to be one of the first ever practicable pieces of equipment with the potential to translate multiple degrees of motion – up, down, backwards, forwards and rotation about an axis – into a single output able to drive a generator to produce electricity. (Watch a video of the generator in action.)

The basic principle involves the use of pendulums that react to external movement. These drive a flywheel and gearbox that in turn drive a conventional generator. The potential benefits could be considerable.

The first is its potential scalability from a wearable device to something that could be mounted in a boat to exploit its pitching and rolling motions. Second, all of the essential working parts can be sealed inside a housing pierced only by the wires carrying the electric current, thereby making it resilient to damage from external forces. Another is that it could be able to produce power across a wide range of excitation – a marine device, for example, should continue to operate in storm conditions. It also would be flexible in operation and could be used to charge batteries if there was no immediate need for power or if the source of motion was intermittent.

The company’s commercial director Nicholas Gill says that the device has already won at least one award for innovation – the 2013 Gulfstream Navigator Award worth $100,000 made by the Ocean Exchange organization, an international venture that seeks to recognize environmentally friendly innovation with a potential for global application. He says the device is also attracting interest from the German conglomerate Schaeffler, which Gill says has agreed to work with WITT to help refine the concept. Both the Indian and U.S. defense departments also have expressed interest, he says.

The defense departments’ interest has been stimulated in part by the device’s potential to be built into a soldier’s backpack. Gill says this would enable the device to provide a means of constantly recharging the batteries used to power electronic equipment that military personnel now carry. He says that a WITT device weighing two pounds and capable of generating 10W of power could feasibly be developed and would be sufficient to meet military applications.

A prototype of such a device has been tested and, Gill says, has achieved a “peak power” output of 5W. Further lightweighting of almost all its component parts could help boost power output towards that target figure. Moreover, Gill says that the company could exploit the need for the pendulums to retain some weight by making them incorporate batteries, which would contribute “net zero weight” to the device.

That possible application is likely to be beaten into real use by a larger version of the concept that is capable of generating as much as 200W. WITT Energy is developing that device in cooperation with UK precision engineering operation Gibbs Gears. Gill says that this device is intended for marine use although the company has also recognized that fixed floating objects such as marker buoys present a potential market. A prototype is scheduled to appear by “the third quarter of 2016” with a market launch possibly in 2017, he says.

Gill says that by late 2015 the company will launch a crowdsourcing push that aims to bring in at least $1.1-4.5 million.

Clear Solar Panels Could Offer Energetic Window Retrofit

Nov 17th, 2015
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http://insights.globalspec.com/article/1732/clear-solar-panels-could-offer-energetic-window-retrofit

Engineers from Michigan State University (MSU) are designing transparent solar panels that could be retrofit to existing glass-covered buildings to generate electric power.

Traditional opaque solar panels such as silicon soak up much of the sun’s light, including visible light, and convert it to energy. A transparent panel allows visible light to shine through and making light that is invisible to the human eye—such as ultraviolet and infrared—do the work.

By making the solar panels transparent, MSU materials scientist and chemical engineer Richard Lunt and his team are creating the potential for them to cover existing windows.

However, making the panels clear is a challenge. So the team came up with ways to layer patterns onto the cell in a way that makes them uniformly transparent. The transparent solar cell under development incorporates thin coatings of organic and inorganic nanostructure materials that selectively harvest the parts of the solar radiation spectrum that are not visible to the eye.

“We actually used a variety of different stencils to pattern our devices,” Lunt says. Each active material has its own pattern. After every layer, the researchers put down a new stencil and in this way build complex structures, he adds.

Team member Margaret Young is testing whether the same process can be used on thin plastic.

“This is much lighter and much more flexible, so instead of rebuilding windows, we could just put this over an existing window,” she says.

Lunt says that he expects that in the next 20 years, this type of technology will be deployed extensively—turning cities and landscapes into solar harvesting systems, surfaces and solar farms without the aesthetic issues that today’s opaque solar panels create.

Could wind drones be the next evolution in wind power generation?

Nov 12th, 2015
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Drones will eventually be “as ubiquitous as pigeons,” London-based futurist Liam Young recently predicted. They are omnipresent already. Only five years ago drones belonged to the realm of the military, unaffordable for anyone else. Today, they are for hobbyists and even kids. Drones arrived in our lives and conquered the extreme ends of the market for technical goods. They proved to provide the best value for both, defense budgets and pocket money. Now the race is on to fill the gap in the middle: startups, corporates and analysts try to find the most promising commercial applications for drones. That is quite a challenge since drones can be used for a surprising variety of tasks. Much media attention was paid to Amazons’, Google’s and DHL’s announcement of using delivery drones. Others see the future for drones in surveillance, detecting fires, cracks in pipelines or illegal wood logging. They can also monitor farmland in detail for precision farming. Autonomous solar powered drones can also be used to hover at high altitude over an area for months to provide wireless communication similar to a satellite. Facebook and Google have invested in startup companies in this field. But there are other disruptive uses for drone technology which the current debate is largely unaware of.

One example is Elon Musk and his SpaceX company. He is working at landing and later reusing Falcon rockets after they have delivered their payload into space. It is impossible for a pilot to control a precision upright landing of a rocket that literally falls out of the sky. Only cutting-edge drone technology can do the job. If the rocket was to be recycled it would lower the flight costs from the cost of building a rocket to the cost of refueling it. That is $200,000 instead of $55 million.1 The business potential for the “rocket drone” would be enormous.

Or take Miles Loyd. In the energy crises of the late 1970s Miles Loyd worked as an engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He attempted to build the best wind generator imaginable.

He had the radical idea of building it without a tower, only using a flying wing connected to the ground by a tether, much like a kite. He calculated the expected energy output of his “flying wind generator”. Based on the formula he first established – today known as Loyd’s Formula – he found that a wing with the size, weight and aerodynamics of a standard plane wing of the 1970s could produce 6.7 MW of power. Even larger wings with an output of 45 MW seemed feasible. To put this into perspective: even today, 35 years later, the average wind turbine is still below 3 MW and the largest existing prototype has 8 MW. Loyd obtained a patent2 and published an article3 on this new technology.

And here the story ends. He could not convince investors to finance his flying wind generator, because he had no solution for one problem: how to control the flying wing without a pilot? Today, we have a technology that lets us control flying objects without a pilot. It is called: drones. If we can apply this new technology to Loyd’s old formula we can build a new type of drone: the wind drone.

WIND DRONE TECHNOLOGY

How exactly does a wind drone work? There is a great resemblance to kite surfers. Kite surfers use a kite and a tether to pull a surfer through the water. The same mechanism can be used to generate electricity. The tethered kite or wing is connected to a drum and a generator on the ground and the tether is wound around the drum. The wing tears at the tether and turns the drum to generate electricity. Once the tether is fully unwound, the wing nosedives and the tether is quickly reeled in. Then the cycle starts again. This up-and-down motion inspired the name “yo-yo” type wind drone (%%0815-IF-Drone-1%%).

Google X, overseen by Sergey Brin, is working on a different wind drone in its Makani4 project. Google’s approach is to use little propellers (mini wind turbines) and generators directly mounted on the wing where they produce electricity. An electric cable is woven into the tether and transfers the electricity to the ground. In 2013 Makani presented a working prototype. They already built their first scaled up product with 600 kW output and announced that it will fly in 2015.

Google will be the first team to show a wind drone with power outputs comparable to today’s wind turbines. But they are not the only ones who have realized that drone technology is ripe to take on Loyd’s formula. Companies including 3M, ABB, Alstom, E.ON, Honeywell, Statkraft and Softbank have conducted research on wind drones and/or financed one of the dozens of airborne wind energy startups worldwide. Some of the prototypes use soft wings resembling a surf kite or a paraglider, others use hard wings like the wing of an airplane. The designs also differ in many other details. A dominant design has not yet emerged. But irrespective of their final design, wind drones share three characteristics that could turn them into the killer application for drone technology: they will disrupt their market, they will be one of the first autonomous drone applications to be market ready and they will have the largest market of all drone applications.

DISRUPTING THE MARKET

Producing wind energy is not a new idea and we already have a tried and trusted device for this task: the wind turbine. Wind drones will have to offer significant advantages over wind turbines to conquer this market. Airborne wind energy companies claim that wind drones can be built at half the price of wind turbines. In addition, they claim that downtimes for wind drones will be significantly lower and wind drones therefore produce twice as much energy with the same rated power. According to their calculations energy from wind drones could therefore be available at just one quarter of the price of energy produced by wind turbines. But are such claims realistic?

COSTS

Can you manufacture wind drones more cheaply than wind turbines? The capital costs of a wind turbine which make up the bulk of the total costs of wind energy are the following (see %%0815-IF-Drone-2%%).5
The structural elements, the tower, the blades, the foundation and the rotor hub make up half of the total capital costs of wind turbines. Material requirements are extremely high: Up to 700 tons of steel for the tower,6 another 100 tons of steel for the rotor hub,7 up to 100 tons of glass-fiber reinforced plastic for the blades,8 and up to 4,000 tons of concrete for the foundation.

Wind drones lack theses massive structures. The tower is replaced by a thin tether. A wind drone with the power of the largest existing wind turbine (8 MW) requires a tether that is 2.5 inches/6 cm thick and would weigh less than one ton.9 Only minimal foundations are required and the wings can be much lighter requiring only 1 to 10 percent of the material of the blades of a wind turbine.10 The Google Makani 600 kW wing weighs below 2 tons including the tether and generators on board.11 A comparable 600 kW wind turbine weighs between 50 and 100 tons without foundation.

The required components for power generation are cheap in comparison: the costs for the electricity producing generator amount to less than 3 percent of total costs. Certainly, wind drones will need more and better sensors, processors and other control components, but these cost much less than the saved materials.

STOP BUILDING LEVER ARMS

How can a wind drone save half the costs of a wind turbine? It is all about physics. A basic construction principle in engineering is to avoid a 90-degree force on an unsupported lever arm wherever possible. Large bridges are therefore supported by arches, columns, or suspension tethers. If parts cannot be supported they have to be made as short as possible.

Wind turbine engineers have done the opposite. Rightfully wanting to build ever larger and more efficient wind turbines they worked to increase the height of the towers and the length of the blades. Both are lever arms in a 90 degree angle to the wind force and they are not supported. Wind engineers would love to tether the tower and the blades. But it is not possible. The wind can blow from all directions, so the rotor has to be able to rotate around the tower and the blades have to spin freely. Nonetheless, wind engineers have excelled in building ever larger wind turbines. They hold the record for building the longest unsupported lever arms in the world. Undoubtedly a great achievement, but one that does not help saving material. The tether of a drone can be 1,000 times lighter than the tower of a turbine simply because it avoids lever arms.

UNLEASH THE DRONES

A simple physical fact cuts costs in half. Can other physical facts double the output? Since wind drones are not restricted by lever arms they can fly higher. They easily reach altitudes twice as high as normal wind towers (300 m/1,000 ft. instead of 150 m/500 ft.). Physical facts: on average the wind speed increases with altitude; higher wind speed means more wind power; wind power increases with the cube of the wind speed. Double the wind speed therefore means wind power multiplied by eight (2³).

Altogether these physical facts lead to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a “bad location” for wind drones. Wind drones only know good and excellent wind sites. They will find enough wind at almost any site.

The impact of height differences can easily be illustrated by using wind data of Dresden, Germany (See %%0815-IF-Drone-3%%.12 At the altitude of wind turbines it is a very poor wind location. Not even with the support of the generous German feed-in tariffs does it allow economic energy generation. At wind drone altitude, the wind speed is 60 percent higher (grey columns). This does not sound spectacular, but due to the cubed relationship between wind speed and power the available wind power almost quadruples (blue columns).

At this altitude Dresden becomes an extremely windy place with a wind force only matched by few wind turbine locations such as coasts, mountains or offshore locations. The world’s largest offshore wind park London Array, has a comparable average wind speed of 9.2 m/s at 100-meter hub height.13 The reason is simple. Obstacles on land like forests, hills and buildings slow the wind down. Offshore winds partly owe their strength to the lack of obstacles. The same applies to high altitude winds: no obstacles to slow them down.

In addition, offshore or high altitude winds are steadier and therefore a more reliable source of electricity. Offshore wind turbines run at full capacity more often. Their idle periods per year are much shorter. Their so-called capacity factor is higher. They are therefore better suited to provide base load electricity. On average the output of offshore turbines is twice as high as that of onshore turbines with the same rated capacity.14 But since offshore turbines cost two to three times as much as onshore turbines, the advantage is quickly outweighed. Offshore wind energy is still more costly than onshore wind.15 According to research conducted by E.ON, Germany’s largest utility, offshore wind drones can boost offshore wind turbines’ high yields by another 50 percent. They can run at full capacity 70 percent per annum.16

In summary, wind drones have lower production costs, they can access much stronger high altitude winds and therefore run at full capacity for greater amounts of time. The estimate of many airborne wind energy startups seems realistic: electricity for a quarter of the price of today’s wind energy.

Google shares this belief in the cost-cutting power of wind drones. Google calculated that less than 16 percent of all the onshore U.S. sites are suitable for economic wind energy production with wind turbines. For wind drones this figure more than quadruples. 66 percent of the United States become viable.17

The higher capacity factor does not only lower the price, it also increases quality. The intermittency of most renewable energy sources causes a lot of concerns. Electricity grid operators face the challenge of matching the fluctuating production of renewables with demand. Current scenarios foresee the necessity to invest billions into stronger grids and energy storage. If wind drones can produce with a capacity factor of 70 percent as envisaged by E.ON, they could replace coal, nuclear and gas power plants without the necessity of massive new investments in grid and storage. Grid and distribution costs already make up for the greater part of our electricity bills. The high quality of wind drone power could become a decisive factor, even more important than its low cost.

TIME TO MARKET

The first wind drone prototypes are in operation. But when will they be market ready? Soon. Sooner than many other autonomous drones. The reasons: simplicity, safety, and the law.

ROUND AND ROUND WE GO

Various drones have various tasks which vary in difficulty. Wind drones are the ones with the easy job. They fly the same simple pattern, say a circle, over the same space over and over and over again. Conventional wisdom has it that robots and drones will first get into the dull, dirty and dangerous jobs. Sorry, wind drones, we cannot get you dirty and dangerous, but when it comes to dullness it is hard to beat your job.

Flying the same patterns over the same area means that the sensors know exactly what to expect, that the software has to know only a few flight patterns, and that the only variation can come from different weather, namely changes in wind speed and direction. And if the wind drone has to land for inspection or due to extreme weather, the landing site is also always nearby.

SAFETY (MAKES THEM) FIRST

No matter how simple a task, something can always go wrong and in case of flying objects the result can be a crash. To be a commercial success, every drone will have to prove that it is safe.
In the beginning wind drones will only be installed in controlled areas in the countryside, or over the sea, where unauthorized access is not allowed. If the public cannot access the flight area, the public cannot be harmed. This is the simplest recipe for safety. Amazon on the other hand might find it difficult to deliver its parcel to your doorstep while keeping a safe distance from people.

Wind drones also have a built-in safety feature that is unique to drones: They are kept constantly on the leash, pardon, tether. So even if all controls go out of control, wind drones can only crash within the area of the tether and will not do any harm outside.

Stationary operation and the strictly defined flight area of wind drones not only increase safety on the ground but also in the air. Wind drone parks can be included in air maps and turned into no-flight zones for low flying air traffic, just as wind parks are today. Air regulators have already honored the additional safety and special features of wind drones. A draft decree of the European airspace authority EASA has an exemption for wind drones (and other drones on the tether) allowing them to fly higher than other drones without the same restrictions.18 And under the new EASA “concept of drone operation”19 the degree of regulation will depend on a specific risk assessment for each use of drones. In case of operation in segregated areas, where drones do not pose a risk to the public, the operator might even approve its own risk assessment. Airspace regulators worldwide are currently working on regulation for drones. They will mostly use comparable flexible concepts, since applying existing strict regulation standards for manned aviation to drones would choke off the respective national drone industry without any safety benefits. So wind drones are not only safer in practice, but this additional safety in the air and on the ground will lead to much lighter regulations. This will make them faster, easier and cheaper to build than other more hazardous and therefore stricter regulated free flying drones or aircraft.

What is true for drones is also true for autonomous cars. Many believe that autonomous cars will become commercial reality in a few years. This is not true. Fully autonomous cars have long ago hit the market. They have been available for purchase since 2008. Where? At your local Caterpillar20 or Komatsu21 dealer, specialized in mining equipment. More and more mines are equipped with fully autonomous haul trucks, which transport rocks and minerals within the mine. Have the engineers at Caterpillar and Komatsu outclassed their counterparts at Google, GM, Tesla, BMW, Volvo, Toyota, Audi, Mercedes by launching their product a decade earlier? Not quite. Haul trucks perform limited and well defined repetitive tasks. They operate stationary in mines, which are controlled distant places with no access for the public. There is little or no regulation on their development and use. The conclusion for drones is obvious.

HUGE MARKET

The strongest argument for wind drones is their potential market: it is huge.

To begin with, the global wind turbine market is a large market. Its volume amounted to $80 billion in 2013.22 Its growth rate averaged 25 percent per year over the last decade23 and the market will continue to grow strongly. But wind drones are not limited to the existing market for wind turbines. A look at the top 20 global companies with the largest revenue as compiled by the Fortune Global 500 list24 illustrates their full market potential:

Energy is big business. But wind energy is still minuscule and accounts for less than 1 percent of total global energy use.25 This will change. And it is mostly a question of competitiveness. Onshore wind turbines are on the brink of becoming competitive with coal and natural gas. This so called grid-parity has been reached in some regions. It means that wind energy is already the cheapest source of electricity even without subsidies. Add wind drones’ potential to slash these costs to one quarter, add steadier production and add their ability to be deployed almost anywhere.

This means that wind drones cannot only compete with wind turbines in their niche but will become the cheapest source of electricity. Cheaper than coal, gas, nuclear and hydro power.

And since electric cars are on the rise, the electricity produced by wind drones will be able to play in the energy major league and compete with oil as a transportation fuel. And oil will have a hard time competing, even at the current “cheap” oil prices. Taking into account the inefficiencies of the combustion engine, oil at $60 per barrel is still a more expensive source of power for a car than the electricity produced by today’s wind turbines. Based on the analysis above, oil would have to sell at a quarter of that price, below $15 per barrel to compete with wind drone energy on a pure cost of fuel basis.

The digital revolution has disrupted many markets, created vast riches and young billionaires. But we have to bear in mind that the digital revolution has only taken place in very limited markets so far. The so-called digital giants Google and Facebook — and many others — are all competing for a share of the online advertising market. This market has a total global volume of $150 billion.26 Compare this to the annual average $2 trillion investment into energy supply required in the next 20 years according to the International Energy Agency.27 Compare this to the $3.4 trillion revenue that the 11 largest energy companies on the Fortune Global 500 list share. Or compare it to the total global energy market that is assumed to have a size of $6 trillion to $10 trillion. This is a difference in market size that could come close to a factor of 100. We cannot imagine what it will look like when the drones the digital revolution created take on the largest market of the world, the energy market.

WORLD CHANGING

We have illustrated how the laws of physics in combination with sensors, chips and smart algorithms can replace the tons of steel and concrete wind turbines are made of. This can make wind drone power cheaper than electricity from fossil fuels. Their ability to harvest stronger winds higher up in the air gives wind drones the potential to provide power where it is needed irrespective of the existing wind resource. Cost-effective electricity made by wind drones could even provide the basis for the clean synthetic fuels of the future. And this fuel could be available at less than today’s oil price.

A lack of wind will no longer be a problem. We have seen how the wind resource dramatically increases by doubling the altitude. But this is only the first humble hop of wind drones into the air. Once these altitudes are mastered, it will be tempting to gradually go higher, until they reach the jet stream at 10 km/33,000 ft. Before, many technical and legal problems will have to be solved. But it will be attempted. The wind resources at this altitude are simply too enticing. The median energy density over New York at this height is more than 10 kW/m² 28 of which about 5 kW/m² can be used.29 The total energy consumption per person in the U.S. amounts to 10.5 kW. This includes all electricity use, heating, car and aviation fuels, and even industrial energy consumption.30 This means that harvesting wind in an area of 2m² (22 sq.-ft.) per person, the size of an open front door, could on average provide all our energy. If 10 wind turbines with today’s dimensions were installed in that altitude over New York, they could have the same rated power as an average nuclear power plant, over 1 GW.31 High-altitude wind energy is not only an extremely concentrated source of energy, it is also abundant. It can provide about 100 times of today’s global energy consumption.32 High altitude wind energy could allow us to live a greener lifestyle without the need to reduce our use of energy. For the energy sector this could mean nothing less than finally solving the conflict between economy and ecology.

Burning fossil fuels started the industrial revolution. It enabled the advances of mankind in the last 200 years. Without fossil fuels feeding 7 billion people on this planet would be impossible. But fossil fuels also destroy and pollute nature, poison our cities and homes and cause an ever more dangerous climate change. Furthermore, our reliance on fossil fuels leads to unjustified wealth and power imbalances, to wars over their control and to undemocratic regimes.

When mankind started to burn fossil fuels it made a huge leap forward. When it stops to burn fossil fuels, it will make another big step towards a better world. Drones will help to bring this day much closer than most of us believe today.

REFERNCES
1 http://www.zmescience.com/space/spacex-reusable-rocket-100-times-cheaper-0432423/
2 https://www.google.com/patents/US4251040
3 M. Loyd, Crosswind Kite Power, Journal of Energy, Vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 106-111, 1980 http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~highwind/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Loyd1980.pdf
4 http://www.google.com/makani/
5 Additional Operations & Maintenance costs are 20% of total costs. Source capital costs breakdown: IRENA International Renewable Energy Agency, Working Paper Renewable Energy Technologies: Cost Analysis Series, Volume 1: Power Sector Issue 5/5 Wind Power, June 2012 http://www.irena.org/menu/index.aspx?mnu=Subcat&PriMenuID=36&CatID=141&SubcatID=230
6 All data is for the MHI Vestas V164-8WM, currently the largest wind turbine prototype of the world. http://www.rechargenews.com/wind/europe_africa/article1344738.ece
7 http://www.rechargenews.com/wind/europe_africa/article1344738.ece
8 http://www.mhivestasoffshore.com/Products-and-services/The-Turbines/V164
9 Calculated for 8 MW power and flight altitude of 250 meters. M. Diehl. Airborne Wind Energy, Airborne Wind Energy: Basic Concepts and Physical Foundations. Springer, 2013. http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~highwind/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Diehl2013a.pdf
10 A detailed explanation of the higher efficiency of the wind drone wings is beyond the scope of this article. For an introduction to the physics of wind drones see M. Diehl. Airborne Wind Energy, Airborne Wind Energy: Basic Concepts and Physical Foundations. Springer, 2013. http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~highwind/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Diehl2013a.pdf
11 http://www.energykitesystems.net/FAA/FAAfromMakani.pdf
12 ind Data source: Christian Geiss, Technical University Chemnitz, Studies on the vertical wind profile in Saxony (Untersuchungen zum vertikalen Windprofil in Sachsen), 2012 http://www.windwetter.net/files/Untersuchungen_zum_vertikalen_Windprofil_in_Sachsen_Projektarbeit__TU_Chemnitz.pdf
13 http://www.siemens.com/press/en/pressrelease/?press=/en/pressrelease/2009/renewable_energy/ere200905050.html
14 A doubling of power output is also roughly expected from average offshore compared to average onshore sites: IRENA International Renewable Energy Agency, Working Paper Renewable Energy Technologies: Cost Analysis Series, Volume 1: Power Sect or Issue 5/5 Wind Power, June 2012 http://www.irena.org/menu/index.aspx?mnu=Subcat&PriMenuID=36&CatID=141&SubcatID=230
15 IRENA International Renewable Energy Agency, Working Paper Renewable Energy Technologies: Cost Analysis Series, Volume 1: Power Sect or Issue 5/5 Wind Power, June 2012 http://www.irena.org/menu/index.aspx?mnu=Subcat&PriMenuID=36&CatID=141&SubcatID=230
16 http://www.ewea.org/offshore2015/conference/allposters/PO090.pdf
17 http://www.google.com/makani/faq/
18 Draft Guidance Material 1 (GM1) Standardized European Rules of the Air SERA.3138(a) paragraph (b) in: NPA 2014-09 https://www.easa.europa.eu/document-library/notices-of-proposed-amendments/npa-2014-09 .
19 https://www.easa.europa.eu/system/files/dfu/EASA%20Concept%20of%20Operations%2012-03-2015.pdf
20 https://mining.cat.com/command-for-hauling
21 http://www.komatsuamerica.com/innovation/autonomous-navigation
22 Global Wind Energy Council, Global Wind Report 2013 http://www.gwec.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/GWEC-Global-Wind-Report_9-April-2014.pdf
23 International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2013.
24 www.fortune.com/global500/
25 0,3% in 2011: Wind 434 TWh, Total Energy Demand: 13.070 Mtoe (= 152,000 TWh), International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2013.
26 http://www.statista.com/statistics/237800/global-internet-advertising-revenue/
27 International Energy Agency, World Energy Investment Outlook, Executive Summary, 2014, http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/WEIO_2014_ES_English.pdf
28 C. Archer, K. Caldeira; Global Assessment of High-Altitude Wind Power, Energies 2009, 2(2), 307-319; doi:10.3390/en20200307, http://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/2/2/307
29 The theoretical maximum is the Betz limit 16/27 or 59%. Modern wind turbines are very close to this with efficiencies of about 50%, including losses in generators, drivetrains etc.
30 http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=85&t=1
31 The Vestas MHI Vestas V164-8WM with a blade lengt of 82m features a swept area of 21,124 sqm. With 10kW/sqm and 50% efficiency, this results in 105 MW per Turbine or over 1 GW for 10 turbines.
32 K. Marvel et al. Geophysical limits to global wind power, Nature Climate Change, Vol. 2 no. 9 September 9, 2012 http://iis-db.stanford.edu/pubs/23831/Marvel_climate_windpower_2012.pdf; M. Jacobson and C. Archer. Saturation wind power potential and its implications for wind energy. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2012 (doi:10.1073/pnas.1208993109) http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/SatWindPot2012.pdf.

About The Author

Udo Zillmann is the founder and managing partner of Daidalos Capital GmbH, a fund management company that specialized in investing in airborne wind energy companies since 2010 and is currently raising its second special airborne wind energy fund. Mr. Zillmann is author of “Financing Strategies of AWE Companies” in the book “Airborne Wind Energy” (Springer, 2013) and a regular speaker on airborne wind energy. Mr. Zillmann holds degrees in law and business.

http://www.windsystemsmag.com/article/detail/992/reaching-new-heights

Renewable Record for Germany

Nov 11th, 2015
by Editor.
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http://tdworld.com/renewables/renewable-record-germany

Germany’s share of renewable energy input into the gross national energy requirement is set to hit the 33% mark for 2015. Some 193 billion kWh will come from solar, wind, and other renewable sources for 2015, around a 20% increase on the previous year, according to the estimates from the Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW) and the German Association of Energy and Water Industries (BDEW).

The most significant increases have been in photovoltaic and wind energy: Wind outlets produced 47% more power up to Oct. 31 than in the same period last year, while photovoltaic sources had already beaten their total production for 2014 in the first 10 months of 2015, despite only modest increases in installations.

“Even if we don’t hit 33%, the overall increase in Germany’s renewable energy share is terrific news,” said Thomas Grigoleit, director of Energy, Environment and Resources at Germany Trade and Invest.

“Not only does it show how important this aspect is in terms of Germany’s Energiewende and climate change targets, it confirms Germany’s pioneering position in the industry. Germany is able not only to install this capacity but integrate it effectively into the grid.”

Waving good buy? A hitherto-obscure piece of physics may be the secret to ocean power generation

Nov 7th, 2015
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http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21677612-hitherto-obscure-piece-physics-may-be-secret-ocean-power

THE idea of extracting energy from ocean waves and turning it into electricity is an alluring one. The first serious attempt to do so dates back to 1974, when Stephen Salter of Edinburgh University came up with the idea of “ducks”: house-sized buoys tethered to the sea floor that would convert the swell into rotational motion to drive generators. It failed, as have many subsequent efforts to perform the trick. But the idea of wave power will not go away, and the latest attempt—the brainchild of researchers at Oscilla Power, a firm based in Seattle—is trying to address head-on the reason why previous efforts have foundered.

This reason, according to Rahul Shendure, the firm’s boss, is that those efforts took technologies developed for landlubbers (often as components of wind turbines) and tried to modify them for marine use. The consequence was kit too complicated and sensitive for the rough-and-tumble of life on the ocean waves, and also too vulnerable to corrosion. Better, he reckons, to start from scratch.

Instead of generators with lots of moving parts, Oscilla is developing ones that barely move at all. These employ a little-explored phenomenon called magnetostriction, in which ferromagnetic materials (things like iron, that can be magnetised strongly) change their shape slightly in the presence of a magnetic field. Like many physical processes, this also works in reverse. Apply stresses or strains to such a material and its magnetic characteristics alter. Do this in the presence of permanent magnets and a coil of wire, such as are found in conventional generators, and it will generate electricity.

The core of Oscilla’s design is a bar made from an alloy of iron and aluminium, a mixture that is strongly ferromagnetic. Such bars need be compressed by only one part in 10,000 to have the desired effect. This means, to all intents and purposes, that the generator has no internal moving parts that can go wrong. But compressing a solid metal bar by even this tiny amount requires the application of a huge force. Fortunately, ocean waves are powerful enough to generate this force. Oscilla’s design, as the firm’s name suggests, does it by oscillation.

20151107_STC900

Its oscillating generators consist of two large objects connected by cables (see diagram). At one end of these cables, floating on the surface, is a buoy that contains the generating apparatus of alloy bars, magnets and coils, together with sets of hydraulic rams which can squeeze the bars as desired. At the cables’ other ends hangs a structure called a heave plate, which is kept stationary by a combination of inertia and the drag of the surrounding water. This arrangement means that, as the buoy rises and falls with the waves at the surface while the heave plate stays more or less put, the tension on the cables increases and decreases. That changing tension drives the rams. The whole system is kept in place by a second set of cables that moor it to the seabed.

A full-scale device, which Oscilla hopes to build by 2018, will be a foam-filled steel buoy 27 metres in diameter, six metres high and weighing 1,000 tonnes, tethered to a toroidal concrete heave plate 70 metres below the surface. It will carry 12 magnetostrictive generators within. Mr Shendure says that a single such buoy, placed a few kilometres offshore, should deliver an average of 600 kilowatts—about the same as an onshore wind turbine. A prototype four metres in diameter underwent a brief but successful open-ocean trial off the Atlantic coast of America last year.

Oscilla’s generators will, Dr Shendure acknowledges, be expensive to build and install. But their simple design, he says, should allow them to operate for decades with no more maintenance than an occasional scrub to remove accumulated barnacles. He calculates that the cost of producing electricity from them will be around ten cents a kilowatt hour. That compares with 16 cents a kilowatt hour for offshore wind farms and six cents for the onshore variety. A grid-connected fossil-fuel power station would be cheaper still—five cents or less. But ten cents represents a decent start for such a novel way of generating electricity.

Jan Allen Plans to Turn Everyone’s Food Waste into Renewable Energy with This Machine

Oct 20th, 2015
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http://electronics360.globalspec.com/article/5849/jan-allen-plans-to-turn-everyone-s-food-waste-into-renewable-energy-with-this-machine

Jan Allen has been involved in design, construction and operation of organics facilities for over 25 years. Now, he is the president of Impact Bioenergy, a company developing a machine that can convert organic waste materials into energy and fertilizer with zero waste. The machine has the capability to converting 25 tons of waste into energy each year.

Allen tells us about the machine, referred to as the “HORSE”, as well as the company’s goal of making communities more self-sufficient and granting individuals the opportunity to create renewable energy right on their property.

Electronics360: Can you tell me a little bit about your background? Do you come from a technical background since your work is generally focused around an electricity-producing machine?

Jan Allen: I have been involved in design, construction and operation of organics facilities since 1989. The aerobic (composting) facilities I designed have diverted over 10 million tons or organics from landfilling and the anaerobic systems produce 10 MW of renewable energy. I am the registered inventor of six U.S. Patents for composting, digestion and biofiltration. I’m a professional civil engineer and was educated at Purdue University in Indiana. I’m more of a microbiologist and nuts and bolts guy than an electrical guy.

Electronics360: Where did you come up with the concept for the HORSE?

Jan Allen: When I was in college, my advisor persuaded me to build three small digesters to convert waste into renewable natural gas. It was an inspiring project. Then much later in my career, I was working for a large firm in Boston that had a mission to build large urban power stations that are fueled by commercial food waste. When I was there, I was impressed at how many inquiries we received for smaller systems. My company did not want to bother with small projects. No one else in the industry did either.

So that was the main reason for starting Impact Bioenergy. There was a need and no one was filling it.

Now there are at least 35 companies selling or developing owner-operator anaerobic digestion technology in North America. Not one of them has scaled down to restaurant, office, campus, or hotel scale. Not one of them has brought the footprint and cost down to the onsite or community scale. It’s not that the technology can’t be scaled—it’s more about conventional wisdom with supersized facilities and long development timelines—on the order of two to 10 years. Conventional wisdom says that small projects take as much effort as big ones, but are not as profitable. These companies just don’t recognize the high cost and risk of permitting and waste transport.

The HORSE.

The HORSE.

Electronics360: Can you explain the science and technology behind the machine?

Jan Allen: It is a liquid system that uses microbes to mimic a living animal. We call it a HORSE, but it functions like a mechanical cow. The food waste is called feedstock and has to be ground and pureed into a smoothie-like consistency. It is metering into the system in small doses continuously and automatically. The system is maintained at 100 F°, is mixed, is airtight (anaerobic), and is monitored for pH, gas production, liquid level, pressure, etc. A gallon of feedstock takes 30 days to make it through the two stages and then overflows out as digested liquid plant food. There are only four moving parts: a mixer, heating pump, grinder pump and dosing valve. There is a gas manifold and a liquid manifold to manage the system.

Electronics360: How exactly does it generate electricity? How much power can it really produce?

Jan Allen: The machine makes natural gas. The gas is stored in a gas storage vessel until it can be used. To make electricity, the gas is used as a fuel in an engine generator. This is an ideal application for combined heat and power. The machine is rated for a full speed output of 15,000 BTU per hour. There are lots of choices for engine types, CHP systems, electrical efficiencies, etc. In general, making heat or hot water can be 90% to 94% efficient. Making electricity only can be 12% to 40% efficient. Making combined heat and power can be somewhere between these figures.

It will consume 25 tons per year of food scraps, beverages, fat and paper products. It can create 5,400 gallons per year of liquid fertilizer and up to 37 MW-hrs of raw energy. As renewable gas, that’s 125 Million BTU per year (4.3 MW-hrs of this energy is electrical output).

This is what that is equivalent to:

Conversion_Chart

Electronics360: How do you envision the HORSE working in a community?

Jan Allen: The vision is to become more self-sufficient and to make renewable energy on your property and fertilize your own or a nearby garden or farm to grow food and flowers. The HORSE is both a sustainability and society game changer. It’s all about the quadruple bottom line: people, planet, profit and progress. There are 700,000 restaurants and 4,000 college campuses in North America. Each one should have their own HORSE. Just imagine the sustainable energy revolution for islands, resorts, zoos, museums, schools, parks, convention centers, farmer’s markets, music venues, apartments and corporate and municipal campuses as they turn food scraps into energy. This is just the beginning.

The HORSE will eradicate curbside garbage pickup and the carbon emissions associated with long distance trucking. It will create a whole new shared carbon-negative transportation model for local use: less trucking plus no landfilling plus renewable energy! Its combined benefit is disruptive and huge; It’s decentralized—it’s portable—it’s affordable. Imagine a technology that can divert waste and create energy off-grid. Imagine eliminating the organic waste from your trashcan. Imagine making it into two valuable new resources that you can personally or commercially use.

Electronics360: What are Impact Bioenergy’s goals at this point?

Jan Allen: To establish a few key partnerships and get these machines on the ground and operating. Everyone wants to see one working. We need reference facilities.

Electronics360: Where do you see yourself and the company in 10 years?

Jan Allen: We see a network of community supporting biocycling groups sharing information with each other. Impact Bioenergy is the core technology provider, designer, builder and supplier of the HORSE digester. CSB is the service end of a strategic partnering program that helps remove barriers to market this transformational technology in different locations. It is a partnering program between businesses such as breweries, restaurants, markets, urban farmers, and gardeners. What is Biocycling? Biocycling is the recycling of organic materials. In the context of our project, this term describes the process of taking organic wastes such as food scraps and converting it into liquid fertilizer and energy that can once more be used directly on the farm at which these food resources were originally produced. We like to say…Farm to fork to fertilizer and fuel, and back to the farm again.

Electronics360: Is there any other technology currently being developed behind the scenes?

Jan Allen: We are working on upgrading the biogas to CNG vehicle fuel. Back to the Future may be fictional, but the machine that converts food scraps into energy is here, because we just built it. This is a living machine that eats food scraps and makes energy and plant food using microbes with zero waste.

Electronics360: What do you find most challenging about being part of a company based on technology geared toward improving the environment?

Jan Allen: Right now the company needs operating systems on the ground so people can see the technology in action in an urban environment. To that end, a recent crowdfunding project has successfully reached its goal just this month to build a reference facility in Seattle. Remarkably, about 30% of the money pledged came from individuals in New York City.

Biggest lessons learned on the business end are:

that being disruptive means some existing stakeholders will not embrace your good idea
that triple bottom line decisions that account for environmental, social values in dollars is very rare indeed
that accountants rule the day on payback period, return on investment, cost savings, etc. Remarkably this technology does offer what the accountants want.
Biggest lessons learned on the social and cultural end are:

The idea of converting waste into energy and organic matter with zero waste really resonates. Impact Bioenergy has no payroll, but three full time workers, seven part time workers, and a constant stream of job seekers and volunteers

Overall there were 16,000 video starts on the crowdfunding page

People in 68 countries clicked into the crowdfunding page and video

The biggest lessons on the technology/environment end are:

This technology is no more complicated that having a real horse or a large aquarium. The machine wants to be fed lots of small meals, doesn’t like to be cold, and sometimes needs antacids

Visual art and odor control are essential. They are integrated into the design so it fits in the urban setting

The big win here is eliminating trucks hauling waste away and hauling food into the city. That is two groups of trucks! Trucking is a huge cost and environmental burden to the city in air quality, greenhouse gases, congestion, noise, fuel use and export of resources and jobs away from the community.

Using a HORSE eliminates the odor, flies, rats, seagulls and leakage associated with the traditional dumpster.

Question or comments on this article? Contact an editor: engineering360editors@ihs.com

Water Utility Inaugurates Waste-to-Energy Project

Oct 12th, 2015
by Editor.
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The District of Columbia’s water utility, DC Water, has unveiled a $470 million waste-to-energy project that will produce a net 10 megawatts (MW) of electricity from the wastewater treatment process. The result is energy that powers approximately one-third of the Blue Plains treatment plant’s energy requirements.

The project began in 2011 and brought in new technology to North America such as the CAMBI thermal hydrolysis process. Thermal hydrolysis uses high heat and pressure to “pressure cook” the solids left over at the end of the wastewater treatment process. This weakens the solids’ cell walls and the structure between cells to make the energy more easily accessible to organisms in the next stage of the process, anaerobic digestion. The methane these organisms produce is captured and fed to three turbines to produce electricity. Steam is also captured and directed back into the process.

Finally, the solids at the end of the process are a cleaner Class A biosolids product that DC Water uses as a compost-like material. Biosolids products are currently being used around the District for urban gardens and green infrastructure projects. DC Water is also working to bring a compost-like product to market.

The project was based on more than a decade of research before bringing these facilities online. The project also received a 2012 Grand Prize in Planning Award from the American Academy of Environmental Engineers & Scientists, a 2012 Global Honor Award in Planning from the International Water Association and a WERF Excellence in Innovation Award was presented in 2011.

http://insights.globalspec.com/article/1580/water-utility-inaugurates-waste-to-energy-project

Sweden R&D team says dye-sensitized cells may work better when “dead”

Oct 12th, 2015
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http://renewables.seenews.com/news/sweden-r-d-team-says-dye-sensitized-cells-may-work-better-when-dead-496884

October 12 (SeeNews) – Researchers at Uppsala University, Sweden, have discovered that some old dye-sensitized solar cells can perform better when they have dried-out, and are conducting further research in the work of such “zombie” solar cells.

In the so-called Graetzel cell, an electrically conductive liquid facilitates a flow of electrons. When this liquid was gone, a solid hole conducting structure was created, continuing to transport positive charge, as revealed by Gerrit Boschloo’s group at the Department of Chemistry-Angstroem Laboratory.

In certain cases, the dried-out solar cells worked better than before. Boschloo said specific cells had hit 8% power conversion efficiency, a record for dye-sensitized solar cells with a solid hole conductor.

“Several companies have said that if it would only seal properly, they’d invest in liquid-based solar cells. If we would be able to seal these ‘zombie cells’ so that they would last for years, it would be very interesting,” Boschloo commented.

The research group is collaborating with two chemistry groups at The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) and experts in the field of industrial manufacturing from Swerea IVF. The researchers have filed a patent application for the “zombie solar cell” through their own company Dyenamo.

DC Water develops $470m waste-to-energy project in US

Oct 8th, 2015
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http://www.energy-business-review.com/news/dc-water-develops-470m-waste-to-energy-project-in-us-081015-4688252

DC Water has opened a $470m waste-to-energy project, designed to generate clean, renewable energy from the sewage solids generated after wastewater treatment process, at the Blue Plains Wastewater Treatment Plant, Washington, D.C, US

The 10MW power facility is expected to generate power to meet about one-third of energy needs of the Blue Plains plants.

DC Water board chair Matthew Brown said: “The Board of Directors approved this voluntary investment to create a better class of biosolids and generate 10MW of power to cut the electricity bill at the Blue Plains plant, which is the single largest consumer of electricity in the District.”

Featuring a dewatering building, the facility comprises 32 sleek thermal hydrolysis vessels, four concrete 80ft-high anaerobic digesters with a capacity of 3.8 million gallons of solids each and three turbines equivalent to the size of jet engines.

District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser said: “DC Waters Blue Plains facility is converting waste to clean water and a nutrient-rich soil byproduct, producing energy and helping to put the District on the path towards a zero waste future.”

The CAMBI thermal hydrolysis technology at the facility uses high heat and pressure to “pressure cook” the sewage solids, which are the byproducts of the wastewater treatment process.

The sewage solids are treated as a sterile food source (carbon) for the microbes in the digesters, which then converts the carbon to methane.

The resulting menthe is then captured and fed to three large turbines in order to produce electricity while the generated steam will be captured and directed back into the process.

The solids at the end of the process are a cleaner Class A biosolids product, which can be used as a compost-like material for urban gardens and green infrastructure projects.

“Additionally, the cleaner biosolids can be applied locally, saving millions of dollars in hauling costs,” Brown added.

DC Water CEO and general manager George Hawkins, said “This project embodies a shift from treating used water as waste to leveraging it as a resource.

“We are proud to be the first to bring this innovation to North America for the benefit of our ratepayers, the industry and the environment.”

DC Water also seeking ways to bring a compost-like product to market.

East Delhi Commissions Hydropower Plant Powered By Sewage Effluent

Sep 14th, 2015
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http://cleantechnica.com/2015/09/14/east-delhi-commissions-hydropower-plant-powered-by-sewage-effluent/

Delhi is getting its first hydropower plant, but it’s not harvesting the energy of running water in the traditional hydroelectric model, as this new system uses falling water from a treated sewage effluent pipe to spin its turbine.

Recapturing some of the energy in flowing water that is generated by existing processes, such as municipal water supplies, is one non-traditional step for hydropower, and cities such as Portland have begun experimenting with this sort of ‘smart water pipe infrastructure.‘

The new hydropower plant, in East Delhi, India, is built onto the Delhi Jal Board’s 9 MGD sewage treatment plant at Chilla, and is said to be the first of its kind, not only because it’s being powered by effluent water, but also because it’s the first hydropower plant in the city. According to the Delhi Jal Board (DJB), this pilot project was set up “free of cost,” and the estimated annual 20,000 kWh of electricity produced by the hydropower installation will be used directly at the sewage treatment plant.

“The use of fossil fuels leads to the generation of carbon dioxide which in turn leads to Green House Effect and Global Warming. However no fossil fuel is being used in the generation of the power through Hydropower at Chilla, therefore this technology is termed as “pollution free technology.”” – Delhi Jal Board

The treated effluent water falls from a height of 4.8 meters at the sewage treatment plant, which is sufficient to spin the turbine and generate clean electricity, and this ‘Green Power Generation’ energy technology will help to reduce both air pollution and electricity costs. No additional specs, other than the estimated 20,000 kWh of electricity annually, for the installation were available. According to DJB, the Board is also looking to replicate this hydropower setup at its other installations in the future.

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