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How the Economy Is Changing Clean Energy
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sat Mar 14, 2009 01:10 AM
from the clean-energy-with-dirty-money dept.
from the clean-energy-with-dirty-money dept.
Al writes "The economy has hit green energy technologies hard, but technologies focused on energy efficiency and clean coal are still attracting money. Over the next few years, venture capitalists say that the biggest winners in clean tech will most likely be companies with technologies that improve efficiency. Such ventures often take advantage of cheap sensors, communications hardware, and software packages to monitor and control energy use both in buildings and on the electricity grid. High-capital businesses are now more likely to succeed if they can attract foreign funding. For instance, Great Point Energy, based in Cambridge, which has developed a process for converting coal into natural gas, has attracted $100m in funding from China."
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Submission: How the Economy Is Changing Clean Energy by Anonymous Coward
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If you ask me... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
And working with finite resources like coal is a dead end. You will end up with the dirty parts regardless.
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Well, it isn't like these resources are going to 'go away' in any of our lifetimes....so, at this point in time, for reasonably short term (20+) years success and profit, it IS a good business move to work with these.
The smart things to do for a company would be to maximize their profits on finite resources we still have plenty of today....and spend some of that profit on the next generation energ
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Coal may be finite, but there's probably enough to last for longer than any of us really expect to be around.
OTOH, "Clean Coal" is not something that's ever been demonstrated. There's no proof that pumping CO2 underground will cause it to remain there for any long period of time. Etc. (It's true that a lot of the places that they are planning on pumping it to once held various gases [including CO2] for very long periods of time, but that was before we drilled holes into it. When you take a lot of stuff
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Re:If you ask me... (Score:5, Informative)
Of course companies need to maximise the profit. Why should they minimise debt is beyond me (if you are talking about maximising net profit and not turn-over, debt is not an issue).
Because investors don't just care about profit, they also care about risk. Average profit with above average risk is not good.
Debt and profit interact like this (ignoring tax, for now):
Case 1: A company uses 100m of capital, all from shareholders, to make an average of 10m/year of profit. Return to shareholders: 10%, plus annual variation. The company goes bust if it persistently makes less than 0 profit.
Case 2: An equivalent company uses 100m of capital, 50m from shareholders, 50m from 5% debt, to make an average of 10m/year of profit before interest, 7.5m/year after interest. Return to shareholders: 15%. The company goes bust if it persistently makes less than 2.5m/year from its operations, so the risk to shareholders is larger. If profits are a normal distribution - or anything like it - this could be quite a big difference in risk.
So what matters is not profit, but risk-adjusted profit....and leverage increases risk. In theory, shareholders should care because they adjust the leverage themselves (owning 1000 of the share capital in case one, or 500 of the share capital and 500 of the debt in case two, is equivalent). However, the tax system encourages debt by taxing profit AFTER interest. This is a BAD thing, and may have contributed to our current mess, because it decreases shareholder returns in case 1 more than in case 2, encouraging otherwise pointless risky behaviour.
Parent
A ticket to tax Hell . . . (Score:3, Insightful)
... the companies that will do the best will be the ones that can maximize their profit with a minimum amount of debt.
. . . that would normally be a very economically sound business plan. However, governments are now in the process of bailing out businesses that have minimized profit, with maximum debt, and are "too big to fail."
So who gets to pay for that?
"Ah, Mr. Bond, I was expecting you. I see that you have again made a tidy profit. I will forgo any unfeasible sharks-with-lasers-aimed-at-your-crotch death machines. Instead, I will simply tax you to death."
Wealthfare (Score:5, Insightful)
That is the new governmental hybrid business model. Private profits, but public debt socialism for the same guys.
IMO, "too big to fail" should translate into "too big to be allowed to exist in the first place".
Parent
Improvements in efficiency (Score:3, Interesting)
There have been a number of ads by IBM lately pushing the idea that their new line of computers is needed to redesign the nation's electrical grid, claiming that half the power never makes it to any light bulb.
In other areas power companies will actually buy you the new CCFL bulbs if you pay the tax on the bulb.
The push for efficiency is long over-due.
But realistically, will the replacement of a an entire power grid really save more than it costs? Is it really necessary?
Wouldn't more energy be saved by taxing long haul trucking out of existence and putting the money into a resurgence of rail freight?
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Well, when your grid ( and im assuming the US one ) is running right to its limits, something needs to be done. You have no real room for failure, look at the last chain reaction of outages there were. Increasing capacity of the grid will increase efficiency (to a point of course). But you gain from less losses, and increased reliability...how much did the last major grid outage cost you, as a country?
The electrical grid is a critical piece of infrastructure for any economy. If you dont invest in it correct
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Great- so with CFLs instead of putting carbon in th air we put mercury in the earth. Yeah, that's at best a sidegrade, at worst actively worse. If they really wanted efficiency they'd push for LEDs- bright, cheap, low polution to make, highly efficient, and they never burn out.
bugs (Score:3, Interesting)
I read about how coal could be converted to methane via bacteria.
here's a quick example.
http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/pubaf/pr/2003/bnlpr091103b.htm [bnl.gov]
This is one way to convert coal to a cleaner form of energy. However there are implications since there is a question as to who owns the energy: coal companies or gas companies?
So to create cleaner coal we just may need to pump some bugs and other chemicals into the ground but we also need to sort out some legal and policy issues.
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Coal to methane, interesting. Methane is kind of implicated in the odor of flatulence, but it comes from it's own charcoal filter. I guess it should be odorless then?
clean coal != clean! (Score:4, Interesting)
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Bravo....
Please by all means invest in your solar panels that cost $10 a watt. let me know how the goes for you.
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Clean coal doesn't exist. Saying it is a clean energy form is like saying fusion is a clean energy form: regardless of whatever merits you can come up with for the system, carbon capture and sequestration (clean coal), like fusion, has no working plants (and probably won't for at least a decade) and is more a gimmick for public support and research funding than anything else. Money would be better spent on the efficiency efforts mentioned and commercially viable forms of clean energy that can be bought in the market today.
So all of the other posts here explaining technologies that convert coal to another, cleaner form of energy are all wrong, and you are right? Even if it's something as simple as taking the scrubber technology we've had since the birth of the space program and attaching that to smoke stack to remove the CO2... it doesn't exist, right? (how do all those space guys breath?)
Guess you are the only smart one here, as usual.
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In space they can dump it overboard. Got a place to put all that CO2? Check out the raw tonnage you're dealing with before you answer.
Um... where is all that CO2 now? We are not creating it, we are releasing it. How bout we put it into plants, the way nature intended? Maybe we could put into your Mountain Dew. There's a thousand other uses for CO2.
Or, is your problem not with coal and CO2, but something else [ncpa.org]:
Scientists at Columbia University are developing a carbon dioxide (CO2) scrubber device that removes one ton of CO2 from the air every day, says the Heartland Institute.
While some see the scrubber as an efficient and economical way to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide, many environmentalists oppose the technology because it allows people to use fossil fuels and emit carbon in the first place.
According to Columbia University physicist Klaus Lackner, who is leading the research team:
* Producing a large number of CO2 scrubbers can keep to a minimum any rise in atmospheric CO2 without the economically painful elimination of inexpensive energy sources.
* This technology would allow people to use fossil fuels, which they will be using anyway, without destroying the planet.
Environmental activist groups such as Greenpeace have consistently opposed similar technologies, such as carbon capture and sequestration, because they do not address what they see as the root of the problem, says the Heartland Institute.
"This is just one more piece of evidence that environmentalists aren't concerned about solving a problem," said Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis. "Every problem, as they see it, is one way to restrict people's lifestyles, and if you come up with a technological fix that can solve a problem but doesn't require sacrifice and lets us go about our business the way we were before, they're not happy about it, even if it solves the problem."
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Lake Nyos fool!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos [wikipedia.org]
CO2 (Score:3, Informative)
When there is more CO2, plants do better.
Some plants grow better with higher CO2 levels, like poison ivy [blogspot.com]. However other plants grow slower. There are winners and losers [cababstractsplus.org] wherein some plants grow faster and others slower under high CO2 levels. The same is true under higher temperatures. [mongabay.com]
Oh, BTW, "The jolt of carbon dioxide [highbeam.com]also boosted the most-toxic forms of poison ivy's rash-raising oil".
So, please, stop trying to insult the intelligence of people on slashdot until AFTER you have educated yourself about
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Where've I heard such simpleton logic before? You're either WITH US or AGAINST US, you dirty traitor. Pretty cut and dry!
Yeah, it is, actually.
Any energy or environmental economist would be laughing their ass off at your sophomoric view of what "wealth" is
Actually, a lot of energy economists would agree with me. The more energy people have, and the less expensively they have it, the more their lives improve. It's cheaper for them to travel, to get to work, to power electronic devices and get new features
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's anybody that acquires too much power that becomes the problem. Doesn't matter what angle they're working.
Ah, you are right, of course!
Old article, old tech, and yet still no prototype (Score:5, Interesting)
Power plant licensing (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm in the business, and the cost of electricity is going to continue to rise pretty spectacularly. Most of the plants built in the past 15 years or so are natural gas, which is now expensive and continuing to rise in cost. Many of plants built in the 60's running on cheap fuel are getting near their end of life. Some are being retrofitted but many aren't worth it. Nobody can build a nuke plant these days and coal is equally taboo. Few people are studying engineering so the manpower is also getting scarce. Its not a crisis yet but most of the power industry is aged in thier 50s and 60s.
We aren't in a crisis yet, but in another 10 years its going to start getting ugly.
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A lot of that is really due to management shifting to an emphasis on economics and a phobia about paying wages even when they are under one percent of operating costs. I was in the power industry at 24 and was one of the three technical staff under 50 years old in my division of around a hundred scientists, engineers and technicians. (That was 15 year
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You can blame the NIMBY folks, or the environmentalists that require environmental study after study before ground is broken.
For which you can blame the power industry, since if they had just fucking kept things clean on their own, none of this shit would be necessary.
I will fight to the death any attempt to put a coal, oil or natural gas burning power plant anywhere. They are destroying the biosphere and putting more of them in is hastening our own demise. If the energy industry wants to be responsible and put in some cleaner power plants, then perhaps it will see more support. Don't act like these people don't have a valid agen
Re:Power plant licensing (Score:4, Informative)
First you have to get the liscensing for all these power plants. For Hydro, this is mostly impossible since someone will stand up and say that the turbines chew up fish at a ridiculous rate and destroy the river. For wind, people will complain about the birds. These drawbacks were true in 1960 but they aren't anymore. You'll be tied down for at least 3 years trying to get the permits and approval to build. And that's being optomistic.
Then you need to build the things. But the lead time for many components is pretty long and still getting longer, even in this economy. We're buying forgings and bearings 3-4 years in advance. And then you have to machine it. These are big forgings and bearings, so not a lot of companies make them.
Finally, you need to install and run the plants. As I said, the manpower is getting a little short. Startup engineers make a minimum of 60k base salary a year and it goes up from there. That's not incuding overtime, which is excessive. So its not at all about the money. Most companies that are installing wind turbines are running flat out too along with everyone else.
Coal is mostly clean now, and it's a huge resource that the US has Right Now. I just spent a week in New Cumberland PA, right next door to Three Mile Island and several huge coal plants. And you know what? The air quality was excellent. There are tons of trees in that area and the scrubbers on all the plants are excellent. The ash is recycled into various useful products and the stuff that comes out of the scrubbers (mostly gypsum) is turned into Gypsum board.
As for natural Gas, its completely clean. I went to one plant in Wallingford Connecticut that was in a heavy residential area. The turbines were abour 400 feet away from a bunch of houses, but nobody who lived there knew they were even running because of the sound wall and the clear exhaust. It's even burning a renewable resource. Most people don't realize that Natural Gas is 99% Methane with a hint of Hydrogen. Sure its not coming from renewable sources *now* but there's no reason it couldn't.
I *want* one of these plants in my backyard. The taxes on 250 million dollars of equipment makes my taxes less. The highly paid employees have to eat, sleep, and socialize somewhere. The electrical costs are less because less energy is wasted in transmission.
If you want to turn this country into Vermont, maybe you should just move to Vermont.
Parent
Coal into natural gas? (Score:2)
You know Sid's Civilization: "You found... FISHER TROPSCH in scrolls of ancient wisdom."
Because that's what Fisher Tropsch is, ancient. I don't deny the novelty of Great Point Energy's process, but why did it take 70 years between Fisher-Tropsch and this technology? Lack of lobbying^Wmotivation, I guess.
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Fischer-Tropsch synthesis is currently uneconomical, and producing hydrocarbons through this process and then burning them in engines generates much more CO2 than burning oil, because some of the coal has to be used to generate the extra hydrogen present in gasoline:
C + 2 H2O = CO2 + 2 H2
That's odd (Score:2, Insightful)
I thought the idea of "clean coal" was finding a way to store the CO2 to prevent it from screwing with the climate. This "coal-to-gas" does nothing towards this goal, so I don't see how one would call it "clean coal" other than the obvious lack of sulfur or mercury.
Shock and awe (Score:4, Interesting)
If you enjoy being depressed, you may want to read "The Next Bubble [harpers.org]", an article in Harper's by Eric Janszen from February 2008. He predicted this green bubble over a year ago, and it's a pretty grim prediction:
Sound something like recent legislation? Then comes the bad news:
Yes, you should read the whole article. It'll take some time, but you'll come away with a better understanding of how our global economy works these days.
ObCredit: I found this article via Memestreams [memestreams.net].
No, Its the price of oil (Score:4, Insightful)
The 'economy' didn't hit all these green energy projects, the plummeting price of oil did. Few, if any, of these projectcs are remotely competitive with oil/nat gas under $75 and in many cases still higher - and even with substantial subsidies and tax breaks.
As we saw with ethanol, energy 'policy' is just another boondoggle of lobbyists and special interest groups seeking government funds so they can make some bucks. Wind, solar, clean coal and so on all live off the government teat to one degree or another. Would they even exist without those tax breaks and direct funding?
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Few, if any, of these projectcs are remotely competitive with oil/nat gas under $75 and in many cases still higher - and even with substantial subsidies and tax breaks.
And you know *why*? It's because oil/gas are, themselves, subsidized, you just don't seem to realize it. It's called negative externalities. I mean, could you imagine how expensive oil/gas would be if the companies were actually forced to run clean operations? But they don't. Instead, they destroy the environment around their operations
"Clean" coal (Score:3, Interesting)
The only reason mankind as a whole has experienced explosive population growth and massive rises in standards of living, is that we discovered and exploited fossil fuels. We have taken out a massive "loan" from the earth and whether it runs out or not is irrelevant. We are basing our future survival on energy that was previously stored over billions of years. Patently, there is no point expecting coal or oil to renew themselves naturally in a useful timescale, and our population is still expanding.
We must find sources of energy that do not rely on previously stored resources. Once those resources are gone, we are pretty much bankrupt, energy-wise. So get with the program, and finally accept that coal or oil in any guise, are only stop-gap solutions to keep us going until we can totally replace them. Spending time and effort on "clean" coal is wasting time and energy on something we will have to do without, more likely sooner than later. And I'm not even going to mention the specific environmental issues, or the myriad chemical/biological uses that fossil fuels could be put to instead of being burnt.
Of course, nuclear fuels are a naturally stored resource too, but they are more efficient, cleaner, and hold possibilities that mere fire can never approach. Solar is the only energy source that is truly long term viable, simply because it is not produced or stored on earth. It comes from outside the system. Is it ready now ? Of course not, but it is the only answer in the universe. (Unless we can somehow harness dark energy/matter).
I found the article about the magnetic spin battery concept interesting. Currently, all nuclear plants use nuclear material in place of fire, to produce heat and then steam to drive turbines. What if a nuclear reaction could be relied upon to directly induce a specific magnetic spin in a "wire" and thus supply the grid ? That has to be more efficient than converting heat > steam > kinetic energy > electricity. Imagine a small cylinder (0.5 " diameter) that you clamp to the power cable of a device and directly induces current to feed that device. Dreaming I know, but this is why that discovery has greater potential than many posters realise.
The biggest barrier to energy efficiency ... (Score:3, Interesting)
... in the commercial building sector is the triple-net lease. This is the most common lease for commercial space. The lease put all the costs, including energy, onto the tenant. The owner has no incentive to make energy efficiency improvements, and possibly a lot of disincentive. Even if the tenant is willing to pay for the improvements (as a trade off against their energy costs) the owner has incentives to disapprove them (such as avoidance of legal liability or any other kind of hassle).
Only owner-occupied buildings tend to get energy efficiency infrastructure technology. I've heard that is about 10% of the sector. The only way around this will be to adopt laws that cause pain to building owners that is best relieved by making or agreeing to energy efficiency improvements.
Re:Innovation and Risk? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Gah - energy was mentioned so the nukes come out (Score:3, Interesting)
There is also a vast
Re:Gah - energy was mentioned so the nukes come ou (Score:3, Informative)
If we had civilian nuclear plants that were good at producing electricity I would agree with you. Unfortunately in nearly every case we have a compromise dual use plant that produces very expensive electricity along with the weapon materials.
The only "dual-use" nuclear power plant in the US was the Hanford 'N' reactor which was shut down shortly after the Chernobyl accident. Light water reactors are poor sources of materials for weapons due to the high 240Pu, and will be even poorer with the high burnup fuels.
Re:Innovation and Risk? (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's see... We can't have nukes, because nuclear waste is dangerous for thousands of years and is produced in tonnes by reactors.
But "clean coal" is ok, because CO2 can be stored by deep well injection. And unlike nuclear waste, it's dangerous forever, and produced in millions of tonnes by power plants.
I guess sequestered CO2 is better than nuclear waste because giant clouds of killer gas are more "natural" than that awful "atom" stuff. After all, look at the area around Chernobyl, and compare it to the scenes around Lake Nyos.
Oh, and while we're at it, lets consider the number of coal miners killed each year. Too bad we can't ask them about "clean coal" technology.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I think one of the reasons people are more afraid of nuclear waste than CO2 is that after you're irradiated, you know you'll die, but are still alive for some time and aware of the fact you will die. (Regardless of the actual chance of that happening, which is extremely low.) People really fear being confronted with their mortality. That's why they are afraid of cancer and flying, but not so much of road accidents where you die instantly.
Re:Innovation and Risk? (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually...
You can take the 'waste' from the reactor and re-enrich it (a process that is also used for creation of nuclear weapons unfortunately) and turn it into fuel-grade material again although you do lose some mass in the process.
The idea of capturing CO2 is basically a result of chemical compounds/processes that turn CO2 into Sodium Bicarbonate or Baking Soda. If you put it underground in places with high Sodium content you'll end up with it converting to Baking Soda as it tries to escape.
Parent
Re:Innovation and Risk? (Score:4, Insightful)
Never mind the CO2 that coal plants produce.
Indeed, never mind the things like arsenic (that remain toxic forever) that are in coal ash.
The fact is, if coal plants had to meet the same standards for radioactive release that nuclear plants do, they'd all have to be shut down. There's all kinds of radioactive stuff in coal (radon, thorium, etc) -- not very much per ton, but coal plants burn millions of tons of the stuff. Indeed, if you could extract the thorium from coal you'd get more energy burning it in a reactor than you would from burning the carbon in a furnace. (Don't take my word, look it up.)
"Clean coal" is an oxymoron.
Parent
Re:Innovation and Risk? (Score:5, Insightful)
We have literally poisoned the ocean with mercury to the point that we need to issue warnings to people about eating too much fish. We load up our rhetorical cannons and open fire over the CO2 issue while we are LITERALLY poisoning ourselves every single day with particulate pollution and heavy metals from coal fired plants.
It is stupid and misguided and ignorant in amounts that make me think that only a deliberate effort could achieve.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Pfft! Yeah right. Pull the other one.
Funny. Nearly every other post here is about converting coal to some other form of cleaner energy. So are you wrong or is everyone else?
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Re:"Clean" coal (Score:5, Interesting)
According to BBCs Horizon, the UK spends more on ring tones than the world spends on fusion research.
In terms of energy we are screwed, but at least we have custom ring tones.
Parent
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The use of coal, no matter what you convert it to, will never be clean.
Define "clean". Is nuclear "clean"? Wind power (kills birds and blocks the view)? How about solar (must cut down trees or cover grass to install)?
So tell me, please: What is "clean" energy by your own definition? Is your problem with coal or just energy in general?
Conservation of matter & Conservation. (Score:2)
Coal burns all the way through. You get so much CO2 in the air and so much ash for every bit you burn. There's no changing that. It's conservation of matter. You could catch the CO2, but then it just screws up the ground water table and doesn't really help, because nobody would do it and it just adds another storage problem (we see how well they store the ash).
Out of curiosity are you a cleverly constructed parody of a dumb ass or a real one. Real ones typically aren't that dumb.
Re:Clean energy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ignoring nuclear power because of controversy (...)
Ignoring the only proven alternative to coal, as in one that is supplying a significant percent of electricity in several nations (over 50% in some cases), only because some dimwits don't understand physics or engineering, is extremely stupid.
Parent