Thursday, March 31, 2011

Energy Use as a Predictor of Bankruptcy?

Try this game. See if you can figure out what types of businesses will go away first as energy gets more and more expensive.

The demise of Harry & David (You know, the company that packages up the best looking fruit and ships it all over the place for big bucks...) got me thinking that we might be able to do this. FYI, in a high-cost-of-energy world, wouldn't shipping pretty pears across the country seem insane? (For that matter, it's insane even when energy is cheap.)

I thought of an approach - construct a ratio of "Value provide" divided by "energy use" for each company or industry. Companies with small ratios would be closest to extinction in an energy-expensive world.

To test my approach, I raised the question in the office this morning. My business partner immediately suggested "NASCAR." We all agreed that NASCAR uses lots of energy. What we couldn't agree on was the "value provided." Another co-worker joked that we should count gallons of beer consumed. If beer consumption is valuable, then NASCAR is going to be around a long time. On the other hand, if we base value on "helping mankind survive in a low-energy world," NASCAR's gonna score pretty low.

How would you value a business or industry? What industries do you see going away first in a high-cost-energy world?


Here are some I came up with:
Indoor sports arenas for amateur athletics (big heated shells so kids can play soccer indoors when it's lousy outside)
Carwashes
Dollar Store crap manufacturers
Ski areas
Malls and Big Box stores

Monday, March 28, 2011

Our Energy Future?

Here is a comment from a recent post at "The Archdruid Report." The comment, by Bill Pulliam, shows, I think, a deep understanding of our energy future.
 
The real paradigm that needs shifting here is the idea that peak oil is a "problem" to be "solved." Peak oil is no more a problem in search of a solution than is the autumnal equinox. The equinox happens no matter what you do, and winter is coming no matter what you do. This is just a phenomenon, a circumstance, an inevitability. It's not a challenge with an answer that will eliminate it.

Energy conservation is not a choice. In the fairly near future, it won't be a matter of choosing to use less energy; there just will be less energy whatever your "choices" might be. You WILL live with less energy (unless you die first), that is just a fact, same as the fact that you WILL live with shorter and colder days in the winter. But, of course, this will be a permanent winter, so you WILL figure out how to live with that forever. There is no choice here, there is no solution. There is adaptation, accommodation, that's it.

Those who actually have been taking in [The Archdruid's] recent writings and their intention should have noticed this. He is not talking about solving peak oil or making optional lifestyle choices. He is presenting methods to adjust to and deal with the inevitable pressures that are impinging on all of us no matter what our choices might be.

Saturday, March 26, 2011

One Example of Why We are Addicted to Oil....

On or about January 7, 2011 my Solar Hot Water (SHW) system was activated. The system, pictured below consists of three 4' x 7' flat-plate solar collectors and an electric backup, 120-gallon water storage tank with a single heat exchanger.

SHW Collectors on High Albedo Roof
The panels are located on the southwest roof of my home. The tank is in the basement. The tank and panels are connected by two insulated flexible stainless steel pipes. One is for hot fluid off the roof, the other returns the cool fluid to the roof. The fluid is a mixture of water and propylene glycol (also known as antifreeze). The solar panels, water storage tank, circulator, and electronic controller were manufactured by Schuco of Germany. (To understand how a solar hot water system works, see the first footnote.)

Since my company sells and installs solar hot water and solar electric systems, I felt it would make sense to add some monitoring so we could see what the system was doing and validate what we tell our customers. To monitor the electricity input for the electric heater and circulator pump, we installed a traditional glass-front kilowatt-hour meter. To monitor the sun's input, we installed a SunReports monitoring system. The kilowatt-hour meter measures electrical energy added to the system and the SunReports system logs roof-to-tank inlet temperature, tank-to-roof outlet temperature, and circulator flow rate. Using these three measurements, we can compute the sun's energy contribution to the tank. 

Shortly after finishing the installation, it snowed - a lot. Within two weeks, we received about 3 feet of snow. My panels were buried. To make matters worse, the northeastern winds blew much of the snow  on the northeast side of my home over the peak on to the southwest side - further burying my panels. Recognizing the risks, I decided to wait for the snow to melt. Unfortunately, my roof (recently replaced) is covered with EnergyStar rated shingles. These shingles are light in color and highly reflective (high albedo) therefore, they don't heat up the way traditional dark shingles do. This meant that the snow melt was really slow - and making matters worse, it was a particularly cold January.

Finally I gave up waiting. I had one of my crew members bring me a ladder and the snow rake and I manually cleared the panels of snow (See snow clearing warnings below). The clearing day was February 6, 2011, one month after the system go-live date.

The system collected measurable amounts of solar energy for 25 of the next 34 days. However, most of the days the system collected energy for less than one hour. In those 34 days, the system collected and stored 139,848 BTUs* of thermal energy.

What's this got to do with our oil addiction? Quick question: How much usable energy can be extracted from a gallon of oil? Quick answer: Depending on the "quality" of the oil we can expect about 138,000 BTUs of heat energy when we burn a gallon of oil.

Yes, that's right. It took one winter month for my solar hot water system to collect the equivalent amount of energy stored in a gallon of heating oil. How big is a gallon of oil: There are 231 cubic inches in a gallon. One gallon is a cube of 6.1" x 6.1" x 6.1". Oil is portable, relatively cheap, easy to burn. No wonder we haven't broken the oil habit yet.

But I keep trying.
-Mark


How Solar Hot Water Systems Work

Antifreeze is heated in the solar collectors on the roof. When the antifreeze temperature exceeds the tank water temperature by more than ten degrees (F) the pump controller turns on the circulator pump. The heated antifreeze is driven to a heat exchanger in the bottom of the water storage tank where it transfers its energy to the stored water. When the temperature difference between the roof and the tank water drops to five degrees, the controller shuts off the circulator pump.

Clearing Snow from Solar Panels
Don't do it.
I'm not going to tell you how I did it so you can't blame me when you get hurt.

BTU
The amount of energy required to raise one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit.

Friday, March 18, 2011

Replacing Nuclear Energy with Solar (or Wind) Energy?

I am in an unusual position. I actually know something about what's going on in Japan at the Fukushima reactors.

I have a BS and MS in Nuclear Engineering and, in a prior life, I worked as a Nuclear Engineer doing reactor physics calculations for some the nuclear power plants in the New England area. The plants I "got close to" were Maine Yankee (MY, Wiscasset ME, Closed), Yankee Rowe (YR, Rowe MA, Closed), and Vermont Yankee (VY Vernon, VT). I also spent a few weeks at VY and MY during one of their refueling outages and was given a great tour of Seabrook Station (Seabrook, NH) before it went on-line. In my present life, I install solar electric and solar hot water systems (NewEnglandBreeze.com). In that role, I often hear that we should "go solar." And while I'm all for this, there is one big issue - Scale.

The thing that most impressed me about the nuclear power plants was that everything on site is massive. For example:
  • Inside each reactor building (the dome at Seabrook and MY, and YR, the "box" at VY), is/was a crane capable of lifting the reactor core into place. The crane sat idle most of the time yet had the capacity to lift hundreds of tons.
  • The Reactor Vessel head is held on with bolts as big around as a 5-gallon bucket. Ten men couldn't turn the wrench for those bolts so it had to be crane operated.
  • The backup diesel generators at Seabrook Station are enormous. 40 feet high, 50 feet wide and more than 100 feet long. If you are in the room without hearing protection when they start, you'll likely go deaf.
Everything about these facilities is huge. And there is a reason for this. These units generate/ed staggering amounts of thermal and electrical energy. To put these numbers in perspective, here is what it would take to replace the energy generated by Seabrook Station with solar for one year.

Seabrook Station is rated at 1,244 megawatts-electric. That means that its peak power output is 1,244 Megawatts.** Seabrook's capacity factor for the past three years was, on average, 88%. That means it operated at peak power for 88% of the 8,760 hours in the year (or some combination of below peak and peak such that the total annual production was 88% of the plant operating at 100% power for 8760 hours). Thus, the average energy output of the plant for each of the past three years was 1,244 MW x 8,760 hours x 88% = 9,622,439 Megawatt-hours.

A typical solar panel is around 200 watts of peak power (they range from tiny 10 watt panels to 300+ watts, but most "grid tied" applications use 180 to 240 watt panels). In MA, the solar capacity factor for an unshaded solar array is about 13%. That means for every 1,000 watts of solar panels, you'll get about 1,200 kilowatt-hours per year. When installing solar panels on "ground mounted" or "flat roof" arrays, we can fit, on average, about 7 watts per square foot (we have to space panels out so they don't shade each other).

If we want to generate 9.6 million Megawatt-hours in a year using solar, we need more than 40 million 200-watt solar panels. At 7 watts per square foot, those 40 million panels require more than 41 square miles (assuming no space for roads). And that only replaces Seabrook Station! (And worst of all, you'd only get that energy on sunny days. As my friends who are still in the Nuke business say, "Solar's all right, but Nukes do it all night.")

We (humans) use an enormous amount of energy (particularly in the US) and until we dramatically change our energy use habits, we are stuck with Nukes and all the other undesirable energy generating plants.

-Mark

P.S. As I finished this write-up, I realized I have the numbers for wind generation as well. The Hull MA Unit 2 Wind Turbine is a land based turbine rated at 1.8 Megawatts. It has a 200-foot tall tower and 130-foot blades. Its first year's capacity factor was about 26%. How many turbines do we need to replace Seabrook? Assuming a 26% capacity factor, a Hull-2-sized turbine will generate 1.8Mw x 8760 hours per year x 26% = 4,100 Megawatt-hours per year. Therefore, Seabrook's 9.6 million MWh/year divided by Hull-2's 4,100 MWh/year = 2353 Hull-2-sized wind turbines.

Cape Wind better get moving...
-M
** The unit "Megawatts" is a measure of power and is an "instantaneous" measurement. The unit "Megawatt-Hours" is a measure of energy or power over time. Your electric company bills you for energy. However some commercial/industrial sites also pay "demand" charges which are based on peak power usage.