What better endorsement on one’s thoughts than that from the President of United States of America! Obama announced his 2012 budget last week, close on the heels of my post on Small Modular Reactors (SMR) and he allocated $853 million dollars for research on SMR in 2012. I always knew Obama is smart enough to know where to get his energy information from:)
More on his budget today, for this is not your average-Joe government budgets but one that signals a clear move towards a clean energy revolution in the United States. The administration has sanctioned about $29.5 billion for 2012 for the Department of Energy, an increase in spending of about 4.2% in a climate where spending on defense has been slashed! About $8 billion of it has been siphoned to clean energy research, specifically wind, solar and advanced batteries. This is in addition to the $36 billion that the White House has asked in loan guarantees for the construction of new Nuclear plants in the US. Nuclear seems to be surely ensconced in this administration’s energy plans much as hydrogen energy was President Bush’s blue eyed boy! Now some people might give me credit for that, for I firmly endorsed Nuclear in all my posts. You know I am not one for taking credits:)
Oh, hydrogen energy! How often do you see a technology go through the cycle of boom and bust in terms of government support, within a decade! From being touted as the next big thing in energy under Bush to being completely stripped of all federal funding under Obama, this technology has seen a lot. I still feel eliminating all funding for hydrogen is a bit harsh. The viability of our fuel cell technologies depend to some extent on such government research funding for hydrogen. That is a topic for another day!
There are other positive tidbits from the budget, like increasing the budget of the government’s venture arm, Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA_E) to $550 million after the excellent work it has done to promote energy entrepreneurship last year. The budget also proposed 3 more Energy Innovation Hubs to solve challenging problems in this area. There is also a proposal to spend $588 million on vehicle technology and a $453 million budget for Carbon Capture and Sequestration projects. The latter proposal has brought a cheer to yours truly, an erstwhile researcher in the field of CCS:)
Finally, let’s discuss the most interesting point of the budget. Obama’s budget seeks to eliminate $3.6 billion in annual subsidies to the oil, gas and coal sectors, totaling to about $46.2 billion in a decade. This is a VERY interesting decision! For long, and especially for people in the renewable energy space, we have heard arguments from the oil, gas and coal lobbies, let’s collectively call them black energy, that renewables are not affordable and the price parity with of green energy and black energy shall never be reached. These aficionados of black energy would conveniently keep mum about the invisible subsidies provided to them by all governments around the world and cry foul whenever a subsidy is announced for green energy. We will be close to talking on a level-playing field with this proposal, by every sense of the word.
The reality is that this budget is too polarized and looks to break too many bastions to even pass the legislative process in the US. The firmly entrenched black energy lobby groups are already out to nip these budget proposals in the bud. Still, the “green” among us can bask in the realization that the most powerful man on earth, as of now, has his priorities right. However fleeting this realization will end up being, it is comforting to see that Obama has followed his talk, of producing 80% electricity here from renewable sources, with matching proposals. Only if Washington, DC could agree!
On a separate note, there is a personal goal for me here. Now that I have Obama in my list of blog followers, I will look to proselytize more world leaders, one at a time. That’s one goal worth striving for and all of you will make this happen:)
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Good things come in small packets
Economy of scale. I love this phrase, bandied about by my economist friends as if there is no tomorrow. And the industrial age, the 19th and 20th century, has been a testament to the beauty of this phrase. Mankind figured that the bigger systems we build, the more efficient they are and the more we can harvest them. Eureka!
Nuclear power must have been one of the darlings of our economist friends, for no other system epitomizes enhanced efficiencies, from enhanced size, than nuclear. Thus, we ended up with behemoths, 1000 MW capacity units, and clubbed 2-4 of such units at one location. All of a sudden we had about 4000 MW of generation capacity to hook up with demand.
As with many 20th century legacies in the 21st century, the concept of economy of scale has also taken a beating. We have realized a whole new love for smaller, manageable things. Remember, too big to fail:) This exciting new paradigm has affected the thought around Nuclear power too and there is a movement towards making smaller, modular nuclear reactors. Reactors which can be placed in each township and managed directly by the people it serves. This not only obviates the need for intricate transmission networks to get this large amount power from God-forsaken places to civilization but also creates something that has never been thought before.
You might be amazed at the concept of a small, modular nuclear reactor in your township. And rightly so. Some of my readers would question, didn’t the Three Mile and Chernobyl nuclear disasters push these dangerous systems away from humanity’s faintest reach, for good? How on earth can we talk of getting them in the midst of townships this time? Fair questions and bear with me for a few more paragraphs for their answers.
One of the major impediments of large-scale installation of nuclear energy has been the enormous cost of financing such a plant. The total cost of starting a conventional nuclear plant is about $10 billion these days, an amount which is not easy to finance without huge government subsidies and other incentives. Small Modular Reactors(SMR), in the works, have capacities in the range of 25-125 MW, a fraction of the conventional designs. This also brings down the installation cost to a few hundred million dollars, which tremendously increases the affordability of such a reactor. The smaller size also reduces the amount of construction material that goes into a safe design, for the risks are much lower with a much smaller quantity of nuclear fuel being used. So much so that initial reports say that the amount of fuel in such a reactor is of no use for weapon grade application. SAFE!
Refueling of nuclear reactors is a process that takes up months and is not a plant operator’s delight. The technology of SMR can make such a reactor go for as much as 30-60 years without refueling. The operators will love this idea, no doubt about it!
All things said and done, it is not that easy to go about planting these reactos. As with every human being, technologies have a cycle of Karma too, and nuclear has not served its Karma well by those famous accidents mentioned in the beginning of this post. A proliferation of such reactors will cause many people to balk at the idea. There will be major delays in their sanctioning by regulatory commissions, which are not adept at handling such a technological shift. Nuclear waste is always a sensitive issue and this concept is not untouched by it. In fact, a number of smaller nuclear reactors will only compound the problem of distributed nuclear waste and ways of disposing it.
However, there are many examples currently to suggest that there is movement in a favorable direction. Several cities, for example the towns of Galena and Fairbanks in Alaska and many island cities, are going ahead with the installation of SMRs. Just keep an eye on this exciting technology in the distributed generation space.
It is exciting to watch how the concept of economies of scale has been turned on its head lately. We have figured that it’s better to work with smaller systems. In fact, this calls for a new phrase, which could be of the order of “Economies of De-Scale!”
Remember, you heard it here first:) 21st century will show us numerous situations where Economies of De-Scale will trump economies of scale.
Let’s not jettison the concept totally. There will always be instances where we cannot do away with scale. And one such instance is the number of followers I have on my blog:) The more followers I have, the more motivation I shall have to write and greater the efficiency of my blog. This economy of scale will always hold true:)
Nuclear power must have been one of the darlings of our economist friends, for no other system epitomizes enhanced efficiencies, from enhanced size, than nuclear. Thus, we ended up with behemoths, 1000 MW capacity units, and clubbed 2-4 of such units at one location. All of a sudden we had about 4000 MW of generation capacity to hook up with demand.
As with many 20th century legacies in the 21st century, the concept of economy of scale has also taken a beating. We have realized a whole new love for smaller, manageable things. Remember, too big to fail:) This exciting new paradigm has affected the thought around Nuclear power too and there is a movement towards making smaller, modular nuclear reactors. Reactors which can be placed in each township and managed directly by the people it serves. This not only obviates the need for intricate transmission networks to get this large amount power from God-forsaken places to civilization but also creates something that has never been thought before.
You might be amazed at the concept of a small, modular nuclear reactor in your township. And rightly so. Some of my readers would question, didn’t the Three Mile and Chernobyl nuclear disasters push these dangerous systems away from humanity’s faintest reach, for good? How on earth can we talk of getting them in the midst of townships this time? Fair questions and bear with me for a few more paragraphs for their answers.
One of the major impediments of large-scale installation of nuclear energy has been the enormous cost of financing such a plant. The total cost of starting a conventional nuclear plant is about $10 billion these days, an amount which is not easy to finance without huge government subsidies and other incentives. Small Modular Reactors(SMR), in the works, have capacities in the range of 25-125 MW, a fraction of the conventional designs. This also brings down the installation cost to a few hundred million dollars, which tremendously increases the affordability of such a reactor. The smaller size also reduces the amount of construction material that goes into a safe design, for the risks are much lower with a much smaller quantity of nuclear fuel being used. So much so that initial reports say that the amount of fuel in such a reactor is of no use for weapon grade application. SAFE!
Refueling of nuclear reactors is a process that takes up months and is not a plant operator’s delight. The technology of SMR can make such a reactor go for as much as 30-60 years without refueling. The operators will love this idea, no doubt about it!
All things said and done, it is not that easy to go about planting these reactos. As with every human being, technologies have a cycle of Karma too, and nuclear has not served its Karma well by those famous accidents mentioned in the beginning of this post. A proliferation of such reactors will cause many people to balk at the idea. There will be major delays in their sanctioning by regulatory commissions, which are not adept at handling such a technological shift. Nuclear waste is always a sensitive issue and this concept is not untouched by it. In fact, a number of smaller nuclear reactors will only compound the problem of distributed nuclear waste and ways of disposing it.
However, there are many examples currently to suggest that there is movement in a favorable direction. Several cities, for example the towns of Galena and Fairbanks in Alaska and many island cities, are going ahead with the installation of SMRs. Just keep an eye on this exciting technology in the distributed generation space.
It is exciting to watch how the concept of economies of scale has been turned on its head lately. We have figured that it’s better to work with smaller systems. In fact, this calls for a new phrase, which could be of the order of “Economies of De-Scale!”
Remember, you heard it here first:) 21st century will show us numerous situations where Economies of De-Scale will trump economies of scale.
Let’s not jettison the concept totally. There will always be instances where we cannot do away with scale. And one such instance is the number of followers I have on my blog:) The more followers I have, the more motivation I shall have to write and greater the efficiency of my blog. This economy of scale will always hold true:)
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Husk Power Systems: Innovation for the poor
If the last week’s post was bordering on science fiction type of innovation, with the NASA ring to it, this week we shall look at one which leverages existing technologies to affect the lives of millions. That would lie at the other end of the innovation-impact spectrum. We shall look at a small, but vigorously growing and infinitely exciting, company called Husk Power Systems (HPS).
Social enterprise and social responsibility initiatives have a vey noble picture attached to them. However, where most of these initiatives fail is that the blueprints are designed in air-conditioned halls and well equipped research labs, which cannot hope to mimic the actual conditions. Hence, such initiatives fail to take flight, having lost the battle in the initial designs conditions itself. One of the biggest, and most prolific, disasters is the path-breaking village stove, or ‘chulha’, made by the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) of a major oil giant, whom I shall not aim here The “stove” was supposed to ease the lives of village folks by ridding them from the wood burning stoves, which were a major cause of environmental pollution and health hazards. However, the essential working of the “stove” consisted of a fan which required electric power to operate! In villages!! While most of the distinguished people in the team that designed the “stove” were fixated on the efficiency of it, they missed the most basic design flaw. That villages don’t have power! Thus, this product of a major social initiative ended up being a space-guzzling furniture in an already space-crunched village household.
Husk Power Systems treaded this path rather dexterously, by designing a product in a local setting, for the local people. And the region we are looking at is the state of Bihar, the state that sports the dichotomy of being the second fastest growing state in India, while being the poorest at the same time. Power in Bihar is much more than a luxury, it still has the science-fiction feel in most parts of the state. 85% of people in Bihar have no grid-connected electricity, a shocking statistic that takes time to settle on you. This is one more reason why we need to move beyond the grid, depending on the situation. This supply-demand chasm cannot be hoped to be covered by the conventional electric grid. The astute founders of this company saw that there are two running motifs in Bihar, lack of electricity and abundance of agricultural waste. It did not take long for their sharp minds to conjure a plan to connect the two, and come up with a biomass-driven electric plant. Their technology generates electricity from rise husk and the cost of the power is cheaper than the cheapest form of electricity available, as claimed by their website. And you can start to see an angelic halo around this initiative when I tell you that HPS has managed to replace 42,000 liters of kerosene and 18,000 liters of diesel per year in regions which depended on their diesel gen-sets for basic functions. And hold your breath, biomass electricity is carbon neutral too. So they are not adding to the carbon in the atmosphere, ideally speaking!
That they have gone from their first installation in 2007 to 60 such small-scale plants in 250 villages, serving 25,000 households, in 2010 is a testament to the solidity of their local engineering method. They saw that farmers in the area already used a dual-fuel system that could handle a fuel mix of biomass and diesel. The real challenge was replacing a dual fuel mix with just the biomass fuel because the amount of dirt in biomass clogged the engines producing electricity. HPS has made a fix that makes such an operation possible and is leading to a heady phase of growth. A business plan on this idea won almost all the business plan competition at the US B-schools and brought in more than the required funding for the scale-up. And now for the killer punch, the company also runs schools that train local people to run these systems, install them, own them and make a healthy sum out of them. They plan to create over 7,000 local jobs in the community by 2014. I am running out of adjectives to describe this initiative, and I hope this company achieves what they set out to achieve. Anything less than that will be a letdown for this story almost seems like a fairytale.
Oh, did I tell you that one of the founders of this company left a successful life in the US to start HPS. I think I should stop here lest you start thinking of this as a Bollywood movie script:) At the end of it all, I will indulge myself a little by saying:
Jai Bihar:)
Please check out the company’s website at http://huskpowersystems.com/index.php
Social enterprise and social responsibility initiatives have a vey noble picture attached to them. However, where most of these initiatives fail is that the blueprints are designed in air-conditioned halls and well equipped research labs, which cannot hope to mimic the actual conditions. Hence, such initiatives fail to take flight, having lost the battle in the initial designs conditions itself. One of the biggest, and most prolific, disasters is the path-breaking village stove, or ‘chulha’, made by the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) of a major oil giant, whom I shall not aim here The “stove” was supposed to ease the lives of village folks by ridding them from the wood burning stoves, which were a major cause of environmental pollution and health hazards. However, the essential working of the “stove” consisted of a fan which required electric power to operate! In villages!! While most of the distinguished people in the team that designed the “stove” were fixated on the efficiency of it, they missed the most basic design flaw. That villages don’t have power! Thus, this product of a major social initiative ended up being a space-guzzling furniture in an already space-crunched village household.
Husk Power Systems treaded this path rather dexterously, by designing a product in a local setting, for the local people. And the region we are looking at is the state of Bihar, the state that sports the dichotomy of being the second fastest growing state in India, while being the poorest at the same time. Power in Bihar is much more than a luxury, it still has the science-fiction feel in most parts of the state. 85% of people in Bihar have no grid-connected electricity, a shocking statistic that takes time to settle on you. This is one more reason why we need to move beyond the grid, depending on the situation. This supply-demand chasm cannot be hoped to be covered by the conventional electric grid. The astute founders of this company saw that there are two running motifs in Bihar, lack of electricity and abundance of agricultural waste. It did not take long for their sharp minds to conjure a plan to connect the two, and come up with a biomass-driven electric plant. Their technology generates electricity from rise husk and the cost of the power is cheaper than the cheapest form of electricity available, as claimed by their website. And you can start to see an angelic halo around this initiative when I tell you that HPS has managed to replace 42,000 liters of kerosene and 18,000 liters of diesel per year in regions which depended on their diesel gen-sets for basic functions. And hold your breath, biomass electricity is carbon neutral too. So they are not adding to the carbon in the atmosphere, ideally speaking!
That they have gone from their first installation in 2007 to 60 such small-scale plants in 250 villages, serving 25,000 households, in 2010 is a testament to the solidity of their local engineering method. They saw that farmers in the area already used a dual-fuel system that could handle a fuel mix of biomass and diesel. The real challenge was replacing a dual fuel mix with just the biomass fuel because the amount of dirt in biomass clogged the engines producing electricity. HPS has made a fix that makes such an operation possible and is leading to a heady phase of growth. A business plan on this idea won almost all the business plan competition at the US B-schools and brought in more than the required funding for the scale-up. And now for the killer punch, the company also runs schools that train local people to run these systems, install them, own them and make a healthy sum out of them. They plan to create over 7,000 local jobs in the community by 2014. I am running out of adjectives to describe this initiative, and I hope this company achieves what they set out to achieve. Anything less than that will be a letdown for this story almost seems like a fairytale.
Oh, did I tell you that one of the founders of this company left a successful life in the US to start HPS. I think I should stop here lest you start thinking of this as a Bollywood movie script:) At the end of it all, I will indulge myself a little by saying:
Jai Bihar:)
Please check out the company’s website at http://huskpowersystems.com/index.php
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