Exciting Ideas In Solar Energy From ARPA-E

 

David Ferris, ContributorGenerally I have been disappointed by the lack of breakthrough

A miniature version of Georgia Tech's Solar Vortex.

Now in its fourth year, the summit of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) never fails to bring out the most cutting-edge ideas in renewable energy. This week’s conference in Washington D.C. is no exception. I walked the exhibition floor today and ran across some sexy new concepts in solar power.
Solar Vortex: Dust Devil Power

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This Solar-Powered Drone Will Watch You All Day David FerrisContributor

How BrightSource's Solar Power Plant Reduces Its Footprint David FerrisContributor

The Solar Vortex borrows its inspiration from dust devils, those miniature twisters of excited dirt that sometimes arise in the dusty and dry stretches of the U.S. Southwest. What gets a dust devil going is the difference in temperature between the scorching-hot ground and the somewhat cooler air above. The hot air rises, twists and gives rise to a momentary dust tornado.
Georgia Techis the leader of a consortium that aims to capture this dust-devil energy inside a stubby cylinder. The concept is simple: The cylinder sits upon a dark surface that absorbs lots of heat. The “walls,” so to speak, are angled vanes that take the hot air rising off that hot surface and twists it into a vortex. At the top, a set of fan blades sit in the path of the rising air. The fan blades turn, activating a generator that creates electricity.
The video below is a miniature model of the Solar Vortex on the exhibition floor. The cylinder sits on a plate that is, like hot pavement, almost too hot to touch, about 47 degrees Celsius (116 degrees Fahrenheit). The movement you see in the blade is solely from the force of moving air.
Georgia Tech has already purchased a site in Mesa, Arizona — plenty of heat there — and is a working to build a 50-kilowatt model by 2015. Final negotiations with ARPA-E for funding are underway. Arne Pearlstein, a professor of mechanical engineering who is a collaborator, told me that this commercial-scale version might be 10 meters wide but only two or three meters tall, and that the units would sit about 55 meters apart. These squat machines could bring renewable energy to regions that are bombarded by heat but don’t have much wind. (Though gusts of wind would only serve to make the turbine spin faster, Pearlstein said.)
Pearlstein estimated that the Solar Vortex could spin out electricity 20 percent cheaper than wind turbines and 65 percent cheaper than solar photovoltaic panels. One form of saving comes from its potentially straightforward maintenance. “You’re talking about somebody getting up on a stepladder instead of going hundreds of meters up into a wind turbine to deal with a gearbox,” Pearlstein said.

A model of Otherlab's heliostat, which goes by the name Sunfolding.

Sunfolding: Cheap Heliostats for Concentrated Solar
Two weeks ago, San Francisco’s Otherlab won a $1.8 million grant from ARPA-E to develop Sunfolding, a smaller, less expensive heliostat for solar concentrating technology. A heliostat is the mirror and assembly that bounces light onto a central point, creating heat that in turn creates steam and spins a turbine to generate electricity. Making heliostats cheaper could bring us closer to the day when concentrated solar energy is comparable in price to fossil fuels like coal or natural gas.
Heliostats are usually made of glass (or another reflective material) and steel, and are often quite sizable. They must stand up to high winds while maintaining a precise orientation. Simultaneously, in order to follow the arc of the sun across the sky, they need gears that can operate for years in dusty and hot conditions. Both are factors that increase costs.
The centerpiece of the Sunfolding is a new tracking technology that does away with a gearbox and replaces it with two air bladders that inflate or deflate to change the mirror’s angle. “All you need are two cheap pressure sensors,” said Leila Madrone, Otherlab’s project leader. The housing for those bladders is a section of extruded plastic that could be manufactured easily. The smaller size means it needn’t stand up to high winds or much structural weight.

A Raven drone decked out with MicroLink solar panels.

MicroLink Devices: Light, Flexible Solar for Drones
Lying on MicroLink Devices’ table at the ARPA-E conference is a Raven UAV, a small drone used by the U.S. military for local video reconnaissance in places like Afghanistan. The topside of the wings are covered with solar panels that, according to Vice President David McCallum, have in tests extended the Raven’s flight time from one hour to two.
Drones are a promising market for solar power, since solar panels don’t provide nearly the wattage necessary to keep a passenger plane aloft, but can do the trick when a craft (like the Raven) weighs only four pounds.
Lightweight, flexible solar panels have been available for a while now in the form of thin-film solar panels, but MicroLink says it can produce loads more electricity than thin films. Thin-film solar has demonstrated a maximum efficiency of 20.4 percent, while MicroLink says it can convert sunlight to electricity at an efficiency of 30 to 34 percent.
MicroLink’s strong suit is that it has figured out how to make triple-junction solar cells — ones that use multiple layers to capture different wavelengths of light — more cheaply than the competition. It does this in two ways, by growing its solar panels on indium phosphide, which is cheaper than the more standard material of gallium arsenide. The company has also figured out how to peel its completed solar panel off while leaving its substrate intact for future use, which again reduces costs.
In December, the company received a $3.3 million grant from ARPA-E with the goal of creating a concentrated-solar panel that has an efficiency of 50 percent or more

How Nest’s Control Freaks Reinvented the Thermostat

 

Two men who created the iPod and iPhone founded Nest and injected new technology into the humble thermostat. Now they have their sights on the rest of your house.

• By Tom Simonite on February 15, 2013

With computing and design savvy, Matt Rogers (left) and Tony Fadell may have done more than anyone else in Silicon Valley to reduce energy consumption.

In 2007, Tony Fadell believed he could see the future. He was an Apple executive who had created the iPod and was a leading figure on the team that had worked on the iPhone, which the company was about to launch. He knew people would soon form attachments to the Internet-connected computers they carried in their pockets, and he kept thinking about that as he started another major project: building an energy-efficient dream home near Lake Tahoe.
“I said, ‘How do I design this home when the primary interface to my world is the thing in my pocket?’ ” says Fadell. He baffled architects with demands that the home’s every feature, from the TV to the electricity supply, be ready for a world in which the Internet and mobile apps made many services more responsive. When it came to choosing a programmable thermostat for his expensive eco-friendly heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system, Fadell blew a gasket: “They were 500 bucks a pop, and they were horrible and doing nothing and brain-dead. And I was like, ‘Wait a second, I’ll design my own.’ ”

Fadell, who soon left Apple at the age of 40, became convinced that his thermostat needed to be built like a smartphone and controlled from one. He wanted it to be smart enough to learn his routine and to program its own schedule accordingly, or to switch off automatically if he went out. A thermostat, he thought, could do that if it was really a small computer connected to the Internet. As he planned the features and design in his head, Fadell began to believe that his vision would appeal to other people too, even if their homes were more ordinary. With about 10 million thermostats sold in the United States every year, it could be a lucrative business. And because thermostats typically control half the energy used in U.S. homes, a better-designed one could significantly reduce power consumption. He sought out Matt Rogers, a precocious 27-year-old who at the time led iPhone software development, and got him to leave Apple to cofound Nest.
Fadell’s instincts turned out to be correct. Nest’s first model, a striking stainless-steel-ringed disc with a circular display, went on sale in October 2011 to widespread acclaim. The HVAC industry, a sector as unexciting as the thermostats it sold, was astonished by the fresh ideas behind the device, which learned from its owners’ behavior and could be controlled with a polished mobile app. The company released a second, more advanced thermostat in October 2012, and says sales of the two models have been brisk. The $250 product has kept owners from using 225 million kilowatt-hours of energy, the company estimates—saving around $29 million at average U.S. prices. This suggests that merely with elegant design and computing savvy, Nest might be having more impact than other Silicon Valley ventures trying to deliver on the promise of “clean tech.” Now the company is preparing to release another product. Details are scarce, but it seems that Fadell’s thermostat epiphany has launched a technological campaign that will make every part of your home more intelligent.
Reprogramming
Fadell has the energy and ready smile of a late-night talk show host, and a voice that is permanently loud. Rogers is quieter and more technically focused. The pair appear to be having enormous fun sweating the details of what is, at its core, just an on-off switch. They burst into a meeting room at Nest’s unremarkable offices in Palo Alto like two boys coming in from playing in the yard, breathless, in high spirits, and completing one another’s sentences. Between them, they have had significant roles in creating two of the most iconic technology products of recent history, the iPod and iPhone—devices notable not only because they are useful and fashionable, but because they introduced genuinely new technological ideas. ­Rogers and Fadell have done the same at Nest, delivering a product that is both easier to use and more powerful than those that came before. That approach has helped them make the thermostat, historically a product bought and installed by contractors, into something people buy for themselves in the same stores where they get gadgets like phones and tablets.

For half a century, the state of the art in home energy controls has been the programmable thermostat. The theory is that if people can schedule when their heating and cooling systems will kick in, they don’t have to waste energy by running the system at all times to be assured of comfortable temperatures when they wake up or return from work. But the HVAC industry has made programmable thermostats difficult to use, with unintuitive dials and sliders and cramped displays. Citing such “user interface issues,” the Environmental Protection Agency removed programmable thermostats from its Energy Star certification program in 2009. Studies showed that they didn’t reliably save energy; in fact, because many people end up switching their system on and off manually, programmable thermostats might cause most people to use more energy, says Kamin Whitehouse, a computer science professor at the University of Virginia. “People have a really hard time setting accurate schedules for their lives,” he says.
When faced with a problem like this, many technologists would seek technical solutions. Fadell and Rogers thought instead about simplifying the device. “We started with the basic principle that 99.9 percent of the time, the only thing that you do is turn it up or down,” Fadell says. “So what’s the simplest form? A knob or a dial.” More complex functions, such as setting a schedule, could be executed more easily through a mobile app. That freed his designers from having to accommodate the many buttons that appear on other programmable thermostats. The Nest became nothing more than a compact stainless-­steel cylinder that you can turn once it’s fixed to the wall.
Fadell and Rogers have made sure that at every stage of installing and operating a Nest thermostat, you discover that potential problems have been solved for you. When you attach the device to a wall, there’s no need to drill holes or use plastic anchors to hold any screws. Nest’s engineers reviewed every screw on the market and then invented their own, with wide-spaced threads that can bite wood or powdery drywall without making it crumble. The device powers itself by leeching electricity from the control wires that connect it to your HVAC system, a feat that makes Rogers chuckle at his engineers’ audacity. Short- and long-range infrared sensors allow the device to light up when you approach and dim when you walk away—and to figure out that it was you, not the cat, who just went out, meaning it’s time to turn down the heat. Perhaps the biggest reminder of the thermostat’s intelligence comes a few days after installation, when you reach out to adjust the temperature and find that it has preëmpted you by learning from your earlier changes. “Think of a normal thermostat. Everyone turns it up, turns it down, a couple of times a day—that’s a pattern we can infer from,” says Fadell. “Instead of changing it fifteen hundred times a year, do it 10 or 20 times and the Nest thermostat can learn from that.”
Fadell can deliver animated monologues about products that don’t meet his ideals, an aspect of his personality that was probably strengthened by years of working closely with Steve Jobs. But he also remains open to taking instruction from hard data, drawing on evidence collected from Nest thermostats, customer surveys, and a group of around 1,000 customers whose thermostats are used to test new features. For example, Nest thermostats originally adjusted themselves to an energy-conserving setting in the morning two hours after detecting that human activity in a home had stopped. They waited that long in case the owner soon returned home. But anonymous data from Nest thermostats revealed that people reliably stayed out for quite a while when they left in the morning. So the company sent a software update to all the thermostats to take that into account. Now the devices turn themselves down after just 30 minutes.
Such responsiveness to data from users isn’t a quality typically found in the HVAC industry, which is dominated by a few large companies, such as Honeywell and Venstar, that sell to distributors and dealers, not consumers. It’s an approach more commonly found in Silicon Valley companies, reflecting the fact that Nest is staffed with dozens of engineers who helped Apple build the iPod and iPhone. Rogers’s former computer science professor Yoky Matsuoka, a winner of a MacArthur genius award, leads Nest’s algorithms group. As a result, if you were drawing the Nest thermostat on a technological evolutionary tree, it would be an offshoot of the smartphone line. Rogers says, “Tear apart a Samsung smartphone—it’s going to have a lot of the same components.” In another echo of the mobile computing business, where the biggest players are locked in court battles over patents, Honeywell sued Nest for patent infringement a year ago. “They’re one of the biggest companies in the world, and they feel threatened by a 150-person startup,” says Rogers. “That’s amazing.”
Soft Power
Nest is being watched by green-tech researchers and investors who believe it may lead a new wave of technologies that can significantly reduce power use in homes, which account for about 10 percent of U.S. energy consumption. The government allocates tens of millions of dollars per year for programs that reduce energy use in residential buildings. But many home improvements, such as insulation and storm windows, cost thousands of dollars per house and deliver energy savings comparable to what a better thermostat can generate for far less money, Whitehouse says.
Nest says that a home with its product will save $173 per year in electricity and heating costs compared to a home with an unprogrammed thermostat, depending on local climate and other factors—allowing it to pay for itself in under two years. (When the device appears in Europe, the payback time will be significantly faster because energy is more expensive there.) Most savings flow from the system’s ability to detect when the house is empty and learn its owner’s preferences, but Nest also saves energy by figuring out how to minimize the use of the air conditioning’s chiller and maximize the use of the fan. It also coaches people to use less energy; when consumption falls, they’ll see a green leaf icon on the thermostat and its mobile and Web interfaces. That leaf won’t appear if the energy use fell because of a shift in the weather. And Nest moves the goalposts so people must cut usage further to keep seeing the leaf.
Nest’s ability to change how people consume energy also appeals to utilities, because the device can smooth out spikes in usage. Eventually, the thermostat’s Internet connectivity could allow utilities to introduce smarter versions of “demand response” programs, in which customers get a discount in return for letting their utility adjust their thermostat in times of extremely high usage. Reliant, a utility in AC-dependent Texas, recently started bundling a free Nest thermostat with one of its plans.
Clearly, Nest’s thoughtful engineering could be applied elsewhere in the home, and its founders acknowledge that they plan to build more than just thermostats. “We have one of the best teams in the industry,” says Rogers—meaning Silicon Valley rather than the HVAC business. “They’re here for more than just one product.”
But Nest mimics Apple’s strict secrecy. My visit was limited to the sparse lobby and a meeting room just inside the front door because, as the director of communications put it, the company was on “lockdown” while a new product was developed. When pressed, Fadell dismissed a suggestion that it would be logical to expand into “home automation,” products today mostly pitched at enthusiasts that allow home appliances and lighting to be controlled remotely. “I’m not here to impress geeks,” he says, but to make simple home technology “empowering for everyone.”
The only thing clear about Nest’s future is that the thermostat, seriously as it was taken, was only a warmup act. The iPod Fadell created at Apple was the first of a series of products that reinvented the company, says Peter Nieh, who led the venture fund Lightspeed’s investment in Nest. “[Then] there was iPhone and much more. The thermostat is the iPod. It’s the beginning.”

Mitsubishi, PointSix Wireless Launch EMS Products

 

February 15, 2013 by Energy Manager Today Staff

Mitsubishi Electric and PointSix Wireless have both launched energy management system (EMS) products.
Mitsubishi says its EMS technology responds to supply-demand conditions, tailoring power savings to each user depending on its capacity to reduce power use.
Customers consuming large amounts, such as operators of buildings or factories, report their power saving capacities depending on the time of day, and desired incentives to utilities. Mitsubishi’s EMS aggregates this information and predicts total power-curtailment capacities and incentives. The system then calculates the distribution of optimized power-saving requirements and incentives for individual users.
This helps stabilize supply, and prevents utilities from having to repeatedly ask customers to save power, the company says.
The system also calculates optimized incentives by taking into account fluctuating power-generation costs, market prices and the power-saving capability of each customer. It calculates optimal power generation volume, electricity transactions and power savings to achieve power savings and cost reductions for both utility supply and customer usage.
Additionally, the technology helps avoid the construction of costly and unnecessary power-generation and transmission facilities in electrical systems that would otherwise be required for power generation and distribution during periods of peak demand.
Mitsubishi developed the technology through its Smart Grid Demonstration Project initiative.
Meanwhile, PointSix Wireless has announced the first WiFi version of its Point Pulse Counter (pictured). The device provides wireless notification to detect power outages and track energy usage for seamless energy management even during an outage. Battery or line powered, the device counts, records and accumulates pulse outputs on gas, water and electric meters.
The Point Pulse Counter has over-the-air configuration and compatibility with existing building automation systems. Battery changes every three to five years are the only maintenance the sensors require. The device is available in single or dual pulse input channels and includes an integrated 802.11.g WiFi module.
Duke Energy has deployed the Point Pulse Counter to augment its energy efficiency programs and services, according to PSW.

Novel Designs Are Taking Wind Power to the Next Level

New technology, including better control algorithms and communications, is improving the performance of wind turbines.

• By Kevin Bullis on February 6, 2013

Bigger, better: Siemens’s six-megawatt wind turbine features the world’s largest blades. It relies on sensors and algorithms to survive harsh weather.

Superficially, wind turbines haven’t changed much for decades. But they’ve gotten much smarter, and considerably bigger, and that’s helped increase the amount of electricity they can generate and lower the cost of wind power.
GE’s new 2.5-120 wind turbine, announced last week, is a case in point. Its maximum power output, 2.5 megawatts, is lower than that of the 2.85 megawatt turbine it’s superseding. But over the course of a year it can generate 15 percent more kilowatt hours. Arrays of sensors paired with better algorithms for operating and monitoring the turbine let it keep spinning when earlier generations of wind turbines would have had to shut down.

The technology is part of a trend that’s made wind power almost as cheap as fossil fuels. In 1991, wind power cost 15 cents per kilowatt hour. The cost has now dropped to 6.5 cents per kilowatt hour, says Ryan Wiser, deputy group leader for Electricity Markets and Policy at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in Berkeley, California. New natural gas power plants are expected to generate electricity at about 6.5 cents per kilowatt hour.
A new generation of more productive wind turbines that’s coming on line this year could be what it takes to make wind widely competitive with fossil fuels.
Indeed, last month the Electric Reliability Council of Texas said that the latest data on wind turbine performance and costs suggests that wind power is likely to be more cost-effective than natural gas over the next 20 years, and it could account for the majority of new generating capacity added over that that time in Texas. Before the council factored in the latest data, it had expected all new generation to come from natural-gas plants.
The biggest impact on electricity production comes from making wind turbines bigger. Increasing the size of a wind turbine’s blades, and making the tower taller, allows a turbine to capture more wind, especially at low speeds. Making wind turbines larger is getting difficult, in part because they’ve have grown so large that the wind conditions at the highest point of the blades’ sweep can be very different than those at the bottom. To compensate for the difference, GE had to develop control algorithms to respond to input from a variety of sensors as the blades spin. This helped the company step up from a 100-meter-diameter wind rotor to a 120-meter one.

Avoiding downtime from mechanical failures also helps boost electricity production. If something goes wrong with a wind turbine, it’s often shut down until technicians can arrive, climb the tower to assess the problem, and then make repairs—a process that can be especially difficult and time-consuming because wind farms are often located in remote areas. With its latest design, GE is networking its wind turbines to make them more resilient. For example, if the wind speed gauge on one wind turbine fails—say, because it becomes encased in ice—the turbine can use data from a nearby turbine’s anemometer (with algorithms for correcting for the different locations of the turbines), eliminating the need to shut down.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, is studying how the turbines within a wind farm can adjust their power production to maximize the power output of the entire farm. For example, if some wind turbines at the front of a wind farm produce less power than they’re able to, this could leave more wind for the other turbines. “It’s a shift from thinking about individual wind turbines to thinking about power plants,” says Fort Felker, director of the National Wind Technology Center at NREL.
Just over a decade ago, a typical wind farm with 2.5 megawatts of wind turbines generated less than 4 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year. GE says its new wind turbines will generate 10 million kilowatt hours a year, more than doubling electricity production. (Increasing power output helps lower the price per kilowatt hour, as long as the cost of the installed turbine doesn’t increase proportionally.)
Technology improvements may have brought the price of wind within reach of that of fossil-fuel power, but the scale of wind will be limited by the grid’s ability to handle the inherent intermittency. Smarter wind turbine designs are helping with that as well. GE’s new wind turbine comes with battery backup. New algorithms, paired with weather-prediction software, determine when to store power in the battery and when to send it to the grid. As a result, wind farm operators can guarantee power output—but for just 15 minutes at a time. If wind power is ever to provide a large share of the total electricity supply, it may be necessary to have hours of storage—or else grid operators will have to maintain backup sources of power, such as natural-gas power plants.

Energy efficiency: Who gets it? Anybody?

By Elisa WoodJanuary 30, 2013

It’s easy for those of us who ‘talk’ energy every day to forget that we operate in a bubble. Outside the bubble the average household is at best vaguely aware of the enormous technology revolution about to change the way each of us uses electricity.

Two recent studies provide some insight into how little of our bubble talk the consumer deciphers.

More than half of the consumers surveyed (54%) by Smart Grid Consumer Collaborative (SGCC) have never heard the term ‘smart grid.’ (And to be fair, the precise meaning sometimes eludes energy insiders too, although they use the catch phrase widely. For households, smart grid generally refers to digital gadgets and technologies that give the consumer increased ability to manage energy more efficiently, such as energy displays and programmable thermostats.)

Women and African Americans are among those who show little awareness of the term, along with those who are not college-educated or earn under $50,000 annually, according to SGCC’s 2013 “State of the Consumer Report.”

“Billions of dollars are being invested in new technologies that are little understood by the people who are supposed to benefit and who are paying the bills,” said the SGCC report.

The good news is that people like the concept once they learn about it. Among those familiar with the term, only 13 percent perceive it in negative way, according to the SGCC survey.

This lends credence to the notion that education will boost energy efficiency efforts.

Meanwhile, Comverge found that two-thirds (62 percent) of those it surveyed spend less than 10 minutes per month reviewing their energy usage or bill. To put this in perspective, the average American spends 100 times longer each day on Facebook, said the Georgia-based demand-side management company.

Both SGCC and Comverge offer some specific advice on how the industry can make efficiency as alluring as Facebook – or at least more alluring than it is now.

SGCC has been at work for some time defining who we are as energy consumers. The organization has segmented the American consumer based on our attitudes, values, behaviors, motivations, lifestyles, technology know-how and other characteristics. SGCC then helps utilities tailor their marketing to each segment. Some groups respond to messages about saving money and energy, others environmental concern and global warming.

“The key to engaging consumers in smart grid is understanding how to appeal to them in terms that will resonate – how to answer their objections and make it easy for them to interact with new technology,” said Patty Durand, SGCC executive director.

For example, those who SGCC calls “Do-it-yourself and save” types are likely to show interest in programmable thermostats that require some planning on their part. And “Easy Streets,” wealthy individuals reluctant to change their behavior, might respond to marketing materials pitching automated thermostats of the “set and forget” variety.

In its research, Comverge found that Americans increasingly want a single location to manage their energy, especially those who are under 40 years old.

“As a society, we are very digitally savvy and much more conscious of how energy use impacts the environment. Couple these changes with an overall desire for simplification, and it should be no surprise that people want all of their energy information in one place, available on any device and easy to understand,” said Blake Young, Comverge president and CEO.

To that end, Comverge recently introduced a new one-stop ‘residential customer engagement solution’, which it describes as a software and services product that helps utilities reduce energy use by making householders more energy aware.

Others, too, are pushing the idea of centralizing home energy management. Virginia-based Opower and technology giant Honeywell rolled out an energy management platform this week that combines Wi-Fi thermostats and Akuacom utility management software with Opower’s interactive, cloud-based application. Homeowners are able to view and adjust energy use from anywhere using a smartphone or computer.

It’s crucial that the energy industry find the friendly talk and technology that captures consumer attention – because the innovators, investors and policymakers are creating an ever-expanding universe of energy management products, a sizable portion for the household. Utility spending on energy efficiency will double by 2025 to about $9.5 billion per year, according to a recent study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. That means substantial energy savings – and a lot of new ideas and technology for the consumer to master.

Elisa Wood is a long-time energy writer whose free newsletter, Energy Efficiency Markets, is available at www.RealEnergyWriters.com