Larvatus Prodeo

Another CCS project is getting underway in Australia, this time in Queensland. This time, the project involves retrofitting the Callide A power station with oxyfuel technology. This is the same technology used in the pilot plant in Germany mentioned in an earlier story. At the time, I thought that oxyfuel was most likely only to be used for new power plants, not retrofitting existing ones. However, just because an existing power station is used for a pilot project doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be economic to retrofit commercial-scale ones (if indeed CCS using this technology is economic at all). The project website is remarkably uninformative on this point. The pilot project should be fully operational in 2011 and may operate for up to five years.

Meanwhile, in the renewables world, one of the major limitations of wind turbines is that they only operate efficiently in a very narrow range of wind speeds, meaning much of the time they produce very little power, requiring expensive energy storage systems or backup generation to support them if they become a substantial fraction of an energy grid. There are already a number of ways to reduce this impact – turbine blades that adjust their pitch, mechanical gearboxes, and, most recently, fitting multiple generators to wind turbines, and only engaging some subset of them when the wind is weak. MIT Technology Review reports on a company developing a new approach – an a new generator design. Essentially, generators use the rotating shaft to move magnets past coils of wire to produce electricity. The new design has many independent coils, which can be switched on or off by electronic switches. If the wind is low, only a few coils are connected, allowing the blades to keep turning and generating at least some electriity. As wind speed increases, more coils can be enabled, requiring more energy to turn the blades, and thus generating more energy while the blades continue to operate at similar speeds. According to the company’s simulations, the new generators could increase annual power output by 50 to 100%, depending on the site – obviously, the more variable the winds at a site, the bigger the improvement. Now all they need is to actually deploy a prototype, scheduled for “early next year”. Sounds very promising, but as usual be prepared for a big gap between the press release and the reality.

Finally, the BP Solar cell factory in Sydney is closing because it’s too small to compete against plants overseas, and it’s too far away from its suppliers of things like ultrapure silicon. The government isn’t raising a finger to save this manufacturing facility. You might very well ask why the car industry deserves support and the solar cell industry doesn’t.