The night before last, deep in the night I was listening to the BBC I think it would have been. There was a news item saying that Iceland was trying to persuade the world to locate all its large computer servers there.
The reason? Apparently cooling the total heat generated by these things is equivalent in greenhouse terms to the entire airline industry of the world. There is heaps of green energy in Iceland and with modern telecomms these thing can be anywhere, so why not have a go at cornering the market in computer servers?
I can’t find a link and would appreciate it if anyone can. If true, this news item is interesting on several counts.
Continue reading ‘Iceland wants our computer servers’
The topic of “hot rock” geothermal energy has been covered a number of times in LP, the first being this post by Steve Edney back in 2006. Australia has little volcanically hot rocks close to the surface; however, in some parts of Australia, rocks kilometres below the surface are nice and toasty; warm enough to spin a steam turbine for electricity generation. All you need to do is drill a couple of holes down to it, either find or create some fractures between the holes, and circulate water through the hot rock. Simple, straightforward, and unlike just about every other form of clean energy out there, reliable and predictable. So it’s not surprising a number of companies have been looking to exploit this resource, one of the most promising sources of clean energy for Australia.
As far as I know, the furthest along is Geodynamics, who announced last week that they had achieved a “proof of concept”; while they didn’t actually generate any power, they circulated water through a pair of bores and monitored the temperature, enough to show that the bores could supply sufficiently hot water, for a long enough time, to run a pilot-scale power plant for years without an appreciable (and efficiency-sapping) drop in the water temperature. As a small shareholder in Geodynamics, I’m extremely pleased that this has finally been achieved. But the Geodynamics experience shows the importance of taking grand plans for innovative renewable energy technologies with large doses of salt. It always takes much longer, and costs a lot more money, than the early press releases claim, and many don’t make it through.
Continue reading ‘Geothermal energy progresses – slowly’
I must confess I’d never heard of it, but the concept is simple. Take some liquid ammonia and heat it with the warm surface water in the sea. The expanding gaseous ammonia drives a turbine, generating electricity. Then cool the ammonia back into liquid form using water pumped up from the cool depths of the ocean. Repeat ad infinitum.
Continue reading ‘Potentially the biggest source of renewable energy in the world!?’
That unsightly mess is an example of the landscape modification involved in tar sands mining in Alberta, Canada. We’ll come back to that.
But grabbing the news recently was the announcement that Australian engineering firm WorleyParsons was looking at constructing 34 solar power plants by 2020 worth $34 billion, with a company objective solar providing 40% of the electricity market. [That should read "40% of the renewable electricity market."]
This is, I think, unequivocally good news.
Continue reading ‘WorleyParsons goes green and black’
While we wait with feverish anticipation (or at least I do) for Garnaut and what he has to say about emissions trading, the government has released a new discussion paper about its other major greenhouse mitigation effort in the energy sector – the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target (MRET) scheme. If you’re concerned about the development of renewable energy technology, this is the one to pay attention to.
Some of the details of the proposed schemes are presented in the discussion paper; one key question is whether “banking and borrowing” permits encourages too much building of renewable energy installations, too early. You might assume that building as much renewable capacity as possible, as early as possible, is a good thing, but there’s a complicating factor; there’s a concern that this discourages the development of emerging technologies (solar thermal, wave energy, and the like are good examples) and will instead lead to more and more installations of “mature” renewable technologies. That, of course, means more and more terrestrial wind power, which as has been discussed at length on LP has severe limitations at dealing with fluctuations in wind speeds.
But perhaps the most interesting thing in the discussion paper is the ultimate fate of the MRET. The more laissez-faire economic types don’t like the MRET. Essentially, it presupposes a particular path to getting emissions down – renewable energy – when there may well be much lower-cost options available, such as conservation, emissions cuts in non-energy sectors, cleaner fossil fuel consumption, and so on. However, the argument in favour of the MRET is that renewable energy technology needs a leg-up to get established; effectively, the MRET subsidises developing and getting the kinks out of these technologies, leading to a better overall outcome than just letting emissions trading rip on its own. But that poses a question of its own – for how long should we keep subsidizing renewables before we let them compete on their merits?
Continue reading ‘Renewables – start delivering by 2020′
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