Kevin’s Daily Digest for 7/12/16

Prognostications overheard, solar cells on cars, “renewable” uranium, China’s idled wind farms,

The Daily Digest, published Monday-Thursday plus a deep take weekend edition, focuses on the latest news and perspectives in climate, renewables, storage and electric vehicles. For more follow me on Twitter @kkchristy. The Digest archive and the rest of my Medium content is here.

It’s undeniable that the electrical industry is facing a wave of megatrends — the rise of renewable energy and distributed energy resources (DERs), the death of King Coal, increasing distribution network intelligence, cheaper storage solutions, electric vehicles, natural gas storage and transportation risk, and more — and it is struggling to react. Some utilities and PUCs are taking the hold-back-the-tide approach and are fighting the trends, while others (California, New York, Hawaii) are embracing and driving the pace of change.

The RTOInsider piece linked above gives helpful insights into how different stakeholders view the current industry environment. I found this statement from Scott Weiner of the New York Public Service Commission particularly insightful:

“REV distinguishes itself not by its specific proposals but by its comprehensiveness. If you take a look at the specific components of REV, most, if not all, are being tested or applied somewhere else in North America. What we’ve tried to do is pull them all together at one time in a holistically, comprehensively approach to reform.”

New York’s REV initiative has taken a measured, thoughtful approach to reform, but frankly this ultimately will need to happen at the federal level if we are to capture these megatrends in a framework that has any degree of structural integrity.

Hanergy has announced that it is working on solar “powered” cars that feature solar cells on the roof, hood and rear deck:

Under ideal conditions, Hanergy’s solar-powered cars can travel about 80 kilometers (50 miles) on a five- to six-hour charge in the sun, it said. Power would come from thin-film solar cells affixed to their bodies.

Really? That’s a bit of a stretch. If you assume that you are able to cover the entire horizontal surface area of a Hyundai Sonata with 20% efficient solar cells and if you expose the car to 1,000W/m2 solar irradiance at 25 degrees celsius for six hours, then you can get about 40 miles at an average of 4 miles per kWh. However, few of those assumptions are reasonable given the fact that a good portion of that horizontal area is glass that a driver needs to see through, solar radiation is never 1,000W/m2 for six hours straight, the temperature of the cells is almost certain to well exceed 25 degrees C, and thin film cells are nowhere near 20% efficient. Haircut that down to about 10 miles and you are more in the range of reality. Then you have to weigh the expense against the benefit.

But progress marches on. I do expect that at some point the value horizons will cross and on-board solar can make a meaningful and cost-effective contribution to vehicle range. But that’s a ways off, I think.

Scientists in Japan are working on a scheme to harvest uranium from seawater, which (who knew?) contains a continually renewed supply of the element. But it’s a leap to move from “renewed supply of uranium” to calling nuclear plants “renewable,” as the author does:

“Renewable energy means that the energy humans extract from nature will generally replace itself. And now uranium as fuel meets this definition.”

The sea-sourced uranium would still need to be refined into usable fuel, and we still have yet to sustainably solve the nuclear waste problem. So rather than characterize sea-sourced uranium as making nuclear renewable, let’s be more accurate and say that this technology would potentially solve national security and environmental risks related to uranium mining.

While China has surged past the U.S. in installed wind capacity for over five years, the country still lags behind in actual delivered energy. Underproduction due to inefficient turbines, poor site selection and lack of adequate transmission capacity are all indicators of a poorly designed deployment program.

I’ll be at Intersolar North America in San Francisco today, hope to see you there!