Halloween party ideas 2015
Tampilkan postingan dengan label future. Tampilkan semua postingan
Tweet Share Share Share Share Share

11.34

World Energy Congress 2016 in Istanbul


From 9th-13th October 2016, the World Congress on Energy was held in Istanbul. It was the 23rd Congress since 1923.

The topics of the congress were distributed over the entire energy area, including the oil and gas production and renewable energies. There were many important statesmen like Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Turkish President Recep Erdogan, including many other government members from different countries, including the visit of Israeli Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz, the first official meeting after six years frozen relations between Turkey and Israel.
Side by side, Putin and Erdogan at the conference in Istanbul

Vladimir Putin talk was about the importance of energy and the price of oil, a remark about a co-operation with OPEC during the speech has moved the oil price to rise by 2 $! He was the only statesmen, who included the words "exponential growth of solar energy".

The issue of energy just brings together not only scientists and engineers, but also politicians and diplomats. The global linking of energy distribution, especialy natural gas, plays an important role and Turkey was presented as a hub between Asia, Middle East and Europe and the Mediterranean.

The world's energy

All participants have concluded, that the energy transition towards renewable energy, particularly solar and wind, is on the way. However, the completeness and how fast that arives is controversial. While I am convinced that before the end of the next decade the significant change of the energy system has been completed, Marie-Jos� Nadeau, Chair, World Energy Council believes that in 2060 the share of renewable might reach only 50% of total energy production [1] ,
Marie-Jos� Nadeau, Chair, World Energy Council

This is understandable from the perspective of the energy industry. They trade with oil, coal and natural gas. Should the change take place quickly, the oil and the coal is not any longer requested by the market. The industry worries about stranded resources. This means the oil in the ground, on which the wealth of large companies and nations is based, may become worthless.

Key issues in the energy transition in the coming decades

The importance of the Paris Convention for the CO2 reduction was repeatedly stressed. Generally, however, many see only a shift from coal to natural gas, as is well known, natural gas produces half as much CO2 when it is converted into electricity than coal! This is due to a fact that a methane molecule consists of one carbon and four hydrogen atoms, but also to the better efficiency of gas power plants.
Key finding: the phenomenal rise of solar and wind energy will continue!

Power Turntable Turkey

At the conference in Turkey, the geo- (energy-) strategic role of  Turkey was stressed by Erdogan.

Important oil and gas pipelines connect large resources of Asia with European customers, more gas and oil pipelines are planned.
Strategic position of Turkey

Finally, the construction of a new gas pipeline connecting Russian and other Asian gas fields to Europe by crossing Turkey, were one reason why Putin, but also the President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, showed up in Istanbul.

The Importance of Hydro-Power

It's a certain irony, the most important renewable energy in the global mix, providing at least 71% of all renewable energy is hydro-power, or 6.8% of global electric energy production, is a often forgotten big player.

The importance of hydro-power may lie in a combination of solar, wind and hydro-power. At the conference solar power as named a water saver, in the form that during the day the turbines are shut down at the dam resulting in increasing water level, during the night, with redoubled turbines, water can be used for power generation. Thus normal dams are important energy storage elements for the energy transition. ot to forget pumped hydro storage or even the new technique of Gravity Storage .
A nice photoshop picture used as advertising billboard in Istanbul

There are, at least in Africa and in South America, still many untapped hydropower "reserves". However, anyone was well aware that each dam has also an enormous impact on nature and very often engages in the habitats of people! Especially in India, the water of the rivers is sacred and thus hardly the construction of dams possible as mentioned by Richard M. Taylorlearned Chief Executive, International Hydropower Association.

Africa to get electricity

While the inhabitants of the Americas and Asia are almost completely supplied with power, in Africa there are still 600 million people without electricity. This means no light, no easy way to charge a mobile phone, no fridge and no welder.

The last day of the conference was therefore devoted to Africa. In Africa, here essentially black sub-Saharan Africa was meant, you have to think about the huge areas and the still sparsely populated countries. This makes the construction of a conventional electric grid network uneconomical and therefore solar energy stand-alone systems and microgrids are very important.
The forum "Talent and Capacity Building" moderated by Samir Ibrahim from Kenya, right Sanjit 'Bunker' Roy from India, next to Andreas Spiess, Solar Kiosk , from Germany.

The practical implementation requires some knowledge of electricity and solar energy. Bunker Roy helps the people with his Barefoot College to teach this to everyone. While he teaches women worldwide (Grandmothers) to practical issues of the use of solar energy, an impressive project!

Andreas Spiess tries with his, as he stressed, commercial solution of the solarkiosk promoting the dissemination of locally adapted use of solar energy in Africa.

The Exibition

There was a international exhibition were companies and countries presented interesting ideas and investment opportunities.
Booth of Heindl Energy GmbH

The Heindl Energy GmbH has presented the "Gravity Storage" technology on its exhibition stand. Unfortunately, very few companies from Europe were represented at the fair. The booth was right next Aramco, the largest oil company in the world from Saudi Arabia. As far as I have observed, our stand had awakened almost more interest.

A 600 MW power plant on the water for emergency cases

There were of course many other interesting exhibition stands, I found the idea of ??"power ship" interesting, which is a ship with a complete power plant (up to 600MW), inclusive substation, which anchors in a port and supports the local power generation, after a natural disaster or for other reasons.

Reference:

Baca selengkapnya »
Tweet Share Share Share Share Share

04.02

The World powered by the Sun

Today, photovoltaic electricity is only a small fraction of the global electricity production. The volume seems to be one percent in the year 2015. If we do a very simple extrapolation and imagine, that all these PV modules were installed in 2014 and we continue this installation speed, than we need another 99 years, to have a 100% emission free PV world. But this is simply not the way the world goes round.
I will try to extrapolate the situation, based on data from the MIT report "The Future of Solar Energy" [1]

Analyse the past of Photovoltaic

If we wont to understand the future, it is very useful, to look into the past, not only to understand the development, but also to understand the error which occurred by predicting the future. 
The Energy Information Administration (EIA) and the International Energy Agency (IEA) predict since 10 years the global PV installations in a published outlook. The first outlook from 2006 predicted for the year 2030 a global installation of 100 GW. This volume was already matched in the year 2011, only five years after the report was published! Ok, one wrong shot can be excused.
In the year 2011, the EIA predicted 150 GW until 2020. Again a failure, already in 2014 we have reached 180 GW of solar. 
The MIT analysed all predictions and compiled them to a very nice picture:
Figure 1: Different predictions and the reality, source MIT [1] page 137
In the early time, the predictions of the IEA had an exponential growth, that is a good guess, because most of the time, new products grow in that type. The only problem was at that time, the growth factor was to small, for example see IEA 2008 prediction in figure 1. Today things have gone worse with the prediction from the IEA. Not only is the factor to small, the prediction includes a reduction of the production of PV itself. This seems hard to understand.(An in depth analysis was done by Christian Breyer, paper PDF)
Things go even more strange, when we look at the price predictions of PV. The EIA predicted the development of the PV price till the year 2030. It should be mentioned, that it is a very difficult task to predict a price of any product for more than 20 years. But this failure is very illuminating.
Figure 2: Price prediction by EIA IEO 2009 of PV and observed results. [1] page 137
The EIA IEO 2009 outlook predicted, that the capital cost of PV in the year 2030 will drop to 4$/W.
Actually, the price even for residential systems dropped to this value already in the year 2014. It should be noted, that the price for residential PV systems in Germany was at the same time at 2$/W.
The price for utility PV systems reached only two years after the report was published the predicted value for 2030, 4$/W. 
All this information should be available to the EIA today. It irritates me, why the EIA does not change the prediction about the deployment of PV although they can observe the rapid price drop obviously. (I am thankful for any helpful hint)

Is there enough material for a large roll out of PV 

One possible reason, to be pessimistic about the global roll out of PV might be the scare elements used in PV systems. Today almost all PV systems use Silicon to convert sunlight into electricity. The MIT analysed the production of different raw materials, essential for the production of SI-PV-modules. 
To set up a PV system we need concrete and steel to mount the panel in the direction of the sun. Glass, aluminium and plastic are necessary to protect the silicon cell, cooper and more plastic is necessary to transport the power away.
Figure 3: Commodity materials required for PV. [1] page 131
Today, all these commodity are produced in a volume, that no real bottle neck will occur. In figure 3, we can see, that the steel production of 9 days is sufficient, to mount all PV panels for 5% of the global electricity production, within half a year, the steel production is sufficient for a 100% conversion to PV.
The least available material in this consideration is glass. For a 100% PV world, we need the glass production of 20 years. But glass production is in no way a limiting factor. The necessary raw material is sand, an endless resource.
The solar cell itself consists of a silicon waver and some silver, are they rare?
Figure 4: The annual production and requirement for a solar future. [1] page 135
In figure 4 we see, that silver might get a little problem, because we need an amount of silver that is produced within 30 years. It should be mentioned that new technologies of production can reduce the necessary mass of silver very strong. Other elements, like Ga are only necessary if we would use GsAs cells in our PV systems what is not widely the case. 
We conclude, the raw material is no show stopper for a PV future.

My prediction of PV growth

Compiling all this information, I come to a quite different prediction than the IEA. My simple, but till today best guess is, that the exponential growth will continue, but at a lower rate. 
Figure 5: Long term trend of PV installation.
In figure 5 we see the global installation of PV shown as a black curve in this logarithmic plot. In the year 1992, we had only 100 MW of PV installed, ten years later, 2002 it was 1000 MW, Today it is about 200 000 MW!
Update to Figure 5 including the growing power demand, wind and the latest figures available 2016.
If the growth rate continues at 25%, as seen within the last three years, we will reach 100% PV not long after the year 2030. Remember, today we have a global power plant pool of 5300 000 MW, sufficient to power half the world. Even if we expect, that the future is fair to all people, we need "only" 10 000 000 MW to bring electricity in every home on this planet, long before 2050.  

One problem remains: Storage

Without an affordable storage system, PV can only bring electricity during sunny daytime. For a complete conversion, we need about 90 000 GWh of storage [2].
One solution for residential systems may be the power wall from Tesla, but I am not convinced, that this makes sense on a large scale. For large scale, I recommend the Gravity Storage!

References:

[1] The Future of Solar Energy, 2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ISBN (978-0-928008-9-8)
[2] Elon Musk predicts (minute 18) during the presentation of the power wall 90 000 GWh of required storage. https://youtu.be/yKORsrlN-2k
Baca selengkapnya »
Tweet Share Share Share Share Share

01.53

Massive Price Drop in PV Systems

The future will be solar, if the price of photostatic (PV) systems drops. There is a new research result about the future pf the PV price online, done by Fraunhofer ISE [1], that gives surprising insights. I will discuss the results in this blogpost.

Learning from past experience

The first silicon PV cell date back to 1950s and since the 1980s there is a global market and production worth mentioning. Since then, the price of PV cells was constantly dropping. The interesting thing is, there is a mathematical law, that describes this drop. To keep it short, this law tells us, that every time, the production of PV doubled, the price felt about 20%. 

The actual development is shown in the graphic:

Developement of PV module price since 1980 [1]

To understand this plot, be aware, the right axis is the accumulated produced capacity of PW measured in GW. It starts with 0.001 GW (=1 MW) and ends with 100.000 GW. To cover this very wide range, the scale is logarithmic. The first price tag dates back to 1980, were we had to pay more than 20 � per watt. The price is adjusted for inflation to the level of 2014, an exchange rate of  one Euro gives 1.25 $ is in use. The last price tag is for 2014 and is in the range of 0.5 � to 0.7 � for large scale PV power plants. 

Learning Curve

It is not surprising, that the actual price in different years is not always precise on the long term trend curve, that shows a drop of 20,9% per year, due to market effects. 

The big question is, how will this learning curve develop in the future? There are three scenarios, a very conservative one, that tells us, only 19% drop with another doubling of the installed PV base, a medium scenario with 20.9% drop and a progressive one with 23%. However, the result will always be a sharp drop of the PV panel price, if the installed base grows in the future. 

Below a price of 0.2 �/W, there seems to be another limitation by the pure raw material cost. To me�, this limitation seems a little bit artificial, because the price of this raw materials, like silicon or glass, could also drop if the production volume grows far beyond todays volume. 

It should be mentioned, that a capacity of 100.000 GW PV installation is equivalent to a surface of one million square kilometers, this is the size of a country like Egypt or Texas and California combined!

How expensive is electricity in the future?

The price of a PV panel is not the only part of the cost drivers in solar power. To break the price down to a kWh of electricity at the grid feed in, we have to include other cost drivers. 

Price of different elements for real world PV grid-scale sites. [1]

The first surprising thing is, that the PV-modules are no longer the main cost driver, as shown in the figure above. The cost of mounting, connecting and planning top already this cost. The paper from ISE does not cover "Red tape", this will hopefully drop in the future, but nobody knows.

Another significant part of the cost drivers are the inverter, they produce AC current from the DC current, generated by the PV cell. The price of this inverter follows a similar law of price drop by market volume as the PV panels.

Price per kWh

To calculate the price of a kWh of electricity itself, we have to take the solar radiation and the capital cost into account. There is a calculation method, the levelised cost of electricity (LCOE). It includes capital cost and maintenance of the PV power site. If you are a geek, you can do the math with the following formula:

Calculation of the levelised cost of electricity (LCOE). [1]

The interesting result is, that one of the main factors for electricity from PV is not only the sun, but the interest or discount rate. Today, we live in a world with very different interest rates. A strange effect is, if we look at the globe, the countries with high insolation have often very high interest rates. For example, Germany has a low insolation but also a low interest rate, Spain has a relative high insolation but a significant higher interest rate. The result is, the price of PV energy is much more similar as we first guess.


PV power price depends on cost of capital. [1]

Long term development

To look into the future beyond 2020 is very difficult, but the gathered information gives us some hints. The first thing is, PV electricity price will drop due to the learning effect resulting from the growing market. The market is growing, because PV electricity gets cheaper and is competitive to all other electric power sources. The long term price in the scenario of ISE is in the range of  2 ct/kWh. 
The share of the market will be beyond 30% in 2050. 

But there is a obstacle on the path to solar. The sun shines only at daytime and only if there are no clouds. This results in a strong request for energy storage. One solution is the new concept of Hydraulic Rock Storage (HRS) as developed by the Heindl Energy in Germany. 

Energy storage using the Hydraulic Rock Storage. [2]

Combining a cheap storage with a storage price of 3 ct/kWh and PV in the range of 2 ct/kWh gives a long term price for electricity over the whole day, only a fraction is stored, for less than 5 ct/kWh in most regions of the world.

Reference:


[1] Fraunhofer ISE (2015): Current and Future Cost of Photovoltaics. Long-term Scenarios for Market Development, System Prices and LCOE of Utility-Scale PV Systems. Study on behalf of Agora Energiewende. http://www.agora-energiewende.org/service/publications/
[2] Heindl Energy, Hydraulic Rock Storage, http://heindl-energy.com/ 
Baca selengkapnya »
Langganan: Postingan (Atom)
Diberdayakan oleh Blogger.