Technology

THE MINIMUM JOB EXPECTANCY:

Free electric vehicle charging at work? It’s possible with optimum solar (SPX, Dec 18, 2023)

The global surge in electric vehicle sales has prompted an Australian university to explore how it could offer free or nominal EV charging facilities to staff and students by optimising its solar PV system and minimising workplace electricity costs.
Engineering researchers based at the University of South Australia (UniSA) Mawson Lakes campus say that using renewable energy to power EV day charging is the key, lowering electricity grid demand in the evening and helping to support Australia’s net zero emission targets by 2050.

Both The Wife and I have free charging at work, meaning we’ve very nearly never spent a cent to power our vehicle.

TRANSITORY IS AS TRANSITORY DOES:

Utility rate roundup: Decreases for Eversource and Unitil, controversy for Liberty (HADLEY BARNDOLLAR, DECEMBER 18, 2023, NH Bulletin)

The U.S. Energy Information Administration expects natural gas prices to decline by 24 percent from last winter. In New England, natural gas is used to produce roughly half of the region’s electricity.

Last year’s exorbitant cost of energy was mainly attributed to the war in Ukraine, the region’s overreliance on natural gas, and extreme weather events, utilities have said.

PHYSICSAL GRAFFITI:

Fusion Breakthrough as Near-Limitless Energy Comes Closer to Reality (Pandora Dewan, Dec 15, 2023, Newsweek)

“The fusion community is urgently looking for new manufacturing approaches to economically produce large plasma-facing components in fusion reactors,” Ialovega said.

The team’s technology uses a cold spray process to deposit a coating of the metal tantalum on the stainless steel surface of the reactor. This metal can withstand the superhot temperatures of the reactor, and is also great at absorbing hydrogen.

“We discovered that the cold spray tantalum coating absorbs much more hydrogen than bulk tantalum because of the unique microstructure of the coating,” Kumar Sridharan, a professor of nuclear engineering and engineering physics and materials science and engineering at UW-Madison, said in a statement.

Cold spray technology is similar to using a can of spray paint.

FOSSILS REPRESENT THE EXTINCT:

Solar costs are now nearly 30 per cent lower than cheapest fossil fuel option, EY says (Joshua S Hill, 12 December 2023, Renew Economy)

A new report from consulting giant EY says solar PV technology remains the cheapest source of new-build electricity in most parts of the world, with a global weighted average levelised cost of electricity (LCoE) that is 29% lower than the cheapest fossil fuel alternative.

In a new report analysing changes to the global energy system, EY found that in 2022, around 86%, or 187GW, of newly commissioned, utility-scale renewable power generation produced electricity at a lower cost than the average cost of fossil fuel generation.

EAVOR-LASTING POWER::

The Man Who Could Finally Solve the Geothermal Puzzle: The huge potential of geothermal energy to meet the climate and energy crises has always been outweighed by its problems. With Eavor, John Redfern believes he’s found the solution. (JOSH SIMS, December 7, 2023, Inside Hook

Their idea is deceptively simple. Traditional geothermal technology has to target an aquifer, and then use a form of fracking, forcing water into and then out of the very hot permeable rock underground, creating steam to drive a turbine to generate electricity, but losing about 50% of the energy in the pumping process.

Instead, Eavor’s plan is to drill two eight-inch-wide wells down several miles, then drill laterally some more miles and connect them, thus making a huge closed loop. Then, through conduction, they’ll let the water flow through it, the large surface area of the bores being super-heated by the surrounding rock. That’s one loop of maybe 10 loops in a major plant.

“It’s just like a big radiator,” as Redfern describes it, making the hard-to-do sound very simple.

In another sense, he says, it’s the reverse of one of the oil industry’s ways of extracting oil sands, in which drilled wells allow heat to be injected underground to loosen the sands and allow the oil to be removed.

Eavor’s “closed-loop’ system — the Eavor-Loop — has been working towards full-scale operation for a few years. The company launched Eavor Lite, a small-scale proof-of-concept plant in 2019, and followed that with Eavor Deep in New Mexico late last year, which proved the technology could be used in, for example, granite rock and super-high temperatures, environments that the traditional oil and gas industry avoid.

Now, among several Eavor projects in the works, the most advanced is a $325 million Eavor-Loop under construction in Bavaria, Germany, on the site of a decommissioned power plant and funded in part by a grant from the EU Innovation Fund. Drilling began this July, and it’s expected to take three years to produce four loops — amounting to 150 miles of wells in total, 2.5 miles deep and coping with temperatures around 302 degrees Fahrenheit — though power is expected to come online in October 2024 when the first loop is complete. With that, Eavor expects its idea to be commercially proven.

“That’s a lot of drilling,” notes Redfern. “Never since Bruce Willis and Armageddon has there been the potential for the world to be saved by a bunch of drillers drilling holes.”

Drill, baby, drill.