The Battery Problem...

The phrase “the battery problem” is shorthand jargon for a problem well-understood by those designing renewable energy systems (especially wind or solar).  The problem is that people need power when these renewable sources aren't available.  You aren't going to get a lot of solar power at night; this is the most obvious case.

The problem is slightly subtler than that, though.  If you look at solar power alone for just a moment, it turns out that you have to account for a lot more than just nighttime.  There is less solar power available in bad weather (like a snowstorm) than in good weather.  There is less solar power available in the morning and the evening than there is at noon (this is true even for systems that orient themselves to point toward the sun).

For all these situations, what's needed is a way to store power when it is plentiful, for use when it is not.  The conventional answer for this storage is a battery, specifically a lead-acid battery very similar to what is in your car.  This battery was invented over 100 years ago, and nobody has ever come up with anything that beat its cost vs. storage capacity.  But lead-acid batteries are far from ideal; in fact, in many ways they are simply awful.  If you've ever carried one of these beasts, you know they are full of environmentally-unfriendly lead.  And then there's the nasty acid.  Lead-acid batteries used in the way that renewable energy systems need to use them (deep-discharge cycling) wear out quickly, typically in three to five years – at which point they must be replaced.  That's an expensive proposition!

Hence the shorthand “the battery problem”.  Renewable energy is always going to be of limited value until someone solves the battery problem by inventing a way to store electrical energy that is cheaper, more reliable, and more environmentally friendly than lead-acid batteries.

Here's a Kickstarter project that's taking a stab at the battery problem, using another very old technique (mechanical flywheels) with some very modern twists.  Their own claims are for relatively modest improvement over the cost of lead-acid batteries, but with much higher reliability and vastly better environmental friendliness.  It's not a quantum leap, but it sure looks like an improvement.  They claim to be essentially finished with development other than the need for a better magnetic bearing, which is why they went to Kickstarter for some funding (a very modest amount, actually).  I don't know enough about the details of what they need to accomplish to be able to even think about their chances of success...but I wish them well.  It's a clever idea, and certainly we could use something better than those danged batteries!

More info (and explanatory videos) here, here, and here:

Learn About Fracking...

A nicely done, fact-based documentary, just a half hour long:

Energy Flows...

Reader Doug S. passes along this very cool chart of energy flows in the U.S. for a recent year (2009), from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.  He points out that the chart makes it clear how difficult it would be to use wind or solar power to replace our other energy sources.  There are lots of other insights like that to be had by studying this for a bit...

A New Contender for High-Density Energy Storage...

An interesting new development from Washington State University.  Their scheme is a compression system, akin to the compressed-air storage systems, but on a molecular level with a vastly higher ratio between uncompressed and compressed states.

There are a few challenges to be overcome, however.  First, the required compression currently can only be achieved in a laboratory diamond anvil compressor – which can only compress tiny quantities at a time.  Secondly, the material used in the system is xenon difluoride (XeF₂), a powerful chemical agent that's dangerous to handle.  Despite the challenges, there are possibilities here...

Gobar Gas...

Michael Yon has another excellent dispatch, this time not about war.  As usual, his article is well-researched and lavishly illustrated with his photos.  Go read.

The Mr. Potato Head Bill...

Brought to you by John (even the French don't want him) Kerry and Joe (even the Democrats don't want him) Lieberman.  The WSJ is on the case.

Hydrogen Production Breakthrough?

Department of Energy scientists are reporting what sounds like a breakthrough for inexpensive hydrogen production: an inexpensive and versatile metallic catalyst, far less expensive than the current standard platinum catalyst.  However, before you run out and buy yourself a hydrogen car, remember that there are several other major developments yet to be made. 

The biggest remaining problem is hydrogen storage, especially storage in a car.  Large improvements have been made in this area, but even the best of them doesn't have the right combination of capacity, safety, and economy that's needed in order to make hydrogen powered cars practical (that is, with a range comparable to today's petroleum powered cars).

Nearly as big is the unsolved issue of how to transport and distribute the vast quantities of hydrogen needed to convert our existing fleet of cars and trucks to hydrogen power.  This is an area where the new catalyst might conceivably help, especially if it actually enabled consumer-scale solar-powered hydrogen production – in other words, if it let you make your own commuting hydrogen at home.  Then it would be as if we each had our own oil well and refinery; obviously this would greatly reduce the distribution problem.

But we're a long, long way from solving either of those remaining problems – and of course I've left out the elephant in the room: the cost of replacing all the existing petroleum-powered engines with hydrogen-powered engines...

Drill! Drill! Drill!

That's the title of Daniel Henninger's latest column in the WSJ. Here's his lead:

Charles de Gaulle once wrote off the nation of Brazil in six words: "Brazil is not a serious country." How much time is left before someone says the same of the United States?

One thing Brazil and the U.S. have in common is the price of oil: It is priced in dollars, and everyone in the world now knows what the price is. Another commonality is that each country has vast oil reserves in waters off their coastlines.

Here we may draw a line in the waves between the serious and the unserious.

Brazil discovered only yesterday (November) that billions of barrels of oil sit in difficult water beneath a swath of the Santos Basin, 180 miles offshore from Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. The U.S. has known for decades that at least 8.5 billion proven barrels of oil sit off its Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf coasts, with the Interior Department estimating 86 billion barrels of undiscovered oil resources.

When Brazil made this find last November, did its legislature announce that, for fear of oil spills hitting Rio's beaches or altering the climate, it would forgo exploiting these fields?

Of course it didn't. Guilherme Estrella, director of exploration and production for the Brazilian oil company Petrobras, said, "It's an extraordinary position for Brazil to be in." Indeed it is.

At this point in time, is there another country on the face of the earth that would possess the oil and gas reserves held by the United States and refuse to exploit them? Only technical incompetence, as in Mexico, would hold anyone back.

But not us. We won't drill.

Read the whole thing.

Drill Here, Drill Now...

Newt Gingrich is working hard to get oil drilling opened up in America's gigantic oil reserves, and sooner rather than later. His starting point is a petition campaign – please sign up.

Now, dammit!

And then pass that link along to everyone you know – let's send an overwhelmingly obvious message to our elected morons Senators and Representatives. They tend not to understand anything that's even slightly subtle...

Pandering Ponders...

This morning's news brings two more stories about political pandering to the public's apparent belief that high oil prices are caused by the evil big oil companies: first there's Harry Reid (D) and Richard Durbin (D) wanting to tax alleged “windfall profits” at the oil companies, and then there's Maria Cantwell (D) and Chucky Schumer (D) who'd like to make U.S. commodity futures markets uncompetitive (compared with, for example, Dubai's markets).

I wonder first whether the American electorate is actually as stupid as these politicians would have us believe. For instance, do Americans really believe that a profit of between 6% and 8% is outrageously high? There are many examples of big companies that make far higher profits than that – Microsoft, for example. The oil companies are actually making very modest profits (by any rational perspective) on very large revenues, which means that the profit expressed in dollars is very large. And the attack on the commodities future markets (which are all about price discovery and speculation, which – contrary to some assertions – is most certainly not a dirty word!) is a classic case of shoot-the-messenger. The speculators are no more responsible for the high prices than I am responsible for Ted Kennedy's brain tumor.

The actual cause of our current high oil prices is obvious to anyone with even the most basic understanding of capitalism and free markets. Hopefully that includes most Americans over the age of 6 or 7. The cause is that demand exceeds supply. The answer is equally obvious (and it's the same answer for every such price rise, no matter what the product is): increase the supply. And the oil companies have been patiently explaining to Congress, for the past 40 years, precisely how the supply could be increased: remove the regulations that forbid the oil companies from exploring and drilling – regulations that Congress themselves imposed.

If a windfall tax is enacted, the results are very easy to predict. Investors in oil companies will move their money to other, more profitable ventures (like Microsoft). Oil companies will have to find more expensive sources of capital. This will make exploration and drilling less attractive, and the oil companies will do less of it. We will buy more foriegn oil. Supply will be reduced further, and prices will go up. Not down, you flippin' (mostly D) idiots in Congress – but up.

If the commodity markets here are over-regulated and thereby made more expensive, the commodity traders will instantly move to other markets. The exchanges in places like Dubai, Hong Kong, and Kuala Lumpur will be beside themselves with glee, laughing all the way to the bank. They'll be laughing because we handed them all the highly profitable trading business for no reason at all, a totally senseless and moronic self-inflicted wound that will kill a large American business (commodities exchanges) and do absolutely nothing to help oil prices.

The rest of the world no longer looks to America for economic leadership. They look to us for economic entertainment.

Rope.
Tree.
Stupid politician (but then I repeat myself).
Some assembly required...


Updated:

John Hinderaker (at Power Line) agrees with me – and has a brilliant idea.

G4B Bug...

It seems a number of gas station pumps have the “Gas at 4 Bucks” (G4B) bug:

Mom-and-pop service stations are running into a problem as gasoline marches toward $4 a gallon: Thousands of old-fashioned pumps can't register more than $3.99 on their spinning mechanical dials.

The pumps, throwbacks to a bygone era on the American road, are difficult and expensive to upgrade, and replacing them is often out of the question for station owners who are still just scraping by.

Many of the same pumps can count only up to $99.99 for the total sale, preventing owners of some SUVs, vans, trucks and tractor-trailers from filling their tanks all the way.

As many as 8,500 of the nation's 170,000 service stations have old-style meters that need to be fixed — about 17,000 individual pumps, said Bob Renkes, executive vice president of the Petroleum Equipment Institute of Tulsa, Okla.

I haven't seen this myself, but I have seen another phenomenon: gas pumps that limit the total purchase to $75. At $4+ a gallon (that's what we're paying in San Diego right now), that means I can't fill my gas tank at a single stop. I'm fairly certain this is an arbitrary limit configured into the pumps, but I've run into it at a surprisingly broad range of gas stations...