Clean energy’s holy grail?
About the Crow's Nest
"My grandfather Bob McCracken began writing the Crow's Nest in 1935. He was 25 years old.
"After a judge threw my grandfather in jail in 1945 for writing a Crow's Nest column criticizing the judge's conduct in a trial, my grandfather and the paper appealed all the way to the Supreme Court - and won. (Read More »)
Advanced energy storage is touted as the silver bullet to make clean energy just as reliable as traditional power. But that’s true only if a city and a utility develop the systems to achieve its potential.
A Season to Remember
It’s been a challenging autumn for my best friend from high school, Darrell Pesek. Like my dad and brother, Darrell works in the financial services sector. Since mid-September, he has witnessed the anxiety experienced by clients nearing retirement as they watch the financial markets erase years of savings.
It doesn’t end there. Darrell, his wife Amy and their 4-year-old daughter Paige live in Houston. Two days before Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy, Hurricane Ike tore through Houston. The Peseks lost their power. For two weeks.
Darrell said the first week without power was bad. The second was far worse. Spoiled food… no TV… ravenous mosquitoes… heat without end. He and Amy eventually got over it. Not so with their daughter Paige. Ever since, Paige has been afraid that the power might go out at any time.
I can relate. Last year, my son Ford and I experienced a power outage at home. Ford was three at the time. A few weeks later, we were at his favorite store – Guitar Center on Anderson Lane – when the power went out there, too.
Ford is only now starting to put away his own fear of power outages. The impact of those outages lingers, though. He now has two visions of what he wants to be when he grows up. He wants to be a T-ball player. Or an electric chord.
The Quest for the Holy Grail
Electricity is unique among commodities because it cannot be stored. In fact, it must be used at the exact moment it is generated.
That fact has profound implications for clean energy’s potential.
It also creates tremendous opportunities for the city and utility that take on the challenge of researching, developing and integrating storage into energy delivery.
First, the implications: MIT’s Technology Review observes that this is “one of the basic problems with solar energy today: there’s no good way to store it… As solar grows, finding a way to store the energy it produces will become essential.”
In their book Earth: The Sequel, Environmental Defense Fund’s Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn write, “Until [storage] technologies are greatly improved… storage will remain a major impediment to widespread use of solar energy.”
It isn’t just solar.The lack of storage similarly affects wind.
According to Cnet’s Green Tech site, earlier this year, grid operators in Texas had to shut down power to customers because the wind died down momentarily, effectively cutting off supply from its wind farms.
Energy writer Robert Bryce sums it up: “Unless or until we come up with a compact, affordable system that can store large amounts of electricity, wind and solar will not be viable for large segments of the electric market… The superbattery is the silver bullet. Solar and wind suddenly become much more viable, and it allows electric utilities to save huge amounts of energy. That’s the key breakthrough.” (Austin American-Statesman, May 18, 2008 - link no longer active)
Austin’s Place on the Map
In the race to develop this breakthrough, Austin is emerging as a major national center for energy storage research and development.
The Austin Technology Incubator’s Isaac Barchas ranks the University of Texas among the nation’s top six in energy storage research. Professors John Goodenough and Arumugam Manthiram are world leaders in lithium ion battery research for electric vehicles (the Chevy Volt will use a lithium ion battery).
Both professors have successfully commercialized their technologies as well. Earlier this year Google made Professor Manthiram’s company, ActaCell, one of the first two recipients of funding from its RechargeIT venture fund.
ActaCell isn’t the only Austin-based energy storage company. Valence is a leading battery company, while eestor has attracted international buzz for its ultracapacitor technology.
Storage is just one piece of the mosaic
Innovation in energy storage is central to creating a vibrant clean energy economy. But isn’t as straightforward as developing a better battery. The challenge is two-fold: innovation in the technology itself, and innovation in the way electricity is delivered.
A panel of experts organized by the New England Clean Energy Council has outlined the advances that would be needed for integrating storage into energy delivery: large-scale battery projects would require a utility to create an integrated system involving batteries, electronics, software, and thermal management systems.
Former Motorola CEO Robert Galvin and former Electric Power Research Institute president Kurt Yeager have a similar assessment. In their new book Perfect Power, they describe storage linked to locally distributed solar as one of the four key technical innovations needed to create an optimal energy system.
Note that Galvin and Yeager emphasize “local” in defining the energy storage opportunity, and they link this to locally distributed solar. Even if advances in energy storage make it possible to reliably store vast amounts of clean electricity, clean energy will not achieve its potential until the current antiquated one-way energy grid is reinvented.
That requires utilities to change more than just technologies. Galvin and Yeager write that utilities’ “traditional thinking is generally limited by two anchors: the existing system design and the assumption that the solutions are bounded by central generation on one end and at the meter… at the other.”
Think of it this way. Imagine that researchers produced breakthroughs in storage. Then imagine that utilities had failed to reinvent the electricity delivery model. (Okay, this is admittedly not very difficult to imagine.)
What would the clean energy future look like in that scenario? Suspiciously like the current power delivery system. Clean energy would likely take the form of traditional power plants: large industrial facilities in remote areas, sending power into cities the same way that coal and nuclear plants currently send power.
Such an outcome would have serious consequences on the economic and reliability opportunities provided by locally-produced solar. Most envisioned green collar jobs require a local emphasis for clean energy – solar installers, new building products and home appliances, and companies that could provide goods and services for electric customers who are suddenly able to sell electricity to a utility from the sunlight hitting their roofs.
Fundamentally, Galvin and Yeager argue, we have to reinvent the way utilities deliver electricity into “an open-system smart grid architecture modeled after the Internet.” And the emphasis in this system needs to be on locally produced clean energy.
Galvin and Yeager are doing more than talking – they have created the Galvin Electricity Initiative to develop such a system. A new Google – GE partnership now aims to advance this vision as well. Now they just need a utility to partner with.
Creating the energy system of the future will require shedding old ways of thinking. It will require innovation and openness to new ideas. It will require a city and a utility that are willing to reinvent their business model away from an old-style one-way system into a flexible, dynamic system that creates opportunities for innovators and local businesses.
Austin’s Opportunity
This brings us to Austin’s clean energy opportunity.
The opportunity for Austin or any city to create a vibrant clean energy economy depends on some utility taking on the challenge of inventing this reliable system. Austin is arguably the best-positioned city to develop this system. (See my previous Crow’s Nest for a fuller explanation on why.)
But – just as an exclusive focus on storage technology is shortsighted - if all we focus on is developing the system, and we ignore the economic opportunity, we will wake up one day and discover that most of the good jobs have gone elsewhere.
Ultimately, our clean energy vision should seek to achieve two goals.
To make clean energy (and energy in general) work well, we need to develop a system – backed by a firm business model and a reliable energy delivery system – that can deliver clean energy generated within the city limits and distribute it over the country’s first smart electric grid.
We also need to create good jobs and broadly based opportunity by developing a vibrant clean energy economy in Austin.
In my next Crow’s Nest, I’ll describe how we can achieve both of these goals at the same time. There is an existing, proven model for how a city can simultaneously make itself the home to researching and developing key technological breakthroughs for an industry while creating good jobs and broad-based opportunity in the process. That model was created in… Austin.
Some city will become the home to transforming the way electricity is delivered. The city that has the vision to do this has the potential to create jobs and opportunity locally by creating a model clean energy system for the world. Austin has the real opportunity to become that city.
The elusive perfect future
I talked to my friend Darrell the other night. After he had told me stories about Hurricane Ike and the current financial crisis, I asked him what the worst part of the fall has been for him.
His response? The performance of the Texas A&M football team.
A few years ago, Darrell and Amy chose their home in northwest Houston because it was only an hour from Kyle Field. Darrell has more than a passing interest in A&M football.
Darrell has lived through the trifecta – the collapse of U.S. financial markets, the urban power system and the A&M football season. And like a true Aggie fan, he has kept his sights set on a future that is simultaneously elusive… and possible with determined effort.
Download a printable version of this week’s Crow’s Nest (pdf file).
GET UPDATES:
