Archive for the ‘Elon Musk’ Category
bonobos, humans, sex, kids, community and work: an interminable conversation 1
just being cosy
Canto: We need to face the sex issue, which is such a problematic one for humans, and far less problematic, it seems, for bonobos.
Jacinta:Yes, they don’t need a Me Too movement, coz the males are already scared of them. I mean the boss females.
Canto: Well it’s not just the males hitting on the females. In bonobo societies, it’s males on males, females on females, old on young, kids on kids, but with a minimum of fuss and bother, it seems to me. And it’s not all the time, I don’t want to exaggerate anything. There are no nymphomaniacs, whatever that means.
Jacinta: A pejorative term. The male equivalents are called studs.
Canto: Well, not always. Sometimes called sex addicts. And paedophiles of course. Suitable cases for treatment. And I remember a group calling themselves ‘sluts on bikes’, seeking to retool the term for their own benefit somehow. I think there’s a lot of confusion or uncertainty out there, about whether an overdeveloped interest in sex is good or bad. And of course there’s a big issue about sexual victims, which doesn’t seem a problem for bonobos.
Jacinta: Not a major problem, but the females appear to keep the males in line, if they go too far. After all much of the sexual stuff is just mutual masturbation.
Canto: Yeah, nowadays, human males – and maybe females – get off on porn, or their own fantasies, wanking in the safe confines of their bedrooms, imagining touchy-feelies rather than experiencing them. It’s quite sad. Bonobos don’t have that problem.
Jacinta: It’s certainly true that there are plenty of sexually unsatisfied human apes around. But maybe if they weren’t so aware of sex – especially the hypersexuality of porn – they wouldn’t be so obsessed with what they’re missing out on. Take orangutans. They’re mostly isolated, and I doubt if they spend much time masturbating…
Canto: Ah but they do spend some time on it. If the Gizmodo website is to be trusted, masturbation has been observed in at least 80 types of male primates, and 50 types of female primates, including orangutans. And I don’t quite trust that male-female disparity.
Jacinta: Yes, that’s odd. And the point is that the crotch area is the most erogenous zone for all mammals, surely – and then some. And it doesn’t require fantasising about sexy other members of your species. Think of the first time you masturbated…
Canto: I really can’t recall the first time….
Jacinta: It’s highly likely you found your pubes rubbing against something, and it felt, well, stimulating, so you rubbed some more. Nothing directly to do with sex, for us or for other mammals. When a dog starts humping your leg, it’s not actually humping, or thinking of humping, presumably.
Canto: So it’s all about chemicals, fireworks in the brain, or something? A dog humps your leg because he’s excited, and humping gets him more excited. But it’s the old chicken and egg – does it start with the humping or the excitement?
Jacinta: Well I suppose the main point for us is that masturbation is natural and common for many species, given the evolution of erogenous zones, especially the zone associated with reproduction. But I’m more interested in another phenomenon – reproduction. In spite of their interest in sex, bonobo females are unable, it seems, to produce more than a few offspring in their lives. According to Wikipedia, the most offspring produced by a human female, that we know of, is 44, 43 of whom survived infancy. That’s a woman in Uganda, whose last child was born in 2016. There are recordings of greater numbers in previous centuries, but they’re insufficiently verified. And this woman, Mariam Nabatanzi, wasn’t just showing off, she had a rare condition that caused hyperovulation. Her births included 3 sets of quadruplets, 4 of triplets and 6 of twins, and she might’ve added to the number but a procedure she underwent in 2019, at age 40, put a stop to it all.
Canto: Elon Musk would’ve been proud of her.
Jacinta: Yeah, well, I wonder if he’s helping pay Ms Nabatanzi’s food bills, though hopefully her unwonted fame would help with that. It’s interesting that both Franz de Waal and Jane Goodall mention, in the beautifully photographed Deutsche Welle documentary referenced below, that the ability of humans to reproduce rapidly compared to other primates has been a vital factor in our dominance of the biosphere, with its positive and negative impacts. De Waal suggests that this high reproductive rate is somehow due to the family structure we’ve developed, with the father helping out the mother, not so much directly as indirectly, as material provider and support. But I think this claim needs more support or more fleshing out.
Canto: Yes, it seems to fly in the face of what we know about bonobo culture, where the mother seems to be helped out by other females, and males, in a tight-knit community. Or is this an exaggeration? I recall reading that this community care, or extended family care, occurs in corvids as well. I don’t know how many chicks the average crow gives birth to in a lifetime. Anyway, it seems that the long intervals between births in chimps and bonobos is more psychological, or cultural if you like, than physiological. The mothers do much of the caring and feeding, and it’s exhausting. Humans have bottle-feeding for instance, and anyone can be in charge of that. I did it for my little brother when I was a kid, and even learned to change nappies. Human mothers are sometimes back at work weeks or even days after giving birth.
Jacinta: Which would require other carers. Maybe we’re not so selfish as we think. But then again, in the WEIRD world we’re having fewer children, and as other regions become more well-off they’re having fewer children too.
Canto: Except for Elon Musk.
Jacinta: Crows generally lay a clutch of 2-7 eggs every nesting season – that’s one clutch every year. About 40 percent of all the corvid species are co-operative breeders, a much bigger percentage than other bird species. Crows’ lifespans can vary wildly – some can live for more than twenty years, and of course it’s hard to say how many offspring they produce in a lifetime, never mind how many of their chicks survive to adulthood. But returning to humans and bonobos, both species make a habit of having sex for fun, though with bonobos it’s more of a standard thing – they don’t have killjoy religious figures or ’empowered’ celibates spoiling the party.
Canto: We’re certainly a long way from public sex. Even nudist colonies now seem a distant memory, and they were about as sexy as an old fart’s farts.
Jacinta: Well, that’s a bit rough. We’re just so much more diverse than bonobos, you can’t compare. Everything from lifetime vows of celibacy to sex dungeons, about which I know nothing.
Canto: We’ll explore them, no doubt. But of course bonobos, when they’re not eating and sleeping, have a lot of time for play. They’re not trying to create the next exciting technology or to quantise gravity or to become the richest entrepreneur in the jungle or to take over their neighbours’ territory or whatever. All play, even sexual play, and no work can be a bit mind-numbing perhaps. A bit of your old Freudian sublimation isn’t such a bad thing.
Jacinta: How about getting AI to do all the smart stuff and we just play?
Canto: Ahh, now you’re talking about the future, beyond where we’ll be, unless those longevity diets really kick in…
References
https://gizmodo.com/9-animals-that-masturbate-other-than-humans-1723592357
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_the_most_children
more on fuel cells and electrolysers
Cross section of a PEMEL(polymer exchange membrane electrolyte?) stack comprising four cells, according to Science Direct
Jacinta: So continuing with Philip Russell’s simple video of a small hydrogen fuel cell (in the previous post), he explains that when the electrolysis process reverses itself, powering the fan, hydrogen is entering the cathode where it reacts with the palladium catalyst. The reaction with palladium is described as complex and weird, so he puts the matter off to a future video. In any case the hydrogen is split, producing electrons and hydrogen ions. Those electrons travel around the circuit which powers the fan, or a light bulb or some other electrical device, and the hydrogen ions travel through/across the PEM, where they react with the electrons in the circuit, and the oxygen, to produce water, which escapes from the anode side.
Canto: So what they’re after in all this is the electrons, in sufficient abundance and in continuous supply to power whatever, without the use of carbon-based fuels. Frankly I’m not even sure how fossil fuels, hydrocarbons etc produce electricity, but hopefully I’ll learn something about this along the way.
Jacinta: You mean how does coal, oil or gas get transformed into high-energy electrons bumped along in a circuit? Yes, we have a lot to learn.
Canto: And how do electrons in a wire make an air-conditioner work? But let’s stick with hydrogen for now. An older video, from 2012, from the excellent Fully Charged series, provides some other insights. I won’t go into too much detail with it, as the fuel cell described is very similar to Russell’s, but it does highlight some problems, at least from 2012. First, the interviewee, James Courtney from Birmingham University, uses the term proton-exchange membrane (PEM) rather than Russell’s PEM – a polymer exchange membrane. They mean the same thing, as the membrane is made of a polymer, and the key is that it’s an ‘electron insulator’, allowing protons to pass through. The polymer is usually nafion, a synthetic polymer created sixty years ago. It’s described as an ionomer for its ionic properties. But the most important thing I learned from Courtney is about the issue of platinum/palladium. It’s very very expensive, and its price is rising. Courtney – nine years ago – was experimenting with solid oxide electrolytes.
Jacinta: From Wikipedia:
A solid oxide fuel cell (or SOFC) is an electrochemical conversion device that produces electricity directly from oxidizing a fuel. Fuel cells are characterized by their electrolyte material; the SOFC has a solid oxide or ceramic electrolyte. Advantages of this class of fuel cells include high combined heat and power efficiency, long-term stability, fuel flexibility, low emissions, and relatively low cost. The largest disadvantage is the high operating temperature which results in longer start-up times and mechanical and chemical compatibility issues.
Canto: An organisation called Bloom Energy, self-described as ‘a leader in the SOFC industry’, has a bit to say about the technology. So, again we have the negative anode and the positive cathode, and the electrolyte in between which undergoes ‘an electrochemical reaction’…
Jacinta: That’s when the miracle occurs.
Canto: Yes, and this produces an electrical current. So here’s something to think about re electrolytes:
The electrolyte is an ion conductor that moves ions either from the fuel to the air or the air to the fuel to create electron flow. Electrolytes vary among fuel cell types, and depending on the electrolyte deployed, the fuel cells undergo slightly different electrochemical reactions, use different catalysts, run on different fuels, and achieve varying efficiencies.
Does that help?
Jacinta: Yes, it helps to complicate matters.
Canto: So the Bloom Energy website reckons that SOFCs have the best potential for fuel cell technology, and promises they’ll bear fruit in the next six years – instead of the usual five. Here’s their diagram of an SOFC.
Note that they’re using natural gas (methane) in a process called methane reformation, also mentioned by James Courtney. So, not exactly a clean technology, but also, as the illustration mentions, no precious metals, corrosive acids or molten materials.
Jacinta: But apparently this isn’t a hydrogen fuel cell. Barely a mention of hydrogen.
Canto: Yes, the illustration presents oxygen ions reacting with ‘fuel in the fuel cell’ to produce electricity. The cleanness comes from the fact that there’s no combustion, making it more sustainable and of course more green than combustion-based tech. Apart from a partial reduction in greenhouse gases, this tech does away with the emission of harmful sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxide. And their ‘Bloom box’ fuel cell packs can run on hydrogen, with net zero carbon emissions. They see their technology being well suited to distributed networks and mini-grids, which may provide the power supplies of the future.
Jacinta: We shall see – if we live long enough. Meanwhile let’s look at another video, featuring Dr Stephen Carr, of the H2 Centre, University of South Wales, on how a hydrogen fuel cell works. Eventually it’ll all come together.
Canto: And then fall apart again. This video is more recent than the previous two, but I’m not sure that there have been any new developments in the interval. So Dr Carr presents ‘a demonstration kit of a renewable hydrogen energy storage system’, in which the hydrogen is produced by solar power…
Jacinta: Another magical moment?
Canto: Well, apparently. Anyway, he represents the sun with a lamp – so I suppose it’s a demonstration, not the real thing. The lamp shines on a PV (photovoltaic) panel which produces electricity.
Jacinta: Grrr, they never explain that bit.
Canto: How do you produce annoyance? Bet you can’t explain that either. Anyway, the electricity runs through an electrolyser, which splits water into oxygen and hydrogen, which is stored for times when we can’t directly produce power from the sun. At such times we can run the hydrogen and oxygen through a fuel cell (which seems to operate oppositely to an electrolyser) to produce electrical power. As he says (and this is new) the photons from the lamp (in lieu of the sun) are converted by the panel into electrical energy or power (but I think those are two distinct things). This is of course referring to how solar energy/power works, which is an entirely different thing. We’ll leave that aside for now, along with the big heap of other things.
Jacinta: Yes let’s just focus on what Dr Carr says. The electrical power powers an electrolyser. The electrons are used to drive an electrochemical process which splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. On one side of this electrolyser the water is ‘split into hydrogen’ and on the other side it produces oxygen (magic happens). Then the hydrogen and oxygen can be stored until required, when we can somehow convert these elements into electricity. We can observe, as in the Philip Russell video, bubbles of hydrogen and oxygen forming on either side of the electrolyser, and being collected and stored.
Canto: So we’re again not going to discover the detailed physics/chemistry of all this, but apparently we now have stored power. And this gets run backwards through the fuel cell. In the fuel cell, the released oxygen and hydrogen, in a reverse process to electrolysis (I think), produces pure, apparently drinkable water, and electricity. So the two gases are released from the electrolyser into the fuel cell, oxygen at one electrode, hydrogen at the other, and they’re combined and subjected to electrochemical processes (more magic), producing water and electricity sufficient in this tiny demo model to power a fan or small light. So far, precisely as enlightening as the Philip Russell video.
Jacinta: So next we’re taken to a big electrolyser, something like the new one at Tonsley, South Australia. It uses a stack of some 80 fuel cells to produce stacks of hydrogen. The electrolyser takes in about 50kw of power and produces about 1 kilogram of hydrogen per hour – which means very little to me.
Canto: It’s good that they know this I suppose. So they have an electrolysis stack, and they feed in ‘pure de-ionised water’ – I bet we could do a whole post on that – and apply DC electric power – another post’s worth – which splits the water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Jacinta: When I think of AC and DC I think of Tesla v Edison. History is so much easier than science. I think we need to do a basic course in electricity. But continuing with Dr Carr, for what it’s worth to us, he says that ‘everything else in this unit is gas clean-up’. The hydrogen is ‘de-watered’ to make sure it’s completely dry, and it’s also de-oxygenated, in other words thoroughly purified. Then, for storage, it’s compressed to 200 bar, meaning 200x atmospheric pressure.
Canto: The bar, presumably for barometric pressure, is commonly used in Europe but not accepted by the US, centre of arseholedom with regard to weights and measures.
Jacinta: The trouble is that ‘atmosphere’ for measures of atmospheric pressure, is highly contestable. Anyway, we’ll finish this off next time, for now I’ll just say that Elon Musk is still not much impressed with hydrogen technology, saying that hydrolysis is way too energy-intensive-expensive, that methane or propane etc extraction defeats the purpose, that hydrogen is too light to store easily, that it’s very volatile etc, but maybe it could work for aircraft in the future… So why is so much money being expended on it, in so many countries? Why is it suddenly such a big deal? That’s a ‘mystery’ we’ll have to investigate…
References
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360319919312145
The Hydrogen fuel cell explained, clean energy, by Philip Russell, youtube video
Hydrogen Fuel Cells | Fully Charged, youtube video
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_oxide_fuel_cell
https://www.bloomenergy.com/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-about-solid-oxide-fuel-cells/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369702103003316
How does a hydrogen fuel cell work, with Dr Stephen Car, video
more on Australia’s energy woes and solutions
the SA Tesla Powerpack, again
Canto: So the new Tesla battery is now in its final testing phase, so South Australia can briefly enjoy some fame as having the biggest battery in the world, though I’m sure it’ll be superseded soon enough with all the activity worldwide in the battery and storage field.
Jacinta: Well I don’t think we need to get caught up with having the biggest X in the world, it’s more important that we’re seen as a place for innovation in energy storage and other matters energetic. So, first, there’s the Tesla battery, associated with the Hornsdale wind farm near Jamestown, and there are two other major battery storage systems well underway, one in Whyalla, designed for Whyalla Steel, to reduce their energy costs, and another smaller system next to AGL’s Wattle Point wind farm on Yorke Peninsula.
Canto: Well, given that the federal government likes to mock our Big Battery, can you tell me how the Tesla battery and the other batteries work to improve the state?
Jacinta: It’s a 100MW/129MWh installation, designed to serve two functions. A large portion of its stored power (70MW/39MWh) is for the state government to stabilise the grid in times of outage. Emergency situations. This will obviously be a temporary solution before other, slower reacting infrastructure can be brought into play. The rest is owned by Neoen, Tesla’s partner company and owner of the wind farm. They’ll use it to export at a profit when required – storing at low prices, exporting at higher prices. As to the Whyalla Steel battery, that’s privately owned, but it’s an obvious example, along with the AGL battery, of how energy can be produced and stored cleanly (Whyalla Steel relies on solar and hydro). They point the way forward.
Canto: Okay here’s a horrible question, because I doubt if there’s any quick ‘for dummies’ answer. What’s the difference between megawatts and megawatt-hours?
Jacinta: A megawatt, or a watt, is a measure of power, which is the rate of energy transfer. One watt equals one joule per second, and a megawatt is 1,000,000 watts, or 1,000 kilowatts. A megawatt-hour is one megawatt of power flowing for one hour.
Canto: Mmmm, I’m trying to work out whether I understand that.
Jacinta: Let’s take kilowatts. A kilowatt (KW) is 1,000 times the rate of energy transfer of a watt. In other words, 1000 joules/sec. One KWh is one hour at that rate of energy transfer. So you multiply the 1000 by 3,600, the number of seconds in an hour. That’s a big number, so you can express it in megajoules – the answer is 3.6Mj. One megajoule equals 1,000,000 joules of course.
Canto: Of course. So how is this working for South Australia’s leadership on renewables and shifting the whole country in that direction?
Genex Power site in far north Queensland – Australia’s largest solar farm together with a pumped hydro storage plant
Jacinta: Believe me it’s not all South Australia. There are all sorts of developments happening around the country, mostly non-government stuff, which I suppose our rightist, private enterprise feds would be very happy with. For example there’s the Genex Power solar, hydro and storage project in North Queensland, situated in an old gold mine. Apparently pumped hydro storage is a competitor with, or complementary to, battery storage. Simon Kidston, the Genex manager, argues that many other sites can be repurposed in this way.
Canto: And the cost of wind generation and solar PV is declining at a rate far exceeding expectations, especially those of government, precisely because of private enterprise activity.
Jacinta: Well, mainly because it’s a global market, with far bigger players than Australia. Inputs into renewables from states around the world – India, Mexico, even the Middle East – are causing prices to spiral down.
Canto: And almost as we speak the Tesla gridscale battery has become operational, and we’ve gained a tiny place in history. But what about this National Energy Guarantee from the feds, which everyone seems to be taking a swing at. What’s it all about?
Jacinta: This was announced a little over a month ago, as a rejection of our chief scientist’s Clean Energy Target. Note how the Feds again avoid using such terms as ‘clean’ and ‘renewable’ when it talks or presents energy policy. Anyway, it may or may not be a good thing – there’s a summary of what some experts are saying about it online, but most are saying it’s short on detail. It’s meant to guarantee a reliable stream of energy/electricity from retailers, never mind how the energy is generated – so the government can say it’s neither advocating nor poo-pooing renewables, it’s getting out of the way and letting retailers, some of whom are also generators, deliver the energy from whatever source they like, or can.
Canto: So they’re putting the onus on retailers. How so?
Jacinta: The Feds are saying retailers will have to make a certain amount of dispatchable power available, but there is one ridiculously modest stipulation – greenhouse emissions from the sector must be reduced by 26% by 2030. The sector can and must do much better than that. The electricity sector makes up about a third of emissions, and considering the slow movement on EVs and on emissions reductions generally, we’re unlikely to hold up our end of the Paris Agreement, considering the progressively increasing targets.
Canto: But that’s where they leave it up to the private sector. To go much further than their modest target. They would argue that they’re more interested in energy security.
Jacinta: They have a responsibility for providing security but not for reducing emissions? But it’s governments that signed up to Paris, not private enterprises. The experts are pointing this out with regard to other sectors. More government-driven vehicle emission standards, environmental building regulations, energy efficient industries and so forth.
Canto: And the Feds actually still have a renewable energy agency (ARENA), in spite of the former Abbott government’s attempt to scrap it, and a plan was announced last month to set up a ‘demand response’ trial, involving ARENA, AEMO (the energy market operator) and various retailers and other entities. This is about providing temporary supply during peak periods – do you have any more detail?
Jacinta: There’s a gloss on the demand response concept on a Feds website:
From Texas to Taiwan, demand response is commonly used overseas to avoid unplanned or involuntary outages, ease electricity price spikes and provide grid support services. In other countries, up to 15 per cent of peak demand is met with demand response.
Canto: So what exactly does it have to do with renewables?
Jacinta: Well get ready for a long story. It’s called demand response because it focuses on the play of demand rather than supply. It’s also called demand management, a better name I think. It’s partly about educating people about energy not being a finite commodity available at all times in equal measure…
Canto: Sounds like it’s more about energy conservation than about the type of energy being consumed.
Jacinta: That’s true. So on extreme temperature days, hot or cold – but mostly hot days in Australia – electricity demand can jump by 50% or so. To cope with these occasional demand surges we’ve traditionally built expensive gas-based generators that lie idle for most of the year. For reasons I’m not quite able to fathom, at such extreme demand times the ‘spot price’ for wholesale electricity goes through the roof – or more accurately it hits the ceiling, set by the National Energy Market at $14,000 per MWh. That’s just a bit more than the usual wholesale price, about $100/MWh. Demand management is an attempt to have agreements with large commercial/industrial users to reduce usage at certain times, or the agreements could be with energy retailers who then do deals with customers. Of course, bonuses could be handed out to compliant customers. The details of how this offsets peak demand usage and pricing are still a bit of a mystery to me, however.
capacitors, supercapacitors and electric vehicles
from the video ‘what are supercapacitors’
Jacinta: New developments in battery and capacitor technology are enough to make any newbie’s head spin.
Canto: So what’s a supercapacitor? Apart from being a super capacitor?
Jacinta: I don’t know but I need to find out fast because supercapacitors are about to be eclipsed by a new technology developed in Great Britain which they estimate as being ‘between 1,000 and 10,000-times more effective than current supercapacitors’.
Canto: Shite, they’ll have to think of a new name, or downgrade the others to ‘those devices formerly known as supercapacitors’. But then, I’ll believe this new tech when I see it.
Jacinta: Now now, let’s get on board, superdisruptive technology here we come. Current supercapacitors are called such because they can charge and discharge very quickly over large numbers of cycles, but their storage capacity is limited in comparison to batteries…
Canto: Apparently young Elon Musk predicted some time ago that supercapacitors would provide the next major breakthrough in EVs.
Jacinta: Clever he. But these ultra-high-energy density storage devices, these so-much-more-than-super-supercapacitors, could enable an EV to be charged to a 200 kilometre range in just a few seconds.
Canto: So can you give more detail on the technology?
Jacinta: The development is from a UK technology firm, Augmented Optics, and what I’m reading tells me that it’s all about ‘cross-linked gel electrolytes’ with ultra-high capacitance values which can combine with existing electrodes to create supercapacitors with greater energy storage than existing lithium-ion batteries. So if this technology works out, it will transform not only EVs but mobile devices, and really anything you care to mention, over a range of industries. Though everything I’ve read about this dates back to late last year, or reports on developments from then. Anyway, it’s all about the electrolyte material, which is some kind of highly conductive organic polymer.
Canto: Apparently the first supercapacitors were invented back in 1957. They store energy by means of static charge, and I’m not sure what that means…
Jacinta: We’ll have to do a post on static electricity.
Canto: In any case their energy density hasn’t been competitive with the latest batteries until now.
Jacinta: Yes it’s all been about energy density apparently. That’s one of the main reasons why the infernal combustion engine won out over the electric motor in the early days, and now the energy density race is being run between new-age supercapacitors and batteries.
Canto: So how are supercapacitors used today? I’ve heard that they’re useful in conjunction with regenerative braking, and I’ve also heard that there’s a bus that runs entirely on supercapacitors. How does that work?
Jacinta: Well back in early 2013 Mazda introduced a supercapacitor-based regen braking system in its Mazda 6. To quote more or less from this article by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), kinetic energy from deceleration is converted to electricity by the variable-voltage alternator and transmitted to a supercapacitor, from which it flows through a dc-dc converter to 12-V electrical components.
Canto: Oh right, now I get it…
Jacinta: We’ll have to do posts on alternators, direct current and alternating current. As for your bus story, yes, capabuses, as they’re called, are being used in Shanghai. They use supercapacitors, or ultracapacitors as they’re sometimes called, for onboard power storage, and this usage is likely to spread with the continuous move away from fossil fuels and with developments in supercaps, as I’ve heard them called. Of course, this is a hybrid technology, but I think they’ll be going fully electric soon enough.
Canto: Or not soon enough for a lot of us.
Jacinta: Apparently, with China’s dictators imposing stringent emission standards, electric buses, operating on power lines (we call them trams) became more common. Of course electricity may be generated by coal-fired power stations, and that’s a problem, but this fascinating article looking at the famous Melbourne tram network (run mainly on dirty brown coal) shows that with high occupancy rates the greenhouse footprint per person is way lower than for car users and their passengers. But the capabuses don’t use power lines, though they apparently run on tracks and charge regularly at recharge stops along the way. The technology is being adopted elsewhere too of course.
Canto: So let me return again to basics – what’s the difference between a capacitor and and a super-ultra-whatever-capacitor?
Jacinta: I think the difference is just in the capacitance. I’m inferring that because I’m hearing, on these videos, capacitors being talked about in terms of micro-farads (a farad, remember, being a unit of capacitance), whereas supercapacitors have ‘super capacitance’, i.e more energy storage capability. But I’ve just discovered a neat video which really helps in understanding all this, so I’m going to do a breakdown of it. First, it shows a range of supercapacitors, which look very much like batteries, the largest of which has a capacitance, as shown on the label, of 3000 farads. So, more super than your average capacitor. It also says 2.7 V DC, which I’m sure is also highly relevant. We’re first told that they’re often used in the energy recovery system of vehicles, and that they have a lower energy density (10 to 100 times less than the best Li-ion batteries), but they can deliver 10 to 100 times more power than a Li-ion battery.
Canto: You’ll be explaining that?
Jacinta: Yes, later. Another big difference is in charge-recharge cycles. A good rechargeable battery may manage a thousand charge and recharge cycles, while a supercap can be good for a million. And the narrator even gives a reason, which excites me – it’s because they function by the movement of ions rather than by chemical reactions as batteries do. I’ve seen that in the videos on capacitors, described in our earlier post. A capacitor has to be hooked up to a battery – a power source. So then he uses an analogy to show the difference between power and energy, and I’m hoping it’ll provide me with a long-lasting lightbulb moment. His analogy is a bucket with a hole. The amount of water the bucket can hold – the size of the bucket if you like – equates to the bucket’s energy capacity. The size of the hole determines the amount of power it can release. So with this in mind, a supercar is like a small bucket with a big hole, while a battery is more like a big bucket with a small hole.
Canto: So the key to a supercap is that it can provide a lot of power quickly, by discharging, then it has to be recharged. That might explain their use in those capabuses – I think.
Jacinta: Yes, for regenerative braking, for cordless power tools and for flash cameras, and also for brief peak power supplies. Now I’ve jumped to another video, which inter alia shows how a supercapacitor coin cell is made – I’m quite excited about all this new info I’m assimilating. A parallel plate capacitor is separated by a non-conducting dielectric, and its capacitance is directly proportional to the surface area of the plates and inversely proportional to the distance between them. Its longer life is largely due to the fact that no chemical reaction occurs between the two plates. Supercapacitors have an electrolyte between the plates rather than a dielectric…
Canto: What’s the difference?
Jacinta: A dielectric is an insulating material that causes polarisation in an electric field, but let’s not go into that now. Back to supercapacitors and the first video. It describes one containing two identical carbon-based high surface area electrodes with a paper-based separator between. They’re connected to aluminium current collectors on each side. Between the electrodes, positive and negative ions float in an electrolyte solution. That’s when the cell isn’t charged. In a fully charged cell, the ions attach to the positively and negatively charged electrodes (or terminals) according to the law of attraction. So, our video takes us through the steps of the charge-storage process. First we connect our positive and negative terminals to an energy source. At the negative electrode an electrical field is generated and the electrode becomes negatively charged, attracting positive ions and repelling negative ones. Simultaneously, the opposite is happening at the positive electrode. In each case the ‘counter-ions’ are said to adsorb to the surface of the electrode…
Canto: Adsorption is the adherence of ions – or atoms or molecules – to a surface.
Jacinta: So now there’s a strong electrical field which holds together the electrons from the electrode and the positive ions from the electrolyte. That’s basically where the potential energy is being stored. So now we come to the discharge part, where we remove electrons through the external surface, at the electrode-electrolyte interface we would have an excess of positive ions, therefore a positive ion is repelled in order to return the interface to a state of charge neutrality – that is, the negative charge and the positive charge are balanced. So to summarise from the video, supercapacitors aren’t a substitute for batteries. They’re suited to different applications, applications requiring high power, with moderate to low energy requirements (in cranes and lifts, for example). They can also be used as voltage support for high-energy devices, such as fuel cells and batteries.
Canto: What’s a fuel cell? Will we do a post on that?
Jacinta: Probably. The video mentions that Honda has used a bank of ultra capacitors in their FCX fuel-cell vehicle to protect the fuel cell (whatever that is) from rapid voltage fluctuations. The reliability of supercapacitors makes them particularly useful in applications that are described as maintenance-free, such as space travel and wind turbines. Mazda also uses them to capture waste energy in their i-Eloop energy recovery system as used on the Mazda 6 and the Mazda 3, which sounds like something worth investigating.
References (videos can be accessed from the links above)
http://www.hybridcars.com/supercapacitor-breakthrough-allows-electric-vehicle-charging-in-seconds/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercapacitor
http://articles.sae.org/11845/
https://www.ptua.org.au/myths/tram-emissions/
http://www.europlat.org/capabus-the-finest-advancement-for-electric-buses.htm
How will the super-duper Tesla battery work? And more on the price of electricity
Image: Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.
I received an email the other day from the Australia Insitute. I don’t know how that happened, I’ve never heard of the organisation. Apparently it’s Australia’s most influential progressive think-tank (self-described) and apparently I subscribed to it recently while in a barely conscious state. All good.
Anyway the topic was timely: ‘Rising Energy Bills: Blame Gas’.
In a very recent post I quoted from a few apparently reliable sources on the reason for South Australia’s very high electricity prices. Unfortunately there wasn’t too much agreement among them, though at least none of them blamed renewable energy. But neither did any of them blame gas, though one did point a finger at wholesale pricing. The Australia Institute’s email put it thus:
Yesterday, we released the latest Electricity Update of the National Energy Emissions Audit for July 2017. The report revealed a stunning correlation between domestic electricity prices and gas prices — particularly in South Australia — despite gas making up only 10 percent of electricity generation.
So this is a subject I need to return to – in my next post. This post will focus on batteries and storage.
Neoen, a French renewable energy company, is building a 315MW, 99 turbine wind farm near Jamestown in South Australia. Connected to this project will be an array of Tesla’s lithium ion Powerpack batteries. According to this ABC News article:
The array will be capable of an output of 100 megawatts (MW) of power at a time and the huge battery will be able to store 129 megawatt hours (MWh) of energy so, if used at full capacity, it would be able to provide its maximum output for more than an hour.
It will be a modular network, with each Powerpack about the size of a large fridge at 2.1 metres tall, 1.3m long and 0.8m wide. They weigh in at 1,200 kilograms each.
It will have just slightly more storage than the next biggest lithium battery, built by AES this year in southern California.
But Tesla’s 100 MW output would be more than three times larger than the AES battery and five times larger than anything Tesla has built previously.
I’m no electrochemist, but a nice scrutiny of these sentences identifies a clear distinction between output and storage. And the output of this planned battery is the pioneering aspect.
So here’s a very basic summary of how a rechargeable lithium ion battery works. Each battery (and they vary hugely in size) is made up of a number of cells, each a battery in itself. On opposite sides of the cell are conductive surfaces, aka current collectors, one of aluminium and the other of copper. Inside and joined to these surfaces are electrodes, the positive cathode and the negative anode. The cathode is made from a lithium metal oxide such as lithium cobalt oxide or lithium iron phosphate, which needs to have the purest, most uniform composition for maximum performance and longevity. The negative anode is made from graphite, a layered form of carbon. The layered structure allows the lithium ions (Li+) created by the current to be easily stored at and removed from the carbon surface. Between these electrodes, filling the cell, is an electrolyte fluid through which lithium ions flow from one electrode to the other, which charges and discharges the cell. Again the purity of this fluid is a vital factor (research is being done to come up with a form of solid electrolyte). Between the two electrodes is an insulating plastic separator, essential to keep the electrodes separate and prevent short-circuiting. This plastic membrane allows the lithium ions to pass through it. The battery is charged when the lithium ions have passed through the separator and become attached to and stored in the layered graphite of the anode. The battery is discharged by reversing the flow.
Lithium ion batteries are found not only in Tesla Powerpacks but generally in electric car batteries and many other devices such as my own iPhone and iPad. They’re lighter and have much less energy density than lead-acid batteries. The technology of lithium ion batteries is described in a number of useful online videos, of which the most comprehensive, I think, is a webinar from the American Chemistry Society (ACS), essentially an interview with Dee Strand, a lithium ion battery specialist and expert. Her talk also provides interesting ideas on how these types of batteries can be improved.
So a fully-charged cell has stored energy, and a discharging cell is producing output. There are variations in lithium ion battery technology, for example variations in the electrode materials, the electrolyte composition and the like, so we don’t know precisely what Tesla will be using for the South Australian battery system, but we have a fair idea.
In any case, there seems no obvious reason why this proven technology can’t be scaled up to meet the sort of need that was identified after last September’s state blackout. Now we just have to wait and see whether Musk will lose his bet regarding completion time come December.
Refs and info
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-07/what-is-tesla-big-sa-battery-and-how-will-it-work/8688992
Click to access AR-Lithium-Ion-Battery-Degradation-RandD-Mag-042214.pdf
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-07/sa-to-get-worlds-biggest-lithium-ion-battery/8687268
Just type in ‘lithium ion battery’ in youtube
What’s Weatherill’s plan for South Australia, and why do we have the highest power prices in the world? Oh, and I should mention Elon Musk here – might get me more hits
just a superhero pic to rope people in
I’ve written a few pieces on our electricity system here in SA, but I don’t really feel any wiser about it. Still, I’ll keep having a go.
We’ve become briefly famous because billionaire geek hero Elon Musk has promised to build a ginormous battery here. After we had our major blackout last September (for which we were again briefly famous), Musk tweeted or otherwise communicated that his Tesla company might be able to solve SA’s power problems. This brought on a few local geek-gasms, but we quickly forgot (or I did), not realising that our good government was working quietly behind the scenes to get Musk to commit to something real. In March this year, Musk was asked to submit a tender for the 100MW capacity battery, which is expected to be operational by the summer. He has recently won the tender, and has committed to constructing the battery in 100 days, at a cost of $50 million. If he’s unsuccessful within the time limit, we’ll get it for free.
There are many many South Australians who are very skeptical of this project, and the federal government is saying that the comparatively small capacity of the battery system will have minimal impact on the state’s ‘self-imposed’ problems. And yet – I’d be the first to say that I’m quite illiterate about this stuff, but if SA Premier Jay Weatherill’s claim is true that ‘battery storage is the future of our national energy market’, and if Musk’s company can build this facility quickly, then it’s surely possible that many batteries could be built like the one envisaged by Musk, each one bigger and cheaper than the last. Or have I just entered cloud cuckoo land? Isn’t that how technology tends to work?
In any case, the battery storage facility is designed to bring greater stability to the state’s power network, not to replace the system, so the comparisons made by Federal Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg are misleading, probably deliberately so. Frydenberg well knows, for example, that SA’s government has been working on other solutions too, effectively seeking to becoming independent of the eastern states in respect of its power system. In March, at the same time as he presented plans for Australia’s largest battery, Weatherill announced that a taxpayer-funded 250MW gas-fired power plant would be built. More recently, AGL, the State’s largest power producer and retailer, has announced plans to build a 210MW gas-fired generator on Torrens Island, upgrading its already-existing system. AGL’s plan is to use reciprocating engines, which executive general manager Doug Jackson has identified as best suited to the SA market because of their ‘flexible efficient and cost-effective synchronous generation capability’. I heartily agree. It’s noteworthy that the AGL plan was co-presented by its managing director Andy Vesey and the SA Premier. They were at pains to point out that the government plans and the AGL plan were not in competition. So it does seem that the state government has made significant strides in ensuring our energy security, in spite of much carping from the Feds as well as local critics – check out some of the very nasty naysaying in the comments section of local journalist Nick Harmsen’s articles on the subject (much of it about the use of lithium ion batteries, which I might blog about later).
It’s also interesting that Harmsen himself, in an article written four months ago, cast serious doubt on the Tesla project going ahead, because, as far as he knew, tenders were already closed on the battery storage or ‘dispatchable renewables’ plan, and there were already a number of viable options on the table. So either the Tesla offer, when it came (and maybe it got in under the deadline unbeknown to Harmsen), was way more impressive than others, or the Tesla-Musk brand has bedazzled Weatherill and his cronies. It’s probably a combo of the two. Whatever, this news is something of a blow to local rivals. What is fascinating, though is how much energetic rivalry, or competition, there actually is in the storage and dispatchables field, in spite of the general negativity of the Federal government. It seems our centrist PM Malcolm Turnbull is at odds with his own government about this.
So enough about the Tesla-Neoen deal, and associated issues, which are mounting too fast for me to keep up with right now. I want to focus on pricing for the rest of this piece, because I have no understanding of why SA is now paying the world’s highest domestic electricity prices, as the media keeps telling us.
According to this Sydney Morning Herald article from nearly two years ago, which of course I can’t vouch for, Australia’s electricity bills are made up of three components: wholesale and retail prices, based on supply and demand (39% of cost); the cost of poles and wires (53%); and the cost of environmental policies (8%). The trio can be simplified as market, network and environmental costs. Market and network costs vary from state to state. The biggest cost, the poles and wires, is borne by all Australian consumers (at least all on the grid), as a result of a massive $45 billion upgrade between 2009 and 2014, due to expectations of a continuing rise in demand. Instead there’s been a fall, partly due to domestic solar but in large measure because of much tighter and more environmental building standards nationwide as part of the building boom. The SMH article concludes, a little unexpectedly, that the continuing rise in prices can only be due to retail price hikes, at least in the eastern states, because supply is steady and network costs, though high, are also steady.
A more recent article (December 2016) argues that a rising wholesale price, due to the closure of coal-fired power stations in SA and Victoria and higher gas prices, is largely responsible. Retail prices are higher now than when the carbon tax was in place in 2013.
This even recenter article from late March announces an inquiry by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) into retail pricing of electricity, which unfortunately won’t be completed till June 30 2018, given its comprehensive nature. It also contains this telling titbit:
A report from the Grattan Institute released earlier in March found a decade of competition in the market had failed to deliver better deals for customers, with profit margins on electricity bills much higher than for many other industries.
However, another article published in March, and focusing on SA’s power prices in particular (it’s written by former SA essential services commissioner Richard Blandy), takes an opposing view:
Retailing costs are unlikely to be a source of rapidly rising electricity prices because they represent a small proportion of final prices to consumers and there is a high level of competition in this part of the electricity supply chain. Energy Watch shows that there are seven electricity retailers selling electricity to small businesses, and 12 electricity retailers selling electricity to households. Therefore, price rises at the retail level are likely to be cost-based.
Blandy’s article, which looks at transmission and distribution pricing, load shedding and the very complex issue of wholesale pricing and the National Energy Market (NEM), needs at least another blog post to do justice to. I’m thinking that I’ll have to read and write a lot more to make sense of it all.
Finally, the most recentest article of only a couple of weeks ago quotes Bruce Mountain, director of Carbon and Energy Markets, as saying that it’s not about renewables (SA isn’t much above the other states re pricing), it’s about weak government control over retailers (could there be collusion?). Meanwhile, politicians obfuscate, argue and try to score points about a costly energy system that’s failing Australian consumers.
Infographic from theconversation.com http://theconversation.com/south-australias-electricity-price-woes-are-more-due-to-gas-than-wind-62824
I’ll be concentrating a lot on this multifaceted topic – energy sources, storage, batteries, pricing, markets, investment and the like, in the near future. It exercises me and I want to educate myself further about it. Next, I’ll make an effort to find out more about, and analyse, the South Australian government’s six-point plan for our energy future.
References and more reading for masochists
http://www.smh.com.au/business/sunday-explainer-why-is-electricity-so-expensive-20150925-gjvdrj.html