Go Go Gadget: Robotic Crawler Rides Up 300-Foot Poles to Inspect Wind Turbine Blades

GE has a promotional article on the use of robots in maintaining wind turbines - Go Go Gadget: Robotic Crawler Rides Up 300-Foot Poles to Inspect Wind Turbine Blades.

checking machinery propped 300 feet high and buffeted by the weather can be tricky. Take wind turbines. An inspector in the field must brake the turbine, rotate the blades, and inspect and photograph any potential defects through a telescope. The process can take up to four hours.

Engineers at GE’s Global Research Center tried something different. They partnered with a New York robotics company called International Climbing Machines (ICM) that developed a remote-controlled wall climbing robot, and strapped a wireless high-definition video camera to its back. The device can scale vertical, 300-foot high steel turbine poles in minutes, photograph turbine blades, and beam the results back to earth.

Read More

Your E-Book Is Reading You

The WSJ has an article on the data mining possibilities created by ebooks - Your E-Book Is Reading You.

In the past, publishers and authors had no way of knowing what happens when a reader sits down with a book. Does the reader quit after three pages, or finish it in a single sitting? Do most readers skip over the introduction, or read it closely, underlining passages and scrawling notes in the margins? Now, e-books are providing a glimpse into the story behind the sales figures, revealing not only how many people buy particular books, but how intensely they read them.

For centuries, reading has largely been a solitary and private act, an intimate exchange between the reader and the words on the page. But the rise of digital books has prompted a profound shift in the way we read, transforming the activity into something measurable and quasi-public.

The major new players in e-book publishing—Amazon, Apple and Google—can easily track how far readers are getting in books, how long they spend reading them and which search terms they use to find books. Book apps for tablets like the iPad, Kindle Fire and Nook record how many times readers open the app and how much time they spend reading. Retailers and some publishers are beginning to sift through the data, gaining unprecedented insight into how people engage with books.

Read More

This US summer is 'what global warming looks like'

AP has a look at the intensifying drought in the western US - This US summer is 'what global warming looks like'.

If you want a glimpse of some of the worst of global warming, scientists suggest taking a look at U.S. weather in recent weeks.

Horrendous wildfires. Oppressive heat waves. Devastating droughts. Flooding from giant deluges. And a powerful freak wind storm called a derecho.

These are the kinds of extremes climate scientists have predicted will come with climate change, although it's far too early to say that is the cause. Nor will they say global warming is the reason 3,215 daily high temperature records were set in the month of June.

Scientifically linking individual weather events to climate change takes intensive study, complicated mathematics, computer models and lots of time. Sometimes it isn't caused by global warming. Weather is always variable; freak things happen.

And this weather has been local. Europe, Asia and Africa aren't having similar disasters now, although they've had their own extreme events in recent years.

But since at least 1988, climate scientists have warned that climate change would bring, in general, increased heat waves, more droughts, more sudden downpours, more widespread wildfires and worsening storms. In the United States, those extremes are happening here and now.

So far this year, more than 2.1 million acres have burned in wildfires, more than 113 million people in the U.S. were in areas under extreme heat advisories last Friday, two-thirds of the country is experiencing drought, and earlier in June, deluges flooded Minnesota and Florida.

"This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level," said Jonathan Overpeck, professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona. "The extra heat increases the odds of worse heat waves, droughts, storms and wildfire. This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about."

Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in fire-charred Colorado, said these are the very record-breaking conditions he has said would happen, but many people wouldn't listen. So it's I told-you-so time, he said.

Read More

It’s time to redesign the world’s energy markets

Giles Parkinson at ReNewEconomy has a call to redesign the way energy markets work to handle the shift to renewable energy - It’s time to redesign the world’s energy markets.

The path from point A to point B in the de-carbonisation of the world’s electricity markets is looking more problematic by the day. Even as more people can see what the destination looks like, few are sure of the best path to get there.

More and more reports are being produced that demonstrate how the world’s biggest economies can be powered by renewable energy sources – essentially the wind and the sun. The EU has done its own scenario planning, as has the International Energy Agency and numerous other institutions and think-tanks, including Australia’s UNSW, the Melbourne Energy Institute, and Beyond Zero Emissions. The US-based National Renewable Energy Laboratory this week released a report showing how the world’s biggest economy could be powered 80 per cent by renewables by 2050. But the problem is how to manage that transition.

Most studies, such as the IEA’s, Desertec’s and NREL’s, talk of a “new paradigm” in energy markets. But it’s not just a new way of thinking. Some utilities who operate in these markets are more prosaic – fearing that these markets are effectively defunct because renewables redefine the rules on which these markets were built. Or, at least, they displace those that were previously favoured.

This is in reference to the merit order effect, which we have documented on numerous occasions, and which is now entering the broad lexicon of policy decision-making.

Australian utilities have a particular interest – although the merit order has impacted revenue and profits to a lesser extent than in Germany, the sort of penetration that is being envisaged by the world’s largest economies – and which will be demanded by consumers who can see that rooftop solar is a cheaper option that grid-connected power – could challenge, or even ruin, the business models of the incumbent fossil fuel generators.

In short, they are about to go through the same sort of revolution that is being experienced by the media industry disrupted by online publications. And no-one is too sure how to react, other than assuming and implementing a massive upheaval.

The German government – which has an ambitious renewables program to fill the gap left by nuclear – has recognized the issue, and called emergency talks to discuss what regulatory initiatives could be adopted to ensure that enough capacity remains in place to manage that transition.

This week Stadtwerke Leipzig, a local utility, noted that renewable energy is lowering power prices, but in doing so has left the country with a market whose design is no longer effective.

“As long as renewables have zero margin costs, the market design we have doesn’t work,” Jens Teresniak, team manager for business development and market analysis at Stadtwerke Leipzig, said in an interview in with Bloomberg. He said capacity markets, that allow utilities to fix prices for guaranteed backup power supply in advance will support margins for gas and coal electricity plants as renewables output rises, and could be the solution.

This is now being openly discussed among German policy makers – because major power producers are refusing to build new gas plant without it. It is even being discussed in Australia, although some wonder if a system that guarantees payment to generators whether they are producing or not, can be the most effective mechanism.

Germany electricity prices have fallen substantially and fell 18 per cent to 43.49 euros ($54.36) a megawatt-hour in the first five months of this year compared to last year, according to data from European Energy Exchange. Australian wholesale prices are also at record lows, hit by the impact of renewables, and lower demand.

“Renewables have shifted the merit order and now it’s like we have two different markets, one for renewables with 20 years’ guaranteed FIT, and one competitive for conventional power plants,” Thorsten Korner, the head of energy trading at Stadtwerke, told Bloomberg. “We have to think about integrating renewables and how we will organize 80 percent renewables on the grid by 2050.”

Meanwhile, the NREL study, a collaboration of 100 contributors from 35 organisations, laboratories, NGOs, corporates and universities, is being billed as the most comprehensive analysis yet undertaken of high-penetration renewable electricity in the US.

The bottom line conclusion was that it was possible, though challenging.

“Renewable electricity generation from technologies that are commercially available today, in combination with a portfolio of flexible electric system supply- and demand-side options, is more than adequate to supply 80 percent of total US electricity generation in 2050, while meeting electricity demand on an hourly basis in every region of the United States,” it said.

However, new sources from grid flexibility would be needed to manage the daily fluctuations from solar and wind generation, and this needed to come from a suite of supply- and demand-side options, including flexible conventional generation, grid storage, new transmission, more responsive loads, and changes in power system operations.

NREL estimates such a scenario would result in average annual retail electricity price increases of 0.8 per cen to 1.2 per cent – compared to around 0.3 per cent on the baseline scenario. But tis was based on technology costs estimated in 2010. Solar PV is already half its price then, and the costs are likely to be significantly lower than forecast.

The bottom line, however, is the need for a complete transformation of the current electricity system – including generation, transmission, and markets.

“This transformation, involving every element of the grid, from system planning through operation, would need to ensure adequate planning and operating reserves, increased flexibility of the electric system, and expanded multi-state transmission infrastructure,” it said. “And it would likely rely on the development and adoption of technology advances, new operating procedures, and evolved business models, market rules, and regulatory regimes.”

It is these institutional challenges that are among the biggest barriers to a decarbonised electricity supply. A lot more so than technology and cost.

Read More

Printcrime - Capitalists Who Fear Change

The Daily Reckoning has an article on what Cory Doctorow presciently dubbed "Printcrime" a few years ago - Capitalists Who Fear Change.

Digital technology is reinventing our whole world, in service of you and me. It's free enterprise on steroids. It's bypassing the gatekeepers and empowering each of us to invent our own civilization for ourselves, according to our own specifications.

The promise of the future is nothing short of spectacular - provided that those who lack the imagination to see the potential here don't get their way. Sadly, but predictably, some of the biggest barriers to a bright future are capitalists themselves who fear the future.

A good example is the current hysteria over 3-D printing. This technology has moved with incredible speed from the realm of science fiction to the real world, seemingly in a matter of months. You can get such printers today for as low as $400. These printers allow objects to be transported digitally and literally printed into existence right before your very eyes.

It's like a miracle! It could change everything we think we know about the transport of physical objects. Rather than sending crates and boats around the world, in the future, we will send only lightweight digits. The potential for bypassing monopolies and entrenched interests is spectacular.

Here is what Andrew Myers reported in Wired magazine last week:

"Last winter, Thomas Valenty bought a MakerBot - an inexpensive 3-D printer that lets you quickly create plastic objects. His brother had some Imperial Guards from the tabletop game Warhammer, so Valenty decided to design a couple of his own Warhammer-style figurines: a two-legged war mecha and a tank. "He tweaked the designs for a week until he was happy. 'I put a lot of work into them,' he says. Then he posted the files for free downloading on Thingiverse, a site that lets you share instructions for printing 3-D objects. Soon other fans were outputting their own copies.

"Until the lawyers showed up.

"Games Workshop, the U.K.-based firm that makes Warhammer, noticed Valenty's work and sent Thingiverse a takedown notice, citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Thingiverse removed the files, and Valenty suddenly became an unwilling combatant in the next digital war: the fight over copying physical objects."

There we have it. The American Chamber of Commerce - the supposed defender of free enterprise - is in a meltdown panic about new technology, determined to either crush 3-D printing in its crib or at least to make sure it doesn't grow past its toddler period.

In the 1940s, Joseph Schumpeter said that the capitalists would ultimately destroy capitalism by insisting that their existing profitability models perpetuate themselves in the face of change. He said that the capitalist class would eventually lose its taste for innovation and insist on government rules that brought it to an end, in the interest of protecting business elites.

Read More

The Great German Energy Experiment

Technology Review has a look at Germany's quest to move to 100% renewable energy - The Great German Energy Experiment.

Along a rural road in the western German state of North Rhine–Westphalia lives a farmer named Norbert Leurs. An affable 36-year-old with callused hands, he has two young children and until recently pursued an unremarkable line of work: raising potatoes and pigs. But his newest businesses point to an extraordinary shift in the energy policies of Europe's largest economy. In 2003, a small wind company erected a 70-meter turbine, one of some 22,000 in hundreds of wind farms dotting the German countryside, on a piece of Leurs's potato patch. Leurs gets a 6 percent cut of the electricity sales, which comes to about $9,500 a year. He's considering adding two or three more turbines, each twice as tall as the first.

The profits from those turbines are modest next to what he stands to make on solar panels. In 2005 Leurs learned that the government was requiring the local utility to pay high prices for rooftop solar power. He took out loans, and in stages over the next seven years, he covered his piggery, barn, and house with solar panels—never mind that the skies are often gray and his roofs aren't all optimally oriented. From the resulting 690-kilowatt installation he now collects $280,000 a year, and he expects over $2 million in profits after he pays off his loans.

Stories like Leurs's help explain how Germany was able to produce 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources in 2011, up from 6 percent in 2000. Germany has guaranteed high prices for wind, solar, biomass, and hydroelectric power, tacking the costs onto electric bills. And players like Leurs and the small power company that built his turbine have installed off-the-shelf technology and locked in profits. For them, it has been remarkably easy being green.

What's coming next won't be so easy. In 2010, the German government declared that it would undertake what has popularly come to be called an Energiewende—an energy turn, or energy revolution. This switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy is the most ambitious ever attempted by a heavily industrialized country: it aims to cut greenhouse-gas emissions 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020, and 80 percent by midcentury. The goal was challenging, but it was made somewhat easier by the fact that Germany already generated more than 20 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, which produces almost no greenhouse gases. Then last year, responding to public concern over the post-tsunami nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan, Chancellor Angela Merkel ordered the eight oldest German nuclear plants shut down right away. A few months later, the government finalized a plan to shut the remaining nine by 2022. Now the Energiewende includes a turn away from Germany's biggest source of low-­carbon electricity.

Germany has set itself up for a grand experiment that could have repercussions for all of Europe, which depends heavily on German economic strength. The country must build and use renewable energy technologies at unprecedented scales, at enormous but uncertain cost, while reducing energy use. ...

Despite the costs, Germany could greatly benefit from its grand experiment. In the past decade, the country has nurtured not only wind and solar power but less-­heralded energy technologies such as management software and efficient industrial processes. Taken together, these "green" technologies have created an export industry that's worth $12 billion—and is poised for still more growth, according to Miranda Schreurs, director of the Environmental Policy Research Center at the Berlin Free University. Government policies could provide further incentives to develop and deploy new technologies. "That is know-how that you can sell," Schreurs says. "The way for Germany to compete in the long run is to become the most energy-efficient and resource-efficient market, and to expand on an export market in the process."

If Germany succeeds in making the transition, it could provide a workable blueprint for other industrial nations, many of which are also likely to face pressures to transform their energy consumption. "This Energiewende is being watched very closely. If it works in Germany, it will be a template for other countries," says Graham Weale, chief economist at RWE, which is grappling with how to shut its nuclear power plants while keeping the lights on.

Read More

2012 Global Fuel Supply Still Flat

Stuart at Early Warning has a look at global oil production trends - 2012 Global Fuel Supply Still Flat.

I seem to be the only person paying much attention to this, but I still think it's significant. May figures for global liquid fuel supply are out from OPEC and the IEA and they continue to show that global supply has increased very little since January (in contrast to the very strong increases in the second half of 2011).

Other things being equal, we would expect this to lead to rising prices. Instead, prices have been weak/falling as a result of Eurozone fears. The fears about the eurozone are legitimate, but still, at present the global economy has got to be growing, if a little weaker than normal. Only Europe is actually contracting at present and that mildly. Thus, if the fears do not translate into much more pronounced global contraction in reality fairly soon, oil prices could jump up quite a bit. On the other hand, of course, if Europe does turn into a full-blown financial crisis then they could fall further.

There is a strong Schrodinger quality to the oil markets at present: prices are a superposition of the state in which Europe turns into a major global financial crisis, and the state in which it doesn't. I wonder how long before the measurement is made?

Stuart also has a look at oil production in Iraq and some of the dodgy reporting of production trends- Is "Soaring" the Right Word Here?.

Ten days or so ago, I posted the graph above under the headline "Sharp Uptick in Iraqi Production". I chose my words carefully - "uptick" to indicate that this was a movement upward of the same general order of magnitude as other recent movements in the time series, and "sharp" to emphasize that, as upticks in Iraqi production go, this was a somewhat larger and faster one than has been typical (but not, in my judgement, so great as to make the use of "uptick" misleading).

Yesterday, the New York Times decided to report on the same development under the headline "Oil Output Soars as Iraq Retools":

BAGHDAD — Despite sectarian bombings and political gridlock, Iraq’s crude oil production is soaring, providing a singular bright spot for the nation’s future and relief for global oil markets as the West tightens sanctions on Iranian exports. ...

I don't object to the graphic. Nor of course do I disagree that Iraq's production has increased and is likely to increase further (I've been covering this for a long time).

But I do really question whether the sober grey-lady paper-of-record should refer to an increase of about 300kbd above the level of last fall as "soaring" in the present tense. I don't think so. I think "soaring" carries a strong connotation of already being way up in the air, or ascending very materially and rapidly. I don't think 300kbd merits that term. I think, if we wanted to use a flight metaphor, we might reasonably say "has begun to take off" or even "looks set to soar". But I think the use of "soaring" in the present tense is an exaggeration. I think this fits in a long-standing pattern at the New York Times of distorted coverage in which positive oil market developments are over-hyped while negative ones are minimized.

Read More