Metals Tech

Last summer, one of the two chillers in the basement of Gere Library broke down, and for two months, higher temperatures and humidity were a problem for both humans and books.

“It was not a good thing. We did have plenty of comments from customers,” said Pat Leach, library system director.

This week, the air handler at the almost 50-year-old branch library in south Lincoln wasn’t working correctly.

Gere, which library lovers visited more than 300,000 times last year, is a poster child for an ambitious and complex program that will pay for improvements on 74 buildings, using energy savings over the next 15 years.

The $3.5 million in improvements for six library branch buildings and 68 buildings managed by the Parks and Recreation Department will include LED lighting in buildings, parking lots and swimming pools, as well as replacing heating and air-conditioning units and some pool pump motors.

Funding will come from tax and keno dollars, plus a $2.2 million, 15-year loan from Union Bank and Trust, using a Nebraska Energy Office loan program that reduces the interest rate.

The 1.95 percent interest rate is lower than the city can get through other financing options, including internal borrowing, according to Lynn Johnson, director of the Parks and Recreation Department.

Expected savings on energy costs and on reduced maintenance costs will pay for the loan in less than 15 years, according to energy savings audits on the projects.

The Lincoln City Council will hold public hearings on the library and parks projects at its Monday meeting, which begins at 5:30 p.m. The council is expected to take action on five resolutions related to the projects, including contracts with the two companies doing the work and the loan.

The almost $2.2 million library project will use about $1 million in keno, tax dollars and Lincoln Electric System rebates, along with a loan of $1.174 million. The project will include lighting, heating and air-conditioning systems at four branches and electrical distribution board replacement at Anderson and Gere libraries.

The Parks and Recreation Department project will use a more than $1 million loan and about $308,000 in tax dollars and LES rebates. The work will include replacement of some heating and cooling units, LED lighting upgrades and pool pump motors.

City staff will do much of the lighting work this winter, replacing about 3,200 bulbs or fixtures with LED lights, Johnson said.

The city will have contracts with two companies that did initial audits for the city, detailing the savings in energy costs and in reduced maintenance. The companies will guarantee the maximum cost for each project and the first-year energy cost savings.

Schneider Electric, a Lincoln-based company, is handling the library work and Ameresco Inc., headquartered in Maine, has the contract for the Parks and Recreation project.

The two companies have already completed research on what improvements the city should consider and identified energy and maintenance-related savings.

The parks projects will be funded using savings from energy costs, while the library funding is based on expected savings on energy costs and on reduced maintenance needs.

Because of that initial audit, Johnson said he has a detailed analysis of the energy-consuming infrastructure in the department buildings, including an inventory of the 3,200 lights and their ratings.

The process, using what are called Energy Savings Performance Contracts, or ESPC, provided the library system with an engineering analysis of the entire system, said Leach.

The project allows the library to replace old equipment in a coordinated way, before an emergency arises. And it will provide energy savings and energy sustainability, Leach said.

“As an administrator this is pretty exciting stuff,” she said.

“This gives us the expertise and the financial engine to allow these things to go forward,” she said.

The library project does not include any work at Bennett Martin, the main library in downtown Lincoln, since the library board is hoping to build a new central library in the future.

“It did not make sense to make investments in this building at this time,” Leach said.

Each of the projects have also been reviewed by the Nebraska Energy Office, which is providing a no-interest rate loan that reduces the interest rate on the total loan through Union Bank, according to Johnson.

Both projects will use some LES rebates as part of the funding.

Lincoln previously used this process — where the expected energy savings pay for the improvements — on the $12.2 million conversion of the city streetlights to LED lights.

Steve Tuckner admits he failed.

His goal: To build an “affordable” net-zero home.

So he picked an affordable neighborhood: St. Paul’s North End. Sold the spacious three-bedroom abode in Roseville where he lived for decades. Moved with his wife and two dogs into an apartment — and hired builders. That was over a year ago.

“Is what we did financially sensible? Hell, no. I’m gonna lose a ton of money on it. … We’re likely gonna die there, because we won’t get the cost back,” Tuckner admits. “I did it because I believe in it. What we did is on the bleeding edge of what you can do.”

Now, the 1000 block of Loeb Street will have a home worth three times the cost of anything next door, across the street or down the block. It’s 1,060 square feet, a single story with no basement — and all for the low, low cost of $400,000, not including the lot. It likely will be the North End’s first “net-zero” home.

“I was surprised when I got an address out of them,” said Ryan Stegora, an Apple Valley builder working as a consultant on the project. “All right, add the North End to the areas where there are high-performance homes.”

“Net zero” is energy-efficiency parlance for eating what it produces; maybe a little less. With a 4-kilowatt solar farm on the roof, 15½-inch-thick walls of poured concrete and foam, a 9-square-foot battery, high-performance air exchangers and a sealed plastic “smart vapor barrier,” Tuckner thinks it’ll be up for the job.

He — if not his wife, initially — got on the “net-zero” kick years ago, after visiting the renowned “House in the Woods” in North Hudson, Wis.: a spare-no-expense home built for more than $1 million.

That home had a symphony of bells and whistles. Solar panels that tracked the sun, weather-resistant exterior shades, wastewater heat recovery, you name it.

Hyundai sees a lot of potential in hydrogen fuel-cell technology. And it may find success with it by looking well past cars and SUVs—to other uses that could, as the company puts it, “transcend the transportation sector.”

With this week’s opening of a second plant making fuel-cell systems, in Chungju, South Korea, Hyundai’s Mobis unit will increase its annual production of fuel-cell systems from its current 3,000 annual units to 40,000 units by 2022.

The plan, called FCEV Vision 2030, highlights the parent company’s “commitment to accelerate the development of a hydrogen society.”

By 2030, Hyundai Motor Group aims to make 700,000 fuel-cell systems annually, of which 500,000 would be units for personal-use and commercial fuel-cell electric vehicles. That leaves 200,000 units for drones, vessels, and forklifts and other uses outside transportation such as power generation and energy storage systems.

That’s still a very small portion of what the company currently produces; in 2018 it expected 7.7 million worldwide vehicle sales across Hyundai and Kia.

To accomplish this plan, Hyundai established a dedicated division for fuel-cell business this month. Under the program, the Hyundai Motor Group and its suppliers plan to invest $6.8 billion to expand R&D operations and facilities, with an estimated 51,000 new jobs created.

Hyundai justifies the very steep growth curve by citing a McKinsey & Company study, pointing to an estimated global demand for up to 6.5 million fuel cell systems by 2030.

The 2019 Hyundai Nexo, which showcases the potential of a new generation of fuel-cell tech from the brand, with an estimated 380-mile range, will be available by sale or lease starting in January—albeit only in California, where a nascent commercial fueling infrastructure exists. That model is going to be the first test vehicle for a Level 4 automated-driving project with the autonomous-vehicle tech company Aurora.

Honda and GM continue to work on a next-generation fuel-cell system that will be produced in Michigan, and Toyota has confirmed that it’s looking to put the technology into more affordable, mass-market vehicles as well as commercial trucks and buses.

There’s another reason why Hyundai should be so bullish on fuel cells. The South Korean government is subsidizing a $2.3 billion plan to support various stages of the hydrogen fuel-cell development chain, including automakers, as well as 310 new hydrogen fueling stations.

Given the biggest limitation for fuel-cell technology in the U.S. today—a lack of hydrogen fueling infrastructure—aiming the growth of the technology toward commercial uses and very well-defined use cases could be a good plan to play on its strengths.

Most of the world’s electricity system was built when primary energy was relatively inexpensive. Grid reliability was assured by having excess generation capacity in the system with unidirectional electricity flow to consumers from centrally dispatched power plants. Investments in the electric system were made to meet increasing demand; not to fundamentally change the way the system works.

Moving to a smart grid infrastructure can help utilities to address some of the challenges that they are now striving to overcome.

Here’s a quick summary of four of those trends with their challenges:

1. Changing Supply:

Europe‘s significant increase in renewable generation has been a blessing for the global climate. The EU’s target for 2020 is 20% production from renewables. The good news is that some countries are pushing hard. For instance, Denmark has already gone well past 50% of power production generated by renewables, mainly wind power. However, unpredictable production creates intermittent supplies, since most green electrons are produced only when the wind is blowing or when the sun is shining. Usually, wind power production does not match up well with peak demand times. Therefore, either too much or not enough capacity is in the system. In addition, some renewable sources feed into a part of the system, the medium and low voltage grid, that today is not constantly monitored (unlike the high voltage transmission grid). Thus, inadequate information is available on the electricity that is being fed into those systems.

2. Changing demand patterns:

In the past, demand was stable and predictable. Due to variable energy costs and growing environmental concerns, customers have been changing their demand behavior.

Not only are unpredictable supply sources a challenge, but so too are the fluctuations on the demand side. As a consequence, it’s becoming more and more complex to maintain the electricity system’s reliability – the key ingredient in avoiding outages.

3. Regulation / Compliance:

Utilities must face up to the twin dilemma: addressing increasing energy demand while simultaneously reducing their overall carbon footprint. As governments across the globe have been imposing stricter restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions, this makes traditional generation sources like coal more expensive. Another example: the U.S. federal government now mandates cybersecurity compliance for critical infrastructure protection.

Many regulatory bodies are mandating security compliance for critical infrastructure protection. In the U.S., NERC-CIP provides specific requirements that mandate both physical and cybersecurity solutions. Consumer privacy and data protection will also drive security measures — all the way from homes to the utility’s own data centers. In addition, global substation automation standards (as detailed in both IEC61850 and IEEE1613) are driving adoption of new technologies within the substation itself.

4. New opportunities:

With an increase in the number of electric vehicles on the road, utilities are seeing the emergence of a huge new market. Since supply to the transportation sector is still dominated today by the oil and gas majors, the electric utilities are keen to find the lowest-cost and highest-margin opportunities to supplant them. One angle is to economically store electricity in assets/batteries across the network, to meet local demand surges. This is a tremendous opportunity to optimize the electricity system, especially in countries such Denmark, who must cope with unpredictable supplies like wind-power generating turbines.

Technology evolutions

Emerging systems make it possible to embed processing and digital communications on top of the analog power grid, with the resultant communications infrastructure capable of handling greater data volumes, and managing the greater data velocity. This enables it to become more advanced in several specific ways:

• A more observable grid. This means that utilities are coming closer to the point where they have complete awareness of grid state. It also means that they can more effectively and efficiently transport sensor data and control commands.
• A more controllable grid. This derives from the new ability to drive the grid to any desired state.
• A more automated grid. This provides utilities with the ability to adapt to rapidly changing conditions, and if necessary without human intervention.
• A more integrated grid. Connect siloed utility systems and siloed processes can deliver enhanced business benefits.

Utilities now benefit from the fact that growing numbers of private technology companies provide advanced communication equipment developed specifically for utility requirements. These are designed and developed to fit with core electrical equipment. Such privately developed equipment matches up with the required industry standards, and can be adjusted for specific conditions (e.g., comms-agnostic, depending on the specifics of the local environment).

Much attention inside the tech industry is now focused on both the transmission networks and substation networks. These networks are important because they reside within and between distribution and transmission substations and utility operation centers.  Such transmission and substation networks must carry a variety of different traffic types for a varied set of functions, including:

• operation and control communications from Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, to collect data on substation operations;
• communication between substations and control centers;
• remote workforce management;
• remote engineering access communications.

The best substation networks are designed with these three important characteristics in mind: redundancy; integrated security; scalability to support these multiple communication types.

The most advanced solutions available to utilities can help to reduce substation operating expenses by improving reliability and optimizing the integration of distributed energy resources. These new systems have some smart capabilities which include the following:

• 2-way communication between transmission-focused SCADA equipment and energy management systems (EMS) for grid monitoring and control.
• support for fault detection, isolation, and restoration, as well as proactive management and maintenance of grid infrastructure.
• compliance services, site security and network management.

Two parts to the smart grid are growing in important, even though they are not especially sexy or visible: networks that connect substations to control centers and to each other; and networks inside substations. In a smart grid environment, there is far more peer-to-peer communications at all levels than the utility’s old star models.

Operation centers are the central point for the analysis of operational data following into and through the smart grid. Applications residing in control centers perform a variety of functions, ranging from fault detection and fault isolation to maintenance planning and scheduling. Getting the right data from smart grid intelligent devices to the right applications quickly and accurately—and providing a response in near-real-time —is the core function of the best-designed operation center.

Emerging technologies and services aim to enable sophisticated data collection, analysis and response solutions for distribution automation and for demand response applications. The core capabilities integrated with the best systems include these:

• virtualized computing for SCADA, AMI distribution automation, energy management applications.
• application acceleration between operation centers and data center.
• operation center security and secure application hosting.

Smart grids are rapidly evolving toward systems that enable distributed intelligence. There is a latency hierarchy in a smart grid, such that some data must be consumed before it ever reaches a control center or data center.

The utility network and regional networks are the networks responsible for delivering the data between substation networks to central operations centers for analysis, control, and response. In order to be adequate to the challenges of our times, these networks must provide functionality in a manner which is secure, reliable, high performance, and customized — to meet the varying delivery and management requirements for the different types of data traffic flowing over it.

The Field Area Network (FAN) is the “last mile” in the power delivery system, which ends with the power consumer. The FAN connects consumer energy management systems to power utility substations. The FAN enables fault location, isolation and restoration; grid optimization; demand response; and management of distributed energy sources — to name just a few of its vital functions. Devices connected to the FAN include optimization equipment (distribution transformers, capacitor banks, voltage regulators); fault identification, isolation and restoration equipment (relays, switches, reclosers and RFIs); and workforce automation equipment (laptops, specialized device access equipment).

The big vision must be for us to use technology to transform how the world manages energy and environmental challenges, enabling an end-to-end, highly secure global smart grid. That vision is looking forward to a world where the following elements are present:

• Converging utility systems and processes work well, across all key elements of the grid, with the aim of increasing grid intelligence and grid efficiencies.
• Providing solutions using a highly secure platform which is based on open-standards.
• Delivering increased grid reliability, security, resiliency, and power quality.
• Enabling smart grids to become platforms for innovation.
• Making smart grid work well hinges on observability: the fast, reliable and secure exchange of data among all components, via pervasive sensing in real-time. This is measured in increasingly shorter durations, as short as 120th of a second.

Today’s electric utility companies have their hands full with myriad dilemmas: The grid is old and increasingly insecure, the traditional one-way broadcast model is outmoded, supply and demand patterns are changing, and utility companies are under regulatory pressure to address increasing energy demand much more efficiently. At the same time, consumers are demanding lower energy bills, more reliable service, better visibility into their usage patterns, and more choice about where their energy comes from.

• Regardless of geographic location, the strategy utility companies are rapidly turning to is the “smart grid”, an intelligent communications infrastructure that can efficiently integrate all supply and demand elements connected to the electric grid. Moving to a smart grid infrastructure can address many of the challenges that utility companies worldwide are striving to overcome, including:
• Inefficient and outdated grid infrastructure: Most of the world’s electricity system was built when primary energy was relatively inexpensive. Grid reliability was assured by having excess generation capacity in the system with unidirectional electricity flow to consumers from centrally dispatched power plants. Investments in the electric system were made to meet increasing demand; not to fundamentally change the way the system works.
• Unpredictable energy sources: When using renewable resources like wind and solar, electricity is produced only when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. Usually, renewable power production does not match the peak demand times; as such, it offers either too much or not enough capacity at any one time.
• Unpredictable demand: In the past, demand was very stable and predictable. Due to rising energy costs and growing environmental concerns, customers are changing their usage behavior, and this is resulting in greater demand fluctuations. As a consequence, it becomes more difficult to maintain reliability and avoid outages in the electricity system.

The framework for utility regulation, in use today, is more than 120 years old. This conceptual framework for utility regulation in use today is contained in a speech titled, “PUBLIC CONTROL AND PRIVATE OPERATION” (before the National Electric Light Association, now Edison Electric Institute), in Chicago, Illinois, on June 7, 1898. (This speech was delivered by Samuel Insull, the former business partner to Thomas Edison, and a leading utility executive of his time.)

The timing is excellent for an update of utility regulation frameworks, especially in light of the transformations now underway. Some governments and some customers are doing the right thing: actively encouraging and rewarding utilities which make smart grid investments. These same utilities are moving towards greater use of more efficient, more reliable and cleaner energy sources. That is, in fact, not only good for the utility and for its customers. It’s helping to ensure a more sustainable future for us all.

New York state regulators yesterday approved energy storage goals of 1,500 MW by 2025 and 3,000 MW by 2030, plus a strategy to reach them, including a $310 million incentive program.

The commission has been considering its energy strategy for several months and collecting recommendations from industry players that ranged from accelerating microgrids to supplementing wholesale market shortfalls.

The final strategy, spelled out in a 199-page decision, relies on a combination of competitive markets, incentives, and market reforms to overcome barriers to energy storage. Much of it comes from an energy storage roadmap issued by the commission’s staff in June.

The commission expects the $310 million incentive to accelerate the cost decline curve for energy storage by almost two years. The incentives also will cut the cost of meeting the 1,500 MW target by $200 million and the 3,000 MW target by $400 million, according to the decision.

Gregg Sayer, a member of the commission, said during yesterday’s meeting that the incentive will help correct the “chicken and egg problem” energy storage faces. While energy storage will ultimately reduce energy costs “it is not immediately commercially feasible to expect the utilties or private market to build and install it. It’s just a little bit too expensive.”

More details about the incentive will be available when the New York State Energy and Development Authority (NYSERDA) puts forward a plan in 60 days.

Utilities to issue energy storage RFPs in 2019

The commission also ordered that utilities issue annual solicitations for bulk energy storage beginning in 2019. Competitive companies will develop and own the energy storage while utilities will manage it, giving them experience acting in a new role as distributed energy platform providers.

Consolidated Edison must seek 300 MW of energy storage and other utilities in the state 10 MW each. Utility plans for the solicitations are due to the commission within 60 days.

Regulators will allow the utilities to recover the contract costs by spreading them among all ratepayers.

The commission ordered:

• Utility solicitations for dynamic load management resources, under terms of at least three to five years, beginning in summer 2020
• Creation of new earnings adjustment mechanisms to encourage utility use of storage to improve system efficiency, reduce peak load and improve load factors
• Utility ownership of energy storage only when the market fails to produce needed resources
• Identification by utilities of property suitable for non-wires alternatives – and its value – to help competitive companies in NWA bidding

The commission postponed until next year some complex rate issues — such as delivery service costs for discharging and charging energy storage. Instead, the rate issues will be considered within another proceeding that looks at standby and buyback rates and at value stacking distributed energy resources. (Matter 17-01277.)

In a separate decision Thursday, the commission also okayed new energy efficiency targets for utilities. The targets are expected to reduce the state’s energy consumption by the equivalent of fueling and powering 1.8 million homes.

Cuomo takes shot at Trump administration

In praising the commission’s votes, Gov. Andrew Cuomo took a shot at the Trump administration’s lack of action on climate change.

“As the federal government continues to ignore the real and imminent dangers of climate change, New York is aggressively pursuing clean energy alternatives to protect our environment and conserve resources,” Cuomo said. “These unprecedented energy efficiency and energy storage targets will set a standard for the rest of the nation to follow, while supporting and creating jobs in these cutting-edge renewable industries.”

 

Argonne chemists have identified a new catalyst that maximizes the effectiveness of platinum. Platinum—which offers unrivaled activity and stability for electrochemical reactions, such as the conversion of hydrogen and oxygen into water and electricity in fuel cells—is both scarce and expensive. Scientists are searching for alternative practical fuel cell catalysts that use far less of the costly precious metal.

In new research from the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, published in Science, scientists have identified a new catalyst that uses only about a quarter as much platinum as current technology by maximizing the effectiveness of the available platinum.

Achieving high catalytic performance with the lowest amount of platinum is critical in fuel cell cost reduction. We describe a method of preparing highly active yet stable electrocatalysts containing ultralow Pt content using Co or Co/Zn zeolitic imidazolate frameworks as precursors. Synergistic catalysis between strained Pt-Co core-shell nanoparticles over a platinum-group-metal-free (PGM-free) catalytic substrate led to excellent fuel cell performance under 1 atmosphere of O2 or air at both high voltage and high current domains. Two catalysts achieved the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) mass activities of 1.08 A mg_Pt⁻¹/1.77 A mg_Pt⁻¹ and retained 64%/15% of initial values after 30,000 voltage cycles in fuel cell.

—Chong et al.