Metals Tech

Taking place in just over two weeks, this year’s Secret Solstice will cement itself as one of the world’s greenest festivals. Event organisers have put in place a series of environmentally friendly measures for 2018, the biggest being the use of 100% geothermal energy to power the festival.

Moving away from a reliance on fossil fuel generators, the festival will instead tap into Iceland’s National Grid, which turns water heated by molten rock under the Earth’s surface into geothermal energy. The festival will also join this year’s trend and enact a total ban of plastic straws on-site to cut its impact on the environment.

This year will also see the return of the festival’s partnership with dance music live streaming video service Be-At.TV. The platform will stream select DJ sets from the HEL stage as well as Lee Burridge’s All Day I Dream set on 22 June. Viewers will be able to watch via mobile, desktop or smart television anywhere in the world in high definition audio and video. Fans looking to catch more of the festival can also find J Hus’ set on Rinse. FM on 24 June.

As well as its new green initiatives, the festival will also introduce its first Red Bull silent disco and the use of RFID bands. Additionally, for the first time in the festival’s five year history, the event will fall during the FIFA World Cup. Fans wishing to keep up with the score will be able to attend its special live screening party of Iceland’s match against Nigeria.

On top of being one of the world’s greenest festivals, Secret Solstice also stands out as being one of the world’s most luxurious – for a price. This year will see the return of the highly prized $1 million ticket, which offers six festival goers private jet travel from anywhere on the planet, exclusive parties and luxury accommodation.

Jasmin Day is pregnant and when her girl or boy is born later this year—she’s keeping the gender a surprise—her baby will become the first child ever born in Babcock Ranch, Fla.

“Almost all the boxes are undone,” she says while stepping over the just delivered new bed. She, husband Josh, and little kids, Judson and Elliot, just moved into their new house and this brand new community – dubbed the city of the future.

The young couple from Memphis, Tenn. could not be happier.

“To be able to be a part of a community of everyone that cares,” Josh Day said, “and wants that for them, not only for themselves but also for their children and their grandchildren, to have it be a more clean Earth whenever our children are older.”

His wife added: “I think we’re pretty all in! We live here. We work here.”

Babcock Ranch, near Fort Myers on state’s west coast, was developed from the beginning with a massive solar power farm generating 100 percent of the electric needs. About 350,000 photovoltaic solar panels stretch across a swath of land the size of 200 football fields.

When developer Syd Kitson, a former NFL lineman with the Dallas Cowboys and Green Bay Packers, bought the 17,000-acre property, it was all old mining and farmland.

It’s now the country’s first, fully solar city, with a very low carbon footprint, a soon-to-open school, electric shuttles that will eventually be driverless, a cute town square with shops and an emphasis on the environment and preservation.

Where most developers would build and sell as many homes as possible, for greater profit, Kitson’s vision from the beginning was preserving most of the open space, now encompassing several lakes and 50 miles of bike trails.

The homes run from $190,000 to about $499,000. Residents can work in the town, but are not required to do so.

The fully completed footprint will eventually be 19,500 homes.

“We think about the way we develop differently…. It’s the most environmentally responsible, the most sustainable new town that’s ever been developed,” Kitson said. “And, it’s the first solar-powered town in America. And we’re very proud of that.”

In January, the first two people moved in. Now, there are 150 homes under contract with an expectation that will there will be 250 families moved in by December. Eight developers are now building homes. The vision is a unique creation of a 45,000-person small city.

But first came the enormous solar farm. Kitson gave the land to Florida Power & Light for free, which then spent more than $100,000,000 installing all the panels, wires and storage batteries. That solar-generated power now is shared throughout FPL’s grid, as Babcock Ranch’s demand, at this point, remains very small.

John Woolschlager, an urban planning professor at nearby Florida Gulf Coast University, said all cities can ultimately follow Babcock Ranch’s model, but it will take years. Babcock Ranch’s huge advantage was that it’s being built from scratch with the self-sustainability and pro-environment philosophy on the ground first.

“I think, also, if you look to the distant future, it’s going to be a necessity,” Woolschlager said. “If we want to have a good life in the future, we have to think more sustainability, because if we don’t, we’re going to run out of energy, run out of water and run out of resources.”

For Josh Day, he’s landed a physical therapy job in the town square’s Life Wellness Center. So, if he doesn’t bike to work and home, he can just ride a solar powered, electric shuttle, in a town which – for now – has no traffic nor rush hours.

Sysco Corp., the Houston-based food distribution company, signed a 10- year renewable energy agreement with NRG Energy to build three solar installations that are expected to supply about 10 percent of Sysco’s electricity use nationwide.

The installations, known as solar gardens, will include one near Houston and two near Dallas. They will have the capacity to generate 25 megawatts of power, enough to meet most of Sysco’s energy needs in Texas, according to the company. The solar sites are expected to reduce about 37,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year, which is about like taking 7,000 cars off the road.

At a recent solar energy conference in Minneapolis, attendees unwound at happy hour tasting free pints of a local honey-based India Pale Ale called “Solarama Crush.” Minnesota-based 56 Brewing makes the smooth IPA using honey from hives located on solar farms outside the Twin Cities.

Honey producers Travis and Chiara Bolton keep bees at three solar farms where developers seeded native plants underneath and around panels. “The advantage to these sites is that they are intentionally planted for pollinators,” says Travis Bolton. “At these sites they’re really trying to get them back to a native prairie, and that’s a benefit to us.”

Native plants have replaced turfgrass and gravel as the go-to bedding for solar gardens in Minnesota, a result of a 2016 state standard that outlines how developers can create pollinator-friendly environments. More than half of the 4,000 acres (1,600 hectares) of solar farms built in 2016 and 2017 feature native plants that not only benefit pollinators but also beautify the site.

Although Minnesota may be in the vanguard of encouraging solar farm developers to grow native plants, it is far from the only place studying how solar farms can harvest more than just energy. Universities in the United States, Germany and elsewhere are testing the concept of “dual use farming,” as some advocates call it, where crops grow below canopies of solar panels. They are finding they grow just fine—and, in some cases, better than crops in full sun.

ALL KINDS OF BENEFITS

Adding plants to solar farms offers all kinds of benefits to the facilities’ primary aim of reducing carbon emissions and expanding renewable energy. “Solar development is happening on a massive scale as lands are being converted from agricultural land or unused land into solar projects,” says Jordan Macknick, energy-water-land lead analyst with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), which funds research on the impact of native and crop plants grown in solar farms. “That represents an amazing opportunity to improve our agriculture and improve our food security while developing energy at the same time.”

Adding plants to solar farms offers all kinds of benefits to the facilities’ primary aim of reducing carbon emissions and expanding renewable energy. And native and crop vegetation can help improve the health of pollinators, which are threatened by habitat loss, pesticide poisoning, poor nutrition, disease, decreased genetic diversity and a host of other factors. As a result, managed honeybee colonies used for honey production declined from 5.7 million in the 1940s to around 2.7 million today. Pollinators have an enormous impact on the economy, too, by annually contributing US$24 billion to the nation’s economy.

With more land being devoted to solar energy production, the idea of making those acres pollinator friendly seems to make ecological and economic sense. “Incorporating habitat into these solar farms across the nation is a good way to promote and protect pollinator health,” says Val Dolcini, president and CEO of the San Francisco–based Pollinator Partnership, a non-profit organization promoting pollinator environments.

Under-panel native plants benefit not just their immediate solar farm surroundings but nearby cropland. Lee Walston, an ecologist at Argonne National Laboratory, says pollinating insects roam beyond solar installations to other agricultural fields, where they help increase production. Native plantings offer refuge for declining species such as monarch butterflies and rusty patched bumblebees while serving the additional purpose of controlling stormwater and erosion, he adds.

Native gardens and vegetables also offer an aesthetic benefit having nothing to do with panels or agricultural production, advocates say. They offer a more colorful and pleasing visual tapestry rather than the monolithic green of turf grass or the gray of gravel, a feature not to be underestimated at a time when some communities seek to stop solar garden expansion due in part to the uniform monotony of endless rows of panels.

NREL-funded research found growing native plants could reduce land acquisition costs, reduce weed control costs, slow panel degradation and slice permitting charges.

PILOT PROJECTS

Pilot projects in Massachusetts, Arizona, Germany, China, Croatia, Italy, Japan and France look encouraging for mixing crops with solar panels, referred to as “dual use” farms because they offer both agricultural and electrical production. “So far, the pilots have been extremely successful in showing that you can grow crops and make electricity at the same time,” Macknick says.

A dual-use farm operated by the University of Massachusetts–Amherst grows a variety of plants—peppers, beans, cilantro, tomatoes, swiss chard, kale—below solar panels elevated roughly 7.5 to 9 feet (3 meters) or more above ground to allow for easier harvesting mainly by hand. Project researchers have found that 1- to 1.2-meter (3- to 4-foot) gaps between panel clusters led to crop yields almost the same as what they would have been in full sun sites.

One of the first concepts for mixing solar and agriculture, dubbed “agrophotovoltaics” (APV), was developed more than three decades ago by physicist Adolf Goetzberger. The research institute Goetzberger created—the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems—finally got around to building its own dual-use farm on one-third of a hectare (just over three-quarters of an acre) at an existing farm cooperative a few years ago. The institute elevated 720 solar panels high enough for farm machinery to harvest plants underneath and nearby, according to a 2017 press release.

The researchers planted wheat, potatoes, celeriac and clover grass in the open and under the panels and compared the yields. Solar shading decreased production 5.3 percent to 19 percent. Yet electricity from the panels, which capture both indirect and direct light, was used to power a crop processing plant and electric farm machinery, offsetting those costs and increasing land use efficiency by 60 percent.

While the farm made a profit, the research team seemed a bit wary of claiming the approach could work everywhere at any scale. Project manager Stephan Schindele said in the press release that “in order to provide the necessary proof-of-concept before market entry, we need to compare further techno-economical applications of APV, demonstrate the transferability to other regional areas and also realize larger systems.”

Similarly, agriculture faculty members at the Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek in Croatia grow shade-happy organic vegetables beneath solar canopies on a local farm operated partly by faculty members. The energy generated goes to power the farm’s irrigation system and farm machinery. In Austria, an entrepreneur created a system similar to APV but using fewer stationary poles by placing panels on a cable infrastructure in an effort to reduce costs and potential accidents involving farm machinery. APV systems are being tested in another part of Germany and in several other countries.

Greg Barron-Gafford, associate professor in the School of Geography and Development at the University of Arizona, has worked on a solar “agrivoltaic” pilot project—basically, the American version of APV—for two years. Tucson public schools with existing solar canopies are being used, as well as the university’s Biosphere 2 research and public education center. Focused initially on reducing the heat island effect of solar panels, the project morphed into one testing crop yields under panels.

A first run at a salsa garden of cilantro, pepper and tomato “was awesome,” Barron-Gafford says. Crops grown underneath the panels required only half the water of those growing out in the open and grew well in the microclimate beneath the panels. “The plants seem to love the modulated temperatures,” he says.

Panels protect the plants from frost, allowing a longer season for avocados, cilantro, peppers, tomatoes and mangos. In late spring researchers began harvesting a winter crop of carrots, kale, chard and lemongrass. “It’s really been something to watch,” he says.

The experiment found other advantages to the panels as well. The skin temperature of people harvesting crops underneath the panels was 25 degrees cooler than those working out in in the sun, no small matter in a state with scorching summers. And some claim the shade-grown produce tastes better than conventionally grown crops.

Barron-Gafford would like to try the dual-use concept out in collaboration with a community-supported agriculture (CSA) farm that would involve at least 10 acres of cropland under solar panels, he says. The extra cost of adding a solar canopy over crops could be paid for by the 5 percent gain in power production seen in panels in Arizona, reduced maintenance and premium pricing for solar-grown produce.

Despite the promising results of pilot dual-farm projects the idea of a future where American farms will be covered by solar canopies is not likely anytime soon. Rob Davis is director for the Center for Pollinators in Energy at the nonprofit Fresh Energy in St. Paul. The huge scaffolds holding solar panels cost a great deal of money, he says, and one bad turn by a farm tractor driver hitting a post could bring down hundreds of thousands of dollars of solar panels.

In places where agricultural land is tight and electricity prices high, such as Europe, the economics might play out in favor of dual-use farms. In the United States, however, farmland remains relatively plentiful and acres of canopies are unlikely to be feasible unless energy and agricultural markets change, he says.

“There are a lot of different ways to design solar arrays that provide significant benefits to agriculture,” Davis says. “One of those ways that is certainly the most cost effective—and continues the accelerated rate of large scale solar needed to address climate change—is creating pollinator habitat in and around solar projects.”

Native plants have their own challenges, such as the perception of higher up-front planting costs partly mitigated by less required maintenance. Not all a solar farms’ neighbors are in love with natives, either, due to their sometimes less-than-tidy appearance. Yet Davis argues American farmers are on board with more native habitats because without pollinators their livelihoods could be at risk.

“They understand the need to keep pollinators alive and in abundance” to seed the fruits and vegetables they grow, to maximize yields and to avoid more regulation, he adds. “This opportunity unlocks private sector dollars and deploys solar energy capital in investing in high quality pollinator habitat that is urgently needed in agriculture.” View Ensia homepage

GE is designing and building the tallest ever wind turbine, the Haliade-X, which at 260m tall will overshadow the current biggest turbine built by Vestas. There are plenty of advantages to upping the scale and height of turbines, but what are the challenges of ever-increasing size and altitude?

GE Renewable Energy announced in March that it will build the world’s largest wind turbine, a towering structure that will reach 260m above the sea level. It is expected to take three to five years to design and construct, and more than $400m in investment.

Each of the three rotor blades, designed and manufactured by Danish LM Wind Power, will be 107m – that’s longer than a football pitch. This size means it will produce 45% more power than any wind turbine previously built, with a capacity of 67GWh annually. These turbines will, therefore, be able to power 16,000 European homes.

GE’s Haliade-X is the latest in a line of turbine expansions that have mirrored the growth of the wind power industry itself. “The offshore wind market is set to grow dramatically in the next couple of decades,” says GE engineering & product development leader Vincent Schellings.

“With a projected industry growth from 17GW to 90GW in the next 12 years, offshore wind is expected to account for 15% of the global wind industry going forward, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. In 2017, offshore represented 8% of global wind installed capacity, and by 2025, offshore will represent more than 15% of global wind annual installed capacity. Last year, 4GW of additional offshore wind power was installed and the offshore segment is moving towards 8GW per year.”

Increases in the size of turbines come with a multitude of benefits, in particular helping drive down the cost of wind energy. Despite the benefits, GE has lagged behind competitors in the race to create the biggest turbine, with Danish company Vestas earning the top-spot with its V164, with a tip eight of 187m and 80m long blades, equivalent to nine double decker London buses. But a power rating of just 9.5MW, GE’s 12MW Haliade-X is set to dwarf Vestas’ turbine.

But new technology brings new challenges, so what will these gargantuan turbines face?

More wind, more power

Wind speeds increase with altitude, thus the taller the turbine the faster it spins and the more energy it can generate. Furthermore, the wind is generally steadier higher up, easing power peaks and troughs and increasing reliability.

“A higher capacity factor makes Haliade-X less sensitive to wind speed variations (better predictability and ability to generate more power at low wind speeds), and can capture more annual energy production (AEP) than any other offshore wind turbine,” says Schellings.

Variability has been one of the main criticisms of renewable technologies, especially wind and solar power. The problem of downtime when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing has led many to deem such technologies unreliable, and to highlight the need for baseload generation through coal or nuclear.

So the increased capacity of the Haliade-X goes some way to alleviating this criticism. Taking advantage of all the wind available by harnessing the characteristically stronger and less variable winds higher up reduces the need to rely on expensive backups, such as batteries, adding to its cost effectiveness.

By increasing the size of the turbines and not the windfarms, maintenance and operation costs and any difficulties will also remain comparable with previous offshore projects. “With fewer machines and foundations to install, in addition to reduced cycle times and simplified operation, Haliade-X generates robust savings on overall project cost (CAPEX and balance of plant) over the life of a windfarm,” says Schellings.

This is based on wind conditions on a typical German North Sea site, although the final location for the Haliade-X demo is still uncertain.

The greater the height at which the turbine operates, the longer the possible blade length, which disproportionately increases the energy capacity. As blade length doubles, the amount of energy it can produce is four-fold, allowing for dramatic increases in capacity. GE predicts that a 750GW windfarm of Haliade-X turbines could power one million homes.

While onshore turbines struggle with wider clearances, space out at sea is less of a premium. Therefore, despite being five times the size of the Arc de Triomphe, land costs do not hamper the cost-effectiveness of the turbines.

Surviving the storm

Although bigger seems to be better in many ways, GE will undoubtedly face difficulties in the construction and installation of the monstrous Haliade-X. “The dimensions of a wind turbine of this size will be a first time in many ways, so we are getting prepared for that,” says Schellings.

As the turbine size increases so must its strength, to ensure the strong winds higher up are not its undoing. LM Wind Power has fifty years of experience building and testing turbine blades. At its testing and validation centre, storm conditions are simulated to put them through their paces. For its previous blades this has included pulling a blade to and fro with the weight of 16 elephants, simulating wind forces of 100km per hour and conducting millions of bends to test for fatigue.

LM Wind Power has produced a fifth of all turbine blades in the world, at 205,000 already, and Haliade-X will mark its biggest project yet.

Beyond the physical problems to be faced by the Haliade-X project, there are broader issues going on in the energy industry. “With growth come challenges, specifically the challenge to compete with traditional sources of power generation, such as natural gas and coal, on a non-subsidized basis in auctions and RFPs around the world,” says Schellings. “The development of the Haliade-X 12MW wind turbine will contribute to offshores challenges of decreasing the cost of energy in upcoming projects. Haliade-X will also contribute to offshores growing momentum.”

Despite the successes seen in the development and deployment of wind power, it must constantly fight with other power sources to secure a market share. This may be hampered as countries, such as the UK, withdraw subsidies. In 2017, the UK Government announced there would be no further green energy subsidies beyond 2025.

And while it seems the benefits outweigh the hurdles of Haliade-X, and more broadly, larger turbines, just how big can they get? “Two decades ago we didn’t get much further than a 3MW machine with a 100m rotor, and that seemed too big at the time,” says Schellings. “Through technology development growth is always possible, but you need the right technology in order to do it cost-effectively.”

Haliade-X is undoubtedly set to be the tallest turbine in the world, but there are already plans to top it. A team led by the University of Virginia and funded by the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, for example, is currently designing a turbine that would be capable of producing 50MW worth of energy. The ultra-large, two-bladed turbine, designed to mimic a palm tree’s ability to bend in the wind, could reach an incredible 500m tall.

GE is hoping to have its first demonstration unit installed by 2019 and to begin shipping the Haliade-X by 2021.

Fusion may have a dark side. A shadowy hypothetical process called “dark fusion” could be occurring throughout the cosmos, a new study suggests.

The standard type of fusion occurs when two atomic nuclei unite to form a new element, releasing energy in the process. “This is why the sun shines,” says physicist Sam McDermott of Fermilab in Batavia, Ill. A similar process — dark fusion — could occur with particles of dark matter, McDermott suggests in a paper published in the June 1 Physical Review Letters.

If the idea is correct, the proposed phenomenon may help physicists resolve a puzzle related to dark matter — a poorly understood substance believed to bulk up the mass of galaxies. Without dark matter, scientists can’t explain how galaxies’ stars move the way they do. But some of the quirks of how dark matter is distributed within galaxy centers remain a mystery.

Dark matter is thought to be composed of reclusive particles that don’t interact much with ordinary matter — the stuff that makes up stars, planets and living creatures. That introverted nature is what makes the enigmatic particles so hard to detect. But dark matter may not be totally antisocial (SN: 3/3/18, p. 8). “Why wouldn’t the dark matter particles interact with each other? There’s really no good reason to say they wouldn’t,” says physicist Manoj Kaplinghat of the University of California, Irvine.

Scientists have suggested that dark matter particles might ricochet off one another. But the new study goes a step further, proposing that pairs of dark matter particles could fuse, forming other unknown types of dark matter particles in the process.

Such dark fusion could help explain why dark matter near the centers of galaxies is more evenly distributed than expected. In computer simulations of galaxy formation, the density of dark matter rises sharply toward a cusp in the center of a galaxy. But in reality, galaxies have a core evenly filled with dark matter.

Those simulations assume dark matter particles don’t interact with one another. But dark fusion could change how the particles behave, giving them energy that would provide the oomph necessary to escape entrapment in a galaxy’s dense cusp, thereby producing an evenly filled core.

“You can kick [particles] around through this interaction, so that’s kind of cool,” says physicist Annika Peter of the Ohio State University in Columbus. But, she says, dark fusion might end up kicking the particles out of the galaxy entirely, which wouldn’t mesh with expectations: The particles could escape the halo of dark matter that scientists believe surrounds each galaxy.

For now, if fusion does have an alter ego, scientists remain in the dark.