Technology

TEPCO, Japan’s largest energy firm, is an unlikely advocate of techno-anarchy. The firm is best known for the meltdown at its Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear-power plant in 2011, during which its buttoned-down executives showed corporate Japan at its most stultified. Yet it is trying to reinvent itself as a pioneer of one of the edgiest forms of energy. It is embracing blockchain technology with an aim, no less, of overthrowing the old order in the electricity business to make it more decentralised.

Blockchains, the technologies on which bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are built, may at first appear to be an uneasy fit with the energy business. Electricity has in the past been generated centrally, run across vast physical grids, with constant management by system operators to keep power flowing smoothly. Blockchains are distributed digital ledgers, which are not managed by a central authority, but collectively by a group of users. If anything, cryptocurrency blockchains are a drain on energy rather than a support for it. Digiconomist, a blog, estimates that just one bitcoin transaction uses as much electricity as an average household in the Netherlands uses in a month.

Yet in an era when more businesses, communities and households are generating their own energy, chiefly via solar and wind power, startups and big utilities alike believe blockchains will help speed the move towards decentralisation. They are finding ways to do this with minimal energy consumption.

There is lots of hype and a degree of heresy, given that stodgy utilities are making use of an anti-establishment technology. Almost all blockchain applications are still experimental. But the scope of potential blockchain-energy businesses is so wide that there may be successes to come. The applications range from ways to promote buying, selling or trading of clean energy between individuals (also called peer-to-peer trading), to balancing wholesale electricity markets (ensuring that supply always matches demand), to trading carbon credits. Further uses are enabling households to provide charging stations for electric cars, and funding the development of solar power in poor countries.

Numbers are hazy. The Energy Futures Initiative, a think-tank led by Ernest Moniz, a former American energy secretary, says that $100m-300m has been invested in over 100 blockchain-related energy ventures. Specialists at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), an American think-tank, say most investment so far has gone into peer-to-peer trading and grid-balancing applications. A “try-anything” attitude prevails. “It is like looking at cell phones circa 1995 and not knowing what the future of mobile communications will be,” says Sam Hartnett of the Energy Web Foundation (EWF), a non-profit venture aimed at developing core blockchain technology for the energy industry.

Tepco, for instance, appears to be throwing the digital equivalent of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. In December, it made an investment of an undisclosed sum in Electron, a British blockchain company that is focusing chiefly on handling the multiplying options for flexible demand in electricity systems. In April Electrify, a Singapore-based startup, said it had signed a memorandum of understanding with Tepco to experiment with peer-to-peer electricity trading. The Japanese group is also one of more than 70 firms, including utilities Duke Energy and Centrica, and oil firms Royal Dutch Shell and Equinor, that are part of the EWF. Among many initiatives, the EWF is pioneering a blockchain application that tracks renewable-energy certificates used to offset carbon emissions to make them more transparent and granular.

Experts say it is important to bust two myths—one too positive, the other too negative—about the blockchain and energy. First, there is a view, promoted in many initial coin offerings, that everyone will be able to use the blockchain and cryptocurrencies to trade locally-generated energy (rooftop solar, for instance) with each other, without a centralised utility in the middle. This is largely nonsense. Electricity still needs to travel down poles and wires, for which the transmission and distribution companies will want hard cash. The blockchain will be used, if at all, at either end of the grid.

On the negative side, a view prevails that the blockchain will guzzle too much electricity for energy applications to make sense. But this assumes that projects will use a public blockchain such as bitcoin, which anyone can access with the right software, requiring lots of computing power and time to verify each transaction and protect the blockchain. Energy firms could in fact employ blockchains in which only trusted participants can join, making the process of maintaining the blockchain faster and less energy-hungry.

Mr Harnett says that, while bitcoin transactions can consume the energy of a medium-sized country when done regularly, those of EWF are “of the order of a medium-sized office building”. The use of trusted pools of participants is where the utilities spy an opportunity to co-opt a potentially insurgent technology; they will use it to remain central to the decentralisation of electricity. “The [blockchain] ventures most likely to achieve commercial traction in the coming years will largely work within the existing system and partner with incumbents such as utilities,” says the CFR report. Or as Electrify’s Martin Lim colourfully puts it, “It’s ironic. Every subversive turns into a dictator.”

Concrete as a building material dates back to Roman times. So good were Roman concrete structures that many still stand today, including the Colosseum in Rome. However, construction may be one of many industries that could soon be revolutionized by graphene, dubbed the new super-material.

NovoCarbon Corp. has just announced the receipt and fulfillment of its first order from an undisclosed North American graphene manufacturer to supply it with high quality, micronized graphite.Graphene is the world’s thinnest material. First discovered by University of Manchester researchers in 2004, the one-atom thick material is commonly found in mineral graphite. Its structure gives it important physical qualities, including its efficiency as a conductor of heat and electricity, water-proofing and strength.

The materialization of a purchase order is a sign that the graphene industry is moving from the science lab to commercial production lines, according to NovoCarbon CEO Paul Ferguson. Several North American graphene companies are making products that are becoming an ingredient in super-strength cement and paint products.“The graphene market is starting to take off. I think that’s where these orders are coming from,” Ferguson told InvestorIntel. “For a low margin product (like cement), modest improvements (in costs) can have outsized results.”While the size of the initial purchase order is modest, the customer has indicated an intention to work in an exclusive supply relationship and to begin placing regular orders by early next year.

“This is perfect for us to get started with,” he said. “Because we want a nice small customer so we can get the gears turning.”Graphene coatings could find applications where water repellent surfaces are required such as ship hulls, for conductive uses like for cellphones as well as in scenarios where chemical resistance is needed, according to the American Coatings Association.

It could also be used in advanced batteries, solar cells and displays.Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) has developed a “graphene ball” for batteries through a mechanism that mass synthesizes graphene into a 3D form like popcorn.

The material enables a 45% increase in capacity, and five times faster charging speeds than standard lithium-ion batteries.One of NovoCarbon’s biggest challenges is building a supply chain. Despite considerable in-house expertise in Dr. Gershon Borovsky – a carbon material expert – the company has had to carefully craft together a network of partnerships to become a supplier of high-purity graphite in the United States.

The company is sourcing high-quality flake graphite from Brazil and relying on main partner Ashland Advanced Materials to make a purified, micronized graphite product at a plant in Niagara, New York. Supplying larger volumes of this quality of graphite will require the company to evaluate other technological production methods.

China’s graphite industry is notoriously associated with the use of hydrochloric acid and industrial pollution.The fact that graphene manufacturers are appearing in the United States underscores the relevance of US President Donald Trump’s executive order earlier this year to draw up a list of strategic materials where the US is reliant on foreign and specifically Chinese-controlled imports. The list includes graphite and several battery ingredients including cobalt, lithium and rare earth elements.

China produces 66% of the world’s graphite and consumes 35%, according to the Mineral Commodity Summary 2017 of the US Geological Survey (USGS). About a hundred U.S. firms consumed 24,200 tons of graphite valued at US$25.6 million in 2016, the USGS said. The U.S. imported 100% of its graphite primarily from China (34%); Mexico, (33%); Canada (18%); and Brazil (7%).

The Trump executive order may actually drive NovoCarbon’s revenue stream. Besides being in pole position to become a preferred supplier in the United States (because it manufactures there), the company is in line to win a contract from the US Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), the procurement arm of the Department of Defense (DoD), to provide advisory services. The DLA put out to tender for consultancy services to identify domestic supplies to reduce dependency on foreign imports, as an offshoot to the executive order.

Graphite could also become scarce. Graphite demand is about to enter a period of rapid growth and price escalation, according to London-based metals consultancy Roskill. Rapid growth in demand for natural flake graphite and synthetic graphite in the lithium-ion battery industry for electric vehicles is now forecast to drive graphite demand growth of 5-7% per year from 2017-2027, it said.

The inclusion of graphene in cement could ironically just be a starting point in matching the quality of Roman concrete. Roman concrete is of superior quality because its marine-based ingredients actually become stronger over time. Graphene-enforced concrete might get one over the Romans, at last.

After a Q2 results announcement that bounced shares up by 16 per cent, Tesla has revealed that it has had to “artificially limit” the production of its residential Powerwall battery units, to prioritise the production of cells for its Model 3 electric vehicle production.

As we report here, Tesla shares made their biggest one-day jump in nearly five years this week, after second quarter results call that featured promises of a sustained production rate of 7,000 cars a week and a “sustainably profitable” business from Q3 onwards.

But what’s been good for the EV division – and for revenue, which was rose to $US4 billion from $US2.77 billion a year ago – appears to have tapped the brakes on Tesla’s energy department, and more specifically, in its production of its 13.2kWh Powerwall 2 batteries.

“We’re kind of cell starved for Powerwall right now, so we actually had to artificially limit the number of Powerwalls because we don’t have enough cells,” Musk said on Wednesday during an earnings call.

“So we’re solving … that very rapidly and we expect to ramp up Powerwall and Powerpack production substantially later this year and early next and as well as ramping up retrofit solar and then the Solar Roof.

But having said that, Musk and his top executives were keen to note that this was a temporary situation – and to put it in perspective against the company’s general “insane” growth rate for battery production.

“…It’s a partial-sum game. We did shut down a Powerwall cell line in favor of Model 3 to be totally honest but we kind of had to do that. But we’re adding new cell lines and we’ll be able to address that issue very soon,” Musk said.

“Yeah, as Elon suggested earlier, we are – essentially makes sense for us to prioritise Model 3, but we are adding a ton of capacity, cell capacity and … that will enable us to dramatically ramp our energy storage business as well in the coming quarters,” added Tesla CFO Deepak Ahuja.

“Yeah, you kind of mentioned only 1 gigawatt hour. But that’s a big number in that business. And that’s maybe on the order of 300 per cent what we did the prior year and we’re still aiming at maybe another 3x to 4x growth for 2019,” added JB Straubel, Telsa’s chief technology officer.

Musk: “These are mad – at scale, these are insane growth levels.”

Jeffrey B. Straubel: “Crazy growth rate.”

Deepak Ahuja: “I think to put it in perspective, we are soon tripling our storage. …And it’s one thing to produce, but it’s also another thing to install. …You need infrastructure and the people to do that. So, it’s massive scaling as very few companies grow at that rate.”

Elsewhere in the Tesla Energy division, Musk noted that the company now had several hundred homes with the Solar Roof installed on them, and that “that’s going well.”

Musk said the company was still in the process of confirming that the Solar Roof would actually last for 30 years, and was also working with first responders to make sure it was safe in the event of a fire “and that kind of thing.”

“So it’s quite a long validation program for a roof which has got to last for 30, 40, 50 years, but we also expect to ramp that up next year at our Gigafactory 2 in Buffalo,” Musk said.

“That’s going to be super exciting. If there’s a company with a better product roadmap, I’d like to know where it is, because we’ve got some super awesome stuff coming. Yeah.”

Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $36.4 million in funding for 37 research awards at universities, national laboratories, and private industry on a range of topics in fusion energy sciences. The research is designed to help lay the groundwork for the development of nuclear fusion as a future practical energy source.

The research focuses on high priority challenges in what is called “magnetic confinement” of plasma (a hot soup of ions and free electrons) on the pathway toward eventual development of a contained, self-sustaining fusion reaction.

Projects include:

• Awards for collaborative fusion energy research using the DIII-D National Fusion Facility at General Atomics, a DOE Office of Science user facility in San Diego, California, and the largest tokamak (a donut-shaped “magnetic bottle”) in the United States. The tokamak is widely deemed an especially promising design for plasma confinement in a future fusion power plant.
• Theoretical and experimental projects studying the physics of spherical tokamaks, a tokamak variant characterized by a compact (apple-like) shape, offering the promise of a more compact approach to plasma confinement.
• Support of U.S. scientists for research at the Wendelstein 7-X superconducting stellarator in Greifswald, Germany—the world’s largest such facility, representing yet another method of plasma confinement by magnetic fields.
• Computational work modeling plasma behavior through DOE’s Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program.

Researchers come from a dozen U.S. universities, four DOE National Laboratories (Lawrence Berkeley, Los Alamos, Princeton Plasma Physics, and Oak Ridge), and four private firms.

Projects were selected by competitive peer review under the following DOE Funding Opportunity Announcements sponsored by the Office of Fusion Energy Sciences within DOE’s Office of Science:

1. Collaborative Fusion Energy Research in the DIII-D National Program,
2. Collaborative Research on International and Domestic Spherical Tokamaks,
3. Collaborative Research in Magnetic Fusion Energy Sciences on Long-Pulse International Stellarator Facilities, and
4. Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing: Runaway Electron Avoidance and Mitigation in Tokamak Plasmas.

Total FY 2018 funding is $36.4 million for projects lasting up to four years in duration. The full list of projects and more information can be found here.

In the electric vehicle community, everyone has the same awkwardly distant relative. Whether they’re an uncle, aunt or grandparent, the certainty is that they live at the very northern tip of Scotland, and the person you are trying to convince to go electric may well need to make an urgent 500 mile trip by car to visit them.

For drivers uninitiated in the ways of EV transportation, the idea of making this journey in a petrol or diesel car isn’t much of a problem, but making it with a full electric car is a terrifying prospect. What if you can’t get there on a single charge? Where do you charge? How do you charge? This isolated Caledonian kin is a metaphor for the issues that still affect the uptake of more electric vehicles – you can blame the infrastructure, but this also has a lot to do with cautious human behaviour too.

The electrification of cars on the roads of the UK is slowly increasing. There are currently 155,000 EVs in the country, with around 4,500 more being registered every month. By comparison, there are around 30 million fuel-powered cars. But, as of July 2018, there are only around 17,400 public charging points in the UK. There are still mental and physical barriers to people taking the plunge into electrification, and, considering the UK government’s goal of halving non-electric vehicle sales by 2030 and ending them by 2040, we need to stop just throwing money and concepts at the problem and start building the infrastructure we need.

But before building (or majorly extending) infrastructure you need secure the demand to use it. When it comes to buying a shiny new electric vehicle, price is a significant issue. EV technology is still disproportionately expensive and it’s estimated that electric cars will need to drive the cost per capacity down to $100 per kilowatt of battery capacity before they are equal to the price of a fuel car, which is only estimated to happen by around 2025. Currently the price is roughly $200 per kilowatt.

In the UK, the government has been operating a plug-in car grant since 2011, back when there were fewer than 1,000 registered electric cars on the roads. The current version has been in place since 2016 and will continue automatically subsidising hybrid or full electric cars that cost less than £60,000 by 35 per cent, up to a maximum of £2,500 for a hybrid, or £4,500 for full electric. The scheme was topped up with £100m in the November 2017 budget, and it’s due to run until at least 2020. And with more electric vehicles on our roads, we’re going to need a lot more infrastructure to support them.

The next step on the infrastructure chain is the charging point. The 2017 budget included another £400m of funding for them and the businesses who make and install them, and the Department for Transport (DoT) announced recently that it was accepting proposals for who would get to manage the money. This is a step forward, but getting money together is easy, turning it into charging points is trickier.

It’s an issue that’s been causing something of a spat between the UK’s local and national governments. Local authorities can ask for money to help install charging points in their districts, but often they have a very poor idea of what they’re doing, or will just not take up the grant money at all. This was noted in January this year, when the DoT wrote to local councils to try and persuade them to take advantage of the department’s scheme to subsidise residential charging points.

“A lot of the time, the councils haven’t engaged with the market, and then you find [the charging points] are not as effectively located,” says Justin Meyer, general manager of commercial charging point installer eVolt. He adds that often the decision to build is based on where there’s space, as opposed to where would be most useful for drivers.

The question of location is generally one of the hardest ones to answer when it comes to charging points. According to the 2017 English Housing Survey, 36 per cent of homes in the UK don’t have off street parking, which makes getting charging points and cables to the cars tricky. This problem extends to businesses too – and since these, along with parking areas in major public areas, are meant to be the key locations for drivers to charge their cars, this additional difficulty is another hurdle for EV adoption.

It’s important to remember that EV infrastructure is not dealt with in a vacuum.“A lot of [local authorities] are restrained in terms of cutting costs,” says Mayer. “Actually having somebody or a team in place, ready to effectively spend that allocated money, that’s where I see the issues coming from.” Training people in managing the systems and employing them for their expertise is just as crucial a part of the network as the hardware itself, and a lack of money in other departments can bring good ideas to a halt, or result in poorly implemented ones.

Then there’s the matter of the national charging network, the EV equivalent to the hundreds of petrol stations around the UK. While you can go driving in a petrol-fuelled car without giving much thought as to where and when they will next refuel; for EVs, range anxiety is a widely shared concern of uninitiated drivers, often symbolised by mythical Scottish relatives.

Even if you do come across a charging point that’s sprung up at a service station or in the odd town and city on your travels, there is still a chance you won’t be able to use it. The charging market is still very much in the hands of the companies who install them. There are around 30 major players, and many of them operate in small areas, meaning that there is little to no interoperability nationwide. If you have to deviate from your usual charging company, you will be left stranded unless you thought to plan ahead. It’s similar to how mobile phone chargers were before the 2009 agreement to rally around the European Commission’s USB standards – wasteful and anti-consumer.

For Randall Bowen, director of commercial and sales for renewable energy supplier Good Energy, there is an obvious choice for a united payment method. “If I’m driving an EV, I don’t even want a card, I want to plug in and use my contactless to pay for it, because I’ve always got that card with me. We need to make things easier for people to make the decision to go for an electric vehicle.”

“It’s just not practical long term,” says Meyer. “If we really want this to be mass market, we need to be stripping that and having effectively one card that uses all networks.” Happily, there are companies trying to get the charger operators to work together, such as Hubject, which lets users access several different networks with one account.

There has been good news on this front recently. The government’s Automated and Electric Vehicles Act puts laws in place to make it easier to install charging points at motorway services, and also locally by letting elected mayors apply to the government to require large fuel retailers to add points to local petrol stations. The act will also standardise points across the country, making interoperability a more likely possibility. It’s not going to solve the lack of knowledge in local authorities, but the ability to get charging points where they need to be will hopefully be an encouraging factor for drivers looking to convert to an EV.

The next problem? Once you introduce more charging points, and then standardise all of them, the grid that powers them isn’t ready. The UK’s National Grid currently has enough energy in its system to support a nation full of EVs, no matter what time of year. What’s lacking is the ability to charge them all simultaneously, which would be a problem if drivers charged their vehicles at the same time in the evening.

One way around unmanageable peak consumption is smart charging, which can vary the rate at which the cars charge, depending on overall demand. But there are still a lot of details to work out, such as what the regulatory mechanism or software would look like, and if this would be better handled at a national or local level.

Ofgem, Britain’s energy regulator, has recently issued its own guidance on this subject, calling for incentives to encourage people to charge their EVs outside of peak hours, which would increase the number of cars currently supportable by the country’s electricity network by 60 per cent. This is very similar to the National Grid’s own opinion, which is that flexible charging would halve the estimated additional generation needed to manage the demand.

Malcolm McCulloch, head of Oxford University’s Energy and Power group, says that if car charging could be done intelligently, then only 20 additional megawatts of power would be needed- that’s the equivalent output a reasonably sized offshore wind farm. If not, then the capacity of the National Grid would need another 20 gigawatts, which is double the amount of energy currently generated by all the UK’s nuclear power stations. In short, with good strategy, it’s an issue of power, not energy.

McCulloch also suggests that this should be done automatically by the charging system, and could be handled on a local level in order to better manage demand. While good news for UK power generators who wouldn’t have to make large investments in generation, it would mean that EV drivers could sometimes be caught out by the idiosyncrasies of automated charging.

Another technology being researched by automakers, and already used in limited markets by Nissan and Mitsubishi, is vehicle to grid (V2G). Using the same kind of tech that would allow for automated charging, this function lets car owners sell the energy in their batteries to the network when it isn’t in use. This would help balance out the demand on power generation and put it to more efficient use. But there are potentially major pitfalls: a long power cut overnight could mean everyone in an area waking up only to find their cars won’t move, or more prosaically the charge and discharge cycles created would likely cause wear and tear on a battery.

Regulators and manufacturers could force these kinds of ideas on consumers for the good of EVs and their infrastructure. But such a move could backfire. “There’s a question of whether the consumer would think it’s a great idea, and as long as it gives someone a comparable experience to a normal petrol car, that’s the big thing for us,” says Bowen. “You’ve got to get the consumers comfortable with the challenges around charging but it all comes down to the consumer being comfortable in driving a vehicle that they feel would do the same job as a petrol car.”

Continuing the electrification of the UK’s vehicles needs more than just incentives and good ideas. Solutions to date are muddled and changing driver behaviour and bad habits will take time. Some ideas, like variable charging and V2G will seem even more alien. But the infrastructure needs to grow quickly to support the increasing number of EVs over the coming decades. Failure to do so now risks creating an almighty headache for the next generation of drivers.

They like to say they are “powered by poo”.

Fair Oaks Farms, a mammoth dairy operation in central Indiana, prides itself on high-tech farming operations which are open for the world to see. But behind the scenes, Fair Oaks has created an energy operation which has become a model for farms around the world.

Anyone driving down I-65 might find Fair Oaks hard to miss. Ubiquitous billboards beckon visitors to spend the day on cow and pig “adventures”, where they will see cows milked on mammoth carousels, even the promise of a calf being born.

How can you be certain of seeing a birth? It’s easy, when you have 38,000 cows. And from the beginning, Fair Oaks’ creators wanted their operation to be a place where everyone could learn about farming from the ground up.

“Only two percent of the population is now involved in agriculture,” notes co-founder Mike McCloskey. “We’ve lost touch with exactly how it is we are producing our food.”

You see it all at Fair Oaks. Visitors can spend their day with hands-on exhibits, watch the milking and birthing operations, and dine in a mammoth restaurant (where yes, the grilled cheese is to die for.) Soon, they will be able to stay overnight in a farm-themed hotel.

But transparency was only one of McCloskey’s goals. As he and his partners built Fair Oaks into the mammoth operation it has become, they also set out to prove they could be a model of sustainability. And that starts with using the manure produced by all of those cows.

All of it.

“We have about 15,000 cows worth of manure on a daily basis coming in to here,” he told NBC 5, standing next to the farms’ mammoth manure “digester”. “In gallons, it’s about 650,000 gallons a day.”

About 30 percent of the manure coming into the digester is converted to natural gas. That is cleaned and used to power the farms’ electric generators, and perhaps most importantly, fuel the 18 wheelers which carry the milk to market.

“We produce enough fuel to go 12 million miles a year,” McCloskey says. “Which is the equivalent of eliminating 2 million gallons of diesel from our highways.”

If that sounds impressive, consider the fact that when he started, McCloskey had the gas but no one made 18 wheelers that could burn it.

That meant inventing the engines. And with partners Cummins and Kenworth, he did just that. But there were misfires in the early days.

“I would say that every truck blew at least one engine and most of them probably two,” he notes. “But Cummins had engines sitting by, and they’d put a new engine in in 48 hours. Everyone was committed.”

Now the engines are humming, and McCloskey boasts that there are over 5,000 of the CNG powered trucks on the road. Over 40 of those truck are transporting Fair Oaks milk.

“You’re destroying methane, which is not going into the atmosphere, so you’re lowering your greenhouse gases,” he notes. “Therefore, your carbon footprint of your farm is being lowered, while at the same time, you’re avoiding using a fossil fuel to produce power, be it coal, or oil, or natural gas.

And the solids left over from the manure-to-energy process, are converted to fertilizer for the fields where Fair Oaks grows its corn. So the cows eat the corn, produce manure, which is processed to energy and fertilizing to grow more corn, to feed the cows, which McCloskey likes to note, are very efficient engines themselves.

Of course, there is one other thing produced, which he reminds a visitor is the main product which comes from cows.

“What comes out of the cow first is this incredible nutritious product called milk—delicious!” he notes. And Fair Oaks’ cows produce about 280,000 gallons of milk every day.

By the way, there is one remaining product from the manure process—-water. McCloskey says he and his wife are seriously looking at a purification process, which may lead to a brewery.

Yes—beer brewed from you-know-what.

But that’s a different story.