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Energy 101: Electricity GenerationReliable energy generation -
A typical nuclear reactor produces 1 gigawatt GW of electricity. Based on the capacity factors above, you would need almost two coal or three to four renewable plants each of 1 GW size to generate the same amount of electricity onto the grid. Suggested Read: What is Generation Capacity?
Office of Nuclear Energy Nuclear Power is the Most Reliable Energy Source and It's Not Even Close. Just how reliable has nuclear energy been? The report equips researchers and utilities with the data they need to make decisions about the future of the U. DOE Welcomes Leaders from 46 Local, Regional, and Tribal Organizations to Peer-Learning Cohorts on Emerging Clean Energy Strategies and Best Practices.
Participants from 28 states and territories will convene for 6 months to learn from each other and national laboratory experts. Department of Energy Analysis Highlights Geothermal Heat Pumps as a Pathway to a Decarbonized Energy Future. Analysis shows geothermal heat pumps can decarbonize buildings and the grid, while reducing grid transmission needs and saving energy.
Turn Down the Temperature, but Don't Let Your Pipes Freeze! Before turning down the thermostat really low to keep your pipes from freezing, here are some things to keep in mind.
Success Story—New Tool Connects Multiple Microgrids to Increase Community Resilience. Microgrids are small electric grids that can operate while disconnected from the main grid. Learn how a new tool that networks multiple microgrids with solar-plus-storage together can lead to community resilience.
Award-Winning Software Helps Communities Plan Their Clean Energy Transition. DOE released a draft roadmap to address interconnection challenges on the transmission grid and seeks feedback from the public. Award-Winning Open-Source Tool Makes Planning for Future Wind Energy Scenarios a Breeze.
The Renewable Energy Potential model can help identify optimal regions for wind plants based on factors like wind resources, land use, topography, and community preferences. Wind Forecast Improvement Project Saves Millions for Utilities and Customers.
Regional wind data from around the U. helps improve a national weather forecasting model, which allows utility companies to better plan for windy days. It has no heat storage. However, this became a solar PV project, apparently due to difficulty in raising finance.
Another form of this CSP is the power tower , with a set of flat mirrors heliostats which track the sun and focus heat on the top of a tower, heating water to make steam, or molten salt to °C and using this both to store the heat and produce steam for a turbine.
Solucar also has three parabolic trough plants of 50 MW each. Power production in the evening can be extended fairly readily using gas combustion for heat.
It comprises three CSP Luz power towers which simply heat water to °C to make steam, using , heliostat mirrors in pairs each of 14 m 2 per MWe, in operation from as the world's largest CSP plant.
The steam cycle uses air-cooled condensers. There is a back-up gas turbine, and natural gas is used to pre-heat water in the towers. It burned TJ of gas in , TJ in and TJ in EIA data which resulted in 46, tonnes of CO 2 emissions in , 66, t in and 68, t in The plant is owned by BrightSource, NRG Energy and Google.
BrightSource estimates that annual bird kill is about from incineration, federal biologists have higher estimates — the plant is on a migratory route. BrightSource plans a similar MWe plant nearby in the Coachella Valley.
Another MWe Ashalim plant developed by Negev Energy uses parabolic troughs and was also commissioned in Further phases of the project will involve solar PV. Using molten salt in the CSP system as the transfer fluid which also stores heat, enables operation into the evening, thus approximating to much of the daily load demand profile.
Spain's MWe Andasol plant stores heat at °C and requires 75 t of salt per MW of heat. It also uses diphenol oxide or oil for heat transfer and molten salt for heat storage.
Spain's Gemasolar employs tonnes of salt for both heat transfer and storage. California's MWe Solana uses , tonnes of salt, kept at °C. SolarReserve filed for bankruptcy in An MWe plant occupying 13 km 2 with six power towers is being built in Qinghai province in northwest China, by BrightSource with Shanghai Electric Group.
It will have heat storage using molten salt. Phase 1 of this Qinghai Delingha Solar Thermal Power Project is two MWe CSP plants using BrightSource power towers with up to 3.
Majority ownership is by Huanghe. The project will apply to NDRC for feed-in tariff. It is part of an international collaboration. It and Noor 2 of MWe commissioned in use parabolic trough collectors heating diphenyl oxide or oil which produces steam in a secondary circuit, and molten salt storage enables generation beyond sunset.
Noor 3 of MWe commissioned in uses a m high central tower with MWt receiver and molten salt for heat transfer and storage.
It has heliostats and is based on the 20 MWe Gemasolar plant in Spain. The whole complex is reported to use 2. The areas occupied are , , and ha respectively so the full plant covers 21 km 2. A small portable CSP unit — the Wilson Solar Grill — uses a Fresnel lens to heat lithium nitrate to °C so that it can cook food after dark.
Another CSP set-up is the Solar Dish Stirling System which uses parabolic reflectors to concentrate heat to drive a Stirling cycle engine generating electricity. A Tessera Solar plant uses 25 kWe solar dishes which track the Sun and focus the energy on the power conversion unit's receiver tubes containing hydrogen gas which powers a Stirling engine.
Solar heat pressurizes the hydrogen to power the four-cylinder reciprocating Solar Stirling Engine and drive a generator. The hydrogen working fluid is cooled in a closed cycle.
Waste heat from the engine is transferred to the ambient air via a water-filled radiator system. The stirling cycle system is as yet unproven in these large applications, however.
A Tessera Solar plant of MWe was planned at Imperial Valley in California and approved in , but a year later AES Solar decided to build the plant as solar PV, and the first phase of MWe was commissioned in as Mount Signal Solar. Power costs are two to three times that of conventional sources, which puts it within reach of being economically viable where carbon emissions from fossil fuels are priced.
Large CSP schemes in North Africa, supplemented by heat storage, are proposed for supplying Europe via high voltage DC links. One proposal is the TuNur project based in Tunisia and supplying up to MWe via HVDC cable to Italy. The Desertec Foundation was set up in as an NGO to promote the Desertec concept.
It comprised 55 companies and institutions and is active in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. The first Dii-fostered project was to be the Noor-Ouarzazate MWe CSP plant in Morocco see above.
Morocco is the only African country to have a transmission link to Europe. In mid the Desertec Foundation left the Dii consortium. Bosch and Siemens had left it in The Desertec Industrial Initiative then announced that it would focus on consulting after most of its former backers pulled out in The remaining members of the Munich-based consortium are Saudi company ACWA Power, German utility RWE and Chinese grid operator SGCC.
The Mediterranean Solar Plan MSP targeted the development of 20 GWe of renewables by , of which 5 GWe could be exported to Europe. The OECD IEA's World Energy Outlook says: The quality of its solar resource and its large uninhabited areas make the Middle East and North Africa region ideal for large-scale development of concentrating solar power, costing 10 to in In its project preparation initiative was being funded by the EU.
In UK-based Xlinks announced plans to build 7 GW of solar PV capacity and 3. Solar energy producing steam can be used to boost conventional steam-cycle power stations. Australia's Kogan Creek Solar Boost Project was to be the largest solar integration with a coal-fired power station in the world.
A hectare field of Areva Solar's compact linear Fresnel reflectors at the existing Kogan Creek power station would produce steam fed to the modern supercritical MWe coal-fired unit, helping to drive the intermediate pressure turbine, displacing heat from coal.
The solar boost at 44 MW peak sunshine would add 44 million kWh annually, about 0. After difficulties and delays, the project was aborted in The MWe Liddell coal-fired power station has a 2 MWe equivalent solar boost 9 MW thermal addition. In the USA the federal government has a SunShot initiative to integrate CSP with fossil fuel power plants as hybrid systems.
The US Department of Energy says that 11 to 21 GWe of CSP could effectively be integrated into existing fossil fuel plants, utilizing the turbines and transmission infrastructure.
While CSP is well behind solar PV as its prices continue to fall and utilities become more familiar with PV. However, CSP can provide thermal storage and thus be dispatchable and it can provide low-cost steam for existing power plants hybrid set up. Also, CSP has the potential to provide heating and cooling for industrial processes and desalination.
Another kind of solar thermal plant is the solar updraft tower, using a huge chimney surrounded at its base by a solar collector zone like an open greenhouse.
The air under this skirt is heated and rises up the chimney, turning turbines as it does so. The 50 MWe Buronga plant planned in Australia was to be a prototype, but Enviromission's initial plans are now for two MWe versions each using 32 turbines of 6.
Thermal mass — possibly brine ponds — under the collector zone means that some operation will continue into the night. A 50 kWe prototype plant of this design operated in Spain In China the A significant role of solar energy is that of direct heating. Much of our energy need is for heat below 60 o C, eg.
in hot water systems. A lot more, particularly in industry, is for heat in the range o C. Together these may account for a significant proportion of primary energy use in industrialised nations. The first need can readily be supplied by solar power much of the time in some places, and the second application commercially is probably not far off.
Such uses will diminish to some extent both the demand for electricity and the consumption of fossil fuels, particularly if coupled with energy conservation measures such as insulation. With adequate insulation, heat pumps utilising the conventional refrigeration cycle can be used to warm and cool buildings, with very little energy input other than from the sun.
Eventually, up to ten percent of total primary energy in industrialised countries may be supplied by direct solar thermal techniques, and to some extent this will substitute for base-load electrical energy. The core of the Earth is very hot, and temperature in its crust generally rises 2.
See also information paper on The Cosmic Origins of Uranium. Where hot underground steam can be tapped and brought to the surface it may be used to generate electricity. Such geothermal sources have potential in certain parts of the world such as New Zealand, USA, Mexico, Indonesia, the Philippines and Italy.
Geothermal energy is attractive because it is low-cost to run and is dispatchable, unlike wind and solar. Global installed capacity was about 14 GWe in , up from 13 GWe in when it produced 88 TWh IRENA data — i.
Capacity includes 2. Iceland gets one-quarter of its electricity from around MWe of geothermal plant. Europe has more than geothermal power plants with about 1. The largest geothermal plant is The Geysers in California, which currently operates at an average capacity of MWe, but this is diminishing.
See also Geothermal Energy Association website. The Iceland Deep Drilling Project IDDP launched in aims to investigate the economic feasibility of extracting energy and chemicals from fluids under supercritical conditions, with much higher energy content. Drilling reached a depth of 4, metres and encountered fluids at supercritical conditions.
The measured temperature was °C and the pressure 34 MPa. Potential utilization is being assessed. There are also prospects in certain other areas for hot fractured rock geothermal, or hot dry rock geothermal — pumping water underground to regions of the Earth's crust which are very hot or using hot brine from these regions.
The heat — up to about °C — is due to high levels of radioactivity in the granites and because they are insulated at km depth. South Australia has some very prospective areas.
The main problem with this technology is producing and maintaining the artificially-fractured rock as the heat exchanger. Only one such project is operational, the Geox 3 MWe plant at Landau, Germany, using hot water ºC pumped up from 3.
A 50 MWe Australian plant was envisaged as having 9 deep wells — 4 down and 5 up but the Habanero project closed down in after pilot operation at 1 MWe over days showed it was not viable. Ground source heat pump systems or engineered geothermal systems also come into this category, though the temperatures are much lower and utilization is for space heating rather than electricity.
Generally the cost of construction and installation is prohibitive for the amount of energy extracted. The UK has a city-centre geothermal heat network in Southampton where water at 75°C is abstracted from a deep saline aquifer at a depth of 1. Customers for the heat include the local hospital, university and commercial premises.
The Geoscience Australia building in Canberra is heated and cooled thus, using a system of pumps throughout the building which carry water through loops of pipe buried in boreholes each metres deep in the ground. Here the temperature is a steady 17°C, so that it is used as a heat sink or heat source at different times of the year.
See year report pdf. This falls into three categories — tidal, wave and temperature gradient, described separately below. The European Commission's Strategic Energy Technology SET plan acknowledges the potential role of ocean energy in Europe's future energy mix and suggests enhancing regional cooperation in the Atlantic region.
The EU Ocean Energy Forum was to develop a roadmap by Harnessing the tides with a barrage in a bay or estuary has been achieved in France MWe in the Rance Estuary, since , Canada 20 MWe at Annapolis in the Bay of Fundy, since , South Korea Sihwa , MWe, since , and Russia White Sea, 0.
The trapped water can be used to turn turbines as it is released through the tidal barrage in either direction. Worldwide this technology appears to have little potential, largely due to environmental constraints. It was expected to start construction in but is now unlikely to proceed. Natural Energy Wyre in the UK has set up a consortium to develop the Eco-THEP, a 90 MW tidal barrage plant with six turbines on the River Wyre near Fleetwood in northwest England by The planned Cardiff Tidal Lagoon involves a 20 km breakwater with turbines in at least two powerhouse units, total MWe, producing GWh per year at low cost.
About million m 3 of water would pass through the turbines on each tidal cycle. An application to build the project was expected in Placing free-standing turbines in major coastal tidal streams appears to have greater potential than barriers, and this is being developed.
Tidal barrier capacity installed in Europe since reached 27 MWe in , with 12 MWe of that still operational. The remainder had been decommissioned following the end of testing programmes.
Production from tidal streams in was 34 GWh. Another 8 MWe of capacity is planned for Currents are predictable and those with velocities of 2 to 3 metres per second are ideal and the kinetic energy involved is equivalent to a very high wind speed.
This means that a 1 MWe tidal turbine rotor is less than 20 m diameter, compared with 60 m for a 1 MWe wind turbine. Units can be packed more densely than wind turbines in a wind farm, and positioned far enough below the surface to avoid storm damage.
A kW turbine with 11 m diameter rotor in the Bristol Channel can be jacked out of the water for maintenance. Based on this prototype, early in the 1. It produced power hours per day and was operated by a Siemens subsidiary until it was closed in after producing The next project is a The first 1.
Meygen phase 1B is known as Project Stroma and uses two 2 MWe Atlantis AR turbines. Phase 1C will use 49 turbines, total The first Atlantis 1MWe prototype was deployed at the European Marine Energy Centre at Orkney in , and a 1 MWe Andritz Hydro Hammerfest prototype is also deployed there, as is a 2 MWe turbine from Scotrenewables mounted under a barge — the SR At the North Shetland tidal array in Bluemull Sound, Nova Innovation is installing three kW turbines, the first already supplying power to the grid.
In December GFC Alliance agreed to buy At the European Marine Energy Centre in Orkney, Orbital Marine Power's 2 MWe O2 floating tidal turbine was installed in mid and secured with anchors.
In France, two pilot 1 MWe tidal turbines were commissioned by EDF off the Brittany coast at the end of They are 16 m diameter to pilot the technology with a view to the installation of seven 2 MWe tidal turbines in the Raz Blanchard tidal race off Normandy in However, the company involved, OpenHydro, failed and was liquidated.
French energy company Engie has announced plans to build a tidal energy project on the western coast of the Cotentin peninsula in northwest France. It aims to install four tidal turbines with a total generating capacity of 5. Some tidal stream generators are designed to oscillate, using the tidal flow to move hydroplanes connected to hydraulic arms sideways or up and down.
A prototype has been installed off the coast of Portugal. Another experimental design is using a shroud to speed up the flow through a venturus in which the turbine is placed. This has been trialled in Australia and British Colombia. A major pilot project using three kinds of tidal stream turbines is being installed in the Bay of Fundy's Minas Passage, about three kilometers from shore.
Some 3 MWe would be fed to the Canadian grid from the pilot project. Eventually MWe is envisaged. The three designs are a 10m diameter turbine from Ireland, a Canadian Clean Current turbine and an Underwater Electric Kite from the USA. In the Irish OpenHydro turbine failed and was written off and the company went into liquidation after its parent, Naval Energies, declined further support.
Tidal power comes closest of all the intermittent renewable sources to being able to provide a continuous and predictable output, and is projected to increase from 1 billion kWh in to 35 billion in including wave power. Ocean Energy Europe reported Harnessing power from wave motion has the potential to yield significant electricity.
Wave energy technologies are diverse and less mature than those for tides. Only about 2. Generators either coupled to floating devices or turned by air displaced by waves in a hollow concrete structure oscillating water column are two concepts for producing electricity for delivery to shore.
Other experimental devices are submerged and harness the changing pressure as waves pass over them. Ocean Energy Europe reported that capacity installed reached Another 4.
The first commercial wave power plant is in Portugal, with floating rigid segments which pump fluid through turbines as they flex at the joints. It can produce 2. Another — Oyster — is in the UK and is designed to capture the energy found in nearshore waves in water depths of 12 to 16 metres.
Each tonne module consists of a large buoyant hinged flap anchored to the seabed. Movement of the flap with each passing wave drives a hydraulic piston to deliver high-pressure water to an onshore turbine which generates electricity.
Near Kaneohe Bay in Hawaii two test units km offshore are producing power. Azura is an American anchored buoy extending 4 m above the surface and 16 m below, and it converts wave energy into 18 kW. A kW version is planned. A Norwegian design is an anchored metre diameter buoy which moves its tethering cables to produce 4 kW.
In Australia Carnegie Wave Energy has the Perth Wave Energy Project with three kW CETO 5 units delivering power to the grid. The CETO 5 system consists of buoys that are fully submerged and their movement drives seabed pump units to deliver high pressure fluid via a subsea pipe to standard hydroelectric turbines onshore.
A three-unit plant using quite different 1 MW CETO 6 units is being deployed by Carnegie with WaveHub in the UK — these generate power inside the buoyant actuator attached to a pump tethered to the seabed, replacing the closed hydraulic loop with an export cable.
The project capacity is now reported as 5 MWe. A large vertical panel harnesses up to 2 MW of wave energy and generates power in the fixed power take-off section anchored to the near-shore seabed 8 to 20 metres deep.
Numerous practical problems have frustrated progress with wave technology, not least storm damage. Ocean thermal energy conversion OTEC has long been an attractive idea, but is unproven beyond small pilot plants up to 50 kWe, though in a kWe closed cycle plant was commissioned in Hawaii and connected to the grid.
It works by utilising the temperature difference between equatorial surface waters and cool deep waters, the temperature difference needing to be about 20ºC top to bottom. In the open cycle OTEC the warm surface water is evaporated in a vacuum chamber to produce steam which drives a turbine.
It is then condensed in a heat exchanger by the cold water. The main engineering challenge is in the huge cold water pipe which needs to be about 10 m diameter and extend a kilometre deep to enable a large water flow.
A closed cycle variation of this uses an ammonia cycle. The ammonia is vapourized by the warm surface waters and drives a turbine before being condensed in a heat exchanger by the cold water. A 10ºC temperature difference is then sufficient. Beyond traditional direct uses for cooking and warmth, growing plant crops particularly wood to burn directly or to make biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel has a lot of support in several parts of the world, though mostly focused on transport fuel.
More recently, wood pellets and chips as biomass for electricity generation have been newsworthy. The main issues here are land and water resources. The land usually must either be removed from agriculture for food or fibre, or it means encroaching upon forests or natural ecosystems.
Available fresh water for growing biofuel crops such as maize and sugarcane and for processing them may be another constraint. Burning biomass for generating electricity has some appeal as a means of indirectly using solar energy for power.
It is driven particularly by EU energy policy which classifies it as renewable and ignores the CO 2 emissions from burning the wood product. However, the logistics and overall energy balance may defeat it, in that a lot of energy — mostly oil based — is required to harvest and move the crops to the power station.
This means that the energy inputs to growing, fertilising and harvesting the crops then processing them can easily be greater than the energy value in the final fuel, and the greenhouse gas emissions can be greater than those from equivalent fossil fuels. Also other environmental impacts related to land use and ecological sustainability can be considerable.
For long-term sustainability, the ash containing mineral nutrients needs to be returned to the land. Some of this comes from low-value forest residues, but increasingly it is direct harvesting of whole trees.
Drax demand is now about 7. No carbon dioxide emissions are attributed to the actual burning, on the basis that growing replacement wood balances out those emissions, albeit in a multi-decade time frame.
Unlike coal, the wood needs to be stored under cover. In Drax received £ million in subsidies for using biomass — mostly US wood pellets — as fuel, followed by £ million in A pilot bioenergy carbon capture storage BECCS project — the first in Europe — commenced at Drax in In central Europe, wood pellets are burned on a large scale, and it is estimated that about half the wood cut in the EU is burned for electricity or heating.
Worldwide, wood pellet burning is increasing strongly due both to subsidies and national policies related to climate change since carbon dioxide emissions from it are excluded from national totals.
World statistics available on the Global Timber website. In Australia and Latin America sugar cane pulp is burned as a valuable energy source, but this bagasse is a by-product of the sugar and does not have to be transported.
In solid biofuels provided TWh from 83 GWe installed capacity, biogas provided 88 TWh from 18 GWe and municipal waste provided 62 TWh from 13 GWe capacity IRENA figures.
In biomass and waste provided TWh of electricity worldwide, from GWe of capacity according to the IEA. However, such projections are increasingly challenged as the cost of biofuels in water use and role of biofuels in pushing up food prices is increasingly questioned.
In particular, the use of ethanol from corn and biodiesel from soybeans reduces food production and arguably increases world poverty. Over about 4 million hectares 40, km 2 of forest in Southeast Asia and South America are reported by Thomson Reuters to have been cleared for EU biofuel production: 1.
Most goes into biodiesel.
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