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Really is great to see such smart people, not arguing...
US Utility CEO: ‘How Do We Get Rid of the Grid?’
Posted on March 19, 2014 by admin • 52 Comments
Thanks to Greenwin for finding a very interesting article published by US News and World Report in which David Crane, president and CEO of NRG Energy, an electric utility that operates in 11 US States, discusses the future of the electric grid.
Crane is of the opinion that the grid as we know it is rapidly becoming an obsolete idea as new technologies are coming along rapidly that allow for point-of-use electricity generation, such as solar and wind installations. Next year NRG itself will be rolling out a microgenerator called the Beacon 10 (a Dean Kamen Stirling engine-based invention) which allows a house to power itself on natural gas.– producing heat as well as electricity.
Speaking at an ARPA-E conference last week, Crane said, “There will come a day, in a generation or so, when the grid is at best an antiquated system to a completely different way of buying electricity . . . Everyone just stop a moment and think how shockingly stupid it is to build a 21st-century electric system based on a system of 130 million wooden poles . . . Stop trying to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, and start talking about, ‘How do we get rid of the grid?’”
Mitchell Swartz is reporting 100 COP with the NANOR at 100th of a watt input, making 1 watt output. Will report more tomorrow night
MORE COMMENTS FROM BARRY:
Heading out to day two. Just wanted to mention the University of Missouri is doing great work. For a while they were boiling water with low wattage and mentioned they could heat up a cup of tea for Richard Garwin from the 60 Minutes piece.
It still isn’t stable, but it’s interesting, with 1 watt input the NANOR can produce 3 watts. With 100th of a watt it can obtain 1 watt.
Today, Rocky Mountain Institute, HOMER Energy, and CohnReznick Think Energy released The Economics of Grid Defection: When and where distributed solar generation plus storage competes with traditional utility service. Seeking to illustrate where grid parity will happen both first and last, the report considers five representative U.S. geographies (NY, KY, TX, CA, and HI). These geographies cover a range of solar resource potential, retail utility electricity prices, and solar PV penetration rates, considered across both commercial and residential regionally specific load profiles.
The report analyzes four possible scenarios: a more conservative base case plus more aggressive cases that consider technology improvements with accelerated cost declines, investments in energy efficiency coupled with load management, and the combination of technology-driven cost declines, energy efficiency, and load management. Even our base case results are compelling, but the combined improvements scenario is especially so, since efficiency and load management reduce the required size of the system while technology improvements reduce the cost of that system, compounding cost declines and greatly accelerating grid parity.
Nobel Prize laureate Brian Josephson has made a post in Nature in which he gives a mini-review of Mats Lewan’s An Impossible Invention book. Calling the publication of the book “the highlight of the week”, Josephson praises the book and urges all E-Cat skeptics to read the book.
Josephson points to last year’s Levi et al. report as strong evidence for the E-Cat saying:
One important event was a long-period investigation, published at arXiv:1305.3913, providing strong evidence of the production of anomalous heat. Particularly interesting to me, in the light of my past dealings with arxiv, was the text of an accidentally leaked exchange between two moderators, wondering if they could find a rationale for blocking that report.
I’m not sure if Josephson has a lot of influence in the scientific community these days, as some of his interests lie outside the mainstream of science — but this may help prepare the ground in the scientific world a bit for when the results of the latest tests are published.
A major development in the story of LENR (low energy nuclear reactions, aka 'cold fusion') broke on Friday afternoon from Raleigh, North Carolina, with start-up Industrial Heat, LLC's announcement via a press release that the company had acquired the rights to Andrea Rossi's E-Cat technology. The E-Cat is an energy production technology that produces industrial levels of heat through a proprietary LENR system using nickel and hydrogen. E-Cat inventor Andrea Rossi has for a long time stated that he had sold the rights to his technology to a US partner, but has never named them due to confidentiality agreements. This is the first public announcement of his partner's identity.
Industrial Heat, LLC is a new company founded by JT Vaughn and Tom Darden (and other unnamed investors), both of private equity firm Cherokee Industrial Partners, also based in Raleigh. For years Cherokee has been in the business of investing in and cleaning up brownfield sites, and has a strong record of commitment to environmentally friendly business practices.
