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 "The green wave..."
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Tyren Senior Member Posts: 2598 |
posted 03-02-2007 13:20
  
" Khosla: solar companies on the wrong path A word of advice to solar energy entrepreneurs: you just might want to think twice before pitching that business plan to Vinod Khosla, legendary Silicon Valley VC and clean tech guru. Khosla, who's placing big bets on biofuels, told the audience attending Tuesday's California Clean Tech Open awards ceremony in San Francisco that "solar is going in the wrong direction." The problem? In Khosla's view, solar energy proponents are too fixated on making solar cells cheaper to produce. "If I were an entrepreneur in solar, I would not be working on lowering the cost of solar cells; I would be working on higher efficiency solar cells." "Solar of course is a great technology and we imagine many uses," he said. "But even with subsidies solar is quite uncompetitive. Being a Republican, I don't like subsidies." Much more promising on the solar front, Khosla noted, are solar thermal power plants, some which use the sun's rays to heat fluids to create steam to drive electricity-producing turbines. |
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Tyren Senior Member Posts: 2598 |
posted 03-02-2007 17:53
Khosla stumps for solar, California ballot initiative Rick Merritt, EE Times The big opportunity for solar energy is in utility plants, according to Vinod Khosla, who gave back-to-back keynotes on the subject here Tuesday (Oct 16.). The iconic venture capitalist who has started his own alternative energy investment company also stumped for California's Proposition 87, which would fund research into so-called clean technology. "I now believe that thermal solar will be cheaper than coal-fired electricity plants. It is far more risky to build a coal-fired plant than a solar thermal one today," said Khosla, speaking at the Emerging Ventures conference. Photovoltaic cells have made significant advances with thin film, multi-junction technology. Utilities represent an opportunity for solar energy that could amount to hundreds of billions of dollars, said Khosla, who earlier in the day he delivered a keynote at a solar power conference a block away that attracted an estimated 7,000 attendees. Although many developers are pursuing the low-cost solar cells, Khosla said "that's exactly the wrong way to go. |
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Tyren Senior Member Posts: 2598 |
posted 03-02-2007 18:08
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Biggest trend in '07? There are a few major areas: biofuels to replace oil, replacement of coal with clean coal, wind and solar, new renewable materials, and efficiency. The pace of progress in each of these areas cannot be predicted a priori. I suspect this will be the year of cellulosic ethanol. Biodiesel is a good product but fundamentally non-scalable unless it can be made form biomass instead of the seed product. Ethanol has had a good start and it will transition quickly to mostly cellulosic based production. But I suspect new fuels like butanol will come along, produced from the same biomass, brewed in the same fermenters, and running in the same flex-fuel engines. I would not be surprised to see bio-gasoline either, made initially from corn and later from biomass. But 2007, we will see the emergence of cellulosic ethanol as a reality and biofuels moving from their role as an additive to gasoline to a primary fuel for automobiles. At the same time you will see critics, often funded by the petroleum interests, increase their attacks on biofuels through surreptitious PR campaigns, while publicly supporting these renewable fuels. We might even see oil prices manipulated down to thwart this transition which is essential for our planet, for our national security, and probably for increased global harmony. You will see the naïve campaigns of people with fancy names like the Earth Policy Institute which intentionally appear to use bad data or ridiculous assumptions but make good press headlines, move to attacking cellulosic ethanol. We will soon see the end of tariffs and protectionism, global markets, and aggressive adoption of these new fuels. Why should we tariff biofuels when we don't tariff oil? And despite popular belief, oil gets more subsidies than ethanol! On the coal front, we will continue to see a push for "clean coal" as a way for a few of the traditional power generation firms to delay action. There are electric utilities like PG&E in California and Duke Energy that are proactively looking at real clean coal efforts as well as all other forms of clean power, especially wind and solar. We will see a serious division between these two types of utilities, one trying to start coal plants and hoping to use political lobbying to grandfather their carbon emission and count them as an "asset," while the more progressive firms will try and use the cleanest technologies and push for treating carbon emission as a liability. Clearly we want to support the Dukes and PG&Es of the world and not punish them just because they have been investing in cleaner power. On the technology side, we will see a horse race between clean coal, solar thermal (not photovoltaic), and wind for central utility-grade power generation. I would personally handicap this in favor of solar thermal power because it can be stored easily as heat and is half the cost of solar photovoltaic and is dispatchable by the utility when it is needed, unlike wind power which must be used when the wind blows. Heat is much cheaper to store than electricity and that gives solar thermal technologies (often called CSP for concentrated solar power) a big leg up over wind and photovoltaic. Contrary to popular belief, I suspect we will find that clean coal plants (often called IGCC plants with carbon capture and sequestration) will prove to be too unreliable and the cost of gasification of coal (the G in IGCC), the separation of carbon dioxide from the waste gases, and compression too high. Liquefaction, handling, and eventually underground storage in large reservoirs will be so expensive that it is likely that solar thermal technologies will win the cost race. The financial risk of building a fifty year lifetime coal plant will become much more visible in 2007, and utilities that are doing it will see their stock suffer as investors recognize this risk fully! You have got to be crazy to build a fifty year asset with the escalating risk of environmental regulations and the certainty of carbon pricing at some point which will triple the effective price of coal. It will be much like all the gas plants built in the last decade that are already uneconomic. Besides, all the renewable portfolio standards (RPS) will make it where you can't produce coal-based electricity and sell it. Already California has a law requiring 33% of the power be renewable by 2020! The eastern states have their own renewable goals. The RPS standards are spreading like wildfire. On materials and efficiency, I suspect in 2007 we will see new startups with great ambitions. I suspect that story will take a bit longer to become part of the mainstream discussions. I wish this would happen faster. We might see talk of "stored wind," which is key to increasing its use. We will see higher efficiency, new style photovoltaics that don't depend on silicon. They will need to get to mass produced technologies and 30% efficiency to really explode in the marketplace. That is entirely possible with thin film multi-junction approaches. What will Congressional/presidential candidates will do before '08 election? The biggest leverage for biofuels will come from the relatively similar positions of all the presidential candidates for 2008. Most of the rumored candidates already support an aggressive biofuels policy, as does the Democratic majorities in the house and the Senate, and the Bush administration. The winds are in favor of major progress in the biofuels arena nationally and globally. What kind of alternative-fuel vehicles will we see this year? What will be the biggest money makers, or areas of heaviest investment in venture capital this year, including in clean tech? I suspect we will see rapid adoption of the flex-fuel model and initial plans for flex-fuel hybrid cars. That is the right strategy for automakers, consumers, and the country, as it gives consumers a fuel choice and leverages hybrid technology to improve efficiency. If we have a battery breakthrough in the next few years we will see this model get adopted quickly. If we don't see a breakthrough -- and we need a five fold improvement in price performance of batteries -- hybrids will grow more slowly because of the increased cost of hybrids. They will in the near term cost $3000-$5000 more than their conventional cousins. Green Home. Will it be brought to us by the Home Depot/Lowe's of the world? What will it look like and who will profit -- other than mother nature? We have invested in Living Homes, which has built the first LEED Platinum high-end designer home, factory manufactured, and installed on site at mid-end cost. I suspect we will see many more similar efforts. Eventually these might come from Home Depot, but I suspect in the short run we will see new manufacturers and home builders dominate this exciting prefab space. Prefab will no longer be associated with low-end homes. Now most Americans can own a prefab Maya Lin home!
I wish I could be as optimistic as you are, Mr. Khosla. Here in Iowa we like to talk a lot about cellulosic ethanol but we'd rather grow as much corn as possible (thanks, government subsidies). I think most farmers probably laugh at the idea of switching to "grass cocktails" -- they would go broke if they were producing the yields Tilman is talking about. The income would hardly take them to the distillery. And, oh yes, we continue to build new ethanol plants that aren't compatible with cellulosic feedstocks. Here at the Midwestern land-grants, we're suffering from what I might call a "greasy-green hole" --the combination of decreased federal research dollars and vast quantities of funny money dangled by agribusiness for biomass research. I would be hard pressed to name a single agronomist who is not involved in something related to biomass/biofuels (myself included). This at the expense of research that might, you know, help us develop something like more sustainable food cropping systems? Doesn't seem like we're really acting in the public good, but I guess we are improving the profit prospects of venture capitalists bold enough to invest in these technologies. Nice of our state governments to provide the infrastructure for that.
Provide us with the evidence (Well said, Julia!)
Meanwhile, Congressmen Earl Pomeroy (D-ND) and Kenny Hulshof (R-MO) have introduced the "Renewable Fuels and Energy Independence Promotion Act", which proposes making permanent the biodiesel and the ethanol tax credits, as well as the small agri-biodiesel producer and small ethanol producer credits, AND the $0.54/gallon MFN import tariff on ethanol. So, what special intelligence do you have to give us any assurance that this bill will be defeated and some bill that seeks to do the complete opposite will win the day? And as for oil getting more subsidies than ethanol, that has been true in aggregate terms, but certainly not per-gallon, much less per unit of useful energy. Doug Koplow (no sympathizer for the oil industry, he), in a study he undertook several years ago, found that, per unit of energy, ethanol was one of the most heavily subsidized energy forms, coming in at over $17 per MMBtu, compared with oil's $1.40 (both figures are updated to 2006 dollars), even counting expenditures in defense of the Persian Gulf. (See Table 3.4 in "Biofuels: At What Cost?".) The subsidy rate for ethanol has since dropped to around $15/MMbtu, plus or minus $2, and the rate for oil may have increased. But it is hard to imagine that, even allocating all subsidies to oil to just two products, gasoline and diesel, would bring the value per MMBtu anywhere near where the per-MMBtu subsidies are for ethanol. You then add,
Cellulosic ethanol There is no question that large-scale production of cellulosic ethanol will be difficult to achieve, but it's worth it. Here's why: we need liquid hydrocarbon fuels to replace gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel. These need to come from carbon-neutral or carbon-negative sources, and that means sugar and lignin from biomass. (2) The molecular problem is that cellulose is inherently a crystalline stuctural material, built to last thousands of years in some environments. Starch is an ephemeral storage material, designed to be readily broken down by tiny plant embryos. Both cellulose and starch are made from the same monomer: glucose. This is the reason the U.S. ethanol industry started with corn starch - now it must evolve, and do so rapidly. We need to get very large quantities of glucose (and xylose) from a two-by-four, figuratively speaking. The benefits: global warming has come upon us rather suddenly, and will almost certainly reach unacceptable levels no matter what we do. It is very much in our interest to begin replacing fossil fuels with realistic biofuels now. Green plants absorb solar energy and carbon dioxide for a living. They are the only practical means of removing CO2 at the atmospheric concentration of 0.04% (400ppm soon). They also store that carbon in glucose, and the solar energy in chemical bonds, something which current solar technologies cannot do. A second benefit is that we may begin to reduce the massive transfer of wealth from the U.S. and other oil consumers to oil producers. When oil prices reach $70/bbl, our oil trade deficit reaches $300 billion per year, not quite a billion dollars a day. Not counting Iraq at $9 billion per month. Both global warming and oil prices are likely to get worse. In 1998, I wrote a paper titled "Global Warming and the Need for Liquid Fuels from Biomass" - linked at our website www.generalbiomass.com. The data at that time (ca. 1993) indicated that China had 9.5 million vehicles with a 6-year doubling time. India had 6.2 million with a 7-year doubling time. I read today in Fortune that China has 33 million automobiles, and is projected to increase to 130 million by 2015. You do the math, but that suggests a doubling time of about 4 years for China's autos. For reference, the doubling time for all world vehicles was 26 years in 1993. Against that backdrop, I hope there will be more public and private support for cellulosic fuels than has so far been evident. Clearly they should be sustainably produced and used to power hybrids, not SUVs. Congress can do this if it has the will. Cellulosic ethanol comes out very well in greenhouse reductions in LCA (Life Cycle Analysis) studies by Kammen at Berkeley and Wang at Argonne. Finally, we should think beyond agriculture. In North America, dozens of paper mills have shut down due to foreign competition. Some of these could be refitted as forest biorefineries, making ethanol and other feedstocks to displace oil. More than half the world's people will live in cities in 2008, generating lots of waste paper which could be made into ethanol. Daniel Gibbs, Ph.D.
Geothermal is already cheaper than clean coal! I completely agree that coal is a disaster and will probably never be economical with sequestration. Geothermal is already competitive and reliable and unlike wind, it works 24/7. The latest MIT study says that geothermal can be used economically even without hot springs by copying the water injection technique used on oilwells. Ormat (ORA on the NYSE) is already doing this profitably and with excellent reliability. They currently have 900 MW in operation and have orders for 200 MW in New Zealand and 380 MW in Indonesia. Here are some links to the report: http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/story?id=47 ... http://geothermal.inel.gov/publications/future_of_geother ... http://messages.finance.yahoo.com/Business_%26_Finance/In ...
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[This message has been edited by Tyren (edited 03-02-2007).] |
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Tyren Senior Member Posts: 2598 |
posted 03-02-2007 18:23
Coal: Could Be The End Of The Line Prices would soar if the U.S. clamped down on carbon emissions If Vinod Khosla is right, the nation's energy mix may be poised for a profound shift. Like most Americans, the legendary venture capitalist and founder of Sun Microsystems Inc. (SUNW ) once assumed that coal was a necessary evil. After all, plants that burn it provide half of the nation's electricity. The U.S. has more than 270 billion tons of the stuff in the ground -- a 200-year supply -- and utilities have plans to build more than 150 additional plants. Khosla has been funneling cash into biofuels and other forms of green energy. But he says he "assumed that coal was impossible to displace."
Has Khosla gone off the deep end? If so, he's not alone. "It's the definition of financial insanity to invest in a new coal plant," agrees Marc Brammer, head of research for consulting firm Innovest Strategic Value Advisors. Even some utility executives see big risks. "It's very likely the investment decisions many are making, to build long-lived high-carbon-dioxide-emitting power plants, are decisions we'll all live to regret," warns Vice-President Gary Serio of Entergy Corp. (ETR ), which owns several coal plants. Here's Khosla's argument: Much of the developed world has already imposed curbs on greenhouse gas emissions, and the U.S. is likely to follow suit. The European experience suggests that the cost of emitting a ton of CO2 is about $20 to $25. Since coal-fired power plants emit more than twice as much CO2 for the same amount of electricity as natural-gas-fired plants, coal gets hit hardest by the curbs. The effective price of coal could leap as much as sixfold, raising the cost of producing electricity by about 50%. Many utilities' current proposals for coal-fired plants don't fully account for those risks, says Michael J. Bradley, founder of the Clean Energy Group, a utility association. Those companies "could be really jeopardizing their stockholders' investment," warns one utility executive. Some industry experts see the rash of proposals for new coal plants -- such as 11 planned by TXU (TXU ) in Texas -- as a strategy for getting in under the wire. "I think they see a window before the carbon costs hit," says Roger W. Gale, president of consultant GF Energy. The companies hope they can get the plants grandfathered under the rules or pass along the added costs to consumers. TXU spokesperson Kimberly Morgan says that regulations are years away, that the company has considered the risks, and that more electricity is badly needed. That's why stocks like TXU's haven't taken a hit. Without coal, where will power come from? Khosla's grand vision is to repower the U.S. via solar plants in the American Southwest. The idea: Use thousands of acres of mirrors to focus solar energy, heating water to drive turbines. An analysis of new Australian solar technology suggests that it is cost-competitive even with today's coal plants. "I'm almost convinced that the cheapest plant would be solar thermal," says Khosla. Skeptics wonder if Khosla is talking down coal to pump up his investments in clean energy. He declines to discuss these stakes in detail, but he says: "I only invest in what I believe in." Meanwhile utilities have begun seriously exploring solar technologies. Austin Energy, for instance, is now getting bids on a plant of up to 50 megawatts. Investors in coal are starting to fret about the risks of emissions regulations. And some customers are starting to insist that their power come from clean sources: Witness California's all-green energy initiatives. That trend could grow as new science prompts more dire warnings about global warming. "I've never seen a phenomenon take over the public consciousness" like climate change, observes David Crane, CEO of NRG Energy Inc., a Princeton (N.J.) utility. "This is the kind of thing that could stop coal." |
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Tyren Senior Member Posts: 2598 |
posted 17-02-2007 00:42
http://www.renewables-made-in-germany.com/en/solar-thermal-power-plants/ |
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Tyren Senior Member Posts: 2598 |
posted 28-10-2007 21:34
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Tyren Senior Member Posts: 2598 |
posted 25-02-2008 08:07
Solar thermal. Ren energi til under 1 kr pr kWh. [This message has been edited by Tyren (edited 25-02-2008).] |
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