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CIA Investing in Modular Green Energy
Paladin144 writes "The CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, has announced a strategic development agreement with SkyBuilt Power Inc. The CIA seems to be interested in SkyBuilt's new Mobile Power Station, which can be parachuted into remote locations and be up and running in a few hours with only 2 people needed to set it up. The MPS harnesses both solar and wind power and is capable of up to 150 kilowatts of electricity. The devices uses off-the-shelf components and easily swappable parts to be cost-effective."
The CIA has tons of front companies it owns, and corporations in it's employ as well. They might as well actually...do something...while pretending not to be part of the CIA... Hey, at least this time they're doing something legal! And don't blame this on "Dubya" this sort of thing has been Agency practice for decades.
Thankfully, there has been building interest in renewables, principally photovoltaics and wind power. At this point, the lifetime cost of a wind power installation (of size greater than, say, 1 MW) is on par or even less than traditional energies like gas and coal-fired plants. Meanwhile, the market cost of 20% silicon-based solar cells is down to something like $3-4/W, depending on how the market for semiconductor-grade silicon goes.
One of the major setbacks in the deployment of such energy is the physical infrastructure in the capital cost. While the solar cells are becoming rather cheap, the structure to support/protect them, and the electronics to interface them with the grid cost at least as much. In both the case of wind and solar, since there is low maintenance and basically no consumables, the lifetime cost of and installation is 90% upfront capital cost. For a coal or gas fired plant, or nuclear, the upfront capital cost is something like 40% of the total cost of running the plant over its lifetime, while maintenance and the cost of consumables take up the rest.
The end result is that people balk at the huge upfront costs of renewable power installations, even though the lifetime costs are nowadays comparable with traditional electrical power generation facilities. However, there are two situations that can give renewables an edge. The first we are already experiencing: the cost of consumables and maintenance are on the rise. Natural gas costs are increasing, coal-fired plants have to run cleaner, and nuclear is an ever-increasing headache.
The second, and more relevant, situation that favors renewables (and the point of TFA), is that there are some situations where one really, really needs electrical power, and is faced either with the choice of an expensive installation cost for renewable power, or a really expensive cost for shipping in the consumable fuel (and someone who can work the power generator itself, which ain't as easy as it sounds). In the case of remote power generation (for relay stations on the side of a mountain, for instance), in very rural areas with little or no road access (developing nations like Afghanistan), or in a disaster situtation where the usual delivery infrastructure has completely gone to hell, the scales tip away from things like petroleum, gas, and coal fired generators and squarely into the arena of renewables.
What these guys are doing is demonstrating that not only is the technology mature enough for long duration, high capacity, low maintenance remote power generation, but that it is rugged enough to be deployed anywhere, anytime, where it is needed. Bravo!
This is either a typo or mistake of some sort. According to SkyBuilt's website (www.skybuilt.com), the device isn't capable of anywhere NEAR 150kW of power.
"SkyBuilt Power® is your premier source for portable, modular, quick assembly, durable, solar, wind, and other distributed power--from 0.5 kW to 50 kW or more."
Yeah. That sounds about right.
Basically its just a shipping container with solar cells or small wind turbines tacked on the sides. Perhaps they did something fancy with the power conditioning or batery circuitry, which COULD make it interesting . . . but ony marginally so. The idea is that you use the inside of the container as a little office or listening post/etc, and it generates its own power. Or it can "use diesel, propane, natural gas or gasoline-powered generators" according to their info, which would seem to defeat the point. Either way I'm not impressed.
Why am I seeing images of a laptop with a photoshopped 2TB "Quantum Memory Unit" in my mind?