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How the Economy Is Changing Clean Energy
Al writes "The economy has hit green energy technologies hard, but technologies focused on energy efficiency and clean coal are still attracting money. Over the next few years, venture capitalists say that the biggest winners in clean tech will most likely be companies with technologies that improve efficiency. Such ventures often take advantage of cheap sensors, communications hardware, and software packages to monitor and control energy use both in buildings and on the electricity grid. High-capital businesses are now more likely to succeed if they can attract foreign funding. For instance, Great Point Energy, based in Cambridge, which has developed a process for converting coal into natural gas, has attracted $100m in funding from China."
... the companies that will do the best will be the ones that can maximize their profit with a minimum amount of debt. How cool their toys are doesn't factor into it.
I work for a company that is retrofitting 30-40 year old steam turbines at coal power plants. Its such a difficult and expensive process to get a new power station built (of any fuel) that the power companies want to keep these coal plants running for another 40 years. You can blame the NIMBY folks, or the environmentalists that require environmental study after study before ground is broken.
I'm in the business, and the cost of electricity is going to continue to rise pretty spectacularly. Most of the plants built in the past 15 years or so are natural gas, which is now expensive and continuing to rise in cost. Many of plants built in the 60's running on cheap fuel are getting near their end of life. Some are being retrofitted but many aren't worth it. Nobody can build a nuke plant these days and coal is equally taboo. Few people are studying engineering so the manpower is also getting scarce. Its not a crisis yet but most of the power industry is aged in thier 50s and 60s.
We aren't in a crisis yet, but in another 10 years its going to start getting ugly.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
In many areas of the country clean coal won't work since the geology isn't right for storing the captured CO2. Additionally, there currently are not even any working demonstration plants, only talk of plants that could be converted. The sheer amount of CO2 produced from coal is also a huge problem. It would require massive pipelines to dispose of the CO2 from areas that don't have the geology for storing it, and then there's the danger of a fissure opening up somewhere and the CO2 escaping, which would be deadly. As I see it, the only long term methods of reducing CO2 are renewable and nuclear. The only reason clean coal is happening is because the government is throwing money at it and all those coal producing states and the votes they represent. There has not been a single demonstration that clean coal actually works.
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Ignoring nuclear power because of controversy (...)
Ignoring the only proven alternative to coal, as in one that is supplying a significant percent of electricity in several nations (over 50% in some cases), only because some dimwits don't understand physics or engineering, is extremely stupid.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
The 'economy' didn't hit all these green energy projects, the plummeting price of oil did. Few, if any, of these projectcs are remotely competitive with oil/nat gas under $75 and in many cases still higher - and even with substantial subsidies and tax breaks.
As we saw with ethanol, energy 'policy' is just another boondoggle of lobbyists and special interest groups seeking government funds so they can make some bucks. Wind, solar, clean coal and so on all live off the government teat to one degree or another. Would they even exist without those tax breaks and direct funding?
That is the new governmental hybrid business model. Private profits, but public debt socialism for the same guys.
IMO, "too big to fail" should translate into "too big to be allowed to exist in the first place".
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Never mind the CO2 that coal plants produce.
Indeed, never mind the things like arsenic (that remain toxic forever) that are in coal ash.
The fact is, if coal plants had to meet the same standards for radioactive release that nuclear plants do, they'd all have to be shut down. There's all kinds of radioactive stuff in coal (radon, thorium, etc) -- not very much per ton, but coal plants burn millions of tons of the stuff. Indeed, if you could extract the thorium from coal you'd get more energy burning it in a reactor than you would from burning the carbon in a furnace. (Don't take my word, look it up.)
"Clean coal" is an oxymoron.
-- Alastair