Did Renewables Contribute to Spain's Blackout?

That's the question that still has not been definitively answered as of today (May 11), almost two weeks after the April 28 power outage that plunged much of Spain and Portugal into darkness for almost 24 hours.  Why could renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power have contributed to the blackout?  The answer isn't simple, but as more and more countries derive more of their energy from renewables, it's a question that deserves examination.

 

What we do know about the blackout is this.  The Iberian Peninsula is a little like Texas in that its power grid is nearly autonomous, with only small interties to the rest of the European continent.  A little after noon, some "oscillations" appeared in the grid and were "detected and mitigated."  Operating a large power grid is a delicate balancing act in which the fluctuating demand must be met by appropriate generating capacity at all times.  And across the entire grid, all the generating plants must produce power in synchronism at a rate of 50 Hz (in Europe—60 Hz in the U. S.). 

 

A prime indicator of the health of the grid is how close the grid's frequency is to its nominal frequency.  The grid is like a symphony orchestra in which all the instruments are tuned to the same pitch.  The entire system is designed for optimum efficiency at 50 Hz, and as little as only 1 Hz deviation above or below that can lead to serious problems and ultimately damage or destroy millions of dollars' worth of transformers and other gear.  So grid operators have both automatic and manually backed-up systems to keep the grid frequency near its nominal value, and to vary the amount of power being generated as demand varies.

 

For reasons that are not yet clear, at 12:33 PM three generators tripped off the grid.  This meant that the system lost 2.2 GW of capacity instantly.  In response, the grid frequency began to fall from 50 Hz, and when it reached 48 Hz, automatic protection circuitry began to disconnect more generators from the grid, leading to a cascade that shut the entire system down in a matter of seconds. 

 

Once a thing like this happens, it takes hours to communicate among the now-isolated generating plants and organize an effort to re-synchronize and reconnect parts of the grid in a way that will not lead to further problems.  In the meantime, most communications and transportation systems in Spain and Portugal were severely crippled, thousands of people had to be evacuated from electric trains, and seven people died as a result of the blackout.

 

At the time of the grid failure, over half of the grid's power was being produced by solar, wind, or hydroelectric plants.   Assuming most of this was wind or solar, the grid was therefore missing something that power grids used to have an abundance of:  "spinning reserve."  And spinning reserve is an important way that grids can stabilize themselves.

 

Simply put, spinning reserve is the energy stored in the mechanical momentum of the turbines and generators used to produce power at nuclear, fossil-fueled, and hydropower plants.  A generator-turbine shaft, armature, and blades weighing many tons cannot be stopped on a dime, and the fact that it's spinning, typically at thousands of revolutions per minute, means that there's a lot of energy stored in it. 

 

When a sudden increase or decrease in load occurs on such a generator, the spinning reserve means that its speed (which directly determines its frequency) does not change instantly.  If the load increases (as it would if generators elsewhere suddenly tripped off the line), the spinning reserve automatically keeps the frequency from dropping instantly.  This factor can be used in designing stability into the grid, and historically spinning reserve has been an asset in making grids stable.

 

When renewable sources began to be connected to power grids, the approach taken by designers was that the renewables would always be a small fraction of the total power generated.  So when they designed the devices to interface solar or wind power to the grid (called "inverters") they simply designed them to follow whatever frequency the grid was producing at the time.  Electronics has no mechanical momentum, so renewable sources can adjust their frequency instantaneously.  As long as they represent a small fraction of the total power generated, like a few monkeys riding on the back of an elephant, the fact that renewables do not contribute spinning reserve was not important.  The monkeys go where the elephant goes, and they're just along for the ride.

 

But reports say that at the time of the blackout, the fraction of power being made by renewables was on the order of 58%.  So the monkeys outweighed the elephant in this case.  Engineers have studied and modeled these situations, and presumably know what they're doing, but there is an undercurrent of suspicion that under some circumstances, having too large a fraction of renewables on a power grid that is isolated, like the Iberian Peninsula's is, can lead to trouble.  The question is, was last month's blackout an example of the kind of trouble renewables can cause?  We will have to wait on the results of the investigation to find out.

 

There is a way to make renewable power sources act like they have spinning reserve, but it's not cheap.  That energy has to come from somewhere, and either the renewable source has to hold its maximum capacity in reserve (which is wasteful), or you have to add capacity in the form of batteries.  But with suitable inverter design, a wind or solar source with batteries can be made to act like it has a certain amount of spinning reserve.

 

If we find that the blackout was in fact worsened by inverter-based renewables, something like the battery-spinning-reserve idea may need to be implemented as a safety precaution.  There are other good reasons to put battery storage on grids with a lot of renewable energy.  A windless night produces no wind or solar power, and it's handy in such cases to have energy stored up somewhere that you can use in such situations. 

 

Batteries are improving steadily and may come in very handy to avert the next blackout.  If it turns out that renewables contributed to the problem, we have a solution, but it's not going to be cheap.

 

Sources:  I referred to an article in Wired at https://www.wired.com/story/what-caused-the-european-power-outage-spain-blackout/, an article on batteries supplying spinning reserve at https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/energy-storage/battery/spinning-reserve-displacement-using-batteries-for-a-more-efficient-and-cleaner-way-to-back-up-power/, and the Wikipedia article "2025 Iberian Peninsula blackout."

The Sierra Club Vision for Texas Energy

 

Matthew Johnson is the deputy director of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club.  Last week on Valentine's Day, the Austin American-Statesman published in its opinion section Mr. Johnson's thoughts about the state of the Texas energy situation.  If his piece was a valentine to the state's energy interests, it was one that had a lot more thorns than roses.

 

As the disastrous power-grid failure during the February 2021 freeze demonstrated, all was not well with the Texas energy infrastructure, and Mr. Johnson notes that in 2023, Texas voters approved spending $5 billion on grid improvements.  But in his view, the trusting voters of Texas, who simply wanted more reliable electricity at lower costs, were betrayed by "greedy industrial corporations," who directed the money into "risky, polluting, and unnecessary gas-fired power plants."  According to Mr. Johnson, this was a betrayal of public trust.  Instead, during the current session the legislature is once more considering funding both fossil-fuel and nuclear plants.  Mr. Johnson thinks nuclear plants are a bad idea, because they have suffered delays and severe cost overruns in the past.

 

What should have been done, and what he hopes the legislature will do instead, is to put our money into energy-efficiency measures and renewable energy such as more wind and solar power.  He favors a regulation that would require electric utilities, "while they don't generate electricity," to "produce energy efficiency savings that offset 1% of the energy they sell."  And he mentions practical consumer measures such as improved insulation, smart thermostats, and retrofitted water heaters.  He concludes with this rhetorical flourish: "Together we have the power to forge a sustainable path forward that benefits all Texans—not just a select few."

 

I agree with Mr. Johnson on some of his points.  Energy conservation is a good thing.  In fact, without any special regulatory incentives such as the one he promotes, the energy consumption per capita in Texas actually went down by more than 6% from 2019 to 2022.  This is part of a long-term national trend that results from a number of factors, including more efficient industrial processes, the changing nature of energy-intensive industries, and replacement of old housing units by newer and better-insulated ones.  Unfortunately for Mr. Johnson's hopes that even more energy savings will occur, the fastest way to make people and corporations save energy is to make it cost more.  And that directly conflicts with one of Mr. Johnson's other hopes:  that energy would cost less.

 

If Mr. Johnson wants our Texas grid to be more reliable, let's consider the one thing that those desperate power dispatchers wished they had on that cold February night in 2021:  rapidly dispatchable emergency generators, robustly insulated for cold weather.  The type of generator that starts up the fastest—in a matter of minutes—is exactly the kind that Mr. Johnson deplores:  gas-fired turbine plants.  Why Mr. Johnson calls them "risky," I'm not sure.  While any process involving flammable gas can go awry, I'm not aware of any special hazards associated with them.  The only significant pollution they produce is carbon dioxide, but they make less CO₂ per kilowatt than coal or oil-fired plants. In fact, a big reason that CO₂ emissions are not higher than they are is the replacement of coal and oil by natural gas. 

 

Reading between the lines, I think Mr. Johnson's vision for our energy future would be as close to a 100% renewable grid as we can get, and the shuttering of all fossil-fuel plants, and no new nuclear plants.  If we could wave a magic wand and turn his vision into reality today, I would currently be typing in the dark until my laptop battery ran down.  It is nighttime in Texas, and the wind is not blowing much, at least in San Marcos.  While for brief moments, the abundant wind generation capacity of Texas has supplied a third or more of total Texas electricity consumption, the average is much less, and the same is true of solar power.  An all-renewable grid would require storage of power that could keep us running for days with little or no wind and long, cold nights. 

 

A surprising amount of battery-based energy storage has already been connected to the Texas grid.  As of 2024, there was almost 10 GW of storage available.  That's nice, until you realize that Texas' electricity consumption has peaked historically in the range of 80 GW.  And those batteries could supply 10 GW for only a short time—a few hours, perhaps.  So even if we had enough renewables to theoretically supply all our needs, we would need about an equal amount of battery storage to keep us going, at an expense that would lead to a lot of energy conservation, no doubt—but there goes Mr. Johnson's hopes of low electric bills again. 

 

And that's the fault of those "greedy industrial corporations," no doubt.  But by its nature, a modern energy grid is a large-scale industrial project, and the best institution we have found so far for organizing and developing such things is the corporation.  As for "greedy," I doubt that energy companies, or solar-power and wind-turbine companies, for that matter, are any greedier than other industrial sectors.  They have to make a profit of some kind to stay in business.  And while I'm sure that the details of how the Texas legislature interacts with energy companies might not bear public scrutiny too well, in my view spending $5 billion on gas-fired turbine generators was about the best way it could be spent.

 

By the way, some electric utilities do generate their own electricity, contrary to what Mr. Johnson says.  Some buy power from companies that only generate, some both generate and sell, and about the only part of the grid that nobody wants is the most essential one:  the transmission lines themselves.  But even that problem is being addressed with so-called "smart grid" developments, which promise to deliver some of the energy conservation that Mr. Johnson wants.

 

Opinion pages are for expressing opinions, and we are all now more enlightened than we were concerning the opinion of a Sierra Club spokesperson about the Texas energy grid.  All I can say is, I'm glad Mr. Johnson isn't in charge of it.

 

Sources:  The opinion piece "Texas needs more renewables—not fossil fuels" ran in the Friday, Feb. 14, 2025 edition of the Austin American-Statesman.  The statistic on Texas energy consumption is from https://www.statista.com/statistics/1496997/energy-consumption-per-capita-texas-united-states, and on Texas energy storage capacity I used https://www.statista.com/statistics/1496997/energy-consumption-per-capita-texas-united-states. 

 

Swimming With Fiberglass: The Fallout from the Nantucket Turbine Accident

 

On the surface, wind-turbine-generated electric power has been one of the green-energy success stories of the twenty-first century.  In 2000, only about 6 gigawatts (GW) of wind power was installed in the U. S.  In 2022, that number had risen to 434 GW, fueled by a combination of government subsidies, advances in mechanical and power technologies, and generally favorable public opinion. 

 

But no large-scale technology is entirely without its problems, and one of the downsides of wind energy started showing up very prominently on Tuesday, July 18, when chunks of fiberglass-carbon composite material began to show up on a number of Nantucket beaches.  They turned out to be from a blade of a wind turbine that had failed the previous Saturday about 13 nautical miles south of the beaches, in an Atlantic-Ocean-based wind farm called Vineyard Wind.  The local environmental authorities shut down the beaches and called out Vineyard Wind for its failure to notify them promptly after the failure, according to reports in National Review.  The system off the New England Coast is the second-largest ocean-based one in the U. S., and began operations only in January after receiving over a billion dollars in indirect federal subsidies. 

 

Now, Vineyard Wind may be able to recover from this incident, in which no one was killed or even injured, as far as we know.  It's not exactly clear why the turbine blade broke, but there is a possibility that manufacturing problems in France may have been responsible, as an identical type of blade also ruptured recently in the U. K. 

 

Broken blades are not the only problem that wind turbines can cause.  Vineyard Wind is in a prime commercial fishing area, and fishing interests opposed the installation because snagging an underwater power cable with a dragnet can capsize a boat.  And there's also the bird problem.

 

Estimates vary, but one source says that up to a million birds are killed every year in the U. S. by wind turbines.  This is a little-known but depressing thought which is easy to ignore, as the turbines are installed either offshore where they are out of sight to everyone except a few boaters (and those fishing boats), or in remote areas such as, well, Texas and Oklahoma.

 

This isn't the first time that governments have put their heavy thumbs on the scale of energy development.  Many of the hydroelectric projects built in the 1930s, ranging from Hoover Dam to the multiple installations of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), were paid for partly or completely with government dollars.  At the time, private utility interests protested about the unfair competition that such organizations as the TVA represented.  But in the depths of the Depression, anything that put people to work and made the perceived blessings of electricity available to more consumers was viewed favorably, and history has shown that viewpoint to be substantially correct.

 

Things are different now.  While demand for electricity is increasing, largely due to recent developments such as server farms for AI and cryptocurrency trading, we are not about to run out of electricity.  If environmental concerns militate against building more coal or natural-gas-fired plants, the nuclear option is one that makes a great deal of engineering sense, but is burdened with a lot of cultural baggage and regulatory barnacles.  In the headlong dash toward "net-zero" carbon emissions, the trendy thinkers and politicians have thrown billions at wind and solar power with more enthusiasm thsn discrimination, ignoring the fact that no hardware lasts forever, and it takes energy and physical stuff to build, and then when it wears out you have to put it somewhere.

 

I am told that after the carbon-fiberglass-composite wind turbine blades reach their end-of-lifetime date, which may be only a few years in some cases, the operators replace then and have to bury the old ones, intact, in the ground.  Recycling them would probably cost as much as making a new blade, and they're too big to take to a standard landfill.  And some of the chemicals in solar panels are nothing that you'd want to put on your morning cereal either, but acres and acres of them are going to have to be disposed of some day.

 

These are partly technical problems, and may have technical solutions.  But it's surprising how the same people who talk about how every technology must be sustainable, tend to turn a blind eye to the life-cycle issues of their favored technologies, simply because while in operation, they don't use fossil fuels. 

 

I'm sorry the beachgoers of Nantucket are having to stay out of the water temporarily while experts in haz-mat suits clean up the mess made by Vineyard Wind.  But some thought should have been given to the possibility of something like this happening, and maybe just a few miles away from some very popular beaches wasn't the best place to put the turbines. 

 

New England, unlike Texas, doesn't have a lot of good places on land to put wind turbines.  About thirty years ago, a mechanical engineer I knew at the University of Massachusetts managed to erect an experimental wind turbine on a prominent "mountain" (really a large hill) visible from I-95 in Massachusetts.  But every time I drove past it, I never saw it operating, and one day at a meeting, somebody finally asked him why they never saw it running.  His reply?  "It runs at night."  Sometimes it's hard being a pioneer.

 

It's a matter of judgment as to whether our era has gone overboard in its fiscal and political enthusiasm for wind, solar, and other renewables,as opposed to the tried-and-true fossil fuels and the controversial option of nuclear energy.  There are real hazards ahead if we displace too many old-style "dispatchable" sources (controllable on demand) with systems that depend on the wind blowing and the sun being out.  We still can't store large amounts of electricity economically, and there are technical reasons that too much wind and solar energy on a grid can make it hard to control, although these may be worked out in time.  And grid reliability is a vital feature that will affect the entire economy adversely if we lose it. 

 

I hope people in Nantucket get their beaches cleaned up before the summer swimming season is over, but even if they do, I'm not planning a trip up there.  This Texas wimp can't swim in water that cold.

 

Sources:  I referred to articles on the National Review website at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nantucket-beaches-closed-after-wind-turbine-breaks-apart-sending-fiberglass-shards-into-ocean/ and https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/07/the-biden-harris-green-crown-jewel-just-shattered-literally/.  The statistic on birds killed annually by wind turbines is from https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/wind-power-bird-deaths, and the growth in wind energy in the U. S. is from https://www.statista.com/statistics/189412/us-electricity-generation-from-wind-energy-since-2005/.

 

The Future of U. S. Energy: More like Texas or Germany?

 

In an article in the August issue of National Review, Mario Loyola warns of a looming energy crisis in the U. S. that would be largely self-inflicted.  Stated simply, it's a case of increasing demand and decreasing supply of reliable power.

 

First, the increasing demand.  For many years, it looked like the future of electric power in the U. S. was one of slow growth, mainly because the increased efficiency of traditional power-hungry industries such as manufacturing was combining with the overall transition to a service economy to create a situation in which we were doing more every year with only slight increases in power consumption. 

 

That is no longer the case.  And one of the big reasons is a new type of industry:  server farms.  The explosion in demand for computing power for novel applications such as artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency mining is now one of the biggest growth sectors for electric power.  Loyola says electricity demand will grow by at least 15% by 2032, only eight years from now. 

 

How are we going to meet that demand?  Right now, nobody knows.  From an economic point of view, building new power plants is a long-term process.  Investors want to be sure that the billions they put into new plants are going to pay off profitably during the lifetime of the equipment.  That requires, among other things, a stable regulatory environment.  But electric power is one of the most heavily regulated and perversely subsidized industries around.

 

The perverse subsidies right now are all in favor of renewable energy such as solar and wind power.  The reason for this is not economic as much as it is ideological.  A substantial and powerful political sector would like nothing better than to see all fossil-fuel facilities tossed into the ocean (except for the pollution that would cause) or otherwise banished from the planet.  We won't go into the well-known reasons for the hatred of fossil fuels here, but the fact of the matter is that if all fossil-fuel facilities vanished tomorrow, most of us in the U. S. would die in a matter of weeks. 

 

The result of all these incentives is that the "interconnection queue," which is kind of a waiting list that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission keeps for prospective generating facilities, is currently 95% solar power, and hardly anyone seems to be planning new natural-gas or nuclear plants. 

 

No matter what politicians say, you get no power from solar or wind on a windless night, of which there are many during the year.  And it is still largely true that we can't store large amounts of energy in batteries, although about 4 GW of battery capacity is now on the grid.  For comparison, the total generating capacity available in the U. S. in 2022 was over 1,600 GW.  That's 0.25% of our total capacity.  To get it up to even 10% would require 40 times as much storage as we have now, and we won't get there for years, even if we could afford it.

 

For the foreseeable future (which feels like it's shorter all the time), a reliable, dispatchable power grid will need to have at least a majority of its power coming from sources you can turn on and off whenever you want.  Right now that means nuclear, gas, and (pardon the expression) coal-fired plants.  But for various mainly ideological reasons, coal-fired plants are getting as scarce as DVD rental stores, and nuclear is under both a political cloud and subject to extremely encumbering regulations, as are most types of power infrastructure, even renewable-energy ones. 

 

In a separate article in the same issue, author Dominic Pino points out that the only U. S. industry largely free of any kind of regulation is the tech sector, meaning software-websites-social-media stuff.  Any activity that needs large numbers of people working for it, large amounts of stuff on land, or large amounts of imports runs into a forest of regulatory trees that requires years of bushwhacking to get through—except for tech.  And what industry is doing famously well compared to all the others?  Don't ask.

 

Even tech needs power, though, and if we keep going the way we're going, we will end up like Germany, which made the politically favored but empirically stupid decision a few years ago to shutter all its perfectly good nuclear plants.  So now Germany depends for its energy largely on natural-gas plants running off Russian gas, which is like chickens buying chicken feed from the fox.  Experts at the Harvard International Review attribute Germany's lackluster economic performance the last few years to its extremely high energy prices, which in turn result from slow growth even in the renewables sector and bureaucratic barnacles on the ship of state.

 

On the other hand, Texas, with its famously independent electrical grid, is going ahead with plans to add a lot of dispatchable power in the forms of natural gas and possibly even nuclear energy.  Texas A&M (still fondly known as Aggies despite the fact that the agricultural school is dwarfed by high-tech engineering these days) is planning to build not one, but several small nuclear power plants right on their campus in West Bryan.  Governor Abbott likes to do news releases every time a generating firm announces plans to build new power plants, whether it's natural gas, nuclear, or something else.  Just one recent announcement from his office stated that 42 new gigawatts of power was being planned by one firm, which goes a long way toward getting us to the 150 GW or so that Loyola says Texas will need by 2030.

 

And while I chilled out along with everyone else during the February 2021 Texas cold-weather grid failure, which might not have been as bad if Texas's grid wasn't independent of the rest of the country, that same independence makes it easier to plan new capacity in Texas than anywhere else in the country, where the Environmental Protection Agency and other bureaucratic blockades slow the process. 

 

So which shall it be?  A stagnant, energy-starved, but green economy?  Or energy enough to power all those electric cars that people allegedly want to drive, and the AI server farms, and maybe even some old-fashioned hands-on factories that we've almost forgotten how to build?  The choice is pretty clear, although energy policy doesn't rank very high on this year's political agenda.  But it's something that affects the lives of everyone in these United States, which makes it inevitably political.  And I only hope that the political process can handle it in a way that at least doesn't do a lot of harm.

 

Sources:  Mario Loyola's article "Our Coming Energy Famine" appeared on pp. 23-25 of the August 2024 issue of National Review.  I also referred to the websites https://www.utilitydive.com/news/entergy-proposes-gas-fired-power-plants-1200-MW/718036/, https://hir.harvard.edu/germanys-energy-crisis-europes-leading-economy-is-falling-behind/, https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us-generation-capacity-and-sales.php, and https://wtaw.com/small-nuclear-power-plants-to-be-built-on-the-rellis-campus/.

Will Space-Based Wireless Power Beams Solve the Energy Problem?

 

A recent article in a good-news website called The Brighter Side claimed that in a few years, we may be getting lots of energy from space-based wireless power stations.  A research group at Airbus, the European aerospace firm, has built a prototype and has high hopes for the technology's future.

 

Here's how it would work.  A solar panel about 2 km (more than a mile) across would be in geostationary orbit, probably an orbit with a tilt to it so that the satellite would be in continuous sunlight 24/7 rather than going through an Earth-caused eclipse once a day.  The amount of power thus generated—comparable to a standard fossil-fueled or nuclear plant—would then be converted into microwave energy, probably the same type of microwaves that heat your pizza.  The microwaves would be beamed through a large, sophisticated antenna array to suitable locations on Earth equipped with things called "rectennas"—antennas specially designed to receive microwaves and convert them efficiently into DC power.  The power would then be converted into standard AC for transmission on a grid, or conceivably used by mobile devices such as trucks and airplanes.

 

Sounds great, doesn't it?  Compared to earth-based solar panels, the ground-based technology is cheaper.  A rectenna is a lot easier to make than a solar panel.  As solar energy is more intense in space than on earth, it takes less solar-panel area in space to generate a kilowatt than it does on earth.  And there's the flexibility of beaming the power basically anywhere you want it, just as communications satellites beam signals to different locations.  What's in the way of our putting up lots of these and throwing fossil-fuel plants, and nuclear too for that matter, in the existential trash bin?

 

As a trained microwave engineer, I can answer that question.  Microwave power from solar-energy satellites is not a new idea.  Raytheon engineer William C. Brown conceived the idea in the early 1960s, and a key component was a crossed-field amplifier that he had invented earlier.  By 1976, Brown worked with NASA to transmit 30 kW of power over a distance of 1.5 km (almost a mile) using a 26-meter dish and a rectenna that was only 7.3 x 3.5 meters—about 10 by 25 feet.  I saw a video of that demonstration in which they used the power to light up an array of spotlights, and the lights gradually came on as the beam was directed at the rectenna.  The Airbus people have so far demonstrated a link only 36 meters long. 

 

If the idea has been around so long, why hasn't it been deployed commercially yet?  I can think of several reasons.

 

First, as even the optimistic Airbus researchers admit, the orbiting part of the system has to be really big to produce a useful amount of power.  Currently, it seems that the largest structure in orbit is the International Space Station, which is a little longer than a football field.  The solar array envisioned by the Airbus people would be twenty times longer and wider, if it was square.  At the current rate of space commercialization, however, such huge projects in space may become feasible.  But not yet.

 

Once you put the orbiting microwave power station in space, you have to be careful where you aim the beam.  The focusing ability of the station's antenna depends on how big the antenna is, and while it will be smaller than the solar array, you could easily imagine an antenna, say, 100 meters in diameter.  Some simple calculations I will spare the reader tell us that the beam on the ground from an antenna of that size in geostationary orbit, using the microwave-oven wavelength, will expose an area on the ground about 24 miles square to a microwave power density of more than a watt per square meter.  This level of energy would definitely be detrimental to human health and not real good for other vertebrates, either.  So a very large area on the ground, probably covering most of a good-size county, would have to be sequestered off and devoted to a giant rectenna farm.

 

The more speculative statements by the Airbus people of directly conveying microwave energy to mobile platforms such as airplanes are pretty much pipe dreams.  Not all the microwaves would be absorbed by the plane, and so people on the ground underneath would be at risk.  The tighter the beam you want, the larger the antenna has to be, so unless the designers want to make an antenna as big as the solar array, which brings up mechanical difficulties, I don't see how they can direct parts of the beam to highly specific locations on earth, although they could probably manage as many as a dozen or so without too much trouble.

 

The Airbus people are to be congratulated for dusting off an old idea that was clearly premature at the time it originated in the 1960s.  Back then it was prohibitively expensive to launch large structures into orbit.  We can count on both launch and space-based construction costs to decrease in real terms in the future.  So that is one big factor that makes reconsidering wireless power transfer from space a good thing. 

 

The drawbacks are substantial, however:  hazards to people and animals on the ground, the possibility of a space-based error that could send the beam skidding across the countryside into a major population center (there's a sci-fi scenario for you), and the difficulties of upkeep and maintenance—I suspect you'd have to have a few people permanently in space simply to keep the station running.  But it eliminates one of the big problems with most types of renewable energy these days: the fact that it's available only when the sun is out or the wind is blowing.  A properly designed geostationary-orbit power satellite would be available 24/7, through clouds, night and day. 

 

We'll know this technology's time has come when somebody like Elon Musk starts a company to do it.  In the meantime, though, it will remain what it has been for more than fifty years:  only an engineer's dream.

 

Sources:  I thank my wife for calling my attention to the article in The Brighter Side at https://www.thebrighterside.news/post/space-based-solar-power-beams-will-soon-be-powering-our-cities.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article "Wireless power transfer," and my 1975 ITT Reference Data for Radio Engineers handbook for antenna-beam calculations. 

Are There Batteries In the Grid's Future?

 

Texas has the largest installed capacity of wind generation of any U. S. state as of 2019.  But all those windmills did no good a year ago when historically low temperatures knocked out natural-gas production and generators, leading to the Big Freeze and the deaths of over 200 people.  The reason?  There was almost no wind associated with the cold snap, and no wind means no wind generation. 

 

In the debate about the Texas power grid that followed, some charged that our increasing reliance on wind power (and to a lesser extent, solar power) was destabilizing the grid.  Up to now, at least, power has to be generated on demand, so electric-utility operators have come up with a combination of base-load and peak-load generators to deal with the fluctuations in demand, which can go very low at 2 A. M. on a mild spring day, but soar to many times the minimum on a blazing August afternoon.

 

Base-load generators are most efficient when they run all the time.  Nuclear power is in this category, as are fossil-fuel plants that use steam turbines and large boilers fired by natural gas (or, decreasingly, coal).  These types of plants are used for base loads because starting and stopping them is a big deal and can take hours or even days. 

 

Peak-load plants, on the other hand, are designed to come on line in just minutes.  One example is the gas-turbine plant, basically a bunch of jet engines hooked to generators.  Peak-load plants are typically less efficient than base-load plants, but they can be started up quickly to meet soaring demand in emergencies. 

 

Solar and wind don't fit either of these categories, as they depend on whether the sun's out or the wind's blowing, respectively.  Fitting the fairly unpredictable output of these renewable types of energy into an existing grid can be challenging, because it adds fluctuations that weren't there before.  If the wind's blowing hard and Texas is getting up to 10% or more of its total electricity demand met by wind energy, and all of a sudden the wind stops, you have to be ready to jump in with peak-load plants and supply what's missing, and that isn't always easy.  So as more fluctuating renewables are added, the problem of managing the grid to meet fluctuating demand gets even harder.

 

Although experts determined that this issue was not a primary cause of the February 2021 Texas blackout, it's an ongoing concern, and one way of dealing with it is a very old one:  batteries.

 

Using batteries as electric-utility energy storage is not a new idea.  I have a 1910-era book on my shelves that describes how electric-streetcar power plants were supplemented by banks of lead-acid batteries attached across the lines at strategic places along the streetcar routes.  In periods of light demand with low traffic, the batteries were charged by the central power plant.  And during rush hour when there were more trolleys on the line than usual, the batteries would discharge into the overhead wires and supplement the base-load power generated at the central plant.

 

The problem with lead-acid batteries is that it takes a huge number of them to store enough energy to make a difference with a large-scale power grid.  Depending on the technology, a lithium battery of the same volume as a lead-acid battery can store up to ten times the energy, and the weight advantages are even better.  That's why electric cars had to wait until lithium batteries were fairly practical to compete with internal-combustion cars. 

 

In December of 2020, Vistra Energy connected what was then the largest battery-storage energy facility in the world to the California grid at Moss Landing in Monterey County.  The system can provide up to 300 MW of power and can store 1.2 gigawatt-hours, implying that it could provide its peak energy output for three or four hours before pooping out.  But that is plenty of time to tide a grid over an emergency until other more conventional sources can be put online.

 

Actually, because batteries can start supplying massive amounts of power in less than one cycle of the 60-Hz power frequency, they are very useful for damping out short-term instabilities in power grids that can otherwise trip relays and cause blackouts.  This type of operation can't be done with mechanical generation systems.  So a battery storage facility like this is one more tool in the power-dispatcher's toolbox to use in meeting fluctuating demand.

 

The Moss Landing facility was in the news recently because of a fire that destroyed ten of the nearly 100,000 battery packs at the facility, the second such fire in five months.  The first fire was caused by leaking water from cooling pipes, and so the second one may be due to similar causes.  The fire was contained and out before the fire department had a chance to do anything. 

 

The nice thing about battery systems is that failures can be isolated fairly easily, as the Moss Landing mishaps show.  Although the plant was shut down during the fire for safety reasons, repairs are fairly straightforward and the system was back online in short order.  This feature of gradual degradation is a big asset in the utility business, where shutdowns can cause big headaches.

 

It remains to be seen how significant a role battery storage will play in the future of the so-called smart grid.  Electric-car makers such as Tesla have dreams of distributed battery storage, in which thousands or millions of electric cars plugged in overnight could serve as a virtual storage facility controlled by the electric utility they're plugged into.  That would require massive changes in both hardware and regulatory structures that I'm not sure we're ready for.  But it's a nice dual-use idea that might evolve into a much more reliable, robust, and efficient grid than the fairly brittle things we have now. 

 

When I worked at an electronics repair shop one summer in college, I'd be amused when a customer would say, "This radio isn't electric, it runs on batteries."  In the future we may all be running on batteries more than we realize, and the grid will be more stable as a result.

 

Sources:  The website www.vice.com carried a story about the Moss Landing fires at https://www.vice.com/en/article/dypw5x/largest-lithium-ion-battery-in-the-world-meltdown-moss-landing.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on "Wind generation in the United States" and "Battery storage power station."

 

A Burning Question: Trees Into Electricity?

Ancient humans probably learned first about fire by watching a forest burn.  One would think that in this era of nuclear and solar energy, the very old-fashioned alternative of burning wood for power is passé, but one would be wrong.  A recent article on the Wired website points out that biomass-fueled power plants are enjoying a comeback both in the U. S. and Europe, but for different reasons.  And the reasons are controversial.

Burning wood releases the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, so other things being equal, generating electricity with solar or nuclear power is ecologically friendlier for that reason alone.  However, every tree on the planet has a natural life cycle, and before humans came along, the fate of many trees was to perish in a lightning-ignited forest fire.  We now know that such fires are a normal way for forests to renew themselves, and nature is not taken by surprise when a forest burns.  A few years later seedlings have sprouted into trees and the scars are largely healed. 

But in places like California, where residents of forested areas have promoted fire-prevention efforts that allow a buildup of dead trees and underbrush, the inevitable fires that nevertheless result can prove even more devastating than if people had just left nature to itself.  So a movement has arisen in that state to cut down dead trees and burn them in biomass plants, so much so that California leads the nation in the number of biomass-to-electricity facilities.

At first glance, this looks like a win-win situation.  The forests are better managed with those dead trees pruned away, the electric grid gets some much-needed power plants, and the local job markets benefit through the creation of labor-intensive logging and chipping activities.  But critics point out that burning any kind of biomass has a carbon footprint we could avoid, and the carbon sequestered in dead trees doesn't contribute to global warming.

I suppose somebody could get a grant to figure out exactly what mix of benign neglect, active harvesting of dead or even living trees, and biomass energy production would lead to the optimum of electricity and minimum carbon footprints, but even if you could figure it out, other factors would intervene before you could optimize things. 

Such factors include politics, both domestic and abroad.  In the Southeast U. S., where attitudes toward forests are more commercial than esthetic, it turns out there is a booming business in planting and harvesting pine forests to make wood pellets for export to Europe.  In a controversial decision, the European Union decided to designate biomass-fueled power plants as renewable energy, and now European countries are importing lots of wood pellets from the U. S. to burn for electricity.

Back when we lived in New England a couple of decades ago, a friend of ours started a business selling wood-pellet stoves for home heating.  As long as the pellets were made locally, they were cheaper per heating unit than fuel oil, which was the only alternative for many homes.  But somehow I doubt that shipping wood pellets across the Atlantic is as cost-effective as shipping oil, or even coal.  But it's renewable, and that label is valued increasingly by an ecologically-conscious public willing to pay more for it.

If you consider the life cycle of a particular tree, there is a good but not certain chance that it will perish in a forest fire some day.  In prehistoric natural forests, this fate was probably more common than it is today in California's fire-protected forests, but as recent years have shown, it's impossible to prevent all forest fires.  And when an artificially-protected forest choked with dead trees and dry underbrush does catch fire, the resulting conflagration can be a lot worse than if we had just walked away from the place a few dozen years ago and let nature do its own burning at its own pace.  But people with million-dollar homes in the middle of a forest don't want to do that, and so you get the situation that California faces now, where many forests resemble powder kegs waiting for a match.

If you look at the situation from a sustainable-energy perspective, it seems to me that biomass energy fits the description better than many other so-called sustainable options.  Over the long term, here's what happens.  Trees use sunlight, water, carbon dioxide, and a few other things to make cellulose.  Either before or after the tree dies, people come along and chip up the tree and burn it for power, releasing the carbon dioxide back into the air.  But other trees will come along some day and grab that same carbon dioxide and repeat the cycle.  Sounds pretty sustainable to me.

One practical problem in the way of going completely biomass for our electricity is that biomass plants don't scale very well.  Just as an example, the largest biomass plant in Texas has a capacity of only 100 megawatts (MW).  The smallest natural-gas plant in Texas has a capacity of 176 MW, and the largest can put out 2051 MW, comparable to the two nuclear plants in Texas.  The fact of the matter is that it takes a whole lot of wood chips to make not that much energy, and so far, most biomass plants in the U. S. have been built not simply to produce power, but to achieve other ends as well:  reduction of dead-tree mass, employment, and so on. 

So we probably shouldn't envision a future in which all our power comes from burning trees.  There just aren't enough trees to go around for that.  But in situations where labor, forestry policies, and politics coincide, biomass energy can both make sense and do some good.  It's not all good, but it's not all bad either, like most things in life.  And in burning wood for fuel, we are doing something that humanity has done since the dawn of time. 

Sources:  The Wired story by Jane Braxton Little entitled "The Debate Over Burning Dead Trees to Create Biomass Energy" appeared at https://www.wired.com/story/the-debate-over-burning-dead-trees-to-create-biomass-energy/ on June 27, 2020.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article "List of power stations in Texas" and some websites promoting the economy of wood pellets over oil, such as https://www.woodpellets.com/support/save-money-woodpellets.aspx. 

Being Green Takes Green: Europe Rethinks Renewable Energy Standards

For the past decade or more, as Al Gore and the majority of climate-change scientists have insisted that the world is speeding headlong toward an environmental catastrophe of epic proportions, European countries have adhered to stringent emission controls in order to lessen their dependence on fossil fuels and replace them with renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power.  And the strictures have been in place long enough to have a significant effect;  Germany, for example, now routinely gets a quarter of its electricity from renewable sources.  But as economist Stephen Moore points out in a recent article in National Review, treading so lightly on one's carbon footprint has a price:  higher energy costs.  A kilowatt-hour in Europe currently costs up to twice as much as it does in the U. S., and European manufacturers who use lots of electricity are starting to take notice.  Companies such as the chemical giant BASF are planning new operations in the U. S. rather than Europe.  As a result, the European Union recently announced that it was dropping its mandatory emissions standards for its member nations, letting them burn more coal and oil, if they can find it.  And one of the places they are most likely to start looking is—you guessed it—the U. S.  New exploration technologies, primarily fracking (hydraulic fracturing), have put the U. S. on track to be a net exporter of energy in the near future, and it looks like Europe will now be a prime customer, their disdain for old-fashioned carbon-based fuels notwithstanding.

Engineers made it possible for Germany to achieve the impressive feat of running a quarter of a modern economy on renewable energy alone.  Engineers also have made it possible for the U. S. to increase its oil and gas production in recent years beyond the wildest dreams of everyone but a few farsighted oil-exploration entrepreneurs.  In the absence of government controls or restrictions, customers for energy will buy the cheapest convenient fuel available.  Everyone agrees that except for a few isolated localities, there are no strictly economic reasons to build lots of renewable-energy sources into a large-scale power grid.  A fossil-fuel power plant is much cheaper to build, its output is more reliable, and the continuing cost of the fuel is often more than offset by the construction, maintenance, and other costs associated with the relative unreliability of wind and solar energy. 

But such a strictly economic analysis ignores a cultural and political factor:  the perceived virtue of using renewable energy as opposed to the use of fossil fuels.  In the moral universe in which many government and science leaders live, burning fossil fuels is as close as you can get to a mortal sin against future generations, and against those living now who may be harmed by the consequences of anthropogenic global warming.  The desire to avoid this sin is so great that, at least in Europe, it led to the European Union's mandatory emissions standards which effectively imposed renewable-energy quotas on its member nations.  But even the bureaucrats of the EU can recognize impending economic disaster when they see it, and as the costs of living with a renewable-energy grid began to pile up, they and their constituents saw the consequences of idealism in their power bills.  And it got to be too much.

This is not the place to debate the truth, falsity, or somewhere-in-betweenness of the connection between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming.  What is of more immediate concern is the public's perception of the issue, and how that perception (or rather, spectrum of perceptions) influences governmental policies and laws.  For whatever reason, the EU, with its relatively opaque governing structure and increasingly centralized power over its member nations, responded promptly and vigorously to the perceived threat of global warming with practical measures that had significant negative economic effects.  The fact that the same leaders are now backing off on these measures in the face of rising energy costs says volumes about their real priorities, which turn out to be similar to those of politicians in other parts of the globe.  The slogan "The economy, stupid" was part of Bill Clinton's successful 1992 presidential campaign that brought down George H. W. Bush's presidency, and while Brussels bureaucrats do not face the same sorts of political pressures that U. S. presidential contenders do, they appear to have more sense than they sometimes get credit for. 

In a free society, individual members can try to live off the grid entirely, or buy three Hummers and take cross-continental trips in them, or anything in between.  But things like national power grids are, by necessity, creatures of politics, policies, and law.  And any society which wants to pay the price for eschewing fossil fuels may do so. 

The problems come when an elite leadership that is persuaded of the evils of fossil fuels tries to implement its expensive energy tastes, however virtuous, on the backs of a populace that has to pay for it.  That experiment has been tried in Europe, and we are witnessing its failure, to a great extent, although Europe will probably continue to rely on renewables to a greater degree than the U. S. does for some time to come. 

It may come as a surprise to some of my readers that in good old "ahl-bidness" Texas, where much of the technology of hydraulic fracturing was developed, and where petroleum is regarded roughly in the same light as mother's milk, we lead the nation in wind-power generation.  In fact, on a particularly windy day in 2013, for a short time Texas surpassed Germany in renewables use,  because for a short time more than a fourth of the total electricity being consumed was supplied by wind power.  As in other parts of the world, the growth of renewables didn't happen without a substantial government incentive, namely a guaranteed purchase price for wind-generated electricity that encouraged the construction of huge wind farms in West Texas.  But this shift to wind was achieved without the penalty-laden restrictions on the construction of conventional fossil-fuel plants that the EU emissions standards imposed.

Decades, if not centuries, will elapse before the whole story of fossil fuels, global warming, and all that can be written.  In the meantime, billions of people on this planet want and need, the advantages that cheap, reliable electric power can provide.  Other things being equal, most of them would probably want to save the planet rather than cook it for breakfast, but things are not equal—not economically, not politically, and not culturally.  And in this inequality lies the complexity of the ethics of energy policy today.

Sources:  Stephen Moore's article "Europe's Green Collapse" appeared in the Feb. 24, 2014 issue of National Review.  The record 28% of electric power generated by wind in Texas occurred at 7:08 PM, Feb. 9, 2013, and was reported in the Abilene Reporter News at http://www.reporternews.com/news/2013/mar/01/texas-wind-energy-sets-record-grid-expansion-in/.  The report that Texas leads the nation in installed wind-power generation capacity is taken from the website of the American Council on Renewable Energy at http://www.acore.org/files/pdfs/states/Texas.pdf.