Greetings from Washington, DC., home of the nation’s newest major league baseball
team, some of the ugliest government
architecture outside the Soviet Union, and the site of the 2008
Washington International Renewable Energy Conference (WIREC). Although the calendar is now littered with alternative energy conferences, WIREC is perhaps the most unique because it brings together several unlikely communities, each of which holds important pieces of the puzzle that will enable us to get a handle on our civilization’s nasty carbon habit without killing the economy (or ourselves) in the process. Although WIREC’s main mission was originally conceived as a conference for policy makers at the state and national level, it’s expanded to become one of the few places where academics, industrialists, technologists, investors, and government bureaucrats all get to mix, mingle, and freely exchange ideas.
Much of my time at WIREC was spent at the so-called
Side Events which hosted more technically-intensive sessions on biofuels, wind, solar, geothermal, ocean waves, and other more exotic power generation technologies. One of the more interesting sessions explored how automobiles might evolve towards a post-petroleum world, and even act as a distributed storage system for the cyclical outputs of wind and solar systems. Known as vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology, a relatively simple 2-way power system would allow the power grid to tap some of the energy stored in the batteries of parked electric cars and plug-in hybrids to serve as replacements for the fuel-hungry peaking units that are currently used to meet short-term demand surges. Once there are enough batteries on line they could also act as a distributed storage system that soaked up surplus capacity during times of abundant wind or sun and released it as needed. Besides a very informative presentation, Dr Willett Kempton, Associate Professor at the University of Delaware, demonstrated one of the first working V2G vehicles on the trade show floor.
The Mid-Atlantic Grid-Interactive Car (MAGIC) V2G
prototype is an electrified Scion Xb which connects to the power grid via a 2-way metering system that can actually sell a portion of its battery capacity according to instructions programmed by the owner. Several utilities and car companies are looking closely at the economics and technical feasibility of deploying V2G infrastructures to take advantage of the growing number of plug-in hybrid and all-electric vehicles that are expected to hit the highway in the next 5 to 10 years.
Of course MAGIC was not the only vehicle on the show floor. Besides appearances by Chevrolet’s all-electric Volt
prototype and one of their 300 hydrogen-powered Equinox
SUVs that are entering user field trials this month, visitors got to see the world’s first
hybrid dump truck. Built by Mack/Volvo, it uses a large bank of ultracapacitors instead of batteries to provide up to 165 hp worth of boost to the 365 hp diesel drive train. Primarily used for getting the truck rolling from a dead stop and for short distances, the quick-recharge capacitor system has demonstrated up to 30% fuel savings in stop-and-go environments.
In addition to green vehicles, the exhibit space was crammed with displays of wind generators, solar panels, celluosic ethanol biofuel production systems, and several technologies for extracting energy from ocean waves. Many small companies as well as multinational giants like GE, Babcock & Wilcox, and Sharp, were there to show how they were capitalizing on opportunities that this shift to a carbon-limited economy has created. As these green power systems enter the mainstream, the electronics that drive them should provide a much-needed long-term revenue source for many sectors of the electronics industry. That’s because, even if they don’t produce electricity, nearly all of them require substantial amounts of electronic control, monitoring and motor drive elements.
The show floor was also home to booths from Japan, Germany, Korea, China, Spain, and other countries displaying their green power industries and programs to lower their national carbon footprints. Their presence complemented many of WIREC’s most auspicious activities which took place at the so-called
Ministerial Track. In these sessions, government policy makers from around the world sought to educate themselves on various renewable energy technologies and the economics that would help make them possible.
It’s impossible to list even a small fraction of the activities at the Ministerial track but my brief conversation with Michael Muller, Germany’s Parliamentary State Secretary, should give you a good sense of how serious much of the world has become about addressing climate change. During our chat, I learned that in late 2007, Germany committed itself to reducing its CO2 and other greenhouse emissions to 40% below its 1990 levels. This goes far beyond the 20% cuts that the European Community committed to at the last climate summit and may, in part, explain why Germany consumes such a large percentage of the world’s solar panel production.
Many other countries have followed suit, with Norway taking the lead by committing to attain carbon neutrality by 2050 and New Zealand close behind with a pledge to get 90% of its electricity from renewables by 2025. These, and the other
commitments made by nations, cities, and businesses at WIREC signal the real beginning of an era where people are discovering how to use the intimate connections between business, technology and the environment to re-tool the global economy for a sustainable future.
I’m already looking forward to the next WIREC to see how many of this year’s promising technologies have made it to market, and to see how many more countries have committed themselves to serious reductions in their carbon footprint. I’m also hoping that by this time next year, the US will finally be ready to join the roster of nations that are more committed to protecting our fragile ecosystem than to protecting the interests of the fossil fuel industry.
Comments? Questions? Predictions about whether the Washington Nationals will make it to the World Series this year? Post your comments on our blog or write me at
lhg at en-genius dot net.
