Ocean Energy Institute and Energy Systems

The Ocean Energy Institute, founded in 2007 by Matthew R. Simmons, is a think-tank and venture capital fund addressing the challenges of U.S. offshore renewable energy. OEI approaches energy R&D and investment from a systems point of view; not just generation, but usage, storage and transmission all together as an interdependent set of opportunities and the next driving force of the international economy.

Grand Opening - Ocean Energy Institute Offices

Rockland, Maine (July 20) -- The Ocean Energy Institute will be hosting a VIP celebration today for the grand opening of its new office headquarters.

Energy as a Complete System

OEI's "GUST" model (generation, usage, storage and transmission) proposes how the offshore wind resource can be efficiently tapped into and used, and the electricity intelligently stored and transmitted.

This model addresses two of the biggest challenges to the reliability of wind power: seasonality (the wind blows strongest in the winter, when energy demand is historically lower) - and intermittency (the wind blows less strongly during the daytime, when energy demand is highest).

The System Solution

1. Use the energy in a way that the seasonal match is great (e.g., winter heating)
2. Use the energy for the 90% of the family energy budget that is NOT "electricity"
3. Use the energy in applications where energy storage is easy
4. Construct a North American Supergrid to balance out intermittency
5. Develop NH3 (ammonia) fuel as a way to seasonally shift energy generation vs. use
6. Exploit Smart Grids to dynamically balance generation and demand
7. Stop handcuffing ourselves to a 20 percent renewable "penetration" limit

The "Pickens Plan Plus" a.k.a the Simmons Plan

The Ocean Energy Institute has published an updated version of the original Pickens Plan. The Simmons Plan is outlined in a pdf presentation here.

Global Wind Power Boom Continues Despite Economic Woes

China doubles installed capacity for fifth year running – Global markets up 31%

Brussels, 3 February 2010. The Global Wind Energy Council today announced that the world’s wind power capacity grew by 31% in 2009, adding 37.5 GW to bring total installations up to 157.9 GW. A third of these additions were made in China, which experienced yet another year of over 100% growth.

“The continued rapid growth of wind power despite the financial crisis and economic downturn is testament to the inherent attractiveness of the technology, which is clean, reliable and quick to install. Wind power has become the power technology of choice a growing number of countries around the world,” said Steve Sawyer, GWEC’s Secretary General. “Copenhagen didn’t bring us any closer to a global price on carbon, but wind energy continued to grow due to national energy policy in our main markets and also because many governments in prioritised renewable energy development in their economic recovery plans,” he said.

Wind energy is now an important player in the world’s energy markets. The global wind market for turbine installations in 2009 was worth about 45 bn EUR or 63 bn US$. GWEC estimates that around half a million people are now employed by the wind industry around the world.

The main markets driving this significant growth continue to be Asia, North America and Europe, each of which installed more than 10 GW of new wind capacity in 2009.

China was the world’s largest market in 2009, nearly doubling its wind generation capacity from 12.1 GW in 2008 to 25.1 GW at the end of 2009 with new capacity additions of 13 GW.

“The Chinese government is taking very seriously its responsibility to limit CO2 emissions while providing energy for its growing economy. China is putting strong efforts into developing the country’s tremendous wind resource. Given the current growth rates, it can be expected that the even the unofficial target of 150 GW will be met well ahead of 2020,” said Li Junfeng, Secretary General of the Chinese Renewable Energy Industries Association.

Newly added capacity of 1,270 MW in India and some smaller additions in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan make Asia the biggest regional market for wind energy in 2009, with more than 14 GW of new capacity.

However, the US continues to have a comfortable lead in terms of total installed capacity. Against all expectations, the US wind energy market installed nearly 10 GW in 2009, increasing the country’s installed capacity by 39% and bringing the total installed, grid-connected capacity to 35 GW. In early 2009, some analysts had foreseen a drop in wind power development of as much as 50%, but the implementation of the US Recovery Act with its strong focus on wind energy development in the summer reversed this trend.

“The U.S. wind energy industry shattered all installation records in 2009, chalking up the Recovery Act as a historic success in creating jobs, avoiding carbon, and protecting consumers,” said AWEA CEO Denise Bode. “But U.S. wind turbine manufacturing is down compared to last year’s levels, and needs long-term policy certainty and market pull in order to grow.”

Europe, which has traditionally been the world’s largest market for wind energy development, continued to see strong growth, also exceeding expectations. In 2009, 10.5 GW were installed in Europe, led by Spain (2.5GW) and Germany (1.9 GW). Italy, France and the UK all added more than 1 GW of new wind capacity each.

“It is a remarkable result in a difficult year” said Christian Kjaer, CEO of the European Wind Energy Association. “The figures, once again, confirm that wind power, together with other renewable energy technologies and a shift from coal to gas, are delivering massive European carbon reductions, while creating much needed economic activity and new jobs for Europe’s citizens.”

“Wind energy is already making a significant contribution to saving CO2 emissions. The 158GW of global wind capacity in place at the end of 2009 will produce 340 TWh of clean electricity and save 204 million tons of CO2 every year,” concluded Sawyer. “As we see in Europe and the US, wind power is now often the most attractive option for new power generation, both in economic and environmental terms, and for improved supply security.”

WattzOn: Climate Change, Recalculated

On January 16, 2009, Saul Griffith of gave a talk at the Long Now Foundation . It was a long discussion that placed our personal lifestyles in the context of climate change and global energy production. A lot of people have requested the slides, here are the latest.



Saul examines his personal impact on climate change based on his energy use. He tells us how he changed his to low energy lifestyle from 17 kW in 2007 to less than 2300 Watts in 2010.

What's on?

WattzOn is a free online tool to quantify, track, compare and understand the total amount of energy needed to support all of the facets of your lifestyle with the goal of helping you find ways to reduce your personal power consumption.

It is becoming clear that our lifestyles have become unsustainable and that fossil fuel scarcity and global climate change are threatening to cause great economic and environmental damage to the world. Any solution to this problem will need to include a collective effort by all of us to reduce the amount of energy we are using in our lives.

With WattzOn's profile builder, you can easily get started in answering these questions. By examining a few key areas of energy use, the profile builder lets you know the baseline power (in watts) that your lifestyle currently requires. If you choose to sign up, you can then save this information, see how your impact compares to others', run visualizations showing the magnitude of your energy needs, and to join our community discussions. Through Wikipedia-like data editing, WattzOn is looking to people to enter data from their own experiences to help us all understand how we use energy in our lives.

Why watts?

A watt is a unit of power that indicates the rate at which you are using energy. For WattzOn, we normalize all of your profile answers (say, flights per year or miles driven per week) down to the second, so that you can see the average power that you are using in every moment of your life.

We chose watts because we want to change the conversation on personal accountability in climate change away from the common "carbon footprint" and towards collective energy reduction. Measuring in power rather than carbon emissions recognizes that it will not be possible to support our current lifestyles with any energy technology that we could implement in the near future - our needs are not sustainable. While there certainly needs to be a reduction of fossil fuel reliance by increasing alternative energy infrastructure, energy reduction will need to be part of any solution to this global challenge.

Learn more about the philosophy behind WattzOn (or check out this shorter version from the O'Reilly 2008 Web 2.0 Summit), and in this video presentation.

Book: Sustainable Energy - Without The Hot Air

David MacKay, the future government energy adviser and professor at Cambridge University's department of physics, warns us in his new book Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air that plans for energy production in the future will not come fast and will not come cheap.

We have an addiction to fossil fuels, and it’s not sustainable. The developed world gets 80% of its energy from fossil fuels; Britain, 90%. And this is unsustainable for three reasons. First, easily-accessible fossil fuels will at some point run out, so we’ll eventually have to get our energy from someplace else. Second, burning fossil fuels is having a measurable and very-probably dangerous effect on the climate. Avoiding dangerous climate change motivates an immediate change from our current use of fossil fuels. Third, even if we don’t care about climate change, a drastic reduction in Britain’s fossil fuel consumption would seem a wise move if we care about security of supply: continued rapid use of the oil and gas reserves will otherwise soon force fossil-addicted Britain to depend on imports from untrustworthy foreigners.

We need a plan that adds up. The good news is that such plans can be made. The bad news is that implementing them will not be easy.

Part I – Numbers, not adjectives

The first half of this book discusses whether a country like the United Kingdom, famously well endowed with wind, wave, and tidal resources, could live on its own renewables. We often hear that Britain’s renewables are “huge.” But it’s not sufficient to know that a source of energy is “huge.” We need to know how it compares with another “huge,” namely our huge consumption. To make such comparisons, we need numbers, not
adjectives.

Where numbers are used, their meaning is often obfuscated by enormousness. Numbers are chosen to impress, to score points in arguments, rather than to inform. In contrast, my aim here is to present honest, factual numbers in such a way that the numbers are comprehensible, comparable, and memorable. The numbers are made accessible by expressing them all in everyday personal units. Energies are expressed as quantities per person in kilowatt-hours (kWh), the same units that appear on household energy bills; and powers are expressed in kilowatt-hours per day(kWh/d), per person.

Part I of Sustainable Energy – without the hot air builds up an illustrative red consumption stack, enumerating the energy cost of a range of energy-consuming activities; and a complete green stack, adding up all the potential renewable resources available in Britain.

The first half gives two clear conclusions. First, for any renewable facility to make an appreciable contribution – a contribution at all comparable to our current consumption – it has to be country-sized.

Second, if economic constraints and public objections are set aside, it would be possible for the average European energy consumption of 125 kWh/d per person to be provided from these country-sized renewable sources. The two hugest contributors would be photovoltaic panels, which, covering 5% or 10% of the country, would provide 50 kWh/d per person; and offshore wind farms, which, filling a sea-area twice the size of Wales, would provide another 50 kWh/d per person on average.

Such an immense panelling of the countryside and filling of British seas with wind machines (having a capacity five times greater than all the wind turbines in the world today) may be possible according to the laws of physics, but would the public accept and pay for such extreme arrangements? If we answer no, we are forced to conclude that current consumption will never be met by British renewables. We require either a radical reduction in consumption, or signficant additional sources of energy – or, of course, both.

Part II – Energy plans that add up

The second part of Sustainable Energy – without the hot air explores six strategies for eliminating the gap between consumption and renewable production identified in the first part, then sketches several energy plans for Britain, each of which adds up.

The first three strategies for eliminating the gap reduce energy demand:

• population reduction;
• lifestyle change;
• changing to more efficient technology.

The other strategies for eliminating the gap increase energy supply:

• “Sustainable fossil fuels” and “clean coal” are names given to carrying on burning coal, but in a different way, with carbon capture and storage. What power could we get from coal, “sustainably”?
• Nuclear power is another controversial option; is it just a stop-gap?
• A third way to get extra carbon-free power would be to live on renewable energy from other countries – in particular, countries blessed with plentiful sunshine, large areas, and low population densities. What is the realistic potential of the Sahara desert?

Part III and Part IV

The third part of the book drills down to the physical foundations of energy consumption and energy production. Eight appendices show from first principles where the numbers in the first two parts come from.

The final sixteen pages of the book contain further reference data and conversion factors, useful for applying the book’s ideas to other countries, and for translating to and from units used by other organizations.

This is a free book. David MacKay didn't write this book to make money. He wrote it because sustainable energy is important. If you would like to have the book for free for your own use, please help yourself to any of the electronic versions on this website.

Wind Energy Grows by 25%

Wind power is the conversion of wind energy into a useful form of energy, such as electricity, using wind turbines. At the end of 2008, worldwide nameplate capacity of wind-powered generators was 121.2 gigawatts (GW). In 2008, wind power produced about 1.5% of worldwide electricity usage; and is growing rapidly, having doubled in the three years between 2005 and 2008.

World Wind Energy Association forecasts a total installed capacity of 152,000 MW worldwide by the end of 2009, which will mean a new record of over 30,000 MW newly installed capacity within one year. This represents a market growth of 25% compared with last year. Several countries have achieved relatively high levels of wind power penetration. As of May 2009, eighty countries around the world are using wind power on a commercial basis.

United States

As of April 30, 2009, wind power in the United States had reached 28,635 megawatts (MW) of installed capacity, and in 2008 the U.S. surpassed Germany as the country with the largest amount of installed wind power capacity. The American Wind Energy Association has reported that wind projects installed through the end of 2008 were expected to generate 52 million megawatt-hours/year (MWh/yr), representing 1.26% of the nation’s electricity in 2008.

Germany

Wind power in Germany produces about six percent of its total electrical power and it is said that no other country has more technological know-how in this area. Wind power in Germany provides over 70,000 people with jobs and German wind energy systems are also exported. Repowering, the replacement of first-generation wind turbines with modern multi-megawatt machines, is occurring in Germany. Modern turbines make better use of available wind energy and so more wind power can come from the same area of land.

Spain

Spain is the world's third biggest producer of wind power, after the United States and Germany, with an installed capacity of 16,740 megawatts (MW) at the end of 2008, a rise of 1,609 MW for the year. On particular windy days, wind power generation has surpassed all other electricity sources in Spain, including nuclear. On April 18, 2008 the all time peak for wind generation was seen (10,879 MW, 32% of Spain's power requirement), and on November 24, 2008 wind energy produced 43% of demand.

China

At the end of 2008, wind power in China accounted for 12.2 gigawatts (GW) of electricity generating capacity and China has identified wind power as a key growth component of the country's economy. China is the fourth largest producer of wind power, after the United States, Germany, and Spain. By the end of 2008, at least 15 Chinese companies were commercially producing wind turbines and several dozen more were producing components.

Denmark

Wind power in Denmark provided 19.7 percent of electricity production in 2007, a significantly higher proportion than in any other country. Denmark was a pioneer in developing commercial wind power during the 1970s, and today almost half of the wind turbines around the world are produced by Danish manufacturers such as Vestas.

EROEI - Energy Returned on Energy Invested

EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested), ERoEI, EROI (Energy Return On Investment) is the ratio of the amount of usable energy acquired from a particular energy resource to the amount of energy expended to obtain that energy resource. It is an important metric to decide on the strategy for the transition to renewable energy.

The Oil Drum has great posts on EROEI.

As production from fossil fuel deposits starts to decline, we are being forced to procure energy from other sources such as wind, tidal, solar, bio-fuel and nuclear. It is important to understand the energy efficiency of new energy procurement systems, if industrial society as we know it is to survive the next great energy transition away from fossil fuels.

The Energy Return on Energy Invested (ERoEI) provides one measure of the efficiency of energy procurement and is quite simply defined as:

Energy procured / Energy used to procure energy

The chart shows how the proportion of net energy available for society to use varies with ERoEI. There is in fact much uncertainty in the data displayed and many large gaps in knowledge. The shape of the curve shows that for ERoEI above 10, the bulk of energy procured is available to society – to power industry, transportation, schools and hospitals. With falling ERoEI below 10 there is an exponential increase in the amount of energy required to procure energy with a corresponding decline in net energy available for society.

High per-capita energy use is considered desirable as it is associated with a high standard of living based on energy-intensive machines. A society will generally exploit the highest available EROEI energy sources first, as these provide the most energy for the least effort. With non-renewable sources, progressively lower EROEI sources are then used as the higher-quality ones are exhausted.

For example, when oil was originally discovered, it took on average one barrel of oil to find, extract, and process about 100 barrels of oil. That ratio has declined steadily over the last century to about three barrels gained for one barrel used up in the U.S. (and about ten for one in Saudi Arabia). The EROEI of wind energy is about 20:1 which is driving its adoption.