Post by solar2016 on Mar 18, 2017 10:22:09 GMT 5.5
Highway Solarization, Battery Electric Vehicles and making use of Green Climate Funding
www.thesundayleader.lk, 05th July 2015, By K. C. Somaratna
Sri Lanka Energy Sector Development Plan for A Knowledge-Based Economy 2015 – 2025’ policy made public early this year, stipulates that Sri Lanka will make plans to reduce the carbon footprint of the energy sector to address global warming and climate change impacts. The announcement by the Ministry of Power and Energy to reduce the carbon footprint of the energy sector by 5% by 2025, is a consolation for those of us who have been concerned about what climate change could do to mankind, if left unabated. Global community has been talking about this climate change for the last two decades having established a United Nations Framework for Conventions on Climate Change, a separate Inter Governmental Panel on Climate Change and having held 20 annual conventions or so.
Reducing the carbon footprint in organizations and companies will have long-lasting environmental and economic benefits not only to individual organizations but to the nation at large.
It was only one year ago that the International Energy Agency put out a document titled ‘Redrawing the Energy-Climate Change Map’ in which a programme to popularize the use of gas to replace fuel oil by 2035 was promoted to achieve a retardation of carbon dioxide increase in the atmosphere by 2035. Even IPCC’s TAR 4 contained a lot of solutions for transportation based on usage of natural gas. We promptly wrote to some of the authors of the document expressing our own fears of water vapour from combustion of gas been more damaging than carbon dioxide in all aspects of climate change – greenhouse effect, global warming, precipitation and wind. But the recent UN Climate Summit is silent about the usage of natural gas and it may be an indication that the UNFCC has given up on natural gas as a suitable option.
Battery Electric Vehicles
When we first started studying climate change through the IPCC’s Nobel Prize winning Technical Assessment Report 4, the IPCC was talking about many different types of alternative vehicles and different fuels to power these vehicles. But we were convinced from day one, that the battery electric vehicle would offer us the best possibilities to reduce greenhouse gases.
For the last seven years we have been promoting battery electric vehicles as the most appropriate vehicle to replace the internal combustion engine powered vehicles of to-day. We evaluated different types of vehicles and different sources of energy to power these types of vehicles and consistently maintained that the battery electric vehicle will be the ultimate winner. We were, of course, guided by the sheer logic of the selection process, the 3As – Acceptability Accessibility and Availability – study of the World Energy Council and many other such studies and articles.
When Sri Lankan papers carried a news item to say that the three biggest automakers in Japan had started research into hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and the prestigious automaker Daimler celebrated the centenary of Mercedes Benz by sending a hydrogen fuel powered vehicle around the globe, we briskly wrote to newspapers about the lunacy of this solution. We were not worried about the big 3 in Japan or the German legendary following that path; but we were confident about the absurdity of electrolyzing water with an 80% efficiency and then recombining hydrogen and oxygen again at a 60% efficiency when you could run a battery electric vehicle with the original electrical energy at a 95% overall efficiency. In our article we also spoke about the other route to make hydrogen by steam reforming of natural gas which will yield newly formed water vapour to our ecosystem and could bring about the disasters similar to those faced by plantation workers in Miriyabedda last year, Uttar Pradesh, India in 2013, Japan, Australia, Philippines, Thailand from 2010-11 and New York in November, 2012. I am sure UN Climate Summit does not want these water-related disasters repeated anywhere on this planet.
So for us, if one wants to eliminate the greenhouse gases both carbon dioxide and water vapour from exhaust pipes of automobiles enhancing the greenhouse effect, battery electric vehicle provides the best solution.. So we are not surprised that the global community is looking at renewable sources of electrical energy to feed these new BEVs which will come on stream. But in order to generate electrical energy using renewable sources on a GW scale to meet the needs of mankind, we need large land areas and if this land area is not off the deserts in the world then it implies that deforestation need to happen. According to Drs. Mark Daluchchi and Mark Jaccobbson of Wind, Water and Solar Infrastructure fame, the utilization of solar energy to meet the global energy needs would account for very high percentage of land surface of the earth and it involves deforestation of a sizable percentage of land.
Constraints of renewable energy
Then we need to look for an arrangement for installation of PV solar panels catering specifically to the needs of BEVs. In fact IPCC Technical Report IV mentioned that although PV solar is available to the extent of 450,000 TW hrs per year, it is limited by four main disadvantages as follows.
(i) It is a distributed source. (ii) It needs to be stored, (iii) It needs a large land area (We saw this above), (iv) It is expensive. It is here that the perfect blend of available source of energy called Photovoltaic Solar matching the emerging demand for electrical energy for BEVs could be seen.
For the BEVs, we need a distributed source of energy and the energy need to be stored in batteries. Although PV Solar energy is expensive it is not expensive when compared to the very high Rs. 117 per kWhr actually paid by a motorist driving an ICE powered car paying Rs. 170 per litre of petrol. So a motorist should be willing to pay even Rs. 50 per kWhr when driving a BEV.
Highway Solarization
The question will arise where this large area of land could be found to lay the PV Solar panels if we want to move towards a situation where loss of forests is zero by 2030. It is then our mind automatically goes to the highway itself which is also the biggest absorber of solar radiation out of all man-made structures due to its blackish surface. It is an area which cannot be used for any other agricultural purpose. So what we suggest is that erect suitable columns on the two sides of the highways and put up a framework between these arrays of columns and install Photovoltaic Solar Panels on this framework. The electrical energy generated by these solar panels can be captured and converted to alternating current via an inverter and transformed upwards and fed to the national grid. Or on the other hand this energy could be used to charge batteries of BEVs.
This usage of highways to lay PV solar panels and capturing solar energy to be converted to electrical energy to be used for charging BEVs do have many advantages over usage of other land areas for establishing PV solar parks as follows.
The energy will be generated where it will be used thus reducing transmission losses.
Will eliminate absorption of solar radiation by the bituminous road surfaces.
New roadways are been built all the time and so they could be built with the energy available alongside.
Roadways cannot be used for any other purpose – agricultural or otherwise.
Roadways are under centralized ownership and the projects could be implemented very fast.
As also could be seen from the figure below, highway solarization is the only solution which would fulfill all the three energy related objectives set at the UN Climate Summit: namely (i) Battery Electric Vehicle related solutions, (ii) Renewable forms of energy and (iii) Zero deforestation.
Green Climate Funding
It was also mentioned in the printed media that UN is taking the initiative to establish US$ 200 billion climate financing fund by the end of 2015 with the support of governments and banks – both commercial and development. When UNFCC announced in 2009 that rich countries promise of making $100 billion available by 2020 to developing countries to fund move towards renewable energy, the writer was enthusiastically waiting for that fund to materialize. Although UNFCC was expecting poor countries to come up with proposals before 31st January, 2010 it was announced at the end of January, 2010, UNFCC had not received a single request for funding a climate change mitigation project.
The National Government and the coordinating personnel need to be alive to these funds and opportunities and ensure Sri Lanka benefits from such financial facilitation by UN, especially so as we have been almost the first party to request such facilities with a concrete idea about mitigating Climate Change when others have been mostly looking at adaptation strategies in respect of transportation.
MESC PUBLIC LECTURE : Highway Solarization
www.thesundayleader.lk, 05th July 2015, By K. C. Somaratna
Sri Lanka Energy Sector Development Plan for A Knowledge-Based Economy 2015 – 2025’ policy made public early this year, stipulates that Sri Lanka will make plans to reduce the carbon footprint of the energy sector to address global warming and climate change impacts. The announcement by the Ministry of Power and Energy to reduce the carbon footprint of the energy sector by 5% by 2025, is a consolation for those of us who have been concerned about what climate change could do to mankind, if left unabated. Global community has been talking about this climate change for the last two decades having established a United Nations Framework for Conventions on Climate Change, a separate Inter Governmental Panel on Climate Change and having held 20 annual conventions or so.
Reducing the carbon footprint in organizations and companies will have long-lasting environmental and economic benefits not only to individual organizations but to the nation at large.
It was only one year ago that the International Energy Agency put out a document titled ‘Redrawing the Energy-Climate Change Map’ in which a programme to popularize the use of gas to replace fuel oil by 2035 was promoted to achieve a retardation of carbon dioxide increase in the atmosphere by 2035. Even IPCC’s TAR 4 contained a lot of solutions for transportation based on usage of natural gas. We promptly wrote to some of the authors of the document expressing our own fears of water vapour from combustion of gas been more damaging than carbon dioxide in all aspects of climate change – greenhouse effect, global warming, precipitation and wind. But the recent UN Climate Summit is silent about the usage of natural gas and it may be an indication that the UNFCC has given up on natural gas as a suitable option.
Battery Electric Vehicles
When we first started studying climate change through the IPCC’s Nobel Prize winning Technical Assessment Report 4, the IPCC was talking about many different types of alternative vehicles and different fuels to power these vehicles. But we were convinced from day one, that the battery electric vehicle would offer us the best possibilities to reduce greenhouse gases.
For the last seven years we have been promoting battery electric vehicles as the most appropriate vehicle to replace the internal combustion engine powered vehicles of to-day. We evaluated different types of vehicles and different sources of energy to power these types of vehicles and consistently maintained that the battery electric vehicle will be the ultimate winner. We were, of course, guided by the sheer logic of the selection process, the 3As – Acceptability Accessibility and Availability – study of the World Energy Council and many other such studies and articles.
When Sri Lankan papers carried a news item to say that the three biggest automakers in Japan had started research into hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and the prestigious automaker Daimler celebrated the centenary of Mercedes Benz by sending a hydrogen fuel powered vehicle around the globe, we briskly wrote to newspapers about the lunacy of this solution. We were not worried about the big 3 in Japan or the German legendary following that path; but we were confident about the absurdity of electrolyzing water with an 80% efficiency and then recombining hydrogen and oxygen again at a 60% efficiency when you could run a battery electric vehicle with the original electrical energy at a 95% overall efficiency. In our article we also spoke about the other route to make hydrogen by steam reforming of natural gas which will yield newly formed water vapour to our ecosystem and could bring about the disasters similar to those faced by plantation workers in Miriyabedda last year, Uttar Pradesh, India in 2013, Japan, Australia, Philippines, Thailand from 2010-11 and New York in November, 2012. I am sure UN Climate Summit does not want these water-related disasters repeated anywhere on this planet.
So for us, if one wants to eliminate the greenhouse gases both carbon dioxide and water vapour from exhaust pipes of automobiles enhancing the greenhouse effect, battery electric vehicle provides the best solution.. So we are not surprised that the global community is looking at renewable sources of electrical energy to feed these new BEVs which will come on stream. But in order to generate electrical energy using renewable sources on a GW scale to meet the needs of mankind, we need large land areas and if this land area is not off the deserts in the world then it implies that deforestation need to happen. According to Drs. Mark Daluchchi and Mark Jaccobbson of Wind, Water and Solar Infrastructure fame, the utilization of solar energy to meet the global energy needs would account for very high percentage of land surface of the earth and it involves deforestation of a sizable percentage of land.
Constraints of renewable energy
Then we need to look for an arrangement for installation of PV solar panels catering specifically to the needs of BEVs. In fact IPCC Technical Report IV mentioned that although PV solar is available to the extent of 450,000 TW hrs per year, it is limited by four main disadvantages as follows.
(i) It is a distributed source. (ii) It needs to be stored, (iii) It needs a large land area (We saw this above), (iv) It is expensive. It is here that the perfect blend of available source of energy called Photovoltaic Solar matching the emerging demand for electrical energy for BEVs could be seen.
For the BEVs, we need a distributed source of energy and the energy need to be stored in batteries. Although PV Solar energy is expensive it is not expensive when compared to the very high Rs. 117 per kWhr actually paid by a motorist driving an ICE powered car paying Rs. 170 per litre of petrol. So a motorist should be willing to pay even Rs. 50 per kWhr when driving a BEV.
Highway Solarization
The question will arise where this large area of land could be found to lay the PV Solar panels if we want to move towards a situation where loss of forests is zero by 2030. It is then our mind automatically goes to the highway itself which is also the biggest absorber of solar radiation out of all man-made structures due to its blackish surface. It is an area which cannot be used for any other agricultural purpose. So what we suggest is that erect suitable columns on the two sides of the highways and put up a framework between these arrays of columns and install Photovoltaic Solar Panels on this framework. The electrical energy generated by these solar panels can be captured and converted to alternating current via an inverter and transformed upwards and fed to the national grid. Or on the other hand this energy could be used to charge batteries of BEVs.
This usage of highways to lay PV solar panels and capturing solar energy to be converted to electrical energy to be used for charging BEVs do have many advantages over usage of other land areas for establishing PV solar parks as follows.
The energy will be generated where it will be used thus reducing transmission losses.
Will eliminate absorption of solar radiation by the bituminous road surfaces.
New roadways are been built all the time and so they could be built with the energy available alongside.
Roadways cannot be used for any other purpose – agricultural or otherwise.
Roadways are under centralized ownership and the projects could be implemented very fast.
As also could be seen from the figure below, highway solarization is the only solution which would fulfill all the three energy related objectives set at the UN Climate Summit: namely (i) Battery Electric Vehicle related solutions, (ii) Renewable forms of energy and (iii) Zero deforestation.
Green Climate Funding
It was also mentioned in the printed media that UN is taking the initiative to establish US$ 200 billion climate financing fund by the end of 2015 with the support of governments and banks – both commercial and development. When UNFCC announced in 2009 that rich countries promise of making $100 billion available by 2020 to developing countries to fund move towards renewable energy, the writer was enthusiastically waiting for that fund to materialize. Although UNFCC was expecting poor countries to come up with proposals before 31st January, 2010 it was announced at the end of January, 2010, UNFCC had not received a single request for funding a climate change mitigation project.
The National Government and the coordinating personnel need to be alive to these funds and opportunities and ensure Sri Lanka benefits from such financial facilitation by UN, especially so as we have been almost the first party to request such facilities with a concrete idea about mitigating Climate Change when others have been mostly looking at adaptation strategies in respect of transportation.
MESC PUBLIC LECTURE : Highway Solarization