Ana Lectures 3 & 4 - Energy Technologies Flashcards
Importance of energy
Energy is a resource for economic competitiveness. The availability of ‘low-cost’ and freely available energy is one of the main factors that enabled the industrial revolution and all of its resultant improvements on our quality of life.
Definition of energy
The capacity of a system to do work.
E = force x distance (1 J = 1 N m)
P = energy/time (1 W or 1 J/s)
1J is approx the energy required to raise 100g vertically 1m against the Earth’s gravity at sea level. 1 W is the power required to do this in 1 s.
In a thermal power plant, what sorts of energy are produced and converted?
We go from chemical energy in the form of fuel or radioactive compounds, to thermal energy (superheated steam), to mechanical energy (rotation of turbine) and then converted through an alternator to electrical energy that can be distributed.
Drivers for energy demand
- Population growth
- Economic growth
- Consumer behaviour
Energy demand sources
Roughly 30-30-30 between industry, housing and transport.
Drivers for energy supply
- Lower GHG emissions (also called decarbonisation)
- Land use/footprint (this affects the cost of energy production, but also its environmental impact)
- Affordable cost (CAPEX/OPEX) to attract investors/consumers
- Environmental impact/risk
- Energy security: i.e can this source be compromised e.g during extreme weather events or under extreme circumstances such as conflicts
- Constant energy supply: i.e is it enough energy to meet the demand and will it be produced when the demand is there (unlike wind or solar energy that depend on climatic or diurnal conditions)
- public perception: need to work with communities, policy makers, NGOs, and social scientists to ensure that a technology is correctly perceived on its merits - otherwise the deployments of technologies can fail - even if they were the best ‘technological solution’
Primary energy supply
energy production + energy imports - energy exports - international bunkers, then plus or minus stock changes. These energy sources have not been
converted into their final form and therefore conversion efficiencies have not been considered.
What is total consumption/demand
The energy source in its final form used in economic activities such as transport, heating.
EU energy policy
- Energy security strategy: includes completing the internal energy market and building missing infrastructure links to respond quickly to supply disruptions and redirect energy across the EU to where it is needed - fully integrated internal energy market
- emissions reduction
- energy efficiency
- research and innovation
UK energy policy
Dept for business, energy and industrial strategies
- Energy white paper (2007): The White Paper sets out the Government’s international and domestic energy strategy to respond to the two main energy challenges of climate change and energy security.
- UK low carbon transition plan (2009)
- Climate change Act (2008): The Act makes it the duty of the Secretary of State to ensure that the net UK carbon account for all six Kyoto greenhouse gases for the year 2050 is at least 80% lower than the 1990 baseline, toward avoiding dangerous climate change.
Tech readiness levels
A tech management tool that provides a measurement to assess the maturity of evolving tech. Has 9 levels.
Levelised cost of electricity (LCOE)
Calculated by accounting for all of a system’s expected lifetime costs (including construction, financing, fuel, maintenance, taxes, insurance and incentives), which are then divided by the system’s lifetimes expected power output (kWh). All cost and benefit estimates are adjusted for inflation and discounted to account for the time-value of money.
The cost of energy efficiency
Energy efficiency is a trade off between investment costs and energy gains. Implementing energy efficient technologies or low-carbon ones is not alway a straightforward decision or the most obvious one since there won’t always be an immediate ROI, or that return might not be economic but rather environmental and therefore, not yet monetised. Sometimes, a tremendous up front investment might be needed to put this into place.
CHP
Cogeneration or combined heat and power is the simultaneous generation of useful thermal energy, and mechanical or electrical energy from a single fuel source.
Smart grids and interoperability
An electrical grid is the sum of all the elements such as transmission lines, energy supply stations, substations, transformers etc, that produce, manage and deliver energy from a source to a customer, either domestic or industrial. Smart grids use digitised technologies, including controls, computers, automations and sensors to connect the different elements in the grid to respond digitally to our quickly changing electric demand.
With so many diff elements, there is a greater emphasis on interoperability, meaning the capacity of all the different parts work together, communicate and influence each other. In practice, this means that computer systems used in smart grids need to ‘use the same language’, softwares need to be integrated, there is a need for control systems and backups in case of failure etc.
