Why is coal in a slump — really?

By Jeff Postelwait
Online Editor

Everyone knows that with enough time and pressure, coal can turn into diamonds. What will become of the coal industry with all the pressure it is currently under, nobody can say.

The Wall Street Journal took a look at two of the top three coal producers, Arch Coal and Alpha Natural Resources, both of which are experiencing lower demand and falling profits. Peabody Energy, another top coal miner, predicted that demand for coal could drop by as much as 10 percent this year. But why?

Given the fact that everyone has their own politics concerning using coal to make power, it's tempting to point the finger at either EPA regulations or some draconian piece of legislation that came from Congress, but I think blaming any one culprit for this trend is short sighted.

One factor the Journal neglects to get into, for example, is the other fossil fuel we use for energy. Natural gas recently hit a 10-year low in demand, some estimates have it. We're sitting on massive new reserves of the stuff because of new extraction techniques, and so many utilities would much rather build a natural-gas fired unit than a coal unit right now.

You could well argue that natural gas, being a finite resource, is also subject to price swings back and forth, but based on all the generation news I handle every day, I'm definitely seeing a big trend toward natural gas to the detriment of other forms of generation.

To explore another possible explanation for this problem, just open a window. It's beautiful out, and it has been for several financial quarters. The almost freakishly warm winter that the U.S. experienced had people eating up less energy — from coal or from any other source. While the EPA has been flexing its regulatory muscles in the direction of coal power lately, you can hardly blame the weather on government bureaucrats.

To be fair, we are seeing quite a few new and proposed regulations that appear to have the coal industry in their sights, whether you'd call it intentional or not. There's the proposed Clean Air Act standard for carbon dioxide pollution for new power plants. There's the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards rule issued in February, which could require coal plants to retrofit and reduce emissions of arsenic, acid gases, nickel, cyanide and other toxins. And finally there's the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule from earlier in 2012.


When the new carbon standards were proposed, more than a few were saying that this was regulation meant to kill coal for good. But at that time, the Energy Information Administration listed only a single coal-fired unit in the pipeline to be built. So if there is a piece of regulation out there threatening to kill coal, this one wasn't it. 


If coal is dying off — still an alarmist thing to say for this multi-billion dollar a year industry — there isn't a single factor you can point to if you're looking for something to blame. The entire energy industry is changing, just as surely as the customers it serves are changing their minds and thinking more about how energy is produced. So while these may be challenging times, there is still time to make changes.


If these trends prove irreversible and it becomes impossible to sell coal in the same country where it is mined, then the U.S. coal industry needs to develop new markets. I can think of nowhere better to look than at China and India, the former of which is about to become the world's most coal-hungry nation. China generates nearly 70 percent of its energy from coal, but only has about 13 percent of the world's reserves. That's just one country that has "potential customer" written all over it.

Unmanned drones could deploy in the fight against outages

By Jeff Postelwait
Online Editor

Maybe this is just the viewpoint of an American who grew up on "Terminator" movies, but I still find it incredibly weird and interesting that we live in a world where robots patrol the skies. Apparently the Electric Power Research Institute still thinks robots are cool too because they're researching ways for the technology to help out the electric power industry.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or drones, of the same category of the Hellfire-carrying Predator, deployed around the world by the United States Armed Forces, could potentially be used by utilities to check on the status of distribution systems, according to an EPRI study. Instead of sporting Hellfire missiles, though, these units could carry cameras, sensors and global positioning capability.



It's easy to see why an all-seeing eye that can fly to a remote area and report data back to its operators might be of good use to an industry that frequently deals with icy roads, downed trees and other hazards at the very same time when the need for good communications has never been higher.

EPRI decided to take that idea and run with it with a series of tests of different types of UAVs at the New Mexico State University Flight Test Center, which is just a short distance away from the White Sands Missile Range in south-central New Mexico. These aircraft carried high-resolution video cameras and transmitted images of power lines from a useful distance of 7,000 feet in the air.

Footage shot like this could provide timely information to grid operators and their field crews, allowing them to better prioritize their outage restoration efforts and get accurate information sent off to affected customers.

"The tests indicated that unmanned airborne technologies equipped with sensors, cameras and GPS could be deployed quickly, allowing utilities to evaluate large areas more quickly than ground-based crews, then develop a repair strategy and mobilize repair crews more quickly and effectively," according to EPRI.

EPRI is also taking a look at the capabilities of drones for the inspection and assessment of overhead transmission lines. To make sure these findings are more practical for the utilities, EPRI is gathering data on UAV functional requirements, costs, inspection technologies, as well as testing several different types of UAVs.

Other sectors have taken a look at UAVs before, including the oil and gas industry, firefighting departments, meteorologists, forestry services and others. Still, I think that for utilities that have the resources to put these drones in the sky, it could dramatically boost response time — and utilities know that when customers are in the dark, every second counts.

10 energy game changers for the Third World

By Jeff Postelwait
Online Editor

It's a safe bet that most people who are reading this are used to living no fewer than a few footsteps away from a lightswitch or electric socket. For almost all of us, the most frequent blackout we have to deal with is a when our smart phones go dark after a long session of Angry Birds. In fact, there are some people who dream of living off the grid — whether that means camping out in a national park or investing in distributed generation equipment for the home.

But as many as a quarter of the world's population live without easy access to grid-connected electricity, according to Scientific American. To address problems such as unemployment, poverty, education and malnutrition, that remaining 25 percent of humanity without power needs innovative solutions that address off-grid life.

I spoke recently with Dr. Al Malouf of NineSigma, which styles itself as an "open innovation services provider." The organization works with companies like Kraft Foods, Unilever, Philips, L'Oreal and others to develop these innovations.

One such partnership is the LAUNCH program, a consortium that includes the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), NASA, Nike and others. The LAUNCH effort aims to develop ten "game-changing" solutions for those who live without adequate access to electricity, heating and cooling, water and other basic needs.

LAUNCH recently identified ten entrepreneurs with ten good ideas in the hopes that their technologies could be developed and deployed to those who need them.

"There was a focus on third world or developing world, as well as the developed world. A lot of our partners had techs that would benefit places in rural Africa that might not even be connected to the grid," Malouf said. "About 80 percent of the people in Africa own cell phones, but fewer than that are connected to the grid. So a big challenge for them is where to charge their cell phone that doesn't involve walking ten miles."

When choosing which energy entrepreneurs to approach for submissions, Malouf said his organization had to stick with technologies that work on the distributed energy level or smaller, as utility-scale, grid-connected technologies.

One example of a highly distributed power source now approved by LAUNCH is the Hydrovolts hydrokinetic mini-turbine. The unit is small enough to take advantage of the potential energy of flowing water just about anywhere it can be found.



"You can just throw these things into the canals. They can work in shallow water, they right themselves automatically and they can power pumps and drive gates within the canal system," he said. "It's a nice way of capturing the kinetic energy of the water to do work in the area."

The technology is scalable too, in that you can fasten three or four of the units together to produce a greater amount of power, if needed.

The Solanterns Initiative aims to replace a million dirty, inefficient kerosene lanterns in Kenya with solar powered LED lights.



"Using kerosene lamps, the problem is the quality of light is poor and they generate indoor pollution, which can lead to lung diseases — especially in young children," he said. "With better quality light, businesses can stay open longer after dark and students can learn better in school."

The devices, when charged up by the sun, can also provide enough juice to charge up a cell phone — eliminating the need to travel to a town center for a working electricity source.

NanoTune Technologies, also chosen by LAUNCH, developed a new ultracapacitor that they claim offers five to seven times greater energy storage technology than conventional capacitors.

"They can't divulge exactly what the technology is, but they think the tech might be able to replace conventional batteries," he said, adding that the ultracapacitors charge quickly, and might one day become a good storage device for wind or solar power — eliminating the need for a bulkier battery bank.

Gram Power's innovation is a microgrid technology that offers pre-paid, intelligently metered power with both AC and DC voltage outputs as well as battery backup at the household level.

"This is a smart DC grid — a way to power a house with a very small power supply," he said, adding that the innovation includes a business model for delivering this pre-paid power source to rural people and their dwellings.

"They will plug these battery packs into this smart grid system that is installed in the house. It works on a prepaid, weekly basis. An affordable and realistic way for rural people to have high quality lighting and places to charge their cell phones," he said.

Point Source Power came up with a fuel cell technology that could allow people living off the grid to charge a cell phone as they cook their dinner — with the same heat they use to cook that dinner.

"This uses biomass to create electricity. It's a small fuel cell, driven by heat. Most of these villagers use a fire pit to cook their food, so they developed a fuel cell that is totally sealed. The heat from the cookstove will generate a small amount of electricity when the cell is thrown into the burning fuel — enough power to charge a cell phone," he said.

You can read more about these and other technologies backed by LAUNCH at their website.

Too early to use the phrase 'nuclear renaissance' again?

Back around late 2008 when I worked for Power Engineering, one of our sister publications in the electric power trade media people were using the phrase "nuclear renaissance" quite a bit.

Is it too early to talk about a nuclear renaissance again? The short answer is: "Probably." The only other answer I can think of right now is, "Time will tell."

With both 2008 presidential candidates supporting a new fleet of nuclear plants and nearly 40 planned nuclear reactors ready to be constructed around the world, my senior editors told me a "sea change" was happening. Those were their exact words. The industry hadn't been buzzing about nuclear energy this much since the days before the Three Mile Island accident, they said.

This was, of course, before the world economy hit rock bottom and an earthquake-spawned tsunami swamped the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, touching off the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. That was before Japan's nuclear industry was shattered, Germany pulled out of nuclear energy entirely and few countries seemed eager to pursue anything resembling a renaissance.

For an industry that has for so long been defined by the terrible accidents associated with it, and not for the carbon-free energy that it produces as baseload electricity for some 30 countries, good news has often been scarce.

Even when people don't think about nuclear disasters, they tend to think of nuclear energy as being more expensive than it appears. While it is true you can fuel cities on just a few small pieces of fissionable material, the sheer amount of cash it takes to get those fuel rods humming in a fully constructed plant makes nuclear energy seem more promising on paper than it is in the real world.

So maybe it's because this industry hasn't gotten much good news over the past decade that people who advocate for nuclear energy are willing to latch on to any bit of progress. That progress may be arriving with the approval of the Nuclear Regulatory Agency's first Combined Constriction and Operating Licenses ever.

At Southern Co.'s Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant and South Carolina Electric & Gas Co.'s Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station, the idea of the nuclear renaissance is being tested yet again. The approvals of the licenses are a big step — a historic step, even. But there is still a lot standing in the way of a true renaissance.

The first time Americans started talking about a nuclear renaissance was around the turn of the century. Perhaps key here was that natural gas and coal prices had spiked. Today, natural gas is dirt cheap, and there's a rush to build more gas-fired turbines. One might justifiably ask now why we shouldn't just build a fleet of gas-fired units instead of a large, expensive nuclear plant.

While there is still some dispute over cost-per-megawatt figure building a nuclear plant represents, no one will call that figure low. Even as large as modern power utilities are, some doubt whether there's a single utility with a balance sheet large enough to float a loan to build one — thus requiring the advent of nuclear consortiums, perhaps even international ones.

Then there's the problem of getting plans for a plant past the local public utility commissions, who must approve these expenditures. In today's economy, they might want to know why the utility doesn't want to choose a cheaper generation technology. Plant Vogtle's builders said they wanted to diversify into nuclear energy because they don't want to be held hostage to a future spike in natural gas prices. This seems logical, but bureaucrats can be less than logical.

Finally, you've got to sell the idea to a post-Fukushima public that is more skeptical of nuclear than ever. Even if you manage to find a receptive audience and the locals do want a nuclear plant, anti-nuclear and other hostile environmental organizations will be more emboldened than they were a decade ago when the talk of a nuclear renaissance first started.

There are still 18 expansion projects comprising 28 nuclear units that have applied for COLs, including Vogtle and Summer, according to the NRC. I'm thinking that potential nuclear power plant builders are thanking heaven for small favors that they are able to apply for and occasionally get a COL approved. Licensing might actually be one of the easier things about building a nuclear plant.

Then again, editors have long memories and we can be a cynical bunch. Just because we've heard this stuff before doesn't mean big things aren't about to happen.