Is fusion power an option?

In his TED talk plasma physicist Michel Laberge talks about the state of the art of energy production by nuclear fusion and presents an idea for a new type of nuclear reactor that could produce cheap energy.


There are two types of energy production by nuclear power, fusion and fission. All current productive nuclear power plants are based on the fission technology, which comes with the risk of thermal runaway meltdown and lots of health risks from nuclear waste.
The other type, fusion, is worth a look though. Currently there are no fusion power plants that gain more energy than is used for running the process. However, since fusion processes only take place under high temperatures, a fusion process would stop under a breach of the containment field which makes it less dangerous than fission - at least if you are not in the immediate vicinity of the reactor when this happens. Fusion power will also produce more short-term radioactive material, which will be dangerous for "only" 300 years. In contrast, current nuclear fission power plants produce material that is active for thousands of years.
Still too dangerous? Then let's have the fusion reactor installed 150 million kilometers away in space. It's called the sun.

Workshop on Modeling and Simulation of Cyber-Physical Energy Systems 2013

Workshop on Modeling and Simulation of Cyber-Physical Energy Systems 2013

May 20 2013, Berkeley CA

http://www.palensky.org/mscpes/

Modern energy systems combine information technology, electrical and thermal infrastructure, autonomous roles and interact with other systems like markets and regulations. Existing modeling and simulation tools are not capable to cover such systems in all of their aspects, new languages, methods and tools are necessary. A combination of universal modeling languages like Modelica and established, specialized tools like grid simulators and telecommunication simulators is necessary. This leads to modeling and co-simulating hybrid systems where for instance a multi-agent framework and an electric grid simulator are combined to investigate smart electric vehicle charging algorithms. It is especially the potential size of such systems that constitute a challenge for modeling and simulation. Implementing these future CPS are another substantial challenge. The designed algorithms need to be compact, computationally inexpensive, potentially self-organizing and intrinsically stable if applied to real energy systems. New methods and alternative ways are necessary to overcome these challenges.

This workshop is a platform for researchers and developers to exchange ideas to the following (not exhaustive) list of topics:

-    Hybrid modeling and simulation

-    Co-Simulation

-    High-performance computing

-    Analytics of system data

-    Ontologies for energy systems

-    Applications of cyber-physical energy systems

-    Distributed algorithms and control

-    Standards in interfacing components

-    Numerics for hybrid and co-simulation

-    Formal languages for energy systems

-    Smart Grid modeling

-    Demand response and power quality

-    Information and communication technology for intelligent energy systems

Submitted papers are peer-reviewed by at least 3 reviewers. Workshop language is English. Proceedings will be published by Springer.

Full paper submission: January 31, 2013

Notification of acceptance: February 20, 2013

Your workshop chairs,

Peter Palensky (Austrian Institute of Technology)

Edward A.Lee (University of California Berkeley)

Keeping an eye on my Photovoltaic System

Guest Post by Benjamin Steinwender

At my home place we have recently installed two photovoltaic systems with a total peak power production of 15 kW. From the first moment my dad confronted me with this idea, I wanted to record time series data of any measurement signal I could obtain from the system. Most promising was the fact of an included web server on the power converter.

Storage

Storing time series data over long periods can lead to high disk usage. Fortunately, I came across RRDtool (round-robin-database tool) - http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/ when I installed a monitoring solution for a FEM simulation server cluster and its UPS some time ago.

RRDtool stores data in a circular buffer so that its file size remains constant over time. However, older data will be overwritten after some time. The idea is to store the data in so-called round-robin archives with a consolidation function applied in order to keep the interesting properties. In my special application, the following archive sizes are used:

•     10080 x 1 minute samples for 7 days
•     11760 x 5 minute maximum & average values for 40 days, 20 hours
•     4704 x 30 minute maximum & average values for 98 days
•     2604 x 2 hour maximum & average values for ~ 7.2 months
•     2678 x 1 day maximum & average values for ~ 7.3 years

This gives plenty of storage with a reasonable file size of roughly 420 kB per data series.

Presentation

To ease the data presentation and acquisition, cacti http://www.cacti.net/ is used. This web-based application (favorable a Linux web server + PHP and MySQL required) is based on the RRDtool and provides Data Input Methods and Graph Templates as well as a nice graphical user interface to view the recorded data. Cacti primarily supports data acquisition via SNMP queries, but the power converter does not provide such interface. However, custom scripts can also be used.

Acquisition

Therefore, a PHP script has been written to fetch the current web page of the power converter and a simple HTML DOM (document-object-model) parser http://sourceforge.net/projects/simplehtmldom was used to extract the required field values. The tools run on a 24/7 NAS server where a cron job invokes the cacti poller (and thus the script) once every minute.

Results

Data acquisition is now successfully running since about 1 month. The total power production from last week can be seen in the following figure. The light-blue area represents the power output of the smaller (5 kW) system and the stacked dark-blue area is the power output of the larger (9.8 kW) system. From the data series we can even infer on the weather – the figure indicates that is was sunny at the weekend, cloudy on Monday, Tuesday and Friday and rainy on Wednesday and Thursday.

National Energy Production in Comparison

Guest Post by Lizzie Dawes

Of the individual countries looked at (Austria, UK, Germany, USA), Austria produces the most renewable energy, in terms of proportion. Unsurprisingly, given its area, the USA produces the most renewable energy. The USA was second only to China in its investment in renewables, spending $51 billion (around 41 billion Euros) in 2011. 

  

As can be seen from the graphs, Austria produces more hydroelectric power than any other type of power – including conventional thermal power. Why is this? Is it because Austria has ample opportunity for hydroelectric power stations? Is it because Austria’s waterways are not vital for commerce, with Austria being landlocked? Is it because Austrians are more receptive to the idea of renewable energy and are prepared for hydroelectric power stations to be built? 

Perhaps the answer lies in Austria’s geography – Austria is mountainous, to a degree that Britain and Germany are not – 68% of Austria’s land is above 500m. The majority of its hydroelectric power stations are in mountainous regions. Similarly, most of Britain’s hydroelectric power plants lie in mountainous regions – in Scotland and Wales, largely.

It is not as if other countries lack opportunity for hydroelectric power –Britain has mooted the idea of a barrage on the River Severn for decades, for example. Recently, there have been plans for more plants along the Mississippi River (USA), some of which have been abandoned as the price of natural gas has fallen.

Is hydroelectric the answer, though? Germany has invested heavily in renewable energy – 200 billion Euros have been pledged to build offshore wind farms. Indeed, Germany’s investments appear to have been successful – it now produces nigh on four times the energy from renewable sources as the UK and well over twice as much as Austria. 

It should also be noted that even Austria has not run away with itself building hydroelectric power plants – a protest at the Hainburger Au in 1984 stopped the construction of a hydroelectricity power station there, due to the impact the power station would have had on the environment. 

Austria, as can be seen from the graphs, has never produced any nuclear power, after a referendum in 1978, deciding that the Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant was never to be used and since then, Austria has never operated a nuclear power plant. An interesting twist in Zwentendorf’s tale is that it has become, at least for the present, Austria’s largest solar power station.

Another factor to take into consideration is that most renewables (wind, solar, hydroelectric, for example) cannot be used constantly - they depend on the time of day, weather, etc. 

It is obvious that there are still issues to be solved, with regard to providing energy, even through renewable sources – careful consideration will still be needed on how to provide power when renewable sources currently cannot – either new ways of generating energy need to be found, or further investment is needed in geothermal, biomass, or nuclear energy.

All graphs based on data from US Energy Information Administration.