The Workermonkey

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Calling on Matt (and maybe Ron) and what the hell - any of you 

# posted by Damon @ 11/22/2005 04:25:00 AM

Would anyone else like to get in on this just-beginning clean energy industry? Now is the time, and the place is Vermont. Vermont gets 36% of its electricity from Hydro-Quebec, and 35% from the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant. The contract with Hydro-Quebec expires in 2015, and the permit for the nuclear plant is done in 2012. As it stands now, neither will be renewed (the reactor cannot be.) Vermont has an electrical capacity of about 1GW, so that's 710MW of new capacity that will be needed in the next 10 year! (With the dubious assumption of constant demand.) So if they decide to build a new reactor, it could do that by itself, case closed. But that is unlikely. There is up to 194MW of commercial wind power in some state of planning, and there is 330MW of hydropower available at existing dam sites (72MW at one site.) And clearly, that still leaves a major need, (also you can only count wind as something like 25% of its capacity since it flucuates so much.) So you see there is a lot of work to be done right now. There will be a substantial job market in energy and hopefully the market forces and politics make it clean energy. The current fuel prices are doing well in that regard, and if we get a really cold winter and everyone goes broke paying for oil, we should be in excellent shape to build alterntives. Honestly I'm a bit disappointed in my MSc program so far, so you other ME's would be at no disadvantage getting good jobs or starting projects in this market.

10 comments

The luck marches on, two emails from the football team encouraging me to meet with them and join. The head coach is American, so my lack of Swedish is not considered a problem, and neither mentioned my light weight. The season actually starts in May so I could probably put back at least half of the missing muscles by then. The team was 7-1 in the second highest division in Sweden last year.

Another email relates to my disappointment in my Sustainable Energy Engineering degree, which was because too much time was spent on convential energy sources. The email says that the nuclear portion of my Sustainable Power Generation class has been shortened, and hence 3 of the remaining 6 lectures have been cancelled.

And my fantasy team overcame a massive Monday deficit for a miraculous victory over a top team to keep me in the playoff hunt, and to provide the trifecta weekend with wins by all my football teams.

But where, oh where, is the Swedish girl that will complete the picture to make me doubt that my atheism can answer such an uninterrupted and highly unlikely string of positive twists and turns?

By  Damon, at Tuesday, November 22, 2005 6:00:00 AM  

-18 jigawatts!!!
-doc, we won't make it.
name that movie

damon, I got a call from UTC power last friday. I'd be working on PEM fuel cells for transportation. I'm really crossing my fingers on that. Other than that its probably going to be typical CT aerospace stuff for me. I havent gotten one response about microengineering jobs. I really should be an electrical or materials engineer for that stuff so I can understand why.

By  ron, at Tuesday, November 22, 2005 11:55:00 AM  

88 mph, Ron. Turn back the clock.

88 days w/o a fulltime job, Macunas. Turn back the paycheck.

For awhile I wanted to get employed with some sort of lobbying for quicker transitions to sustainable energy economies, but I still don't have the clout yet. Politically.

By  DJ Booze Piñata, at Tuesday, November 22, 2005 3:42:00 PM  

Ron, I thought you knew the hydrogen economy is nonsense, and it is especially unlikely that fuel cells will be used in cars. Stationary fuel cells, especially high temp ones that can cogenerate seem to be good for industrial or large residential projects and grid-independent installations, but when H2 takes several times the volume that gasoline does, it is going to take some major storage breakthroughs to use it in cars, nevermind the infrastructure, and the fact that renewable hydrogen costs 4 times gasoline. And if it's not renewable, then are people going to pay the major price premium for a fuel cell when all it buys is a little more efficiency? Most hybrids' small price premium doesn't even payback within the vehicle lifetime unless gas goes even higher. For transportation my favorites are ethanol and biodiesel, both of which can run with only minor engine and infrastructure modifications. And ethanol allows for major turbo compression because it's something like 105 octane. But it still has to be blended with gasoline for now, so that's the problem to solve there, and biodiesel's cloud point is 40 degrees F or so, so that's a huge problem there.

Oh course which technologies you believe in and doubt is a matter of what you heard from whom, and for me it was Joseph Romm's The Hype About Hydrogen," that caused a virtual 180. Here, I've sat through lectures of researchers who are working with hydrogen, and therefore trying to be optomistic, but even then, it's not just that using renewable hydrogen in cars is a long time off, we don't even know how to start on the way there.

By  Damon, at Wednesday, November 23, 2005 3:58:00 AM  

Be sure to check out Romm's other titles including such educational books as: "The Atom, from A to booooom!" and "What's the deal with metaphysics?" and who could forget the classic bestseller "Diagnosing the global industrial use of beta-ions with carbon quirks of babylon".

Sorry...

By  Brancibeer, at Wednesday, November 23, 2005 11:09:00 AM  

woohoo metaphysics! now you're speaking my language...

By  josh, at Wednesday, November 23, 2005 12:20:00 PM  

BB tries with creativity and no research to discredit my source. Google "joseph romm," and you may find: first he didn't write anything similar to those books; he was part of the management of the DOE's program on hydrogen and fuel cells during the Clinton Administration; he held high positions at the National Renewable Energy Lab, where I have applied twice for a job; and he initially thought about writing a positive book about hydrogen but the multipart agrument and long list of obstables presented in the book, combined with media hype and Bush's massive support (really doesn't that alone justify a hard look at it?) made him write the opposite. I highly suggest to read it at least for Ron if it's a career interest. There is an updated edition just published in September, which I hope to get the time to refresh myself with, and to see if the numbers have improved. By no means am I saying it should or would persuade you to work elsewhere but it brings up many good points, like why using hydrogen in an IC engine is a bad idea, which a couple of years after reading it, still makes me cringe when automakers do just that. Anywho, he's an expert in the field, and I saw him give a presentation to a group of maybe 60 people, many of whom worked in hydrogen, so you can imagine their pointed questions, but he could quickly and articulately counter every argument.

By  Damon, at Wednesday, November 23, 2005 1:05:00 PM  

I just came across an interesting point of view in a article about fuel cells in my Energy Management textbook:

"One has to accept that an electric engine costs just as much as a petrol engine, so fuel cells must in fact compete with petrol tanks (i.e. assemblies of bent and welded metal sheet). Electric vehicles with fuel cells will therefore never be able to compete with petrol and diesel-powered vehicles in the foreseeable future; they have to be treated on different economic terms, which can be justified as fuel cells are non-polluting."

Of course to be non polluting, the hydrogen has to be from renewable energy sources, which then means the price of fuel will not be able to compete.

By  Damon, at Wednesday, November 23, 2005 1:42:00 PM  

Damon, what kind of classes are you taking? classical stuff like elastacity, fluid dynamics and mechanics or special topics stuff like fuelcell chemistry and say.. wind turbines, i dont know. I'd like to get a better idea of your program consists of, it seems interesting.

By  ron, at Wednesday, November 23, 2005 1:59:00 PM  

Special topics of course, otherwise I would just be repeating my BS.

Renewable Energy Technology
Energe Management
Sustainable Power Generation
Sustainable Energy Utilization
Energy and Environment
Applied Energy Technology - Project Course

Thermal Comfort and Indoor Climate
Applied Refrigeration and Heat Pump Technology

The last two are specific to my 'major' Sustainable Energy Utilization in the Built Environment as opposed to Sustainable Power Generation or Nuclear Power Techonlogy

The course titles aren't very descriptive but the main technologies they focus on are wind and biomass, but also things like combined cycles with natural gas or even gassified coal.

By  Damon, at Thursday, November 24, 2005 2:13:00 AM  

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