Student Post: "Saving" the Environment

As we look to renewable forms of energy production to provide for the demands of the future, scientists are continuously straining to find new ways to harness the great power of the environment’s natural resources.  From waves to wind, it seems the possibilities for sustainable energy production are limited only by the human imagination.  Which is all well and good, but no two days are ever the same.  With that concept in mind, the alternative energy crowd faces a new challenge:  where do we store the wind and the rain brought in by a hurricane?  How can Alaska store its 20 hours of summer sunlight to keep the lights on during 20 hours of winter darkness?

In densely populated areas, temperature extremes can overwhelm the power grid.  In California and New York, for example, residents are all-too-familiar with the scenario in which record-high temperatures in the summer months create such a burden on the system that it simply cannot keep up with the demand.  On numerous occasions, this has resulted in devastating blackouts when residents need that power the most.  This scenario is just one reason why utility companies have looked to harnessing renewables as a way to meet the demands along the grid.

However, as utilities have been developing their renewables programs, they face the newest issue of how to store surplus energy.  Matthew Wald, writing for the New York Times, explains one such instance.  “In June 2010, for example, a violent storm in the [Pacific] Northwest caused a simultaneous surge in wind power and in traditional hydropower, creating an oversupply that threatened to overwhelm the grid and cause a blackout.”  The Bonneville Power Administration, a federal agency responsible for the region, resorted to giving away free power just to get it out of the system.  Faced with the dilemma of harnessing excess wind power or excess hydro power, Bonneville chose to unplug the wind machines.  (They reasoned that diverting water around the regional dams could hurt salmon in the region.)  This move brought on a lawsuit by wind producers and investigation into the matter by FERC.

Rather than simply accept the monetary losses during an event such as that in Washington, the Energy Department is lending a hand and proposing new ways in which companies can store the surplus energy.  At a recent forum, the Federal Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, proposed several methods of storage, including using batteries and also cooperation among utilities to remove barriers among their systems.  Even more compelling was his description of a Houston medical center.  Faced with surplus energy, the hospital “was simply chilling water in a tank that could be used to cool the building the next day. ‘The amount of energy needed to keep that tank cold is one-tenth of what you’d need to chill it,’ [Chu] said, describing a method of storing energy as cold water instead of as electricity.”  Chu has also suggested storing the energy as ice or heat, but energy companies and other regulators are wary of moving into this new realm.

The costs of implementing renewable energy systems on a large scale are often debated by those on both sides of the energy debates.  And yet it is rare to find any discussion of the costs associated with the storage issue such as that described above.  Perhaps this is because it is too new a dilemma or is largely misunderstood.  Regardless of the reasons for its lack of prominence in the discussion, there is no question that the issue will continue to gain momentum as more and more alternative energy facilities begin to pop up all over the nation.  Whether this is another cost that will be passed on to consumers or, as in Bonneville’s case, will result in giving away the excess energy when the system cannot handle the strain, is anyone’s guess.  But even the still somewhat novel idea of alternative energy has created still newer dilemmas that only time will solve.  Regardless of the outcome, one thing is glaringly clear:  it's a good time to be in R&D in the energy sector.