Synergy Module

My good friend, Aidan Lynch, asked an excellent question on my post about energy storage using pumped hydro. He asked, could you use surplus electrical energy from renewable sources to produce hydrogen and then use that as a fuel.

I am not a fan of Hydrogen as a fuel or as a way of energy storage. I am not well disposed to any fuel that burns the way Hydrogen does from a safety perspective. The efficiency of hydrogen production and consumption from power plant to wheel is around 22%. See the following report for an analysis.

http://www.efcf.com/reports/E04.pdf

And, this involves a new infrastructure and a new car technology. Electric cars and plug-in hybrid electric (PHEV) cars offer far greater efficiencies. If you want to use electricity to produce fuel, then use it to support biomass derived diesel.

Watch this movie to get a taste for why I feel that the diesel-hybrid car is the car of the future. The speaker shares my distaste for Hydrogen and even makes a case that Ethanol is not the direction to go.

So in the future I see us having small electric cars for short distances and hybrid diesel cars for medium and long distances. Both types of car will be charged using energy demand managed electricity. The diesel will be produced from cellulosic materials (not food) via synth gas using energy demand managed electricity as the heat source.

The author of the above report and the speaker in the presentation share this view of the future.

I am fascinated by the new all electric Tesla Roadster. Electric and hybrid cars offer the opportunity to consume surplus energy from renewables such as wind and wave to replace our current dependance on fossil fuels for motoring.

www.teslamotors.com

Electric Car + Renewable Energy + EDM = Fossil Fuel Displacement

Toyota have announced that they are road testing a plug-in version of the Prius.

http://www.japancorp.net/Article.Asp?Art_ID=14929

This is the off peak electrical load we need to get EDM on the road (literally) in Ireland. According to the published specification, the secondary battery can store about 2.6kWh of energy. If we had 10,000 of these cars in Ireland they would consume 26MWh of off peak wind generated electricity per day. The grid stabilistion effect of this managed load would be a very positive factor in increasing wind energy penetration in Ireland.

The work that Google are doing on solar energy and hybrid cars is fascinating. Reading the following blog from Google though adds a new element to the mix.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/clean-energy-update.html

Google are growing a fleet of plug in hybrid cars. These are standard hybrid cars with larger batteries fitted and the ability to charge from the electricity grid. The blog also mentions vehicle to grid (V2G) technology. This allows the bidirectional transfer of electricity between the electricity grid and the plug in hybrid.

In the context of Ireland’s need to consume surplus wind generated electricity, electric vehicle or hybrid vehicle batteries would be an ideal candidate for energy storage where the stored energy replaced fossil fuels when consumed on the following day. According to the Irish Examiner (19 June 2007), Toyota are selling 400 Prius hybrid cars per annum in Ireland. Obviously the installed base would have to be much higher to have a significant impact on grid stability.