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  • Author Author: rscasny
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OpEd: What India and Pittsburgh Have In Common

rscasny

I think we all live with some level of tunnel vision. We live locally and too often are unaware of what is going on in the wider world despite our access to the reportage of world events.

 

I thought about my own tunnel vision of the wider world when I did my typical Saturday morning thing: got a cup of coffee from my local Starbucks and read in the New York Times the story: India, Once a Coal Goliath, Is Fast Turning Green.

 

The gist of the story is that India WAS planning on building a whole lot of coal-fired plants but are cancelling many of them because (a) their current plants are operating at only 60% capacity and (B) they are relying more on renewables such as solar power.

 

India, so says the story, is also decreasing its annual coal production from 660 million tons to 600 million tons -- down 10%.

 

Clearly, the world is embracing renewable energy technology. It appears to be making sense in India. It even makes sense to the mayor of Pittsburgh in the U.S. In another story, it says that  Pittsburgh already has 13,000 jobs in the renewable energy industry. Says the story, "Pittsburgh today is increasingly rebuilding around greener medical complexes, research university and tech offices." Less need for coal, for sure.

 

I haven't been to Pittsburgh since I worked for Eaton Corp. as a field engineer about 20 years ago. And I have yet to visit India. But this morning over a cup of coffee at my local Starbucks, my world view just got a wee bit bigger.

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  • That was an interesting article. I see huge adoption of solar in villages in Pakistan, their main problem they are solving there is simply they cannot trust the mains supply, it regularly shuts down.

    The electricity companies 'round-robin' the supply to different towns/villages, so that everyone gets a time-slice of power for a few hours, because they don't have the capacity to power all of them simultaneously. It's not great : (

    The small solar cell provides a supply for running a couple of low-voltage (e.g. 12V) fans, and the stored energy can be used for running 12-volt LED lamps. Some will also have an inverter for running their fridges etc.

     

    Small solar panels and battery backup is commonplace there, although the cost is still high for people. Technically if we look at solar panels, the solar cells inside them are cheap, a lot of the cost is the waterproof and environment-proof structure.

    Taking solar cells and building them into solar panels could be an interesting project, especially if it can be done using easy-to-obtain materials. Another interesting project would be to develop efficient but high quality LED lighting for low-voltage

    use. A lot of the lighting I saw was awful, barely usable.

  • in reply to shabaz

    The inverters for appliances in RC (campers) in the US are fairly efficient and common so I shouldn't be surprised that solar cells can be used to feed them for appliance power and lighting in developing areas of the world.

     

    What really excites me is the renewable energy storage designs. This is about using molten salts for energy storage in a heat exchanger process:

     

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWIeJh-sDOw

     

    Of course, the above is beyond the scope of individuals in the developing world, but I think renewable energy storage is the stealth technology that will fundamentally change the world if it can be pulled off on a global scale.

     

    Randall

  • in reply to rscasny

    That was a great video to watch. I'd not heard of molten salts for energy storage, but I found a PDF from University of Alabama, where they mention that the salts they are designing that can have a melting point of around 89-124 degrees C, and energy storage of the order of 1000 megajoules (MJ) per meter cubed, and storage efficiency of 93%!

    Also this Thermal Energy Storage PDF looks interesting although I've only scanned briefly through it so far.

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