OT: Thought this article on VRB might be of interest Taikun.
Canadian rebirth for wind power
Nathan Vanderklippe
Financial Post
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
VANCOUVER - Inside an unremarkable office building on the outskirts of Vancouver, a small team of engineers and marketers is building a technology that will tame the wind.
It is a high-tech battery that looks like a pair of hot-water tanks linked by a twisting network of plastic piping. Each tank is filled with vanadium, an element named after a Norse fertility goddess that could give birth to new possibilities in alternative energy by making wind turbines nearly as reliable as coal-fired electric plants.
First designed by NASA and developed by Vancouver-based VRB Power Systems Inc., the vanadium battery took a major step toward commercial success yesterday after the Irish government released a study showing it could substantially boost profitability at wind farms when the Emerald Isle is looking to inject some of its famous green into its power supply.
"It's definitely going to give us a lot of credibility," said Simon Clarke, VRB executive vice-president. "There's never been a fully commercial, large-scale storage project with wind, and this study gives us a blueprint for our technology, which we can use in Ireland, Europe and worldwide."
The study, sponsored by Sustainable Energy Ireland (SEI), showed that a small island wind farm could see a 17.5% rate of return by using the VRB batteries, a huge growth over the 10% returns at most Irish installations.
The high-efficiency batteries work by storing excess electricity when it's not needed, then instantly releasing it back to the grid when the winds calm down.
"Today in Ireland the biggest barrier to deploying wind energy is not finances or planning, it's ? these concerns about the controllability of wind," said Graham Brennan, a renewable energy program manager with SEI. "This technology gives us an ability to capture the wind power and deliver it at peak times of the day."
The study crunches the numbers on how the VRB system could be used at the Sorne Hill wind farm, a 32-megawatt operation to be installed near the northern tip of Ireland. It calculates battery storage will allow Sorne Hill to forecast its output for a 24-hour period with 98% reliability -- a key selling feature for electrical markets. Those figures are convincing enough that Tapbury Management Ltd., the company that plans to build Sorne Hill and had contracted to buy US$6.3-million of VRB batteries, has now raised its contract -- which could be finalized in as little as four weeks -- to US$9.4-million.
In Ireland, a free electricity market has led to significant discounting in the price for wind energy, but the study's results show the VRB batteries make wind-powered output stable enough that the Sorne Hill project could reasonably seek the amount paid for more dependable fossil-fuel-generated electricity, Mr. Clarke said.
Since the Irish winds generally blow at night, the batteries will also allow wind farms to save their electricity for peak demand times during the day.
In many ways, Ireland is the perfect test bed for the VRB technology. It lies at the very end of the long natural gas pipeline that originates in Russia, making its gas-powered electrical generators acutely vulnerable to price swings and politically motivated supply interruptions.
That alone is a huge potential market for VRB, whose current plant can produce just under 30 megawatts of batteries per shift per year. But, said VRB CEO Tim Hennessy, there are upwards of another 200 islands such as Ireland around the world, and other nations that have already invested heavily in wind power.
VRB has begun negotiations or submitted proposals to use its batteries in Denmark, Spain, Scotland, Hawaii, California, Alaska, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand. The company produces 50-kilowatt and five kilowatt units; the smaller units will sell for about $35,000, low enough to be palatable to the market and high enough that VRB will sell its first units at a profit, said Mr. Hennessy.
VRB is positioning itself as the right technology at the right time, as the Kyoto-driven surge in wind generation threatens to destabilize electrical grids. Batteries could allow the grid to support far higher concentrations of alternative energy, by making it less intermittent.
However, said Mr. Brennan, industrial-scale wind farms could find it more economic to use what's called "pumped hydro." In that system, excess electricity is used to pump water into reservoirs. When needed, that water is then run through hydro turbines to generate electricity.
Still, Mr. Hennessy forecasts an annual market of US$1-billion for VRB batteries as renewable power storage, plus an additional US$500-million for use in remote areas, such as diesel-reliant towns in the Canadian territories.
The technology is promising enough that the small Vancouver company, whose stock rose 11% to 61? yesterday, has attracted coverage from a half-dozen analysts.
nvanderklippe@nationalpost.com
© National Post 2007 |
