Tag Archives: energy

Sunsetting infrastructure

At some point in my career I got involved with projects with utilities in Australia. First with electricity distribution networks, then with gas utilities as well. They are all energy networks or utilities because my role as an energy transition consultant is to help players in the economy to navigate the challenges and struggles around our transforming energy landscape. They are struggles that the players and our economy must go through in order to emerge more resilient and climate-relevant.

Electricity networks are seen as important for the energy transition – the drive to decarbonise the energy system – so much so that The Economist ran a cover in April this year that shows a man hugging a transmission tower and the cover text reads “Hug Pylons Not Trees“.

Gas networks and pipelines are on the other end of the spectrum. There’s a lot of concerns around what is going to happen and the expectations of a death spiral. Activists campaigning against the gas networks can sometimes claim that they should be written off completely while contradicting themselves that the assets should not be allowed to depreciate quickly given they still have some operating life or runway. There is a role for gas networks to actually consider the challenging question of getting renewable gas into their network and the struggle has to do perhaps with the question of which gas. Would it be hydrogen, or biomethane, or what? And on the other hand, will they need to transport carbon dioxide? Perhaps captured ones from the industry? What role can the pipelines or network play?

If we keep thinking about molecules and figuring out which molecules, we’ll be somewhat stuck. The trick it seems, is to consider potentially taking the lead. It is still fascinating that Jemena actually took the lead to initiate the Malabar biomethane injection project and saw through it to the recent operation with the first biomethane injection into a distribution network in Australia. Biomethane in most cases is the straight-forward solution – one that is tricky to pull off but can be handled just from supply-side as the end-use equipment will not have to switch from the ones that already use natural gas. Therefore, it is the logical choice for gas networks to start taking the lead on. Perhaps in the next two to three years, it would soon be a no-brainer. But for now, we do what we can to further accelerate the transition.

Small firm in energy transition

The energy transition exposes the weakness of the current energy system of the world. It reveals how much we are reliant on a few resources to draw our energy to power the economy despite how dispersed and distributed energy resources are.

Take for example a rural area in Indonesia, where there are small farms and villages – and they are relying on diesel or kerosene refined and fetched from some far flung areas in order to power their generators or farm equipment. All the while just sitting beside heaps of bioenergy resources that are seen as waste.

The emphasis on low-carbon economy helps us recognise that we may have to start shortening our supply chains and reducing its complexity if we want to decarbonise our economies. Part of this has to do with how stuck we are between the CAPEX and OPEX distribution of the manner we consume energy. By consuming fossil fuels, we shift the burden of costs mostly to the OPEX since equipment are mostly standardised and so they are cheaper to procure and use while we adopt the long supply chains needed to achieve the delivery of fossil fuels on regular basis.

If we were to shift to shorter supply chains where the distributed energy resources were consumed instead, there might be more local equipment needed, the CAPEX might increase. But OPEX may actually decrease because now you’re saving on storage or disposal costs of some of the feedstock that might go into making the fuel you need.

If the world is to develop shorter supply chains, it will need more small firms. And governments all around the world needs to know better how to encourage, support and empower small firms to rise up to the challenge. We need local firms who are familiar with the local constraints, context and needs. They need to be upskilled technically to rise up to the challenge and generate solutions.

This mode of development is vastly different from the old school model of having a big multi-national firm come into a less developed location to help ‘develop’ it by reshaping local demands. Aside from how much this harks back to colonialism, it is creating long supply chains which seem to create more jobs but is not doing much for the climate and environment.

Hydrogen ecosystem II

When I first penned the blog post on hydrogen ecosystem, I had a couple of ill-fitting ideas that I thought could come together but I did not successfully pull them together beyond putting them in a single blog post. What I really meant to say is that the government will need to do more work understanding and studying the nuances of the ecosystem and industrial value chain that makes sense for green hydrogen and then perhaps take action to ease the struggles of the market in developing projects.

The thing about green hydrogen is that it is something that requires quite a fair amount of new infrastructure. And the situation is uncertain because governments are thinking that maybe electrification will be more dominant and want to avoid investing in white elephants. Or they think that it is all a zero-sum game due to budget and resource constraints and that investing into transmission and distribution which meant favouring electrification would naturally be inconsistent with investing into more gas infrastructure.

In reality however, green hydrogen is made from renewable energy and hence the alleviation of electricity grid issues that foster more wind and solar can also support the development of a green hydrogen sector. The key here again is that the government needs to have better knowledge of how different parts of the value chain works and the value they are contributing.

Only in appreciating that, the governments can make the right moves.

What would a net zero business in your industry look like?

We spend a lot of time thinking about emission reduction. And it is all based on considering the existing state of affairs and how to move ahead from here. So we often consider how a process can be optimised to use less energy, or to use alternative materials. So a decarbonisation roadmap plays an important role in considering an existing business and how carbon emissions can be gradually eliminated from the workings of the business to transit it towards a low-carbon economy.

But just as important is how we can envision a new business to perform exactly the functions of an existing business but with zero carbon emissions. It is no longer about mapping or developing emissions baselines but rethinking how the same process can be achieved without emitting as much carbon. It is rethinking processes altogether. Heck, it might even involve rethinking products.

Major oil & gas companies are now refashioning themselves as provider of energy, competing with their customers who are power generators. Or they can think of continuing to supply the electricity generation players by going into mining and extracting of minerals and metals that are needed for wind turbines and solar panels. Or they could reconsider that they are actually logistics players ferrying molecules around and look into dealing more with chemicals transport. They could even consider themselves producers or inventors of new materials.

This exercise can be repeated for other industries and we could potentially have very interesting outcomes.

Subsidies and fundamentals

Huge amounts of subsidies goes into fuel and energy. The companies are not necessarily being the ones subsidised to produce the fuel but rather, domestic markets of net exporters tend to be protected somewhat from international energy prices through subsidies. The notion is to help maintain internal price stability and hence cope with cost of living.

Australia is one of the few markets who are net exporters of natural gas for example and yet do not really “shield” its domestic market from international price impacts. The result is that the recent price spike in natural gas had Australians screaming in pain and for perhaps the first times in decades, businesses and households are seriously considering disconnecting from the grid and electrifying.

But there can be a middle ground. Subsidies can exist for these energy exporters to protect their domestic users given that these exporters stand to gain when the energy price increase. How can they share these windfall with their own economy and the users in local market? The government can subsidise users but make the subsidy transparent. This way, households are not paying the full prices and they are also given information about how much the government is helping to make them affordable. At the same time, it becomes more politically acceptable to pull back on such subsidies for those heavy users who are higher on income brackets and can afford it.

For far too long, we shield the markets from the proper price signals and artificially create false sense of affordability by subsidies, we reduce the resilience of our economies and contribute further to wastage and carbon emissions. Making subsidies transparent is a great first step, towards removing this political gridlock around domestic energy tariffs.

Moving solar around

You might have seen solar panels ground-mounting on vacant land in Singapore. Today I was on a cab when the driver told me about this and thought it is such a waste of land in Singapore.

So I explained the idea that our government agencies had and the tender they designed. The projects are actually to maximise the use of land rather than waste them. In Singapore, there are plots which are left vacant for future development – they may not be empty for the full period of a solar farm, but at any one time in the island of Singapore, there should be enough space to hold a certain amount of ground-mounted solar. So the plan is to move the panels around to a vacant lot once an existing solar farm land is needed for development.

Such a model seems common sensical but requires a great deal of coordination and detailed thinking. But in the grand scheme of trying to produce more green electricity for our island state, this is not exactly a great solution. And this is an example of the challenge that Singapore faces when it comes to being innovative and scaling solutions. We have requirement for unique solutions that serves us well but probably no one else – nor are we able to easily adapt our solutions to other places.

Not sure who else would want to be moving their solar panels around.

Primitive technology

Had a chat with a friend who used to be in the oil & gas industry; well at least along the value chain. He was also a bit on the old school side of things and he calls solar PV technology primitive because compared to the gas turbines whose efficiency is 60% when using combined cycle, the efficiency of converting solar energy into electricity is only 15-20%.

I was a bit surprised at that idea given that inputs in terms of the energy from the sun is free whereas you might need to calculate the energy cost from the drilling, piping, even liquefaction and then gasification of gas. Nevertheless, the point is that turbine technology has been widely adopted and used for many more decades than the solar panels. So a lot more money, time, resources have been invested into that those technology compared to renewables. That is simply fact.

Yet if you consider which technology has more room for progress and can move us to a future that we want to live in, the answer is just as clear. The problem again, with the economic analysis undertaken is that they are all based on individuals considering Ceteris Paribus everywhere else. The energy transition, decarbonisation is more than just that an individual decision and it was never meant to be worthwhile done alone. It was something to be coordinated, actions taken together. Which is why we cannot allow all of these technologies like solar, wind, EVs, hydrogen to be as primitive as they are.

Making the transition III

I have written about green ammonia and hydrogen before. And I might keep talking about them because they are important candidates as energy vectors in a decarbonised world. They are quite likely what is considered as the end points of the transition for the world towards zero carbon or low carbon. What does it mean to transit to green ammonia or green hydrogen? What needs to take place, and who will move first? What should the players be looking out for in order to make the switch?

We need to start defining intermediate steps for the switch. There is actually very little doubts about the inevitability of the switch. Yes there are concerns that it might be energy intensive, the costs are high, and the market is not formed yet. But realistically, most new things are like that. When the Apollo mission took up 60% of the computing power of United States in order to perform its calculations for the project, there wasn’t anyone saying the industry is not formed yet we should wait for better computers before we send man to the moon. We just viewed the mission as a series of problems to be solved, within the budget constraint.

The transition needs a budget; it can be a small one or it can be a large one. The issue is that the businesses needs to take a stance and say that climate change and the transition is a mission I want to be on, and to explore the series of problems to be solved in order to complete the mission. And we don’t wait for costs to come down before we make the transition, we take active steps towards it. That is also what leadership is about. That is really the only issue people should be considering.

So for example, if you’re providing equipment for natural gas systems – be it power generation, cogeneration, for steam methane reforming, etc. You need to start thinking about the smaller pieces of things: are your valves able to handle hydrogen? Do the membranes in your cryogenic tanks work if it was to be filled with hydrogen? What about your manpower, are they able to be trained in the safe handling of the gas? All these to prepare for the transition. You won’t be able to make the transition overnight or achieve it through a single project. It takes much smaller steps.

So start making them now.

Making the transition II

Transition means being in an in-between state, crossing over to something which is supposed to be perhaps a less temporary state. The challenge, however, is that one can get stuck in transit. Natural gas as a fuel risk being in that state because it wasn’t really adopted fast enough as a transition fuel. And now renewable electricity from solar and wind has more or less leapfrog it in terms of cost advantage. Once battery or other energy storage technology moves along the cost curve and decline sufficiently, natural gas might even be bypassed.

So the world is in a somewhat confused state. When is it right to use gas? What should be counted as alternatives for decarbonisation? In any case, gas prices are spiking now so what does it mean? Should that mean we move forward into more renewables which might even be more expensive? Or we move backward into coal?

These decisions are not meant to be made in categorically; because the entire system needs to be considered. And what is at the margin in terms of choice needs to be clearly identified. If the additional unit of power that satisfies both energy security and the quantity demanded can be obtained through renewables, it should be used. Of course if that is not available, one might have to step back into more carbon-intensive processes. Availability can also be based on budget.

Natural gas itself, needs to be displaced by greener fuels without threatening the underlying combustion technologies that underpin the gas turbines. But that is perhaps for another day.

Solar as Future of Energy

The Economist ran a couple of stories about Solar Energy in the latest issue (16 April 2016); mainly touting the trends the industry has been facing in the recent years:

  1. Falling cost of panels
  2. Increasing interest, attention and commitment (in the form of Feed-in Tariffs)
  3. Falling levels of subsidy support and FiTs
  4. Increased avenues of financing and ambitious solar farm projects

Quite a couple of bottlenecks to the growth of solar still awaits solutions; and in the recent years, competition in this industry will be shifting into solving some of these problems holding back the development of solar energy.

  1. Land intensity of PV solar farms (need to improve efficiency and quality of PV cells) – land is an issue because of potential competition with arable land (plants need sunshine too) in certain places
  2. Intermittency of Solar power (a large dark cloud moving over a PV farm by can reduce generation significantly and abruptly – need for energy storage and some sort of balancing mechanism)
  3. Grid curtailment issues; inability of the grid to take in the power generated when at the peak generation capacity (especially with wind power thrown into the vicinity).

As a result, I believe these issues are going to drive the growth of this few industries/businesses:

  1. Data analytics combining weather/cloud forecasting with energy storage smart systems to optimise the operations of large scale solar farms
  2. Market platforms that helps with cost-balancing and electricity trading in order to smoothen demand and supply fluctuations from solar/wind power
  3. Improvements in both energy storage technologies as well as PV cell technologies.
  4. Further financial innovation in financing solar power deployments – including leasing of panels, leasing of rooftop space, usage-fee-purchase model, etc.