Patchy notes about energy

Why the future belongs to electric cars

1. Burning fuel more efficiently There is a clear-cut environmental incentive to promote transition to electric cars even if they are charged with electricity generated by fossil-fueled power plants. And here is why. Modern power plants are based in combined cycles, and the development of such cycles will continue in the future. Their key advantage is energy efficiency. And some preliminary…

Corporate research on nuclear fusion

The development of nuclear fusion power plants is still considered within the framework of scientific research despite the formal status of ITER being a demonstration project. This framework obscures the economic prospects of nuclear fusion. An attempt to analyze nuclear fusion as a nearly commercial power generation technology immediately leads to the conclusion that it cannot compete with…

Siemens gas turbines and Crimean scandal

The scandal caused by the shipment of several Siemens turbines to the Crimea despite the sanctions prohibiting such shipments sheds some light on the real progress in import substitution in Russian. Import substitution has been declared to be a top priority according to practically all Russian officials and state programs for about a decade. It would be an exaggeration to say that Russia produces…

Sources of incremental innovation in energy technology

1. Introduction Innovation in energy technology differs from innovation in other areas and industries as was exemplified by Grubler and Wilson [1]. Despite the obvious importance of innovation in this field, the number of works studying specific aspects of energy technology innovation is limited in proportion to the research on innovation in general. What can foster innovation in financial…

Prerequisites of further development of unconventionals

Steve Schlotterbeck, CEO of EQT Corporation, interviewed by Claudio Brasca and Joe Quoyeser (McKinsey) recently mentioned two important aspects of the development of technology for the exploration and production of unconventional hydrocarbons: 1. “the experiments are generally low cost“, 2. “in the shales, if we try something and it works, we’re going to get to apply it to thousands of future…

Petroleum versus renewables? Not quite…

There is a widespread misconception that oil somehow competes with photovoltaic and wind energy sources. It doesn’t. Major renewable sources are bio, hydro, photovoltaic, and wind energy. Hydro, photovoltaic, and wind sources only generate electricity, while oil is mostly refined and used as fuel or chemical feedstock. Some power generation is fueled by oil derivatives, but this share is tiny.…

Investor’s guide to frauds and scams in technological innovation

New technology may change the world, but as an investor you may prefer to capitalize on it in the process.  And at this point you have to assume the financial risks. A potentially breakthrough technology may be premature. Early samples may not be reliable. The developers may have to educate the market or create an expensive infrastructure for their product. The list of obstacles and bottlenecks…

Oxy-fuel combustion + supercritical CO2 cycle

“Toshiba, NET Power, CB&I, Exelon and 8 Rivers Capital are working together to develop and commercialize the application of supercritical carbon dioxide power cycle technology for efficient emissions-free electric power generation. The cycle is not a combined cycle. Instead, it exploits the special thermodynamic properties of carbon dioxide as a working fluid by eliminating the energy losses that…

Case study of corporate breakthrough innovation in energy technology

/The abstract of the forthcoming presentation at the XVIII April International Academic Conference On Economic and Social Development/ There are two traditional managerial and organizational models of innovation. In one model innovation is driven by business entities impelled by market competition or incentivized by anticipated profits. The history of the first electric utility grids is an…

Degrees of freedom and feedback loops

We tend to think about climate as a major threat but forget what it really is — a giant heat exchange machine. The most important property of this machine is complexity. Climate includes multiple heat transfer effects which work simultaneously and are distributed over vast territories. There are three elementary physical mechanisms transferring heat: thermal conductivity, convection and radiative…

Validity and effectiveness of thermodynamic models in economics

The following text is posted as a working paper. The paper suggests a classification of thermodynamic models in economics into local, global and translational. Local models use applied thermodynamics for feasibility study, productivity analysis and similar purposes in a way that strictly complies with thermodynamic definitions of entropy, temperature and pressure. Thermodynamic correctness of…

At first sight, there are humanities and natural sciences (including some applied engineering disciplines), but in fact there many shades of gray. For example, have you ever noticed that one can easily find thermodynamic properties of iron, water or even some rare refrigerant, but you can’t find data on the entropy of petroleum? Theoretically speaking, one could take a sample and spend several…

Why oil prices mean little to energy technology in general

The widely discussed price trends in the petroleum markets are important for the budgets of some petroleum exporters, but their relevance for the long-term technological development outside exploration and production is overestimated. In the years of the first petroleum shocks this factor was important. 40 years ago soaring petroleum prices created a powerful incentive to develop alternative…

What do we know about the sources of innovation in the modern economy?

It would be logical to expect that the since diversity and variety of technological taxonomy grows along the value added chain, so does the innovative potential of the economic agents sustaining and developing the corresponding technologies. For example, extracting natural raw stock (such as ore), processing it and producing economic feedstock (such as aluminum, cement or silicon) all add to…

BBC released a film which deserves a few more paragraphs than I typically post here. Hypernormalisation https://www.facebook.com/VICE/videos/1414301661936421 The full version: https://thoughtmaybe.com/hypernormalisation/?lang=en Let’s think of it without disturbing music, gray colors, British pronunciation and a bit of manipulation. “This is the normal world. You’re going to work in a city. All…