Energy Generating Door… yea
February 8th, 2008
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A bunch of places have revolving doors. The revolving doors need resistance to keep them from just swinging every time the wind blows. They use dampers or some kind of friction device. But following the mindset of “Every little bitty teeny tiny minuscule big helps” and also the fact that eco-crap seems to be selling and getting attention pretty well, someone came up with the idea of using revolving doors to generate electricity. It seems pretty logical when you realize that there are many milliwatts just free for the taking. Well, free once you pay for the door and have it installed, that is. It’s hoped that if enough of these “eco-friendly” doors are installed, that it may actually produce enough energy to offset the energy used to generate the rendering you see bellow.
Okay, so it will never actually generate enough energy to offset the energy used to manufacture, transport and install the damn thing, but that’s not really the point, now is it? The point is it is helping… or at least, it kinda seems that way as long as you don’t think about it too hard. And it does “raise awareness.” The other thing about this rather stupid idea is that it is intended to put electricity onto the grid or otherwise supplement mains AC. If the door just powered a bunch of LED’s or something then at least the energy would have some use. Unfortunately, after the energy is buffered, voltage regulated and sent through a phase-synchronous inverter, there will be considerably less than you start with. Add to that the fact that this kind of intermittent and tiny power source doesn’t actually result in any reduction of power generation and it becomes apparent pretty fast that this thing isn’t just small in terms of helpfulness, but rather it’s completely useless.
But then again, if you install one at your establishment there’s a good chance you might get some extra customers who fall for the “environmentally friendly” crap and actually stop by your business to pick up an organic frapachino before heading out to the tanning salon in their respective Hummers.
This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 4:38 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Culture, Enviornment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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February 8th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
Pathetic, just pathetic
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February 8th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
The thing which is most idiotic about this is selling it as “Environmentally friendly eco-generation” It’s such an exploitive use of deceptive advertising that it’s shameful. Agreed with DV82XL. Absolutely pathetic.
But if these go on sale, believe you me, they will be installed and people will feel damn proud of themselves every time they walk through one. Just pathetic.
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February 8th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
This is an example of energy recapture, where some of the waste heat is converted into electricity and stored in batteries or sent to a power grid.
What people tend to forget is that energy recapture systems also costs money, which translates into scarce resources.
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February 8th, 2008 at 8:29 pm
I have a huge issue with net metering schemes (the concept of selling surplus power back to the grid) in general.
The big problem is net metering requires the utility to pay to an individual producer an amount greater than the value of the energy generated.
Net metering statutes generally provide that the individual generator must have a meter that rolls forward when it is taking energy from the utility’s system and backwards when it is providing energy to the utility’s system. Even though most utilities only pay wholesale rates on electricity produced in this way, the power generated by individual generators is of low value because it is generally intermittent and expensive to integrate into the utility system. It is therefore worth much less to the utility than what the utility pays. In addition, simply rolling an individual’s meter backwards to reflect energy generated causes the individual generator to under-pay fixed costs, such as maintenance of transmission lines, capital projects, system stabilization, and administration of the utility system.
The result is that, the other consumers end up over-paying for their share of the fixed costs. Ironically under the net metering system, the other consumers pay too much for their power while a small minority of individual generators reap a benefit out of proportion from what they provide the utility. Essentially this is cross-subsidization; net metering results in a subsidy for a choice made by an individual generator and is not the most equitable result.
This is especially true because the subsidy will be regressive: the consumers who can afford to develop their own generation, such as large industrial consumers, will in most cases be shifting the costs to consumers who do not have such funds available for local generation.
In addition to enacting an unfair cross-subsidization net metering encourages the development of generation sources that would not be economically feasible without the unfair subsidization. Such a system potentially diverts funds from energy saving projects and causes these individuals to rely on an unfair and uneconomical pricing system for the sustainability of their generation projects.
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February 8th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
This is actually far from the stupidest variation of this concept I’ve seen- the worst was a proposal for a chair that generated power when people sat on it. Although I think it was a bit tongue-in-cheek, there was clearly a lack of understanding about efficient use of materials- there was speculation about a future where floors, furniture, etc. all generated electricity.
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February 8th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
Yeah I’ve heard of these ideas as well. Basically involves everything you walk on or sit in having some sort of peizo that is compressed or some sort of magnetic inductive component. It obviously produces a pitifully small amount of energy and involves an enormous amount of effort to get it in place and working.
The whole idea of using body motion to gernerate electricity is okay for small devices which do not need much power and do not have any source of continuous power (the self-winding watch for example). But using it for anything larger and thinking it adds up to something is idiotic.
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February 8th, 2008 at 10:43 pm
It’s still a start. It would be enough power if we had more minds like this working on this kind of thing and if we all cut back a bit. First we cut back and then we start looking to sources like this plus wind plus solar plus other inovative ideas. I’m glad people are working to solve these problems. It will add up. No revolving doors won’t save the world, but add in other stuff and it can!
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February 9th, 2008 at 12:10 am
No it won’t. If people start putting out innovative ideas that make a few hundred megawatts each, then it might add up. You’ll need a lot to make a real difference though. But I’d say if we can get enough of those we might be good.
This is just idiotic.
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February 9th, 2008 at 12:32 am
We need less nay sayers like you and more who will do what needs to be done. I know that i might not do everything but at least I help. You are the problem and you hurt earth. I hope you either change your mind. I think your kind will die though because you refuse to adapt to what is happening in the world. every bit does help.
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February 9th, 2008 at 5:37 am
You know Wilson your stand would have more merit if these damned schemes worked in the first place. The problem is they don’t do anything but heat up the wires. There is no net energy gain from these ideas because the little bit of power they produce is lost when you try to condition it for the grid. And the problem gets worse, not better when you multiply the sources.
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February 9th, 2008 at 5:39 am
Dare I get DV82XL started on “Vehicle-to-grid” technology — the ultimate suburbanite’s dream? “My nifty new car is powering the grid!”
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February 9th, 2008 at 5:47 am
Well the same criticisms I mentioned up-thread in my second comment hold: these things wind up being cross-subsidized by those who do not have them.
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February 9th, 2008 at 9:56 am
One thing I’ve wondered about VTG is why people would be willing to expend the life cycles of their battery so that other people can keep their lights on. Isn’t it kind of like “I’m wearing out the most expensive component in my nifty new car at little benefit to myself!”? Even if it is physically feasible, where’s the incentive for the vehicle owner? Is it likely to be great enough to actually get people to participate?
Also, I know that Altairnano claims that their batteries will last through so many charge cycles that this won’t be an issue. But have they actually submitted their batteries to independent testers to prove this?
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February 9th, 2008 at 10:14 am
Well, Sovietologist, the real question — if one is really concerned about doing something to contribute to the grid — is why not just stick a big diesel generator in your back yard and a big, industrial-strength battery in your garage. These technologies exist today, unlike all the V2G vaporware, and they would be far more economical (probably by an order of magnitude or more) and effective than “powering the grid” with your car, when you consider the amount contribution to the grid versus the cost of the equipment and cost of maintenance. In any case, both alternatives are expensive propositions.
But, upon further consideration, a diesel/battery combo wouldn’t justify having a neato electric car that can “power the grid,” would it? If the Joneses don’t have one of these, then how can the rest of the environmentally minded neighborhood keep up?
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February 9th, 2008 at 11:44 am
So, I’m the first to admit I’m a total geek, and one thing to remember about the geek mindset is that the “haha, nifty!” factor often captures geeks’ attention more so than the overall utility of a given technology. The tech world is littered with Next Big Things that turned out to be more trouble than they were worth in the end, and were thus abandoned. (2002: “Portals! It’s all about portals!”)
Personally, I really dig the idea of capturing small amounts of energy that would otherwise go unused and repurposing them for appropriately scaled use cases — Doc’s example of the self-winding wristwatch is a perfect example, as it’s much less annoying than having to wind a little stem and doesn’t require batteries that have to be disposed of. It’s the “appropriate use case” part that this revolving door totally fails at.
The difference between the average geek and an experienced engineer is that the experienced engineer will look at something like this and realise “but it’s ultimately useless, because the sunk costs are far more than will ever be recouped during the lifetime of the object, and so much energy is lost during conversion that it can’t even do what it’s intended to do.” The geek just sees “oh, hey, power being generated in a way I hadn’t thought about before, that’s cool!” and doesn’t have the domain knowledge to connect the dots like the engineer does.
IMO, geek enthusiasm is something that it’s worthwhile to encourage … but in a way that brings them back to reality so that they can funnel that enthusiasm into ideas that make sense. I’ve spent a few minutes already thinking about what kinds of things are likely to (1) be near revolving doors, and (2) need small amounts of intermittent DC … nothing’s coming to mind, alas. But now I have an idea to carry around in the back of my head: where is there “wasted” motion, e.g. a swinging arm with a wristwatch on it, that could be converted into power without stupid infrastructure overhauls, and what kinds of everyday objects would benefit from small amounts of intermittent electricity? (Thinking about watches has me thinking about how many other items we carry around every day that are usually battery-powered. If only iPods were powered by springs!)
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February 9th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Brian said:
Yeah I’ve seen that. The whole idea is ridiculous. Why waste valuable gasoline on generating electricity in a small engine which is less effecient than the large plants? Or perhaps it’ll be a hydrogen car… even worse. The hydrogen then comes from either natural gas (which produces co2 and gives you less energy than the gas had to begin with) or perhaps from water (which is about 12x in 1x out for the process of creating, compressing, distributing and using the hydrogen. And that’s being generous).
The only thing I could ever see a use for a car as an electricity source would be as a standby generator that could be pressed into service in a power failure or if you wanted to use the electricity for something remote like maybe a tailgate party or something. Of course you can already do this anyway with an inverter and a car with a decent sized alternator. In the past I’ve used a 1200Watt / 1800 peak inverter and my dad’s big SUV during a power faoilure to run a few lamps and a small television, so we could see the news reports. Not really the best thing to do for the car’s electrical system, but he bought the extended warrantee so I figured leaving it idling with a big extension cord was not so big a risk.
If you actually wanted to, you could certainly power a good part of your house with your car with a few modifications. Get an oversize aftermarket alternator installed, (optionally add a couple extra batteries in the trunk for peak loads). Then add a regulator and breaker to make sure you don’t burn it out or drain the battery to nothing. Then just add a big multi-kilowatt alternator and an idling controller to make sure the engine gets enough throttle when under load.
Yes, this is done by some people who need it. For example, those who might need to run power tools and such in remote locations, emergency services and that sort of thing. Powering your home on it is obviously a pretty dumb idea. But hey, this was never really about doing the “smart” thing.
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February 9th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
Well, DrBuzz0, personally I think that V2G, like Las Vegas, is a concept totally dependent on good feelings and bad math.
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February 10th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
I hate to jump in and support a concept that is getting such a bad reception, but I think some of you are missing the point of VTG. The idea is not to run a (very inefficient) gasoline engine in the driveway to generate grid-synchronized electricity, but rather to use the (as yet pie-in-the-sky) efficient electrical storage in a plug-in hybrid or all-electric car to supply a few kWh to the grid during peak hours, to be replenished from the grid during off-peak hours. In the case of fuel cell vehicles, the value of the electricity generated would have to be somewhat more than the fuel cost. If there were practical fuel cell vehicles, with practical fuel, this would not be too hard.
There are lots of conditions to be satisfied for this to work. You need multi-kWh storage batteries (or mythical supercaps) that are capable of enough discharge cycles that using some of the battery’s life for grid support is still economical. You need a utility metering system that allows the vehicle to be charged at off peak rates during off peak hours, and will buy peak kWh during peak hours at the peak price. You need sufficient spread between the peak and off peak price for this to be economical.
If you have these conditions, and a vehicle in the driveway with a big honkin’ battery in it with, say, 10kWh left in it, then the vehicle can supply those 10kWh to the grid during peak consumption hours at a profit, and re-charge later during off peak hours. It is one way to levelize the demand of the power system. While it may not be profitable to buy a battery bank, charger and inverter and put it in your basement to do the same sort of thing, with the VTG concept you’ve already invested in the battery and a lot of the power electronics required as part of the vehicle cost. The incremental cost of making the battery capable of supplying peak energy is (in theory) not excessive.
I am well aware that VTG is not economical today, and may never be practical. But the concept is an interesting way to provide distributed grid storage. The biggest problem is the one Sovietologist pointed out; Existing batteries do not have sufficient charge-discharge cycles available. Some manufacturers are claiming success, but I don’t think we’ve seen it proven in production yet. The other problems pale in comparison to the battery life issue.
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February 10th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
Brad F Says: “There are lots of conditions to be satisfied for this to work.”
No kidding?
Yes I know what the pamphlet says about this notion – and it’s still not workable.
To start of with, if dense and efficient storage was avalable in the form of supercaps or molten salt batteries, why wouldn’t power companies install them at fixed locations where they would be under full network control? For that matter why wouldn’t a private operator build such a station and arbitrage load?
When I pointed out that the same cross-subsidies that make net metering unfair I should have elaborated. The issue is why should I invest in such a car to benefit the power company? The answer is they would have to sweeten the pot by giving me a break on my energy cost, which perforce they would have to pass on to those who did not have such a vehicle.
The last thing that I have never gotten a satisfactory answer for is this notion of charging these things in off-peak if most of the vehicles in North America were charging on the grid at any given time. I suspect that would be peak load.
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February 10th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Yeah there are ways of providing additional power to the grid when needed and then regenerate when not. Pumped storage is the most common but it’s also very ineffecient and is a net user of energy. This is true of any. But in general, synchronizing millions of cars which may or may not be home at any given time or tapping into them as a storage medium would be a nightmare and involve a lot of inverting and regulation and converting.
Batteries are much more effecient in terms of energy-in to energy-out compared to pumped storage. There have been some experiements and pilot plants. See here: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=3742103&page=1
It’s still a net energy user (always will be). Also not very economical. It might become more avaliable and common in time. But it would be a lot better to use that kind of storage than the nightmare presented by thousands or millions of cars as a storage medium.
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February 10th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Command and control is the Achilles’ heel issue in all distributed energy schemes, and one that doesn’t get enough coverage. As nodes multiply the issue gets worse fast and as you showed dramatically in another thread cascading failuresare the consequence.
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February 11th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
Well, if you have to put on a door anyway in a new place it seems like it is worth it to me. If I were going to go to a coffee shop, as your example says and there were two but one had a door which made energy I’d go there because at least then I know I’m helping a bit. Okay, not much, but it ads up. Add a solar panel and some other energy recovery and you have it add up fast.
DV82XL: disrtibuted energy is the problem that got us here. We need to ditch the old way of making electricity and have it so everyone makes their own. Ok, if you don’t always have enough, so what? That is why you connect to your neighbors and you have distributed generation at the community level.
We need to stop thinking big and thinking global and start thinking community and thinking modest. You and your neighbors generate power and you share it in a local distribution system. It’s a smarter system and we do it better and don’t harm the world like the old way.
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February 11th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
First of all we have centralized energy, not distributed.
Second the presumption for schemes like you suggest is that they can be made to work. In another thread on this site I wrote of the ‘Captain Picard syndrome’ This is where an implausible never before achieved technical solution to a problem is required and Jean-Luc turns to Jordi and Data and says in a stern commanding voice, ‘Make it so,’ and marches into his ready-room. The real world doesn’t work that way. There are serious and yet to be solved issues with this sort of network.
And then there is the cost, I have read estimates that suggest that we would have to spend again as much as was spent building the grid in the first place to upgrade it for two-way traffic. This is not a simple task.
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February 11th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
The reason for this is that energy production requires equipment, which translates into fixed costs.
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February 11th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Not just the cost, but not to mention the fact that having distributed generation doesn’t have any real advantages. Big and medium-big power plants mean that the effeciency can be higher and the site costs are a lot less. Moving to many sites doesn’t help you if you are going to burn stuff anyway. If you use solar and wind instead, fine, except that will never actually work to provide nearly enough power.
It’s pointless and it’s just a diversion from the real issue. It’s not where you generate the power but how you do it. Putting a little coal fired boiler on every street coroner doesn’t help you at all.
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February 11th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
It gets even better.
I haven’t looked at this idea in several years, but during a debate on another thread here, I had a chance to do a recurrent on the subject and this is what I found.
Most of the “Smart Grid” tech is still vaporware, but ‘to get started’ and ‘as a first step’ utilities are demanding net metering, and load management. That is they want to charge clients a sliding scale for peak usage, and have the ability to cut power to home HVAC and hot water devices at the utilities whim. They also want to see frequency-sensing in all inductive loads, like fridges and freezers, that would inhibit these appliances from starting if line-frequency dropped past some predetermined value.
All of these will help it is true; but note how the consumer now has to invest in apparatus, and now is responsible for maintaining the grid by accepting degraded service. And what’s the bet when they get these things passed in to law, the rest of the architectural changes will go on the back burner.
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February 11th, 2008 at 11:29 pm
Hmm. That sounds like a crap deal for everyone, but it also seems to be the fairest way to manage it, eh? I mean if the consumer is going to be generating the electricity and paying for it then it should be their headache to manage the damn voltage and loading.
Hell, if it’s the utilities power then fine I can see keeping it them being responsible for quality of service and not shutting down your air conditioner because they can’t support it, but what’s the point if they don’t generate it eh? “You expect us to have good QOS? Hey, don’t blame us. We just maintain the lines. If your fridge won’t go on it’s because all the screwoffs in your town ain’t generating enough electricity. Not our problem”
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February 12th, 2008 at 11:14 am
I’m afraid that’s about the size of it.
BTW in post 26 I should have written ‘flex metering’ not ‘net metering’ the difference being that former allows changing variable rates depending on grid conditions and the consumers load profile, while the latter is a meter that can run backwards.
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February 12th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
The whole idea of a “smart grid” ignores an obvious problem which is true no matter what your grid is: You cannot have demand that exceeds generating capacity without having major problems. At least you cannot do it for more than a very short time due to the energy stored through induction motors and generators.
If the customers demand 200 megawatts on a part of the grid for which only 190 megawatts is avaliable there is no reconciling this. You will have brownouts, phase problems, forced shutdowns of equipment or some other major problem. The only way to avoid this on a grid that does not have reliable and sufficient supply avaliable is to create massive distributed energy storage mechanisms. This also tends to create more problems than it solves.
Especially in an AC system, this is simply a formula for a nightmare. You can’t make a grid “smart” enough to provide more energy than you have. Simple as that.
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February 17th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
Bloody revolving doors; I hate the things.
Want to save on energy? Here’s an idea, use a real door and harness the bio-mass power of humans to open it.
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