Energy Systems

I saw things in Cairo that I thought were only true in the movies. This whirlwind trip has been a real eye opener for me, an enormous culture shock and I have come to realize my own naivety surrounding mega cities in developing countries. To give you an idea of the conditions:

• the city is home to 18 million people
• the sixteenth most populous city in the world
• a diameter of 15 km

There are two extremes here: rich and everyone else. Most people live in homes that are in poor condition at best and generally absolute wrecks. Half a million squatters are living in cemetery tombs in central Cairo.

...

The change to Combined Heat and Power (CHP) in Denmark created a decentralized heat and power structure that gradually can be transitioned entirely to renewable energy.

By establishing local consumer-owned and municipality-owned Combined Heat and Power plants (CHPs) ownership of power production gradually shifted from centralized power production to local, independent, not-for-profit energy supply. This change to decentralized CHP happened over the course of 10 years, in parallel with building of 3200 MW of new wind power with 85% owned and used-by-community power co-operatives referred to as Independent Power Producers (IPPs). By2001 a total of 45% of the 35 TWh of power used in Denmark was being produced by IPPs. Of the 45%, wind power accounted for 20% and CHP 25%. As a consequence the central power utilities (now owned by Vattenfall, DONG Energy and EON) had their share of the power market reduced to 55%. This...

Rob and I were very happy to host Robs parents, Jon and Thea, for a few days here at the Folkecenter at the end of October. Keen to expose them to some of the neat things that we have experienced, we organized a field trip packed with renewable energy exhibitions. In the morning we visited (i) a straw-bale fired community district heating plant and (ii) a cooperatively owned biogas facility providing combined heat and power to the local community of Lemvig. We’ll discuss both of these in separate district heating and biogas blogs.

In the afternoon we concentrated on wind power. We first visited the large National wind turbine test site, followed by the Folkecenter’s 525kW turbine and the small-scale wind test site. 

The Risoe Large Wind Power Test Station, Hoevsoere

...

As most of Robs friends and family know Rob has three loves in his life:

1. 1) his wife, of course
2. 2) good beer
3. 3) Renewable Energy

Well, being at the Folkecenter has allowed Rob to experience all three of these things in one swoop! Here at the Folkecenter small wind turbines are constantly showing up from various manufactures from around the world in order to get a shot at the Danish test bench. In order to test a wind turbine a load has to be applied to it so that a power curve can be attained. Some test centers do this by plugging the wind machine into a battery with lighting or even by dumping the load using a rheostat. Here at the Folkecenter they came up with a much smarter use of the precious resource of wind- Beer Cooling!

The temperature of Robs beer on any given day is directly related to the speed of the wind during that day.

...

{After initially publishing this blog I came across a Vancouver-based company, Finavera Renewables, looking to develop a wave energy project (I think that it may be the first commercial application in Canada) off the west coast of Vancouver Island, in Ucluelet, BC. Check out this very interesting short clip of the technology:}

I was sitting around on a Saturday Morning this weekend tired of looking at a computer screen so Melissa and I decided to go for a bike ride over to the Folkecenter Wave Energy test site. The site consists of a long pier which allows test devices to be placed away from the shore in order to capture dynamic wave energy and transform it into power.

The Folkecenter is...