WAYS TO SURVIVE TILL GOING GREEN

We walk on renewable energy resources, we eat them, and we all are surrounded by
them, yet we are using non-renewable energy resources to generate electricity and as fuel. This
attempt of human race to destroy her, like 99% of species lived on earth, has been made
unsuccessful, thanks to the green energy.

The energy crisis and its answer by using coal and petroleum is now getting obsolete. In
this new era energy will be produced using renewable resources only. The following are the most
popular renewable resources.

Renewable Resources:

 Hydro Energy
 Wind Energy
 Bio mass
 Solar Energy
 Industrial waste
 Geothermal Energy
 Tidal Energy
 Wave Energy

This paper will not discuss about these traditional way to generate electricity from renewable
resources, rather the ways to survive till the vision of 100% electricity from renewable resources
is achieved.

Efficiently using coal:-

Cofire Biomass with Coal
Biomass and wood waste from the local area can be mixed in with coal up to 10 or 20%. Since
the next crop of biomass will take in as much CO2 as was emitted, it is considered carbon
neutral. Biomass also has very low sulfur and mercury content and reduces NOx, so cofiring can
also help meet emissions limits. Fuel and maintenance costs are often significantly lowered.
Georgia Power’s conversion of its Mitchel Plant, for example, is expected to lower fuel and
maintenance costs by 30%.

Use Biocoal
Biomass is more expensive to ship than coal because of it’s 30% lower energy density. It also
must be protected from rain and cannot be easily pulverized like coal. Torrefaction, a process
similar to coffee roasting, can convert biomass into biocoal which can be shipped, stored,
pulverized and burned just like coal. Torrefaction plants along the train tracks or rivers normally
used to supply coal can convert locally grown biomass to biocoal and fill the same vehicles now
used for coal delivery. Plant modifications are therefore unnecessary. Torrefaction increases the
energy density of biomass to about 11,000 Btu/lb while making it waterproof and friable.

Sell Waste Energy

Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plants achieve up to 90% overall efficiency by selling waste
power instead of disposing of it in cooling towers or streams. Existing plants can be modified to
do the same thing. Hot steam can be sold to nearby Kilns, ethanol and drying plants and then
passed on as hot water to lower temperature applications like Cold storage, greenhouses and
fishponds. In Denmark 53% of the power plants also sell their waste heat. Many towns have a
hot water or steam loop that distributes heat and returns the preheated water to the boiler. Recent
improvements in insulation and leak detection have made long distance heat delivery practical.
In one installation in Denmark, hot water is sent through insulated pipes 30 miles with only a
10% loss.

Install Biomass Gasifiers

Biomass gasifiers can be located anywhere on the property to produce syngas, which is then
piped to burners installed in the coal boilers. As with natural gas conversion, only a brief
shutdown is required for installation. Direct coal firing is still possible if desired. Fluidized bed
gasifiers are extremely efficient and can work with a wide variety of feedstocks including
biomass and municipal waste.

Solar Preheating of Boiler Water

Solar thermal preheating of boiler water efficiently captures the energy of the sun and reduces
fuel consumption. Solar heating peaks in the middle of the day but is ineffective at night. By
using the sun to preheat water, fuel requirements are reduced by an amount equal to the heat
captured. It is particularly effective on the same bright sunny days that produce maximum air
conditioning loads. Carbon credits and investment credits are available. Parabolic troughs that
track the sun can increase the efficiency of energy capture.

CLEAN COAL
Wind, solar and geothermal power can provide clean sustainable energy but it will take
decades of work to grow enough capacity to satisfy our power needs. We can solve our problems
quickly by converting our existing coal power plants to biomass power. Biomass is carbon
neutral and has virtually no sulphur or mercury. Conversion cost will be much less than the cost
of adding carbon capture and mercury scrubbers and more importantly, it can be done now!
Biomass has about half the energy density of coal so transportation costs could be high for large
urban power plants. The solution is simple: torrefy the biomass at its source. This will convert
the biomass to biocoal, which has the same energy density, moisture resistance and friability as
coal.
 Torrefaction is like coffee roasting. When any woody biomass is heated to about 270° C
in the absence of oxygen it undergoes a transformation that increases its density while retaining
most of its heating value. The result is extruded into pellets that have an energy density of 11,000
Btu/lb, just like coal. Since it doesn’t absorb water, biocoal can be shipped in the same train cars
and barges as coal. It can be stored outdoors, fed into a coal pulverizer and burned just like coal.
The big difference is much less ash and NOx, and virtually no sulfur or mercury. Biomass waste
is abundant. China has an estimated total supply of 700 million tons/year. About 100 million of
this is currently being burned in the fields. Using biomass to produce power qualifies for carbon
credits. One ton of biocoal prevents several tons of CO2.

National Bio Energy is a new Chinese company specializing in building new biomass
power plants that use waste straw from grain production as fuel. Since their founding in 2005
they already have approval for 40 biomass plants, mostly in Northern China. Twelve of their
projects are already in production, producing 324 MWe. The plants are relatively small and
located near the biomass sources. These power plants provide independent power and jobs for
local farmers and eliminate the pollution of burning fields. Our massive investment in existing
coal power plants can be cleaned up by repowering them to burn biomass. In the U.S., Georgia
Power is planning to convert an existing 96MW coal plant to biomass power. The fuel cost
compared to coal is expected to be roughly 30 percent less per year and maintenance costs are
expected to be about 13 percent less. FirstEnergy is converting a 312 MW plant to biofuel and
will thus avoid the $330 million cost of adding scrubbers to remove mercury. In Canada, Ontario
Power Generation is considering a similar move. The U.S. already has 80 biomass power plants
in operation. A recent government report found that fuel and maintenance costs were lower than
coal.

Repowering or cofiring existing coal plants is a quick fix that can be implemented now to
slow global warming while providing good jobs. However, since coal plants average only 33%
efficiency, this is only a stopgap solution. When new plants are built they should be much
smaller in size so that waste heat can be put to good use. Wherever heat is needed, cogeneration
plants can generate power and sell it to the grid while putting the excess heat to good use.
Overall efficiencies of 85% are possible with good design. New turbine and heat recovery
technology and the reduced need for pollution control equipment makes smaller plants
economical. Biomass is also a perfect match for solar thermal hybrid plants. As the sun grows
weaker the biomass is gradually fired up to keep the turbines running at full speed even at night.
Think of biomass as a store of solar power that can be used when needed. Wood pellets are
already taking over the heating market in some areas because fuel costs are cut in half. Torrefied
pellets will be even more cost effective.

USING PLANTS TO STORE SOLAR ENERGY:-

The custom of rating solar plants based on their peak output on a clear summer day at noon leads
to some dangerous misconceptions. Cost per Watt, for example, understates the actual cost by a
factor of 4 even in the desert. Growth figures and land use in acres/MW are similarly grossly
misstated. If we look at land use of some real projects now on the drawing boards we find that
the latest photovoltaic, parabolic and tower projects all use about 5-6 acres per peak MW. The
Saguaro 1 MW parabolic trough plant near Phoenix for example, generates 2000 MWh of
electricity annually, using 15.8 acres. It’s interesting to compare this sun-capturing performance
to a field of biomass. Miscanthus is perennial grass that yields 15-20 tons/acre on marginal land.
That’s about 250 million Btu/acre which is 73 MWh/acre. If we use a 85% efficient combined
heat and power (CHP) plant to convert the biomass to power, it would take only 2000/(73X.85)
= 32 acres to grow the same amount of power.

SOLAR POWER FOR CLOUDY REGIONS:-

In places that often have cloud cover, thin film photovoltaic power works much better than
polycrystalline because the clouds scatter the light in all directions more than actually blocking
it. Thin film panels usually have 3 layers to cover a wider spectrum of light. Evacuated tube solar
collectors also work well with clouds.

PUMPED STORAGE:-
Pumped storage reservoirs aren't really a means of generating electrical power. They're a way of
storing energy so that we can release it quickly when we need it. It could be used with any kind
of power generation. Water is pumped up to the top reservoir at night, when demand for power
across the country is low. When there's a sudden demand for power, the headgates (huge taps)
are opened, and water rushes down the tunnels to drive the turbines, which drive the powerful
generators. The water then collects in the bottom reservoir, ready to be pumped back up later.
Dinorwig, a pumped storage in North Wales has the fastest response time of any pumped storage
plant in the world - it can provide 1320 MegaWatts in 12 seconds.

NATURAL GAS FUEL CELL CARS—NO TO PETROL:-

The hydrogen fue l cel l cars work fine but no good solutions have been found to the problems of
where to get the hydrogen, how to deliver it and how to store it. 95% of our hydrogen is made
from natural gas, which is abundant on earth and already distributed at 1/3rd of the price of
gasoline. Three recent breakthroughs have made natural gas a very interesting fuel:

· Ceramic fuel cells that can make electricity from natural gas at 60% efficiency.
 · ANG: Adsorption stores natural gas at low (500 psi) pressure in compact tanks.

· A glut of cheap natural gas caused by new shale drilling/extraction techniques.

The fuel cell breakthrough is particularly important because it means a car can generate its own
electricity more efficiently than a massive power plant! Big plants typically average 30%
efficiency, so a 60% NG fuel cell hybrid is twice as efficient as an electric vehicle charged from
the grid. That means half as much fuel is consumed. Twice as efficient as an electric car is saying
a lot because electric cars are already three times more efficient than conventional cars. This is
because internal combustion engines are less than 30% efficient verses 90% for electric motors.
Natural gas fuel cell cars are thus about six times more efficient than today’s cars. Using 1/6th as
much fuel means pollution is also 1/6th . But NG is inherently very clean. and has 30% lower
carbon content and virtually no sulfur, mercury, volatiles, and NOx so pollution is way less than
1/6th.

METHANE AS ENERGY CARRIER:-

Methane (natural gas) is a better long-distance energy carrier than electricity. Its storage and
transportation is much cheaper and easier than electricity. Natural gas pipelines cost half as much
to build as electric towers and have about one fourth as much transmission loss. They are also
more reliable, safer and visually superior to ugly transmission towers. Our electrical grid is only
30% efficient in delivering the energy in fuel burned to the customer. That efficiency could be
doubled or even tripled if we used gas powered combined heat and power (CHP) electrical
generators located where heat is needed. By using the generator’s waste heat, an efficiency of
85% is possible. Clearly it is smarter to expand our gas pipeline network than to build more
electrical towers to distribute inefficiently generated electricity from massive power plants.

Even though most of our natural gas is now fossil fuel, a doubling of efficiency would
be just as effective as achieving 50% renewable power as far as global warming is concerned.
We can simultaneously work on greening our gas supply by feeding more and more biogas into
the pipeline. In Germany 22 billion kWh of biogas were produced in 2007. That’s a six-fold
increase from 1999, driven partly by feed-in tariffs. About half of that biomethane was from
landfill and sewage gas and the other half was from commercial and agricultural biomass plants.
Renewable biogas is produced by natural processes of anaerobic digestion or gasification then
cleaned up for sale to the gas pipeline.

IMPORTING SOLAR POWER TO BIO MASS:-

Every six hours the sun bathes the lands of the earth in as much energy as the world
consumes in a year. If we could just find a way to collect and distribute that energy our energy
problems would be solved. Unfortunately, most of our energy consumption is in the places with
the least sunshine:
Biomass captures and stores the suns energy for later use. In tropical zones biomass grows year
round and can be five times more productive than in the temperate zones. Biomass can be
converted to denser forms and shipped to where it is needed surprisingly economically. For
example, ocean shipping of coal priced at $73/ton from Australia to China only adds about
$12/ton to the final cost. Wood chips are bulkier, but they can be made as dense as coal by
heating and compressing them into torrefied pellets. Ocean shipping is amazingly efficient for
long distances. Australia has shipped an average of two million tons of coal per month to China
so far this year. Ordinary (untorrefied) wood pellets have less than half the energy density of
coal, yet Plantation Energy just signed two contracts to ship $130 million worth of pellets to
Europe over the next three years. With torrefied pellets shipping costs could be halved so the
economics would work out even better. Torrefaction is like coffee roasting. It requires no
external energy but uses about 8% of the biomass energy to drive the process. Some of that
energy is recovered because pelletizing energy is reduced because the heat-softened lignin in the
biomass makes it easier to compress into pellets.

GREENING DESERTS:-

Poor farming practices have degraded the world's soils causing them to release carbon that
should have stayed in the soil. In the past 150 years soils have released twice as much carbon as
fuel burning. Improved farming methods could quickly rebuild degraded land and store enough
carbon to offset the damage already done by fuel burning. Dr Rattan Lal of Ohio State
University, a leading expert on soil carbon, estimates that the potential of economical carbon
sequestration in world soils may be .65 billion to 1.1 billion tons per year for the next 50 years.
This is enough to draw down atmospheric CO2 by 50 ppm by 2100. This is a one-time
opportunity, however. We must ultimately stop burning fossil fuels. We have only recently
begun to understand the destructive effects of plowing and grazing. The delicate surface crust is
an almost invisible biotic network of algae, cyanobacteria and lichens that hold the soil together
with tiny filaments. This thin crust takes in an amazing amount of CO2 by photosynthesis and
also fixes the nitrogen in the air to a form usable by plants. Tilling the soil breaks up and buries
the biotic crust, stopping photosynthesis. The dust bowl in Oklahoma in the 1930s was an
example of the bad effects of plowing the land. Wind and erosion almost turned that once-rich
grassland into a desert.

A very encouraging project in China has restored a desert community and given them a source of
revenue growing sand willow for making wood planks. This experiment was so successful that
the restored area is growing rapidly as individuals plant sand willow as a source of income. Even
more exciting, is the plan to build hybrid solar power plants in the area that will use the sand
willow as biomass to feed boilers when the sun doesn't shine. Solar will provide heliostats and a
solar tower for generating solar power in the daytime. The same turbines will be driven at night
by steam, generated by burning the sand willow. A total of two GigaWatts of these hybrid power
plants are planned.
Energy Saving:

It costs about $2.50/watt to build a new coal power plant. But replacing light bulbs can decrease
demand for only $.025/watt! (A 13-watt compact florescent bulb replacing a 60 watt
incandescent bulb reduces demand by 47 watts for only $1.19. $1.19/47= $.025/watt) A properly
motivated power utility can accomplish the equivalent of building an expansion power plant at
much lower cost by just giving compact florescent lamps to their customers. That’s exactly what
Southern California Edison did in 2007 by sending out sample CFLs to their customers with
discount
coupons that resulted in over a million lamp replacements. That’s 47 megawatts demand
reduction when they’re all turned on! Another program paid $100 towards an efficient, Energy
Star refrigerator and offered free pickup of the old refrigerator. Eight hundred thousand
refrigerators were replaced on this program.

CONCLUSION:-

As countries all over the world are investing more and more in renewable energy resources, as
we
See in following statistics,
it is very important to use our now available resources efficiently till the world shifts to the renewable
power. These methods would certainly help existing power plants to save money and in going green.

A few notes on current green energy development project in India:

 According to the Indian Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, India added 2.33 gigawatts of
grid-connected renewable power between March 2009 and March 2010.  This represents a record
year for clean power development in India, and more than doubles the installations from the
previous year.

 The first 13 GW projects will be established at Karnataka, which is eventually found in the
southwest of India. There are already 12 sites that have been selected; four for wind farms and
eight for solar farms. The first stage of the development will be initiated in around 36 months and
will have an expected supply of 100 MW from solar and 200 from wind energy . The aim is to
 harness 13 gigawatts (GW) where 3 GW from wind farms and 10 GW from photovoltaic.
One more 5GW solar power plant to go in Gujrat.

REFERENCES:-

1. http://www.clrlight.org/fuel.htm
2. http://www.pewglobalwarming.org/cleanenergyeconomy/index.html
3. http://www.darvill.clara.net/
4. http://www.solarfeeds.com/
5. http://www.solarishi.com/