Jim Thomson is principal oceanographer at the Applied Physics Lab at the University of Washington. He studies ocean surface waves and coastal processes and wrote about his expedition to the North Pacific in the fall.
Monday, Jan. 14
One of the many quirks in renewable energy research is the amount of energy it takes to conduct the research. A senior colleague of mine likes to joke that marine renewable energy, in particular, is very likely to run at a deficit of watts for some years to come.
He is mostly thinking of the jet fuel used by people flying around in airplanes to meetings and such, but he would do well to consider the batteries in all of my instruments. The instruments we will deploy to measure turbulence in Chacao Channel, Chile, and assess the prospects for turbines to generate electricity from currents, are all autonomous; they are powered internally by batteries and record data to flash memory. The obvious choice for battery type is lithium, because of higher energy density and steady voltage during discharge.
The lithium battery is not without problems, however. Lithium is a hazardous material, both by regulation and by reality. Early in graduate school I had a near miss with a lithium battery inside an instrument case that leaked and filled with seawater. Lithium + water = explosion.
Now, lithium is causing problems again (and not just for Boeing). The last report on our shipment of equipment to Chile was ?arriving in port, all well.? The update now, 24 hours before we were to board a plane, was not well at all.
Apparently the port is not licensed to store hazardous material, like lithium batteries, while waiting for the shipment to clear customs. Despite having arranged our shipping details months in advance, including completing reams of ?hazmat? paperwork, the port was unprepared for our shipment?s arrival and so they simply did not unload it.
That?s right: all of our equipment, including said batteries (which constitute a tiny part of what we shipped), is still on the cargo ship. And that cargo ship set a course for Peru. As an old captain I used to sail with would say, ?well, now, that?s a pickle.?
The ultimate irony in this story pertains to the lithium itself: much of it comes from Chile to begin with. Some estimates put Chilean production at 40 percent of the global total.
The shipping company has assured us that the cargo ship will be back in Chilean waters soon, and they will try again to deliver it. I was hoping for a more definitive word than ?try,? but perhaps that?s just a problem in translation.
For now, we have postponed our flights and begun shuffling calendars to make room for the same trip ? just a week or two later.
We have a contingency plan, of sorts. We have a few spare instruments still in the lab in Seattle, complete with standard alkaline batteries (which are not designated as hazardous material). We can hand-carry these instruments on the plane with us.
When we get to Puerto Montt, we can build a mooring from scratch with whatever we can source locally. It?s a sizable fishing community, so we should be able to find plenty of shackles, line, chain and anchors. It might not be pretty, but if that cargo ship never makes it back to Chile, it should work.
In the meantime, I am left to contemplate those lithium batteries. We could have gone with alkaline batteries instead to begin with and just planned to collect less data. I could have been less greedy, using less energy for less time. Perhaps that?s an obvious choice for a renewable energy project.
Power density is the Achilles? heel of all renewable energy generation. The power available from the sun, wind, and ocean is diffuse. The standard metric is watts per square meter. There are plenty of watts to be had, certainly, but it will take a lot of square meters to get those watts.
Fossil fuels, by contrast, are highly concentrated (a result of cooking underground for millions of years). Batteries are concentrated, too. Neither lasts forever. A pickle, indeed.
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