2025 stepping up

The start of a new year might be an arbitrary moment in time but it instills a sense of things moving forward. There are still plenty of problems to solve and opportunities that come from those solutions and we are choosing to look at 2025 through that lens.

So what are the opportunities?

IEEE Spectrum

IEEE Spectrum has provided a list of 9 Intriguing Engineering Feats for 2025 and that is a good place to start. I’ve cherry picked a couple.

Tracking Greenhouse Gas Emissions

MethaneSat is set to make global real time Methane Emissions publicly viewable. This is a big deal because Methane (Ch4) has a much bigger impact on atmospheric warming and is also increasing at a faster rate than Carbon Dioxide (CO2). Plus it is generally recognised that it is highly under reported. So this will help with the last problem and hopefully lead to reductions.

Radioactive Waste Cleanup

Radioactive Waste has been leaking into the soil at locations used for nuclear bomb development sites. So it isn’t just sites bombs were dropped on or where there have been nuclear reactor leaks. A bigger problem than I realised.

It is hoped that cleanup efforts will start to produce real results in 2025.

Energy Storage

This one did not get a mention but it is at the top of my list for 2025. Cleaner energy production and use requires us to get away from polluting energy generation. And while Nuclear Power is a candidate, that it is a long way off and there is a lot of energy expended and industry development to build it in the first place. I’m not worried about waste management because that is a solved problem. We just need a more mature conversation about how that can work.

So looking at the other options, here are the challenges and possible responses that I see.

Pumped Hydro Energy Storage (PHES)

95% of all the energy storage in the world is currently pumped hydro. But those are big projects and if the water has to be potable (drinking quality) then that also makes it more expensive.

Plus Australia is the flattest continent and low on water. Regardless of that Arena has published a survey that identifies 22,000 viable pumped hydro sites in Australia with up to 67,000GWh of energy storage. While the focus seems to be on big project like Snowy 2.0 there is clearly a lot of opportunity for smaller projects. See below for where the sites are. Access the full report at An atlas of pumped hydro energy storage.

Pumped Hydro Energy Storage Australia

Gravity Well

Pumped Hydro Energy Storage is a Gravity Well energy storage method. The water is the weight and pumping it up and letting it flow back down are the use of gravity where the height difference allows potential energy (storage) to be converted to electrical energy (generation).

But you don’t have to use water. And there are advantages in not having to maintain assets that stay wet all the time. So while the lack of mountains and height differences in Australia also affects this there are still plenty of options.

The most obvious one is to take all those mine sites that were never rehabilitated by the mining companies (in contravention of their licenses) and rig them up with generators and hoists and lug weight up when we are storing and let it run down when we are generating. Same as pumped Hydro only dryer. The weight can be anything including the mine tailings that might still be lying about.

Big Battery

Alas, as far as we know it, there is not enough Lithium on the planet to provide all the storage we need. So this category needs to be broader than just Lithium. There is some excellent development in Sodium based batteries and Flow Batteries should also be in consideration.

Then there are liquid metal and molten salt batteries being developed. In practice, we might find ourselves spoiled for choice.

Thermal

There are lots of options here.

One of our clients, RAYGEN, uses solar mirrors to heat up water then uses the heat later on for generation.

RAYGEN Solar Thermal

There are overseas projects looking at heating up sand for storage.

So I remain optimistic that 2025 will see some important progress toward a more sustainable future.

Successful Endeavours specialise in Electronics Design and Embedded Software Development, focusing on products that are intended to be Made In Australia. Ray Keefe has developed market leading electronics products in Australia for more than 40 years.

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Renewable Energy

Regardless of where you sit on the climate crisis versus beat up continuum, generating renewable energy that doesn’t continue to create pollution post manufacture has a lot of merit. So where are we at now that it is 2023 and we are green house gas looking at pollution reduction targets over the next 12 years?

Better Solar Panels

Most of the best breakthroughs in solar cell efficiency in the past 20 years have come from the University of New South Wales (UNSW). So you would think we should be making the world’s best solar panels? Alas not, but I still think it is the right move and especially as China has shown it can play hard ball on trade restrictions when it suits them. A definite case for sovereign capability.

According to Renew Economy, there are 6 promising projects that could lead to either significant reductions in solar cells costs or a doubling of solar cell efficiency. These are:

singlet fission solar cells
PERC/TOPCon Hybrid Cells
Chalcogenide-Si tandem cells
Reducing reliance on Silver
Machine Learning to optimise solar farm management
Material dependency reduction

The singlet fission project could increase the theoretical maximum efficiency of Silicon solar cells to 45% by creating double the number of charge carrying excitons generating 2 instead 1 as happens now.

singlet fission

You can read the full rundown at Six ways Aussie researchers hope to deliver ultra low-cost solar.

Grid scale storage

Currently, 95% of all the grid scale storage in the world is hydopower. Australia is the flattest and driest continent on earth (ignoring Antarctica which has 97% of all the fresh water in the world but it is frozen). So it would seem that hydropower is not as easy an option here.

An Australian government study shows that there are about 3000 identified low-cost pumped hydropower sites in Australia.

Australian electricity options pumped hydro-energy storage

Australian pumped hydro-energy storage sites

So that is a lot.

The other things that affects the cost is whether the water is potable (consumer grade clean water). So some sites can be made into closed systems and not necessarily connected to the main water supply. This reduces the cost of the facility.

And of course there is still the big battery and flow cell options for large scale storage. In practice there is not enough Lithium in the world to achieve this using that battery material so while Australia might get by if we stopped selling off ore to China and used it to build the batteries ourselves, it doesn’t solve the global problem and this needs a globally scalable solution.

Offshore Wind Farms

This one is a bit more controversial for a range of reasons. However it does mean the wind farms are not consuming nice coastal foreshore areas. Victoria’s Star of the South project will be built offshore from Gippsland.

Star of the South – offshore wind farm

So this is looking to be the beginning of a big shift in attitude as we all start to pull together for the good of the whole planet.

Ozone Hole Repair

As a sign of hope, the actions taken by all countries 30 years ago to ban the use of CFCs so that we stopped damaging the Ozone Layer have now shown that they were successful. The Ozone Layer is repairing itself and we could see it fully repaired by 2050. So unilateral action can work. Giving us hope in the area of climate repair.

Ozone Layer Hole 2022

This has reduced from a peak of 27.5 million square kilometers in 2006 down to 23.2 million square kilometers in October 2022. Part of the problem is that CFCs have very long half life times of up to 500 years so this is a slow process. CO2 has a half life of 120 years so this is why we want to stop adding more of it to the atmosphere as soon as we can. You can read the full report at Ozone Layer Hole Update NASA.

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Tag Archives: Clean Energy

2025 is a year of promise