How Supercomputers Will Help To Accelerate The Emerging Energy Economy

How Supercomputers Will Help To Accelerate The Emerging Energy Economy

Peter Kelly-Detwiler , CONTRIBUTOR

source Computer | HowStuffWorks

edited by kcontents

Meeting global carbon reduction goals will not be easy, but the good news is that this heavy lift is getting a little lighter each day. In some places, renewable energy technologies are now delivering the cheapest electrons on the planet. Soon, they will no longer be ‘alternative’ technologies at all. As their costs continue to fall, utilities and grid planners are beginning to appreciate that renewables are indeed cost-effective and increasingly becoming mainstream technologies. The emerging challenge will soon be how to wrap other technologies around these emissions-free assets that deliver super-cheap, but intermittent, electrons into our grid.

That dynamic is about to accelerate as supercomputers are used to develop new molecules that will be incorporated into even better clean energy technologies. At the same time, the computers themselves are about to become a whole lot faster and more powerful, becoming a critical tool in our evolution to a clean energy economy.

Progress in so-called ‘alternative’ energy technologies will continue to accelerate, while ‘conventional’ technology risks stalling out

A key point to understand here in this evolving energy transition is that the efficiency gains in traditional (fossil and nuclear) mature generating resources are flat-lining, and becoming increasingly difficult to eke out. Take GE’s combined cycle plant in Bouchain France as an example. The machine is capable of converting 62.2% of the fuel energy in gas into electricity, a new world record. Created with the aid of supercomputers, this generator burns gas at a temperature almost hot enough to melt steel, while the volume of hot air exits the machine at the speed of a category 5 Hurricane, with volumes capable of inflating the Goodyear Blimp in 10 seconds. The development of Bouchain is an amazing feat, but consider this: according to GE, it took about a decade of development to increase gas power plant efficiencies by just 1%

By contrast, newer ‘alternative’ energy technologies are far from mature, with great potential for advances made both in the laboratory and the field. To take one example, the conversion efficiencies of solar panels continue to increase annually: the chart from National Renewable Energy Laboratory provides perhaps the clearest example of this trend.

Those gains are in the lab.  In the real world, the same thing is happening: just last year, over a seven month period, SunPower realized an absolute increase in conversion efficiencies from 23.9% to 24.7% (median efficiencies) in their ‘Fab Four’ facility that makes panels for the market. That represents 3.3% increase in relative output– in less than a year, still a steep improvement curve.

Now let’s look at wind. Higher towers, combined with longer and stronger blades have the power to significantly lower costs as megawatt ratings get higher and capacity factors increase. Add to that the digitization of entire wind fields, so that the fields themselves are optimally located and the turbines then act in concert with each other to maximize the output of the entire field – aided by high-performance computing. A recent NREL study estimates that resulting efficiencies could “result in an unsubsidized cost of energy of $23/megawatt-hour and below, a reduction of 50% or more from current cost levels.”

NextEra Energy Partner’s CEO indicated in a January 2017 conference call that he expected wind prices to fall to between two and three cents per kilowatt-hour absent subsidies over just the next five years. Wind turbines and solar panels are hardly alone: batteries and inverters are following similar paths in terms of declining costs coupled with improving performance.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterdetwiler/2017/12/13/how-supercomputers-will-help-to-accelerate-the-emerging-energy-economy/#2f75dcf341c3

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