Solar Techno Park in Japan

Above is Yokohama, Japan's Solar Techno Park. It sounds like the name of an early 1990s massive rave, but the Park is a solar research facility built by international steelmaker JFE to explore alternative energy technologies. Of course, new energy sources are a hot R&D area in Japan right now following the Tohoku earthquake/tsunami and massive nuclear accident at Fukushima. Fifty-two of the 54 nuclear reactors in Japan are now shut down for safety review. From National Geographic:

Located along the industrial coast of the port city of Yokohama, the Solar Techno Park aims to achieve a combined output capacity of 40 to 60 kilowatts this spring. The facility's most notable apparatus is the HyperHelios (seen here), a photovoltaic system consisting of rows of heliostats with mirrors that follow the sun and a receiving tower.

"Tilting Toward Solar in Yokohama"

• [bcsizemo]

  “Fifty-two of the 54 nuclear reactors in Japan are now shut down for safety review.”

  And that’s only 30% of their capacity… I wonder how much they really have to make up.  I think if America lost 30% of its capacity we’d need to make up close to 29% of that back by summer.

• [Sam Ley]

  @bcsizemo The brilliant thing about Japan’s strategy is that it is based almost entirely on efficiency, with only a small focus on recovering capacity. After Fukushima there was a nationwide call to reduce energy demand, and simply through a combined effort of individuals changing their household habits, combined with requirements put on some of the largest businesses, they reduced their summer peak demand by over 15%. Their current plan is to reduce peak load even further, removing the need for nuclear entirely.

  The amazing thing is that it is working – people around the world poo-poo “efficiency” as a solution because they assume that spoiled westerners will never change their habits. I fear this is a defeatist view, and eliminates the best way to reduce demand on undesirable energy sources – reducing peak demand.

  Renewables are absolutely part of the picture (that is my world, MW+ solar PV projects), but if you want to cut out a particular generation method – just use less energy. Japan is showing that it is possible.

  • [rndmtim]

     And the amazing thing is they were already far more efficient than we are.

• [tp1024]

  If this park covered the entire Fukushima exclusion zone, it could barely provide as much energy as Fukushima Daiichi did, not to mention Fukushima Daini.  Then the area wouldn’t merely be uninhabited, but permanently turned into a landscape covered in a single, huge, industrial installation.

  And Japan would need 10 of those behemots just to replace its nuclear power stations.

  • [travtastic]

    But there’s no reason to do that. You’re looking at research prototypes.

    • [tp1024]

      Prototypes operating at the limits of the available technology.

      • [travtastic]

        Available technology? You mean geometry? Because I see a hell of a lot of unused, empty space between those reflectors. You’d get far better efficiency using standard panels for that amount of area. And if you do some mapping and research, you could partially ring the facility in high-output turbines. Or you could avoid megaprojects altogether and use roof space.

        • [tp1024]

           Conventional panels are less efficient and also need spacing to avoid putting each other in shade.

          As for roofs: this may be a viable alternative in the huge single-family houses of US suburbs, but not dense Japanese urban space with multi-storey buildings and small appartments. The roof-area-per-capita is just way too small for this to work. In fact, this is very good, because high population density allows for much higher energy efficiency.

        • [travtastic]

          @tp1024: There are dirt-cheap active- and passive-tracking mechanisms that will keep panels mostly oriented perpendicular to the sun: small motors/actuators to increment the angle based on location, and hydraulic/pneumatic systems.

          Spacing requirements do exist but suffer from diminishing returns, because the increased area at high-noon cancels out a good amount of the decreased capture at low-incidence times of day (when there’s less total influx anyway).

          In any case, most of the empty space in the above case are for researcher acesss because it’s a prototype. Commercial-grade concentrators don’t bother with access lanes for obvious economic and safety reasons.

          Area usage notwithstanding, none of this discussion is taking into account the hidden costs, externalities and waste disposal issues inherent in fission power. What does an exclusion zone cost?

        • [tp1024]

          I do wonder why those dirt cheap systems are so rarely used. Maybe because they just aren’t dirt cheap or maintenance of mechanical parts is anything but? And what about the not so hidden cost of a devastated landscape covered in solar power plants?

          As for waste disposal: reprocessing and fissioning of transuranics reduces radiotoxicity of spent fuel to the level of natural uranium (including its decay products, such as radium) within 300 years and generates as much energy as an equal amount of uranium in the process.

        • [travtastic]

          “(…) it is estimated that trackers are used in at least 85% of commercial installations greater than 1MW from 2009 to 2012.”

          So with that taken care of, I’d love to know why we don’t reprocess all of our nuclear waste, then?

        • [tp1024]

          Could you provide a source that is a) not selling the equipment in question and b) referring to actually installed systems and not predicting over several years.

          Afaik, the US doesn’t reprocess its nuclear waste because somebody said so decades ago. Other countries made more reasonable decisions.

        • [rndmtim]

           TP1024
          Hmm. Breeder nukes are the most dangerous form of reactor. Other than that, there isn’t a form of disposal, only some forms of recycling, and those mostly are not meant to deal with low grade waste. Even France is still wrestling with this problem.

          http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/french.html

          Also, check out We Almost Lost Detroit, true story of the only commercial breeder nuke we ever had (Fermi I).
          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Almost_Lost_Detroit

          The criticism you’ve leveled at some folks on here – ideas that are good in theory, but lacking in reality – well, right back atcha. Because many of my coworkers used to work at nuke plants, and, when not around people who are stridently anti-nuke they will admit that problems like neutron embrittlement are very difficult to solve. Plants aren’t run anywhere near as well as we would ideally like, which is why we have so many backup systems – on 345kV you have to have primary and secondary relaying completely independent of each other, for example. But there are always ways to screw up even the best (and most complex) safety systems.

          I know a couple of places where an electrician in the plant I work at could go to the wrong node in an MCC and bypass EVERY safety feature in our yard. That’s not bad design, that’s just the nature of this beast. So there are some systems that will never be as inherently safe as say proponents of thorium reactors would like to think. The devil is always in the details, and those details don’t become apparent until you implement it in reality.

        • [tp1024]

          Great. Everything that was true half a century ago is true to this day in your world. I guess the US is still at war with Vietnam then. So why are we even talking about solar power?

          Breeder reactors have come a long way since then. These days they can be built much safer than conventional powerplants, because they dispense with the need for water to cool the fuel rods of the reactor. There is no pressure in the reactor, there is no hydrogen in there to begin with. Lead needs no pumps to keep the reactor cooled after shutdown, the chain reaction shuts down by itself even without  control rods being inserted into the reactor, when the reactor heats up too much.

          This was demonstrated when the lead-cooled reactor of a Russian submarine shut itself down in 1968, when a coolant channel was blocked. And did so time and again, when the captain (who didn’t understand what was going on) ordered controlrods to be withdrawn, to start the reactor up again.

          https://smr.inl.gov/Document.ashx?path=DOCS/Reading+Room/GeneralSFRvsLFR-05.pdf

      • [John Paul Morgan]

        These are no where near the limits of available technology.  If anything this is a make work project for JFE which is why it is so over-engieered.

        The Fukishima plant produced around 30,000 GW·h per year.  With cutting edge photovoltaics you would get roughly 1600 GW·h per GW installed in Japan, so to replace Fukishima in terms of net generation would require 19 GW of installed panels on trackers which would occupy an area 20 km by 20 km.  Huge, yes, but not intractably so (if Japan were sunnier it would be smaller).  That area will drop with further advances of technology but never by more than half (to about 14 km by 14 km).

        Now Japan consumes a total of 925,500 GW·h per year.  This would require about 30 such plants altogether, and would occupy a land area of about 12,000 square kilometers.  This is almost 3% of Japans total surface area.  HUGE, sure, but that is it.  No more mining for coal.  No associated pollution. No melt-downs.

        There are barriers to this; mainly energy storage technology which is advancing in leaps and bounds lately.  Without a stretch Japan could go all solar for an initial investment of about $1.7 Trillion USD, including the battery aspects.  It could be done cheaper with a mix of wind thrown in in order to reduce the storage needs.

        For the record, for Japan to rebuild all it’s nuclear power would require an investment of about $600 Billion, but then you still have fuel costs, high operating costs, and risk.

        So there you go, for a relatively un-sunny country like Japan the current state of the art of solar occupies a lot of land, 3%, and costs about 3 times more than nuclear.  As technology advances, the land area will drop to 1.5% and the cost will drop to parity.

        Solar will inevitably be the major source of power in the future.  Whether that is 50 years or 100 years I can’t say.  But I can say that it can’t be soon enough.

  • [Sam Ley]

     You are also missing the entire point of Japan’s energy reconstruction. They do NOT plan on “replacing the nuclear capacity”, they plan on reducing peak demand to the point where the nuclear baseload is not even required, and then filling in the gaps with some renewable generation.

    You have to get out of the mindset that renewables are a 1:1 replacement for energy sources – they are part of a much larger re-thinking of how energy is used in homes and businesses.

    • [tp1024]

       Your mindset works exactly until the next oil or natural gas crisis. Because that is what has replaced the energy that could not be saved.

      Also, your statements about reducing peak demand until baseload becomes unnecessary is beyond mere ignorance of the topic you’re talking about. Baseload is what you have between the peaks.

      • [Sam Ley]

        ??? Easy tiger – you shouldn’t jump to “ignorant” so quickly.

        Baseload and peak loads are crucially linked through spinning reserves and dispatchable generation. While nuclear in Japan was primarily touted as a “baseload” generator, it held other generation sources up at a level where peaks could be absorbed through spinning reserves in their other generation sources. After the Fukushima-Daichi plant went offline, TEPCO started rolling black-out programs because the reduced baseload generation, combined with grid-management’s inability to predict rapid demand spikes meant that they could not use dispatched generation to handle peaks that would normally come from a spinning reserve. Reducing the peaks meant that they were able to avoid using rolling blackouts, even without the nuclear plant online, and without simply replacing the baseload with new oil or natural gas facilities. You can’t look at “base” or “peak” in isolation – changes in one type of demand scenario deeply affect the other scenario.

        You are correct that simply replacing nuclear with natural gas is a short-sighted plan, but you are wrong when you assume that 1:1 replacement is what I (or Japan) is suggesting. There is a lot of reading to be done about about the work being done on Japan’s energy efficiency and smart-grid systems (which can help curtail or predict impending peaks) – this is a good place to start: http://www.iea.org/papers/2011/saving_electricity.pdf As well as some of the reporting by Dan Bihn of Solar Today. I’m trying to find a copy of one of his TED presentations that goes into the baseload/peak relationship in Japan in much detail.

        • [tp1024]

           So, you’re abusing peakload plants to provide baseload and now you pretend there is no such thing as baseload, when it is provided by peakload plants.

        • [rndmtim]

           TP1024
          There are IEEE papers showing that if you can average wind over a large enough area – especially off-shore wind which is more constant – you can get about 27% of nameplate power with a 99% certainty. Then your peaking is handled by solar, and your backup can be nat. gas. And before you tell me that most of this will be idle most of the time, and that’s inefficient, that’s the current state of the grid for nat. gas in many places (the northeast has overcapacity right now).

        • [tp1024]

          Which paper? And how large is “large enough”?

          This may or may not work in the US, but I doubt that Japan is anywhere near large enough.

        • [rndmtim]

          They used part of the midwest in one part of the study, and Florida in the other.
          http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/winds/aj07_jamc.pdf
          The gist is that you get some average effect from any interconnection at all, and it gets better as the area covered gets better. The area used was smaller than Japan (850kn across) but you’d get some effect of this kind in any largish geographical area.

      • [rndmtim]

         A lot of the baseload structure we built was around the limitations of our power sources, not the other way around. If the generator curves and ramping of fossil steamers and nukes had allowed say 80% idling at night, we probably wouldn’t even have the kind of baseload and time of use pricing we’ve got now.

        Anyway, there’s more than one way to skin this cat, and a lot of baseload can be avoided – there are already significant programs doing this in places like NYC where transmission is overstretched – and many of those programs can be expanded. This doesn’t solve the problem completely – a lot of storage is also needed – but there are no technical obstacles at this point, just economic ones. One of Japan’s ways of doing this is sodium sulfate batteries – they use them a lot at their wind farms – and for deeper storage they’ve also got the topology for pump hydro. They can also do compressed air storage in caves.

        All of that will be pretty expensive. So will losing a huge amount of land area near their capital. Energy is becoming more complex and more expensive, and that’s all there is to it.

        • [tp1024]

           It’s not just that. Continuous processing is one of the most effective ways to make use of energy. That way you can use residual “waste” heat to preheat your incoming products. You can keep ovens at a constant temperature instead of letting them cool down to ambient and heating them up again.

          The reason why airconditioning, space heaters, freezers etc. are usually keeping temperatures within tight limitations is that the larger the deviation, the larger the losses.

          Also, when you start using discontinous processes, you just need more plant capacity. If you can only run your plant 12 hours a day, instead of 24, you need two plants for the same production. Same for computer centers – if you’d shut down your computers 12h a day, you’ll need twice the performance or twice the computers to do the same job.

          Baseload is a fact, not an artifact of generation.

        • [rndmtim]

           Look… if you’re saying the major cost of running a coal fossil overnight is outweighed by the savings on heating and cooling it, I suggest you look at the heat required to ramp it, and the energy lost keeping it there. That is not the reason this is done. This is like saying we’d keep running to prevent the rotational losses as we start up. A generator is not a refrigerator – it’s purpose is to transform as much of one energy source into another as possible as efficiently as possible. It’s about as logically far from as closed system as you can get.

          For fossil steamers, running overnight is done to prevent damage to the equipment, which is a very long shaft in most cases with torsion between the highest quality steam turbine, lower quality, etc… there are many different machines essentially on a single shaft. The heating has to be gentle.

          Gas fired turbines (combined cycle) are not used this way. The companies doing it would rather forgo the “huge savings” you’re talking about to save on fuel – that’s where the cost is.  It’s expensive to spin – even without load – in both fuel and maintenance. Where the equipment allows it, units are brought on and offline relatively quickly. A gas fired turbine can be brought on in 15 minutes, and that’s how they use it unless they’re getting paid to be reserve.

          If heating and cooling your turbine is any major power consumption factor in operating a generator – compared to the hundreds of MWh being output -   you’re doing it wrong.

• [Matthew Petty]

  This is crying out to have James Bond strapped to it.
  “No Bond-san. I expect you to burn.”

  • [Sam Ley]

     I also had a Fallout: New Vegas flashback when I saw the pictures…

    • [Cynical]

      Seconded. “Why the hell can’t they fix these damned solar panels themselves? Mutter, mutter…”