The 25 by ’25 Renewable Energy Initiative for New Hampshire – Can We Do It? – Part 2

In my last post, I wrote that about 15% of our in-state energy use in 2010 came from renewable energy resources and that we are making progress towards reaching the goal of getting 25% of our energy needs from renewable energy by 2025 – the 25 x '25 goal. However, I also showed that our progress towards this goal has been on the back of reduced overall energy consumption rather than increased amounts of renewable energy.
 

This week I want to take a look at what it will take for us to achieve the 25 x '25 goal. We can achieve it in one of three ways. We can:

 

A) Increase the amount of renewable energy we generate and consume in-state.
B) Decrease our in-state energy consumption so that the existing base of  renewable energy becomes a larger fraction of our total energy supply.     
C) Simultaneously increase the amount of renewable energy we generate and reduce our overall statewide consumption of energy.

Before considering these options, it is worth taking a look at the direct use of energy in the state. Below are two pie charts. The one on the left shows the split for in-state energy usage - the net energy usage described in my previous post. I have simplified the available data by rolling residential, commercial and industrial use into a single category of "Buildings". As can be seen, the allocation for in-state direct energy use is 37% electricity, 36% transportation and 27% buildings. The second pie chart to the right shows the renewable energy components of these three main sectors in green. Relatively small proportions of the transportation sector and building sectors utilize renewable energy, 5 and 7%, respectively. However, for in-state electricity production (and as noted in my last post - grabbing all the green electrons for ourselves), we can see that a significant fraction, 29%, comes from renewable resources.

 

Let's take a look at Option A – increasing the amount of renewable energy. My previous post calculated that our in-state energy consumption (using 2010 data from the Energy information Agency) was 295 trillion BTUs. If we assume that our in-state energy consumption remains steady at this level, we would need to increase the renewable energy amount to 74 trillion BTUs. We are presently at 43 trillion BTUs from renewables so we would need to increase this amount by 31 trillion BTUs. We could do this by increasing renewable usage in each of the three main sectors but it is unlikely that this will happen in the transportation sector. We are already at 10% corn ethanol in our gasoline and this is unlikely to increase in the near future. Wood pellet-fueled transportation is unlikely to ever be practical. We could achieve the 31 trillion BTUs of new renewable energy by converting 60% of the present oil-fired building heat in the state to biomass in the form of wood pellets. My concern would be the sustainability of this approach. Can NH forests support this amount of biomass utilization? I suspect a statewide switchover to biomass heating is unlikely to happen in the next 12 years. Instead we will continue the slow substitution of oil furnaces by wood pellet burners that is presently underway. As long as oil prices continue to be high, this changeover will continue, homeowner by homeowner.

The only area where we could see a substantial increase in the amount of renewable energy is in the generation of electricity. However the additional 31 trillion BTUs would be equivalent to 135 25 MW wind plants, like the one in Lempster, or 80 15 MW wood-burning plants, like the one in Bethlehem, or 780 10 MW solar photovoltaic farms, each of which would require 100 acres of cleared land. This level of investment and approval of projects seems highly unlikely if not downright impossible. Based on last week's news of the rejection of the Antrim wind project by the NH Site Evaluation Committee, it is clear that the folks of New Hampshire do not want this level of impact on their environment.
 

In the "what's he been smoking" category of ideas, consider this one. If the Northern Pass project goes through, we could claim all those green hydroelectric electrons from Hydro Quebec for ourselves for our renewable energy accounting purposes. Even though the energy is intended for the rest of New England, they are nice juicy green electrons, they are coming through New Hampshire and they are being converted from DC to AC in Franklin, NH. Is it so unreasonable to claim those green Canadian electrons for our renewable energy goals? In that case, we could meet our renewable goal as the Northern Pass project should bring in the equivalent of 32 trillion BTU of energy, if not more.

Crazy ideas aside, that brings us to Option B - decreasing our in-state energy consumption. To achieve this, we will need to tackle the topic of energy waste. As noted in previous blogs, we waste an inordinate amount of energy. In the pie charts below I again show the in-state split of energy in the three main categories of transportation, electricity and buildings: to the right I show the proportions of energy losses, in grey, for each of the three categories.

 

Overall, our energy losses are 60% of total in-state energy use (the sum of the grey slices above) and this would appear to be a fine place to direct our efforts. However, as noted in a previous post, we need to be realistic about these losses. We can never totally eliminate them due to the nature of energy, materials, electricity and the laws of physics. Nevertheless, there is a lot we can do to reduce our energy losses. Examples abound and I cannot do justice to them in this blog, but they include reducing transportation losses through higher MPG vehicles, improving the efficiency of building heating and HVAC systems, as well as improving the efficiency of electricity generation and transmission operations through new, higher efficiency power plants, equipment upgrades and even the utilization of wasted byproduct heat in district heating applications. Of course, we cannot overlook the fact that energy usage can be reduced by better insulation of our buildings, which, in turn, reduces the buildings slice.
 

It is clear that there is lot we can do in the reduction of waste and energy usage category and we should continue our efforts in these areas but we need to be rather sober minded about where this gets us. To achieve the 25% by 2025 renewable energy goal we would need to reduce in-state energy consumption by 174 trillion BTU, assuming little change in the present level of renewables, or by 60% (!) of our present usage. To put this into context, bear in mind that we have only reduced our energy consumption by 9% over the 2005 to 2010 six-year period. Frankly and pragmatically speaking, a 60% reduction in our energy usage is unlikely to happen in the next 12 years.
 

Perhaps we can consider Option C, which involves a combination of increased amounts of renewable energy and reductions in energy consumption and losses. In many respects this is the road we are presently on, with the slow introduction (and even slower approval) of wind projects and the gradual substitution of wood for oil in building heating applications as well as the usage reductions I noted in my previous blog. However, even a 20% increase in renewable energy will require us to reduce energy consumption by 50% to reach 25% renewable energy by 2025. It will take enormous amounts of money, political will, bipartisan agreement, coordinated effort, and goodwill - as well as an updated State energy plan to achieve this. All of these factors are in short supply – the State energy plan is dated "2002". My opinion is that the 25 by '25 goal has little chance of being achieved. I simply don't see it happening. Maybe we need to rethink our goal - perhaps we can achieve 25% by 2050 or 20% by 2035.
 

Or am I wrong? What do you think? And what about those green Canadian electrons - should we count them?

Until next time, remember to turn off those lights when you leave the room.

Mike Mooiman

Franklin Pierce University

mooimanm@franklinpierce.edu

2/17/13

Click on this link to receive email notifications for Energy in New Hampshire updates

 

The 25 by ’25 Renewable Energy Initiative for New Hampshire – Can We Do It? - Part 1

With a new governor in place, I have been giving some thought to the initiative enacted by Governor Lynch in 2007 that New Hampshire should aim to get 25% of its energy from renewable resources by 2025 – the so-called 25 x '25 initiative. With my recent posts on renewable sources and their contribution to the NH energy supply, I was wondering how we are doing and if we are making progress towards the 25 x '25 goal. Until a few years ago, the New Hampshire Office of Energy and Planning, OEP, had been calculating and recording our progress, but they have not updated their information in a while. The last available numbers were for 2008 so in the next few posts I will be presenting updates of the OEP numbers and will be taking a closer look at the feasibility of the 25 x '25 goal and what it will take to achieve it.  

The goal is 25% renewable energy by 2025 but we need to start off by asking the question: "25% of what?" According to the OEP, the "what" is net energy usage. Net energy use refers to the energy we use in-state and excludes that associated with any energy exports. In our case, we export 51% of our produced electricity, so we need to subtract the energy used to produce this exported electricity from the gross, or overall, energy usage by NH to generate the net energy number.

All my blog posts and previous calculations, to this point, have referred to overall energy use by New Hampshire, so for net energy usage we need to reduce the 409 trillion BTU overall usage by the 113 trillion BTU used to produce exported electricity, leaving us with a new number: 296 trillion BTU. This is our net energy usage for New Hampshire for 2010 and will be the basis for the calculations and discussion for the next few blogs.

With the net in-state energy usage in hand and using the renewable energy numbers from previous blogs, we should be ready to calculate the percentage of renewable energy. Ah, if only it were so straightforward. Instead, we now face an intriguing dilemma: this revolves around how we look at that exported energy (electricity exports plus the energy waste associated with its production). The electricity produced in NH comes from renewable and non-renewable sources and even though the electrons involved in electricity flow from these sources are indistinguishable, we can view our produced electricity as a blend of green electrons (those from renewable energy) and brown electrons (those from fossil fuels and nuclear). So, when we export electricity are we exporting just brown electrons or a blend of green and brown electrons? As I have noted the electrons are indistinguishable, so we are, in essence, just playing an accounting game but this is an important game with important consequences. If we take the position that exported electricity is indeed a blend of green and brown electrons then we need a commensurate reduction in the amount of renewable energy we can claim for in-state use. Specifically: we export 51% of electricity production, so we need to reduce the renewable fraction that goes into electricity production by 51%. This significantly reduces the amount of renewable energy we can claim. On the other hand, if we take the position that we use all the green electrons in-state, then we can claim all that renewable energy that goes into electricity production.

Which is the correct answer? Well, the OEP sidesteps the issue of the correct answer by calculating the percent of renewable energy data for both scenarios. In my calculations, I adopted that same convention by performing calculations for both scenarios as well. The results of my calculations for 2010 are shown in the following table. I have used headings and formats similar to the OEP results to make for direct comparison. However, it should be noted that my methodology is a little different from that of the OEP as I have used the NH data and energy accounting approach from the Energy Information Agency, EIA, exclusively and I do not include imported electricity in accounting for renewables - even though it might be from hydroelectric operations in Canada.

At first glance, the results are not encouraging. Even if we lay claim to all the green electrons for in-state use, Option 1, we are at 14.7% renewable energy with 13 years to go. The situation is even worse if we calculate on the basis that we are exporting a blend of green and brown electrons, Option 2. In this case, we are only at 9.1% renewable energy. However, this still begs the question – which is the correct number? Well, it depends on who is playing the game and making the rules. Nevertheless, my vote is for the higher number, the one comes from grabbing all of the green electrons for ourselves. The basis of my choice that the calculation is simpler to perform, and this is an extraordinarily complex scientific reason - it is a larger number - which makes the 25% easier to achieve!

Feeling somewhat gloomy about where we presently stand, I wanted to see if we were, in fact, making progress since the 2007 start of the 25 x '25 initiative. If we were - and it was rapid progress – it would certainly be encouraging. I therefore went back a few years to calculate the percent renewable data for both options which I have presented in the chart below. I have included the earlier OEP numbers (shown as red X's) in the chart below and even though, as noted earlier, my methodology is somewhat different from that of the OEP, the agreement between the two data sets is good.

Since the start of the initiative in 2007, we have, using Option 1, gone from about 12% to almost 15% renewable energy which is commendable progress over the past 3 years. (With Option 2, we have only gone from 7.5 to 9.1% which is not as commendable and therefore, for the "complex" scientific reasons noted above, we will ignore it going forward.) At this rate – about a 1% increase per year – reaching 25% by 2025 looks achievable, which is rather encouraging. However, while we are basking in the warm glow of our collective achievement, let's take a closer look at the two sets of data that generated this chart. Specifically, let's examine net energy usage and renewable energy production in NH separately, which I have done in the bar chart below.

A closer review of this data reveals that most of the change in the renewable energy fraction has occurred as a result of the reduction in the in-state energy consumption over the past few years. We have gone from 325 trillion BTU in 2005 to 295  trillion BTU in 2010 – an impressive 9% decrease in 5 years (an annual compounded decrease of 1.9%) but, and this is rather crucial, an examination of the renewable data shows that there has been little change in the amount of renewable energy we produce in-state. As a result, we need to conclude that our progress toward the 25% renewable energy goal to date has been on the back of energy savings - and not from increased renewable energy.

Going forward, can we continue to rely on further energy savings to get us to 25% and how realistic is this? It also requires us to ask the question – where are these energy savings coming from – are they the result of a general economic slowdown in the state accelerated by the Great Recession, high energy prices, a shrinking population, the success of energy savings programs, or some other reason? This is certainly worth closer examination and I would be interested in your opinion. For the moment, and for an energy savings geek such as myself, regardless of the reason these energy reductions are positive and are certainly propelling us towards our goal. But we should stop here and ask ourselves - are they sustainable? In my next post, I will look at how net energy usage is allocated in the state and what we need to do in terms of more energy savings and/or renewable energy increases to achieve the 25 x '25 goal. It might be more difficult than we think.

 Until next time, remember to turn off those lights when you leave the room.

Mike Mooiman

Franklin Pierce University

mooimanm@franklinpierce.edu

2/10/2013

Click on this link to receive email notifications for Energy in New Hampshire updates

 

Renewable Energy in New Hampshire – Part 2

In my last post, we took a first look at the renewable energy portfolio for New Hampshire and we examined the pie chart below.

In this post, I am going to step back in time and see what progress we have made in the last 50 years. The figure below shows what we have achieved in terms of renewable energy.

 It is clear we have made progress on the renewables front. Since 1960 we have gone from 26 trillion BTU to 43 trillion BTU from renewable energy sources in 2009 – a 65% increase. However, for the last fifty years, hydroelectric and wood have been the largest components of the renewable energy supply. In fact, from 1960 to 2000 they were the only relevant components and most of the renewable energy increases were done on the back of increased wood burning. It was only in the 21^st century,  with federal mandates for ethanol in gasoline, that ethanol began to feature. Technological advances and federal subsidies have helped spur advances in wind energy and it is now beginning to feature, albeit to a limited degree, in the NH's renewable energy equation. What is intriguing to me is that, in 1990, there seemed to be a significant surge in renewable energy, particularly from hydroelectric generation. A closer examination of data indicated that this was a one-year surge only and, in the years before and after 1990, the numbers were more in line with the longer term averages. The reasons for this one-year surge are most likely due a year of high rainfall which filled up dams and rivers, that, in turn, led to the generation of larger than usual amounts of hydroelectric energy. According to the National Climate Data Center, 1990 was indeed a high rainfall year in New Hampshire. In a future post on hydroelectric power in NH we will be taking a look at the correlation of rainfall and hydropower.

Except for the addition of ethanol into the renewables mix and a tiny bit of wind energy, it is my assessment that we have not made much progress, at least on the large statewide scale, in terms of renewable energy generation and, to be frank, considering our overall energy requirements, there is not a whole lot we can do.

For the moment, cheap natural gas has hammered at the viability of almost all other modes of generating electricity, including coal, nuclear and wood, but, interestingly, there has been the statewide growth of use of wood pellet-based heat for homes, schools and commercial operations where wood offers a competitive advantage over oil. The limited infiltration of natural gas supply into NH has made wood even more competitive in most communities.

Large-scale solar here in New Hampshire is unlikely to be competitive in the near term. More wind plants will make some difference: again this will be a relatively small fraction of our renewable energy. Permitting and local approval are challenging and I am not sure if we want to plant wind turbines on every available hill and ridge in NH. Hydroelectric power is a good energy source, especially here in the Northeast where water is plentiful, but frankly I do not believe there is the appetite for developing more large-scale hydroelectric operations. They inundate large swaths of land and, if wind farm opposition is anything to go by, establishing a hydro facility to drown thousands of acres of land is simply not going to happen.

What is more likely to happen is the continuation of the small-scale fuel switching from oil to wood and the slow roll-out of small-scale residential and commercial solar photovoltaic devices. Photovoltaic panels, while perhaps not the best investment (demand reduction is a better way to go), are becoming more affordable and downright fashionable.

This is a good place to circle back to the point I made two weeks ago. Yes, renewables are important, but what is more valuable is reducing the 65% of energy we waste. Our focus should be improving energy efficiency and reducing our energy demand. As we reduce our demand, we can ratchet back our need for fossil fuels and then renewables will, by default, become a more prominent proportion of our energy portfolio. If I were to be investing State dollars on energy programs in the State, I would be investing the large part of our time and money in demand reduction rather than in renewable energy sources. That is, at least, the opinion of this writer. Let me know what you think we should be doing?

Until next time, remember to turn off those lights when you leave the room.
 

Mike Mooiman

Franklin Pierce University

mooimanm@franklinpierce.edu

2/3/13

Click on this link to receive email notifications for Energy in New Hampshire updates

Renewable Energy in New Hampshire – Part 1

In this week's post, I am going back to some of the early analysis I did so that we can take a closer look at renewable energy in New Hampshire. As shown in the figure below, about one-tenth of our energy supply comes from renewable energy sources. Transportation - largely ethanol in gasoline -  accounts for 12% of the renewable energy supply, heating for residential and commercial buildings uses 9%, industrial operations, 4%, and three quarters goes directly to the generation of electricity. In fact, renewables make up 15% of the energy that goes into electricity generation in the state.

 
At this stage, you might be asking yourself "What is in the renewables box?" so let us take a closer look at this. If we pop open the renewable energy box, we find the pie chart below.

 
By taking a look at the various slices of the renewable pie, we see that energy from burning wood and waste makes up just over half of the renewable energy produced in the state.

I was a little surprised at the large slice of wood and waste, and my first thought was that a lot of this energy comes from the incineration of municipal solid waste (MSW). As it turns out, I could not have been more wrong: MSW incineration is only about 2% of the renewable energy category. The bulk of the wood and waste slice is from the burning of wood and other biomass to generate electricity. It turns out that there are seven wood-burning power plants in the State and two more under construction. These wood burning plants are responsible for three quarters of the wood and waste slice (or 4% of the overall energy consumption in NH). My estimation is that 8% of the total energy input into electricity production is from wood. This is a lot larger than I anticipated and clearly fodder for a future post.
 
The remaining quarter of the wood and waste slice is from the burning of wood and wood pellets in homes and businesses. I, for one, am impressed that the Energy Information Administration, EIA, that put together all this valuable information is able to collect reliable information on firewood and wood pellet sales. A lot of these sales are to individual homeowners, only some of which are sold at retail. A good portion must be from individuals buying and selling truckloads of firewood to one another and, in many cases, even from trees on one's own property. This figure must be extraordinarily difficult to measure or estimate.

Turning back to the pie chart above, we can see that hydropower makes up about one-third of the renewables pie which goes directly into the electricity supply for the state. Corn-based ethanol, which is now part of the gasoline in our automobiles, represents 12% of our renewable energy use. How renewable this food-based energy source actually is, is debatable, but I will take another opportunity in the future to grind that particular axe. Wind is a relatively small component, only about 2% of renewable energy and driven largely by the Iberdrola wind farm in Lempster. With new wind projects underway, this portion will increase in the future. Solar thermal and photovoltaic are a minute fraction and, at this time, geothermal does not even feature in the EIA numbers. However, there are a good number of geothermal applications in the State but these tend to be small-scale residential or commercial-based installations and are thus difficult to track. It could be interesting to review this sometime in the future.

The pie chart shows where we were in 2010 regarding our renewable energy portfolio in New Hampshire. For our state it is largely a lot of wood and hydropower. Next week, in Part 2, I will be taking a look at historical trends in renewable energy and will look at where we might be going and if we should be spending so much time, effort and tax dollars supporting renewables.

 
Until next time, remember to turn off those lights when you leave the room.

Mike Mooiman

Franklin Pierce University

mooimanm@franklinpierce.edu

2/3/2013

Click on this link to receive email notifications for Energy in New Hampshire updates

Another View of Statewide Energy Flows in New Hampshire

In this post I want to look at New Hampshire energy flows in a different way, without resorting, as I have in previous posts, to column charts and criss-crossing cobwebs of arrows. Instead, I would like to introduce the concept of Sankey, or flow, diagrams which are often used in the energy industry. In these diagrams the magnitude of the flow of energy is indicated by the width of the arrow. These diagrams were first used in the energy field by an Irish engineer and captain in the British army, Matthew Henry Phineas Riall Sankey in 1898 to illustrate energy flows in steam engines. A modern version of a Sankey diagram is shown in the next figure. This figure neatly shows how input energy into a steam engine is lost to smoke, friction and a large portion to the steam condensation step. The condensed water is then recirculated to be heated into steam again, hence the small recirculating flow. Useful energy as forward motion of the steam engine and a small amount going to the alternators is shown as the exiting blue flows.

The great thing about Sankey diagrams is that they are not restricted to only energy flows. They can be applied to quantities of many types. For example, material and cost flows are often depicted. One of the most famous of these flow diagrams is that prepared by the French engineer George Charles Minard in 1869, shown below. This figure illustrates the fate of Napoleon's army in 1812 -1813 as they progressed through their disastrous Russian invasion. The figure shows, by the width of the lines, the fate of the invading army. Napoleon crossed into Russian with 422,000 men and through attrition, minor skirmishes and some great battles he entered a largely abandoned Moscow with about 100,000 men under his command. He then turned back to return to France: on the way back, starvation, battles and incessant harassment by guerilla forces decimated his army to 10,000 survivors. The harsh winter also took its toll on his men - the line graph below the flow diagram shows the decreasing temperatures encountered on the army's return from Moscow. The diminishing width of the flow is a skillful, albeit rather harrowing, representation of what was happening in the army in the field, the prisoners that were taken and the lives that were lost.

But I digress. Let's return to energy flows. The folks at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) annually prepare flow diagrams for the total flow of energy in the US. These diagrams are particularly useful and informative and they appear in energy-related presentations all over the place. In 2011 LLNL prepared individual diagrams for all 50 states based on 2008 data. To the best of my knowledge, they don't update these state diagrams every year like their total US flow diagram. Nevertheless I thought I would share their 2008 diagram for New Hampshire, shown below, with you.

 

Much of this figure shows the same information as my previous analysis, but it does so in a more elegant fashion. Off to the left, you can see the energy inputs to the state. These input energies then flow into transportation, homes, offices, stores and industry and a large part of the flow goes into electricity generation. The width of the lines clearly shows the magnitude of the flows. As with my analysis, it can be seen that electricity produces a lot of waste heat and a relatively small portion, 32% according to LLNL, ends up in electricity that is directed to homes, businesses, factories or exported out of state.

What this diagram includes, which my previous analysis did not, is the recognition that a large fraction of the energy that goes into transportation is lost as waste heat rather than motion. According to the LLNL estimates, only 25% goes into motion. They also recognized that a lot of the heat that goes into warming our homes, businesses and factories is lost due to poor insulation, waste and equipment inefficiencies. Their numbers suggest that 35% of the input energy into homes is lost. For commercial operations they estimate 30% of the energy is lost and losses of 20% are encountered in industrial applications. The diagram then neatly combines all the separate waste energy flows into a single value at the right of the diagram which illustrates the rather sobering fact - that, of the 418 trillion BTU energy supply to NH, 270 trillion BTU, or 65%, is lost as waste heat!

While not as dramatic as the fate of Napoleon's army, this single sobering fact that 65% of our energy input is lost provides the best opportunity for managing our energy needs going forward. Investments in higher efficiency equipment, higher mile-per-gallon vehicles and better insulation for our buildings will all serve to reduce the amount of energy wasted. This will reduce our input requirements. Energy supplies, especially those associated with fossil fuels, can be reduced and better managed. In the process we will reduce our carbon emissions as well.

In many respects, this is the most single beneficial thing that you and I can do at present – we can and we must reduce the amount of energy we waste. Yes, alternative energy sources are necessary but, while we are waiting for scientific breakthroughs and large-scale commercial development, we can be taking measures right now to reduce our energy consumption. We as individuals can take action and we can organize to get the organizations we work for to take action. There is lots of help out there. Many companies and non-profits are working in this field and they are making a difference. For example, here in New Hampshire the very focused mission of the Jordan Institute is to reduce energy losses from buildings in the State. They are doing some impressive things to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Take a look at their website if you get an opportunity.

We also need to be realistic about these losses. Yes, they are large, but we will never be able to totally eliminate them due to the nature of energy, materials, electricity and the laws of physics. Even so, we are so far away from these physical limits that there is a lot we can do to reduce energy waste.

So there you have it – another way to look at energy flows in the state. Bear in mind that this analysis uses 2008 figures from the Energy Information Administration and does not reflect the rapid switch away from coal that we are presently undergoing. I plan to present an update of the energy flow diagram for NH in a future post but, in the meantime, hopefully I have got you thinking about what you can do avoid energy losses in your home and the building you work in.

Until next time, remember to turn off those lights when you leave the room.

Mike Mooiman

Franklin Pierce University

mooimanm@franklinpierce.edu

1/20/2013

Click on this link to receive email notifications for Energy in New Hampshire updates

The New Hampshire Energy Picture – Part 3: What Happens to the Energy that is Supplied to the State?

In my last post we looked at the direct use of energy in the State. We followed the various components of the energy supply into transportation, residential and commercial heating, industrial use and the generation of electricity. However, I also made the point that electricity is not an energy source - it is an energy transfer medium. It is the way we get the energy out of a lump of coal or a nuclear fuel rod so that it can power the coffee maker in our kitchens. I think we can all agree that buckets of coal or enriched uranium in the kitchen do not work well in powering the toaster and microwave. Therefore, if we are to determine the final allocation of energy use in NH, we have to follow the flow of electricity into its final end use: that is the focus of this blog post.
 

Here is the NH Energy picture I have been working through in the last few posts. In the last post we looked at energy flows from the left column to the center one. This week we are going to focus on the energy flow from the center column to the rightmost one.

So let's start off by looking at the largest slice of the center column so we can determine what happens to all the energy that goes into the production of electricity. We note that 224 Trillion BTUs, or 55% of our total energy supply, goes into the production of electricity. The arrows radiating out from the electricity slice tell the following story:

Approximately two thirds of the energy that goes into the production of electricity is lost as waste heat during the energy production and transmission process. If you are not familiar with electricity production, this might be a rather startling fact. It indicates how inefficient transmission and especially the generation of electricity is when only 35% of the energy input ends up as useable electricity in our homes and businesses. This is a result of the physics of the electricity generation process, and since the advent of commercial scale electricity production, engineers and scientists have been working hard to improve conversion efficiencies. The first commercial electricity generating operation was established by Thomas Edison in New York in 1882. Edison's first operation converted less than 2.5% of the energy in coal to electricity. The average coal plant operating today has a conversion efficiency of ~28% and the latest generations of combined cycle coal power plants have conversion efficiencies of the order of 45 to 50%. We have indeed come a long way efficiency-wise, but we cannot escape the fact that electricity generation produces a lot of waste heat. Not only is energy lost in the generation process, but some of it dissipates during transmission where losses are typically of the order of a further 7%.

The other distribution arrows in this figure show us that 7% of the energy that into goes into electricity production ends up as electricity routed to our homes. A similar amount ends up in commercial operations and industrial usage accounts for 3%. Finally, and for me quite interestingly, a significant 17% ends up as electricity that is exported out of state.

To get a better view as to what happens to electricity after its production, I have sliced and diced the data a little differently in the figure below. I have subdivided the tall electricity slice into its two main components – electricity and waste – because I wanted to examine the allocation of generated electricity in the state. The subdivided column shows that the electricity generation slice is one third generated electricity and two thirds waste heat. Now, if you follow the arrows radiating out on the electricity only piece, you can see that, of the electricity generated in the state, 21% is used in our homes, 21% in our commercial operations, 9% is used to drive our factories and an impressive 51% is exported out of state into the New England Electricity Pool.

It is this exported pool of electricity that often gets politicians, ordinary folks and even less ordinary folks worked up into an absolute lather here in New Hampshire. It has been used at various times to justify the closing down of the Seabrook Nuclear power plant, our coal burning plants and even the Northern Pass project. In a future post I will weigh in on this debate but for the moment you should know that my viewpoint is a highly pragmatic one. I believe that as we continue our rather slow transition to renewable energy, we need to draw upon as many different energy sources as we can so that we are not trapped and reliant on one or two energy sources sometime in the future. Diversification in energy supply, just like picking investments, reduces future risk and my focus is on reducing risk and creating a sustainable future for my children.

It is crucial to note that even though we presently export 50% of the electricity produced in the State, this has not always been the case, and it might not be the case in the future. Prior to the Seabrook Nuclear plant, we were net importers of electricity. We are part of a regional and national pool and at this time we are in the good position to be making a positive contribution.

This final figure combines the allocation of the energy that goes into electricity production with the other energy flows we saw in my previous post. From this figure we learn the following:

• In our homes 71% of our energy comes from fuels, largely fossil fuels, for direct heating applications. The remainder of the energy supplied to our homes is from electricity usage.
• For our commercial businesses 58% comes from direct heating and 42% from electricity. The higher percentage of electricity use in our commercial operation is likely due to increased use in lighting for displays and air conditioning in the summer.
• Our factories are more like our homes where 75% of energy use is from direct heating and 25% is from electricity.

Finally, if we examine the percentages in the leftmost column and working from the bottom up we learn that, of the 409 trillion BTU of energy supplied to the state, 36% of it is lost as waste heat during the generation and transmission of electricity, 9% leaves the state as exported electricity, 7% is used to power our factories, and 9% is used to keep our office buildings and stores lit up, warm and air conditioned. Our homes are responsible for 13% of NH's energy appetite and transportation uses up the remaining 26% of our energy supply.

So there you have it. After slogging through three detailed posts you should now have an understanding of NH's energy picture and a good idea of where our energy comes from, how it is used, where it ends up and how much is wasted as a result of electricity generation.

Before I ride off into the power line sunset shown on the background of my blog, some of you might be ready to point out that this picture is not quite complete: if I have shown how much energy is lost as waste heat during electricity generation, I should have done same for the energy used in transportation and that lost from our homes and businesses. I totally agree with you, but that brings in another level of analysis, more complications, more columns and spider webs of arrows and, I think, for the moment, we have all had enough of those. There is a better way to show this and that brings me to the topic of flow diagrams which I will be discussing in my next post.

Let me know if this rather lengthy explanation over the past few posts has helped you understand the statewide energy flows and, as always, I am interested in your opinion.

Until next time, remember to turn off those lights when you leave the room.

Mike Mooiman

Franklin Pierce University

mooimanm@franklinpierce.edu

1/13/2012

 

 

Click on this link to receive email notifications for Energy in New Hampshire updates

The New Hampshire Energy Picture – Part 2: What Happens to the Energy that is Supplied to New Hampshire?

Following on from my last post where we looked at energy supply, I am going to take a look at how we use the energy that comes into New Hampshire. Let's start by taking a look at the New Hampshire Energy picture I presented last time. This is the complicated three column diagram with the cobweb of arrows veering off in all directions. This week we are just going to focus on the first two columns.

 

Our energy supply, generated in the State and imported, is directly used for transportation, for heating residential, commercial and industrial buildings and for producing electricity. Electricity is then used to power our homes, businesses and industry but that is an energy flow pattern that we will be looking at in the next blog post. So let's take a look at the energy flows from the first column to the second.

Even this simplified figure captures a boatload of information. It shows the energy supply, in trillions of BTUs, as well as the percent of each of the components of the total energy supply. In the second column we see how the energy is used for each of the main categories, again in trillions of BTUs, as well as the percentage of total direct use. Our direct energy use falls into four main categories. The bulk of it, 55%, is used to generate electricity which, of course, is then distributed to end users. Transportation sucks up 26% of the energy supply and the remainder goes into heating our buildings with residential and commercial buildings taking up 14% and industrial use absorbing the remaining 5%.

Let's turn our attention now to the arrows and their associated percentages. The arrows show the energy flows from each of the supply categories to each of the direct use categories. The percentage at the tail of the arrow shows the amount of a supply component used for that particular application. The percentage at the head of the arrow shows the amount of energy used in an application that comes from a specific source. By way of an example, the very top arrow shows that 66% of our oil based energy supply is used for transportation. Following the arrow to the Transportation slice shows that 95% of energy used in this sector comes from oil based fuels. So if we follow the energy flows radiating out from the oil based supply slice, we learn the following: 

 
• Oil based fuels totaled 153 trillion BTU or 38% of our total energy supply.
• 66% of oil based fuels are used in transportation.
• Oil makes up 95% of energy use for transportation applications.
• 25% of the oil supply to the state is used to heat our homes and businesses.
• 66% of energy usage for heating our homes and businesses comes from oil.
• 8% of oil consumption is used in industrial operations - most of it for heating purposes.
• 60% of industrial building heating is done using oil based fuels.
• A very small amount of oil, 0.5% of the crude oil supply, is used to generate electricity.

 

Let's move onto natural gas and examine how we use this energy resource. When reviewing how natural gas supply to the State is utilized, we learn the following from the natural gas split figure below.

 

 

 

• Approximately 25% of natural gas is used in residential and commercial establishments - most likely for cooking and heating applications.
• Natural gas represents 27% of the direct energy consumption of residential and commercial buildings. 
• One tenth of the natural gas supply is used by industrial operations where it represents 31% of their direct energy usage.
• The bulk of the natural gas supply, 65%, is used to generate electricity.
• Natural gas represents 18% of the primary energy supply used to generate electricity.
• A small amount of natural gas, ~0.5%,  is used in Transportation, probably as compressed natural gas.

 

 

Moving on to renewable energy supply, let's take a look at the next figure which shows the renewable split. In the process we learn the following:

 

• Transportation absorbs 12% of renewables in the form of corn based ethanol that is now part of our gasoline make up.
• This ethanol makes up 5% of the total energy used for transportation.
• Relatively small amounts of energy from renewable sources are used directly in building applications. These renewable sources are most likely wood and wood pellets used in heating applications.
• The bulk of the renewable energy supply, 75%, is used to directly generate electricity. This includes electricity generated by waste incineration and hydroelectric operations.
• Renewable energy constitutes 15% of the total energy supply used to generate electricity. 

If you have been following along so far, you might have noted that there are two very important energy flows missing. Those are the coal to electricity and the nuclear to electricity arrows. All of the coal and nuclear energy supply is directed towards electricity production. Nuclear makes up 51% of the energy supply used to generate electricity and coal supplies 15% . These arrows are included (and highlighted in red) in the combined two-column diagram shown below.

       

 

Hopefully this step by step untangling of some of the sources and uses of energy has been helpful in improving your understanding of the energy flows in New Hampshire. In my next post I will be looking at what happens to all the energy that goes into electricity generation and how that is distributed through to the different applications. In other words, we will be following the arrows from the middle column of Figure 1 to the rightmost column. With a bit of luck, this should lead to an understanding of how all the energy in the State is utilized.

I realize this has been a long post and some of the details might already be fuzzy but if you are to take anything away from this post, I  consider these to be the three most important points: 

1. Two thirds of the oil based energy supply for NH ends up in transportation applications and the rest is used to heat residential, commercial and industrial buildings.
2. Approximately 90% of heating for our buildings is done by a combination of oil and natural gas with oil outweighing gas, on a percentage basis, by a 3:1 margin.
3. Nuclear energy makes up 51% of the total energy supply used to generate electricity.

I would be interested to hear what you think are the most important energy supply/usage issues.

Until next time, thanks for reading the blog and remember to turn off the lights when you leave the room.

 

 

Mike Mooiman

Franklin Pierce University

mooimanm@franklinpierce.edu

12/30/12

Click on this link to receive email notifications for Energy in New Hampshire updates

The New Hampshire Energy Picture – Part 1: Where Does New Hampshire Get Its Energy From?

 
I have done an interesting analysis of statewide energy flows in New Hampshire based on 2010 data that is available from the Energy Information Agency. In this analysis I have looked at energy supply, utilization and final usage, and it makes for a useful overview of what happens to energy in the State. The analysis is shown in Figure 1 and there are three key columns in this diagram as well as a whole lot of arrows radiating out from one column to the next. At first glance the amount of information presented in this graphic is somewhat overwhelming due to the spider web of arrows and allocation percentages so it takes a lot of work to understand all aspects of this picture. To counter this information overload I will, in the next few blog posts, pull this figure apart, column by column, to build up a picture of energy supply and use in the State.

For the moment, let's focus on the columns. The left column shows energy supply to NH, the center column shows how the energy is directly used and the column on the right shows the final disposition of energy once part of the energy supply has been converted to electricity and distributed to the various users. It is important to remember that electricity is not actually an energy source; instead it is an energy transfer medium - it is the way we get stored energy out of coal or natural gas into a usable form that can power the electrical appliances in our homes and businesses. This is why we need this three column picture – the first two columns show how the supply is converted into direct use in transportation, heating our homes and businesses as well as the portion that goes into the generation of electricity. The right hand column shows how all this energy is finally utilized.

In this post I am going to be taking a close look at the first column which shows the energy supply to New Hampshire. This will be followed by a post about the middle column which will describe what we do with all the energy supplied to the State and then in a third post I will take a look at the column to the right which presents the final usage of energy in New Hampshire after it has been converted to electricity and distributed to the different users.

 

So let's take that closer look at that first energy supply column which is presented by itself below. There are two sets of numbers in each of column slices. The first is the total energy value, measured in trillions of BTUs, and the second is the percent of the total supply that comes from that fuel source.
   

 

In 2010 the total supply of energy to New Hampshire was 409 trillion BTUs. Working from the top and starting with the fossil fuels, it can seen that the biggest slice of the energy supply, 38%, comes from crude oil based fuels. The other two fossil fuels, natural gas and coal, furnish 15% and 8% of the state's needs, respectively. Overall fossil fuels provided 60% of the State's energy sources. Nuclear energy is an important component of NH's overall energy supply and represents about 28% of the overall amount. Renewables, which include hydroelectric, wood, waste and ethanol in gasoline, are an important 11% of NH's energy input. A small amount of electricity was purchased from out of state in 2010, but the amount is so small,  less than 0.5% of the total energy supply, that it was not included in these figures.






















The following figure shows how New Hampshire's energy supply has changed over the past 50 years.

 

Some interesting points arise from this historical chart.

• There has been impressive growth in the energy supply to the State. Energy supply as increased almost four fold - we have gone from 117 trillion BTUs in 1960 to 409 trillion in 2010. This is an annual growth rate of 2.5% per year compounded over 50 years which is very much lower than the equivalent 7.5% growth rate of the NH Gross State Product over the same period.
• Since 1970 there has been relatively little change in the amount of oil based products supplied to the state. We will look at the reasons behind this in a future post.
• Natural gas use has grown substantially over the past 20 years and its use has almost doubled over the past 10 years.
• Except for some increases in the 1990s, coal use in the state has been fairly steady. However with large amounts of cheap natural gas available, I am anticipating decreases in NH's coal usage.
• Since the commissioning of the Seabrook Nuclear plant in 1990 increasing amounts of nuclear energy have been added to the State's energy supply.
• The renewable component of energy supply to the State, which largely comes from hydroelectricity and biomass, has not changed much since 1990.

So what are our main takeaways from all this information? Clearly there have been tremendous increases in the supply of energy to the state and, except for substantial increases in energy supplied by nuclear and natural gas, there has been relatively little change in the other components of the energy supply equation. We are still dependent on fossil fuels for 60% of our energy needs so, in some respects, the minor changes in the amount of energy from renewable resources could be viewed as disappointing.

 

What do these facts tell us about the future? Well it looks like nuclear is here to stay and, as long as natural gas remains cheap, the amount of coal burnt in NH should decrease, but we should not expect large amounts of renewable energy to come in and create a wholesale displacement of fossil fuels or nuclear. At this time, the economics and technology do not work. This is our state as well as our national energy reality.

Until next time, remember to turn off those lights when you leave the room.

Mike Mooiman
Franklin Pierce University

mooimanm@franklinpierce.edu
12/30/12

Subscribe below to receive email notifications when this blog is updated