Size: 684 MW
Consortium: RWE, Mitsui, OSaka Gas
Commission date: 2029
[rwe.com] – RWE secures 684-megawatt project together with Mitsui and Osaka Gas in Japanese offshore wind auction
[rechargenews.com] – RWE biggest winner in Japan offshore wind round with plan to use 18MW GE turbines
Watch video on YouTube.
YouTube text:
00:00 – Opening
00:32 – From a NY organic farm
01:45 – Carbon farming: What is it?
03:03 – Regenerative agriculture: A Minnesota Case Study
06:04 – Ray Archuleta: Visually comparing soil health
12:19 – Gabe Brown: The 5 principles
19:14 – Shinano Takuro: Visualized rhizosphere
23:05 – Carbon farming around the world
23:42 – Toshimichi Yoshida: Our dear friend bacteria
38:20 – The ‘4 per 1000’ Initiative
39:20 – Biochar: A Yamanashi Case Study
47:54 – ConclusionRegenerative agriculture, also known as carbon farming, is one way people are taking action against the climate crisis, turning harmful carbon emissions in the atmosphere into nutrient rich soil or biochar and using it to farm organic and sustainable food.
Meet carbon farming pioneers like Gabe Brown in the US, Toshimichi Yoshida in Japan and more.
Of all major car manufacturers, Toyota is the one that consistency stayed loyal to its belief that hydrogen could play a major role in future automobility. I believed that too, but recently so much progress has been achieved on both the battery and the electrolyzer front, that I now tend to believe that batteries and hydrogen will coexist, just like diesel and gasoline do today.
YouTube text:
The world’s first ever liquid hydrogen transport ship is on its way from Australia to Japan, carrying a cargo of brown hydrogen (made by gasifying brown coal with no carbon capture). Once it gets there, it’ll either be used to generate electricity or perhaps to fuel cars. Either way, it’ll be more expensive, more complicated and worse for the climate than if Australia just shipped coal for Japan to burn in a coal power plant.
So why am I a fan of this project? Finally, we are moving past the talking phase of the hydrogen economy and into the testing phase. How much energy will it take to transport liquid hydrogen thousands of kilometers? Will most of the liquid hydrogen boil off and leak out during the trip? Is there any way liquid hydrogen transport can ever be cost-effective? This project will help us answer these questions.
Just don’t called it “clean” energy.
[source]
Next year, Vattenfall will bring a new ‘plug-and-play’ high-temperature heat pump onto the market, that is suitable for older homes, eliminating the need to replace conventional radiators with an expensive floor heating. ‘Plug-and-play’ meaning: gas heater out, electric heat pump in. Temperatures: 70-90 C, power 6 kW base, 11 kW peak. The project is a joint-venture between Swedish Vattenfall, Dutch installer Feenstra, German hybrid heating manufacturer SOLVIS and the Japanese DENSO components and heat pump company. The hope is that over the entire season, a COP-value of 3 can be achieved.
The real advantage is that very high investments can be postponed. Vattenfall estimates that 2.8 million Dutch homes (out of 7 million in total) are suitable for this natural gas-free space heating solution. Another advantage is that the solution is available NOW, rather than having to wait for district heating or hydrogen. The medium in the thermodynamic cycle is CO2. The heat pump is rather bulky to accommodate a large water buffer, with stratified storage. The strategy is to slowly heat the storage during the day. When the inhabitants come home in the evening, the house can be warmed rapidly.
The heat pump is the result of 3 years R&D between Vattenfall and Feenstra and implemented in 20 test homes in Heemskerk. The winter of 2020-2021 had fairly cold days, but no complaints were registered.
[volkskrant.nl] – Vattenfall komt met warmtepomp voor oude woningen
[feenstra.com] – Van het aardgas af zonder ingrijpende verbouwing
[vattenfall.com] – Bestaande woningbouw eenvoudig aardgasvrij
[wattisduurzaam.nl] – Plug and play-warmtepomp voor ‘moeilijke’ huizen productierijp
Operational date: 2022
Consortium: Mitsui, Asahi Tanker and Mitsubishi
Cargo: 500 ton
Battery: 3.5 MWh
Power: 600 kW
Operational time: 6 hours, full load
[wikipedia.org] – e5 Project
[greencarcongress.com] – 7 Japanese companies form e5 Consortium
[mol.co.jp] – ‘e5 Consortium’ Established to Promote Zero-Emission Electric Vessel
Power ARK 100 – planned to be operational by 2025.
Island nation Japan is surrounded by very deep waters, eliminating the possibility of monopile-based wind farms. So floating wind must be applied. But laying cables in waters of many kilometers deep is problematic. So engineers of the company PowerX came up with a floating battery solutions. Unmanned ghost ships, stuffed with batteries with a cumulative capacity 200 MWh will be commuting between the floating OWFs and mainland Japan.
The Japanese government has OWF ambitions to the tune of 10 GW by 2030 and 30-45 GW by 2040. This electricity will have to be brought onshore, one way or the other.
[offshorewind.biz] – Transporting Offshore Wind Electricity by Automated Ships – A New Concept Emerges in Japan
[prnewswire.com] – PowerX Announces Its Business to Innovate Power Storage and Transmission with “Power Transfer Vessels” and In-house Battery Manufacturing
[renewableenergyworld.com] – The automated vessel designed to transport electricity from offshore wind farms to shore
The experiment is said to be based on this:
Hydrogen has recently attracted attention as a possible solution to environmental and energy problems. If hydrogen should be considered an energy storage medium rather than a natural resource. However, free hydrogen does not exist on earth. Many techniques for obtaining hydrogen have been proposed. It can be reformulated from conventional hydrocarbon fuels, or obtained directly from water by electrolysis or high-temperature pyrolysis with a heat source such as a nuclear reactor. However, the efficiencies of these methods are low. The direct heating of water to sufficiently high temperatures for sustaining pyrolysis is very difficult. Pyrolysis occurs when the temperature exceeds 4000°C. Thus plasma electrolysis may be a better alternative, it is not only easier to achieve than direct heating, but also appears to produce more hydrogen than ordinary electrolysis, as predicted by Faraday’s laws, which is indirect evidence that it produces very high temperatures. We also observed large amounts of free oxygen generated at the cathode, which is further evidence of direct decomposition, rather than electrolytic decomposition. To achieve the continuous generation of hydrogen with efficiencies exceeding Faraday efficiency, it is necessary to control the surface conditions of the electrode, plasma electrolysis temperature, current density and input voltage. The minimum input voltage required induce the plasma state depends on the density and temperature of the solution, it was estimated as 120 V in this study. The lowest electrolyte temperature at which plasma forms is ˜75°C. We have observed as much as 80 times more hydrogen generated by plasma electrolysis than by conventional electrolysis at 300 V.
[researchgate.net] – Tadahiko Mizuno, Hydrogen Evolution by Plasma Electrolysis in Aqueous Solution (2005)
[wikipedia.org] – Tadahiko Mizuno
[deepresource] – Australian Startup Claims it Can Cut Cost Electrolisys by a Third
[iopscience.iop.org] – Hydrogen production by plasma electrolysis reactor of KOH-ethanol solution
DeepResource 