Ch.1 Principles of renewable energy

ME – 414 2(2, 0)
ENERGY RESOURCES &
UTILIZATION (ERU)
Arranged By
PROF. DR.ASAD NAEEM SHAH
anaeems@uet.edu.pk

ME-414 2(2, 0)
ENERGY RESOURCES & UTILIZATION
Introduction, Fossil fuels, Fossil fuels in solid, liquid and
gaseous state, Types of Renewable Energy, Solar
Energy/Power, Hydro Power, Wind Power & Turbines,
Compatible Electric Generators, Wind Turbine Design Issues,
Fuel Cells, Tidal Power, Biomass Energy, Geothermal Power,
Modern Renewable Energy Plants, Operations and
maintenance problems, Energy Conservation and Storage
Techniques, Energy Audit And Management Systems.
Arranged by Prof. Dr. Asad Naeem Shah

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
1) Renewable Energy Resources by John Twidell and
Tony Weir, 2nd Edition
2) Renewable energy by Godfrey Boyle
3) Renewable Energy Resources by T Abbasi & S A
Abbasi
4) Energy Resources, Utilization and Technologies by A
Yerramilli and F Tuluri

ENERGY
• Energy is an engineering concept that might best be
described in terms of what it can do.
• We can not see energy, only its effects; we can not make it,
only use it; and we can not destroy it, only waste it through
inefficient use.
• Energy can be converted or redistributed from one form to
another, such as from wind energy to electrical energy or
from chemical energy to heat etc. However total amount of
energy in the universe is constant.
• Energy may be renewable, sustainable or non-renewable.

ENERGY Cont.
• Renewable energy may also be called Green Energy or
Sustainable Energy. It includes the technologies that convert
natural resources into useful energy services:
a. Wind, wave, tidal, and hydropower (including micro- and
river-off hydropower).
b. Solar power (including photovoltaic), solar thermal, and
geothermal technologies.
c. Biomass and biofuel technologies (including biogas).
d. Renewable fraction of waste (household and industrial
waste).
• Household and industrial waste is composed of different types
of waste. Only the fraction of waste that is naturally
replenished is usually included in the definition.

ENERGY Cont.
• Non-Renewable energy supplies are also called finite supplies or
Brown Energy. This energy is initially an isolated energy potential,
and external action is required to initiate the supply of energy for
practical purposes.
These two definitions
are well portrayed in
Fig. 1.
Fig. 1: Contrast between
renewable (green) and
finite (brown) energy
supplies.
Environmental energy flow
ABC, harnessed energy
flow DEF.

ENERGY Cont.
RENEWABLE VERSUS SUSTAINABLE:
• Although in many situations, these two terms are used
interchangeably. In typical definitions, however, significant
differences can be found between the two terms.
• Even though sustainable energy sources are most often
considered to include all renewable sources, some renewable
energy sources do not necessarily fulfill the requirements of
sustainability.
• For instance some biomass resources may prove not to be
sustainable i.e., Ethanol. Similarly nuclear and fossil fuels may
be considered to be sustainable.

ENERGY CONVERSION TECHNOLOGIES
• Energy conversion technologies are technologies that can
convert from one demand (heat, electricity, or fuel) to
another. For example:
a) Conversion of fuel into heat and/or electricity by the use of
technologies such as power stations, boilers, and CHP
(including steam turbines as well as fuel cells)
b) Conversion of electricity into heat by the use of technologies
such as electric boilers and heat pumps
c) Conversion of solid fuels into gas or liquid fuel by the use of
technologies.

ENERGY STORAGE TECHNOLOGIES
• Energy storage technologies are defined as technologies that
can store various forms of energy from one hour to another,
such as:
a) Fuel, heat, and electricity storage technologies
b) Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES)
c) Hydrogen storage technologies
• It is important to note that the definition of storage
technologies is broader than the concept of storage itself as it
requires conversion technologies as well. For example
electrolyzers.

INTRODUCTION TO FOSSIL FUELS
• Coal, petroleum, natural gas and the related carbonaceous fuels
are called 'fossil fuels'.
• In case of fossil fuels (FF), the word fossil is used to indicate that
the fuels are derived from plants and animals that had lived
millions of years ago.
• Some 300-400 million years ago, the land masses were just
forming, and there were swamps and bogs everywhere. The
climate was warmer and there was much more C02 in the
atmosphere than is present today, leading to generation of
great quantities of biomass.
• Ancient trees and plants grew everywhere. Animals, in earlier
states of their evolution, walked on the land and swam in the
rivers and seas. When these ancient live forms died, they
decomposed and became buried under layers and layers of
mud, rock, and sand.

INTRODUCTION TO FOSSIL FUELS Cont.
• Eventually, hundreds even thousands of feet of earth covered
them. In some areas, the decomposing materials were
covered by ancient seas, then the seas dried up and receded.
• During the millions of years that passed, the dead plants and
animals slowly decomposed into organic materials and
formed fossil fuels.
• Different types of fossil fuels were formed depending on
different conditions.
• For example, oil and natural gas were created from organisms
that lived in the water and were buried under ocean or river
sediments. In most areas, a thick liquid which is now called
'crude oil' formed as a result of slow 'cooking' over tens of
thousands of years. Subsequently, natural gas and cap rocks
were formed.

INTRODUCTION TO FOSSIL FUELS Cont.
• The same types of forces which created oil and natural gas also
created coal, but there are a few differences. Coal formed from
the dead remains of trees, ferns and other plants that lived 300
to 400 million years ago.
• In some areas, coal was formed from swamps covered by sea
water. The sea water contained a large amount of sulphur, and as
the seas dried up, the sulphur was left behind in the coal. When
this coal burns, the sulphur is converted to SOx which causes air
pollution.
• Some coal deposits, however, were formed from freshwater
swamps which had very little sulphur in them. These coal
deposits, located largely in the western part of the United States,
have much less sulphur in them.
• Contrary to popular belief fossil fuels are not the remains of dead
dinosaurs.

HISTORY OF FOSSIL FUELS (FF)
• Historical records exist of fossil fuel use by humans since over
four thousand years ago, but it was in the latter half of the 18th
century when large-scale mining of fossil fuels (coal) began.
• Till this happened, mankind was almost entirely dependent on
woody biomass for its energy needs. But the availability of
wood was not always as high as its need. Once coal mining
began, it opened a very vast—seemingly inexhaustible—
reservoir of energy for mankind to use.
• The availability of coal enabled the industrial revolution and
very strongly influenced the course of the world history.
• Through the 19th and the mid-20th centuries, use of fossil fuels
kept increasing, but during the latter half of the 20th century its
use grew exponentially, and has now precipitated global climate
change. A brief history of major fossil fuels is presented here.

HISTORY OF COAL
• The Chinese have recorded the use of coal 1100 years before
the Christian Era and there is mention in the Bible that King
Solomon (now Syria) was familiar with coal. There is evidence
that the Bronze Age people used coal for funeral pyres, and that
the Romans used coal, too.
• So, the knowledge that coal would burn, and even some uses of
that knowledge, go back thousands of years. There is evidence
of occasional use of coal by the American Indians.
• The mining of coal was done in China and Europe, but the first
discovery of coal was by the French explorers, who reported
exposed coal rocks on the Illinois River in 1679.
• Following this, other discoveries were made by French and
British explorers, and first time a French settler was granted
permission to use coal for his forge in Virginia in 1702.

HISTORY OF COAL Cont.
• The earliest recorded commercial mining of coal occurred in
1750, from the James River coal field near Richmond, Virginia.
• The Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain in the 1700s,
and later spread to Europe, North America, and Japan, led to
the availability of coal to power steam engines.
• International trade expanded exponentially when coal-fed
steam engines were built for the railways and steamships in
the 1810-1840 Victorian Era.
• Coal was cheaper and much more efficient than wood fuel.
This helped greater and greater mining of coal, the method
shifted away from surface extraction to deep shaft mining to
extract larger quantities of coal in shorter and shorter time to
meet the need of rapidly spreading industrial revolution.

HISTORY OF PETROL & DIESEL
• Petroleum (petr means 'rock', oleum means 'oil'), in one form
or another, has been in use since over four thousand years.
• Asphalt was employed in the construction of the walls and
towers of Babylon; there were oil pits near Ardericca (near
Babylon), and a pitch spring on Zacynthus. Great quantities of
pitch were found on the banks of the river Issus, one of the
tributaries of the Euphrates.
• Ancient Persian tablets indicate the medicinal and lighting
uses of petroleum in the upper levels of their society.
Evidence exists that oil was used in the Roman province of
Dacia, now in Romania.
• The earliest known oil wells were drilled in China in the fourth
century AD or earlier. They had depths of up to about 800 feet
and were drilled using bits attached to bamboo poles.

HISTORY OF PETROL & DIESEL Cont.
• By the 10th century, extensive bamboo pipelines were used to
connect the oil wells with salt springs in China.
• Petroleum was known as 'burning water' in Japan in the 7th
century. In his book Dream Pool Essays written in 1088, Shen
Kuo of the Song Dynasty coined the word 'Shiyou' (literally
'rock oil') for petroleum.
• The first street of Baghdad was paved with tar, derived from
petroleum. In the 9th century, oil fields were exploited in
Baku, Azerbaijan, to produce naphtha. These fields were
described by the Arab geographer Abu al-Hasan in the 10th
century, and by Marco Polo in the 13th century.
• Petroleum was distilled by the Persian alchemist Muhammad
bin Zakariya Razi in the 9th century, producing chemicals such
as kerosene which was used for kerosene lamps.

• The processes of petroleum distillation developed in the Islamic
Spain were utilized by Western Europe from the 12th century
onwards.
• The modern history of petroleum began in 1846 with the
discovery of the process of refining kerosene from coal by a
Canadian Abraham Gesner. The first rock oil mine was built in
Galicia(Poland/Ukraine) in the 1853. In 1854, Benjamin Silliman
of Yale University became the first to fractionate petroleum by
distillation.
• Meerzoeff built the first Russian refinery in the oil fields at Baku
in 1861. At that time, Baku produced ~90% of the world's oil.
• The first commercial oil well was drilled in 1857 (in Romania),
and the world's first oil refinery opened at Ploiesti. Romania
became the first country in the world with a crude oil output
officially recorded in international statistics, namely 275 tonnes.

• By 1910, significant oil fields had been discovered in Canada,
Sumatra, Persia, Peru, Venezuela, and Mexico for large-scale
extraction.
• The word 'diesel' honours the German inventor Rudolf
Christian Karl Diesel who in 1892 invented the diesel engine.
Diesel is a specific fractional distillate of petroleum.
• Until the mid-1950s, coal was the world's foremost fuel, but oil
gradually took over as it was a much cleaner fuel than coal.
Coal generates copious smoke, soot, and fly ash, petroleum
distillates like petrol and diesel produce fewer (and finer)
particulates and no fly ash.
• Moreover petroleum's worth as a portable, high energy density
fuel powering the vast majority of vehicles and as the base of
many industrial chemicals made it one of the world's most
important commodities.

HISTORY OF NATURAL GAS
• Natural gas is believed to have been first discovered and used by
the Chinese, perhaps as early as 1000 B.C., but human encounters
with natural gas date back to ancient Mesopotamia, known today
as the Middle East.
• Historical and biblical references to humankind's encounters with
natural gas include burning springs created when something
(perhaps lightening) ignited natural gas seeping out from the earth.
• Early cultures and religions often attributed such phenomena to
divine origins and built shrines at the sites for worship, where
flares remained burning sometimes for centuries (Ingersoll, 1996).
• One of the most famous legends about natural gas originated in
Greece at 1000 B.C. A herdsman discovered a burning spring on the
mountain. A temple was built on that spot and the priestess,
Oracle of Delphi, made prophecies in a state of trance.

HISTORY OF NATURAL GAS Cont.
• The first known natural gas well was drilled by the Chinese in 211
B.C. In later centuries, the Chinese adapted bamboo pipelines to
transport natural gas to provide fuel for boiling water, heating,
and lighting. The Japanese dug gas wells as early as A.D. 615.
• In the early 17th century, French explorers observed indigenous
people in North America igniting seeping gases near Lake Erie.
Meanwhile, natural gas manufactured as a byproduct of coal
began lighting houses and streetlights in UK by the late 18th
century.
• In 1821, an American gunsmith−W.A Hart drilled the first natural
gas well in the United States. It was covered with a large barrel,
and the gas was directed through wooden pipes that were later
replaced with lead pipe. In the early 1900s, huge amounts of
natural gas were found in Texas and Oklahoma, and modern
seamless steel pipes were introduced.

HISTORY OF NATURAL GAS Cont.
• As reliable welding and leak-proof pipe coupling technology
developed in the early twentieth century, the pipeline network
began to grow, and natural gas applications increased along with
the supply networks.
• The materials—particularly associated hydrocarbon liquids such
as ethane, propane, and butane—are removed from natural gas
so it can be safely transported and processed (including
liquefaction and compression) and used in natural gas
applications, from heating houses and businesses to propelling
motorized vehicles (Speight, 2007).
• Vehicles running on compressed natural gas (CNG) have become
increasingly common because they generate much lesser NOx and
SOx than vehicles running on petrol or diesel.

HYDRATES & OTHER FOSSIL FUELS
• Hydrates − huge quantities of natural gas (primarily methane) exist
in the form of hydrates under sediments on offshore continental
shelves and on land in arctic regions that experience permafrost
such as those in Siberia. However, no technology has been
developed to produce natural gas economically from hydrates.
• Oil shales − sedimentary rocks from which significant amounts of
shale oil and combustible gas can be extracted—are found in many
parts of the world. Global resources of shale oil are conservatively
estimated at 2.8 trillion barrels. Oil shale deposits have been
identified in 38 countries, with the largest resources located in the
USA and the Russian Federation.
• The production costs of oil shale are generally higher than those
involving conventional crude oil. Consequently only a few deposits
are presently being exploited, with oil-shale rock mining believed to
be confined to Brazil, China, Estonia, Germany and Israel.

HYDRATES & OTHER FOSSIL FUELS Cont.
• The US Office of Naval Petroleum has announced that the
state of Colorado would soon be producing oil from shale on a
commercial basis.
• Natural bitumen (tar sands or oil sands) and extra-heavy
oil−are characterized by their high density and viscosity and
high concentrations of nitrogen, oxygen, sulphur and heavy
metals. In each category, one country is predominant—
Canada in the case of natural bitumen, with over 70% of
worldwide reserves, and Venezuela in the case of extra-heavy
oil, with about 98% of presently recorded reserves.
• The only natural bitumen deposits presently being
commercially exploited on a significant scale are those in
western Canada.

USE OF FOSSIL FUEL (SQUNDERING)
• Coal was the first of the fossil fuels to be mined on a large
scale and became the key fuel of the industrial revolution. The
steam engine, which was the pivot of the industrial
revolution, operated by the force of steam that was generated
in coal- fired boilers.
• As the industrial revolution spread from England to other
parts of Europe, North America, and Japan, the use of coal
grew by leaps and bounds. Steamships became larger and
more powerful, steam-based automobiles were developed
(Fig. 1) and steam-powered railway engines began criss-
crossing the landscapes across the world.
• With the increasing use of coal also spread the pollution of
smoke, soot, and fly-ash generated continuously by the
burning coal.

USE OF FOSSIL FUEL Cont.
Fig. 1: The 'steam wagon' built by Cugnot.

• In the early years of the 19th century, the internal combustion
(IC) engine was invented. The IC engine was to pave the way
for the transportation revolution, but in its early years its
development was hampered for want of suitable liquid fuels.
• Interestingly, the earliest IC engines were powered with
hydrogen as a fuel, not only to meet the need of power but
also to address the issue of global warming. However, the plan
could not be executed owing to the transportation problem of
hydrogen as a fuel (in early 19th century).
• Search for a suitable fuel for automobiles then took the
inventors to ethanol and biodiesel, which also happen to be
the fuels the world is trying to switch back to. Then someone
thought of petrol. That was it! Petrol turned out to be an ideal
transportation fuel.

• The world's first vehicle to be powered by petrol was seen in
Vienna, Austria. It consisted of an engine mounted on a cart
(Fig. 2).
Fig. 2: The worlds first gasoline-run vehicle (Vienna Austria, 1870).

• But the first practical automobiles with petrol/gasoline-
powered internal combustion engines were completed
almost simultaneously by several German inventors working
independently− Karl Benz built his first automobile in 1885
(Fig. 3) and began production in 1888.
Fig. 3: The world's first ever
petrol-driven model to go into
production (Benz, 1885).

• One of the first four-wheeled petrol-driven automobiles in
Britain was built in Birmingham in 1895 by Frederick William
Lanchester, who also patented the disc brake. So, within the
space of less than 145 years several models of automobiles
were rolling out of production lines in Europe and America.
• In another years, the Wright brothers were to make the first-
ever manned flight. The world was beginning to use more and
more of petroleum.
• This did not reduce the consumption of coal, but actually
helped to increase it because faster and better transportation
made possible by petrol-driven vehicles and aeroplanes
stimulated regional economies. It boosted production of new
goods which, in turn, boosted the use of coal as well.

• The manner in which fossil fuel use has risen from 1850 onwards is
reflected in Fig. 4, which shows estimates of carbon released
(mainly as C02) into the atmosphere due to fossil-fuel burning.
Fig. 4: Emissions of carbon due to fossil fuel used in the world. A: Total, B: Petroleum, C: Coal,
D: Natural gas, E. carbon emissions due to cement production.
As the use of coal crossed 1000 million
metric tonnes per year by early 1900,
the use of petroleum began to increase
sharply and that of natural gas also
began to rise. As a result, the total
carbon emissions due to fossil fuel use
doubled between 1900 and 1950. Total
fossil fuel use increased more than five
times by the year 2000 from the 1950
levels.
A

• Figure 5 shows the trends of petroleum consumption by the world's
two most populous countries—India and China—as compared to
USA, Japan, and South Korea.
Millionbarrelsperday
Years
As the economies of these countries are growing, the people are
copying the lifestyle which the consumerist western countries had
adopted till recently.
Fig. 5: Trends in the
oil consumption.

• The increasing use of vehicles, other materials, and power
surely has contributed to the degradation of the environment
at much faster rate than the ability of the environment to
assimilate. From 2004 onwards, the demand for petroleum by
India and China has begun to rise faster than it has ever
before.
• The world's oil reserves are now 'peaking', which means there
are no new reserves to be found and if we continue to use the
existing reserves at the present rate, from now onwards the
reserves will keep declining till they get totally exhausted by
about 2080 (Fig.6).
• All other fossil fuels are expected to peak by 2030 and exhaust
by 2230.

Fig. 6: Peaking of fossil fuel use and the eventual exhaustion of fossil fuels.
A: All fossil fuels combined, B: Petroleum crude, C: Coal, D: Natural gas.

• Thus, within a matter of less than 200 years we have burnt
away half of all the fossil fuels which the earth had taken
several million years to generate.
• The carbon that had been 'plucked' from the atmosphere (and
water bodies), and had been sequestered over millions of
years has been released back to the atmosphere (and oceans)
by us in just under 200 years. And if we continue at the
present rate we would release all of the sequestered carbon
in another 200 years.
• Can such a massive interference with the global ecosystems
be done without any side effects showing up?
𝑵𝒐, 𝒊𝒕 𝒄𝒂𝒏′
𝒕 𝒃𝒆!
• So we have global warming and ocean acidification on our
hands now!

GLOBAL WARMING
TABLE 1: Trends in atmospheric C02 and average air temperature (IPCC, 2007)
Year Atmospheric C02 (ppmv) Average temperature
(°C)
1800 280 15
1870 280 15
1950 305 15.2
1970 325 15.2
1988 350 15.5
2000 360 15.8
2006 375 16
2008 380 16 +
2050 forecast -550 Up to 17.2
2100 forecast Up to ~800 Up to ~19.2
The increasing trends of atmospheric C02 concentration in the 140
years, during which large quantities of fossil fuels were used, are
given in Table 1.

GLOBAL WARMING Cont.
• Between 1950 to 2000, the atmospheric C02 levels have risen
by 55 ppmv (parts per million by volume), i.e. at an average
rate of 1.1 ppmv per year. From the year 2000 onwards the
average rate of C02 increase has doubled to 2.5 ppmv per year.
Already it has warmed the earth by 1°C.
• If we continue increasing C02 emissions at the present rate, the
atmospheric C02 levels will nearly double from their 1871
figure of 280 ppmv to 550 ppmv by the year 2050, leading to
the mean global temperature up to 17.2°C.
• Even with the average 1°C rise in the earth's temperature that
has occurred, massive adverse impacts are being caused.
Trillions of tonnes of extra ice has melted at the poles and
elsewhere; glaciers are thinning down and disappearing;
extreme events of rainfall, hurricanes, cyclones and draught are
being faced around the globe.

OCEAN ACIDIFICATION
• Ocean acidification is the name given to the lowering of ocean
pH that is beginning to occur because the oceans are being
forced to absorb C02 at much faster rate during the last few
decades.
• The term does not imply that the oceans (covering almost 70%
of the earth's surface) have actually become acidic, it signifies a
shift of ocean pH towards less alkaline levels. This shift has
already threatened coral reefs and calcifying organisms.
• The average ocean pH should remain at about 8.2. But the
dissolution of C02 has already lowered the average pH of the
oceans by about 0.1 units from the pre-industrial levels (Palley,
2005).
• The pH is measured on a logarithmic scale; and a change of 0.1
units means a whopping 30% increase in the concentration of
hydrogen ions (H+) in the oceans.

OCEAN ACIDIFICATION Cont.
• By the end of this century the pH is projected to drop another
0.3-0.4 pH units (Feely et al., 2008). This leads to increase in
bicarbonate ion concentrations, with a concomitant reduction
in the concentration of carbonate ions.
• Moreover, calcite saturation and aragonite saturation of the
oceans will decrease.
• All these changes have very ominous portents for the ocean's
environmental balance, and are expected to significantly
reduce the buffering capacity of the natural processes that
have moderated changes in ocean chemistry over most of
geological time.

Ch.1 Principles of renewable energy

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