Woods Institute Energy Seminars

The Stanford community is invited to attend the weekly Energy Seminar, an interdisciplinary series of talks primarily by Stanford experts on a broad range of energy topics. These are the talks I attended in Fall of 2008. I also have notes on the talks I attended in Spring of 2008.

Ed: Woods Seminar: Marine Energy

Posted by: Max Dunn on December 3, 2008 14:06:49

Today's talk was on marine energy and was subtitled "Making Waves - Riding Currents". It was interesting hearing an expert on this topic because there seems to be a lot of promise in marine energy and I have been wondering why there is not more work being done in this area. Margot answered this question and the answer is essentially that it is hard to capture, much harder than capturing wind energy, and also there isn't much energy in ocean currents and waves that is feasible to capture.

Ed: Woods Seminar: Nanomaterials

Posted by: Max Dunn on November 24, 2008 11:57:35

Designing Nanomaterials for Energy Storage Batteries and Supercapacitors

Speaker: Yi Cui, Department of Material Science, Stanford

Yi Cui is the researcher that is looking at silicon nanowires as anodes for Li-ion batteries which could increase 10 times how much energy a Li-ion battery can store. However, this technology is still about 5 to 7 years away from commercialization, and one of the issues is that it is only getting a lifetime of a hundred cycles because of problems with the electrolyte interacting with the silicon nanowires.

Ed: Woods Seminar: Solar Thermal

Posted by: Max Dunn on November 14, 2008 07:54:55

Speaker: John O’Donnell

I have been skeptical of solar thermal because it seemed like the cost was higher than PV due to it needing turbines and other power-plant equipment. However, John showed costs of $110 mWh for solar thermal versus $120 for coal (with a $30/ton CO2 tax). He also brought up a very good point that solar power only lasts to about 5 or 6 pm, but peak hours go to 8pm in the summer. So no matter how much solar power we have, it won’t eliminate the need for any peaking plants. And while batteries cost $500/kWh, storing heat as supercritical water or molten salts costs only about $50/kWh. With storage, solar thermal could supply 95% of energy in US, versus only about 20% for wind and PV. So while solar thermal plants are still only economical in large installations, it seems like they might be a good component of a sustainable energy future.

Ed: Woods Seminar: Pacala - Equitable Solutions

Posted by: Max Dunn on November 6, 2008 09:50:37

It was exciting to hear from Stephen Pacala of the Pacala/Socolow CO2 reduction "wedges" plan. Usually he gives an optimistic message but today he is going to tell us what he really thinks which will temper his usual optimism.

Ed: Woods Seminar: The Future of Oil

Posted by: Max Dunn on October 27, 2008 08:40:24

Roland Horne spends half his time on fossil fuels and half on geothermal. He did an interesting Hubbert analysis of world oil production by moving back the 300 billion barrel OPEC jump in reserves of 1980 back to when they were probably initially discovered. With this displacement, world oil discoveries peaked in 1980. He also projected, based on intuition, that the world will never produce more than 90 billion barrels per day. We have already pumped out 1 trillion barrels, and there are probably about 1 trillion left, so we are at the halfway point and close to peak oil.