What advancements are needed in order to efficiently switch from traditional to alternative energy sources?

By Colin Leath, Field Application Engineer, AVX Corporation

The switch to alternative energy sources is an important ongoing issue within the technical and scientific communities. From small-scale operations, such as energy harvesting, to larger-scale ones, such as solar and wind farms, there is a variety of ways in which the field is advancing.

Supercapacitors are a major part of the future of alternative energy, and are especially useful within the field of energy harvesting technology. Energy harvesting focuses on gathering a relatively small amount of energy from ambient sources, such as solar or thermal energy, and then using that energy to power small autonomous devices. Advances in supercapacitor technology will allow these devices to achieve expanded operational range, lifetime, and power density, all of which are important to the future of energy harvesting.

Large-scale power generation is also important for alternative energy. This is exemplified by the growth of distributed grid power sources, including wind, geothermal, and small-scale hydropower, which are becoming increasingly efficient and important to the power grid as a whole.

Wind power systems can use power film capacitors to further increase efficiency, helping to drive the overall movement away from fossil fuels. Power film capacitors can be used to replace older electrolytic capacitors in wind power systems and offer a number of critical advantages, including extended lifetimes and open-circuit end-of-life performance. The increased lifetimes of these capacitors are particularly advantageous in wind turbines, as they are often located in remote, hard to reach locations, like offshore wind farms, which can significantly increase maintenance costs. Film capacitors also have a soft, open-circuit end of life as opposed to electrolytics, which can explode or burn. This feature significantly increases the overall safety and lifetime of wind turbines, as exploding capacitors can threaten other components or even start a fire.

By Peter Knazko, Manager, Segment Marketing – Energy Management Systems, Renesas Electronics America Inc

A historic switch to alternative energy is already taking place, certainly. This can be seen from the growth of solar and wind generation, especially at non-traditional entry points into the energy delivery model, such as directly within the local electricity distribution system. At the consumption end, electric vehicles and battery storage adoption are growing quickly. The many technological improvements that have enabled these advances began with the explosion of choice at the semiconductor level, which happened in tandem with massive software innovation. The performance capability, functional flexibility, and lower total cost of ownership of the embedded computing systems represented by these innovations have allowed infrastructure equipment companies to develop extraordinarily effective solutions for enabling alternative energy sources to be brought into the mainstream energy delivery system.

Whether we are talking about protection and control equipment in the utility grid, or the efficiencies required to make alternative energy sources viable at all, the building blocks at the silicon and software level have been key. For energy delivery to advance to the next level and take further advantage of this impressive technological advancement, it will require an emphasis on the interconnection of these often disparate systems to work together more seamlessly than they are working today. The evolving reality of the “smart grid” has meant a singular achievement of standardization of the communication capability possible within the energy utility. Making the grid more capable of accepting solar and wind power, without the grid collapsing, is the challenge for our future if we want more alternative energy to supply our energy needs. Interconnecting the pieces effectively and efficiently, from the revenue meter to the distribution automation control center, is one of the main challenges confronting our technology community.