Latest news with #energygrid
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Nebraska needs a nuclear energy strategy
Nebraska Public Power District's Cooper Nuclear Station near Brownville, Nebraska. (Courtesy of NPPD) In February 2021, thousands of Nebraskans found themselves in the dark of rolling blackouts. A brutal polar vortex froze wind turbines, strained natural gas supplies and exposed serious weaknesses in our energy grid. However, even as multiple power sources failed, one remained steadfast — nuclear energy. That moment was a wake-up call. We can no longer afford to treat energy policy as a matter of convenience or short-term cost. To avoid future blackouts and maintain affordable, resilient, firm and reliable power, Nebraska needs nuclear energy. Wind and solar are intermittent. Natural gas is a vital bridge fuel, but it is vulnerable to supply shocks in extreme weather. This is about building a reliable and resilient energy source that can deliver for Nebraska families, farmers and businesses when it counts. Nuclear energy, which currently generates 17% of Nebraska's power, brings unique strengths. It provides carbon-free baseload power that runs around the clock regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. During the 2021 deep freeze, Nebraska's lone nuclear plant kept running at full strength while other sources faltered. The United Nations 2021 report, 'Life Cycle Assessment of Electricity Generation Options,' shows that nuclear has the lowest overall impacts on human health and the environment by any measure and from any perspective. The cost of new nuclear energy is within a penny per kilowatt-hour of other forms of new energy sources, including natural gas, wind and solar. Is that one cent too much to have a resilient, reliable power source for Nebraska? We've seen what happens when nuclear gets overlooked. Omaha Public Power District's Fort Calhoun plant and Nebraska Public Power District's Cooper Nuclear Station accounted for about a quarter of Nebraska's net generation capabilities before Fort Calhoun was shut down in 2016. The shut down was nearly two decades ahead of schedule, a casualty of market conditions that failed to account for long-term reliability and energy needs. Hundreds of skilled jobs were lost. Our energy safety net shrank. And just a few years later, that decision looked shortsighted as the grid buckled under pressure. To avoid repeating that mistake, policymakers should ensure that energy markets properly value reliability and resilience. As 26 House Republicans made clear in a late April letter to congressional leadership, protecting the federal nuclear production tax credit (PTC) is one way to do so. It has proven a huge help in incentivizing the development of nuclear power at a time when NPPD is exploring options. For Nebraska, the credit helps create and protect hundreds of high-paying, skilled jobs, generating local tax revenue and sustaining a stable source of affordable power. Another step Congress could take is expanding investment incentives for next-generation technologies like small modular reactors (SMRs). These compact, scalable reactors can serve Nebraska's rural areas and industrial parks where large traditional plants aren't practical, offering flexibility and grid stability. Policies like the Advanced Nuclear Production Credit and bipartisan permitting reform proposals can help accelerate local deployment. U.S. Sen. Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., has advocated for nuclear's role in America's energy future on the Senate Environment and Public Works Subcommittee, where it helps Nebraska to have a voice in ensuring that our state's long-term energy interests remain protected. Nebraska's energy future isn't just about keeping the lights on. It's about protecting lives during extreme weather, powering our farms and factories and anchoring high-skilled jobs in our communities. If we want to avoid another round of blackouts, we should encourage policies that keep every reliable tool in the toolbox — including nuclear. Bruce Bostelman, a farmer and veteran from Brainard, served in the Nebraska Legislature from 2017 to 2025, including serving as chair of the Natural Resources Committee. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
TechCrunch
29-05-2025
- Automotive
- TechCrunch
Volteras wants to connect to more EVs than anyone else
For years, people have been worried — both rightly and otherwise — that electric vehicles could strain the grid to the breaking point. But as they spread, and as EV technology advances, some think these rolling battery packs could become a lifeline for the United States' aging electrical system. 'In the future, the electric vehicle will be the center of the entire energy grid,' Peter Wilson, co-founder and CEO of Volteras, told TechCrunch. The potential is there: Last year, the U.S. installed 37.1 gigawatt-hours of grid-scale energy storage. The country could increase that amount by nearly 10 times if every EV on the road today was hooked up to a charger that can feed electricity back into the grid. There are a few hurdles, of course. Many new EVs today don't support vehicle-to-grid connections, though that's changing, and there's a lack of affordable bidirectional chargers. But Volteras has been making headway on the software side. Recently, the London-based startup closed a $11.1 million Series A led by Union Square Ventures, with participation from Edenred, Exor, Long Journey Ventures and Wex, Volteras exclusively told TechCrunch. Volteras is building virtual connective tissue that will allow plugged-in EVs to offer their batteries to support the grid. When massed together, they can serve as virtual power plants, giving utilities quickly dispatchable power that's distributed across the grid. Along with control over the car's battery, Volteras also gets access to a host of other connected-car features, like remote unlocking and telematics. The company integrates with automakers' own APIs and offers those functions to other companies interested in using them. In the case of a virtual power plant, a utility can pay EV owners to sell some of the car's stored electricity back to the grid. Car rental services might subscribe, too, so they can remotely unlock vehicles for stranded motorists. Volteras charges those companies a monthly fee per connected car and passes on some of that revenue to automakers. Techcrunch event Save now through June 4 for TechCrunch Sessions: AI Save $300 on your ticket to TC Sessions: AI—and get 50% off a second. Hear from leaders at OpenAI, Anthropic, Khosla Ventures, and more during a full day of expert insights, hands-on workshops, and high-impact networking. These low-rate deals disappear when the doors open on June 5. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you've built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | REGISTER NOW Several companies are working on similar solutions to smooth the connection of EV batteries to the grid — Texture, and Greenely, to name a few — but Wilson argues that Volteras has a head start because his company is currently working with more than 30 automakers which include Ford, BMW, Tesla, Stellantis and Volvo. 'We're going to cover like 90% of the automotive market worldwide by the end of the year,' he said. Automakers have been salivating over the financial prospects of connected cars, though progress has been spotty. GM, for example, in 2021 set a bold target for its subscription services: $25 billion in revenue by the end of the decade. But in its most recent annual report, the automaker didn't offer an update. (Usually when things are going well, companies tell the world about it.) Wilson still sees potential in connected services, starting with the battery. In addition to virtual power plants, Volteras is courting fleet managers, EV routing apps, and insurers interested in offering usage-based plans. 'This kind of hidden data layer that you don't see — that'll be the crux of how companies offer services to you, give you discounts, and make it more affordable to own an electric vehicle,' Wilson said.
Telegraph
16-05-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
The Danes are finally going nuclear. They have to, because of all their renewables
The Danish government plans to evaluate the prospect of beginning a nuclear power programme, this week lifting a ban imposed 40 years ago. Unlike its neighbours in Sweden and Germany, Denmark has never had a civil nuclear power programme. It has only ever had three small research reactors, the last of which closed in 2001. Most of the renewed interest in nuclear seen around the world stems from the expected growth in electricity demand from AI data centres, but Denmark is different. The Danes are concerned about possible blackouts similar to the one that struck Iberia recently. Like Spain and Portugal, Denmark is heavily dependent on weather-based renewable energy which is not very compatible with the way power grids operate. Conventional generators produce alternating current, creating a stable output of current and voltage that alternates at a frequency which is directly – synchronously – linked with the rotating turbines which drive the generators in gas, coal, nuclear or hydropower plants. All of these turbines rotate at a speed of 3000 revolutions per minute, so producing electricity with current and voltage that varies in a sine wave shape with a frequency of 50 cycles per second (ie 50 Hz). Electrical equipment is highly sensitive to this frequency and can break if it deviates too much from 50 Hz. For this reason, power stations, substations, switching equipment and other devices in the grid have fail-safes which will cause them to trip out should frequency fall outside acceptable bounds. This frequency property is also connected to the balance between supply and demand: if there is more generation than consumption, frequency increases and the turbines speed up, and if there is more demand than generation, the opposite happens. Fortunately, conventional generators are large heavy lumps of metal whose speed of rotation is hard to change. They resist changes to their speed of rotation, providing resistance to changes in grid frequency, a property known as 'inertia'. However, wind and solar do not produce synchronous alternating current. Although wind turbines rotate, they do not do so at a constant speed, and solar has no moving parts at all. They produce direct current which is converted to alternating current using electronic devices known as inverters. Wind and solar have no inertia. The situation in Iberia highlighted the difficulties with running low inertia power systems: an as yet unidentified grid fault caused a disturbance and frequency changed. There was not enough inertia to contain the frequency shift and inverters dropped out, widening the gap between supply and demand and worsening the frequency deviation. This caused other equipment to disconnect, quickly leading to a cascading blackout. The process was too fast for grid operators to take action to contain it, due to the lack of inertia. If there had been more time, generators could have been shut down or started up in order to match supply to demand and get the grid frequency back to 50 Hz. That the incident happened just days after the Spanish grid operator boasted about running with 100 per cent renewables suggests a desire for net zero virtue signalling trumped concerns over grid security. It was notable that when the fault propagated into France, it was quickly contained and power was rapidly restored to the small region that experienced an outage. This is because the French grid operates with very high inertia, since almost all of its electricity is generated by big, heavy nuclear and hydroelectric turbines. The Danish government is worried about how it will continue to decarbonise its power grid if it closes all of its fossil fuel generators leaving minimal inertia. There are only three realistic routes to decarbonisation that maintain physical inertia on the grid: hydropower, geothermal energy and nuclear. Hydro and geothermal depend on geographic and geological features that not every country possesses. While renewable energy proponents argue that new types of inverters could provide synthetic inertia, trials have so far not been particularly successful and there are economic challenges that are difficult to resolve. Denmark is realising that in the absence of large-scale hydroelectric or geothermal energy, it may have little choice other than to re-visit nuclear power if it is to maintain a stable, low carbon electricity grid.
