Leonardo ENERGY

This document is an overall report of the seminar “Electricity in the next decade”, the first in an annual series of events regarding “Low carbon electricity systems”. KEMA, ECI and Leonardo ENERGY are jointly organising these events.

Next to the topics presented during the first event, a few additional topics have been added in order to create a white paper and a more complete picture on the theme “Electricity in the next decade”.

In August, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced the delivery of $377 million in funding for 46 new Energy Frontier Research Centers. The centers will be hosted by universities, national laboratories, non-profit organizations, and private companies. The research domains that were chosen offer a good sampling of those technologies the US Department of Energy (DOE) sees as potentially important in the energy landscape of the future. The funded projects are focussed on:

• Improving the efficiency of photovoltaic systems; with particular projects dedicated to hybrid inorganic/organic PV cells and nanometre-sized PV cells
• Advanced nuclear techniques
• Carbon capture and geological storage (CCS)
• Hydrogen, including the production of hydrogen as well as hydrogen fuel cells
• Biomass, including energy-rich plants and the conversion of biomass into chemicals and fuels
• Energy storage systems
• Superconductivity (1 project)

In Japan about 16 million units of distribution transformers are in service.
These transformers are expending a huge amount of energy in the form of no load
loss and load loss. Among these losses, no load loss is major. No load loss can
be saved dramatically by changing these transformers to amorphous transformers
(i.e., amorphous metal-based transformers). This paper
estimates the scope of the possible energy saving and reduction of CO2
emissions by the adoption of amorphous transformers in Japan and in China.