Escaping Energy Obscurantism

It is natural, I believe, transparency makes governments uncomfortable, not for nothing, it is a constant struggle with citizens, media outlets and social organizations around the world. Here in Mexico, even, the government carries out an open crusade to define the true truth and establish nuances to everything that the media outlets publish, as if the media outlet were more important than the object that is communicated. Form is substance, then, the old political school would say.

The energy sector, of course, is not the exception and the problem of transparency is great, as if transparency harmed the consumer or the citizenry. I leave you some examples. In these days in which LP Gas has become a trend in Mexico because of price controls and Gas Bienestar, accessing the open data of prices to generate a comparison is a titanic task.

The Energy Regulatory Commission publishes daily the current prices of LP gas through distribution plant reported by the permit holders. For this, it establishes a form that asks for the Federal Entity, Municipality and Locality to be selected from the list, as well as to check a box that says “I am not a robot.”

If the media outlets or civil organizations wanted to report the average prices of the whole country in real time, they would have to select more than 2000 municipalities and other thousands of localities. As if it were a moral duty of the CRE to present partial data in areas of protecting the market.

The pattern repeats itself from agency to agency. In CENACE there is no information related to the amount of renewable energy that is limited, as does happen in California, nor can we know the amount of electric energy by technology by state, municipality and hour of generation. They will say that for protection of the market, as if the competent authority, COFECE, could not attend to this issue.

CFEnergía does not publish the prices and quantities of natural gas that it buys, alluding to the fact that they are unregulated activities. But they have a very important effect on the plants that deliver energy to CFE Basic Supply, which is indeed a regulated activity and whose effects we already saw in February with the freezes in Texas.

In any instance, energy obscurantism is present, from Environmental Impact Manifestations that have public versions mutilating the most important elements to protect the business, to the social impact manifestations whose publicity shines by its absence.

The national energy sector urgently needs a movement that consolidates an idea of open energy where the benefits for citizens and consumers are greater than those of the State, its agents or the business itself. Where transparency is not a painful and costly exercise for citizens and media outlets, but rather a practive exercise of periodic obligations that facilitate consultation and the maximum publicity of information. It is urgent, then, to escape energy obscurantism.

This article was originally published by Energía a Debate.
Date: September 10, 2021
Link: https://energiaadebate.com/escapar-del-oscurantismo-energetico/ [Online]

Woven City: The Hydrogen City






As we have expressed in this column, Japan has important reasons to bet on the development of hydrogen as fuel to achieve energy security and decarbonize the economy. In that logic, the Toyota group and the energy company Eneos Corporation seek to develop a prototype city to explore the use and application of hydrogen.

Woven City is an initiative developed by the Toyota group and is located in the city of Susono, in the prefecture of Shizuoka, Japan; it is defined as an urban incubator to carry out tests and demonstrations of different technologies in the construction of the foundations of the cities of the future.

This implies that inside it, interconnectivity technologies and digitalization of services will be tested to improve the living conditions of the inhabitants, the companies and recreational centers around it. In terms of energy, inside Woven City hydrogen will be tested as a source of energy.

What implications does Woven City using hydrogen instead of other energy sources have?

It would mean that in the city they would not use energy from fossil sources. Therefore, if you want to cook, you would use an induction stove with electricity and not LP gas or natural gas.

The electric energy generated in the city comes from hydrogen and serves as lighting, power source and heating source and to drive light vehicles.

In that sense, hydrogen is presented as the source of energy that could make Woven City sustainable and, therefore, applications of hydrogen are investigated from its production, distribution, application and integration with other developments such as digitalization and intelligent temperature control, to give some examples.

Woven City Intends to Generate Alliances for the Future

Woven City is a project that seeks to generate alliances for the various applications that are developed inside it, and in energy matters Toyota’s ally is the company Eneos Corporation. The company will be responsible for the development of the service stations that would fill the tanks of hydrogen automobiles, which gives continuity to the business model of service stations, unlike automobiles that require electric connection and whose main source of recharge are homes, offices, shopping centers and parking lots.

The stations would use a hydrogen generation model based on electrolysis with renewable energy sources, mainly solar —that is, green hydrogen— and, therefore, it constitutes an effort to advance in decarbonization in cities.

One of the most interesting points of the project is, undoubtedly, that the leader of this development is Toyota Motor and it is built in one of the company’s facilities near one of the automobile production plants. This implies that the company is getting ahead of the next generation of vehicles, although the bet is not in plug-in electric vehicles but in vehicles that use hydrogen.

With this we can observe that Toyota is preparing for the future and with a view to maintaining its business model and adapting to the new social demands, mainly carbon neutrality, and it extends it to integrate it into a much broader project such as smart cities. We hope to see more news about this development in the near future.

This article was originally published by Business Insider México.
Date: July 6, 2021
Original Link: https://businessinsider.mx/woven-city-ciudad-hidrogeno-japon-opinion-paul-alejandro-sanchez-energia-circular/ [offline]
Archived Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240623043726/https://businessinsider.mx/woven-city-ciudad-hidrogeno-japon-opinion-paul-alejandro-sanchez-energia-circular/ [Archived]

Don’t Let Them Tell You It Can’t Be Done!






We live in times of confrontation and it would seem that suggesting something different from what we know is a capital sin that is punished with a penalty of silence; dreaming is prohibited —which is undoubtedly the beginning for innovating and transforming—. If you mention something about renewable energies, green hydrogen, energy transition, the knight-errants of the internet will seek to correct the audacity of going against what is known.

I imagine it would be as if the Florentine community of the 16th century had gathered outside Leonardo DaVinci’s room to demand that he stop designing instruments for flying, with arguments such as that man was destined to be on the ground, because if God had wanted it, he would have given us wings. Nothing different from the old inquisition that condemned men of science to death at the stake.

Let us go to the beginning of the 20th century, to the year 1908. Imagine the master blacksmiths saying: “there is still a long way to go before a Model T replaces the horse,” “there are not enough gasoline stations,” “How are you going to fill a tank on a long trip between cities?”, “The automobile will never replace the railroad.”

A leap further ahead in time would take us to RIM, the company that manufactured the Blackberry and that underestimated the potential of the market that Apple opened with iPhone. The company did not believe that people wanted a phone without a keyboard or a series of apps beyond email, messaging or the web browser. Even with the launch of the iPad that would open the tablet market, RIM executives would point out that they did not serve any specific market.

The wonderful thing about technology is that it does not advance as companies or governments would wish, but rather that it has its own inertia. We could talk about thousands of examples: whalers resisting the growing kerosene market at the end of the 19th century, or the producers of kerosene lamps themselves resisting the first incandescent bulbs lit by electricity.

Today we can see more and more drones in the streets or a memory card the size of a fingernail with a capacity of 1 TeraByte —which is equivalent to 1 million Megabytes—. There are more cameras than ever, with better definition than in recent years, and that, combined with more precise facial recognition, has generated very interesting moral debates and debates about the limits of the State.

Voice recognition, real-time translation, artificial intelligence and autonomous automobiles, to cite some examples, are advancing by leaps and bounds and there are still those who question whether the Earth is flat because they cannot see its roundness, without thinking, for example, that the first private space trips under the command of Space X have already begun.

In the world, solar energy breaks records in capacity and time, as do storage and green hydrogen. And also, why not?, conventional technologies such as combined-cycle turbines, nuclear fission or direct air CO2 capture, with which artificial diamonds are now even produced.

There are even challenges that we will see in the future that we still do not perceive in their complete dimension. The waste from batteries and solar panels, light pollution or the saturation of the immediate airspace could also require thinking about creative solutions in the long term.

This is circular energy and this is what this space is about: that no one tells you that it cannot be done, that you should conform; that it is impossible to think or even dream of a better world. That they do not tell you that it is too early to think about green hydrogen or decarbonization; that they do not tell you that it is not possible to have 100% renewable energy and storage; that they do not tell you that you cannot think or dream of a better world, because, quoting Heraclitus, the only constant is change.

This article was originally published by Business Insider México.
Date: June 22, 2021
Original Link: https://businessinsider.mx/energias-renovables-innovacion-opinion-energia-circular-paul-alejandro-sanchez/ [offline]
Archived Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240229054340/https://businessinsider.mx/energias-renovables-innovacion-opinion-energia-circular-paul-alejandro-sanchez// [Archived]