Breakthrough energy innovations explored further

January 26, 2025 By    

Editor’s note: In the December 2024 issue of LP Gas, we published a guest column by Gordon Feller about how power demand growth will require breakthrough technologies and a new approach to gas.

Gordon Feller
Feller

Q: What else can you tell us about power demand growth and the solutions required to meet that demand?

A: The good news is that, for the past three years, massive new funding has been flowing into companies focused on developing breakthrough innovations that reduce the negative impacts of many kinds of gas. U.S. financiers are eagerly engaged with their checkbooks: venture capitalists, private equity bankers, commercial lenders, investment bankers.

Fortunately, the federal government is also playing a leading role. In that effort, one key organization stands out: the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). Its mission is to advance “high-potential, high-impact energy technologies that are too early for private-sector investment. ARPA-E awardees are unique because they are developing entirely new ways to generate, store and use energy.”

ARPA-E’s role in the bigger picture could be critical, although we may not know for a few more years. The agency’s initial $400 million budget was a part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. ARPA-E has steadily been growing – from $180 million in fiscal year 2011 to $460 million in fiscal year 2024.

Jack Lewnard, ARPA-E program director, has spoken several times about the potential for “small renewable molecules” such as DME and renewable propane. He says that these fuels are “relatively easy to make” from a variety of green feeds (biomass, renewable electricity, green hydrogen, captured CO2, wastes, etc.).

“They also have the potential to be drop-in fuels, which will reduce the cost and accelerate the speed of the low-carbon future,” according to Lewnard. “The United States uses [about] 100 quads (100 exajoules or EJ) of energy per year. Fossil propane is a small fraction. Its potential could be 50 quads or greater as a drop-in fuel – only limited by our ability to make it.”

Lewnard thinks “now our task is to find drop-in fuels. The easiest and cheapest to make are small hydrocarbons. Here’s two examples: dimethyl ether (DME) and renewable propane, which can replace about 50 EJ of the 100 EJ we use today with minimal modifications to storage/delivery and end-use devices. All of these examples are commercial today.”

Problems for the grid

A Horizons report from Wood Mackenzie, “Gridlock: The Demand Dilemma Facing the U.S. Power Industry,” carefully spells out how U.S. electricity demand growth will be between 4 percent and 15 percent through 2029, depending on the region.

The forces at work here include rapid growth in data center development, a resurgence in energy-intensive U.S. manufacturing and greater transport and heating electrification driving electricity demand growth not seen since the 1990s. In its study, the firm shows how “demand growth rates for individual utilities may be much higher as the demand being added to the grid is not evenly spread, and one large load can have a significant impact on the growth of individual utilities.”

In light of spiking power demand from an enormous number of new data centers, the latest study (October 2024) from the United Nations’ International Renewable Energy Agency shows that, despite the surge of new solar coming online, the world’s total numbers are now off track for reaching the COP28’s renewable energy target. In fact, current plans will only deliver half of the growth needed to hit a global target of tripling renewables by 2030.

Gordon Feller is a Global Fellow: The Smithsonian Institution; a White House appointee of a federal commission advising the U.S. secretary of energy; and an adviser to U.S.-based companies.

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