One would hope that with the continuing disaster in the Gulf, renewable energy would grow in popularity. Of course, it's far too early to know if that is the case, but investments in such energy projects continue on. A comprehensive energy policy from Washington would help this effort. Hint, hint.
Lamar Advertising Co. in Florida is making advertising a green enterprise:
Lamar Advertising Co. will start retrofitting all billboards across Florida with wind and solar energy systems. The company intends to complete the operation by 2012 at the cost of about $12.5 million — the Department of Energy will provide $2.5 million while the remaining cost will be borne by Lamar.
The project will cover 1,370 billboards across eight markets throughout
Florida with most of the billboards located along interstates and at thoroughfares. Not only will the billboards be powered by wind and solar energy systems, they will also function as small power generating hubs feeding the surplus electricity to the grid. The combined capacity of the billboard energy systems will be about 1 MW.
WePower, a California-based sustainable energy solutions company, estimated that if all of the 500,000 billboards along the interstates were to switch to wind energy generating power at a wind speed of 10 miles per hour, they would generate 16.8 billion kWh of electricity. It would be enough to power 1.5 million homes in annually and would prevent 5.3 million tonnes of carbon emissions from entering into the atmosphere.
Remember that story about the EPA cleaning up Brownfield sites for possible renewable energy use? It's okay if you don't. Anyway, that project is starting to bear fruit:
The utility company National Grid has teamed up with solar specialist Rivermoor Energy to build a 1-megawatt solar array at a former industrial site in Haverhill, Massachusetts. The new project is more than double the size of its closest competitor, a 425 kilowatt solar array located on the site of a former brownfield in Brockton. The new installation is another notch on the solar belt for Rivermoor, which also started construction on the largest rooftop solar installation in Boston earlier this year.
Beyond that, the whole idea of reclaiming brownfields to create new green jobs in sustainable energy by reclaiming brownfields has been taking off with a big push from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It’s a restorative approach that offers a stark contrast with the destruction caused by fossil fuel harvesting, the latest example being British Petroleum’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The idea behind reclaiming brownfields for sustainable energy is partly one of simple expediency. Many of these abandoned or underused industrial sites have usable roads and utility hookups in place, helping to lower the cost of new construction on the site. Many are located near existing communities, raising the possibility of creating new local jobs that would reduce the impact of long distance travel. Both of these aspects are essentially conservationist, maximizing the use of existing resources to create new energy generating capacity. The brownfields concept also ties in with the trend toward distributed energy, in which sustainable energy is harvested at or near its point of use.
Japan has embarked on a new project involving Tokyo's taxis:
Due to a government-funded pilot project to test emission-free cars, the world’s first taxis with easily replaceable batteries hit the streets of the Japanese capital on Monday.
Japan’s energy agency has launched the purpose-built vehicles that can run on easily swapped batteries, rather than wait to be recharged or switch to other fuels. Three cars based on the Nissan Dualis will operate as normal taxis. "Tokyo can become the capital of electric vehicles," said Kiyotaka Fujii, president of the Japanese unit of Better Place.
According to the company, ordinary Tokyo taxis can clock up as many as 300 kilometers a day, the city being world’s largest taxi market with 60,000 cabs more than London, New York and Paris combined.
There's an interesting new design for wind turbines:
FloDesign has raised $40 million of venture capital financing in two rounds after winning the MIT Clean Energy Entrepreneurship Prize as well as the Ignite Clean Energy Competition in 2008. The company was awarded an $8.3 million grant in 2009 also, as part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s highly competitive Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) program, which supports the development of "transformational" energy technologies.
The company was founded in 2007, after leveraging its knowledge of turbine design based on the jet engine technology. Its shrouded wind turbine design is expected to deliver more than three times the amount of energy as traditional wind turbines for the same size rotor. The rotors of its turbines are very small in size and they can be easily installed and utilized at places where there is high consumption of power but there is no space for conventional wind turbine towers; airports, for instance. It’s significantly smaller compared to other wind turbines and also costs a lot less to install and operate. With the help from MassCEC’s Renewable Energy Trust the Massachusetts Port Authority has already shown a keep interest in deploying FloDesign’s wind turbine technology. It works by channeling wind into a vortex that spins the blades and generates electricity.
Here's a picture of the design:
Green Mountain College in Vermont has embraced biomass energy:
The new combined heat and power (CHP) biomass plant will burn woodchips, and is projected to provide 85% of the school's heat and generate 20% of its electricity. Number six fuel oil will now be used mainly as a backup to heat campus buildings. GMC estimates it will burn about 4,000-5,000 tons of locally harvested woodchips each year as the primary fuel. The $5.8 million plant will pay for itself over eighteen years through savings on fuel costs.
In the new plant, woodchips are fed into a boiler and heated at a very high temperature with low oxygen, until the fuel smolders and emits gas. On the back side of boiler, oxygen is added and the gas ignites—the resulting steam is circulated through existing pipes for heat and hot water. The steam also activates a turbine which will produce 400,000 kWh of electricity.
Don't have access to solar power where you live? Talk to your neighbors:
Community gardening is taking up a new energetic form across the country. Rather than rows of corn, leaf lettuce and heirloom tomatoes, friends and neighbors are planting solar gardens. The power of the collective solar will is already evidenced by the successes of organizations like One Block Off The Grid (1BOG) and companies like SolarCity that offer group buying discounts. But those installations still involve individual homes with individual solar arrays. Increasingly, homeowners are taking advantage of net metering and feed-in tariff (FIT) laws to communally install solar "gardens" in one location off-site from their homes.
Solar gardens present an alternative for renters, condominium residents and homeowners with shaded or otherwise obstructed rooftops. These solar outcasts represent the latest in creative solar power adoption. Solar gardens are groups of solar panels creating solar energy together but owned by a group of people.
To facilitate this new solar movement, one innovator, Joy Hughes, started the Solar Panel Hosting Company and SolarGardens.org (as explained in a recent ecopolitology blog). The concept involves homeowners installing solar panels on a rooftop nearby. You, the individual, monitor and record the energy production from your specific panels, subtract your home usage and collect a check. It’s the same as if the panels were on your own roof, only with benefit of group buying and cheaper, bulk installation. The ultimate goal is that anyone, no matter their financial status or credit score, can own their own solar panels.
Washington, Maine, Vermont and Massachusetts have laws enabling group solar, and Oregon, Indiana, and Florida have feed-in tariffs that allow for some monetary reward, even profit. Senator Mark Udall has introduced the SUN Act, a bill that would give equal federal tax breaks to solar panels hosted off-site.
Hydrogen has always been alluring to those looking to cut automotive emissions, but it can be expensive. Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory may have solved the problem of cost:
Hydrogen would command a key role in future renewable energy technologies, experts agree, if a relatively cheap, efficient and carbon-neutral means of producing it can be developed. An important step towards this elusive goal has been taken by a team of researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California, Berkeley. The team has discovered an inexpensive metal catalyst that can effectively generate hydrogen gas from water.
"Our new proton reduction catalyst is based on a molybdenum-oxo metal complex that is about 70 times cheaper than platinum, today’s most widely used metal catalyst for splitting the water molecule," said Hemamala Karunadasa, one of the co-discoverers of this complex. "In addition, our catalyst does not require organic additives, and can operate in neutral water, even if it is dirty, and can operate in sea water, the most abundant source of hydrogen on earth and a natural electrolyte. These qualities make our catalyst ideal for renewable energy and sustainable chemistry."
Hydrogen gas, whether combusted or used in fuel cells to generate electricity, emits only water vapor as an exhaust product, which is why this nation would already be rolling towards a hydrogen economy if only there were hydrogen wells to tap. However, hydrogen gas does not occur naturally and has to be produced. Most of the hydrogen gas in the United States today comes from natural gas, a fossil fuel. While inexpensive, this technique adds huge volumes of carbon emissions to the atmosphere. Hydrogen can also be produced through the electrolysis of water – using electricity to split molecules of water into molecules of hydrogen and oxygen. This is an environmentally clean and sustainable method of production – especially if the electricity is generated via a renewable technology such as solar or wind – but requires a water-splitting catalyst.
Guess what? Americans really want electric cars:
Nissan Motor Co said on Thursday it is on track to book 25,000 U.S. orders for its Leaf electric vehicle by the end of the year and the automaker will be making money on the green car.
Nissan has taken 8,000 U.S. reservations for the hatchback, set to go on sale in the United States in December, since it started taking orders nine days ago, Mark Perry, Nissan's North America director of product planning and strategy, told Reuters on the sidelines of an industry conference.
"We are on a double time march (for launch)," Perry said. "We are on our way to have 25,000 firm orders by December."
While the cost of the Leaf is high, Federal tax credits of $7,500 will cut the Leaf's retail price to about 10 percent over the $23,000 starting price for a Prius. State incentives could cut the cost further. In California, credits could reduce the Leaf price to $20,280.
As I've said before, while it's great that we want to buy electric cars, it's not enough to have just the cars. To make these vehicles viable to all Americans, we need to build an electric vehicle infrastructure. Charging stations in parking garages and hotel & restaurant parking lots. Stations right next to highway exits and on street corners. Transitioning to an electric fleet will require a massive undertaking, and hopefully we will be up to the challenge.
The Department of Agriculture & EPA are teaming up to promote biogas:
The EPA and USDA believe the $3.9 million their collaboration will provide over the next five years will help farms overcome obstacles preventing them from recovering and using biogas. Right now, there are about 150 on-farm manure digesters across the country that turn methane into biogas. Estimates are that 8,000 farms could put in digesters and recover the equivalent of the greenhouse gases of 6.5 million passenger vehicles a year while producing 1,500 megawatts of energy.
Poo!
And more poo!:
A new $2.4 million biogas and energy efficiency project at a sewage treatment plant in Washington State will capture methane gas from the treatment process and recycle it as fuel to run equipment at the plant, saving the sewage agency more than $228,000 yearly in utility costs. That’s a pretty decent payback, especially since $1.7 million of the total was chipped in by Puget Sound Energy, the local utility company. Along with the efficiency upgrade, the biogas project will greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the treatment plant and save about 2.8 million kilowatt hours yearly (enough to power about 210 homes), relieving pressure on the local grid and helping to obviate the need for new fossil fuel burning power plants in the region.
The project, which is located at the Budd Inlet Treatment Plant, is just one of a veritable flood of new methods for reclaiming valuable resources from what is, let’s face it, the ultimate renewable energy feedstock.
I know you rely on me for all poo-related news.
The Defense Department is investing in an Ithica battery manufacturer:
The U.S. Department of Defense has its eye on Ithaca -- in hopes that groundbreaking battery technology being developed here could help boost national security.
It is investing $1 million in Ithaca-based company Widetronix to support the production of tiny self-charging batteries that can last anywhere from 25 days to 25 years.
Earlier investment from the Navy helped the Cornell University spinoff company develop silicon semiconductor materials upon which to build the tiny batteries, and an additional $1.2 million from The Solar Energy Consortium will enable the small startup to double its staff and expand its facilities at the South Hill Business Campus.
Google has made its first investment in wind energy:
Google Inc. has invested $38.8 million in two North Dakota wind farms, the Internet giant's first direct investment in utility-scale renewable energy generation.
The Mountain View, Calif., company said in a Monday blog post that it invested in wind farms built by NextEra Energy Resources, a unit of FPL Group Inc. The wind turbines, made by General Electric Co., generate 169.5 megawatts of power, enough to serve more than 55,000 homes.
While VA Governor Bob McDonnell may be lobbying big oil for more off shore drilling, a new study suggests he would be better served investing in off shore wind energy:
Researchers identified 25 leasing sectors that could generate 3,200 megawatts of offshore wind generating capacity without interfering with shipping lanes, Navy training or space launches from NASA's Wallops Island facility on the Eastern Shore. The Navy and NASA have expressed concerns about offshore energy developments, and NASA has stated serious reservations about ocean structures within its flight path.
Turbine manufacturing in Virginia would decrease the capital costs of wind projects by 15 percent and generate an investment of $403 million in the local economy.
Within two decades, 9,700 to 11,600 jobs could be created with the development of 3,200 megawatts of offshore wind.
Research on the environmental impacts to shore and sea birds is scant and will require additional studies. A separate report will address that issue in June.
Be sure to visit the eKos Earthship for environmental news and diaries.