GreenGuy 1700

The Brew Barons

2011-03-22T19:40:00.000-07:00

The Brew Barons: Masters of Advanced Fermentation, Driving the Redefinition of Biofuels: Pt 1
By Jim Lane, Biofuels Digest
March 14, 2011 Will the new fermentation technologies completely shatter preconceptions about biofuels and bio-based products and redefine the way in which we approaches the production of fuel, food, feed and fiber?

Miami, FL, USA -- The Regents of the University of Washington generally only admit under conditions of duress – waterboarding is typically employed – that I graduated from their institution. At issue? What they felt was an inappropriate level of focus on beer and other fermentation products as a subject of personal discovery disguised as undergraduate research.

They’ve been laughing in Seattle since I left, but unintentionally I may just have the last laugh. It may be the case that fermentation, in its modern incarnation, may indeed be the key to saving Western civilization from itself.

Is there enough energy, food, fiber and feed for all? Advances in industrial fermentation – a/k/a an incredulous “you’re making what? from what? using what? – will be the key to answering that question.

The stars of this drama are using everything from sorbitol to steel waste gases, grass clippings, pulp mill black liquor, sludge, cane trash, vinasse, leftover chili, and potato peels that never found a home.

They are using two basic strategies – fermenting liquids and, more unusually, fermenting gases too. Most are fermenting liquids; companies utilizing gas-phase fermentation, like Coskata, LanzaTech and IneosBio, are just now proceeding towards demonstration at scale.

Their microorganisms have become so focused and well trained that they are creating phosphate-free detergents, ethanol, organic acids, diesels, gasoline, base and novel chemicals, even synthetic anti-malarials. Just today, Codexis announced that it has developed a process to capture CO2 from coal-fired power flue stacks by fermenting the waste gases.

Intriguingly, researchers from Cornell this week reported, in “Bacterial Community Structures Are Unique and Resilient in Full-Scale Bioenergy Systems” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Feb. 22, 2011), analysis of 400,000 gene sequences of the microbes in the sludge at nine Budweiser facilities that treat wastewater in bioreactors. Anheuser-Busch InBev recoups 20 percent of its heat energy use through the methane produced by these nicrobes, saving the company millions of dollars every year. The intrigue: the Cornell engineers are looking to prevent methane production by the microbes, and instead, to shape the bacterial communities to produce carboxylates, which are a precursor to the alkanes found in fuels.

“We are going to shape these communities so they start making what we want,” said Cornell’s Largus Angenent, associate professor of biological and environmental engineering.

Now that’s the, ahem, spirit. That’s the outlook that why these fermentation-meisters are responsible – along with the Kings of Catalysis – for shaking up the world in a very positive way.

The New Brew Barons
They are the new Brew Barons. In an earlier age, they might have been content to make White Lightning, or craft brews. Today their targets are jet fuel, renewable gasoline, renewable diesel, ethanol, a boatload of renewable chemicals, plus feed grains, food oils, pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals, and more.

One thing is for sure. Based on the advances they are making, anyone who begins a sentence with “biofuels are…” isn’t up on the science. They are too turbulent to be characterized – too fast-moving to be catalogued or pigeon-holed. The nature, potential, and value of biofuels are changing nearly as rapidly as feedstocks in a fermenter.

Who are they? Let’s look at some of the best and the brightest.

Algenol
An interesting approach. Algenol are utilizing algae to make starches, which they then ferment into ethanol.

Algenol Biofuels and Dow Chemical are in the process of constructing a $50 million pilot algae biofuels plant in Freeport, Texas. The plant will be located with Dow’s existing chemicals complex, and will supply CO2 as well as land for the pilot algae facility. Dow said that it was interested in Algenol’s ability to use algae to produce ethanol, which could be used as a base for making ethylene, which is in turn a feedstock for many types of chemicals. The plant is designed to produce 100,000 gallons of ethanol per year at a target price of between $1.00 and $1.25 per gallon, according to CEO Paul Woods, who added that groundbreaking is expected to commence this year. Traditionally, chemical companies have been using natural gas as an ethylene feedstock.

Amyris
It was an unheralded IPO – a lot of people passed on it at $16, now the stock is riding at $32 less than six months later, and the company just received this week its first purchase order for Amyris renewable squalane. The order was generated through collaboration with Amyris’s partner, Soliance, a leading green ingredient provider to the cosmetic industry based in France.

Last week, Amyris announced that it had completed multiple runs of its fermentation process using its engineered yeast to produce renewable farnesene, in 100,000 and 200,000 liter capacity fermenters. These runs were completed through contract manufacturing operations in North America and Europe.

The results of these fermentation runs, including yields, were consistent with previous runs at smaller scale. Amyris expects to commence commercial production of Biofene in the second quarter of 2011 and ramp production through manufacturing arrangements with entities including Biomin and Tate & Lyle.

In addition, Amyris and Grupo São Martinho, a leading sugar and ethanol producer in Brazil, have commenced site preparation on their joint venture production facility at Usina São Martinho. All of these facilities will utilize fermentors with capacities ranging between 100,000 and 600,000 liters.

Amyris is building an integrated renewable products company by applying its industrial synthetic biology platform to provide alternatives to select petroleum-sourced products used in specialty chemical and transportation fuel markets worldwide. They genetically modify microorganisms, primarily yeast, and use them as living factories in established fermentation processes to convert plant-sourced sugars into potentially thousands of target molecules. Their first commercialization efforts have been focused on a molecule called farnesene, which forms the basis for a wide range of products varying from specialty chemical applications such as detergents, cosmetics, perfumes and industrial lubricants, to transportation fuels such as diesel.

They have developed genetic engineering and screening technologies that enable us to modify the way microorganisms, or microbes, process sugar. By controlling these metabolic pathways, they design microbes to serve as living factories, or biorefineries, to produce target molecules that we seek to commercialize. Their platform utilizes proprietary high-throughput processes to create and test as many as 1,000 yeast strains a day in order to select those yeast strains which are most efficient. They first developed and applied our technology to create microbial strains to produce artemisinic acid, a precursor of artemisinin, an anti-malarial therapeutic. This work was funded by a five year grant awarded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the Institute for OneWorld Health. We have granted a royalty-free license to this technology to sanofi-aventis for the commercialization of artemisinin-based drugs.

Bluefire Renewables
BlueFire often gets overlooked because they are not using enzymes for the crucial hydrolysis step, and missing out on the attention that is generated by companies like Codexis, genencor and Novozymes for their enzyme customers. But fermenting their acid hydrolysis brother indeed they are, and operating a successful, proven technology for a number of years now.

Next step – they are awaiting loan guarantees – like Fulcrum, BP Biofuels, POET and a number of others – in order to proceeed with their Fulton,Mississippi-based cellulosic ethanol project. The facility will be engineered and built by Wanzek Construction, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of MasTec, Inc. (MTZ) , for a fixed price of $296 million which includes an approximately $100 million biomass power plant as part of the facility.

In recent months, BlueFire had also announced the securing of 15-year offtake and feedstock contracts with credit worthy partners, and has thereby became the first advanced biofuels company to secure all three legs of the requirements generally associated with DOE loan guarantees. BlueFire is working with both the USDA and DOE loan programs, and over the past three years has secured $88 million in DOE grants.

Last month, BlueFire Renewables announced that Lincoln Park Capital Fund will invest up to $10 million in the company. Upon signing the agreement, LPC invested $150,000 in BlueFire as an initial investment under the agreement at $.35 per share together with warrants to purchase an equivalent number of shares at an exercise price of $.55 per share. BlueFire intends to use the proceeds of this transaction for general corporate purposes and to aid in the closing of additional financing for the Fulton project.

Cobalt Technologies
Cobalt Technologies is commercializing cellulosic biobutanol, a versatile platform molecule for the renewable and profitable replacement of petrochemicals and petroleum. The Company’s technology efficiently converts diverse non-food feedstocks – initially, hemicellulose extracts from woody biomass and sugar cane bagasse – into biobutanol. Cobalt will offer complete systems for biomass power facilities and retrofitting pulp and paper plants with a cost-effective biorefinery module, taking advantage of benefits of co-location (feedstock supply, logistics, permits) while enhancing overall facility returns. Feedstock for the biorefinery will be low-value hemicellulose extracted from woody biomass (or bagasse) that otherwise would be burned for energy.

Biobutanol can be used as is in paints, coatings and other chemical products, a 1.2 billion gallon, $6 billion market. It can also be converted via known chemistry into a wide range of high value products, including 1-butene, isobutene and butyraledehyde derivatives, replacing petrochemicals and accessing a 67 billion gallon, $300 billion market, and full performance jet fuel and diesel. Biobutanol can also be blended with gasoline, diesel and ethanol to reduce emissions.

Engineered to achieve low costs through high productivity, energy efficiency and the use of low-cost feedstock, Cobalt is making biobutanol and its derivatives a cost effective substitute to petroleum-based materials.

Codexis
Codexis’ platform is based on proprietary directed evolution biocatalysis technology. Codexis manufactures industrial biocatalysts for use in creating faster, more efficient and environmentally-friendly manufacturing processes and industrial scale in the bioindustrials and pharmaceuticals markets.

At the ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit this week in Washington, DC, Codexis will announce significant progress towards developing economical, commercial scale technology to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants. The program is supported by an ARPA-E Recovery Act program grant.

The grant supports development of custom enzymes to decrease energy needed to capture CO2 from coal-fired power plants. Enzymes developed by Codexis under the grant have been shown to be functional and stable in relatively inexpensive and energy efficient solvents for 24 hours at temperatures up to 75?C. Use of these solvents with fully developed enzymes is expected to reduce the energy needed to capture CO2 within the plant by 30%.

These reductions are possible through development of customized carbonic anhydrase (CA) enzymes, or biocatalysts. CA is an enzyme which catalyzes the transfer of carbon dioxide in nature – for example, CA enables carbon dioxide to be released from blood into the lungs during respiration. However, the natural enzyme does not function at the high temperatures and harsh industrial conditions in coal-fired power plant flue gas. In research being presented this week, enzyme performance has been improved by about 100,000 times over natural forms of the CA enzyme.

We profiled Codexis most recently in “Resistance is Futile: Codexis and the chase for low-cost cellulosic feedstocks“.

Coskata
Coskata was in the news most recently with the securing of a massive (though conditional, subject to closing) loan guarantee from the USDA that will power the company towrds its first commercial demonstration.

It’s an intriguing technology (that finds itself currently entangled in a lawsuit with INEOS), that employs a three step process: gasification, biofermentation, and separation. During gasification, the feedstock is thermally broken down to form synthesis gas (syngas). During the second step, fermentation, the syngas is sent to a proprietary bioreactor where patented microorganisms consume the gas and produce ethanol. The last step of the Coskata process uses conventional distillation and dehydration technology to separate the ethanol from the water, resulting in pure, fuel-grade ethanol.

Coskata’s feedstock flexible process can utilize virtually any carbonaceous feedstock, including energy crops such as: switchgrass and miscanthus; wood chips, forestry products, corn stover, bagasse and other typical agricultural wastes; municipal solid waste and industrial organic waste like petroleum coke. Our feedstock flexibility allows for enormous geographical and economic advantages over other fuel technologies.

Coskata’s hybrid process, combining gasification and biofermentation, leads to several competitive advantages in terms of efficiency, affordability, and flexibility.

Coskata’s highly efficient hybrid technology allows for one of the lowest costs of production in the industry. Our microorganisms are specific to ethanol production and our technology has the ability to extract the entire energy value of the feedstock. Finally, we are not dependent on expensive enzymes or chemicals and pre-treatment costs are significantly lower than any non-gasification based technology available today.

Second, Coskata’s ethanol conversion process is one of the most feedstock flexible technologies among advanced biofuel startups and is able to create a high quality fuel from virtually any carbon-containing material. This feedstock flexibility also leads to geographic flexibility, allowing the company to build facilities virtually anywhere around the world where feedstock is available.

Genencor
Known primarily in the biofuels neck of the woods as an enzyme supplier, Genencor picked up a 2010 Biofuels Digest Award for the development of its C5 BioIsopren platform for use in the production of branched chain hydrocarbons, C10 gasoline; C15 biodiesel and jet fuel blend stocks that they collectively refer to as BioIsoFuels.

Isoprene is an important commodity chemical used in a wide range of industrial applications ranging from the production of synthetic rubber for tires and coatings to use in adhesives and development of specialty elastomers. Current production of isoprene is derived entirely from petrochemical sources. There is an increasing global need for more isoprene and a simultaneous environmental imperative to reduce green house gases, both of which can be achieved by a high efficiency fermentation based process for polymer grade isoprene production. BioIsoprene™ will have broader commercial applications beyond the biochemical uses of isoprene in synthetic rubber, adhesives and specialty elastomers. As a C5 hydrocarbon, BioIsoprene™ has inherent fuel properties and represents a key biobased intermediate that can be converted to a drop-in transportation fuel additive using chemical catalysis to C10 and C15 biobased hydrocarbon fuels, thus addressing performance gasoline, jet fuel and biodiesel markets.

Genencor develops enzymes and enzymes systems that enable starch as well as a wide range of cellulosic biomass processing to deliver fermentable feedstocks for use in the production of biochemicals and biofuels. Feedstocks may include; corn, wheat, rye, barley, sorghum, triticale and rice. We develop biological systems capable of producing biobased chemicals from a wide assortment of feedstocks including refined sugars from starch and biomass-derived feedstocks.

Genomatica
Genomatica’s technology is used to make major intermediate and basic chemicals in a direct, one-step process. This one-step process means fewer processing steps, lower capital costs, greater efficiency, and reduced overall cost. We are able to go directly from renewable feedstocks to the product of interest, as demonstrated with our recent partnership with Waste Management. Genomatica’s technology offers sustainable chemicals at lower costs than petroleum-based alternatives. The unique integration of technologies cuts years and millions of dollars of R&D investment from developing bio-based processes for making low-cost chemicals. The organisms and complete manufacturing processes for Genomatica’s targeted products are developed with high productivity due to our platform.

Their platform has been proven through an astonishing 2.5 year timeline to pilot production for1,4-butanediol, or BDO; and through $20 million of industry and government collaborations. The platform allows them to cost-effectively perform high-throughput ‘in-silico’ (computer-based) design and testing of highly-optimized organisms, manufacturing processes and economics. This results in more efficient, focused lab work, much faster product development and time to commercial-scale manufacturing, lower-cost production, and de-risking of the process.

Gevo
Another celebrated IPO – Gevo just debuted at $15 not too long ago, but is already trading at a 30% premium, riding the NASDAQ currently at $19.71 after flirting briefly with $22.

Gevo has two proprietary technologies that combine to make it possible to retrofit existing ethanol plants to produce isobutanol, a four carbon alcohol which serves as a hydrocarbon platform molecule. We have developed a robust industrial scale yeast biocatalyst to produce isobutanol without typical byproducts operating at parameters equivalent to commercial ethanol producers. The second piece of technology is a separations unit that operates continuously and removes isobutanol during fermentation. This helps reduce distillation requirements, thereby reducing process energy consumption.

Gevo will produce isobutanol, a four carbon alcohol that can be dehydrated using well known technology to isobutylene, a C4 hydrocarbon. Isobutanol has 30% more energy content than ethanol and can be blended into gasoline without modifying automobile engines. Isobutanol is a low RVP blendstock and less soluble in water than ethanol. It can be transported in pipelines and be dispensed in existing retail pumps. Isobutanol is a biofuel that carries a RIN value of 1.3 and It can be an advanced biofuel from corn if it achieves a 50% GHG reduction.
Isobutanol also has a market as a chemical solvent. The opportunity for isobutylene spans many C4 markets in jet fuel, paraxylene, PET and other multi-billion dollar applications in fuels, synthetic rubber, chemicals and plastics.

Gevo has a number of off-take agreements and has announced non-binding letters of intent to supply Total for gasoline blendstock; United Airlines for biojet; Lanxess for butyl rubber; and, Toray industries for p-xylene.

INEOS Bio
INEOS Bio was most recently in the news with the groundbreaking at its 8 million gallon per year advanced bioenergy facility in Vero Beach, Florida. The facility will also produce up to 6 MW of renewable power from municipal solid waste and yard and wood residues, enough to power more than 4,000 residences. INEOS New Planet BioEnergy is a joint venture between INEOS Bio and New Planet Energy, which received a $50 million grant from the DOE last year towards construction of the INEOS New Planet demonstration plant.

The INEOS Bio process is a combined thermochemical and biochemical technology for ethanol and power production. It is comprised of four main steps: (1) feedstock gasification, (2) synthesis gas fermentation (3) ethanol recovery and (4) power generation. The process utilizes a patented fermentation process, where cleaned, cooled synthesis gas is converted selectively into ethanol by a naturally occurring anaerobic bacteria. The process has been under development for 18 years.

Last June, INEOS Bio received a $10.8 million in grants from the Department for Energy and Climate Change and the Regional Development Agency One North East towards the construction costs of its waste-to-ethanol BioEnergy Process Technology project at the INEOS Seal Sands site in the Tees Valley. The 7.9 Mgy (30 million liter) project will also produce 3 MW of renewable power and will be completed in 2012. The plant which will utilize 100,000 tonnes of municipal solid waste (which it will convert at a 25 percent yield) will create 40 permanent and 350 construction jobs, and will become the base of a larger commercial INEOS Bio plant that will open in 2015

GE to buy 25,000 electric cars by 2015

2010-11-11T09:51:00.000-08:00

Fleet upgrade will include 12,000 cars made by General Motors Video
GE's electric deal

Paul Sancya / AP

GE plans to buy 25,000 electric vehicles by 2015 for its corporate fleet and to lease to customers, including 12,000 vehicles made by GM, such as the forthcoming Chevrolet Volt, shown above.
Reuters updated 1 hour 0 minutes ago 2010-11-11T16:46:28

BOSTON — General Electric Co plans to buy 25,000 electric vehicles by 2015 for its corporate fleet and to lease to customers, in a move it said could help speed acceptance of the technology.

The largest U.S. conglomerate initially will buy 12,000 vehicles made by General Motors Co, including the forthcoming Chevrolet Volt. It plans to buy other manufacturers' electric vehicles as they are introduced.

GE makes equipment for the electric grid that will charge these vehicles and owns a stake in battery maker A123 Systems . It estimated that it could generate $500 million in electric vehicle-related revenue over the next three years.

The cars will go both into GE's fleet of cars and trucks used by staff and be leased out by a unit of GE Capital that leases cars and other vehicles to businesses, for traveling sales representatives and repair crews, for instance.

"By electrifying our own fleet, we will accelerate the adoption curve, drive scale and move electric vehicles from anticipation to action," said GE Chief Executive Jeff Immelt.

The Volt is a plug-in hybrid car, which GM estimates will be able to run for up to 40 miles on battery power, but will also have a small gasoline engine to charge the battery over longer trips.

Nissan Motor Co also is rolling out a plug-in electric car this year, called the Leaf, which it estimates will be able to run for 100 miles on a charge.

These cars represent the next generation of vehicle electrification, following on gasoline-electric hybrids such as Toyota Motor Corp's Prius.

Businesses that use large fleets of vehicles have been embracing these technologies as a way to cut fuel costs, as well as lower their emissions of of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas associated with climate change.

United Parcel Service Inc and FedEx Corp, for instance, have both been phasing hybrids into their fleets of delivery trucks

For Those Near, the Miserable Hum of Clean Energy

2010-10-08T08:58:00.000-07:00

By TOM ZELLER Jr.
Published: October 5, 2010

VINALHAVEN, Me. — Like nearly all of the residents on this island in Penobscot Bay, Art Lindgren and his wife, Cheryl, celebrated the arrival of three giant wind turbines late last year. That was before they were turned on.

Matt McInnis for The New York Times
Residents living less than a mile from the $15 million wind facility in Vinalhaven, Me., say the industrial whoosh-and-whoop of the 123-foot blades is making life unbearable.

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“In the first 10 minutes, our jaws dropped to the ground,” Mr. Lindgren said. “Nobody in the area could believe it. They were so loud.”

Now, the Lindgrens, along with a dozen or so neighbors living less than a mile from the $15 million wind facility here, say the industrial whoosh-and-whoop of the 123-foot blades is making life in this otherwise tranquil corner of the island unbearable.

They are among a small but growing number of families and homeowners across the country who say they have learned the hard way that wind power — a clean alternative to electricity from fossil fuels — is not without emissions of its own.

Lawsuits and complaints about turbine noise, vibrations and subsequent lost property value have cropped up in Illinois, Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Massachusetts, among other states.

In one case in DeKalb County, Ill., at least 38 families have sued to have 100 turbines removed from a wind farm there. A judge rejected a motion to dismiss the case in June.

Like the Lindgrens, many of the people complaining the loudest are reluctant converts to the antiwind movement.

“The quality of life that we came here for was quiet,” Mrs. Lindgren said. “You don’t live in a place where you have to take an hour-and-15-minute ferry ride to live next to an industrial park. And that’s where we are right now.”

The wind industry has long been dogged by a vocal minority bearing all manner of complaints about turbines, from routine claims that they ruin the look of pastoral landscapes to more elaborate allegations that they have direct physiological impacts like rapid heart beat, nausea and blurred vision caused by the ultra-low-frequency sound and vibrations from the machines.

For the most extreme claims, there is little independent backing.

Last year, the American Wind Energy Association, a trade group, along with its Canadian counterpart, assembled a panel of doctors and acoustical professionals to examine the potential health impacts of wind turbine noise. In a paper published in December, the panel concluded that “there is no evidence that the audible or sub-audible sounds emitted by wind turbines have any direct adverse physiological effects.”

A separate study financed by the Energy Department concluded late last year that, in aggregate, property values were unaffected by nearby wind turbines.

Numerous studies also suggest that not everyone will be bothered by turbine noise, and that much depends on the context into which the noise is introduced. A previously quiet setting like Vinalhaven is more likely to produce irritated neighbors than, say, a mixed-use suburban setting where ambient noise is already the norm.

Of the 250 new wind farms that have come online in the United States over the last two years, about dozen or so have generated significant noise complaints, according to Jim Cummings, the founder of the Acoustic Ecology Institute, an online clearinghouse for information on sound-related environmental issues.

In the Vinalhaven case, an audio consultant hired by the Maine Department of Environmental Protection determined last month that the 4.5-megawatt facility was, at least on one evening in mid-July when Mr. Lindgren collected sound data, in excess of the state’s nighttime sound limits. The developer of the project, Fox Island Wind, has contested that finding, and negotiations with state regulators are continuing.

In the moonlit woods behind a neighbor’s property on a recent evening, Mr. Lindgren, a retired software engineer, clenched a small flashlight between his teeth and wrestled with a tangle of cables and audio recording equipment he uses to collect sound samples for filing complaints.

At times, the rustle of leaves was all that could be heard. But when the surface wind settled, a throbbing, vaguely jetlike sound cut through the nighttime air. “Right there,” Mr. Lindgren declared. “That would probably be out of compliance.”

Maine, along with many other states, puts a general limit on nighttime noise at 45 decibels — roughly equivalent to the sound of a humming refrigerator. A normal conversation is in the range of 50 to 60 decibels.

In almost all cases, it is not mechanical noise arising from the central gear box or nacelle of a turbine that residents react to, but rather the sound of the blades, which in modern turbines are mammoth appendages well over 100 feet long, as they slice through the air.

Turbine noise can be controlled by reducing the rotational speed of the blades. But the turbines on Vinalhaven already operate that way after 7 p.m., and George Baker, the chief executive of Fox Island Wind — a for-profit arm of the island’s electricity co-operative — said that turning the turbines down came at an economic cost.

“The more we do that, the higher goes the price of electricity on the island,” he said.

A common refrain among homeowners grappling with sound issues, however, is that they were not accurately informed about the noise ahead of time. “They told us we wouldn’t hear it, or that it would be masked by the sound of the wind blowing through the trees,” said Sally Wylie, a former schoolteacher down the road from the Lindgrens. “I feel duped.”

Similar conflicts are arising in Canada, Britain and other countries. An appeals court in Rennes, France, recently ordered an eight-turbine wind farm to shut down between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. so residents could get some sleep.

Richard R. James, an acoustic expert hired by residents of Vinalhaven to help them quantify the noise problem, said there was a simpler solution: do not put the turbines so close to where people live.

“It would seem to be time for the wind utility developers to rethink their plans for duplicating these errors and to focus on locating wind turbines in areas where there is a large buffer zone of about a mile and one-quarter between the turbines and people’s homes,” said Mr. James, the principal consultant with E-Coustic Solutions, based in Michigan.

Vinalhaven’s wind farm enjoys support among most residents, from ardent supporters of all clean energy to those who simply say the turbines have reduced their power bills. Deckhands running the ferry sport turbine pins on their hats, and bumper stickers seen on the island declare “Spin, Baby, Spin.”

“The majority of us like them,” said Jeannie Conway, who works at the island’s ferry office.

But that is cold comfort for Mrs. Lindgren and her neighbors, who say their corner of the island will never be the same.

“I remember the sound of silence so palpable, so merciless in its depths, that you could almost feel your heart stop in sympathy,” she said. “Now we are prisoners of sonic effluence. I grieve for the past.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 7, 2010

An article on Wednesday about the noise of wind turbines misstated the material of which turbine blades are made. They are typically made of fiberglass or plastic reinforced with carbon fiber, not steel.

Green lights for big solar projects on fed lands

2010-10-05T20:07:00.000-07:00

One will install 28,360 collectors in Southern California desert Interactive
Solar power basics

Sandia National Laboratories

These "SunCatcher" systems are the backbone of one of two projects approved Tuesday. The solar dishes were developed by Sandia National Laboratories and Stirling Energy Systems for Tessera Solar.msnbc.com staff and news service reports msnbc.com staff and news service reports
updated 10/5/2010 3:19:06 PM ET

+-After five years of negotiations and battles, some of them environmental, two large solar power projects on Tuesday got the first-ever green lights to set up shop on federal lands.

More U.S. news Green lights for big solar projects on fed lands
After five years of negotiations and battles, some of them environmental, two large solar power projects on Tuesday got the first-ever green lights to set up shop on federal lands. Full story

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.."These projects are milestones in our focused effort to rapidly and responsibly capture renewable energy resources on public lands," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement announcing the approvals in desert areas of Southern California.

One includes a square mile of solar panels near Victorville in inland Southern California, and the other covers about 10 square miles in the remote Imperial Valley, east of San Diego.

The announcement comes about five years after solar developers began asking the U.S. Bureau of Land Management for rights to develop hundreds of solar plants on federally owned desert land across the Southwest.

Expected to cost around $2 billion, the largest of the two projects will use 28,360 solar collectors known as SunCatchers to produce enough electricity to power more than 200,000 homes.

The approvals give the project sponsors access to almost 6,800 acres of public lands for 30 years.

Construction is expected to start on both by the end of the year, and Interior said the projects should generate almost 1,000 jobs.

"There are 11 million acres of public lands in the California Desert, and a large majority of those lands are managed for conservation purposes," Salazar said. "These projects, while a significant commitment of public land, actually represent less than one-hundredth of one percent of that total area. Given the many benefits, the extensive mitigation measures, and the fair market value economic return, approval of these projects is clearly in the public interest."

The two approvals are:

•The Imperial Valley Solar Project, by Tessera Solar of Arizona and based in Imperial County, Calif., is expected to produce up to 709 megawatts from 28,360 solar dishes, enough to power at least 200,000 homes.

•The Chevron Lucerne Valley Solar Project will use photovoltaic solar technology in San Bernardino County, Calif., and will produce up to 45 megawatts from 40,500 solar panels, enough to power at least 13,000 homes.

Interior said both are part of a "fast track" process that provides significant funding via the federal stimulus program if construction begins by the end of 2010.

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.."The Recovery Act’s payment for specified energy property in lieu of tax credit program makes Tessera and Chevron eligible for approximately $273 million and $31 million, respectively," Interior stated.

Environmentalists weigh in
Interior said California and federal agencies had "set up a joint compensation fund operated by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to ensure that impacts are mitigated."

Some environmentalists criticized the projects, especially the larger one, because of potential impact on habitats for bighorn sheep and a rare lizard.

"It's a classic example of a good project in the wrong place," Ileene Anderson, a biologist with the Center for Biological Diversity, earlier told the San Diego Union-Tribune. "We clearly need to get on renewable energy and get off of fossil fuels ... but we don't have to destroy species."

But the Natural Resources Defense Council and Defenders of Wildlife said they supported the projects because of advice they offered that had been incorporated into the projects.

"During the federal and state reviews Tessera Solar moved the project out of sensitive desert washes, scaling it back to 709-megawatts, to reduce important impacts," NRDC attorney Johanna Wald said in a statement Tuesday. "Tessera Solar then sat down with NRDC and our conservation partners and agreed to develop the project in two distinct stages and other measures, all of which went above and beyond the requirements imposed by state and federal regulators."

Tuesday's approvals came shortly after California regulators passed rules requiring utilities to derive a third of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020, the most aggressive standards in the U.S.

The Bureau of Land Management opened federally owned lands in 2005 to solar development, but an examination of records and interviews of officials by The Associated Press showed the program operated a first-come, first-served leasing system that quickly overwhelmed its small staff and enabled companies, regardless of solar industry experience, to squat on land without any real plans to develop it.

Story: Wall St. firm behind slow solar pace on federal lands?
To expedite environmental review and bureaucratic red tape, Interior identified 14 of the most promising solar projects among the more than 180 current permit applications.

The newly approved permit for sites in California were the first in a series Salazar expected to issue before the end of the year. Final approval by 2011 qualifies projects for federal stimulus funds under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

"When I became secretary of the interior .... dozens of permit applications had languished," Salazar said. "There was no process for transforming ideas on paper to projects on the ground."

Currently, solar developers have proposed facilities that would produce more than 6,000 megawatts, enough to power 4 million homes for a day at peak usage. The projects are proposed for about 23 million acres of federally owned desert in the Southwest.

Land use and renewable energy experts said the BLM's initial mismanagement created a solar "land rush" that spurred lawsuits by environmental groups concerned about endangered species and rare plants.

Story: Here comes the sun: White House to go solar

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said the state is on track to approve nine large solar plants by year's end.

"Our great partnership is helping to improve public health, grow our green economy, promote energy independence and strengthen our national security," the governor said in a statement.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

.Interactive: Solar power basics

Link | Share .Discuss: Green lights for big solar projects on fed lands
337 total comments
One will install 28,360 collectors in Southern California desert
“ Its about time. I'm fed up with environmentalists who keep urging us to use less fossil fuel, but then block every attempt to establish clean energy, whether its nuclear, hydroelectic (don't want to interfere with spawning fish -- and don't forget the Snail Darter fiasco of the 70's), wind (don't want to spoil the view off Martha's Vineyard, even though they're 10 miles out to sea), solar (why is there always an endangered species at every building site?).

They keep preaching "conservation", but with a population growing due to (mostly illegal) immigration, there's a limit to how much we can cut total energy usage in this country.

When it gets one right, the Obama administration should be congratulated. And, it got this one right.
”
Expand
Collapse Barry-NJ, with 25Reply “ If you really think it's environmentalists who are blocking attempts at moving away from fossil fuels, I have some BP stock to sell you.
”
Expand Collapse trolleater, with 11Reply “ Barry-NJ.......five years ago the Repubs were in control of the Congress and the Executive office. Sounds like they weren't saying no to alternative energy back then. Looks like it's the left wing environmentalists who typically support Democrats have been holding this up. Quit drinking the koolaid.

How is the obvious question not being asked......... If they are so wonderful, why did the panels Carter installed get removed?

Also, I swear I read an article not more that a few weeks ago that stated "No panels going on the White House". Source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129934816 ; http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/obama-says-no-to-solar-panels-on-white-house-roof/19632526?a_dgi=aolshare_twitter

Watching this Administration make decisions is like watching a tennis match.

Amateur hour in DC with these Socialist / Progressive parasites to society in charge!!!

Not much longer..........

8 votes#1.1 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 11:31 AM EDT.Mark-532951
Carter's panels were removed by Saint Reagan because Reagan didn't like them. There was absolutely nothing wrong with them.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=carter-white-house-solar-panel-array

23 votes#1.2 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 12:04 PM EDT.V...
Stop-The-Statists

You sound as paranoid as a conspiracy theorist...

You seem rabid to spin anything done by the administration into a negative light... regardless of what it is... I think if the administration somehow found a cure for cancer, you would say it's really just a socialist mind control vaccine or something....

18 votes#1.3 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 12:21 PM EDT.DUDE-875416
Great, lets just cover the planet in solar cells. I like how the article ignored the obvious question that comes to mind. How much is this going to cost the American tax payer? How long will it take for the panels to pay for themselves? Should we be spending this money on things like this when unsustainable government spending hasn't been addressed yet?

Do you really think I'm going to put solar cells on my roof only because Obama did no matter what the cost?

5 votes#1.4 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 12:36 PM EDT.Karlmarx-1622182
DUDE,

Tell you what, when I send my taxes in, I'll include a note telling the IRS that my taxes can go toward those solar panels. That way, you can rest assured that your tax money will go toward something more important, like paper clips for the military or something.

11 votes#1.5 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 12:44 PM EDT.Holy_Cow
Mark-532951

Carter's panels were removed by Saint Reagan because Reagan didn't like them. There was absolutely nothing wrong with them.

They were Carter's

1 vote#1.6 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 1:32 PM EDT.Hawaii2
Solar Panels are not cost effective. Do your research. Expensive to make and install, but eventually there is no saving.

Bunk. Thinker: just read your comment. Yes, you are right!

2 votes#1.7 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 1:54 PM EDT.Ziti
Enough with the president-bashing. And over solar energy? Jeesh.

Mark #1.2's Scientific American reference cites one reason why the Carter-era panels were removed during the Reagan administration: cost. The contemporary article below supports that reason but with a tad more explanation:

White House Will Not Replace Solar Water-Heating System

AP

Published: August 24, 1986

WASHINGTON, Aug. 23— The Reagan Administration says it will not replace a solar water-heating system that was installed in the White House in the Carter Administration.

The panels of the system had been dismantled to fix the roof underneath. Dale A. Petroskey, a White House spokesman, said Friday, ''Putting them back up would be very unwise, based on cost.''

Joseph M. Slye, a spokesman for the General Services Administration, said a decision on replacement would be made after the roof repairs were done.

I would also suggest that the nascent state of solar energy technology and our relative ignorance of global warming in the mid-80's had something to do with the subsequent decision not to reinstall a new system until now. Thankfully, our knowledge about both topics has grown exponentially.

Something I've learned: The National Park Service oversees White Hour maintenance and repairs, while the GSA reviews the budget. The solar energy system installed on a White House maintenance building during the Bush II administration was in keeping with NPS long-term energy reduction goals for the residence. I should think the new solar panel system is too.

The lesson: Not everything in Washington is about who's president or which party is in power. Some things stand above all that. The White House itself is one of them.

4 votes#1.8 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 2:22 PM EDT.Bruce-308647
I also doubt if they make economic sense at this time. The cells are expensive to buy and install, and then you have to add storage devices (both for electric and hot water). You have to save a lot of energy to offset the cost, and then you also have to include maintenance cost and replacement cost. I heard somewhere that the "payback" for a hybrid car (extra cost offset by the savings in fuel) is something like 12-15 years, or longer than most people have their cars. And of course the batteries do need replacing at some point, which is expensive.

My point is, right now most of this stuff is just for show or solely to help the environment. Little of it makes actual economic sense.

#1.9 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 2:34 PM EDT.Handgunner
It's not Barry's house. It's the White House, and it belongs to Us, the People. Barry just happens to be the current tenant.

#1.10 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 2:56 PM EDT.Wheres Congress
So, where are the solar panels manufactured that the White House is purchasing? China? Or is the White House finally finding a way to create manufacturing jobs in the good old USA?

#1.11 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 3:08 PM EDT.J. Hill-1376776
Carter's Baaaaaaaaaack! or Barak. Whichever.

#1.12 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 3:27 PM EDT.Heartlight3
I suspect that considerable progress has been made in solar technology since the 70's when Carter's panels were used. It seems like all of you who are complaining about this just need something to whine about. This country has a lot more things to worry about than this president leading by example on alternative energy.

2 votes#1.13 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 3:38 PM EDT.Jon-1321288
Reagan not only removed the solar panels from the White House, which were a largely symbolic item, but he cancelled the Solar Power programs that Carter started. Those programs, if left in place, would have made the US the leader in Solar Technology, creating many good paying jobs and products that we could export to other nations.

The result of Reagan's actions allowed Germany to become the leader in Solar research and development and China to become the biggest producer of Solar panels, harming the US economy as we now try to catch up and have to import this.

The lesson is that backward thinking reactionaries aren't good for our country. Please, think this time and don't vote TP in November.

6 votes#1.14 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 3:41 PM EDT.RevengeFromMars
@Hawaii2, I have done my research. Solar panels can be cost effective, depending where you live. For example, if you live in, say, Hawaii, where electricity is 20 cents per kwh, twice what the rest of the US pays, and where there's plenty of sunlight, you'd easily break even in a few years. In places like California, Arizona, or Texas, it may take a few more years but you'd still break even well before the lifetime of the panels.

Also, not sure why your entire comment was in bold. I guess your comment is more important than mine?

6 votes#1.15 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 3:52 PM EDT.GK Thetruth
Ziti had a great comment above.

For everyone that is ignorant on the whole Solar energy debate. It is true that Solar Energy is currently the most expensive way to create electricity today. But at the current rate that the technology is improving, many predict that it will eventually be more efficient than burning coal, oil, or natural gas. Another benefit of Solar is that the cost to produce electricity is stable. Gas, oil, and coal costs will all increase or decrease based on current market prices Since we do not have infinite supply of the fossil fuels, I would expect prices to eventually increase. Nuclear is a very cheap, but we are hoping we will eventually find a satisfactory way to deal with the waste. Considering that most wars are over resources, and Energy is the most important resource of them all, wouldn't it make sense to spend a little bit of effort to perfect a way to extract energy directly from the Sun?

#1.16 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 4:36 PM EDT.Greek Prince
I wonder how much this cost me as a taxpayer? I wonder how many years before it breaks even? Never mind, it's the thought that counts not whether it is cost effective or not. Let's all go green and to hell with the cost. Throw the trash out in November.

#1.17 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 6:48 PM EDT.DB Akron
No Mark

They were removed because they did not work properly i.e. the savings failed to exceed the cost. The removal was recommended by the White House maintenance people.

#1.18 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 8:45 PM EDT.Weldon Gebhard-1638908
I have looked into Solar Panels for my house in Panama City, Fla. Great spot huh! I have a large south sloped roof perfect for installation.

However, the estimated pay back is 10 years and that is "estimate", and without maintenance. No one ever talks maintenance. Don't kid yourself, everthing needs maintenance. And, one needs back up power. One day maybe. They are making improvements.

#1.19 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 8:46 PM EDT.AtomicZeppelinMan
DUDE-875416: "How much is this going to cost the American tax payer?"

Handgunner: "It's not Barry's house. It's the White House, and it belongs to Us, the People."

Greek Prince: "I wonder how much this cost me as a taxpayer?"

These guys crack me up.

#1.20 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 9:09 PM EDT..Thinker-543390
Wonderful, I would guess a number of us have checked out solar and/or talked to a solar salesperson. Quickly finding out, even after rebates, that it would take about 150 years to break even. This move solidifies the mindset of Obama with Carter, aren't we proud.

8 votes#2 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 10:42 AM EDT.Valhalla Phil
If you did check and got that payback you were getting ripped off. Where I live, just a ferry ride from Vancouver, BC. My payback would be 16 years and that's because Washington states rebates are worthless.

Getting solar electricity is easy, so easy you can do it yourself. If you don't know how to wire an outlet or a switch, find someone in your neighborhood that does. Check this site for real pricing:

http://sunelec.com/

As soon as I finish building my house, that is where I'm going.

As for solar hot water, that payback is typically 3-5 years. I had it on my last house 20 years ago and it works great. Again, if you can find a neighbor that knows plumbing you can find a site, buy direct, and save a bundle. Here is another good web site:

http://solarhotwater.siliconsolar.com/

12 votes#2.1 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 11:12 AM EDT.Jon-1321288
And Phil doesn't even mention that you can hook up your Solar panels to the grid and get payback from the electric company during times when you generate more electricity than you use. And that is every sunny day.

3 votes#2.2 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 3:45 PM EDT..Act2
Better open the windows in the summer and wear coats in the winter! How about his home in chitcago? What about algore's large azz footprint of a house??? Better yet, put them on algore's jet!

6 votes#3 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 10:48 AM EDT.Valhalla Phil
I'm amazed they gave Bush credit for his work. What is largely swept under the rug by the leftist media is that Bush did a lot for alternative energy. In addition to what the story pointed out, he also removed the $3000 limit from the renewable energy tax credit. He spent more on alternative energy research than all previous presidents, a lot of which is paying off now.

His home was also designed from the ground up to be green, featuring solar hot water, solar electric, and geothermal heating. Compare that with Gore's house using 12 times the energy of the average home.

Here is the bottom line; Solar electric was absurd 30 years ago, ridiculous 20 years ago, and over the top 10 years ago. Even 5 years ago it was iffy. However, just like cell phones, computers, and TV's, technology marches on. At a dollar/watt retail, it is finally becoming ready for prime time. In less than half a dozen years they won't even need incentives.

I know as a conservative, when a leftist talks our automatic response is that the truth is usually 100% opposite and indeed, for solar that was the case. As an electrical engineer by trade, I can tell you that technology has finally caught up with their rhetoric.

Personally I see utilities, as just another unelected arm of the government with no competition. The only possible free market competition they have is home grown power. The only thing we need is a low cost solar conversion loan program so a homeowner could pay the same for a loan payment as they would to the electric utility. That and a nationwide challenge to have 100 million solar rooftops would transform our country and make it much more immune to possible terrorist attacks on our infrastructure.

Contrary to leftist propaganda, there is a lot of support for alternative energy in the conservative community. Conservative Texas gets 30% of it's power from renewables. How many blue states can boast that percentage?

2 votes#3.1 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 11:38 AM EDT.Suzy-2005071
Phil you are singin' my song. I have often said the green movement needs to focus on the individual level. Instead of massive wind farms that are inefficient for large scale power generation, especially when you consider the amount of land they take up, focus on individual homes. Same with solar. It's not practical (yet) to power a city with wind or solar, but you can power a single family home, if not in full at least in large part. Subsidize individuals through rebates, low interest loans, whatever it takes and you'll get a much more immediate and larger return on investment than subsidizing large scale municipal projects. Plus you increase demand which creates jobs in production, installation and maintenance. By taking individual households off the power grid you also free up capacity to adapt to other new technology like power stations for electric vehicles. Seems to me like we could reduce the government's capital investment for a greater return if we focus locally.

1 vote#3.2 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 12:44 PM EDT.AZChzhd
In light of the huge disaster in Hungary regarding the waste byproducts of manufacturing, do people understand the incredible garbage that comes from manufacturing solar panels?? Cant imagine how you can call yourself green for buying these when the damage done in manufacturing far exceeds the benefits to the environment lol Its almost a no win situation.

1 vote#3.3 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 12:45 PM EDT.zard1959
Vahalia Phil - It's true that Bush used many alternative energy stategies at his ranch. But his policies were often contradictory. After all, both he and Cheney's entire careers revolved around oil. Remember the secret energy meetings that were never disclosed? It turns out their 63 member energy advisory team had strong ties to oil, nuclear, and coal interests. I could go on, but it is pointless to expend our energies endlessly pointing fingers. So, can we just get over the partisan bickering and put-downs and get down to the real business of promoting alternative energy for the good of all? Stop name-calling and bashing. It serves no purpose. You obviously have useful knowledge to share. But for this country to go forward, we need to dialogue together and get over our differences. We as a country can do so much better and at least Obama administration is trying. For once, give credit where it is due. And let's work together as a nation, as people that are united instead of divided. Did you know that even China is way ahead of us in developing wind and solar? We can all do better, by working together, and visioning a much brighter future. Yes, we can!

5 votes#3.4 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 12:53 PM EDT..jw-438130
Not sure where you were getting quotes on systems. Mine ran 27k with 13k rebate. Also got a tax credit that reduced the overall out of pocket to about 8k. Got a tax exempt home improvement and only pay about $19.00 month average electricity bill (down from average of $300.00) - anticipate system to pay for itself in 4-5 years. Of course, I live in the sunbelt, that does make a difference.

11 votes#4 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 10:58 AM EDT.Act2
Payoff should include all the tax breaks. After all that is part of the total cost to you and the rest of the taxpayers. The federal govment has to subsidize solar energy and electric cars since they can't compete on their own.

2 votes#4.1 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 11:18 AM EDT.Capt Tripps
of course they can't compete, they are a relatively new and expensive technology (high efficiency, durable cells rated for single family homes)with little to no market share. The government subsidized all the current gas and electric power lines when they were built half a century ago. They subsidized plumbing when it moved indoors. This is the next step, and they are right where they should be, encouraging people to adopt so that it becomes common place and prices fall.

And you have a problem with that, why exactly?

9 votes#4.2 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 11:34 AM EDT.Act2
If it is such a savings, then people will purchase it. It can be installed in new homes and be part of the purchase price. You can't compare the infrastructure for gas and power line to solar panels. Last I heard, govment doesn't subsidize gas lines since the last plant construction I was involved in, we had to pay the full price to have a natural gas line ran to the plant to burn energy uselessly in an RTO, a useless environmental process! I don't believe cell phones needed govment intervention to get people to start buying them. In fact the govment makes more money off cell phones that the cell phone providers do. The original gas car didn't need govment to get involved, so why now to push an inferior product on people?

#4.3 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 11:50 AM EDT.Valhalla Phil
If technology continues to advance, neither electric cars nor solar power will need subsidies within have a dozen years. It is just the nature of technology. To reiterate, the one glaring omission to a solar plan is a low interest loan program to handle the up front costs. If that were available, you would see the avalanche effect and adoption would reach critical mass.

Anyone who reads my posts knows how conservative I am and I will tell you that the time is now to support solar and electric vehicles. You cannot stop the inevitable march of technology. What did a cell phone cost when they were first coming out? What about a PC? Color TV's in the fifties actually cost more than they do today, and that does not include inflation! It is the nature of the beast and solar and electric vehicles are no different.

Switching stances does not mean admitting you were wrong, it just means that the technology has finally caught up with they hype.

3 votes#4.4 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 11:52 AM EDT.Act2
All I have to say is if they are that good, they would sell themselves!

1 vote#4.5 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 12:00 PM EDT.clarke ong
Oh, I don't know....Coal SUCKS and it sells itself.

#4.6 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 1:59 PM EDT.crashmld
I can go over 400 miles with my gas guzzling car, pull into a gas station and fill up with the stuff then continue on for another 400 miles or so. Can you that with an electric car? If the electric cars and all these hybrids were so good then why are there not more on the road?

#4.7 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 3:45 PM EDT..jw-438130
Anything we can do to reduce dependence on ME oil, even subsidizing solar and electric, is better than continuing to borrow money from China to fight wars over oil.

5 votes#5 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 11:24 AM EDT.STexan
For the last time ... we do not use oil to generate electricity! Never have, never will. We need more nuclear power generation, and everyone will be satisfied.

Half of US taxpayers could not implement a solar or wind system if they wanted to, but you leftists have no problem with EVERYONE paying out of their pocket in the form of taxes, to pay a few contractors and homeowners for a technology that in the grand scheme of things will NEVER amount to more than just a few drops in the perverbial bucket in terms of realistic power needs. These numbers that get thrown around are all based "bull crap" estimations by a few industry major investors.

If solar and wind is SO GREAT, then why do you not want to rely on "electric bill savings" to pay for the startup costs? The same people with their hand out for these governement solar/wind tax credits, are the ones bitching about government subsidies, credits, and tax abatements going to farmers and large businesses. This world is being turned upside down, and most are clueless.

2 votes#5.1 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 11:37 AM EDT.Walt in AZ
@STexan:

Hawaii generates most of it's electricity by burning oil. Anyplace using diesel generators to generate electricity (very common) is burning oil to generate it. LOTS of oil gets burned to generate electricity.

Half (or more) or US taxpayers don't get their power from burning coal (I live in AZ and we burn natural gas to produce our electricity), yet our government spends tons of money subsidizing coal and this new "clean coal" idea. Why not subsidize solar as well?

And the numbers being "thrown around" are better than the "bullcrap" you put forth with no data or details, just a bunch of ranting about how the "leftists" want to take away all your hard earned money...

7 votes#5.2 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 11:53 AM EDT.Valhalla Phil
If you live in Texas, you should know that it gets 30% of it's electricity from renewables, putting blue states to shame.

I used to be a big supporter of nuclear, and even toured a plant. After TMI, I changed my mind. As an electrical engineer specializing in high avalibility systems, I can tell you that there is no such thing as a fail proof system. There is always a possibility of failure. When a refinery fails, there is loss of life and a few days of pollution. If we have something worse than TMI there would still be loss of life but there could also be millions of people effected by residual radiation exposure as well as perhaps millions of acres rendered useless for millenia. Statistically, even if the chance is one in a billion, that one could just as likely be tomorrow as it could be decades from now. When solar is just on the cusp of viability, and will be cheaper than utility power before the next nuclear plant is built, nuclear need never be a dominant energy source.

Payback for solar is already competitive with utility power with incentives and technology will continue to advance to the point that incentives won't even be needed in a few years.

There is no reason why every home in the lower 48 and Hawaii couldn't be a net generator of electricity. Where I live in Northern Washington state, there is a large solar push here, despite the fact that the states incentive program is useless. Look up Clallam county, WA, then consider that we are one of the most solar power active counties in the state.

Also, Germany is heavily into solar power and the bulk of their country is actually the same distance north as Canada. If it works for northern Washington, if it works in Germany, it can work everywhere but Alaska. Even Vancouver, BC has solar installations.

4 votes#5.3 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 12:15 PM EDT.clarke ong
New technology for photovoltaics is here with the 3 dimensional solar cell which is about 15 times more efficient than the status quo. It will produce significantly in Northern zones because it is not dependent on angle of incidence to produce peak power.

Next generation thin film is looking real good too. There is even (down the road a bit) photovoltaic PAINT so the entire skin of a dwelling of car would produce power.

If you actually take the time to see what is happening in new technology and come at this from an open mind, you will be convinced.

3 votes#5.4 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 12:31 PM EDT.American Illuminati
S Texan, stop fighting our current.

http://futurist.typepad.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/08/19/solar_3.jpg
Solar will be viable with the power grid by the end of the decade. If you look over Google Maps real view in ANY suburb, what do you see?? Acres & Acres of roof tops...The entreprenuers taht grasp this are going to be the one's controling elections in the 2020's.

1 vote#5.5 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 12:41 PM EDT..Be4real...
This is excellent news, the more this gets done the more cost efficient it can be for the masses.

9 votes#6 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 11:24 AM EDT.stormerF
If it cost $30,000.00 during the late 70's to provide hot water to the west wing offices,Just how much would it cost today and who is paying for it. What happens when there is a snow storm and clouds for a week at a time. That's right I forgot Carter did say he liked taking cold showers.

#6.1 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 1:22 PM EDT..marcelj
The gov needs to lead in solar wind etc by example. The blm needs to allow solar on our land after all we own it as the american people.

2 votes#7 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 11:40 AM EDT.Valhalla Phil
Sorry but with so many vacant roof tops available, there is no need to pave the desert over with silicon. Moreover, if we own the power, we benefit, if the utilities own it, they get the benefit that we pay for.

If we own it, in a decade +/- our power is free. If the utility owns it, we pay forever.

I am a big supporter of solar power, but only if we own it.

4 votes#7.1 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 12:20 PM EDT.clarke ong
Makes much more sense to not have so many long distance transmission lines and to produce as much as possible at the need.

Thats pretty much a no-brainer. So, the next real fight will be with the Commercial producer themselves. They don't want you to sell power, they want you to buy it.

2 votes#7.2 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 12:34 PM EDT.Jon-1321288
As Phil has stated earlier, he's as conservative as it gets. I am about as progressive as anyone on this board. And I have to admit, I am in complete agreement with everything Phil says on this issue.

It makes perfect sense to generate your own electricity on your own roof. And there are laws on the books already that say the utilities will have to let you onto the grid, a pay you something for your excess energy.

#7.3 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 3:54 PM EDT..Walt in AZ
@Act2:

You realize the federal government still subsidizes petroleum exploration and production, right? As if that weren't profitable enough on it's own...

5 votes#8 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 11:42 AM EDT.Act2
The govment makes ten times more money off petroleum products than the manufacturers do. I believe the greedy govment gets plenty more out of oil than the oil companies do. I am sure more would be done without govment intervention. Just ask the oil workers in the gulf!

#8.1 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 11:56 AM EDT..jw-438130
Jeez! Someone has a real problem with good news. It is not a "leftist" issue - it is an American issue. Even the US Military is looking into alternative energy sources. Many military bases are installing solar energy conversion systems - for electricity and hot water. This is a no-brainer, got to reduce oil dependence (and coal fired electric plants). As far as the carbon footprint - some people just love their big ol' pickup trucks and SUVs. Can't commute to work in style without them.....

9 votes#9 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 11:48 AM EDT.Flyingstar
Well MY "big ol 3/4 ton dodge pick-up" runs on Bio diesel and polutes less than a Prius!

4 votes#9.1 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 12:07 PM EDT.jw-438130
Right! No way your Dodge truck produces less pollutants than a Prius. I drive a Prius and did my homework before buying it.

3 votes#9.2 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 12:13 PM EDT.Act2
My corvette gets 30mpg and doesn't need an extension cord!

1 vote#9.3 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 12:23 PM EDT.jw-438130
You must be a good driver. FYI, Priuses are self-contained, no electric cord. I get average of 47 MPG and in stealth mode (battery only 100 MPG).

2 votes#9.4 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 12:32 PM EDT.American Illuminati
Act2

Your Corvette is also the product of Extreme & Arrogant Consumerism. America is going to have to rethink how it does things if it wants to become the world leader in ANYTHING again. Except consuming energy, we have the WHOLE WORLD trumped on that card.
"Go US! We burn more non-renewable resources a day then ANY OTHER NATION! Woo Go America"

86% of Americans thinking a car is a neccessity is one of the 1st blocks to our Nation advancing as a whole

2 votes#9.5 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 12:44 PM EDT.clarke ong
Corvette?

Do you Flintknapp as well?

1 vote#9.6 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 1:01 PM EDT..shadowmax-2454334

good points act2 - if solar were economicly feasible, the big corps would be on it like stink on sh!t.

1 vote#10 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 12:37 PM EDT..shadowmax-2454334
good points act2 if solar were economicly feasible, the big corps would be on it like stink on sh!t

#11 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 12:45 PM EDT.clarke ong
They are. They are trying to slow or kill it.

Where have you been? LOL.

4 votes#11.1 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 1:00 PM EDT.stormerF
Who wants to invest in something that costs more to created,and maintain,than our current energy supplies? No One. Soon as the Government funds stop the green energy industry also stops,it is just not cost effective or profitable.

1 vote#11.2 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 1:17 PM EDT.acidrain
StormerF:

And how much does it cost to secure Oil supplies in the mideast? When are we going to stop subsidizing oil with our military?

Solar has gotten a lot more affordable, and it will only get better. Gas and oil are old tech that will not get much more efficient than they are now.

1 vote#11.3 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 1:47 PM EDT.clarke ong
Yeah sure stormer. Thats why it is the fastest growing sector of private economy next to healthcare.

Why don't you make a REAL attempt to find out what you're talking about instead of coming at it from a negative at the git-go?

At the PRESENT TIME, alternatives are CHEAPER than fossil fuels because you consistently fail to factor in the hidden costs.

The truth is that you don't want it to be better.

2 votes#11.4 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 1:50 PM EDT..Neil-798344
...just another publicity stunt...

1 vote#12 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 12:58 PM EDT.Windy Citizen
Not if it inspires others. In fact, I will be turning down my thermostat tonight before I go to bed in order to conserve fossil fuel. At 9 pm I will be holding a press conference on my front lawn and will discuss future energy-saving initiatives, including taking quicker showers and finally fixing the cracked window in the basement.

1 vote#12.1 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 1:23 PM EDT..Mark Thomas-371822
It's really remarkable that something as innocuous as solar panels but demonstrative of where the future lies is so quickly derided by the right.

Same thing for Obama's speech to school children to study hard; according to the right wing it was marxist propaganda.

Talk about people with nothing of substance to say.

4 votes#13 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 1:02 PM EDT.jw-438130
I'm guessing some of the comments come from professional nay-sayers to any idea or concept that advances our country. These folks simply do not want to participate in real discussions on issues facing our nation. Some may mean well, but I suspect they do not put a lot of thought into their responses.

4 votes#13.1 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 1:13 PM EDT.stormerF
What country gave up on going green after trying it only to find out when the government subsidies stopped,no private corporation would invest in it? Spain. No private industry wants to push green energy,because it costs too much,and we have cheaper sources of energy. No one wants to wait 50 years to get their money back with a little profit,it just will not work like that.

#13.2 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 1:14 PM EDT.Mark Thomas-371822
Stormer, untrue. Too many solar energy providers were built in Spain and many went bust. Many though are now profitable.

The whole issue with solar technology is the cost to manufacture panels. As the volume goes up, costs will come down, unlike oil whose price will only go up while reliability declines.

The other thing to keep in mind is that you don't pay the true cost of oil at the pump because that cost doesn't include environmental damge or the cost of maintaining our sources of supply in the ME, among other costs.

#13.3 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 1:24 PM EDT.stormerF
Its not the providers,I care about,it is the Government subsidies that are needed to keep them going so they can make a profit off the Tax Payers. When the subsidies stop the providers can not make a profit and give up on green energy,Because we have cheaper energy,oil.If you want green go Nuclear at least it will last 100's of years,we have over 100 Nuclear facilities here working now.

#13.4 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 1:38 PM EDT.Mark Thomas-371822
Stormer, nuclear energy is good in the near term but there is obviously a problem with what to do with waste that is a health and environmental hazard for several centuries (I think).

Say the government could reduce its military expenditures in the gulf by $200b a year because we no longer needed oil from that area. Wouldn't that go a long way toward justifying the development of solar energy? In other words, there are a lot of benefits that are not directly reflected in the cost/benefit analysis of renewable energy.

Likewise, there are many costs not directly included in the alternative of doing nothing.

It's a good thing you weren't overseeing the Apollo program, that could never be cost-justified (at least in 1960).

#13.5 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 1:48 PM EDT.acidrain
StormerF conveniently ignores the costs associated with securing oil in volatile nations. Oil is subsidized.

#13.6 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 1:49 PM EDT.Jon-1321288
Are we now saying the Nuclear Energy has never had subsidies? It wouldn't even exist but for huge government subsidies.

And the cost of a Solar generating plant is right now about the same as a new Nuclear generating plant. The cost of the Solar plants will continue to fall, and the cost of the Nuclear plant does not take into account the billions of dollars required to store the waste.

Stormer also states that Spain is abandonning solar. Here is the first two paragraphs from the Wikipedia entry on Spain's solar program. I doubt that Stormer is correct:

"Spain is one of the most advanced countries in the development of solar energy, since it is one of the countries of Europe with more hours of sunshine. The Spanish government is committed to achieving a target of 12 percent of primary energy from renewable energy by 2010 with an installed solar generating capacity of 3000 megawatts (MW).[1] Spain is the fourth largest manufacturer in the world of solar power technology and exports 80 percent of this output to Germany. Spain added a record 2 GW of solar power in 2008. Total Solar power in Spain was 3 GW by end of 2009. Solar energy has covered 2.8% of the electricity demand in 2009.

Through a ministerial ruling in March 2004, the Spanish government removed economic barriers to the connection of renewable energy technologies to the electricity grid. The Royal Decree 436/2004 equalises conditions for large-scale solar thermal and photovoltaic plants and guarantees feed-in tariffs."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Spain
#13.7 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 4:06 PM EDT.Mark Thomas-371822
Jon, stormer is correct in that many of the solar operations started in Spain went bust.

Many though restructured and are now profitbale.

#13.8 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 4:30 PM EDT..stormerF
I wonder how much hot water you could make with a gas water heater for $30,000.00 ,when Carter install these worthless panels? What happens when the sun don't shine? Carter did say he liked taking cold showers.

1 vote#14 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 1:10 PM EDT.jw-438130
Yet another dumb comment. Solar is renewable - gas is not.

1 vote#14.1 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 1:15 PM EDT.stormerF
Solar renewable,now you are talking dumb,if it is such a good idea why are the people who build really big buildings not using solar enegry? Since they only heater water for the west wing offices,I'll bet at $30,000.00 they could have heater water for 40 years or more using a gas water heater. Why kind of repairs and replacement do solar panels require? How much hot water do you use in an office dumbo?

#14.2 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 1:32 PM EDT.clarke ong
They are stormer.

You just don't want it to be.

2 votes#14.3 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 1:52 PM EDT..Captain of low taxes
If the goverment really wants to do somthing , why not mandate that all new homes must provide 25% of their own power....

and up that percentage every five years by 5%.

#15 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 2:18 PM EDT..hampster
President Jimmy Carter went solar, but that idiot Regan had all the solar panels dismantled and sold for scrap! Regans stand was America does not have to worry about energy!

#16 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 2:23 PM EDT.crashmld
I hate to burst your bubble but none were sold for scrap. Read this article to understand where they went and at least look things up before you spout off nonsense. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=carter-white-house-solar-panel-array

#16.1 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 3:52 PM EDT..Chuck H-316019
First I wonder what changed the WH's mind? A few months back, he was against solar panels.

2nd. I wonder what this is going to cost us in TAXPAYER dollars $$$$$$? What is it going to save the Taxpayer and how long is it going to take the TAXPAYER to re-coop the money spent on the panels and maintance?

Just like Ted Kennedy, put up windmills, but not in my back yard.

1 vote#17 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 2:25 PM EDT..MikeNSanAntonio
Do you notice how MSNBC doesn't say what the price per kilowatt hour is? It's not an oversight cause they left it out of the article about Obama praising solar plant in the California desert. For over thirty years the Greenies have been saying that the price of solar panels will drop due to a technological break through. Well, it hasn't happened yet. And isn't likely to. Solar is three times more expensive than coal or nuclear. The solar energy fanatics have bamboozelled Congress into subsidizing their overpriced equipment. So, for you people bragging that you bought solar because of all the subsidies and rebates, shame on you. You just transferred the cost to your grandchildren because the Feds are printing money to give you the subsidy. If you're so committed to solar, you should have paid the full price by yourself. Then you would be entitled to be holier than thou. But, since you didn't, you're just another pig feeding at the Federal hog trough.

#18 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 2:31 PM EDT.clarke ong
Really?

What is the cost of a permanent Military presence in Saudi Arabia complete with a whole fleet to protect the shipping lanes?

What is the cost of environmental degradation and remediation from fossil fuel extraction and use?

What are the medical costs associated with fossil fuels?

What are the Geo-political costs associated with the same?

3 votes#18.1 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 2:39 PM EDT..Beckwolf
Yeah, I installed solar panels on my family's home a little more than a decade ago. With the reduction in my electricity bill this created, the panels will be paid for by the savings in 113.63 years. Nothing I would call worth it, especially considering how wear and tear is actually reducing their effectiveness, meaning we're looking at decades longer than that not counting maintenance or replacement that will be needed long before the original 113.63 years is up. Then combine that with the fact that here in northern California our years have been getting colder and the period with sufficient sun is lasting far fewer weeks these last few years, the panels are becoming even less efficient. It's similar to buying a Civic Hybrid versus a regular Civic. When I bought my Civic, I compared the cost increase for a hybrid to the improved mileage to see how many miles I would have to drive to pay for the extra cost if gas prices never rose...no car would last that long.

#19 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 2:34 PM EDT..smit-o-rama
Whatever! Progressives can watch as they are removed in 2013...

#20 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 2:37 PM EDT..DarkRising
This is a great way to lead by example.

2 votes#21 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 2:40 PM EDT.American Illuminati
Cheers

1 vote#21.1 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 2:46 PM EDT.smit-o-rama
Example of what? Worshiping a dreadfully inefficient alternative power method that can never replace conventional ones?

Not to worry though! Cap & Trade will never pass because Obama is going to lose the Congress in a BIG way.

Global warming is nothing more then a pro-global socialist backed wealth redistribution scheme.

#21.2 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 2:49 PM EDT.clarke ong
No, WALMART is a conservative backed redistribution scheme.

Inefficient is allowing 5,0000 American troops to die for oil, along with the actual physical cost of same.

Inefficient is when your main power source pollutes your physical environment to the point where sulphuric acid rains from the sky.

3 votes#21.3 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 2:57 PM EDT.smit-o-rama
Who cares about WalMart Clarke? I've never shopped there nor do I ever intend to.

PS- Conservatives didn't back WalMart's financial rise, it was Democrats in the 1990's who saw to that. Do you feel like recalling who sat on WalMart's Board of Directors?

Does the name Hillary Clinton ring a bell?

While you are on the subject of polluting the environment, feel free to look up the amount of toxic byproducts that are produced to manufacture solar panels.

#21.4 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 3:00 PM EDT.acidrain
Horribly inefficient? Solar cells are usually 15-20% efficient, and some of the research types are 40%+ efficient. Gas engines are about 18-20% efficient, and dirty. And you have to ship it, making it even dirtier.

You have it backwards. Even if you don't get more power out of solar cells, they are still more efficient due to their other benefits.

Based on what evidence do you say it will never replace "conventional" power methods? Because you don't want it to?

Keep your paranoid delusions about socialist redistribution schemes to yourself.

1 vote#21.5 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 3:01 PM EDT.American Illuminati
Smit-o, paranoid much??

Even if Global Warming is a "scheme". Why is that a bad thing?? Too put pressure on business's as a whole to rethink how they do business so that it is perpetually sustainable?? That only seems like a long term smart business decision too have your grand kids owning stakes in a family business that planned ahead for 2011,2015 & 2025. Cap & Trade in it's current execution would put undue pressure on polluter's in the short term. Which is why the GOP needs to sit down at the table & properly lobby for their Coporate interests (GOP Corporate Campaign funding is out pacing Democrats SEVEN to 1). It needs to take a reality of what we have & a proper prediction to what we want. The idealistic Democrats & the StatusQuo Republicans both are needed at that negotiation table.

Secondly. By the end of the decade Solar's price will be competitive. Seems to me that if you look at any Google Map of suburbs, all you see is acre's & acres of rooftop's. Some smart entreprenuers are goign to capitalize on that.
http://futurist.typepad.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/08/19/solar_3.jpg

2 votes#21.6 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 3:01 PM EDT.smit-o-rama
Acres & acres of rooftops with panels subsidized by the government. How about these people pay for their setups with their own cash instead of the taxpayers?

#21.7 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 3:05 PM EDT.acidrain
Smit: Because it saves the tax payer money to not have to fight for oil in the mideast.

1 vote#21.8 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 3:08 PM EDT.clarke ong
How about you buy your own roads and schools.

1 vote#21.9 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 3:10 PM EDT.smit-o-rama
Roads and schools are shared costs for things that everyone can use while subsidized solar panels on rooftops are not.

I'm not saying solar panels are a bad thing if one wants to install them, I'm just pointing out that they are not cost effective and taxpayers should not be subsidizing them. You want a rooftop full of them? Great! Now go shell out 25-50K of your own money.

Next?

#21.10 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 3:18 PM EDT.Mark Thomas-371822
smit, there are obvious external economies to solar power, among them reducing the destruction of the environment and lower costs to maintain our lines of supply (re: ME wars).

In addition, as volume increase, costs come down and efficiency increase. What the government is doing is subsidizing solar energy (far less than it subsidizes carbon energy supplies) so that it can become a viable, general purpose source of energy where it is appropriate.

1 vote#21.11 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 3:23 PM EDT.smit-o-rama
Wrong Mark,

Solar technologies cannot produce a decent ROI because they are inefficient in comparison to other sources of power. This reason alone is why the US government subsidizes the entire industry and is also the reason you don't see major energy companies developing a crash effort towards it. IBM has some interesting stuff going on in the solar field, but it is not a realistic, cost effective solution that can be filtered down to everyday people.

If you want to develop alternative energy sources to get off of hydrocarbon based sources that is fine and I'm all for it. However, you need to look that the long term picture and start putting your R&D into realistic solutions.

The USA currently uses approx 3.6TW of electricity, the demand curve rises to 5.2TW by 2040 and 8.0TW+ by 2060. You have no chance in hell of generating this amount of power via solar & wind. Would you like to discuss what China & Japan's future energy demand curves are projected at while we are on the subject?

What the US should be doing is a initiative similar to the space program, however this time it is all about fusion research. This country is inexcusably the furthest behind in this field and should be in emergency mode leading the rest of the world.

#21.12 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 3:33 PM EDT.jw-438130
You've got to be kidding - no educated person could spout such nonsense.

1 vote#21.13 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 3:39 PM EDT.American Illuminati
Smit-O
The USA currently uses approx 3.6TW of electricity, the demand curve rises to 5.2TW by 2040 and 8.0TW+ by 2060. You have no chance in hell of generating this amount of power via solar & wind.

What your logic fails to comprehend is that 1) Our current energy backed Oil-Coal-Natural Gas system is heavily subsidized. 2) Your demand curve exists on current demands of the average American Citizen AND current inefficient uses within the infrastructure. Within this stat you are failing to comprehend the exponential growth of any & every tech industry. Not only is the cost curve of Solar going to be effective against standard energy means by the end of this decade. But the efficiency of every industry is increasing every day. Gas cars go farther, diesel cars still farther, hybrids still farther & next year I'm sure they'll still yet go farther. Pure electric cars can be completely viable in Urban living, & wouldn't it be nice to take a deep breath in LA?? But good Public Education that promotes "Little to No" carbon footprint could effectively get people rethining how they travel & use energy. If everyone completely neutralized their carbon footprint with offsets like solar panels to control their home energy demands & public transporation for travel & more efficient personal vehicles that would have an impacts as an Energy Consumer per Capita as a whole. But also good policy could promote Urban parking structures or parking meters with extension cords & Debit Card swipers. Then Electric Cars in Urban life would be EVEN MORE viable. Why do we have to use the most Energy? Don't Leader's lead by example. What if we were the most productive while being the lowest Energy Demand per Capita??

2 votes#21.14 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 3:58 PM EDT..WheresCongress
So, where are the solar panels manufactured that the White House is purchasing? China? Or is the White House finally finding a way to create manufacturing jobs in the good old USA?

#22 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 3:06 PM EDT.smit-o-rama
Because US manufacturers could never be competitive when figuring in the costs of Indium and labor unions.

#22.1 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 3:10 PM EDT..Joe Speranzi
I read somewhere where the panels were purchased from an Oakland-based firm, Sungevity.

1 vote#23 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 3:36 PM EDT..mark shipp
It will take the military to start installing solar energy devises before the nuts (i.e. the right wing) feel that it is 'American' to do so.

Whoops, they are. See Stars and Stripes. Guess our military has gone socialist. http://www.stripes.com/news/military-proposes-wind-and-solar-energy-for-outpost-in-eastern-iraq-1.90844

http://www.newser.com/story/comments/102194/us-military-ditching-fuel-for-solar-energy.html

5 votes#24 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 3:49 PM EDT..Joe66
Looks to me like they trying to buy votes with solar panels..good luck democrats im voting Republican in November.

#25 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 4:56 PM EDT.acidrain
Republican, or Tea Party idiot? Because there don't seem to be too many republicans left. Only nut jobs.

#25.1 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 5:06 PM EDT.Joe66
Republican

#25.2 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 5:15 PM EDT.American Illuminati
Why are you voting Republican?

#25.3 - Tue Oct 5, 2010 9:56 PM EDT

2 Brothers Await Broad Use of Medical E-Records

2010-10-05T08:11:00.000-07:00

By STEVE LOHR
Published: October 3, 2010

There is no silver bullet for reforming America’s health care system, but medical experts have long agreed that digital patient records and electronic prescribing can help improve care and curb costs.

Using the Nimble service, a doctor can connect via iPad to a patient’s medical records.

Gabriela Hasbun

Dr. Tom Doerr, left, and John Doerr, the venture capitalist.

It seems straightforward. Just combine technology skills with investment money, and then develop innovative products. But to date, the push for a digital revolution in doctors’ offices has brought mostly frustration for the many companies big and small that are trying to conquer the field.

Just ask the Doerr brothers — John Doerr, the well-known venture capitalist who was an early backer of Google and Amazon, and Dr. Tom Doerr, a physician and software designer.

Dr. Doerr founded a software company in 1999, beginning with an electronic prescribing product and later adding electronic health records. His brother is the largest investor. After more than a decade, the venture has fewer than 500 doctors using its software.

The experience, Mr. Doerr said, has been “a long, slow march.” And Dr. Doerr conceded, “It’s been a lot harder getting to a business that is self-sustaining than I had imagined.”

But the Obama administration’s economic stimulus package contained an ambitious program to encourage the market for electronic health records, with billions in incentive payments to buy and use digital patient records — and eventually penalties for the failure to do so.

The Doerrs’ software company is only one of many hoping to cash in on the national mandate for digital medical records. The companies range from giants like General Electric to specialists like Athenahealth that cater to small physician practices.

They, like the Doerrs, are betting that the law will help create a turning point for the economics of digital health records, opening the door to rapid adoption by doctors and a thriving business at last.

The brothers are also betting that Internet technology and Apple’s iPad can make electronic records far easier to use and less expensive. Last week, they introduced a new product, Nimble, to allow doctors to manage patient information by connecting their iPads to data centers managed by the Doerrs’ software company, ClearPractice.

The Doerrs’ aging start-up is unusual in that it has evolved to extend its reach in health care beyond technology. The lessons it has learned along the way are a microcosm of the challenge of applying technology to health care.

To attack the problem of wayward financial incentives, the Doerrs bought a Medicare Advantage health maintenance organization, Essence Healthcare, in 2007, and shifted it toward paying doctors for helping make patients healthier. It now covers 50,000 people in six states.

They also built up a medical analytics software company, which tracks procedures and patient results for payers, enabling them to manage outcomes instead of just costs. The software also mines data to help hospitals and doctors make more informed decisions about treatments.

Their target market is doctors in small practices, with 10 physicians or less — where digital records are used least. More than 70 percent of the nation’s doctors are in such small practices.

The Doerrs’ three companies are part of the Essence Group, based in suburban St. Louis, not far from where brothers grew up. Dr. Doerr, 53, is co-founder and head of clinical strategy of Essence, and Mr. Doerr, 59, is the largest shareholder.

Though a small private company, Essence has attracted the attention of some experts. Intrigued, Dr. Denis A. Cortese, former chief executive of Mayo Clinic and a professor at Arizona State University, joined the Essence board two months ago. It is trying to bring to small physician practices, he said, the kind of health care championed at Mayo.

“These guys may or may not be successful, but they’ve got the right ideas,” Dr. Cortese said.

The goal, Dr. Doerr explained, is to deliver the better care and lower costs achieved by some large health care groups without being one. Essence, he said, is trying to combine technology tools, cooperative relationships between doctors and insurers, and financial incentives to create the “virtual equivalent” of an integrated system.

The goal also, of course, is to make money. Essence, though, does not have the look of a big winner anytime soon. It has 330 employees and yearly revenue of about $450 million. But the vast majority of the revenue comes from the Medicare insurer, which is like a regulated utility with modest profits.

If the Doerrs’ venture is going to become a money-spinner someday, it will come from software, a business that can grow rapidly and profitably, if successful. For its new offering, ClearPractice worked closely with Apple to develop the Nimble, a service tailored for the iPad.

Using Nimble, doctors do not need other computers in their offices, since most of the software and patient information resides on remote computers in data centers managed by ClearPractice. A doctor’s iPad connects to the patient data and software wirelessly, over the Internet, as if in a computer “cloud,” as this fast-growing model of computing is known.

Doctors pay a subscription fee of up to $499 a month if they choose all the ClearPractice offerings — electronic prescribing, electronic health records and billing software.

“With the right software that is cloud-based, the iPad is going to be transformational in health care,” Mr. Doerr said.

2 Brothers Await Broad Use of Medical E-Records
Published: October 3, 2010

The right technology, medical experts say, can potentially overcome two major hurdles to the adoption of electronic health records by doctors: cost and complexity. Those obstacles are most pronounced in the market of doctors in small practices that the Doerrs are pursuing.

Related
Times Topic: iPad

About one in five doctors now uses digital health records. But the percentage is far lower in small practices, while in larger, integrated health groups — Kaiser Permanente, Mayo Clinic and others — all use digital records.

The larger groups are big enough to afford the investment in electronic records, training and technical support. But they also use the electronic patient data as a tool to better manage patients with chronic conditions like diabetes and heart diseases, so they are healthier and less apt to require costly hospital care.

The groups use that performance-improvement data to market themselves to insurers and employers, and many are insurers themselves. So they have considerable economic incentive to use electronic records.

Yet such larger groups provide less than 15 percent of health care in America. For the rest, the dominant economic model is fee for service. The incentive is for more of everything — more visits, more tests, more pills, more surgeries. The sicker the patient, the more lucrative.

For Mr. Doerr, his private health care venture has been an education. “Our health care system,” he said, “is an absolutely dysfunctional circle where none of the participants — patients, payers or providers — are linked together in any kind of rational economic system.”

Until recently, doctors in small practices had no incentive to invest in electronic health records. They would bear the costs, but savings would go to insurers.

But with the federal stimulus package, the economic barrier will be lowered. The government plans to spend $19 billion in incentive payments — up to $44,000 per doctor, and gave practices five years to adopt electronic records before penalties begin.

As an investment, Essence is a world apart from the classic Silicon Valley venture-capital mentality of finding the Next Big Thing. Mr. Doerr, who joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers three decades ago, has done that as successfully as anyone.

“Health care is a complex system, where the improvements and effects are felt over time,” said Esther Dyson, an analyst, investor and friend of Mr. Doerr’s. “So in that sense, this is very different from conventional venture capital investments. It’s not going to take off quickly.”

Still, at the headquarters in Maryland Heights, Mo., Mr. Doerr’s team is thinking big. The chief executive of the Essence Group is Frank Ingari, who has known Mr. Doerr for 20 years, and headed a computer networking company that Kleiner had backed and helped take public.

Mr. Ingari, who is working Silicon Valley-style 80-hour weeks, speaks of health care technology as a “tremendous opportunity” both as a business and as a benefit to society. “This is a missionary endeavor,” he said

U.S. Military Orders Less Dependence on Fossil Fuels

2010-10-05T07:49:00.000-07:00

Aaron Favila/Associated Press

Oil tankers that were set on fire in Pakistan. The convoys that haul fuel to bases have been sitting ducks for enemy fighters.

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Published: October 4, 2010

With insurgents increasingly attacking the American fuel supply convoys that lumber across the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, the military is pushing aggressively to develop, test and deploy renewable energy to decrease its need to transport fossil fuels.

Beyond Fossil Fuels

Articles in this series examine innovative attempts to reduce the world’s dependence on coal, oil and other carbon-intensive fuels, and the challenges faced.

Greening the Army

Related
Pakistan Militants Hit NATO Convoy (October 5, 2010)

Notes from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other areas of conflict in the post-9/11 era. A blog about energy and the environment.

Major Paul Greenberg/U.S.M.C.

Solar power was tested in May in Morocco. A Marine company brought some renewable energy equipment to Afghanistan.

Last week, a Marine company from California arrived in the rugged outback of Helmand Province bearing novel equipment: portable solar panels that fold up into boxes; energy-conserving lights; solar tent shields that provide shade and electricity; solar chargers for computers and communications equipment.

The 150 Marines of Company I, Third Battalion, Fifth Marines, will be the first to take renewable technology into a battle zone, where the new equipment will replace diesel and kerosene-based fuels that would ordinarily generate power to run their encampment.

Even as Congress has struggled unsuccessfully to pass an energy bill and many states have put renewable energy on hold because of the recession, the military this year has pushed rapidly forward. After a decade of waging wars in remote corners of the globe where fuel is not readily available, senior commanders have come to see overdependence on fossil fuel as a big liability, and renewable technologies — which have become more reliable and less expensive over the past few years — as providing a potential answer. These new types of renewable energy now account for only a small percentage of the power used by the armed forces, but military leaders plan to rapidly expand their use over the next decade.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the huge truck convoys that haul fuel to bases have been sitting ducks for enemy fighters — in the latest attack, oil tankers carrying fuel for NATO troops in Afghanistan were set on fire in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, early Monday. In Iraq and Afghanistan, one Army study found, for every 24 fuel convoys that set out, one soldier or civilian engaged in fuel transport was killed. In the past three months, six Marines have been wounded guarding fuel runs in Afghanistan.

“There are a lot of profound reasons for doing this, but for us at the core it’s practical,” said Ray Mabus, the Navy secretary and a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, who has said he wants 50 percent of the power for the Navy and Marines to come from renewable energy sources by 2020. That figure includes energy for bases as well as fuel for cars and ships.

“Fossil fuel is the No. 1 thing we import to Afghanistan,” Mr. Mabus said, “and guarding that fuel is keeping the troops from doing what they were sent there to do, to fight or engage local people.”

He and other experts also said that greater reliance on renewable energy improved national security, because fossil fuels often came from unstable regions and scarce supplies were a potential source of international conflict.

Fossil fuel accounts for 30 to 80 percent of the load in convoys into Afghanistan, bringing costs as well as risk. While the military buys gas for just over $1 a gallon, getting that gallon to some forward operating bases costs $400.

“We had a couple of tenuous supply lines across Pakistan that are costing us a heck of a lot, and they’re very dangerous,” said Gen. James T. Conway, the commandant of the Marine Corps.

Col. Robert Charette Jr., director of the Marine Corps Expeditionary Energy Office, said he was “cautiously optimistic” that Company I’s equipment would prove reliable and durable enough for military use, and that other Marine companies would be adopting renewable technology in the coming months, although there would probably always be a need to import fuel for some purposes.

While setting national energy policy requires Congressional debates, military leaders can simply order the adoption of renewable energy. And the military has the buying power to create products and markets. That, in turn, may make renewable energy more practical and affordable for everyday uses, experts say.

Last year, the Navy introduced its first hybrid vessel, a Wasp class amphibious assault ship called the U.S.S. Makin Island, which at speeds under 10 knots runs on electricity rather than on fossil fuel, a shift resulting in greater efficiency that saved 900,000 gallons of fuel on its maiden voyage from Mississippi to San Diego, compared with a conventional ship its size, the Navy said.

The Air Force will have its entire fleet certified to fly on biofuels by 2011 and has already flown test flights using a 50-50 mix of plant-based biofuel and jet fuel; the Navy took its first delivery of fuel made from algae this summer. Biofuels can in theory be produced wherever the raw materials, like plants, are available, and could ultimately be made near battlefields.

Concerns about the military’s dependence on fossil fuels in far-flung battlefields began in 2006 in Iraq, where Richard Zilmer, then a major general and the top American commander in western Iraq, sent an urgent cable to Washington suggesting that renewable technology could prevent loss of life. That request catalyzed new research, but the pressure for immediate results magnified as the military shifted its focus to Afghanistan, a country with little available native fossil fuel and scarce electricity outside cities.

Fuel destined for American troops in landlocked Afghanistan is shipped to Karachi, Pakistan, where it is loaded on convoys of 50 to 70 vehicles for transport to central bases. Smaller convoys branch out to the forward lines. The Marines’ new goal is to make the more peripheral sites sustain themselves with the kind of renewable technology carried by Company I, since solar electricity can be generated right on the battlefield.

There are similar tactical advantages to using renewable fuel for planes and building hybrid ships. “Every time you cut a ship away from the need to visit an oiler — a fuel supply ship — you create an advantage,” said Mr. Mabus, noting that the Navy had pioneered previous energy transformations in the United States, from sail power to coal power in the 19th century, as well as from coal to oil and oil to nuclear power in the 20th century.

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Go to Blog The cost calculation is also favorable. The renewable technology that will power Company I costs about $50,000 to $70,000; a single diesel generator costs several thousand dollars. But when it costs hundreds of dollars to get each gallon of traditional fuel to base camps in Afghanistan, the investment is quickly defrayed.

Because the military has moved into renewable energy so rapidly, much of the technology currently being used is commercially available or has been adapted for the battlefield from readily available civilian models.

This spring, the military invited commercial manufacturers to demonstrate products that might be useful on the battlefield. A small number were selected for further testing. The goal was to see, for example, if cooling systems could handle the 120 degree temperatures often seen in current war zones or if embedded solar panels would make tents more visible to enemy radar.

This summer, renewable technologies proved capable of powering computers, residences and most equipment for more than a week at a test base in the Mojave Desert — though not enough to operate the most sophisticated surveillance systems.

Much more is in the testing stages: one experimental cooling system uses a pipe burrowed into the cool earth eight feet underground that vents into tents; a solar fan on the tent roof evacuates the hot air and draws cool air from underground. The Marines are exploring solar-powered water purification systems and looking into the possibility of building a small-scale, truck-based biofuel plant that could transform local crops — like illegal poppies — into fuel.

“If the Navy comes knocking, they will build it,” Mr. Mabus said. “The price will come down and the infrastructure will be created.”

Comment

If the military gets involved things will happen rapidly. They are the biggest users of fossil fuels in the USA. They have the money and resources to make this happen, and happen quickly. This should be a boon for the manufacturers of renewable products.

Money-Saving Reuses for Plastic Soda Bottles

2010-10-02T12:54:00.000-07:00

Use these containers for keeping things cold or decorating your porch.

by: Jeff Yeager | from: AARP | September 16, 2010

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Each year, the average American drinks about 48 gallons of carbonated beverages, but only about one-third of all plastic soda bottles get recycled, according to the American Chemical Council (ACC).

We — or at least our landfills — are drowning in discarded soda bottles.

The ACC says that residential recycling programs for soda and other plastic bottles are now available to more than 80 percent of Americans, and that's clearly a solution to keeping bottles out of the landfills. But there are also several creative ways to reuse these bottles before you put them in the recycle bin. These ideas can help you save the environment — and save money at the same time.

A juicy tip. Cut the base off a two-liter plastic bottle and you have something that looks almost like the plastic juicers you buy at the grocery store. Use the base to start squeezing fresh orange juice and lemonade. Your potential savings: Buying a cheap plastic juicer will set you back at least a couple of bucks, while a fancy chrome-plated citrus press or electric juicer can cost between $20 and $200.

Dripless cold packs. Fill these bottles almost to the top with water, freeze and then use in your coolers instead of loose ice or ice in plastic bags. It's cheaper and a lot less messy than all those melting cubes. Plus, keeping your freezer filled helps to insulate it and makes it operate more efficiently, not to mention that a full freezer keeps things colder for longer in the event of a power outage. Your potential savings: about $2 to $3 for every 10-pound bag of ice.

Workout weights. Try a soda bottle workout! Fill different-sized bottles with water or sand to use as free weights on land or in the pool. A one-liter bottle filled with sand weighs about 3.5 pounds. Your potential savings: A pair of 3-pound hand weights will cost you about $10. Or cancel your gym membership and just work out with soda bottle weights instead, which will save you an average of about $600 a year.

Toilet tank trick. Drop a plastic bottle or two filled with water (or water and gravel) into your toilet tank and you'll displace enough water to save half a gallon or more with every flush. Most toilets flush just fine with less water, and you'll conserve water and save money. Your potential savings: Based on the average American household's FPP (flushes per person), a family of four will save about 16 gallons of water a day with this little trick. That could add up to saving almost $100 a year on your water bill.

Festive patio lighting: Don't put away your strings of Christmas lights after the holidays. Instead, feed them into colorful empty soda bottles and rope them together (secured with duct tape) to hang around the patio in the summertime. Your potential savings: A set of 20 patio lights costs about $25.
Just don't buy it. At best, soda is empty calories and an expense you don't need. Consider cutting soda out of your diet and budget — or at least cutting back — and drink tap water or more nutritionally beneficial beverages instead. Your potential savings: The average family of four spends nearly $1,000 a year on carbonated soft drinks.

Jeff Yeager is the author of The Ultimate Cheapskate's Road Map to True Riches and The Cheapskate Next Door. His website is www.UltimateCheapskate.com and you can friend him on Facebook at JeffYeagerUltimateCheapskate or follow him on Twitter.

62 mpg car standard by 2025? U.S. mulls options

2010-10-01T10:20:00.000-07:00

Notice of intent aims at dealing with climate and oil dependency but carmakers cite cost Interactive

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President Barack Obama checks out an all-electric Ford Focus — a model still in development — at a groundbreaking ceremony for Compact Power's advanced battery factory in Holland, Mich. on July 15. The plant will build batteries for electric vehicles including the Chevrolet Volt and Ford Focus. A new federal push for higher mileage cars will likely bolster gas-electric hybrids and all-electric vehicles.
msnbc.com staff and news service reports msnbc.com staff and news service reports
updated 1 hour 2 minutes ago

WASHINGTON — Should new cars be required to get 62 mpg by 2025? That's one scenario under an Obama administration notice filed Friday for drafting mileage standards covering the period from 2017 to 2025.

The fleet of new vehicles may need to meet a standard set somewhere from a low of 47 mpg to a high of 62 mpg, the administration said in its notice of intent.

An initial assessment shows the additional costs for producing high-mileage vehicles ranges from $800 to $3,500, its notice stated, but that cost could be "higher" when a more detailed analysis is completed by November.

The notice added, however, that the changes would lead to "lifetime savings due to reduced fuel costs of about $5,000 to over $7,000."

Moreover, the mileage gains would be the equivalent of an annual decrease in carbon dioxide emissions per mile of 3 to 6 percent.

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Updated 6 minutes ago Posts indicate student turned to staff before suicide Cops shoot father who killed 2 teenage sons Updated 62 minutes ago 62 mpg car standard by 2025? U.S. mulls options Students or servants? Ex-dean accused of abuse The move is framed as a way of attacking climate change, reducing U.S. dependency on foreign oil and growing the economy through cleaner energy jobs.

The administration's "notice of intent" was released by the Transportation Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, laying the groundwork for a proposal to be issued in September 2011 and approved by July 2012.

It gives automakers, environmental groups and states an overview of the possible standards, describe the technologies that would be needed to achieve those goals, and seek feedback from the public.

David Strickland, the administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said the notice lays out the game plan for the proposal but that the government would not make any decisions "until we have the data and the facts and the science behind us."

The time period in question, model years 2017-2025, may seem "like a long way away, but it isn't," Strickland said. "We're looking at a lot of technologies on the horizon that could be incorporated into the fleet."

35.5 mpg by 2016

But while environmentalists are behind measures to increase vehicle efficiency, automakers argue that pushing gas mileage standards up that quickly could force them to raise prices higher than drivers can afford.

After little progress during the past three decades, rules adopted earlier this year will lift the new vehicle fleet average to 35.5 mpg by 2016, an increase of more than 40 percent over current standards.

The standards are designed to improve gas mileage across each automaker's lineup and across the nation's entire fleet of new vehicles. Vehicles must meet differing standards based on their dimensions. Compact cars must get better mileage than sport utility vehicles, for example, but requirements for all types will go up.

Environmental groups say a mix of gas-electric hybrids, electric vehicles and improvements to conventional vehicles could create a vastly more efficient fleet. A target of 60 mpg by 2025 would translate to about a 6 percent improvement each year.

President Barack Obama said in May he thought it was possible for cars and trucks to cut their fuel use and carbon emissions by half within 20 years.

U.S. passenger vehicles emit about 20 percent of the nation's carbon emissions and consume about 44 percent of its oil, figures show.

Not all of industry on same page
Charles Territo, a spokesman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, said many different factors must be considered to set the maximum feasible level of fuel economy and greenhouse gas reductions.

"The danger is that a standard is put forth that increases fuel economy too quickly, adding unnecessary cost and effectively pricing consumers out of the market," Territo said.

Other parts of the automotive industry have a different take.

Aluminum suppliers, for example, were quick to tout the benefits of light-weight aluminum over traditional steel in vehicles.

Only on msnbc.com Arctic refuge oil is back as battleground Why you shouldn't eat like Gwyneth Slime mold wins silly science prize ... again! Meet the Kims — A guide to N. Korea's ruling family Airplane repairs move to foreign shops Crooks 'cram' phone bills with bogus charges "When it comes to shaking up the status quo on automotive fuel economy and emissions, aluminum can be a game changer," Randall Scheps, a spokesman for the Aluminum Association, said in a statement. "Weight is the enemy of efficiency and that’s why vehicle weight — not vehicle size — must be reduced significantly in concert with engine technology."

Suppliers of hybrid and all-electric vehicles also stand to benefit.

Later this year, several automakers will begin releasing plug-in electric hybrids and electric cars. General Motors is releasing the plug-in Chevrolet Volt, and Nissan begins selling the all-electric Leaf, opening a new wave of mass-produced electric vehicle options.

"You will have to go with the alternative that's on the table now," said John O'Dell, senior editor of Edmunds Green Car Advisor.com. "Some combination of electricity with or without an engine — conventional hybrid, plug-in, extended range. It will be a combination of those things."

Conventional hybrid automobiles are the only vehicles on the road today with a measure of commercial popularity that could come close to meeting new aggressive government targets for fuel savings and emissions reductions, these experts say.

Slideshow: Green shines at N.Y. car show (on this page)
Prius now at 51 mpg
For instance, the 2011 Prius achieves 51 mpg city/48 highway. It runs on a nickel-metal hydride battery pack and a gasoline engine.

Hybrid sales overall are down this year and represent roughly 2 percent of the U.S. automotive sales market, roughly 150,000 cars for 2010 through August. Prius accounts for about two-thirds of the total, according to industry sales figures.

Hybrid sales have traditionally gotten a boost from high gasoline prices, which this year have remained steady around $2.70 in 2010 after dramatic price swings in recent years. In 2008, gasoline hit a record $4 a gallon.

Government tax breaks and manufacturer incentives have also helped sales and some of those have expired.

O'Dell believes 10 percent market penetration would put hybrids in the mainstream — about 1 million in sales. A 4.5 percent annual gain in fuel efficiency over 2016 levels would put the industry at 53 mpg.

Brendan Bell, a lobbyist for Union of Concerned Scientists, believes the entire family of hybrid/electric vehicles could shoot to more than 50 percent of the market by 2025, depending on gasoline prices and incentives.

All-electric vehicles, because they use zero gasoline, are not measured in terms of miles per gallon of gas, but their operational costs are much less and they don't emit CO2 so they would easily make a 62-mpg equivalent ranking.

Still, obstacles to wider electric vehicle deployment include securing a steady and not costly supply of materials for nickel-metal hydride, lithium-ion, and other batteries used to power those cars.

The government is also expected to soon release a proposal for first-ever fuel efficiency and emissions standards for medium-duty and heavy-duty trucks beginning with the 2014 model year.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

Interactive: Computer chips and hybrids
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Photos: High energy, efficiency at Detroit auto show Open in new window

General Motors introduces the automaker's Cadillac XTS Platinum Concept at the show. (Rebecca Cook / Reuters) Share Back to slideshow navigation Crowded house
Journalists gather on stage after the Lincoln news conference at the show. (Carlos Osorio / AP) Share Back to slideshow navigation On Tourer
A Subaru Hybrid Tourer concept car is displayed at the show. (Carlos Osorio / AP) Share Back to slideshow navigation Advertisement | ad infoElectrifying
A Blue-Will gasoline-electric hybrid concept vehicle is displayed at the Cobo Center in Detroit, Michigan. (Bryan Mitchell / Getty Images) Share Back to slideshow navigation Aveo blue
Chevrolet Design Director Mike Simcoe unveils the Chevrolet Aveo RS show car at the show. (John F. Martin / Chevrolet via EPA) Share Back to slideshow navigation Advertisement | ad infoHang ten!
Dancers introduce the Mini Concept Beachcomber at the show. (Rob Widdis / EPA) Share Back to slideshow navigation Leave 'em hanging
Exhibit designers inspect the 2010 Buick LaCrosse mounted on the wall in the General Motors exhibit at the show. (John F. Martin / Buick Handout / EPA) Share Back to slideshow navigation
Advertisement | ad info Advertisement | ad infoCharge!
The Audi e-tron concept car, a pure electric drive auto that goes from 0 to 62 mph in 4.8 seconds, is shown at the show. (Carlos Osorio / AP) Share Back to slideshow navigation Dieter on Daimler
Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche speaks during the first press preview day at the show. (Stan Honda / AFP - Getty Images) Share Back to slideshow navigation Advertisement | ad infoCoupe de grace
A model presents the Mercedes E 350 coupe at the show. (Stan Honda / AFP - Getty Images) Share Back to slideshow navigation Advertisement | ad infoAward for Ford
The 2010 Ford Transit Connect was named North American Truck of the Year at the show. (Rob Widdis / EPA) Share Back to slideshow navigation Dance break
Dancers add that certain something to the introduction of the Volkswagen NCC Hybrid Concept during the press preview at the show. (Bryan Mitchell / Getty Images) Share Back to slideshow navigation The gang's all here
Journalists gather on stage after Ford Motor Co. introduces the next generation Ford Focus at the show. (Carlos Osorio / AP) Share Back to slideshow navigation Executive summary

Ford Motor Co. CEO Alan Mulally, left, and Executive Chairman William Ford, Jr., pose beside to the next-generation Ford Focus 5-door at the show. (Carlos Osorio / AP) Share Back to slideshow navigation Small package

The Toyota FT-CH compact hybrid is displayed at the auto show. (Stan Honda / AFP - Getty Images) Share Back to slideshow navigation Regal bearing
Global Chief Engineer Jim Federico presents the GMC Buick Regal during the first press preview day at the show. (Stan Honda / AFP - Getty Images) Share Back to slideshow navigation Rock show

The GMC Granite concept car takes the stage at the auto show. (Stan Honda / AFP - Getty Images) Share Back to slideshow navigation I'd like to thank ...
Ford Motor Co. President of the Americas Mark Fields holds up the 2010 North American Truck of the Year award and Car of the Year award at the show. The Ford Fusion Hybrid was named the 2010 North American Car of the Year and Ford Transit Connect was named the 2010 North American Truck of the Year. (Carlos Osorio / AP) Share Back to slideshow navigation Opening day

Journalists from around the world walk through the displays during the opening hour of the show. More than 700 vehicles, including 60 new models, are being exhibited. (Bill Pugliano / Getty Images) Share Back to slideshow navigation Shocker

A Green Vehicles' Triac is on display at the show. The 100 percent electric vehicle has a top speed of 80 miles per hour, and a 100-mile range. (Bill Pugliano / Getty Images) Share Back to slideshow navigation
In the mix Ford shows off its Fusion hybrid at the show, where it was awarded North American Car of the Year . (Bill Pugliano / Getty Images) Share Back to slideshow navigation

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood speaks to the media standing near a Volkswagen Golf during the the first press preview day at the show. (Stan Honda / AFP - Getty Images) Share Back to slideshow navigation Feeling blue
Mitsubishi President and CEO Shinichi Kurihara, introduces Mitsubishi's all-new Crossover Utility Vehicle at the New York International Auto Show at the Javits Center in New York City. (Emile Wamsteker / Getty Images)
Notice of intent aims at dealing with climate and oil dependency but carmakers cite cost
“
as far as i'm concerned, this should be a matter of national security... 65 mpg would end the stranglehold foreign oil has on us now. Ford has the diesel Fiesta in England, right now, that gets 65 + MPG. Bring it over. People are too hooked on horsepower, speed, and luxury. Big, fast cars are the past, not the future.

”
Expand Collapse garyg-1228020, with 5Reply
“
What the heck are WE waiting for? 60 MPG by 2015 should be the goal...

I guess the US auto companies enjoy having us fighting wars in places like Iraq to secure oil for their over sized and gas guzzling vehicles.

Drill-baby-drill.....it kills the environment, it kills people, it kills our balance of payments, it kills our mfg. base in the US.....but it makes for a nice big fat top line and profits for big oil and bid auto companies....and so the execs get their big fat bonuses.

But the "small people" suffer as a result.....because of gas guzzlers, oil is more expensive, food is more expensive, everything that the small people struggle to afford (basic essentials) is more expensive. The rich don't care......they just hold back on what trickles down to the serfs.

Drill-baby-drill.........so we can all look like Texas.

”
Expand Collapse steve-641900, with 4Reply
“
Yep. It runs off of smoke and mirrors, like the rest of the Obama administration.

City to Stop Using Rivers as Giant Toilet

2010-10-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

By Matt Chaban
September 29, 2010 | 6:21 p.m

When the tornado hit Brooklyn the other week, it not only knocked over trees and damaged property. It also sent a wave of raw sewage cascading into the Gowanus. (WARNING: This video is kind of gross.):

This happens all over the city every time it rains. The reason is because our sewer system, like our subway, is decades and in some places centuries old. The city still operates a combined-sewer-overflow system. All that wastewater is not only odoriferous but also screws up the marine chemistry. The EPA is none too happy about it.

Fortunately for our noses and the fishes, the Bloomberg administration announced a plan yesterday to address this problem, called NYC Green Infrastructure. It includes the expansion of the city's traditional "grey" water systems of tunnels and cisterns as well as a new emphasis on green roofs, absorbent pavement and a dozen other fixes. The measures are expected to reduce sewage outflows up to 40 percent by 2030 and save the city $2.4 billion in sanitation costs between now and then. It's yet another piece of PlaNYC sustainability coming to fruition.

And yet what goes unsaid in that 40 percent figure is that 60 percent of our waste will still be creeping into the creeks whenever it rains too hard. Granted it would take an astronomical expenditure to completely fix this problem. But like a dainty lady in polite company, it's better not to discuss such things.

mchaban [at] observer.com / @mc_nyo

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COMMENTS (4 posted)
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City to Stop Using Rivers as Giant Toilet
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Using the rivers as a giant toilet
Submitted by Paula Piekos on Thu, 09/30/2010 - 01:55.
Although no one likes to hear it, this attitude is also noticeable in Westchester County.

In White Plains, I know that there are human sewage lines running very near the water runnoff storm system lines, and that there are damaged pipes along the way. I believe that this adds to the bacteria problems that are documented in Long Island Sound.

Also, the whole city was designed long ago in an archaic manner, where as it was planned, water runoff was always handled by just having storm drains shunt water off into a small river, which now rages uncontrollably when there are large storms. As I said, this was the design thought up years ago, but is still utilized today when developers want to build on wet lots. Well-paid design teams come up with mitigation ideas, such as dry wells, but when there are extreme conditions, the water level swamps the dry wells and they are useless. In addition, the city's DPW simplistically adds storm drains to enable the building on these lots. The Village of Mamaroneck is downstream from us, and I was warning about the wrongness of shunting our excess water toward them even before the devastating floods a few years back.

Another way in which we are misusing our rivers is that there really is no awareness that out eco-themed Gedney Landfill puts a good face forward to visitors on tours about how well it's run and eco-friendly it is, but viewers are blocked from seeing the deplorable way the small river that runs through it is treated. The Gedney Landfill hosts an area of the Mamaroneck River but no attempt is made to be sure that an enormous amount of disgusting garbage does not leave the premises via the waterway when it rains. I believe it is viewed as a convenient, cheap way to rid their property of trash. Rather than remove the floating debris from their property before it goes downstream, it is easier to look the other way and ignore the situation, as with each storm, it will flush out and end up in downstream residents bushes and bridges, until it eventually enters the Long Island Sound in Mamaroneck. It's hard to see this because the river is well-hidden by woods and is not visible on the walking tours.

It's time to stop treating our rivers as a feature that we can use to carry off our trash and storm water. When the economy improves, I hope that the Department of Public Works does not go back to the pre-recession practice of routinely adding stamps of approval to plans for houses on wet lots and just add city storm drains at the taxpayer's expense. It's just more water and more garbage downstream to Mamaroneck and to the Sound.

reply
River as Toilet
Submitted by Paula Piekos on Thu, 09/30/2010 - 02:07.
Your video is fabulous documentation. The audio almost makes it as good as having scratch-and-sniff video. The bystanders in the parking lot holding their noses really helped, too
Thanks for sharing an important video piece. I hope you have alerted the proper governmental agencies to its existence, so maybe something will be done more quickly.
If you monitor you site, how often have you seen this happen?
I have photos posted of the garbage that the City of White Plains allows to sit in the stream portion of the Mamaroneck River. The public can't see the existence of this garbage, but it feels to me that the city uses storm events to flush the property, knowing full well that the litter will clog our bridges, get stuck in waterfront brush, and end up going through Mamaroneck and end up in the Long Island Sound. Much of it consists of dog waste bags.

Thanks for your great video work.

reply
River as toilet
Submitted by Paula Piekos on Thu, 09/30/2010 - 02:11.
Sorry - I forgot to tell you where you might want to see my photos of how White Plains uses a river as a giant trash disposal at their Gedney Landfill. Go to the Whiteplainsecoissues.com site and look at the Landfill Gallery. The photos are old, but it is always like this, just with different garbage after each rain.

reply
Permapave
Submitted by morgera on Thu, 09/30/2010 - 11:41.
DPW and cities alike are more and more now starting green infrastructure projects. One reason is because these types of technologies mimic the natural processes in nature. The other is cost. We can reduce flooding and pollution from stormwater runoff with permeable pavement like Permapave but also reduce maintenance spending and prevent CSO's.

By making roadways and highways permeable, these biggest culprits of runoff and pollution can now be part of the solution. Rainwater can percolate through the ground and not be forced to combine with waste water. Thus, a reduction in runoff will be a reduction in treating stormwater at wastewater facilities.

Permapave is one type of pavement that has been replacing pervious asphalt and concrete in city stormwater projects. Its worth to take a look at it if your goal is improving water quality and reducing city spending.

$1.5 Billion Plan Would Cut Sewage Flow Into City Waters

2010-10-01T05:49:00.000-07:00

By MIREYA NAVARRO
Published: September 28, 2010

The Bloomberg administration wants to invest up to $1.5 billion over the next 20 years on new environmental techniques to reduce the flow of sewage into the city’s waterways.

Related
Green Blog: Sewage Overflow in New York? Believe It (September 29, 2010)

A blog about energy and the environment.

The plan, announced on Tuesday by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, calls for building an infrastructure to capture and retain storm water before it reaches the sewer system and overloads it. The city would foster investments in projects like green roofs with plantings, porous pavement for parking lots, rain barrels, wetlands and depressions for collecting water in parks, for example.

Such strategies would complement more traditional methods to control sewage overflows like underground storage tanks and tunnel systems.

The plan is intended to block the overflow of untreated sewage and storm water into bodies of water like New York Harbor, Jamaica Bay and Newtown Creek when it rains. This week, Newtown Creek, which straddles Brooklyn and Queens, was designated a federal Superfund cleanup site by the Environmental Protection Agency because of severe pollution that includes discharges from sewer pipes that would otherwise overwhelm the city’s 14 wastewater treatment plants.

And another sewage-choked body, Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, was designated a Superfund site in March.

The problem of overflow from sewers is common around the country, and the city’s proposed solutions parallel approaches that are being tried in other cities.

City officials said that the natural features like plantings would help reduce sewer overflows by 40 percent by 2030 and reduce the city’s sewer management costs by $2.4 billion over 20 years, helping to keep water bills down for ratepayers. Up to 30 billion gallons of overflows from the city’s sewer system, which carries both sanitary sewage and storm water from the streets, end up in the waterways each year.

“Our green infrastructure plan is bringing a new approach to an old problem by using natural means to capture the storm water that too frequently overloads the system,” Mr. Bloomberg said in a statement. “The plan will help clean our waterways, green the city and reduce the costs for residents and business owners, who pay the bills for maintaining the city’s water and sewer systems.”

The federal Environmental Protection Agency promotes green infrastructure as a cost-effective and environmentally preferable alternative to conventional overflow management. Such methods also draw support from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which enforces federal Clean Water Act requirements and consent orders under which New York City is upgrading its treatment plants and dealing with the overflow issue.

James Tierney, the department’s assistant commissioner for water resources, said the state had already approved a similar green infrastructure plan for the City of Syracuse and for Onondaga County.

“It’s a way to hold the water in the landscape and do it in a way that beautifies a community,” he said.

Mr. Tierney said the department would undertake a careful review of the engineering involved in New York City’s plan, but added, “We’re interested in exploring it and making it happen.”

Environmental groups say that sewer overflows are the biggest water quality problem in the region, keeping many waterways from meeting federal standards for fishing, swimming and a healthy habitat for wildlife.

Paul Gallay, executive director of the environmental group Riverkeeper, which monitors water quality in the waterways around the city, called the mayor’s plan “a good start.”

“Green infrastructure is great, but there has to be enough of it to achieve water quality standards, and it has to be complemented with the more traditional approaches,” he said. “It’s a question of the mix.”

Eric Goldstein, New York City director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, also welcomed the plan, saying it was a step “in the right direction” for addressing overflow.

“There will be some spirited negotiations to secure agreement on the all-important details,” he predicted.

Cas Holloway, the city’s environmental protection commissioner, said that most of the efforts would be financed through capital projects like roads and sidewalks. The city would also impose requirements for new private residential and commercial development, effectively adding $900 million in private investment to the $1.5 billion outlay.

For example, the city plans to tighten regulations to limit the amount of runoff allowed to emerge from a new property.

The goal, Mr. Holloway said, is for the city’s landscape to absorb about 12 billion gallons of untreated runoff and wastewater a year that now fouls up the waterways. “You need to make the city more permeable,” he said.

Comment

New Yorkers are really under water now, with all the rains going up the east coast.

3 Trashy Ideas For Building Greener Cities

2010-09-30T07:53:00.000-07:00

3 Trashy Ideas For Building Greener Cities

posted by: Beth Buczynski 19 hours ago

In a recent post, I highlighted a Swiss study that questioned whether or not recycling is really the greenest fate for plastic waste.

The reader response was passionate and varied, but one comment stood out: Care2 member Julieta S. wrote, "I think we should start making garbage bricks... some would stand for more than hundreds [of] years... right? (please steal this idea)."

While I had never thought of making bricks from trash, it seemed like a sensible way to build green structures using the ultra-durable plastic waste that's causing our planet so much trouble.

Here's what I found...thanks for the idea Julieta!

1. "Ecological Bricks" for Low-Income Housing in Argentina

Argentina's Experimental Center for Economical Housing (Centro Experimental de la Vivienda Económica – CEVE) has developed a brick made of used food (primarily candy) wrappers and plastic (primarily PET) soda and water bottles.

The raw materials are supplied by Córdoba's selective collection plant, collection points in schools and government agencies, plus rejects from the local bottling plant.

The plastics are ground up and then mixed with Portland cement and chemical additives to make the bricks (pictured above) and something CEVE calls "brick plates." The CEVE project hires unemployed youth (between 18-24 years old) to make the bricks. The participants can use the bricks to build their own mini-houses (The Temas Blog).

2. "Byfusion" Machine Makes Building Blocks

It took a New Zealand man 10 years to put together a prototype recycling machine that could turn raw plastic into useful building materials, but now, the "Byfusion" machine is spitting out the building blocks of a multimillion-dollar business.

Peter Lewis' machine can swallow most types of raw plastic and turn it into compacted plastic bricks or other shapes.

A new brick, formed from over 20 pounds of plastic, emerges from the recycling machine every 30-45 seconds.
The rock-hard bricks can be used for garden retaining or landscaping walls, and have other potential uses including shock absorbers behind crash barriers (Otago Daily Times).

3. Interlocking Polli-Bricks Made From Plastic Bottles

Earlier this year, Taiwan jumped to the front page of green websites all over the world when it was announced that a building commissioned by Far Eastern Group was built using bricks made from 1.5 million plastic botles.

These Polli-Bricks create an interlocking shape that's light weight and structural at the same time. When connected, Polli-Bricks almost look like a honeycomb. The building, dubbed the EcoARK, can be taken apart and reassembled at another side with relative ease, and was and later donated to city government in Taipei.

Do you know of other cool building techniques that utilize waste? Share them in a comment!

Read more: plastic, argentina, waste, recycling, taiwan, trash, new zealand, environment & wildlife, green building

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Victoria S. says
Sep 30, 2010 7:35 AM
If it were properly sealed, Plastic can be molded to mimic every thing in nature. Think of all the Forests we could save by no longer cutting them down for building materials. We could properly maintain them by means that have been proven to work for sustainability. All this information exists now, but will not be funded by our Congress or House that are 80% Bought by Wealth that do not want any changes to take place as long as they can keep making huge profits. We have to do this ourselves in our own communities and not wait for them to implement any of this kind of innovation. I have already gotten almost everyone where I work to collect the PVC plastic gift cards and store credits to keep then out of our land fills. If everyone suggest this to the business as a way to be "greener", the companies would remove 700 tons a year of this product that will leach out into our water and cause illness. We The People have to be an underground source of change for the better for us all, while they will do anything for money we will have less use for their money or their useless overpriced services. We can think of ways!

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Michelle Staples says
Sep 30, 2010 6:40 AM
I can see this leading to a whole new industry of ships gathering up the waste in the middle of oceans. Right on!

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nancy sands says
Sep 30, 2010 6:37 AM
GOOD IDEAS!

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Mike Masley says
Sep 30, 2010 6:06 AM
The idea is good, but not sure I would want to live around all of that plastic.

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Mark S. says
Sep 30, 2010 6:04 AM
The best solution (from an environmental POV) would of course be to stop using plastics altogether. And I would hate for a solution like this to lead to even further use of fossil fuels. That being said, it is a brilliant use of the plastics we've already made.

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Kate Kenner says
Sep 30, 2010 6:03 AM
the goal seems like it should be to stop making so many products that are bad for the planet yet that will not happen it seems. It seems like an idea that should be seriously considered. I am tired of picking up plastic bottles and bags every day (I know that bags are not included in this plan.) Somehow I don't think flying them around Pluto is a very good plan, Nyack. There is enough trash out there. Thank goodness in you are not on the committee to dispose of trash.

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Michele Hill says
Sep 30, 2010 5:35 AM
i do see what you mean, this is a great idea, if its safe, BUT what are the numbers?? i know that i think its a 1,3,7 are safe for us to use. the rest are not. even though they sell it to us, like rubbermaid, etc. i'm talking about on the bottom of the containers, anything that is not them numbers and they will leach into our bodies, so if it gets to hot, the fumes, geuss where their going? into us, lungs, etc. if you have a new born, and he gets asthma, Hmm i'd start wondering where he got it. or if you were pregnant and living in that building, and your baby comes out with respitory problems i'd start to wonder exactly how this came about. Don't get me wrong!! i LOVE the fact that they are reusing the plastic, and a huge amount of its going somewhere, but are they safe numbers for us to live in?? if they are, i'm all for it!! **big smile**

Comment

I saw a program last night on CNBC about using plastic water bottles to make shirts, rugs, and other stuff here in South carolina. BMW uses plastic water bottles recycled to make their car seats.

Scotland to Run Off 100% Renewable Energy by 2025

2010-09-30T07:45:00.000-07:00

Scotland to Run Off 100% Renewable Energy by 2025
posted by: Jasmine Greene 13 hours ago

While many countries are complaining about the Copenhagen requirements, other countries are striving to go above and beyond the call of duty. Last week Northern Ireland stated that they were hoping to have 40 percent of the country running off renewable energy. This week, new First Minister of Scotland Alex Salmond went even further, stating that the country could be running off of 100 percent renewable energy by 2025.

This ambitious goal happened a week after the SNP administration upped Scotland's renewable energy goal from 50 percent to 80 percent by 2020. Salmond announced the 100 percent goal in front of the Scottish Low Carbon Investment Conference citing new Offshore Wind "Route Map" that would focus first on key areas to achieve immediate results:

Investment in infrastructure;
Appropriate supply chain;
Ongoing innovation of technologies and practices;
Regulation of and access to the electricity grid;
Managing the marine environment;
Necessary and available skills;
Finance [Source: NewEnergy]

and also cited priority recommendations to give Scotland the best chance at securing the best-case scenario route map which includes increasing supply and demand of renewable energy, up-skilling or re-skilling of workforces, bringing in large investments and providing incentives to harbor and port owners for offshore wind farms. For the project to be successful, over £200 billion would be needed by 2020 for any chance of success. While this number may sound large, Salmond is confident that they will receive the funding and states, "Investment on this scale established today's North Sea oil and gas industry. Scotland's second wave of offshore energy offers unique investment opportunities..." [Source: STV news].

Salmond's confidence that Scotland could run off of 100 percent renewable energy is also not unfounded. Scotland currently has under 3 GW of renewable energy capacity, mostly from onshore wind turbines, but it has the potential to generate up to 63 GW of low-carbon electricity, under six times more than the current model of fossil fuels and renewable energy. Scotland's major source of energy would come from offshore windfarms and tidal stream power, with hyrdopower, biomass and geothermal making up a small fraction of the total power [Source: Treehugger]. Scotland has already tapped into tidal power after creating the world's largest tidal power plant unveiled at the beginning of September 2010. This power plant generates enough power for 1,000 homes (around 1 MW of energy) [Source: Wired]. The coasts of Scotland could potentially harness around a quarter of Europe's potential offshore wind and tidal capacity and a tenth of its wave resource. Besides being better for the environment, creating alternate power generators would also lead to 60,000 more jobs with 28,000 directly servicing domestic and international wind markets [Source: Business 7].

While Scotland would be weening the country off of fossil fuels, it will continue to maintain some coal and nuclear power plants to supply surplus energy to other countries, most notably the UK. This will actually mean that Scotland produces only 63 percent of its energy from renewable sources. Still, the aim is much higher than the baseline 20 percent standard for the rest of the EU nations and certainly higher than the US.

Read more: environment & wildlife, scotland renewable energy

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Robert B. says
Sep 30, 2010 7:31 AM
The US could do this too.We must eventually do it before it's too late. IF the greedy corporate owned right will either get out of the way or help, not constantly hinder the present administration. We have the resources, what we need is sane rational political will!

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Jennifer Griffith says
Sep 30, 2010 7:28 AM
If more countries would just stop whining & get to work, I'd bet that at least a dozen countries could reach this same goal. It's like the kid putting off doing homework: It has to be done, but whining & procrastinating is just making it worse. Quit whining, sit down, shut up & "git 'er done!"

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Robert B. says
Sep 30, 2010 7:25 AM
Dear "Barry O'Bama"
You seem to be another one of those no-profile frauds who have either been hired to sign up on Care2 to be a pain or you're just doing it on your own. If you can't be constructive , DON'T BOTHER!

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neil a. says
Sep 30, 2010 7:19 AM
Scottish engineers are known(but often forgotten world wide) they built or designed so many engineering projects all over the world & so many went to USA, Andrew Carnegie & so many others. Scotland can do it but should concentrate on perfecting wave power which could be 24/7 & not depend on wind or Sun, looks as if California is getting going. I am Scots & various other nationalities. here in Spain we are hydro, wind, photovoltaic & solar turbine so totally sustainable, if anything is??

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Jo C. says
Sep 30, 2010 7:18 AM
I meant 'throughout' this area. Sorry.

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Martin P. says
Sep 30, 2010 7:11 AM
This is a great step, but i think Scotland could do it! And all the other industrial states of the northern hemisphere should learn a lesson from Scotland!!!

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Donald Jensen says
Sep 30, 2010 7:04 AM
Gene W. Said... "This sounds so great until you look at the statistics, the population of Scotland is 5.1 million people"
It doesn't matter if there are 5 million or 500 million. The US can do this just as easily if we CHOOSE to but as long as the "Climate Skeptic Sheep" continue to support greedy energy, coal and oil production goals, we will live in this filthy environment. And Chris W. said the "Climate Change Gravy Train" Really? Who stands to lose and who stands to profit here? Tax payers or Big Energy? It's big energy that has created the climate controversy for their own greedy interest, not us conscious Americans who are working to save our way of life by preserving the things that sustain us and keep us alive.

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kathie f. says
Sep 30, 2010 7:04 AM
truly commendable and inspiring! instead of whining about having to change and submitting to the proposed standards, scotland is embracing them with their "we can do this and we can do more" attitude; the united states should pay attention instead of listening to big oil lobbyists and continuing to rape the environment and jeopardize the oceans and, in fact, entire ecosystems and ultimately, the planet, with their greed and "more offshore drilling". california, we have a chance in november to make a small difference and start pointing ourselves in the right direction; in 2006 or 2007 voters rejected an initiative that would have required big oil and other other energy monopolies to start exploring renewable energy sources, and, by letting them win that election, we have been paying the price! remember that those who do not learn from past mistakes tend to repeat them. we have so many more resources and so much more funding than scotland, we should be certainly be trying to at least stay in the race to use alternative renewable energy for ourselves!

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Jo C. says
Sep 30, 2010 6:59 AM
I live in West Lothian in Scotland and there are small wind farms being created throught this area. So far, they have placed them in the fields so, no trees have been cut down. They haven't had a detrimental effect on the surrounding areas at all and although they are not the prettiest sight, I'm happy to see them. We all know politicians are great at telling us what we want to hear, but in this case, they're actually getting on with the job.

Engineers foresee big changes for electric grid

2010-09-28T05:49:00.000-07:00

September 28, 2010 4:33 AM PDT

by Martin LaMonica

WALTHAM, Mass.--Technologies now being tested on the grid are a step toward strengthening the U.S. energy infrastructure and boosting the economy, according to speakers at an IEEE conference on the grid.

After relatively little change for decades, the electric grid is poised for a technical facelift that could include small nuclear power plants, new forms of grid storage, a network of electric vehicles, and power electronics that control large flows of energy efficiently, speakers here said yesterday. The IEEE is a professional organization of engineers.

Images: The many faces of the smart grid

The pace of investing in research and development in the power industry slowed over the years, but government policies to improve energy security and reduce pollution are speeding innovation, said Stanley Blazewicz, vice president and global head of technology at utility National Grid.

Energy storage could be a disruptive technology to the electric power industry because it would "firm" up supply of wind and solar power, which are intermittent sources of energy. The U.K., for example, has an aggressive target of getting 30 gigawatts of its power from wind power. (A typical large nuclear plant produces about one gigawatt.) One option to make wind more reliable is to add storage but a significant amount is needed--about 20 percent of the generating capacity, he said.

The most economically viable grid storage technologies right now are for supplying short periods of power to stabilize the grid with flywheels or batteries. Those early applications set the stage for bulk energy storage but utility regulations need to be updated to address energy storage technologies, Blazewicz said.

"Storage breaks a founding principle of the utility industry which is that you can't store the commodity. That principle has driven everything around the industry--the way it's designed, how you regulate it, and the way to make money," he said.

In the near term, electric vehicles have the potential to strain the local distribution grid if several people in the neighborhood charge at once. Based on demographics, National Grid has drawn a map of areas in its region which are likely to have high densities of EVs and is planning its network upgrades on that. Smart charging, where cars charge at off-peak times, is also crucial.

Solid-state lighting is another technology that could make a big impact. For consumers, solid-state lighting, such as LED bulbs, offer a jump in energy efficiency, he said, and the technology allows for factors such as temperature and wavelength to be tuned.

By contrast, Blazewicz said that adding IT and communications to the electric grid--also known as the smart grid--is more evolutionary since utilities are adopting IT to improve automation and efficiency, as many other industries have already done.

He added that when it comes to consumers and the smart grid, it's not clear that consumers will be eager to share energy consumption data and actively manage energy for better efficiency. National Grid plans to work with other companies to offer home efficiency recommendations, because it expects other companies to communicate conservation tips better to consumers, Blazewicz said.

ARPA-E's power electronics gambit

The electric power industry, which contributes about 40 percent of U.S. carbon emissions, offers a number of areas for the U.S. to take a technological lead globally, said keynote speaker Rajeev Ram, the program director for electrical power at the Department of Energy's ARPA-E agency. ARPA-E, which was authorized in 2007 and funded in last year's stimulus plan, is geared toward funding energy technology breakthroughs by focusing on advancing research to the prototype phase, he said.

The ARPA-E program most closely aligned with the electric grid is called Agile Delivery of Electrical Power Technology (ADEPT), which is funding research in power electronics to reduce the amount of wasted energy in power delivery.

Improvements in power electronics, which match electrical supply with the load, can make a significant difference on the overall efficiency of the grid and other electric components, such as variable speed industrial motors and power supplies. Losses in the distribution side of the electricity grid add up to about 200 million tons or carbon dioxide a year, the equivalent of 56 coal plants, said Ram.

The program is funding research in advanced materials to make equipment such as transformers more efficient and able to handle higher amounts of power in a smaller footprint, he said. The research is also geared at chip-scale power converters which could be used to optimize output of solar photovoltaic arrays and make solid-state lighting cheaper.

Advanced power electronics could result in a 25 percent to 30 percent reduction in electricity consumption in the U.S. But ARPA-E also has an explicit economic goal of improving technical innovation in the U.S. and bringing U.S. manufacturers back to the fore in the power industry, said Ram.

"What we're really trying to do is to help companies develop a product," he said. "We want to accelerate basic science to prototypes."

Small nukes?

In another talk, nuclear weapons and power expert Victor Reis, who is a senior advisor in the Department of Energy, said that small, modular nuclear power systems could be the quickest way to reignite the nuclear power industry in the U.S.

There are at least two designs of nuclear power plants, which use the same fuel as large reactors but are small enough that cost isn't as large a barrier to construction. He named the Babcock & Wilcox mPower modular reactor, which can produce 125 megawatts, and the reactor from NuScale Power, which can produce 45 megawatts.

Reis argued that Department of Energy labs and facilities, which consume a lot of electricity, should be the first customers for these systems in the U.S. This would help scale up production of these systems to help bring the cost down.

The primary barrier to their adoption in the U.S. is political, not the technology or the permitting, he said.

"I believe the DOE is very serious about doing it," he said. "It's hardly a done deal but I think everyone in the department, including Secretary (Steven) Chu recognizes it as very important."

National Grid executive director, Tom King, also focused on energy policy in his morning talk. He said there is available funding from utilities to improve the energy system of the U.S. but the country lacks a policy and regulations to make the grid more efficient and reliable. Blackouts cost $1 billion annually but publicly funded research and development for electricity delivery and reliability is only $170 million, he said.

"The U.S . is one of the few countries that doesn't have a robust roadmap in the use of the energy infrastructure, the use of energy resources, and how we deploy them on a timeline," King said.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20017810-54.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20#ixzz10pOrvx3T

Partnerships Aim to Accelerate EV, Smart Grid Development

2010-09-27T12:28:00.000-07:00

September 27, 2010

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While GE and Better Place have teamed up to accelerate the global deployment of electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure, with one goal of converting corporate fleets to electric vehicles as a way to lower cost and carbon emissions, Hitachi and Panasonic’s partnership is aimed at creating smart communities.

The collaboration between GE and Better Place, an EV services provider, is focused on four key areas: standards-based technology development, battery financing, joint fleet electrification programs and consumer awareness.

The partnership leverages GE’s global and broad technology portfolio, smart grid expertise, and its new WattStation electric vehicle charger with Better Place’s EV services and infrastructure solution to create scalable solutions that power electric vehicles for nearly all consumers and fleet owners.

GE’s WattStation will be compatible with the Better Place network, enabling consumers to manage charging costs under Better Place’s network, while charging their vehicles using GE’s WattStation. It will guarantee that drivers can “roam” from one charge point to another under one seamless transaction for faster charging.

GE and Better Place also will develop a battery financing program that begins with a pilot project to finance 10,000 batteries in Israel and Denmark, which are the first two markets for Better Place.

The companies also are collaborating to target fleet owners for pilot projects to test a comprehensive fleet electrification offering model in major city centers and connecting highways. The goal is to convert corporate fleet owners to electric fleets, delivering a lower cost of ownership while reducing carbon emissions.

Target pilot locations include cities in North America, including the San Francisco Bay Area, Honolulu, Hawaii, and Ontario, Canada, as well as cities in Europe, Asia and Australia. Better Place is already working towards initial network deployments in these markets, beginning in 2011.

Better Place and GE, as part of its ecomagination initiative, also will focus on raising consumer awareness to understand the economic and environmental value of electric vehicles and the infrastructure required for adoption.

The Hitachi and Panasonic agreement is focused on interface development and standardization initiatives to commercialize community energy management systems (CEMS) and home energy management systems (HEMS) to drive the development of “smart” communities. Hitachi brings to the table its expertise in CEMS technologies, while Panasonic offers HEMS technologies.

The companies say in order to create these smart communities, which use information and telecommunication technologies to link power systems based on smart grids, all systems ranging from the energy supply side to the energy demand side must be linked.

CEMS link and manage the supply side — the main electricity grid beginning from power generation facilities, including wind power, large-scale photovoltaic solar power, and other renewable energy systems — and various demand side systems in detached houses, condominiums, office buildings and elsewhere including such systems as electric vehicle (EV) charging, while HEMS connect home appliances, photovoltaic solar power generators, home-use EV chargers, storage batteries and other facilities and equipment to support energy conservation.

Their goal is to jointly develop international standard interfaces for CEMS and HEMS through projects such as the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City project. Hitachi is already providing environmental technologies and solutions for this eco-city project currently under development on the outskirts of Tianjin, China. The two companies will also share market information on CEMS- and HEMS-related businesses.

Seven national smart-grid organizations recently launched the Global Smart Grid Federation (GSGF) to promote best practices and to help accelerate the deployment of smart grid around the world. GSGF will work with government policymakers to execute a national agenda on smart grid, helping governments understand these challenges, including consumer engagement, innovation and capacity building.

SF Giants Installing Solar Panels at AT&T Park

2010-09-27T10:40:00.000-07:00

March 20, 2007

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The San Francisco Giants and PG&E are planning to install 590 solar panels around AT&T Park to generate 123 kilowatts of power for the San Francisco power grid, The Examiner reports (via Green Options).

Although the Giants will be hosting the solar panels and working with PG&E for ongoing promotions, the park will not use the power collected, instead PG&E will sell the electricity its customers. If they did use the energy, it would be enough to power their new high-definition scoreboard screen for the year.

Ze-Gen Gasification Facility to Power Industrial Park

2010-09-27T10:35:00.000-07:00

September 27, 2010

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Ze-gen plans to build a $15-million gasification facility at the Attleboro Corporate Campus that will supply energy to the businesses in that industrial park, after three years of testing its waste-to-energy technology in New Bedford, Mass., reports The New England Business Bulletin.

Ze-gen says the “Attleboro Clean Energy Project” could divert 44,000 tons of waste (an average of 150 tons per day) from landfills every year, while creating less pollution and lower emissions than energy production from fossil fuels, according to the article.

Bill Davis, president and CEO of Ze-gen, told The New England Business Bulletin that he hopes to continue to test in its leased New Bedford facility for the next year, and is currently in discussions with the Department of Environmental Protection about renewing its annual Research and Development (R & D) permits to allow it to operate in the city for another year, while construction is under way in Attleboro.

The New Bedford plant has been testing the conversion of waste materials into synthesis gas, or “syngas,” which is fed into a boiler to make steam and electricity. The gasification process uses six materials — wood pallets, railroad crossties, utility poles, non-recyclable source-separated plastics, carpet fibers, and recycled coolant glycol (anti-freeze) residuals — that would have ended up in landfills or incinerators.

The company is in the permitting stage, seeking both state and local permits, reports The New England News Bulletin. Davis said in the article that the company hopes to start preparing for the new facility at the end of the year and be in full operation a year later.

The project is financed by the company’s investors but Davis hopes to qualify for federal incentives. Davis said in the article that the facility will generate a positive return on investment and be commercially viable. The company plans to build similar facilities around the globe that runs on additional waste streams.

Other companies are also looking into gasification technologies to turn waste into energy. As an example, in March, S4 Energy Solutions, a joint venture formed by Waste Management and InEnTec, announced it would build a plasma gasification facility at Waste Management’s Columbia Ridge Landfill in Arlington, Ore., that will convert municipal solid waste into clean fuels and renewable energy.

Clean-energy miracles: Myth or viable strategy?

2010-09-27T05:58:00.000-07:00

September 24, 2010 4:00 AM PDT

by Martin LaMonica

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--As people consider the best path to a sustainable energy future, two polar ends of a debate are emerging between those who argue for a big boost in technology research and those who advocate more aggressive use of existing technology.

Those who work at incumbent companies in the oil and gas industry don't expect miracles with the ability to transform energy overnight, according to speakers at the EmTech conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology yesterday.

At the opposite extreme are techno-optimists, such as Bill Gates and venture capitalist John Doerr, who say that much more money should be plowed into research and development to stimulate clean-energy innovation.

Funding more energy research is a good idea, but don't expect even a sharp increase in spending to turn energy around quickly, said Jose Bravo, chief scientist at Shell Global Solutions, during a panel.

"You don't create miracles by throwing money at something--that's never been the case," Bravo said. "It's not like you'll wake up one morning and Bill Gates has funded a project that saved the Earth."

Many of today's green-technology entrepreneurs and investors have come from the IT industry, where the pace of change has been rapid and relentless. But the major energy transitions that happened in the past--from wood to coal, for example--took decades.

Expecting energy to operate at the same pace as Moore's Law and the world of bits and bytes is misguided, said Elisabeth Moyer, assistant professor of atmospheric science at the University of Chicago.

"There's been a lot of excessive techno-optimism based on people's experience with information technology. It's just not that way in energy. You're constrained by the laws of physics," Moyer said during a talk. "It's going to be big, hard, expensive, and slow. There's really no way around it."

What are your options?

The Obama administration made clean-energy investments a big part of the economic stimulus package and continues to make energy research a priority through a number of initiatives. The ARPA-E agency, for example, is tasked with placing bets on breakthrough energy technologies in areas such as energy storage and recycling carbon dioxide from power plants.

High-profile investor Vinod Khosla, who manages a $1 billion green-technology fund, regularly argues that people underestimate the impact of technology innovation. Khosla chases potential game-changing ideas, such as Calera, which has a process for making cement using waste carbon dioxide, and Kior, a start-up that is testing a process to make bio-gasoline from wood.

"A better way to forecast the future is to invent it because it's been proven that extrapolating the past doesn't work," Khosla said at the ARPA-E Summit in March. Bill Gates, meanwhile, has invested in TerraPower, a company pursuing a nuclear reactor design that would use spent fuel from other nuclear power plants, allowing it to operate for decades without fueling.

Speakers on the energy panel at EmTech yesterday advocated for more technology research and development in renewable energy, biofuels, and carbon capture and storage. But they made clear that the immediate future will continue to be dominated by hydrocarbons and that all energy sources, including renewable energy, come with tradeoffs and costs.

Looking for a clean-energy home run (photos)

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ExxonMobil, for example, has a research and development project with Synthetic Genomics to make liquid fuels from genetically engineered strains of algae. But algae production takes huge amounts of water. Making a modest amount of oil from algae--about 150,000 barrels per day--would require all the water that Mexico City consumes in a day, said Shell's Bravo.

Solar, which accounts for less than 1 percent of power generation in the U.S., is more expensive than wind for making electricity. However, both require large amounts of land to do a very large scale and are intermittent, which makes managing reliability of the grid more complicated, said John Reilly, associate director for research at MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. Storage on the grid can help shore up wind and solar, but high costs mean it will be used relatively little--mainly for providing short periods of power under an hour, he said.

The developed world can and should use energy more efficiently, but overall usage around the globe is certain to go up in the coming decades as the developing world uses more energy to raise its standard of living, panelists said. Nuclear power, which is seeing a surge of construction in China, costs about twice what a pulverized coal plant does, Reilly said.

"As soon as you look at something that looks like a silver bullet, you see that it's tarnished and not moving as fast as you thought," he said.

Bridge fuel
One consensus among the energy experts was that use of natural gas will increase significantly in the decades ahead and should be used as a "bridge fuel" to sustainable energy. Oil companies are moving into natural gas, which can be used for heating, electricity generation, and transportation. Natural gas emits about half the greenhouse gases per unit of energy that coal does.

The discovery of large reserves of natural gas in shale rock in the U.S. has changed the overall energy industry equation, said ExxonMobil Senior Technical Adviser Nazeer Bhore. Demand for natural gas will grow 80 percent from 2005 to 2030, a situation that demonstrates how energy changes happen over long periods.

"Nowhere in U.S. (energy) history has something come in so silently and made such a large impact," he said. "Changes in energy are very evolutionary in the short run but revolutionary in the long run."

To a large degree, whether a country should invest in--and count on--energy breakthroughs or fund programs to encourage deployment of existing technologies, such as wind and electric vehicles, is a policy question. On research, ExxonMobil's Bhore said the government should fund "pre-competitive" research and let commercial companies sort out technology winners.

All panelists said that the energy industry needs more policy certainty with regard to greenhouse gases, with Bhore coming out in favor of an economy-wide tax on carbon emissions. With more clarity on the cost of greenhouse gas emissions and the goals of U.S. energy policy, companies could better assess different energy technologies, panelists said.

"We like whatever allows us to make a decision--a price, a tax, whatever framework for us to make a decision," said Shell's Bravo.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20017470-54.html?tag=mncol;posts#ixzz10jacenk1

Comments

by pjcamp September 24, 2010 5:23 AM PDT
We are always looking for breakthroughs, but the history of technology shows us that there really aren't that many. Almost all progress is incremental improvements from an existing base. That isn't to say that we shouldn't explore promising possibilities, but it is to say that putting the bulk of our efforts into high risk possibilities is 99% likely to be equivalent to doing nothing in the most expensive possible way.

Like this Reply to this comment by solitare_pax September 24, 2010 5:31 AM PDT
Agreed - it took over a hundred years for oil to completely replace other sources of raw materials for fuel and product manufacturing - just as it took thirty-plus years for computers to go from simple word processing to full-fledged audio-video editing.

Like this by WineMaker5000 September 24, 2010 6:41 AM PDT
There are many breakthroughs!!! Some are even disruptive. But only very few gets massive adoption. I agree with the author that when it comes to technologies that require massive infrastructure to implement, it requires time and huge expenses. At the current pace of new breakthroughs there is a high risks that whatever is being implemented can be disrupted and thus we are in perpetual implementation of breakthrough technologies and it gets expensive. Quite the opposite reason.

Like this 4 people like this comment by mike_ekim September 24, 2010 8:16 AM PDT
Breakthroughs are made when someone stumbles upon a solution, not when a company hires 10,000 people to 'work'. For example, the advances between 1900 and 1925 (or so) in math and physics and thermodynamics were a result of a small handful of math geeks that finally put two and two together and (literally) brought us from the horse and buggy to the jet engine in a single lifetime. Those few people were, as individuals, so important that they're famous. They were smart and capable and really really interested in what they were doing. Compare that to a program where someone says. "I'll hire a bunch of people and pay them $85,000 a year to work on this stuff". You're not gonna turn 'us ordenary folk' into the best and the brightest, you're gonna get a whole lotta medeocraty.

Like this 4 people like this comment by Mergatroid Mania September 24, 2010 12:43 PM PDT
To assume all breakthroughs are made my accident is foolish. Breakthroughs like rocket power, jet engines, nuclear weapons and power, radiology, DNA were all made through due diligence. There are literally hundreds of other examples. including physics, astrophysics, chemistry, electronics. You think microprocessors were made by accident? Lets not forget flight and internal combustion engines. Television anyone? Some of these were incremental and some happened literally overnight. In either case, they all happened due to research. If it were up to the fuel companies we would still all have piles of coal in our basements. Once again there are two polar opposite sides in the argument, the fuel companies claiming we should just find better ways to use their products (gee, I wonder why?), and scientists claiming we should put all our funds into research. Both sides have a vested interest in their arguments. The obvious reasonable answer is that we need to find better ways to use what we currently have while increasing funding to try and achieve a breakthrough in power generation and/or energy storage. To say these two options are mutually exclusive is ignorant at best..

Like this by Been_there_Saw_it_before September 24, 2010 12:48 PM PDT
Mr. mike_ekim said it perfectly. Breakthroughs have typically been individual efforts.

Like this 1 person likes this comment by SergeM256 September 24, 2010 2:55 PM PDT
There had been many breakthroughs and many periods of explosive growth, far more explosive than current computer/internet explosion. Invention and quick adoption of steam engine, telegraph, undersea cables, radio, nuclear energy, etc. Breakthroughs are happen when they are ready to happen, not when we want them to happen. Unfortunately, green technology is not ready for breakthrough, no matter how much money we may through in it.

Like this by mike_m_ekim September 24, 2010 11:15 PM PDT
Mergatroid Mania - some comments on your (completely baseless) statements. Your post sounds like a person who thinks the space program is responsible for Tang, Velcro, and radar. Flight - the Wright brothers ran a bicycle shop, no one paid them to research flight. Astronomy - Galileo was not looking for planets, he was just looking at stars, and no one paid him to do it. Physics - Einstein started off in the Swiss patent office and later became a University professor. Among other things Einstein was a philosopher. He was not 'paid to unravel the mysteries of the universe.' He was paid to teach. Atomic models - Neils Bohr studied mathematics and philosophy and then became a professor. No one said 'Hey Niel it's your job to describe the nucleus and figure out if states are quantized.' Electricity - Tesla started out working as an electrical engineer, but it was when he was employed as a ditch-digger for Edison Electric that he worked out polyphase AC - so no one paid him to do that, either. Tesla actually did improve electric motors and generator functionality under contract, but those were incremental improvements to existing devices and not a 'breakthrough tech.' Telecommunications - Edison started out as a telegraph operator, and invented the automatic repeater and other telegraph-related inventions before the phonograph and later he improved the light bulb. No one paid him to invent those things, which is why they were 'his' patents. Engines - Rudolph Diesel was employed doing R&D at a refrigeration company and was not allowed to use company patents for his personal gain, so he started working on other side projects that led to the diesel engine. No one paid Diesel to invent an engine, which is why it's 'his' patent. Transistors - Julius Edgar Lilienfeld got the first patent for a primitive transistor; he was actually researching it for medical uses, trying to make mini-X-ray tubes. No one asked Lilienfeld to invent a transistor for computers. The jet engine and rocket engine are originally derived from Hero's engine and similar devices, they were toys with no practical application. More on rockets and jet engines to follow: Rockets - Early rockets were in the form of fireworks that were later used as weapons; there is no credible evidence that anyone was ever paid to figure out how to invent fire works. It is far more likely that the elements of fireworks were stumbled upon. More rockets - Robert H. Goddard, a physicist and inventor, created and built the world's first liquid-fueled rocket. He was not hired by any company to build a liquid-fuel rocket, and he received ridicule for his work. He also told the Army how to build a bazooka. The army didn't hand out grants to invent a bazooka, he thought it up on his own and figured the Army would be interested. Jet Engines -The first practical gas turbine patent was filed by John Barber, he was a coal master and inventor who developed the gas turbine as a way to power horseless carriages. Again, no one paid him to work on it, he did so because he wanted to. DNA - The study of DNA did not begin with a desire to understand genes or evolution or hereditary traits, DNA research started out when Friedrich Miescher wanted to know what was in the pus of discarded surgical bandages. I hardly see how studying biology has anything to do with engineering or physics; studying biology is understanding what is, it is not creating something new. Nuclear energy - Marie Curie's most important single bit of research (determining that radioactivity is not a result of chemical reactions) was done as part of her thesis work; again, she was not hired by a company or given a grant to determine the source of radiation. If anything she may have been given a research grant because she was poor at the time. She performed much of her research in a shed. She and her husband devised a way to isolate radium but after his death she did not patent it because she did not want a patent to hinder other people's research. She was not paid for her efforts, in fact she toured the United States raising funds to further her research. More nuclear energy - the Manhattan project was a big group of engineers and scientists hired to harness reactivity, but by and large they knew exactly what they were designing and what needed to be done, i.e. split atoms with a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction and extract the heat. The idea had been worked out already. They did NOT get a bunch of people together and ask 'who has an idea?' and wait for someone to raise their had and say 'maybe we should do something with atoms.'
Like this by iptofar September 24, 2010 5:41 AM PDT
Was there no discussion of fusion and updated nuclear tech? There has been a tremendous growth in nuclear tech since the US built it's last reactor and the waste processing and reduction tech has also been growing.
Like this Reply to this comment by mlamonica September 24, 2010 5:46 AM PDT
There was some passing discussion of nuclear but not much. Fusion didn't come up and, as I understand it, that's really way out there the future. One investor recently told me fusion said it's on the order of 100 years away.

Like this by mike_ekim September 24, 2010 8:19 AM PDT
New constuction of nuclear palnts is now in the licensing/regulatory/financing phase. The NSSS portions of the plant (the 'nuclear' part)plants have been (for the most part) designed and are waiting for gov't approval before more final plant designs can be finished. Right now nuclear is not at the 'throw money at it' phase.

Like this by Mergatroid Mania September 24, 2010 12:51 PM PDT
@ mlamonica That would be unless all the research currently underway produces a breakthrough. @mike_ekim You are not referring to fusion, but fission. There are currently no fusion reactors capable of creating a sustained fusion reaction generating more usable power than they put into the unit to get the reaction.. And yes, they are still throwing money at it. Just google it.

Like this by Been_there_Saw_it_before September 24, 2010 12:53 PM PDT
I have been reading Popular Science since I was ten. I remember the stories about fusion being just a few years away and how it would power the world with no radioactive waste. Now I am 61 and fusion is 50 to 100 years away. Guess I will only see it from the top side of the clouds.

Like this by mike_m_ekim September 24, 2010 11:23 PM PDT
@Mergatroid Mania: correct, gold star for you, I am talking about fusion. notice that every word of iptofar's post after the word fusion is actually about fission. i.e. "...and updated nuclear tech? There has been a tremendous growth in nuclear tech since the US built it's last reactor and the waste processing and reduction tech has also been growing." Or, perhaps you think his comments about waste processing has to do with fusion? And FIY, my company had done work with Westinghouse and GE on new reactor design (NSSS, not BOP) and right now every thing is focused on NRC approval and not figuring out how it will work, but proving that it will work safely. Some sites are allowed early site permits to pave roads and other preliminary. I don't need to Google it, when you Google nuclear power you're Googling what I do. :)

Like this by wabcd September 25, 2010 6:32 PM PDT
Fusion Energy is inevitable, and could easily be commercially viable inside of 20 yrs if funding was provided. The Oiligarchy forbids Gov't funding of Fast-Trak fusion projects, in order to sustain their Energy Hegemony. Fortunately there are Visionaries like Microsoft Co-Founder, Paul Allen. Trialpha Energy has raised $50 million for their Colliding Beam Fusion: http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/06/tri-alpha-energy-nuclear-fusion-patent.html There are at least one dozen fast-track-to-fusion projects in development who have to manage with funding that Oil, NG, Wind, Solar, Ethanol, Clean Coal, Efficiency, Smart Grid Bandits all consider pocket change, or coffee money. Make no mistake about practical Fast-Track Fusion is entirely feasible, but like any tech needs funding and the Energy Establishment doesn't want ANY Cheap, Clean alternatives to its noxious product.

Like this by weegg September 24, 2010 6:08 AM PDT
There are several avenues for revamping our energy grid and structure. First, under the nuclear umbrella why aren't we going to Thorium reactors (completely safe and will allow us to recycle spent rods) while generating energy. Second, mandate all new homes must provide their own power (solar, geothermal, etc.) and encourage older homes to go solar. Third, with EV ramping up start programs to recycle their batteries into storage banks for the grid. We are going to have to, because once the world (and ours) economy recovers watch a huge jump in energy prices (especially oil now that we passed the world peak oil point).

Like this Reply to this comment 1 person likes this comment by i-arman September 24, 2010 7:34 AM PDT
Mandating that new homes provide their own energy will take a $100,000 home, and make it into a $175,000 home. Not a good idea. I agree with the nuclear option completely, though - nuclear energy is clean, powerful, and doesn't randomly cut out like wind or solar...

Like this 1 person likes this comment by bwillner September 24, 2010 7:50 AM PDT
While thorium reactors sound nice, those working on them will tell you that even with full funding, which will require billions of dollars, it will be 20 years before a commercial reactor could be built. Unfortunately, thorium reactor technology was abandoned in favor of uranium decades ago. The military largely funded nuclear power R&D and they were not interested in thorium reactors as it could not provide weapons materials. Before someone jumps on me for this, I am not criticizing the military for this; developing nuclear weapons was an objective and that is what they funded. Unfortunately, no one else was developing nuclear power technology, so uranium technology leaped ahead while thorium did not.

Like this 4 people like this comment by mike_ekim September 24, 2010 8:21 AM PDT
Completely safe? That's an unfortunate lack of respect. Thorium reactors are completely safe as much as the Titanic was unsinkable. I.e. they become dangerous as soon as people treat them like they are completely safe.
Like this 4 people like this comment by wabcd September 26, 2010 9:07 AM PDT
For those who want to learn about molten salt reactors, see:------------------------------ http://www.energyfromthorium.com/TEAC1/02_LeBlanc_LFRchoices.pdf----------------- David LeBlanc's Denatured Molten Salt Reactor could certainly be developed to commercial production in 5 yrs with a serious effort, as was done many times in the 60's and is easily done with Naval Reactors. The inherently safe design is certainly safer than any comparable sized NG power plant, so that is not an impediment to development. And would supply cheaper electricity than even Coal.

Like this by bwillner September 24, 2010 7:41 AM PDT
There have been many technological breakthroughs in recent years. Many of them are and will have a major impact on energy technology. LEDs for general lighting is now taking off after years of development. Within 10 years, LEDs will be the dominant lighting technology and the old incandescent and fluorescent lighting technologies will be vanishing (unless there is a breakthrough to revolutionize incandescent or fluorescent technology). Power supplies have been transformed from heavy, inefficient transformer-based bricks to compact, lightweight, highly efficient transistor-based switching power supplies. That technological revolution has barely been noticed by the consumer public, but has had a profound effect on electronics design and performance and resulted in huge energy efficiency gains. Efficient switching power supply technology is expanding to higher power applications in industry. Great strides are being made in photovoltaics and, more recently, in large scale battery technologies which will have a major impact on energy as well. These changes cannot be implemented overnight, but they do happen.

Like this Reply to this comment 3 people like this comment by Mergatroid Mania September 24, 2010 12:54 PM PDT
Switching powersupplies still use transformers. They're just not as big.
Like this by stewartm0205 September 24, 2010 8:04 AM PDT
You need both. We need to start transitioning now and to do that we have to use whats available today. But we also need to improve the current green tech so that it is gets so cheap that there is not debate about replacing fossil fuel with it.

Like this Reply to this comment 3 people like this comment by Mergatroid Mania September 24, 2010 12:54 PM PDT
Agreed. Very wise....

Like this by QA_Tester September 24, 2010 8:43 AM PDT
Clean energy R&D should not be either or proposition. It is necessary to work on several areas: reduce consumption, clean up energy sources we have now and develop new sources. "Solar, which accounts for less than 1 percent of power generation in the U.S., is more expensive than wind for making electricity. However, both require large amounts of land to do a very large scale and are intermittent, which makes managing reliability of the grid more complicated, said John Reilly, associate director for research at MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. Storage on the grid can help shore up wind and solar, but high costs mean it will be used relatively little--mainly for providing short periods of power under an hour, he said." This is true if generation of solar and wind is strictly commercial, meaning it's only done by energy companies and using new lands. However, if we start taking advantage of residential rooftops the need for the amount of land can be reduced. That said, consumers must be able to sell all or portion of what they are generating back to the power company when there is excess energy generated at their homes. Combine that with the smart grid that allows transfer excess energy to were it's needed. Add some commercial buildings to that and need for large tract of lands to be used for commercial solar energy would be reduced.

Like this Reply to this comment 2 people like this comment by tg_iv September 24, 2010 9:06 AM PDT
What difference does it make if algae requires massive amounts of water? The ocean is a massive amount of water and we have direct access to it.

Like this Reply to this comment 1 person likes this comment by Joe Real September 24, 2010 9:46 AM PDT
I believe that we have many breakthrough solutions in various stages. Because of the accelerated discoveries nowadays, the newer solutions will always pose a risk of making the current ones obsolete, and that is the risk that investors are facing today, so their investments are never full scale to implement a particular solution. Mankind always tinkers and comes up with even better solutions. Take for example Solar PV, many cheaper production methods and designs have recently surfaced after several billions of $$ have been invested in ramping up production of Silicon based PV and now we have the thin film. While the thin film has been heavily invested and are ramping up, still cheaper solar PVs based on plastic, spray on paint like installations are on the horizon. Germany invested heavily in installing gigawatts of solar PV and now those installations are obsolete. The reason is that we have very disruptive breakthroughs that are coming to us at a very rapid pace. The disadvantage is that our rapid discoveries actually makes investments in newer discoveries and technologies riskier.

Like this Reply to this comment 1 person likes this comment by Squashman2 September 24, 2010 9:56 AM PDT
"You don't create miracles by throwing money at something--that's never been the case," Bravo said. "It's not like you'll wake up one morning and Bill Gates has funded a project that saved the Earth." Spoken like a true OIL company person. No optimism at all. I don't believe wind or solar is our future energy source. We have known for Decades about our energy crisis so don't go comparing this to how fast computers have come along. Shouldn't take 40 years to come up with an alternative solution that is sustainable. We have also known for many years about the potential energy on the moon and we do nothing about it.
Like this Reply to this comment 1 person likes this comment by Mergatroid Mania September 24, 2010 12:56 PM PDT
Yep, oil company employees are the last people you should ask about this topic.

Like this 1 person likes this comment by duggerdm September 24, 2010 10:43 AM PDT
Our company, (www.biocepts.com) has looked at alternative energy - especially biotechnology related energy sources in depth, because our principals have decades of biotechnology development experience. What we have concluded is that our country's current alternative energy efforts are not being prioritized either strategically or by economics (fiscal or life cycle) and without this prioritization the US has no meaningful strategy for alternative energy development. Most of those promoting projects in the field of bio-energy and especially those making grants in this field are ignorant of the real limitations that prevent significant primary stand alone bio-energy projects from contributions to our long term energy needs ? much less the risks that bio-energy development poses regarding the depletion of critical strategic resources. Consequently there is no practical strategy being applied to alternative bio-energy development. Limiting factors in bio-energy development such as ?peak phosphate? are not even discussed by bio-fuel proponent interests or their government counterparts. While nitrogen and potash are abundant from a variety of sources on earth - phosphate is a very limited resource on earth. All large-scale bio-fuel production and our food crops are dependent on phosphates ? especially at our current growing and unsustainable populations levels. Scientists in recent years have been rapidly revising their estimates of global phosphate reserves - downward. Because all large-scale bio-fuel production efforts compete with food crops (85% use chemical fertilizers containing phosphates) for these phosphates - it?s strategically short sighted to develop such bio-fuels. This is even truer considering that primary energy production concepts using bio-fuels are such a relative short-term solution ? considering our very limited phosphate reserves. Organic production of foods while certainly possible on small scale would only supply less than 10% of the global food needs of the current global population. The sad part here is that the limiting factors like peak phosphate mentioned here are widely known, but we have no alternative energy strategy that reflects them. Why would we use up our phosphates for energy if it only exasperates a near term known food shortage crisis. As much as our company would like to use its biotechnology development skills in alternative energy, it has become very clear to us that as primary energy alternative sources only solar, wind, wave and tidal sources of energy don't hasten the upcoming global food crisis by using up our finite phosphate resources. We do see biotechnology as having a major role in capturing waste products, increasing food production efficiency from a given amount of resources and making food production become efficient and more profitable in the process. Secondary or by-product bio-energy development makes sense, but primary bio-energy development is foolish and has a rather large fatal risk potential for large segments of humanity.

Like this Reply to this comment 1 person likes this comment by WineMaker5000 September 24, 2010 11:17 AM PDT
Your company's concept about sustainability is all wrong. You plan on producing biofuels on one way street only taking out without nutrient recycling. There are many companies today whose concepts are highly sustainable when it comes to biofuel production because nutrients such as phosphates and nitrogen are recycled back from the dead tissues after oil or fuel are extracted. Only sunlight and CO2 are the inputs and the water and nutrients are recycled. Take for example the patents filed by Joule. Their system makes diesel directly using only sunlight and waste CO2 in glass barrels. The algae is retained in the system and therefore no nutrients such as phospates are taken out. This is perfectly sustainable and your company have overlooked such approach.

Like this 2 people like this comment by Joe Real September 24, 2010 11:24 AM PDT
Theoretically you can build a system that recycles the nutrients back into it such as being developed by a few companies that experiments with algae, which are easier to have nutrient cycling built in a closed loop. Sapphire energy for example will inject back the dead cells after fuels are exracted, thus putting back all the nutrients for the growth of next batch of algae. Joule has taken a step further by genetically engineering microorganisms that produces the fuel components directly without having to macerate the microorganisms and harvest only the fuels. Except for the required nutrients to build the modules, everything can become a steady state with no influx of added nutrients and so is highly sustainable and I believe to discuss the current supply of phosphates is moot point. Reports about Joule in CNET: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20016330-54.html?tag=mncol;1n http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20003503-54.html?tag=mncol;2n http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10295100-54.html?tag=mncol;3n

Like this 1 person likes this comment by Joe Real September 24, 2010 11:29 AM PDT
Theoretically you can build a system that recycles the nutrients back into it such as being developed by a few companies that experiments with algae, which are easier to have nutrient cycling built in a closed loop. Sapphire energy for example will inject back the dead cells after fuels are extracted, thus putting back all the nutrients for the growth of next batch of algae. Joule has taken a step further by genetically engineering microorganisms that produces the fuel components directly without having to macerate the microorganisms and harvest only the fuels. Except for the required nutrients to build the modules, everything can become a steady state with no influx of added nutrients and so is highly sustainable and I believe to discuss the current supply of phosphates is moot point. Reports about Joule in CNET: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20016330-54.html?tag=mncol;1n http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20003503-54.html?tag=mncol;2n http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10295100-54.html?tag=mncol;3n Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8618-11128_3-20017470.html?communityId=2069&targetCommunityId=2069&blogId=54&messageId=9886127&tag=mncol;tback#ixzz10TNj55PV

Like this 1 person likes this comment by RWKeyes September 24, 2010 1:50 PM PDT
Phosphates can be harvested from seawater as a byproduct of desalinization. There are many places where agricultural runoff has made aquafers too rich is phophates, which can lead to algae blooms. Perhaps this can be recovered as well. Additionally, as algal oil does not contain phosphates, the nutrients don't leave the algal 'farm' and so the cost is on-time. In summary, I think you are saying the phophate sky is falling, at it isn't.

Like this 1 person likes this comment by RWKeyes September 24, 2010 1:44 PM PDT
A representative of Shell claims that ExxonMobil's algae oil system would use as much water per day as Mexico City consumes. I find this to be suspicious. Perhaps there is a disconnect of reason here...is the volume of water used by the Algae a one-time need? Or is this per-day? And what exactly is this number in some true measure (liters, or at least, gallons...not swimming pools). I don't know much about Exxon's system but I know something of other algae fuel systems and they do not require this amount of water. The comment about Thorium is right on. Thorium is a known quantity, research reactors have been run for over 5 years in the 1960s. The LFTR (liquid floride thorium reactor) solves many of the problems that conventional nuclear reactors have. Don't count out wind, either - new designs which are much more efficient are around the corner, using technology such as counter-rotating secondary turbines. Solar photovoltaic techologies using plastics or carbon nanotubes have a lot of promise, and there is interesting work being done on solar Sterling engines. There's tidal power, geothermal, and even schemes to harness the planet's magnetic field for energy. But I think the safest bet is Thorium.

Like this Reply to this comment by Joe Real September 24, 2010 2:00 PM PDT
In a closed system, the volume of water used by algae would just be for replenishing leaks and minor losses. For sure, Exxon's algae growing is doomed to fail. Exxon is unsustainable. One should look at Joule's system and Sapphire Energy: http://www.sapphireenergy.com/ http://www.jouleunlimited.com/ And about the Thorium reactors, I have read that they are small and can reuse nuclear waste. How much water would these baby reactors need per megawatt hours of power generated?

Like this 1 person likes this comment by RoyHarvie September 24, 2010 7:12 PM PDT
To Shell: Please take this seriously. Re-consider your role in the energy business. This isn't really a question, but a plea, to help save our planet. Oil is a very valuable commodity, for the petro-chemical side of your business. Great for plastics and synthetics. Excellent lubricant and hydraulic fluid etc. But the most wasteful thing you can do with oil is burn it. Make your long term strategy to get out of the energy business or do something really spectacular like using your massive corporate resources to fund and complete research on LFTRs. Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactors were invented in the 1960s at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They ran one for almost 5 years. LFTRs use cheap thorium, are inherently safe, do not produce long term radio-active waste and were abandoned because they are not suitable for making bombs. See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWUeBSoEnRk and http://energyfromthorium.com/ Although the principles are proven, there is still some research required for the best materials to have long 50 year plus life. You could set up an LFTR at a tar sands project to create heat and steam without polluting. Put one in a big ship like a tanker and save a bundle on fuel while stopping pollution. Sell them by the thousands and make a fortune. Just don't promote burning oil please. Save this precious substance for future generations. Actually I don't think we should burn anything, coal, biofuels etc. Trying to make these alternatives carbon neutral is not just difficult, it greatly reduces the net energy gained. There are better alternatives. I realise we need to burn fuel for airplanes and rockets, but most other applications can be replaced with electricity. The best answer I could hope for is that you will look into it. Thanks Roy

Like this Reply to this comment 1 person likes this comment by SteveChicago September 25, 2010 9:58 AM PDT
Why was Exxon and Shell even invited to a clean energy conference?? These guys are oil and natural gas explorers. Of course they are going to poo-poo any new energy form that they do not control. They must hate Tesla and Coda, since they do not use any of their products directly. Look at the MIT breakthrough in the lab that generated self assembling solar panels that are suppose to be 40% efficient. That would be twice the current best efficiency. I know that this is lab results and actual will probably be less. But that is a big jump. What happens when we hit 50% efficiency on a solar panel and it is cheap to install? Tie that to en energy storage system in your house. Why not, you have a local furnace, AC, water heater. Forget about the smart grid, what about the smart house.

Like this Reply to this comment by wabcd September 25, 2010 6:53 PM PDT
What a SHAM. Pure Spin and B.S. ------Look at France's meager effort to replace Oil generated Electricity with Nuclear in the 1980's. ------http://www.iea.org/stats/pdf_graphs/FRTPES.pdf--------. Notice that they replaced half of their total Energy Supply with Nuclear in about 20 yrs, most of it in 12 yrs. This is for a middle wealth nation, with the best health care & social services in the World, one of the most expensive Military's in the World, and during the period improved their Standard of Living & productivity much faster than "renewable special" Germany. And all France did was take a run-of-the-mill GenII American Pressurized Light Water Reactor design, standardized and started building. No modern modular construction. No assembly line production. No CAD or CAM. No advanced electronic control systems. No advanced GenIII designs or computer simulations. ---------------- All France has to do now is Electrify Transport, Nuclear Synthetic Fuels, District Heating and/or expand their Nuclear by another 50% over what they already did. Pretty simple minded, even without using Modern Construction & Design Methods. Check out Germany #1 Renewable Nation on Earth: -------http://www.iea.org/stats/pdf_graphs/DETPES.pdf------- See the skinny little Red Line - that's Germany's MEGA-EFFORT no-holds-barred Solar & Wind Energy. Tiny compared to their Nuclear NON-EFFORT. -------That is the Truth about Energy - that the Energy Establishment doesn't want you to know.------

Like this Reply to this comment by K A Cheah September 25, 2010 8:46 PM PDT
Using Green Tech to produce energy although it is just promises in the beginning, but it is the first steps in the right direction, the choices of Green Tech used will be of paramount importance to determine the success of these endeavors. Using Natural Gas as the fuel replacement does not 100% really reduce the carbon footprints as Natural Gas combustion produces Carbon Dioxide, Monoxide, Nitrogen Oxides and other polutants as well. Hydro Electric Power is the Tested & Proven Sources of Power Supply as well as the Proven Highly Efficient Titanium Brown Gas Hydroxy HHO Generator Devices' Technologies to run the Petrol and Diesel Engines as the hybrid fuel. There must be clear aims as to what would be the tested, proven & most viable and successful sources of green energy sources that would be with the best potential of mass producing power day and night without fail. Hydro electric power has the greatest chances of success in supplying powers, now for about a century starting with the first Hydro Dam, and now we can have mini-hydro electric power by diverting river water to run new highly efficient & productive direct drive turbines and at every given opprotunities creating multiple mini-hydro electric power sources without the need to dam a river but by just diverting the river water to run these new & direct drive efficient multiple turbines now used in Wind Power production to produce power supply. R&D are necessities in the Advanced Nuclear Energy Technologies adopted by Terra but until now these have not proven to work for France, Germany & Others which are equally advanced & developed Nations in these technologies but those technologies that have been tested & proven must also be encouraged and implemented like the HHO Generator Devices that should be installed & used in all Vehicles to spur reduction and curb in the emission of Greenhouse Gases by giving a tax incentive on the cost of installation of one such device in each of the existing petrol and diesel engines' vehicles that will not be easily replaceable with electric or hybrid vehicles as yet. Renewable Energy Hybrid vehicles' solutions to mitigate global warming, without any need for picking waste sugars' residues & land use !!! In order to mitigate global warming, there is no way that the whole world could immediately convert all their existing polluting petrol and diesel engine driven vehicles to electric and hybrid cars, trucks, boats & ships. These latter type of cars are expensive to adopt and took great effort to produce. Therefore, it will take a much longer time for such vehicles to go mainstream. Also tapping Sugar Residues' Conversion to Gasoline when in use will also pollute the atmosphere even if when this technology is made really successful which will take much longer time to mature. In the meantime, all the existing petrol and diesel engine driven vehicles will still be polluting the atmosphere but these vehicles have still retained their market value and they are not easily replaceable. Therefore, the only solution to reduce their emission of greenhouse gases by say 50% to 90% is by turning them into HHO (Hydroxy) hybrids running on both fossil fuel and water-produced gases called HHO (hydrogen and oxygen) or 'brown gas' which has been the tested and proven. The technology uses the excess electrical energy, produced by the vehicles' alternators, which would have otherwise being wasted if left untapped, to convert water into HHO or 'brown gas' to run the vehicles' engines. This is by installing 'HHO generators' made partially of 316L stainless steel and partially of titanium as electrodes. Coal and gas-burning power stations could also use HHO or 'brown gas' (using similar technologies) as a hybrid fuel as well. There are proven local and international companies that produce such HHO generator devices for sale and the governments of the world's nations should spearhead their adoption through tax incentives so that the whole world can achieve its goal of achieving a 40% reduction in the emission of greenhouse gases to 2005 levels or more as per committed at the recent Copenhagen Summit. Although the Copenhagen Summit agreement is not legally binding, it is morally binding on us to save our world from further destruction by impending natural disasters caused by global warming. If oil can spill like it is now due to an accident or human errors in the Gulf Coasts of USA causing widespread pollution in that Area, what if an accident or human error occurs in the Nuclear Plants anywhere in USA it will not only cause pollution but disasters in Human Life in contamination of the whole surrounding environments for centuries, therefore Nuclear Power Production should also be strictly avoided at all costs as nobody can guarantee that accidents or human errors will not recur such as the Chernobyl Nuclear disasters repeating itself.

Like this Reply to this comment by tsport100 September 26, 2010 2:33 AM PDT
What a surprize, the incumbents talking down their competition. Renewable energy is "constrained by the laws of physics" and I guess that means electronics and therefore Moores Law isn't? What a ridiculous statement! "One consensus among the energy experts was that use of natural gas will increase significantly in the decades ahead" again, no surprize hearing this from incumbents, they sell the stuff. What's their argument against wind and solar? "both require large amounts of land to do a very large scale and are intermittent, which makes managing reliability of the grid more complicated" So drilling and mining for fossil fuels don't destroy huge amounts of land and transporting the stuff across the planet is an easier and cheaper problem to solve than regulating the grid? I've heard enough!!!!!!!!!!

Like this Reply to this comment by wabcd September 26, 2010 8:50 AM PDT
Solar @ >$40k per kwavg, Wind @ >$11k per kwavg. Both require a shadowing Fossil Fuel power source to supply most of the Wind/Solar/NG energy. About 80-90% of the energy comes from NG. Cycling inefficiencies in that 80-90% waste as much fuel as the Wind & Solar would save. A complete waste of money.------------------------------------------ Even a wealthy nation like the USA would go bankrupt trying to finance a significant Renewable Energy power source. See my above comment for the failure of Germany's all out effort on Renewable Energy vs the incredible success of France's Nuclear.------------------------------------ the World's Foremost Environmentalist, James Lovelock, has correctly determined that ONLY NUCLEAR ENERGY can replace fossil fuels.-------------------------------------------------------------: The Natural Energy of the Universe - James Lovelock on Nuclear Power:------------------------------------- http://newpapyrusmagazine.blogspot.com/2009/06/natural-energy-of-universe-james.html

Like this by sanenazok September 26, 2010 12:27 PM PDT
The way I see it, if there's going to be breakthrough, it will have to be in solar. Wind is already at 90%+ efficiency as far as motors are concerned, while solar is in the 20's. Neither has a chance against breeder nuclear plants, though. Funny how a story about magical future tech does not mention the magic capacitors that EEStor has been promising since 2006. http://green.autoblog.com/2008/03/29/zenn-claims-they-will-launch-eestor-powered-ev-in-fall-2009/ Oh wait they'll have a demo out before the end of 2011. Great, I guess the illuminati are dragging the approval processes.

Like this Reply to this comment by FredC1212 September 26, 2010 1:08 PM PDT
If there were some consensus among the world's great scientists that a certain path would lead to the very high probability of a certain result, like physicists and the atom bomb, then throwing money at a goal might be the way to go. But as long as there is no general consensus, the due diligence approach is the tried and tested methodology which will, hopefully, deliver much needed breakthroughs in energy production before we fossil fuels are exhausted and we have to turn to breeder reactors, or horses and sails.

Like this Reply to this comment by nunya82 September 26, 2010 7:57 PM PDT
everyone who thinks we need to think along the lines of that same hundred year old framework is just a brainwashed naysayer. thats exactly what the powers that be want you to think. the answer lies in thinking outside the box. just look at you tube and type in seg generator or or www.magpower.us they want us to think we have to keep using their existing infastructure. tecnology is different than it was in the early 1900s. real alternative viable resources have been known about for decades. people have likely been killed over it. they want everyone to think that there is no easy ways to create energy so that we have to keep paying for their heavy equipment to dig up coal then pay for their trains to haul it around and so on. wake up!

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20017470-54.html?tag=mncol;posts#ixzz10jjEBb6w.

As is frequently the case, the discussion is as informative and stimulating as the article that started it.

ADT adds energy controls to home security service

2010-09-27T05:50:00.000-07:00

September 24, 2010 9:43 AM PDT

by Martin LaMonica

When you arm your alarm system when you leave the house, how about automatically turning off all the lights and resetting the thermostat?

Home security service company ADT next month will roll out a service that does exactly that. It's a home-automation system that uses a network of wireless sensors to let people control thermostats and lights along with their traditional home monitoring service.

Called ADT Pulse, the service uses software from start-up iControl that provides the consumer portal application as well as the back-end software, said Lewis Long, the company's vice president of residential and small business marketing today. ADT will also provide a touch-screen tablet device, made by GE Security, for controlling the system, which has other applications, such as weather and news.

There are a growing number of home energy management technologies, which include everything from power monitors to Web portals made available through utilities, and many companies vying to provide energy-related products and services to end users.

The ADT Pulse system can be accessed through a PC, smart-phone application, or dedicated device for controlling thermostat, lights, cameras, and home security settings.

(Credit: ADT)
Verizon, for example, is developing a combined home energy management and security service that the company hopes to start testing later this year.

Similar to Verizon, ADT's approach is to offer additional services to its home alarm service in an effort to get more customers. The ADT Pulse system is designed to lower overall energy usage by cutting down on wasted energy and give people remote control over the thermostat, lights, and other connected devices such as cameras which use the Z-Wave protocol.

The energy-related package includes a thermostat, light switches, and a wireless module that lamps (or any other appliance) plug into. All those devices, as well as the security keypad and touch-screen controller, connect to a central hub about the size of cable modem. That connects the home router via an Ethernet cable.

The set-up lets people use a Web site to schedule a thermostat, lights, and other connected devices, such as door and window sensors or fire monitors. A person could, for example, program all the lights to turn off at a certain time every day or set thermostat settings. The system can also be accessed through an iPhone, Android phone, or the touch-screen tablet.

The company is looking to expand the service by connecting to utility meters in the future, Long said. That would allow people to view how much energy a whole house uses and what the impact of different adjustments is.

ADT started testing the service, which was first announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2009, earlier this year and now has it in about 4,000 homes. Long said that anecdotally, people have been able to cut electricity use by about 20 percent, which would be a very significant savings. Many smart grid companies with home energy monitoring systems expect consumers can lower energy anywhere from a few percent to 15 percent.

The base package costs $399 for installation and $47.99 per month. The package with lighting and thermostat controls is $749 for installation and $49.99 per month. The package that includes cameras and video feeds of the home is $1,249 and $57.99 per month.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20017556-54.html?tag=mncol;posts#ixzz10jYXYKlX

SolarCity: Solar financing to become a commodity

2010-09-27T05:43:00.000-07:00

September 27, 2010 4:00 AM PDT

by Martin LaMonica

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--SolarCity is a cross between a solar installer and software company, which will give the company an edge as solar leases become commonplace, according to CEO Lyndon Rive.

The San Francisco-based start-up is one of the pioneers in offering financing for residential solar power, which eliminates the hefty upfront cost of photovoltaic panels. The model has served SolarCity well, which has grown rapidly in the past three years and could go public within two years, Rive said.

Lyndon Rive, CEO SolarCity

(Credit: SolarCity)
Consumers can lease panels from SolarCity, which owns and maintains them for 20 years. Through the arrangement, customers' monthly electricity bills go down by about 10 percent to 15 percent, according to Rive, who was at the EmTech conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Thursday.

But eventually, offering some sort of financing, either through a lease or a power purchase agreement, will become a commodity, he said. Indeed, more and more solar installers are offering financing to homeowners interested in solar, but unable to invest $25,000 to $40,000 upfront for a full system.

To stay ahead of others, SolarCity has developed a software system which could be called customer relationship management (CRM) for solar. It smoothes out the process of delivering a bid to consumers, handling permits and incentives, and designing installation.

"Our differentiator has never been our lease. It's the entire customer experience," said Rive, who cofounded the company with his brother Peter after working at a software company. "As the economy and the financial markets stabilize, financing will be a commodity."

Rather than the installer bringing in a third-party financing company, SolarCity can offer a full offering, sort of like how Apple offers an end-to-end offering, Rive said.

As for going public, Rive said the company is cash-flow positive now although shrinking state incentives for solar power do make it harder to lower customers' bills through a lease. SolarCity now offers installation services in five states and is looking to expand in the Northeast next.

An IPO "is not my exit. That's my start. I have to deliver solar to millions of homes," he said.

Using storage to firm solar on the grid
In addition to seeking to expand nationally, SolarCity is involved in two projects that are on the cutting edge of solar technology.

The company is working with Pacific Gas & Electric and the University of California at Berkeley to see how storage can make solar panels a reliable power source for utilities.

A 2.8 kilowatt system installed by SolarCity in Beaverton, Ore.
(Credit: SolarCity)

Right now, utilities can't count on distributed solar panels as a power source as they would a power generation plant because there are variations in weather. With the battery program, SolarCity will develop a system to aggregate power from solar panel-charged batteries so that grid operators can plan on their contribution. The battery packs will be supplied by electric-vehicle maker Tesla Motors.

In Hawaii, large numbers of distributed solar panels risk causing instability in the grid by providing more power than the grid can use, Rive said. In Maui, there's been a halt to solar installations so the local utility can better understand the impact, he said.

"Over the next two or three years, it will become more of a problem (in California) but we have to figure out how to reduce the cost of the batteries," he said.

In another project, SolarCity will be installing thin-film solar panels from MiaSole and First Solar at Wal-Mart, which put out a bid specifically to advance thin-film solar panels.

Price competition between traditional polycrystalline silicon and thin-film panels is going to be brutal in the years ahead, Rive said. "It's going to be a battle. It's going to be a bloodbath," he said.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20017590-54.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20#ixzz10jWqhtDt

Whopper of a wind farm opens off Britain

2010-09-26T19:02:00.000-07:00

World's largest offshore project has 100 turbines — so far

A boat powering through the Thames estuary on Thursday provides perspective of just how big the wind turbines there are.

msnbc.com staff and news service reports

updated 9/23/2010 11:59:42 AM ET

-LONDON — The world's largest offshore wind farm had its grand opening Thursday — and its location on the estuary of the Thames River makes it a showcase for Britain's push to move beyond fossil fuels.

So far, 100 wind turbines have been planted in waters up to 80 feet deep across the estuary in southern England. The idea is to produce enough electricity, 300 megawatts, to power the equivalent of 200,000 homes.

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Each turbine is nearly as tall as a 40-story building and the blades are at least 65 feet above the water for clearance with vessels. No turbine is closer than 1,600 feet to another and the entire "farm" covers an area of 22 square miles.

Up to 341 turbines will be installed over the next four years.

With Thursday's opening, which tops a 91-turbine farm off Denmark, Britain now has more offshore wind capacity than the rest of the world combined.

"We are in a unique position to become a world leader in this industry," British Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne said in a statement before he attended the grand opening. "We are an island nation and I firmly believe we should be harnessing our wind, wave and tidal resources to the maximum."

Britain now gets three percent of its electricity from renewables but aims to get 15 percent by 2020. As part of that, the government this year awarded licenses to wind farm developers in a program that could deliver up to 32 gigawatts of generation capacity and require investment of more than $117 billion.

Critics of the $1.4 billion wind farm include some nearby residents who object to the sight of the giant towers, some visible from shore. The farm starts about seven miles from shore.

Environmental groups tend to back wind power as long as projects are not in areas of significant bird flight paths.

The new wind farm met that standard. It's an "important stride forward," said Craig Bennett of the British chapter of Friends of the Earth.

But the group also wants Britain to guarantee funding of at least $3 billion a year for the recently created and government-funded Green Investment Bank, which aims to boost private-sector spending on low-carbon technology.

"I know that there is still more to do to bring forward the large sums of investment we want to see in low-carbon energy in the U.K.," Huhne said, "and we as government are committed to playing our part."

One embarrassment to the government is that only 20 percent of the investment in the new wind farm has gone to British firms. The farm is owned and operated by Swedish energy company Vattenfall, and the largest chunk of expenditure has been to Denmark's Vestas for the wind turbines.

Global interest
The promised vast expansion of Britain's offshore wind resources is proving to be a powerful lure for companies not normally associated with renewables but keen to generate eco-friendly and reliable sources of revenue.

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Engineers, consultants and oil rig makers around the world are setting up new divisions and partnerships in order to get a foothold in the market, which offers secure returns to those building and running the turbines.

"It's attractive for a lot of companies that are looking for contracts," said Ian Simm, chief executive of green fund firm Impax Asset Management, which has holdings in companies such as Vestas.

"The fundamental point that makes it attractive is scale and government commitment, and the fact that industrial companies can learn the facts of success in one offshore environment and be able to transfer the majority, if not all, of those skills to other countries," he said.

However, clearer statements from the government on renewables incentives are still needed to support wind farm developers and really kick-start the market, according to Sarwjit Sambhi, managing director of power generation at Centrica, which has won the rights to develop up to 4.2 gigawatts of offshore windpower in the Irish Sea.

"There is a general theme across this in that we haven't passed the tipping point yet where the industry is confident enough that there is a long-term pipeline of projects."

Britain's potential

The Offshore Valuation Group, made up of government and industry organizations, estimates if Britain were to develop just 29 percent of its potential offshore resource, this could deliver 169 gigawatts of capacity by 2050 and turn Britain into a net exporter of electricity.

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..This would involve installing 7.2 gigawatts a year — roughly equivalent to 1,000 7.5 megawatt turbines — with fixed offshore wind accounting for 5.4 gigawatts of the average annual build rate needed.

The supply chain needed for this would have annual revenues of nearly $100 billion in 2050 and employ around 145,000 people directly, according to the Offshore Valuation report.

As a result shipbuilders and companies that specialize in making oil rigs are also entering the wind market.

SeaEnergy Executive Chairman Steve Remp, who has worked in the offshore oil and gas market for 30 years, expects the market for equipment vessels to take off at the beginning of 2012.

"I foresee a sizeable industry evolving that calls on the engineering expertise in working offshore in deep water," he said

Higher Education Going Green

2010-09-24T15:45:00.000-07:00

An Eco Education
Colleges and universities are finding innovative ways to promote green technologies and sustainable practices on campus, saving money and appealing to eco-conscious coeds through their efforts.

By Nicholas Gilewicz for MSN Local Edition

Rutgers University harvests the sun on its expansive Solar Farm.

Classes at most American colleges and universities have just started, and students there are more concerned about environmental issues than ever before. According to a 2009 Princeton Review survey of 16,000 students, 66 percent said they wanted to know about a college's environmental stances and commitments; 24 percent said that information would very likely affect their choice of schools.

Schools are listening.

"They're responding to customer demand, if you will," says Mark Orlowski, the founder and director of the Sustainable Endowments Institute in Cambridge, Mass. "They're trying to provide the best education to their students, and the students are interested in how robust the school's sustainability programs are."

Since 2007, the institute has published the College Sustainability Report Card, which now grades 330 colleges and universities on their sustainability efforts. The next report card will be released in October.

"Schools are frequently coming up with new and innovative programs, and modeling things that have come online elsewhere," Orlowski says.

Here are four steps -- some big, some small, all efficient -- that higher education institutions are taking to reduce negative environmental effects and improve their campuses and communities.

Plans for the Solar Strand at UB were developed by landscape architect Walter Hood.
.Under the sun

Until recently, one main entrance to University at Buffalo campus in Buffalo, N.Y. has been, essentially, a muddy field. Not for long. Ground has broken for the "Solar Strand," an array of 5,000 photovoltaic (PV) panels modeled on strands of DNA and designed by an internationally renowned landscape architect, Walter Hood.

"Hopefully [the experience] will be nice and strange," Hood says. "Have you ever hung out underneath 5,000 PV panels? I talk a lot about hybrid space and about trying to break down these single-use spaces. They're not sustainable. I'm not taking that approach of mitigating anything about what a PV array does. Normally with our infrastructure, we keep [energy facilities] out of sight and mind."

At the "Solar Strand," scheduled to be completed in the spring of 2011, public spaces are enmeshed in the structure, with paths leading to, from and through the array. A major reason the university chose Hood to design the project was his plan to emphasize the site as a portal to the school.

"That was the gesture that was really persuasive to us," says Robert Shibley, UB's campus architect. "It puts a destination as an artifact, but more to the point, [the Solar Strand] leads to the emerging ecology of the rest of the campus," including efforts to improve and restore some of the campus's older ecological features.

Funded by a $6.5 million grant from the New York Power Authority, the Solar Strand is part of an effort to install 100 megawatts worth of arrays across New York State. Educational efforts, focused on both research and workforce development, are part of the plan, as well.

Other schools are also turning to the sun. A 1.3 megawatt array Rutgers University calls the "Solar Farm" generates 10 percent of all of the energy consumed by its Livingston Campus in New Brunswick, N.J. Arizona State University is cooling cars, reducing the heat island effect, and generating energy all at once by topping parking lots and garages with solar panels that shade out the sun, but absorb its energy.

The Recycles program at the University of Chicago keeps students free wheeling.
.Travelin' right

Generating solar energy is only one way to cut emissions. Another is transportation, and some schools have taken steps to get students out of their cars and on bikes. Students, faculty and staff at Elmhurst College in Elmhurst, Ill. who sign a pledge not to bring a car onto campus get a free bicycle, helmet, and lock. That's right: free.

"We had pent up demand," says Mark Wakely, who manages the services offered to students and employees at Elmhurst. In 2009-2010, the program's first year, 200 people took the offer. Wakely says it helped the college deal with three issues at once: a paucity of parking; student, faculty, and staff wellness; and the school's carbon footprint.

Every year, Wakley says, "We offer a little incentive to continue. We'll give them a $25 gift certificate for a bike shop and a free tune-up to sign the agreement."

At the University of Chicago, students have access to a bike-share program that relies on used bicycles refurbished by Blackstone Bicycle Works, a nonprofit in the school's neighborhood. And students at Atlanta's Emory University may have the best of both worlds. They can buy discounted bikes through the school, or take part of their bike share program instead.

Bike programs are a very visible, if small-scale, way to reduce emissions. But harvesting efficiencies from less sexy systems already in place can have a large impact as well. Power plants at all University of California campuses must now use cogeneration facilities to capture the energy of previously wasted heat.

And back at the University at Buffalo, the chilled-water plant is always 55 degrees Fahrenheit. By using the plant as a source of heat in the winter, and as a cooling source on hotter days, temperature differentials are markedly reduced -- saving energy and money. These are taxpayer-supported public universities, after all.

Sustainable and organic farming practices are on the curriculum at Warren Wilson College.
.Fresh off the farm

"I think local food in the dining halls has been very popular, shifting away from the one-stop supplier model that schools used to use," Mark Orlowski, of the Sustainable Endowments Institute, says. His own alma mater, Williams College, along with two other New England schools, Smith College and Wesleyan University, use exclusively local dairy products, yielding cheaper and better-tasting food.

Margo Flood, the executive director of the Environmental Leadership Center at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, N.C., says that land stewardship and farming play a major role there.

"This land is so diverse," Flood says, "that there's a tremendous stewardship responsibility. We steward and model a way of life that's not archaic by any means, and was common in this region up until the 1950s when small farms still flourished."

Since its 1894 founding, Wilson College has operated a full-scale farm. In the mid-1990s, it made the decision to take the garden and farm fully organic. According to Chase Hubbard, the school's farm manager, its five-acre garden generates between seven and 10 percent of vegetables served in dining halls, and its 350-acre farm provides all of the unprocessed beef and pork, 10,000 pounds worth every year. Another 25,000 to 30,000 pounds are sold to Asheville and surrounding communities.

As a part of the school's mission to educate students through academics, service learning, and work, the farm is entirely staffed by students, some continue to contribute to the community after graduation. Since Warren Wilson first brought grass-fed beef to campus, Hubbard says, "there are 15 to 20 local producers who do this. The largest is run by Warren Wilson graduates, Hickory Nut Gap Farm, a husband and wife team who both worked in the farm program."

Penn State's Trash to Treasure program saves thousands of dollars a school year.
.Waste not, want not

Move-in day at most American colleges is a call for consumption - new furniture, clothes, school supplies get bought by thousands of coeds. But on move-out day, when students have more than will fit in the car or are moving across the country for a job, tons of things are left behind.

According to Al Matyasovsky, the supervisor of central support services at the main campus of Pennsylvania State University, move-out creates about 200 tons of waste over only two days.

Ten years ago, Matyasovsky helped create "Trash to Treasure," Penn State's solution to keep some of that waste out of the landfill. The program takes goods -- from clothes to furniture to microwaves -- donated by students who are leaving campus for what's essentially a giant yard sale. About 60 of those 200 tons of waste are laid out on over 400 tables in Beaver Stadium. By 7:30 a.m. on the day of the sale, over 1,000 people line up for an early crack at the merchandise. Proceeds from the sale reach over $50,000 each year and are donated to the local branch of the United Way.

David Manos, Penn State's assistant director of housing, says one item in particular got under the skin of his predecessor, Fraser Grigor.

"The final straw for him," Manos says, "was seeing a set of golf clubs going to the landfill."

One similar project, PennMOVES at the University of Pennsylvania hosts a large sale at the campus ice rink, with proceeds going to organizations in the university's West Philadelphia neighborhood, via the United Way.

"It's a very good way to marry Penn's sense of civic and social responsibility with its commitment to climate action plan," says Marie Witt, the university's vice president for business services.

Programs have been replicated elsewhere such as Notre Dame, Swarthmore College and the University of Indiana.

At Penn State, Matyasovsky says there are immediate savings -- both financial and environmental.

"We have to take stuff 102 miles from Penn State to put it in a landfill," Matyasovsky says. Over the course of the program, he's saved $63,000 in landfill tip fees, and eliminated the emissions that 60 round-trip truck trips would have generated.

> See great college towns that are too cool just for school.

Nicholas Gilewicz is a freelance arts, culture and travel writer based in Philadelphia, and reports on city planning and zoning reform for

Silver Spring Networks, Itron, eMeter to Lead Smart Meter Infrastructure Market

2010-09-24T12:12:00.000-07:00

September 24, 2010

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Utilities The U.S. advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) market will grow from $2.54billion in 2010 to $5.82 billion in 2015, representing an 18 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR), according to Zpryme’s latest Smart Grid Insights report (PDF).

Smart meter revenues, including electric, gas, and water, are projected to grow from $1.2 billion in 2010 to $2.3 billion in 2015. The market research firm projects that Silver Spring Networks, Itron, and eMeter will be key leaders in the U.S. market over the next five years.

Zpryme says AMI is a fundamental first milestone in the development and deployment of the smart grid. Case in point: nearly 24 percent, or $818 million, of the $3.4 billion in the U.S. Smart Grid stimulus funds were awarded to 31 AMI projects in 2009.

The report, sponsored by Tantalus Systems, indicates that this focus on smart meters creates opportunities for AMI communication systems, meter data management systems (MDMS), customer data management, and AMI program management. Currently, companies such as GridPoint, eMeter, Tantalus, Itron, Google, Silver Spring Networks, Cisco, and IBM are all trying to capture market share in these emerging markets, according to the report.

But there are still some major service and technology gaps that need to be filled to advance the AMI market, says Zpryme.

The report provides a six-phase framework for smart grid AMI market opportunities that include evaluating existing market opportunities, evaluating internal company strengths, beginning R&D and product/service testing, securing smart grid ecosystem business partners, starting strategy & product/service launch planning, and executing marketing & sales strategy.

Report researchers say product testing and identifying partners at the early stages of the game will mitigate the risks and liabilities by both major players and start-ups.

A company should also consider the financial resources they have access to (e.g. government subsidies), existing customer base, relationships with utilities and key smart-grid integrators, as well as identify areas to participate in smart-grid pilots and AMI programs in preparation for a product/service launch, according to the report.

The report also finds that inadequate evaluation of existing market opportunities and internal company strengths could lead to a poor and costly decision to move forward; when the most opportune decision could be to mitigate risk by not entering the market or delay entry into the market, says Zpryme.

Greenopolis, PepsiCo Recycle 4 Million Beverage Containers

2010-09-24T10:41:00.000-07:00

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Greenopolis, a producer of interactive recycling kiosks for high-traffic locations, has captured its four millionth item through its automated recycling system.

Greenopolis, a subsidiary of Waste Management, has partnered with companies like Pepsico to help increase the number of beverage containers recycled. The Dream Machine recycling initiative places computerized receptacle kiosks in numerous locations, allowing consumers to collect and redeem points for every bottle or can recycled in the kiosks.

The four millionth item — a bottle of Lipton Iced Tea – was recycled using a PepsiCo Dream Machine, recently placed at a Reasor’s store, in Tulsa, Okla. Reasor’s has a PepsiCo Dream Machine at each of its 15 locations and two convenience stores.

The Dream Machine recycling initiative is designed around PepsiCo’s goal to increase the U.S. beverage container recycling rate from 34 percent to 50 percent by 2018. The program is currently introducing recycling kiosks and related technologies at public locations across North America.

PepsiCo is also using the program to help America’s veterans through its Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities (EBV), a national program offering free training in entrepreneurship and small business management to post-9/11veterans with disabilities.

The Greenopolis technology platform features product tracking applications that enable people to track the brands they recycle, and online technologies that allow users to share and learn about their recycling behavior through social networks, games and Greenopolis.com.

The interactive “smart” recycling kiosks provide coupons and rewards for recycling on-the-go.

The Public Benefit: Making Real the Promise of "Green Jobs"

2010-09-22T09:10:00.000-07:00

Vince Kasten Sustainable Energy Specialist
Posted: September 22, 2010 11:25 AM

Renewable energy projects mobilize money, workers and materials to create resources for delivering abundant clean energy for many years. These projects are announced with great fanfare and often the public good will and political muscle needed to make them happen is predicated on the promise of local economic benefit and the creation of many local jobs. All too often the actual benefit realized is transient, and difficult to quantify; little attention is given to creating related programs to drive job and supply chain creation, and even less given to creating the monitoring and reporting needed to provide transparency of results. In the end, projects and their promoters take credit for job creation much like, as a congressional member once confided, "a crowing rooster tries to take credit for the sun coming up."

The amount of public attention generated by high profile, prestigious projects, as well as the effort that has and will go into making such projects a reality, demands greater, more far reaching and lasting results. There are however excellent examples of projects where economic development is an explicit goal of the project, balancing the economic performance of the project - so vital to attracting funding and advancing the cause of renewable and sustainable energy - with the economic benefit produced by the project. They capitalize on the effect that unique and compelling green projects have in galvanizing local and regional attention, and dedicate project resources and funding to programs that specifically target job creation and economic impact as requisite outcomes of the project rather than incidental side effects, making each of these projects a focal point for local and regional transformation.

The goals of these programs - executed collaboratively with established economic development organizations, community colleges, vocational/technical institutes and union programs - include:

· Creating jobs in target populations such as disadvantaged youth, displaced union workers, veterans and the chronically unemployed

· Creating a lasting transformation in the local/regional supply chain to support renewable energy and sustainable projects

· Enhancing the image and prestige of the locality that sponsors and hosts the project as leaders in economically viable sustainability technologies and practices

· Establishing research and development programs with local and regional universities

· Heightened awareness and appreciation of the citizens and the business community of the economic potential of renewable/sustainable technologies

· A lasting stream of funded projects - such as projects to retrofit existing buildings for energy efficiency - that may be unrelated to but inspired by Lake Erie Wind

In projects where we are directly involved the project sponsors the establishment of a non-profit "Institute" whose mission is to maximize the project's economic impact by creating awareness, training workers, and providing funded, technology-based energy efficiency programs to increase the sustainability of local and regional economies, directly create green jobs for the workers trained, and support the economic development goals presented in the list above. The non-profit structure also positions the Institute to mobilize public and private funds along with project-derived revenue to drive the creation of a new economy energized by the flow of talent and treasure into the project. Control of the programs, the Institute and the funding it raises and deploys is transitioned to local leadership, creating permanence in the organization and its programs.

By explicitly targeting local and regional economic benefit as a project outcome, these projects become a nexus for development of education and outreach programs, establishing leadership in sustainable technology education and job training, and shift the locus of economic impact beyond the considerable impact from its design, construction and operation into a job creation engine from with a lasting impact on the region far greater than that caused by the development of the project alone. They serve as a model for making real the promise of green jobs.

Opel Unveiling Vivaro e-Concept Extended Range Electric Van

2010-09-22T08:43:00.000-07:00

Research Study at the IAA Commercial Vehicles 2010 Show
22 September 2010

The Opel Vivaro e-Concept.

At the IAA Commercial Vehicles Fair in Hannover (23-30 September 2010), Opel will unveil a research project on a Vivaro e-Concept, an electric van with up to 400 kilometers (249 miles) extended range. The e-Concept is conceived to have 5.0 cubic meter storage capacity able to carry 750 kilograms (1,600 lbs) of load.

The 111 kW electric motor in the Vivaro e-Concept propulsion system delivers 370 N·m (273 lb-ft) of torque and would offer 100 kilometers (62 miles) pure electric driving range.

We would like to test the acceptance of our advanced propulsion technology by showing the Vivaro e-Concept to the commercial vehicle specialists attending the show. We are convinced that we will get a fantastic reaction from the people who use such vehicles on a daily basis: Electric mobility will allow them to travel in city areas which are now off-limits to petrol and diesel-powered vehicles and the range-extender technology makes it possible to use an electric van for normal routine business.

—Chris Lacey, Executive Director, International Operations Opel/Vauxhall Commercial Vehicles

On longer, regional hauls or shuttle services, the range-extender switches on, extending the total driving range to more than 400 kilometers. Engineers foresee the Vivaro e-Concept as capable of driving permanently with engine and electric motor propulsion, enabling drivers to reach distant destinations.

Opel engineers have mounted the batteries, which can be re-charged on a standard household 230-volt outlet under the floor of the Vivaro e-Concept. There, the lithium ion battery modules are protected from the weather. At the same time the modules provide a low center of gravity for good handling characteristics, protecting especially from crosswind influence.

The e-Concept is envisioned to be capable of meeting the typical daily needs of inner city delivery transport fully electrically.

At this point in time there’s no plans for production in the future. We have an important task to do, which is to conclude the research we are undertaking, have a look at that research and then determine the right configuration for any vehicle in the future...We know we have the technology. Now we’re just looking at the right application and right configuration of that technology before making any plans on future production.

—Chris Lacey

Volvic ‘Greener Bottle’ Made from 20% Sugarcane Waste

2010-09-22T07:10:00.000-07:00

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Volvic Natural Mineral Water has launched its GREENER BOTTLE made from 20 percent sugarcane waste. The beverage maker says it is the first UK company to introduce a 100 percent recyclable PET plastic bottle using this renewable plant material.

The new plant-based plastic, called BioPET, is created by combining PET with fermented and dehydrated sugarcane waste, a natural and renewable waste product from the production of sugar.

“The GREENER BOTTLE is a real breakthrough for us and a genuinely cutting edge innovation,” says Stéphane Cousté, director, nature committee, Evian Volvic Worldwide. “What we’re announcing today is just the first step to integrating renewable materials into our bottles and is a key milestone in our journey to reduce the global carbon footprint of the Volvic brand by 40 percent from 2008 to 2012.”

The new Volvic 50cl GREENER BOTTLE, available in December, will contain 20 percent plant material, reducing the amount of non-renewable material needed to create the bottle, says Volvic.

In addition, the new bottle offers a 38 percent lower packaging carbon footprint and a 16 percent lower total lifecycle footprint than the previous 50cl Volvic bottle. This reduction is achieved by incorporating 25 percent recycled plastic from previously used bottles and using the new plant-based plastic.

The weight of the bottle also has been reduced from 17g to 15g, which will cut the carbon footprint of the current Volvic bottle in half.

Volvic has cut the amount of plastic in its bottles by 30 percent over the past 15 years.

Other beverage companies also are making the move to bioplastic packaging. In November 2009, Coca-Cola started the global rollout of its PlantBottle and by the end of 2010 it expects to have sold more than 2 billion units. The PlantBottle is made from a process that turns sugarcane and molasses into a component for PET plastic.

Green Planet Bottling and Keystone Water Company also offer bioplastic water bottles that are made 100 percent from plants, and are reusable, recyclable and compostable in 80 days.

Sugarcane-based packaging is also starting to move into the beauty products market. As an example, Procter & Gamble Company (P&G) recently announced plans to pilot the use of renewable sugarcane-derived plastic on selected packaging for its Pantene Pro-V, COVERGIRL and Max Factor brands, starting in 2011.

UPS Adds 167 CNG Delivery Trucks

2010-09-22T06:59:00.000-07:00

March 29, 2008

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UPS has added 167 Compressed Natural Gas delivery vehicles to its fleets in Texas, Georgia and California. It placed the order in October.

The company operates the transportation industry’s largest private fleet of alternative fuel vehicles. This deployment brings the UPS “green fleet” total to 1,629 trucks, according to the company.

The CNG truck bodies are identical externally to the signature-brown trucks that now comprise the UPS fleet although they will be marked as CNG vehicles. The trucks are expected to reduce emissions by 20 percent and improve fuel economy by 10 percent compared to the cleanest diesel engines available today.

In November, UPS rolled out a small parcel delivery service tin Northern California using 42 electric cars and trucks from ZAP. The company runs hybrid electric delivery trucks too.

Fleets Can Improve Fuel Economy 5-40% by Making Switch to Hybrid Vehicles

2010-09-22T06:54:00.000-07:00

September 20, 2010

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Fleet operators are finding that hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) can help them cut fuel costs and meet emissions-reduction targets, according to a new report from Pike Research.

A key finding shows that commercial and government fleet managers can improve fuel economy between five percent and 40 percent and lower emissions 10 percent to 50 percent below comparable vehicles with internal combustion engines (ICEs).

Pike’s researchers forecast that the global market for HEV light-duty (LD) vehicles in the fleet sector will increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.5 percent from 2010 to 2015, with vehicle sales surpassing 740,000 per year by the end of that period.

The U.S. is expected to be the largest fleet market for LD HEVs through 2015, with vehicle sales of 233,454 vehicles, an 8.1 percent CAGR from 2010. Global HEV fleet sales will reach 740,704 vehicles in 2015, representing nearly 4 percent of global LD vehicle sales.

However, there are still some economic challenges associated with hybrid vehicles, says Pike’s senior analyst Dave Hurst. “Lifetime costs for HEVs, including the cost of the vehicle plus fuel, can often be higher than ICE vehicles. However, a number of government incentives are helping to close the gap for fleet operators. In addition, many fleet managers are electing to purchase HEVs as a means of complying with requirements to reduce fleet emissions, as well as to hedge against higher fuel costs in the future.”

Hurst says that passenger cars will be the largest segment for HEVs in fleet markets, but some of the highest growth rates over the next five years will be in the SUV and pickup truck segments, particularly in the United States.

The study, “Hybrid Electric Vehicles for Fleet Markets”, also finds that for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) passenger cars will represent 80 percent of the fleet market in 2015, primarily driven by the automakers’ focus on consumer markets for PHEV launches.

Corporate fleets already making the switch include Verizon, UPS, FedEx and Coke.

EPEAT ‘Green’ Ratings Save 10 Billion kWh of Electricity

2010-09-22T06:50:00.000-07:00

September 21, 2010

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EPEAT registered products will save more than 10 billion kWh of electricity, reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by more than 2 million metric tons and avoid 44 million metric tons of air emissions (including GHG emissions) and more than 93,000 metric tons of water pollutant emissions thanks to their Energy Star efficiency specs, according to the 2009 EPEAT Environmental Benefits report released by the Green Electronics Council.

EPEAT, which stands for Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool, helps buyers identify environmentally-friendly computer equipment including desktops, laptops and monitors. The EPEAT registry makes it easy for purchasers to compare and select products based on their environmental attributes.

Since launching in 2006, more than 317 million EPEAT-registered products have been purchased, which have avoided more than 8,000 metric tons of toxic substances, reduced GHG emissions close to 9 million cars’ annual releases and delivered associated savings to manufacturers and users of more than $6.5 billion.

According to the report, EPEAT registered notebooks, desktops, and monitors purchased worldwide in 2009 will, over their life, reduce use of toxic materials including mercury by 1537 metric tons, eliminate more than 29,000 metric tons of solid waste, and reduce hazardous waste disposal by 72,000 metric tons.

Over the past year, EPEAT has moved from a global registration to a country-specific registration model, which allows EPEAT “to more closely police registry claims and enables purchasers to more easily find locally available registered products,” says Jeff Omelchuck, EPEAT Executive Director.

Renewable Energy Standard Revived in New Energy Bill

2010-09-22T06:40:00.000-07:00

September 21, 2010

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A bipartisan group of U.S. senators will introduce legislation today that would require utilities to generate minimum levels of power from clean energy like wind and solar, after such a measure was stripped from a broader oil-spill bill in July, Reuters reports.

Senators Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), who heads the Senate energy committee, and Sam Brownback (R-KS), will unveil the standalone bill this afternoon.

“I think that the votes are present in the Senate to pass a renewable electricity standard,” Bingaman said in a release. “I think that we need to get on with figuring out what we can pass and move forward.”

Bingaman’s office told Reuters that Senators Sue Collins (R-Maine), and Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and Tom Udall (D-NM) would attend Today’s conference unveiling the bill.

In July, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid removed climate measures from his energy bill which were tied to legislation that responded to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. At the time, Reid said the renewable electricity standard wouldn’t be part of the oil-spill bill because it couldn’t muster the 60 out of 100 votes that are required to pass it through the Senate.

Reid had cited a lack of Republican support for a renewable energy standard. Democrats from some states in the Midwest and South that lack strong solar and wind resources had also opposed the measure.

A month later, Reid said he hoped the renewable electricity standard could be added back to the energy bill and be passed in a lame-duck session after the Nov. 2 congressional elections because lawmakers may feel more free to vote for such a program.

Today’s legislation is very similar to one passed in Bingaman’s panel last year, Bingaman’s spokesman Bill Wicker told Bloomberg News. That mandate required 15 percent of electricity to come from renewable sources like wind, solar and biomass by 2021. The legislation would incorporate small changes, such as moving the starting date from 2011 to 2012. New hydrogen power would count as a renewable fuel under the bill, but nuclear power would not count toward the mandate.

Republicans opposing the energy standard have sought more inclusion of nuclear power in a mandate, as well as coal production using carbon capture and storage technology and hydroelectricity, according to E2 Wire.

The Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimated this year that wind energy could generate 20 percent of the power needed by households and businesses in the eastern half of the United States by 2024, but would require up to $90 billion in investment.

EPA Kicks Off ‘Green’ Power Community Challenge

2010-09-22T06:33:00.000-07:00

September 21, 2010

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Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has launched its national “Green Power Community Challenge,” a year-long campaign to encourage cities, towns, villages, and Native American tribes to use renewable energy to help prevent greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and to accelerate the development of renewable energy capacity across the Unites States.

The EPA is challenging the Green Power Communities to purchase more than 1.8 billion kilowatt-hours of green power annually, doubling the total amount of green power used by these communities today. Communities will compete to see which one can use the most green power and achieve the highest green power percentage of total electricity use. The winners will be announced in September 2011.

To participate in the challenge, a local government must join EPA’s Green Power Partnership and meet the program’s green power purchase requirements. They also have to conduct a campaign to encourage local businesses and residents to collectively buy or produce green power on-site in amounts that meet EPA requirements.

More than 30 cities and towns in Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wisconsin have become green power communities, and are collectively buying more than 900 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) of green power annually, says EPA. Green power is generated from renewable resources such as solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, biogas, and low-impact hydropower.

EPA will provide quarterly updates at its Website

Dyess AFB to Deploy Energy-Saving Tech to Cut Energy Use, Costs

2010-09-22T05:50:00.000-07:00

September 21, 2010

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Dyess Air Force Base (AFB) is planning to deploy an occupancy-based energy management solution from Telkonet after a pilot program delivered run-time savings of more than 29 percent in 44 dormitory room units for one year. The base will spend $535,000 to install Telkonet SmartEnergy for an additional 844 dormitory rooms.

The Telkonent SmartEnergy technology is expected to significantly reduce the base’s energy consumption since heating and cooling comprise one of the largest in-building energy costs. Dyess AFB will implement Telkonet’s Recovery Time technology to conserve energy when military dormitory rooms are unused.

“We are implementing the SmartEnergy occupancy-based energy management system as part of our continuing energy efficiency initiatives and reaching new heights in cost reduction and reduced energy consumption,” said Tom Denslow, energy manager for the Dyess Base.

Dyess AFB, located in Abilene, Tex., is the home of all initial B-1B combat crew training, two combat squadrons, a weapons school and a B-1B test and evaluation squadron.

This is not Dyess AFB’s first energy savings project. As an example, in 2008, the base saved more than 160 million gallons of water and reduced energy consumption by 16.5 percent, saving more than $1 million. This earned Dyess AFB the 2009 Department of Energy’s Federal Energy and Water Management Award.

Dyess AFB also became the first Air Force aircraft to fly at supersonic speed using an alternate fuel in 2008.

Meanwhile, a U.S. Navy facility in Seal Beach, California, has completed a 190-kilowatt (kW) photovoltaic (PV) solar energy carport project, reports GetSolar.com.

The PV system, installed by Stronghold Engineering, is expected to produce more than 265,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of clean energy annually and save the base more than $30,500 annually in energy costs, according to the article.

Stronghold has installed two other solar energy systems at the Navy’s Seal Beach facility, totaling more than 2,000 solar panels and accounting for 6.5 percent of the facility’s energy needs, which is shy of the 7.5 percent needed to meet the 2005 Energy Policy Act, reports GetSolar.

Smart Grid Managed Services - Pike Research

2010-09-22T05:44:00.000-07:00

Infrastructure, Application, and Business Process Outsourcing for Smart Grid

Utilities: Market Analysis and Forecasts

Utilities in many parts of the world – especially in the United States – are experiencing radical operational change as they update their decades-old infrastructure to be replaced by an Internet-enabled grid that will provide high-quality, reliable, and real-time information to both utilities and consumers. To meet this challenge, many utilities will seek consulting and implementation services from service vendors to help them with their smart grid deployments. In addition, because they often lack the resources and skills to manage a smart grid program on an ongoing basis on their own, they are also likely to turn to an external service provider to manage it or certain aspects thereof.

Because smart grid managed services is an emerging and nascent market, it is relatively small with an estimated worldwide spending of $470 million in 2010. It is, however, growing very rapidly so that by 2011, Pike Research forecasts that the smart grid managed services market will reach $821 million, a 75% growth rate over 2010. Growth is forecast to continue to be strong and this market will eventually become a multi-billion market opportunity for managed service providers by 2015.

There are multiple market forces fueling a growing demand among utilities for smart grid technology and smart grid-related service offerings, such as managed services. Although they tend to vary by country and region, there are some market factors that are common across the globe. Pike Research has grouped them into four major drivers –Economic, Environmental, Social and Technological. The economic factor tends to be one of the strongest drivers. In this case, utilities are motivated to deploy smart grid technology in order to reduce their operating costs through improved process and technology efficiency and mobile workforce management. Other driving factors are regulatory requirements to meet certain environmental policies and rules, brand image, and technological advancement that enables utilities to effectively and efficiently undertake smart grid deployment.

This Pike Research report examines global and regional smart grid managed services trends, and forecasts market size and growth prospects by region and managed services segment from 2009 through 2015. In addition, Pike Research assesses the competitive landscape, including a detailed competitive analysis of major smart grid managed service vendors.

Key questions addressed:

What is the size of the total smart grid managed services market on a year by year basis – worldwide and regionally – through 2015?
What are the growth trends and prospects in the smart grid managed services market on a global and regional basis?
What are the various market forces driving and inhibiting growth in smart grid managed services?
Which managed services segments offer the most promising opportunities and growth prospects?
Who are the key vendors in the smart grid managed services market? What are their capabilities and strategic plans?
What kind of competition are smart grid managed service vendors facing in this market?

Who needs this report?

IT service vendors
Telecom equipment and service providers
Product vendors
Utilities
Government agencies
Investor community

Table of Contents

1. Executive Summary
1.1 Introduction to Smart Grid Managed Services

1.2 Market Opportunities

1.3 Market Forces

1.4 The Competitive Landscape

2. Market Issues
2.1 Introduction and Background

2.2 The Smart Grid Market

2.2.1 Market Drivers

2.2.1.1 Economic – Cost Savings and Financial Incentives

2.2.1.2 Environmental

2.2.1.3 Social

2.2.1.4 Technological

2.2.2 Market Inhibitors

2.2.2.1 Financial Distress

2.2.2.2 Regulatory Environment

2.2.2.3 Lack of Standards and Best Practices

2.2.2.4 Shortage of Skills and Talent

2.2.2.5 Grid Security and Privacy Concerns

2.2.3 Market Adoption of Smart Grid

2.2.3.1 The Americas

2.2.3.1.1 United States

2.2.3.1.2 Canada

2.2.3.1.3 Latin America

2.2.3.2 Europe and Asia Pacific

2.2.3.1.1 Western Europe

2.2.3.1.2 Asia Pacific

2.3 Smart Grid Services

2.3.1 Smart Grid Service Offerings

2.3.1.1 Consulting Services

2.3.1.2 Implementation Services

2.3.1.3 Managed Services

2.3.1.4 Bundled Services

2.4 Smart Grid Managed Services Market – Current and Future Outlook

3. Competitive Landscape
3.1 A Converging Competitive Landscape

3.1.1 A Mix of Players

3.1.2 Partner Ecosystems

3.2 A Winning Value Proposition

3.3 Services and Technology Vendor Profiles

3.3.1 Accenture

3.3.2 Alcatel-Lucent

3.3.3 AT&T

3.3.4 Capgemini

3.3.5 CSC

3.3.6 EnerNOC

3.3.7 Ericsson

3.3.8 FirstCarbon Solutions

3.3.9 GE Energy

3.3.10 HCL Technologies

3.3.11 IBM

3.3.12 Infosys

3.3.13 Itron

3.3.14 KEMA

3.3.15 Lockheed Martin

3.3.16 SAIC

3.3.17 Siemens

3.3.18 Tendril

3.3.19 Trilliant

3.3.20 Verizon

3.3.21 Wipro

4. Market Forecasts
4.1 Forecast Introduction

4.2 Assumptions and Observations Determining This Forecast

4.3 Worldwide Smart Grid Managed Services Spending

5. Company Directory
6. Acronym and Abbreviation List
7. Table of Contents
8. Table of Charts and Figures
9. Scope of Study, Sources and Methodology, Notes

List of Charts and Figures
Smart Grid Managed Services External Spending by Region, World Markets: 2009-2015
Smart Grid Managed Services Revenue Share by Vendor Category, World Markets: 2010
Smart Grid Managed Services External Spending by Region, World Markets: 2009-2015
Smart Grid Managed Services Spending by Segment, World Markets: 2010
Smart Grid Managed Services Spending by Segment, World Markets: 2015

List of Tables
Smart Grid Managed Services External Spending by Region, World Markets: 2009-2015
Smart Grid Managed Services External Spending Share by Region, World Markets: 2009-2015
Smart Grid Managed Services External Spending by Services Segment, World Markets: 2009-2015
Smart Grid Managed Services External Spending Growth by Services Segment, World Markets: 2009-2015
Smart Grid Managed Services Spending Share by Services Segment, World Markets: 2009-2015

Debating the Nuclear Waste Problem

2010-09-20T11:53:00.000-07:00

March 9, 2010, 3:16 pm

By MATTHEW L. WALD

With Nevada’s Yucca Mountain facility apparently out of the picture as a nuclear waste repository, government nuclear experts say interim measures might be needed for a very long time.

In a speech Tuesday delivered to about 2,700 industry executives, nuclear regulators and other experts gathered for a nuclear energy conference in Washington, Gregory B. Jaczko, the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said that his agency needed to determine just how many centuries such fuel can be safely stored above ground, and that it should come up with a policy that would not require amendment for many years.

The commission currently allows reactors to operate and accumulate waste under a “waste confidence” policy that anticipates that the federal government will have a repository in place by the 2020s. But with the demise of the plan to bury the waste at Yucca Mountain, the commission is working on a new policy.

Nuclear fuel can be stored safely for long periods, Mr. Jaczko said in remarks to reporters, and the commission will “work to see what that time frame is really like — 100 years, 200 years, 400.”

The commission was supposed to hear a license application brought by the Department of Energy to open Yucca, but that agency said last week that it wanted to withdraw the application. A court may have to rule on whether the administration can do that, under the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which laid out the procedure for selecting a site.

Earlier this month the Energy Department convened a “blue ribbon commission” to evaluate all options, including new kinds of reactors that could run partly on waste from the old ones, and convert some of the most toxic and longest-lived materials into less troublesome materials. But there is no clear path forward at this point.

A new policy, said Mr. Jaczko, should not predict when a repository will open, but show, “what are the limits of safe and secure storage of fuel.”

Fuel is now stored in dry casks — steel-lined concrete silos that require no liquid cooling or forced ventilation — and those are licensed for 20 years.
At three plants, the licenses have been extended for another 20.

Metal parts of such casks can begin corroding in weeks if salt hits them, the N.R.C. has found. Whether this happens depends partly on the temperature of the cask (it is heated by the waste) and the humidity in the air.

The engineer who headed the Yucca program under the Bush administration, Edward F. Sproat III, also attending the conference, said, “you can’t keep that stuff in those canisters forever. They’re not designed that way.”

Dale Klein, a member of the commission whose term will expire as soon as the Senate confirms a replacement, spoke bluntly about the decision by the Obama administration to drop the license application for Yucca.

A year ago, Mr. Klein said, Mr. Obama suggested the public should have confidence that government policy was driven by “scientific integrity.”

No scientific judgment was made about Yucca, Mr. Klein said. That is what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was supposed to do, he said.

Conventional Energy, Energy Business, Energy Economics, Energy Politics, Environmental Politics, General Business, General Pollution, Government Policy, Nuclear Energy, jaczko, nrc, Washington
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California to Regulate ‘Most Potent’ Greenhouse Gas 13 Readers' CommentsPost a Comment »All CommentsHighlightsReaders' RecommendationsRepliesOldestNewest 1.NL
Oak Ridge, TN
March 10th, 2010
6:22 amOften the first objection people have to an expansion of nuclear power is, "where do you put all the waste." However, nuclear power is perhaps the only energy source that actually captures and contains all of the by-products rather than dumping them in to the air and water. By contrast, fossil fuels users only dream of capturing their wastes. Only after carbon sequestration becomes technologically feasible (if ever) can the fossil fuel industries be concerned about "where to put all the [carbon] waste". The volume of carbon waste would dwarf the volume of nuclear waste and it be pumped directly into the ground.

Yucca Mountain was nixed because of legitimate political reasons (Nevandans are against it), but it was well engineered and scientifically sound. The current blue ribbon panel has the opportunity to solve the political impasse while moving the US toward nuclear recycling.

All experts (including the NRC) agree that the current process of storing spent fuel in casks is adequate for decades, perhaps even centuries. Therefore the issue of "where do you put all the waste" is not a crisis, but a distraction from expanding one of the cleanest and most reliable energy sources the world has ever known.

I can't wait for more nuclear power, less coal, cleaner air, and a livable climate.
Recommend Recommended by 1 Readers 2.Patrick
Long Island NY
March 10th, 2010
6:22 am Yucca Mountain is only about 100 miles upwind of Las Vegas, near where the nuclear bomb testing took place many years ago. Someone consider scientifically, the dangers to past, present, and future travellars and residents there. I've already done some looking myself. I'll bet the land was dirt cheap when they started building there. So, you really want nuclear power?
Recommend Recommended by 1 Readers 3.Jim Baird
Nanaimo, Canada
March 10th, 2010
6:22 am The main problem with storing spent nuclear fuel underground is heat which can over the long-term break down the crystalline structure of the rock in which it is placed and induce hydrothermal convection that can transport hazardous material back to the biosphere.

In accordance with the First Law of Thermodynamics the way to reduce this heating effect is to convert heat into work. Preferable to produce North America's unconventional oil deposits.

Alberta's Bitumen is produced with an energy return on investment of 5.2/1 and bitumen has unprecedented capacity to sequester radionuclides as was noted by a recent international study by American, French, Australian and Canadian scientists.

Close to 6 billion barrels of Alberta's bitumen can be produced annually using the global inventory of spent nuclear fuel at a savings of about $15/barrel.

Capitalizing on the economic potential of the back end of the fuel cycle is the best way to offset the high front end cost of reactors.
Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers 4.Matt
Reno, NV
March 10th, 2010
6:22 am Chu wants to reprocess spent fuel, thereby reducing the radioactivity of the high-level waste to 500 years (see http://www.seattlepi.com/specials/eternity/d3.html). But he's only considering this tech because Yucca won't last ONE MILLION years!

Keep Yucca open, reprocess and store the non-recyclable waste there, otherwise it's a giant waste of money and only hurts the Nevada economy. You're never going to find the ideal storage solution, so you need a balanced approach. Why not leverage what taxpayers & utilities have already paid for?
Recommend Recommended by 1 Readers 5.Wang Suya
Japan
March 10th, 2010
6:22 am Nuclear power plants are defficult issue, we need energy without fossil fuel. Rnewable energy can not satify our demands so soon. Maybe nuclear can be one instand energy of fossil fuel to promise the earth temperature raise under 2 degree C.
Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers 6.Russ Finley
Seattle
March 10th, 2010
10:17 amHuh. Five reasonable comments in a row. Some leading independent environmentalist thinkers, George Monbiot, Steward Brand, James Lovelock, and Steve Kirsch, to name a few, have changed their minds about nuclear. Nuclear could actually be an ally of renewable energy rather than a competitor:

http://biodiversivist.blogspot.com...

The point that only nuclear is charged with its own clean up is valid. Imagine the cost of coal if it had to pay to clean up its waste and environmental damage.

Recommend Recommended by 1 Readers 7.AIG
Nashville, TN
March 10th, 2010
10:45 amThe spent reactor fuel, which contains plutonium, is currently stored on site secured only by a chain link fence. The French on the other hand have armed guards and an anti-aircraft battery securing their plutonium separated from spent fuel. Why can't we be more like the French? The NRC needs to join the war on terror.

Barrier strips and blast shields will be insufficient to protect us from an enemy with ingenuity to bring down the World Trade Center using box cutters as their only weapon. Imagine what they can do if they step up to the new technology of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). A Newsweek article "Will Foreign Drones One Day Attack the US," suggests we won't have to imagine for long.

Until then, IEDs can be flown into the spent fuel casks by low tech suicide bombers just as the plane flew into the IRS building in Austin, Texas. Each cask contains as much spent fuel as was released into the atmosphere in Chernobyl. This is something the NRC should consider in their three day global conference this week in Bethesda.
Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers 8.abevanluik
Las Vegas, NV
March 10th, 2010
10:59 am It is hubris of the first order to suggest that a government will be around for several centuries to guarantee safety and security at well over a hundred locations around the nation.

This is the main reason that publications by the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Nuclear Energy Agency (both international safety-related agencies) have repeatedly said that storage without a disposal program with a well-defined endpoint is irresponsible: Rock can be trusted to last thousands of years, even millions of years, but nations, their governments, and their institutions have never ever lasted that long.

Yucca promised very likely to be safe over a million-year period. It has sat there pretty much as it is today for about 9 million years after the mountain-building of the nascent Basin & Range stretching did its thing and made what were flat layers of tuffs into tilted mountains radiating away from the now dead sources, the collapsed calderas just to the north.

Was Yucca ideal or perfect? No, but what ever is? We drive our cars daily knowing they are not perfect, but we keep them inside their design bounds and assure safety to the extent we can. Yucca Mountain promised a safe operation, transporting nuclear fuel has been shown by the National Academy of Sciences to be orders of magnitude safer than transporting some of the chemicals we transport across the country continually, and whatever species dominates Earth at a million years were likely to get an almost undetectable increase in their background radiation if they happened to live relatively close to Yucca Mountain.

The only reason to reconsider Yucca was its cost to this generation, it can perhaps be done cheaper in a clay, clayey shale, granite or salt site. But safe is safe, and there are other issues related to such sites such as sealing out aquifers (technical) and relative nearness to populations (political). The County hosting Yucca Mountain, by the way, was in favor of the project. After all, they had absorbed almost a thousand nuclear bomb blasts, this was a boring project in comparison.

Other American, European, Asian and African countries planning their repositories in clays, salt bodies, granites and other rock types are showing that sealing out aquifers and dealing with local populations are not insurmountable problems, we can learn from their mistakes and imitate their successes.

Some commenters in this blog opined that the heat and radiation were going to damage the repository. Heat is about a 300-year issue, then things are relatively cool, and initial heat loads are controlled by spacing waste packages to prevent geochemical changes that may not be desirable. Radiation has not been shown to affect the selected rock types in any significant way. It produces oxygen by decomposing water at or very near the waste packages and waste forms, but that is a minor problem readily handled through design and site-selection (in Yucca, with an already oxygen-rich environment it was a rather moot process).

I hope that the Blue Ribbom Panel recommends moving forward with disposal of the "legacy" (existing) wastes as soon as possible.

Even if in 20 or 40 years we have the capacity to reprocess and maybe even transmute, we will then do very well just to treat our new annual arisings with any facilities we build. We'll likely never return to work on the legacy wastes now being stored, and we will certainly never try to re-reprocess what has already been turned into glassified high-level wastes (nor will we ever touch some of the "cats-and-dogs" from experimental and weapons-production reactors). Those wastes alone will fill a 'small' repository (about half Yucca's legally limited -not physicaly limited-size).

I also hope the Blue Ribbon panel will take note of the instability of governments and be in a hurry to at least start up a new repository project. Seeing the sea-change in this government, apparently now having killed a planned repository at one location and in the process ignoring several laws duly passed by Congress and signed by sitting Presidents over several decades. The administration may have the right to impose a new policy, but it is a policy not voted on by Congress or signed into law. This ought to be a giant reminder that governments are not to be trusted or taken seriously when they imply they will be there to assure safety for centuries at over a hundred specific locations.

I would put my century-and-beyond trust in a competent rock body before I would ever put that trust in any government body, no matter how currently competent that body is (the US NRC is a very competent organization).

Saying we can store for centuries shows a total disregard for history. Suggesting we can trust in our current institutions for centuries is high-risk-hubris.
Recommend Recommended by 3 Readers 9.James
Northern Nevada
March 10th, 2010
12:24 pm The Oklo nuclear reactors show that it is possible to safely store nuclear "waste" for upwards of a billion years.

However, the fundamental problem here comes from thinking of the products of a first-stage fission reaction as waste, when in actuality they are valuable materials that can readily be reprocessed, and used in the next stage of the cycle.

As for storing the waste - temporarily, one hopes - near Las Vegas, that seems by far the best place for it, since nothing you could do to Las Vegas would make it worse that what the developers already do.
Recommend Recommended by 2 Readers 10.JimHopf
San Jose, CA
March 11th, 2010
8:27 amAIG,

I find your scaremongering to be disgusting. I work in the field of dry cask storage, and I know that the risks to the public from such casks is negligible. Even a full breach of the cask, as a result of a severe, successful attack is unlikely to cause a single death among the public.

Chernobyl's core contained a much larger amount of nuclear material than that present in the cask, and its core consisted of flammilble graphite (the main mechanism of dispersion) whereas spent fuel casks contain no flammible materials. Also, the fuel in storage casks has decayed for at least 5 years, so the intensely radioactive, short-lived isotopes are gone. Most of the measureable health effect from Chernobyl is due to the release of I-131, which is not present at all in dry-stored spent fuel.

Extracting plutonium from spent fuel requires reprocessing, a very expensive and technically challenging process that is more difficult than simply mining and enriching raw uranium ore (which is found all over the world). Even if the plutionium in spent fuel were extracted, its isotope distribution makes it far less useful for weapons. Thus, spent fuel is even less useful to weapons making than (ubiquitous) uranium ore, and it is therefore not a proliferation risk.

One reason the French sites have so much security is that they contain SEPARATED plutonium. In other words, the difficult reprocessing step I mention above has already been performed. If this plutonium were stolen, it could simply be used directly in a weapon (although the isotope distribution issue would remain). Spent fuel does not require that level of security, for the reasons I give above.
Recommend Recommended by 1 Readers 11.Dr. J. Singmaster
94536
March 11th, 2010
8:28 amWhat about another TMI or Chernobyl incident? Also a recent report on Yankee reactor in New England indicated that it and 20+ other nuclear power plants had ground water beneath the plants contaminated with escaped tritium oxide from the heavy water used in the plant.
BUT the big always-with-us problem is the releasing of trapped energy to add to the overload already in the biosphere to worsen climate change. This adding was detailed in article by Dr. E. Chaisson of Tufts U. in EOS, Trans, Amer. Geophys. Union, Vol;. 89, No. 28, pgs, 253-4(2008). For our children's future we have to get to making the sun just about our sole source of energy including using it to actually remove some of the carbon dioxide and the heat energy from their overloads already in the biosphere. I have detailed actions to get more and better use of the sun's energy in comments on a number of blogs. We are letting large amounts of trapped energy collected by the sun get away along with unneeded reemitting of GHGs from our present handling of organic wastes and sewage.
Dr. J. Singmaster
Recommend Recommended by 1 Readers 12.Anonymous
March 15th, 2010
7:35 amThose who favor nuclear power as a solution are probably those who have not experienced the devastation that the nuclear industry has had on the health of many of us, especially Native Americans. I have worked with Pueblo and Navajo people who were exposed to uranium mining for over 30 years. The environment down gradient from old uranium mines is devastated and irreparable; where once there were orchards and gardens, there is a sick-looking gray soil that remains radioactive. I have a pueblo friend who lived close to one of those mines whose mother and husband died of cancer and whose children suffer from chronic illnesses, illnesses connected with over exposure to radiation. Now, there are many applications for new uranium mines in her area. How can we think that nuclear energy is 'clean' energy when resource-light Native American communities who have already sacrificed their health for the material used in the early atomic bombs will now be asked for further sacrifices to provide the rest of us with our energy desires; I say desires instead of needs because our efforts at conservation of energy seem sporadic at best. If you live in a big city, just look at the skyline at night and you will know what I mean.
Recommend Recommended by 1 Readers 13.Tea Leaf Reader
New Mexico
March 29th, 2010
1:21 pmObserving the yahrzeit for Three Mile Island, March 28, 1979, falling one day before Passover this year, I was reminded that we are enslaved to the fantasy of cheap unlimited energy, reading "Passover Nuclear Pharaohs" online today. Uranium ore mining and milling contaminated the west, and now they want to do it again. Why go with another non-renewable fuel when we have all the unlimited free energy available to us in solar? Why indeed - you can only make money on scarcity.

Comment

I see two main problems with nuclear - One, the upfront costs are considerable. Two, the waste disposal question. What doers France do with ITS nuclear waste? I am all for recycling here, too.

Bike Sharing Expands in Washington

2010-09-20T11:28:00.000-07:00

September 20, 2010, 10:34 am

By J. DAVID GOODMAN

J. David Goodman/The New York Times

Test bikes sit at a new bike sharing station in Arlington, Va.

As Lauren Statman made her way along Calvert Street in Washington on Sunday, she stopped to investigate a new phenomenon on the sidewalk near her home: a large, empty bike share station.

From just 10 stations and about 100 bikes downtown, one of the first municipal bike sharing programs in the country is ballooning by a factor of 10: 100 stations and about 1,100 bikes are to spread around Washington and across the river in Arlington, Va., by the end of October.

The system officially opens to the public on Monday with 400 bikes at 49 stations. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty plans a morning news conference on the program.

“It seems cool because you don’t have to commit,” Ms. Statman, 23, said. She does not own a bike, she said, but will consider using the city’s bikes now that she has become interested in riding again.

The project, known as Capital Bikeshare, is the latest to come to a major American city, mirrors the systems have become integrated into many European cities. Its goals are both modest and potentially transformative: to get more people riding bikes, thereby promoting health, and shift the way transit systems work in cities.

In June, Minneapolis launched its Nice Ride program, with over 60 solar-powered stations and 700 bikes. A similar effort got under way in April in Denver, with 425 bikes. A major program is set to make its debut in Miami this fall, and New York is studying a massive program, with 30,000 bikes.

“In the early days there were discussions about our rugged individualist culture,” said Parry Burnap, executive director of Denver Bike Sharing, a nonprofit that operates the program. Some wondered whether Americans would embrace the notion of sharing. “But there are so many reasons to share,” he added. “It removes all the headaches of ownership, and people see that pretty clearly.”

For the last two years, Washington has had a very small bike share program, SmartBike, which was owned and operated by Clear Channel, the billboard advertising company. While seeking to build on lessons learned from SmartBike, the new, expanded system uses none of its infrastructure, said Chris Holben, who has been overseeing the program for the District Department of Transportation.

J. David Goodman

A couple perused bike-share instructions on Sunday in Washington.The two systems make use of separate electric docking stations to secure the bikes and will coexist for a month before SmartBike begins to be phased out. The new stations are portable, solar-powered and wirelessly connected to a central processing hub, Mr. Holben said, and are rolling out at a pace of three to five a day.

On a test ride around Arlington on Sunday, one of the program’s fire-red three-gear aluminum bike rode smoothly if a bit heavy — the bike equivalent of a sturdy station wagon.

Ms. Statman said the bikes would be a great alternative to borrowing from friends, as she has been doing recently. She said that using the share program will allow her to try out riding on the street until she gets comfortable enough to consider buying a bike of her own.

Memberships cost $75 a year, and bikes can also be taken out by the day for a $5 daily membership fee paid by credit card. After that, the first 30 minutes are free. The next 30 minutes cost $1.50, followed by $4.50 for the next 30 minutes and $6 for every subsequent hour. “The idea is to take short trips,” Mr. Holben said.

If a bike needs work because of a flat tire or other mechanical problems, a button can be pressed on each individual lockup station. The button effectively locks the bike in place until someone from Capital Bikeshare can take a look.

Vandalism and theft were not a major problem for Washington’s earlier program, as it was in Paris, Mr. Holben said. Of 100 bikes, only two were stolen and very few needed repairs beyond regular maintenance. There were a few incidents of tire-slashing while the bikes sat in the station and of graffiti being painted at the stations, he said.

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A Crop Sprouts Without Soil or Sunshine 9 Readers' CommentsPost a Comment »All CommentsHighlightsReaders' RecommendationsRepliesOldestNewest 1.John
Las Vegas
September 20th, 2010
11:24 amI tried the Nice Ride system in Minneapolis and it was awesome -- so much fun. Minneapolis has a terrific trail system, which helps, but DC has so many more destinations in close proximity, so I think it will be great there too.
Recommend Recommended by 1 Readers 2.Joe
CA
September 20th, 2010
12:08 pmBike sharing is great but DC needs more and better bike lanes. The car lanes are very narrow and drivers there are terrible.
Recommend Recommended by 1 Readers 3.eric
Boston, MA
September 20th, 2010
12:09 pmAre they using the Bixi system, developed in Montreal? The pricing and solar-power sound very similar--and the stations and bikes look similar... I used the one in Montreal and loved it. I'm waiting for it to come to Boston--it was scheduled to start up last summer, but they delayed it, I hope not forever!
Recommend Recommended by 2 Readers 4.swatter
Washington DC
September 20th, 2010
12:12 pmEven for those of us who ride to work and prefer a higher end bike, it may sometimes be logistically simpler during the day to use one of these to go short distances downtown. Great idea, long overdue, hope it works well.
Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers 5.swatter
Washington DC
September 20th, 2010
12:54 pmAlso, as was being said on NPR this morning, motorists and bicyclists need to be polite to each other and both need to get away from the in-your-face behavior that is all too evident today in the U.S.
Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers 6.Mark
Toronto
September 20th, 2010
12:54 pmI'm surprised you didn't mention the Bixi bikeshare program in Montreal. It is certainly North America's most successful program - I think there are about 7,000 bikes available now. Just take a visit to Montreal to see how successful it is. There are so many people riding bikes it is almost farcical.
Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers 7.FastEddy
Washington, DC
September 20th, 2010
12:54 pmI live in DC and I would love to join. However, the bike lanes here are inadequate and drivers are unwilling to share the road. I'm originally from Boston, home of the aggressive driver, but the road rage exhibited in the DC metro area puts drivers here in a class of their own. For now I'll stick with walking and public transportation.
Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers 8.G
Montreal, Canada
September 20th, 2010
12:54 pmI am from Montreal and this IS the Bixi locally home grown and developed program. I tend to see it more a political and profit move than an ecological and social movement of more people abstaining from using fossil fuel vehicles and getting better use of their own muscles and health benefits. It is relatively cheap for the yearly membership, but the result of this program produces worse road conditions especially for pedestrians because these new users riding bikes do not know how to abide by DRIVING road rules and laws! This Made in MTL, CANADA program is spreading arou d the world as we speak. Personally I rather own my own bike.
Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers 9.Schwinnme
Washington, DC
September 20th, 2010
12:55 pm Before unleashing all these bicyclists onto our streets is anyone giving thought to maybe including road safety/rules info either printed on the machine or in a little pamphlet? I'm sick of bicyclists yelling share the road as they bowl over people on the sidewalks, weave in and out of traffic lanes with no hand signals, run traffic lights/stop signs and ride the opposite way on streets. And no these aren't just the bike messengers

Self-cleaning solar panels field-tested on Mars

2010-09-20T09:32:00.000-07:00

August 24, 2010 9:12 AM PDT

by Martin LaMonica

Cleaning an array of thousands of solar panels could be done with a mini shock wave, rather than manually washing each one, according to a researcher.

Boston University professor Malay Mazumder on Monday offered details about a material that can be used to enable automatic cleaning of solar photovoltaic panels, in a presentation at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston.

Some of the thousands of solar panels at the Nellis Air Force base in Nevada.

(Credit: SunPower)
Keeping solar panels clean is serious concern, particularly for large-scale solar PV farms in dusty desert areas. The build-up of dust and particulate air pollutants blocks the sun and can significantly decrease the output of solar panels.

Right now, solar farm operators clean panels with water, which is a scarce resource in sunny desert areas. Mazumder proposed an electrically sensitive coating that would be placed on the glass of PV panels or a plastic sheet. Sensors that monitor dust concentrations would send an electrical charge through the material, causing a wave to ripple across the surfaces of the panels and send dust to the edges.

Mazumder said the process, which was originally developed for moon and Mars missions, would remove 90 percent of accumulated dust in two minutes.

"A dust layer of one-seventh of an ounce per square yard decreases solar power conversion by 40 percent," he said in a statement, adding that the technique could be used in commercial or residential systems.

The growth of solar power creates a need for cleaning services and methods, particularly for large-scale installations where investors expect a certain output. For the high-tech coating and sensor system to be used by commercial energy project developers, it cannot add significantly to the maintenance costs associated with panel cleaning.

Martin LaMonica is a senior writer for CNET's Green Tech blog. He started at CNET News in 2002, covering IT and Web development. Before that, he was executive editor at IT publication InfoWorld. E-mail Martin.

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Add a Comment (Log in or register) (5 Comments) prev next by Get_Bent August 24, 2010 10:06 AM PDT

"Right now, solar farm operators clean panels with water, which is a scarce resource in sunny desert areas."

Is there something wrong with using compressed air to do the job? Start at the upwind side of the solar farm and work your way downwind to prevent blowing dust back on the clean panels.

Like this Reply to this comment by Remijdio August 24, 2010 1:40 PM PDT
I could sure use this on my solar panels! Climbing up on my mansion and hosing them off is getting ridiculous!

Like this Reply to this comment by Joe Real August 24, 2010 2:54 PM PDT
Meanwhile, you can use a longer stick that can be mounted with cleaning, brushing or wiping module at the end. Some of the nifty contraptions have wheels so they are not hard to lift.

Like this by imgx64 August 25, 2010 12:58 AM PDT
Am I the only one who would love to be able to clean their car with this technology?
Like this Reply to this comment by solitare_pax August 25, 2010 5:25 AM PDT
I was about to note that.

I imagine it might be modified to assist with deicing aiplane wings on the ground as well, instead of using gallons of deicing fluid.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20014540-54.html?tag=mncol;mlt_related#ixzz105Wnc35U

Global Solar Rolls Out Stick-on panels

2010-09-20T09:25:00.000-07:00

Glue may be the magic ingredient to making solar power cheaper.

Solar company Global Solar on Tuesday introduced a line of flexible solar modules that are designed for flat commercial rooftop buildings.

Rather than install racking systems to hold heavy glass-covered solar panels, the company's PowerFlex BIPV modules can be adhered onto a roof or built right into roofing materials. The modules are quicker to installer, lighter, and don't require any penetrations into the roof, according to the company.

Global Solar's solar modules use thin-film solar cells and can be attached to flat roofs without racking.

(Credit: Global Solar)
The installed cost of Global Solar modules is about the same as traditional polycrystalline silicon panels with racks, said Jean-Noel Poirier, the vice president of marketing and business development. But because there is no need for spacing between racks, the flexible thin-film modules can cover more roof space and generate more power, he said.

The company plans to sell its solar modules--long strips of solar panels almost 19 feet long and 1.5 feet wide--through roof membrane manufacturers. The solar cells are made from a combination of copper, indium, selenium, and gallium (CIGS) and perform comparatively well in areas that don't have direct sun, Poirier said.

The company plans to get certification for the modules, which are being evaluated by roofing membrane companies now, by the end of the year and hopes to start production early next year.

Global Solar, one of many solar companies developing CIGS solar cells and modules, now has 75 megawatts worth of production capacity at two plants in Tucson, Ariz., and Berlin. Until now, the company has supplied solar cells to panel manufacturers, but it's now manufacturing its own modules for building-integrated photovoltaics, said CEO Jeff Britt.

Martin LaMonica is a senior writer for CNET's Green Tech blog. He started at CNET News in 2002, covering IT and Web development. Before that, he was executive editor at IT publication InfoWorld. E-mail Martin.
Topics:
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Tags:
thin film,
CIGS,
Global Solar,
BIPV
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Add a Comment (Log in or register) (15 Comments) prev next by Squashman2 August 31, 2010 8:31 AM PDT
What happens when Golf Ball size hail hits one of these?
Like this Reply to this comment by solitare_pax August 31, 2010 8:37 AM PDT
Agreed - how durable are they to wind & hail?

And what will they retail at?
Like this by rekees1 August 31, 2010 8:54 AM PDT
But if the energy company sues you for installing too many panels, as they control the states' legislatures and the federal government regarding power distribution quotas, this doesn't make much sense, does it?
Like this Reply to this comment by methos2000 August 31, 2010 8:57 AM PDT
So installed cost is no less expensive, I am guessing efficiency is than conventional PV panels (typical for thin film...), and durability is unknown - but hey, you can fit more on the roof! Not a very convincing sales pitch to me. How about some numbers Martin LaMonica? Without mentioning the power produced, cost etc, this is pretty much a fluff piece.
Like this Reply to this comment 2 people like this comment
by methos2000 August 31, 2010 9:01 AM PDT
Oops... meant to say "guessing efficiency is LESS than conventional PV panels..."
Like this 1 person likes this comment
by WineMaker5000 August 31, 2010 8:59 AM PDT
If they are cheaper to make and sell them at the same price i would go with proven technology rather than this greedy company. If they received funding from the DOE and still will market it this way, i would call this double rip- off. It benefits them only. We want the funding back with penalties and interests.
Like this Reply to this comment 1 person likes this comment
by aMUSICsite August 31, 2010 9:14 AM PDT
More info on durability, price and the amount of power you can get out would have been nice.
Like this Reply to this comment 1 person likes this comment
by mlamonica August 31, 2010 9:25 AM PDT
Company execs declined to provide a $/watt cost, except to say it's "competitive" on installed system cost. They did say the installation cost is 30-40 percent less. The module has a 25 year power output warranty. Each module puts out up to 300 watts. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a product spec sheet available.
Like this by Joe Real August 31, 2010 10:11 AM PDT
Time and again, we should not believe any of those 25 to 30 year warranties. Very few new companies are going to last that long, let alone 5 years, especially when it comes to solar industry. So I generally find these warranties useless. Maybe one to three companies will outlive the warranties.
Like this 1 person likes this comment
by dumbspammers August 31, 2010 10:14 AM PDT
Is "roofing membrane" what we used to call "tarpaper," or is it more like the rubber-like sheets called "membrane" for making custom shower pans?
Like this Reply to this comment by allo1977 August 31, 2010 10:27 AM PDT
very dumb why would you want solor when we have electric already in are homes already
Like this Reply to this comment by rsrupert1972 September 20, 2010 8:46 AM PDT
and where do you get the electric? Solar, if you use it, and you use more than you need, you can sell back for money. Duh. It also helps the environment, it's clean and reusable, and allows us to stretch out the fossil fuels used in cars
Like this by sdfwef_ewer August 31, 2010 11:08 AM PDT
Mounting the thin film panels directly onto the surface does allow you to cover more of the roof but the gain in surface area is mitigated by the reduced efficiency of horizontally mounted PV panels (i.e., the sun's rays will strike the PV surface at an oblique angle for much of the day and much of the year). Horizontally mounted panels will produce on the order of 15% less power than equivalent panels mounted at 30 degrees (after taking shading losses into account for the tilted panels).

On top of that, thin film is less efficient than conventional PV... so we have less efficient materials mounted at a suboptimal angle.

That said, many (most?) commercial roof tops are designed with virtually no surplus load factors... i.e., the wind load factors or the ballasting loads required for a tilted panel system preclude mounting them onto many roofs. This material would presumably be suitable for those roofs
Like this Reply to this comment 2 people like this comment
by joaompq September 1, 2010 2:18 AM PDT
Nice gadget if you go camping , not a good solution if you want to set a long term infrastructure.
Like this Reply to this comment 1 person likes this comment
by Energy_Credits September 1, 2010 12:10 PM PDT
Great article.

And it's also worth noting how lucrative the federal credit is for homeowners who install solar panels.

It's 30% of the cost of solar panel installation.

And as long as it's installed between January 1, 2009 and December
31, 2016, there is *no* maximum credit.

So $10,000 installation = $3,000 credit. Not bad. Just get multiple quotes from installers; shop around!

And a lot of the utilities and local municipalities offer free/low interest loans too.

-andrew
http://energycredits.com/consumer-tax-credits/solar-power-tax-credits

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20015164-54.html?tag=mncol;mlt_related#ixzz105V8MM8E

WalMart To Increase Thin-film Solar Panels On Stores

2010-09-20T09:15:00.000-07:00

Retail juggernaut Wal-Mart is using panels from First Solar and MiaSole in what is expected to be one of the largest business installations of thin-film solar technology.

Wal-Mart on Monday said that it is adding solar panels at between 20 and 30 store locations in California and Arizona, building on the 31 stores in California and Hawaii already equipped with on-site solar. The majority of the new installations will use thin-film solar panels, a technology a number of companies are developing to undercut traditional silicon cells on price.

First Solar's cadmium telluride panels have been available for years and are widely used, often by utilities. But Walmart also plans to use panels from MiaSole, an upstart supplier of panels with cells made from another thin-film material--a combination of copper, indium, gallium, and selenide (CIGS). Wal-Mart's adoption of CIGS panels could help scale up the technology and bring it to business customers quicker, the company said.

Thin-film panels from MiaSole will be used at Wal-Mart stores, a vote of confidence from a corporate customer on CIGS technology.

(Credit: MiaSole)

The latest solar project will generate up to 22.5 million kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, enough to power 1,750 homes. Each installation will produce around 20 percent to 30 percent of a store's power usage.

In each case, Wal-Mart is contracting with SolarCity, which installs, finances, and owns the solar arrays. Rather than purchase the panels, Wal-Mart will buy the power produced from the panels, which will be maintained by SolarCity. Getting electricity from the solar arrays at a predetermined fixed price lowers the Wal-Mart's energy price risk, said vice president of energy Kim Saylors Laster, in a statement.

Wal-Mart began its solar program three years ago and has since launched a number of green-technology initiatives at its stores. It is testing small-wind turbines and fuel cells at stores and has contracted to buy wind energy from a wind farm in Texas

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20016945-54.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20#ixzz105Sb0eeW

Garbage Trucks Going Green in Miami

2010-09-19T09:23:00.000-07:00

By Brent Solomon
NBCMIAMI.com
updated 9/18/2010 11:15:29 PM ET

Some Miami communities are mixing the latest technology with going green when it comes to waste collection.

On Wednesday, Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Alvarez unveiled one of six new hybrid garbage pick up trucks the county received. Hialeah is also getting four of the new trucks, and the city of Miami is getting one. Instead of diesel, the trucks use hydraulic energy to run. Officials say the trucks will cut fuel costs in half, lower carbon emissions and reduce noise. "Basically these trucks have no maintenance costs. The reduction is unbelievable," Alvarez said. "So it's going to cost less but more importantly it goes along our blueprint for a greener and sustainable Miami-Dade County." The three Miami area communities are the first in the nation to implement this new technology for waste trucks.

NOVACEM - A New Cement

2010-09-12T08:41:00.000-07:00

Stuart Evans
NOVACEM | U.K.
Bob Barkany / Getty Images for TIME.

Novacem could nearly erase the enormous carbon footprint of the $180 billion cement industry, which accounts for more than 5% of greenhouse-gas emissions — worse than the airlines. "Our goal is to become the first great cement company of the 21st century," says CEO Stuart Evans, 60. Cementmaking requires tons of carbon-emitting fossil fuels like coke to heat kilns above 1400°C. As its raw material, limestone (calcium carbonate), breaks down, carbon leaches from it. Chief scientist Nikolaos Vlasopoulos, 30, invented a method that replaces limestone with a family of carbon-free minerals called magnesium silicates. The raw material emits no carbon and cooks at just 700°C. Vlasopoulos says his product emits 85% less carbon than cement does. In the right situation, it even absorbs atmospheric carbon during production — making it "carbon negative." Novacem's product has half the strength of the strongest limestone-based cement, which means it works for many purposes but not for, say, a long, complex bridge. "We'll get there in the next couple of years," says Evans.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2017050_2017049_2017040,00.html#ixzz0zKXeLOwM

Paijit Sangchai - Environmental entrepeneur - Time

2010-09-12T08:23:00.000-07:00

FLEXORESEARCH | Thailand

Christopher Wise for TIME

Paijit Sangchai loves to solve problems that seem unsolvable. "There are so many environmental problems associated with papermaking, I thought I should do something about it," he says. In his native Thailand, laminated paper wasn't being recycled, so it was often burned. Since founding Flexoresearch in 2007, he's developed five series of enzymes for various aspects of recycling paper. While several are local adaptations of existing technologies, the blends of enzymes that peel away plastic, aluminum and other substances from paper are unique. For every 300 tons of coated paper, Paijit produces 270 tons of recycled pulp, plastic and metals. His pulp can be used as a replacement for asbestos in construction materials. It's stronger, safer and cheaper.

The benefits are manifold. Making more types of paper ripe for recycling can help protect forests, reduce waste that would end up burned or in landfills, boost the incomes of the scavengers who collect paper, improve air quality and lessen health risks. The goal is to turn waste into wealth and pollution into profit, Paijit says. With his factory operating at capacity, that's anything but pulp fiction.

—by Robert Horn

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2017050_2017049_2017045,00.html#ixzz0zKSoiVfw

Report: 3.24 million plug-in EVs to be sold by 2015

2010-09-02T11:38:00.000-07:00

September 1, 2010 7:48 AM PDT

by Candace Lombardi

Automakers will sell a total of 3.24 million plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and battery electric vehicles worldwide between 2010 and 2015, according to a report released Wednesday.

It will be Chinese and U.S. drivers buying most of these vehicles, Pike Research says in its report, "Plug-in Electric Vehicles." Cars in these categories include the plug-in hybrid Chevy Volt, the battery electric Ford Focus, and a number of vehicles from China's BYD Auto.

Over the five-year period, Chinese consumers are expected to purchase about 888,000 plug-in and battery electric vehicles combined, accounting for 27 percent of worldwide sales, while U.S. consumers are expected to purchase about 841,000 such vehicles, or 26 percent.

Plug-in cars and light-duty trucks are expected to gain in popularity due to their "improved fuel economy, lower emissions, and a quieter ride than comparable traditionally powered internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles," according to Pike Research.

However, U.S. consumers are still skittish about the initial cost of the vehicles despite the promise of long-term fuel savings. They also remain worried that the number of miles between charges a plug-in all-electric vehicle can manage--the vehicle range,--may not be enough to meet their needs.

Manufacturers are well aware of consumers' concerns over range and cost, which is why their smaller models will be the first to carry the new technology.

"Electric vehicles will follow the lead of hybrids and will be launched in the small car segment for consumer markets initially, with the small SUV segment close behind. Because of their low weight and good aerodynamics, smaller vehicles are far more efficient to better extend the electrically powered driving range, and the smaller vehicle segments also allow the use of a smaller, less expensive battery," Dave Hurst, senior analyst at Pike Research, said in a statement.

Candace Lombardi, a freelance journalist based in the Boston area, focuses on the evolution of green and otherwise cutting-edge technologies, from robots to cars to scientific innovation. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET. E-mail Candace.
Topics: In the home, Transportation, Batteries and energy storage

Tags: PHEVs,EVs,research reports,BEVs,hybrids

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Add a Comment (Log in or register) (7 Comments) prev next by globaltechfirm

September 1, 2010 10:26 AM PDT
I don't understand why everyone is so confused about alternative fuels.. apparently we had it right from the get go.. Hemp seed oil was used in the early 1900's to fuel cars, but that would cause our US government a mess now wouldn't it.. i encourage you whom are really interested to research all of the wonderful uses of hemp, you will soon realize what the real issue is.. Hemp vs BIG oil company's & pharmaceuticals/healthcare(donated the largest amount of money to the Obama campaign) .. it will help make sense of our new healthcare reform; if you continue to dig deeper into this topic. I have deeply researched this topic for many years.
Like this Reply to this comment by omnimoeish September 1, 2010 10:27 AM PDT
Wow, I am the biggest plug in vehicle proponent in the world, but even I think that's a little optimistic. I heard a recent report that 40% of US adults wanted to test drive an EV, which is a ton, like probably close to 100 million people, but the problem is the auto makers are so afraid that people are as afraid to move on from oil as they are, they are producing them in small token amounts. Like they're only making 10,000 Volts in all of 2010 and 2011 and 25,000 in 2012 or something, and GM is leading the industry in plug ins. Toyota won't even have a plug in until at least 2012, maybe later. Nissan is trying to crank up production, but there's so many supply bottlenecks too as EV components are not commoditized yet.

Like this Reply to this comment by j-allen September 1, 2010 11:44 AM PDT
Electric vehicles are only as green as the power source from which they are charged. In most of the US, "electric" cars are actually coal-fired steam cars with the boiler and steam engine located at the power station. It is true that the overall efficiency from fuel to wheels can be better than with an onboard internal combustion engine, but a truly "green" electric vehicle would be charged from renewable sources.

About 20 years ago I designed a solar photovoltaic charging station for an electric car that a friend used to commute to work and back. It was about 10 miles each way so he did quite well with conventional lead-acid batteries and a DC motor. With today's improved systems one could do much better.

Like this Reply to this comment by WineMaker5000 September 1, 2010 12:23 PM PDT
Coal to wheels have a higher overall efficiency than oil to wheels.
Coal requires simple mining and transport to the coal plants and electricity has distribution network. Compared to heavily subsidized oil count the cost of govt subsidies, exploration, drilling, pumping, transporting, refining, wholesale distribution then to retail distribution and finally to the tank and then to the wheels.

But i agree with you that with EV we can change the source to use renewables or sustainable sources and that option is a big plus. We dont change the cars only change the power source.
Like this 1 person likes this comment
by parke0123 September 1, 2010 1:53 PM PDT

Agreed! Don't put dirty electricity into a clean car! TimberRock Energy Solutions has recently launched a solar-based EV charging solution able provide 100% of the projected annual energy use of the Chevy Volt or Nissan Leaf. www,timberrockes.com
Like this by jamesthurber September 1, 2010 7:45 PM PDT
A reality check:

If each new EV displaces 600 gallons of gasoline per year (very optimistically assuming 12,000 miles per vehicle per year at 20 miles per gallon displaced), then placing 841,000 EV's on the road in the US by 2015 equates to displaced gasoline of 504 million gallons per year. This is about 0.36% of current annual gasoline consumption. This does not consider the energy that is used to charge the EV's.

The bottom line:

EV's cannot significantly impact fossil fuel consumption without dramatic improvements in battery technology. Subsidizing the purchase or manufacture of EV's without these improvements is a waste of money.

Like this Reply to this comment by YogitheK9 September 1, 2010 10:03 PM PDT
The Projected Reports said DSL would be covering 90 % of the USA in 2009 too.
Right now DSL only covers 36% of USA & Wireless Broadband covers 90% of the USA!.

Who is making your projections? The same people who made them for the phone companies back in the year 2000?

EV's have a battery problem & even Lithium batteries in a Tesla EV cost 8K to replace after only 3 yrs use. That is more money then using Gasoline & Oil for the vehicle! Someone needs to rethink your projections bet you only 1 M EVs will be in use in 2015 . The rest will be Hybrids and we will get rid of Ethanol from corn products to ethanol from Sugar cane production. Like Brazil does.. Brazil also has E-85 & E-100 Vehicles which require no gasoline whatsoever.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20015278-54.html?tag=mncol;posts#ixzz0yOn6IO7Z

Philly subway to capture energy from braking trains

2010-09-02T11:22:00.000-07:00

September 1, 2010 9:15 AM PDT

by Martin LaMonica

Here's an unusual way to upgrade a subway system: add a giant battery.

Viridity Energy said Monday that it has been awarded a $900,000 grant by the Pennsylvania Energy Development Authority to build a system that will capture the energy from Philadelphia subway cars as they brake to enter a station.

(Credit: CC Infowidget/Flickr)
The regenerative braking system will collect energy in a large battery installed along the busy Market-Frankford Line. The stored energy will be used to power trains when they leave the station and to earn money from energy sold back to the grid.

"Essentially we're creating a microgrid that is integrated with the transmission grid and operated so that its optimized for efficiency and economics," said Audrey Zibelman, president and CEO of Viridity.

The project, which Viridity hopes to be operating by next spring, will have a battery with between 1 megawatt and 1.5MW of power, intended to replace the current system, which cannot capture all the energy from incoming trains.

With the battery in place, the system can power trains when they leave, cutting down on operating costs for Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA).

The battery will be able to make money, too, by providing services to the grid. Using its stored energy, it can make money from grid operator PJM by supplying quick bursts of energy to maintain a steady frequency. SEPTA can also draw energy from the grid at off-peak times and supply it at peak times when the utility is looking to lower usage because energy prices are high.

Viridity's hosted software is like a "network operating service" that optimizes how the energy is pulled into and dispatched from the battery, said Zibelman. The company, which makes money by getting a percentage of customers' revenue, is now evaluating what types of batteries it will use, she added.

"Electric vehicles are on everyone's mind right now as where we need to go, but we have an electric vehicle system already sitting here. Let's use those first," Zibelman said. "It's something could be done in almost any transit system.

SEPTA estimates that it can save $500,000 a year on its electricity spending. If the project is successful, SEPTA hopes to replicate the model system-wide, Joseph Casey, SEPTA general manager said in a statement.

Updated at 9:45 a.m. PT with corrected term for the battery's expected power.

Martin LaMonica is a senior writer for CNET's Green Tech blog. He started at CNET News in 2002, covering IT and Web development. Before that, he was executive editor at IT publication InfoWorld. E-mail Martin.
Topics: Transportation, Batteries and energy storage, Smart grid

Tags: subways,Viridity Energy

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Add a Comment (Log in or register) (4 Comments) prev next by Franko234 September 1, 2010 10:17 AM PDT

The Montreal metro has been doing that since the 70's

Like this Reply to this comment by fudbuster77 September 1, 2010 1:09 PM PDT
In the early 1900's, many electric railroads used regenetive braking to help power other trains. The Milwaukee Road would use a train going downhill on one side of a mountain pass in the Rockies to use regenetive braking to help add power to a train going up on the other side.

Everything old becomes new again.
Like this Reply to this comment by Joe Real September 1, 2010 2:23 PM PDT
What is the typical roundtrip efficiency of the system? Would the amount of energy saved be enough to pay off the added investment?

Like this Reply to this comment by GRobLewis September 1, 2010 7:36 PM PDT
New Rule: anybody writing about energy technology must pass a course in basic physics. "1 megawatt" is not a measure of battery capacity! 1 megawatt-hour might be.

In similar articles, I have seen assertions that a new power plant has an output of "10,000 kilowatts per year." This is a meaningless statement that, like the above claim, has no physical interpretation.

Innumeracy strikes again.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20015306-54.html?tag=mncol;posts#ixzz0yOj6evBT

Waste Management going for 'black gold'

2010-09-02T11:13:00.000-07:00

September 1, 2010 11:06 AM PDT

by Candace Lombardi

Garick ad for its Paygro Black Satin brand of all organic mulch.

(Credit: Garick)
The trash and recycling services company Waste Management is expanding into the organic gardening business, the company announced Wednesday.

The Houston-based company has acquired Garick, which manufactures things like mulch, garden compost, and playground turf made from recycled organic materials.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed. WM only went so far as to announce that Garick's composting facilities will be used to augment WM's existing organic recycling services, and offer a line of organic garden products made from WM-collected biomass waste.

The new line of products will include organic garden compost, which is often referred to by gardeners as black gold because the nutrient-rich material enhances plant growth when added to soil.

Garick currently has the capacity to compost more than 1 million tons of material per year, according to WM. So, where will the trash mega-giant get all this organic waste to make the gardening products?

The company plans to expand its food and organic waste removal service--also known as organics recycling.

WM said in a statement it believes many large food companies and retailers, in the interest of sustainability, would use an organics recycling service. The service would be akin to the way many companies opt for cardboard or plastics recycling collection as a way to improve their carbon footprint.

The deal helps WM work toward its goal of "doubling its renewable energy production, tripling the amount of recyclables processed by 2020, and investing in new technologies for managing waste."

The company hinted that expansion of organics recycling services could also serve as fodder for the company's biofuel aspirations.

"Recycling organics through composting and other technologies that may produce energy, fuel, or specialty chemicals enables us to generate more value from this specific material stream," Tim Cesarek, managing director of Organic Growth at Waste Management, said in a statement.

WM already has a trash-to-energy project that garners fuel from landfill gas. It's not a far leap to think WM may be planning plants similar to Enerkem's waste-to-ethanol plant in Canada, which uses compostable trash to make ethanol.

Candace Lombardi, a freelance journalist based in the Boston area, focuses on the evolution of green and otherwise cutting-edge technologies, from robots to cars to scientific innovation. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET. E-mail Candace.

Topics: Biomass, Deals and investments, Carbon, Waste and recycling
Tags: trash,recycling,Waste Management, compost, garbage,organics recycling, black gold

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Add a Comment (Log in or register) (4 Comments) prev next by MyRightEye September 1, 2010 11:27 AM PDT
HA! That's the very last source of compost that will ever set foot in my yard thanks. What you put on your garden, you eat a month or two later. I'll pass, thanks.
Like this Reply to this comment by mrorie September 1, 2010 11:55 AM PDT

...you know that a lot of fertilizer is basically cow ****, right? How is this going to be any worse?
Like this 1 person likes this comment
by hutwarmer September 1, 2010 12:42 PM PDT

Actually I think it is great that garbage companies are looking for ways to reduce the amount of garbage dumped in landfills, even if the motivation is profit rather than sustainabilty. I started composting about 2 years ago and it is amazing how much stuff we used to throw away which is now devoured by the compost pile in the back yard. And this is the first year i really used the compost in my vegetable garden and i can tell it made a huge difference.
Like this Reply to this comment 1 person likes this comment

by Joe Real September 1, 2010 2:21 PM PDT
In strict organic philosophy, this "black gold" is not strictly ORGANIC because the materials from which they came from are not produced from organic farming or manufacturing methods. Think about the toxic residues from the various chemicals used in the processing, the preservative chemicals, the pesticides, fungicides, insecticides used to get these farm products and now just the same they will be composted into black gold as organic matter. Not all organic matter are considered fit for strict organic farming and this is one of them.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20015315-54.html?tag=mncol;posts#ixzz0yOgqbFW4

Cisco, Itron team on smart-grid networking

2010-09-02T11:06:00.000-07:00

September 1, 2010 11:59 AM PDT

by Martin LaMonica

Networking giant Cisco Systems announced Tuesday a deal with meter maker Itron to advance Internet Protocol-based communications for the power grid.

The two companies will create a reference design for using the IPv6 networking protocol to connect everything from people's homes to power distribution equipment on the grid. That reference design will form the basis for gear installed in smart meters, sensors, and computing systems inside utilities, Cisco executives said.

(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET)
As part of the deal, Itron will license and embed Cisco's IP technology in its meters and distribute Cisco hardware as part Itron's smart-grid deployments.

Right now, communications on the grid is done with many proprietary protocols, but Itron and Cisco executives said using IP, the transport protocol of the Internet, will speed up grid modernization.

"We feel the market will accelerate when standards are in the market. We see it as a way to stimulate and broaden the market, which ultimately benefits us all," said Philip Mezey, senior vice president and chief operating officer of Itron.

The companies will develop a system which uses IP for neighborhood area networks, also called field networks, to bring data from smart meters back to utilities, said Paul De Martini, the chief technology officer for smart grid at Cisco.

The reference design will also address a number of grid-related applications, such as demand response, automation of power distribution equipment, managing energy storage, and distributed generation like rooftop solar panels, he said.

Major move by Cisco

Cisco has said that it considers the smart grid a $100 billion dollar market but it has only released a few products so far, including a home energy management controller and routers and switches for substations.

Although the companies were vague on product details and timing, the partnership is a much more significant move into the smart grid by Cisco, said Bob Gohn, a smart-grid analyst at Pike Research

Partnering with a significant meter manufacturer committed to using IP for data transport opens the way for Cisco to provide a number of add-on products, such as security and network management, he said.

"If they can sprinkle some of their own bits of intelligence as a software widget into various end devices (on the grid), it gives Cisco a better chance of providing the overall solution," Gohn said. "The parallel with the enterprise computing space is pretty easy to draw."

Itron has historically used proprietary communications technology in its meters, but having IP advocate Cisco as a partner improves its credibility on standards-based communications, Gohn added.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20015341-54.html?tag=mncol;posts#ixzz0yOf5aD57

Motor City getting in on electric fever

2010-09-02T10:59:00.000-07:00

September 2, 2010 10:28 AM PDT

by Candace Lombardi

Coulomb's ChargePoint stations unlock for use when presented with a smart card or key fob recognized by the station's RFID reader.

(Credit: Coulomb Technologies)
Coulomb Technologies unveiled its latest electric-vehicle charging station on Thursday morning in Detroit.

The Motor City is the first locale in Michigan to get a charging station for public use as part of ChargePoint America, a $37 million program to install public and residential stations throughout the U.S. to encourage adoption of plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles.

ChargePoint is funded in part by U.S. Department of Energy as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Automakers Ford Motor, General Motors, and Smart USA are also partners on the project. The automakers have a vested interest in making charging stations publicly accessible--they're all pushing to sell their newly introduced plug-in hybrid and all-electric cars to the American public.

The first Detroit station is located downtown at the headquarters of NextEnergy, a nonprofit company that facilitates and brokers technology-sharing research projects and deals between academic, government, and corporate entities.Any interested company or municipality in the country may apply to be considered for a charging station for their property. Who gets one depends on whether the site fits several criteria in keeping with the program's goal of encouraging EV adoption.

"The objective is to get highly visible, publically accessible, geographically dispersed locations from which we can provide the DOE and our automobile partners a lot of data on the usage of these charging stations," according to ChargePoint.

Coulomb has been installing charging stations throughout the U.S. in places including Orlando, Fla., San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City, with thousands more planned in the coming year. A total of 4,600 electric-vehicle charging stations throughout nine regions of the U.S. are to be installed, along with a number of charging stations going into the homes of plug-in hybrid or EV owners.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20015436-54.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20#ixzz0yOdN8vEy

EPA proposes grading system for car fuel economy

2010-08-30T12:11:00.000-07:00

August 30, 2010 11:25 AM PDT

by Martin LaMonica

The Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation on Monday proposed a fuel economy label overhaul to reflect how electric and alternative fuel vehicles stack up against gasoline passenger vehicles.

The federal agencies released two new labels that officials expect to be finalized early next year and used in 2012 model year cars. The published labels will be available for public comment for 60 days.

The changed label, mandated by the 2007 energy law, includes the same information on city and highway miles per gallon and estimated driving costs based on 15,000 miles a year now available.

(Credit: Environmental Protection Agency)
But the new labels add more comparative information, rating cars on mileage, greenhouse gas contribution, and other air pollutants from tailpipe emissions. That means that consumers can look at a label to see how one vehicle compares to all available vehicles, rather than only cars in a specific class.

One label proposes grades, ranging from and A plus to a D. There are no failing grades, since vehicles need to comply with the Clean Air Act.

"The idea of the grade is to give a single metric that combines greenhouse gases and fuel economy into one metric," said EPA assistant administrator Gina McCarthy. "We will have information underlying those grades available to consumers when the labels are in place."

The proposed labels address one of the outstanding problems of rating the fuel efficiency with vehicles that don't use gasoline as a fuel source.

General Motors brought the issue into the public spotlight last year, when it said it expected to get a fuel economy rating of 230 miles per gallon for the electric Chevy Volt. As of now, however, the mileage rating for the Volt and the all-electric Nissan Leaf still are not yet certified.

EPA and DOT officials did say plug-in vehicles will have different labels than gasoline-only cars, which will include a miles-per-gallon equivalent number. The electric-car label also includes the anticipated driving range and efficiency expressed in kilowatt-hours per 100 miles.

Making the grade

During a media briefing on Monday, McCarthy said the median grade for passenger cars will be a B-minus.

Electric vehicles that run entirely off of batteries, such as the Leaf, will have a rating of A-plus. Plug-in hybrid vehicles will have a grade of A.

The EPA has modeled where existing cars will fall along the grading bell curve. Hybrids such as the Ford Fusion, Honda Civic, and Toyota Prius will get an A-minus. Fuel-efficient cars such as the Nissan Altima, Toyota Corolla, and Volkswagen Golf will be given a B-plus.

Grades for midsize sedans will range from A-minus to D, and those for SUVs will range from B-plus to D, McCarthy said.

The fuel economy ratings address only tailpipe emissions, and not the "upstream" energy use and pollution related to generation of electricity or oil refining, officials said.

There are also ratings for compressed natural gas vehicles, diesels, and different types of plug-in hybrids, including both the extended-range electric vehicle of the Chevy Volt and Fisker Karma, and plug-in versions of conventional hybrids. (Click PDF of all labels.)

By the time the labels are finalized, the EPA and DOT hope to have a Web site available where consumers could get more information at the point of sale on a smartphone. For example, a person could get an accurate idea of the car's environmental impact, or the cost associated from using electricity to fuel it.

The agencies are seeking consumer feedback through the e-mail newlabels@epa.gov

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20015069-54.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20#ixzz0y7NldHMf

Converted grain bins

2010-08-23T17:21:00.001-07:00

Another great conversion idea is homes made from grain bins. Mother Earth News has some how-to instructions, as well as photos of how surprisingly attractive such structures can be. Used grain bins are common in many rural areas, and can often be bought for a song. They aren't even that daunting to move, given the right gear.

Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in Rutledge, Mo., converted a grain bin into a two-bedroom apartment. According to the center for sustainable living, "We chose the grain bin because it already had walls, a roof and a concrete floor. This made for a simpler project that we could complete in the three months before winter." The pleasant dwelling is insulated with locally sourced straw bales, is powered by solar panels and is heated with wood stoves

Shipping container homes

2010-08-23T17:18:00.000-07:00

Architects and homeowners are gradually discovering the benefits of shipping container homes. It turns out that the strong, cheap freight boxes make pretty useful building blocks. They can be loaded with creature comforts and stacked to create modular, efficient spaces for a fraction of the cost, labor and resources of more conventional materials. Shipping containers can be easily insulated and climate controlled, and they are being deployed as disaster-relief shelters and modest vacation homes. In stacking configurations, they are appearing as student housing and even luxury condos.

Would you live in a recycled shipping container? They can also make homes out of the pallets that stuff comes on.

9 homes made of the darndest things

2010-08-23T17:11:00.000-07:00

By Brian Clark Howard of The Daily Green

Green building — designing homes and businesses to maximize energy and water efficiency and minimize harm to the environment — has been gathering steam across much of the world. In New York City, architects are exploring the exciting potential of growing fresh food in the urban landscape through green roofs and vertical farms. In the Midwest, more folks are taking advantage of home-energy tax credits to tighten up their home's seal, invest in more efficient systems and install renewable energy. In Hawaii, new single-family homes built in 2010 or beyond will be required to heat their water via the sun's rays. People are even taking green digs on the road with them.

Regular folks can green up their current residence in many ways, from swapping out light bulbs to planting shade trees, sealing leaks and so on. This article isn't about those things. It's also not about the latest green dream homes. This article is more along the lines of the famous "hobbit house," which combines elements of the old-fashioned prairie sod house with a whimsical, aspirational, "why not?" attitude.

We don't expect most people will be moving into reclaimed trains, planes and automobiles any time soon. But we do think these home designs are a lot of fun. They show what's possible if we think outside the ticky-tacky box and dream of something different. You may not be reusing an airplane wing today, but maybe you can reuse some lumber or furniture, or perhaps switch to paints that are better for your air quality.