Category: Energy

From Green Right Now Reports

Ninety of America’s leading scientists have urged Congressional leaders to be certain that any climate/energy bill or regulation accurately accounts for carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from bioenergy sources, including biofuels such as ethanol.

In a letter to U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, U.S. Majority Leader Harry Reid, and key Obama Administration officials, the group says that ignoring the carbon impact of bioenergy can actually lead to increases in greenhouse gas emissions because not all forms of bioenergy produce less carbon dioxide pollution than fossil fuels.

“There may be a public perception that all biofuels and bioenergy are equally good for the environment and are all lower in carbon emissions than fossil fuels, but that’s not true,” said Dr. William Schlesinger, president of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, one of the scientists who signed the letter. “Many produce just as much or more carbon pollution than oil, gas, and coal.

“If our laws and regulations treat high-carbon-impact bioenergy sources, like today’s corn ethanol, as if they are low-carbon, we’re fooling ourselves and undercutting the purpose of those same laws and regulations.”

Failure to properly account for bioenergy CO2 emissions could seriously undermine other efforts to address climate change, the scientists warn. “Many international treaties and domestic laws and bills account for bioenergy incorrectly by treating all bioenergy as causing a 100% reduction in emissions regardless of the source of the biomass. … Under some scenarios, this approach could eliminate most of the expected greenhouse gas reductions during the next several decades …”

The letter cautions decision makers about the basic mistake that biomass is “carbon neutral.”

“Clearing or cutting forests for energy, either to burn trees directly in power plants or to replace forests with bioenergy crops, has the net effect of releasing otherwise sequestered carbon into the atmosphere, just like the extraction and burning of fossil fuels. That creates a carbon debt, may reduce ongoing carbon uptake by the forest, and as a result may increase net greenhouse gas emissions for an extended time period and thereby undercut greenhouse gas reductions needed over the next several decades.”

From Green Right Now Reports

Try as we might to conserve energy and cut down on those electric bills, doing so can be a challenge.

Clothes need to be washed. You can fill the dishwasher to capacity, but it still has to run.

But what if you could program those functions to work when electricity usage is at its lowest and rates are cheapest? Six students at Michigan Technological University are developing a way to do just that. The group has designed a prototype for a “smart meter” that would replace the average home’s watt meter.

“There’s currently a mismatch between how much electrical power we can generate and when consumers need that power,” faculty advisor John Lukowski says. “The goal was to create a device that would record, analyze and store data about energy consumption and current time-of-day energy pricing.”

Not only can homeowners learn when power usage (and price) are at their lowest, but the meter also can control household devices based on time and date.

“Say it has been determined that the price of power is lowest at 2 a.m.,” says Lukowski. “The meter can be set to automatically start the dishwasher at that time each day.”

Until theory becomes reality, the group recommended several ways to be smarter power consumers:

• Run the vacuum, do a load of wash, or turn on the outdoor sprinklers when neighbors are asleep—very early in the morning or late at night.
• Don’t run five household devices at once—try to stretch out the usage throughout the day (and night).
• Run the dishwasher and clothes dryer at times when you are not also using lights, TV, computers and other electrical devices.

A new report just released by the Solar Energy Industry Association (SEIA) shows that extending the Treasury Grant Program (TGP) by two years, combined with new tax breaks for equipment manufacturers, would increase investement in the solar industry by $48 billion, creating 207,000 additional jobs by 2016.

The TGP is part of the US stimulus package of early 2009. It gives solar project owners a cash grant in lieu of a tax credit.The program is set to expire in December if not extended.

(more…)

Howard Lovy wrote:

Five companies ranging in focus from fueling to family planning will have a chance to compete for $50,000 in business acceleration services and a one-year incubator lease at SPARK East in Ypsilanti, MI, on June 4. Business incubator Ann Arbor SPARK, which first announced the competition at the end of April, listed the finalists today. Each of the following companies will have three minutes to make their case before a panel of “noted funding and business experts.”

• Urobiologics, based in Livonia, MI, has a product called the UroGender Test Kit aimed at couples that would like to know the gender of their children early in a pregnancy. The company claims a 95 percent success rate in detecting a fetus’s gender, based on the mother’s urine sample, between five weeks and 15 weeks after conception.
• Mobile Sign Language Systems, a University of Michigan startup, is developing smart phone software that translates spoken English into real-time sign language.
• Eco-Fueling is developing a way for diesel engines to run on a mix of renewable ethanol and diesel, aimed at the six million diesel trucks currently on the road that use no renewable fuel.
• Own, based at the TechArb incubator in Ann Arbor, MI, will present its combined Web and hardware point of sale (POS) system for coffeehouses. Own says its product replaces cash registers or software POS systems.
• Aeradigm will present an air conditioning appliance for data centers that it says fits in the same racks with servers, cooling adjacent equipment and reducing overall energy load by harvesting waste heat for power.

Bruce V. Bigelow wrote:

Cleantech was the watchword of the week, with much of the news concerning algae-based biofuels and energy efficiency. Read on to get that and the rest of last week’s biztech news.

—The new executive director of the National Alliance for Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts (NAABB), José Olivares, outlined some of the technical challenges that must be solved before algal biofuels production can become an economically viable industry. Olivares came through San Diego to meet with members of the NAABB from UC San Diego, HR BioPetroleum, and Kai BioEnergy.

—Fallbrook Technologies, the San Diego startup developing an energy-efficient, continuously variable transmission, provided new information in a recent fling about the financial risks and funding requirements the company faces. Fallbrook filed for an IPO in February.

—The San Diego company that Barry Sandrew started in 2001 as Legend Films specialized in providing digital colorization technology for the motion picture industry. But the company has recently reinvented itself as Legend 3D, and now focuses on visual special effects and 3D technology for Hollywood. With studio demand for 3D “dimensionalization” exploding, Legend 3D has 260 employees at its San Diego headquarters and another 700 in Patna, India, and plans to add another 500 there in coming months.

—After securing a $100,000 grant to get life sciences entrepreneurs to talk with teen-agers about their technology innovations and startup companies, Connect CEO Duane Roth is looking for additional funding to do the same thing with high-tech entrepreneurs. The idea behind the grant from the Biogen Idec Foundation of Cambridge, MA, is to get young people excited about studying science, technology, engineering, and math.

—Some 1,200 people and more than 70 companies turned out for San Diego Gas & Electric’s 5th Annual Energy Showcase at the downtown convention center. I found a few local startups that are developing innovative technologies.

UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS

Ryan McBride wrote:

Lebanon, NH-based Mascoma has made strides with its process for producing ethanol from non-food plants such as wood chips and grass. Yet the firm is likely to delay the start of production at its first planned commercial facility, in northern Michigan, company CEO Bill Brady says.

Mascoma had been aiming to open a plant in Kinross, MI, by 2012. Now, Brady says, the facility is more likely to open in 2013—and the company has not secured the debt and equity funding it seeks to pay for the project. Though he would not say how much it would cost to build the proposed Kinross plant, Brady says that such facilities typically cost more than $100 million.

To hear Brady tell it, the financial meltdown bears much of the blame for slowing down plans for the Michigan plant. “There’s no doubt that the financial crisis in 2009 was a setback to all of the cleantech world, and so the financing that’s ever so important to this first plant has definitely been delayed,” the CEO says. “So that’s really been the big issue in terms of timing.”

In October 2008, Mascoma said that it had garnered grants of $26 million from the U.S. Department of Energy and $23.5 million in grants from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation to help build and support the facility in Kinross. Brady, who joined the company as CEO in January, says that part of the state grant was to fund research and development of the firm’s technology, and that some of those funds have been spent. Yet the CEO declined to say how much of the state grant remained for building the production plant. The DOE grants also included funding for both research and plant construction.

Mascoma is working on multiple fronts to advance the project in Michigan. One big effort is to prove the commercial …Next Page »

UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS

Namely: the awesomeness of robots. Secondarily: the joys of sustainable energy. The £13.00 T3 Solar Robot/Tank/Scorpion will help impart both of these lessons, guiding your child to a promising future as a sun-harnessing super-scientist (or a robot army-commanding supervillain.) [Red5] More »

From Green Right Now Reports

A U.S. government study released today is optimistic about bringing wind and solar power onto the western grid.

The analysis by the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) shows that the Western grid can accommodate a large input from wind and solar operations without extensive and expensive upgrades.

With better coordination among utilities using the grid serving states in the mountain west and southwest, it could produce 35 percent of its electricity from wind and solar energy by 2017.

The key is that operations would have to take into account the strengths and timing of various power sources to even out supply. Utilities would have to coordinate efforts to manage the grid and the timing of power inputs from wind, which is strongest at night. At the same time, the introduction of these renewable power sources could reduce the need for back up power generation, which contributes to the high cost of producing electricity.

“When you coordinate the operations between utilities across a large geographic area, you decrease the effect of the variability of wind an solar energy resouces, mitigating the unpredictability of Mother Nature,” said Dr. Debra Lew, who coordinated the study by the NREL , which is run by the U.S. Department of Energy.

The 35 percent target exceeds many other estimates and targets. Many states are aiming to have 20 or 25 percent of their power come from renewable sources by various points in the 2020s. The federal government has previously said that wind alone could provide 20 percent of the nation’s power by 2030.

The study looked at the impact of integrating wind and solar power — both photovoltaics, and concentrating solar power — into the power system operated by the WestConnect group of utilities in the mountain and southwest states.

WestConnect is a group of transmission providers, which includes Arizona Public Service, El Paso Electric Co., NV Energy, Public Service of New Mexico, Salt River Project, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Cooperative, Tucson Electric Power, Western Area Power Administration, and Xcel Energy.

The NREL study, called the  The Western Wind and Solar Integration Study, also reported that if the WestConnect group got 27 percent of its power from wind energy it would  lower carbon emissions by 25 to 45 percent.

Fuel and emissions costs could decline by 40 percent, depending on the future price of natural gas.

Environmental News Network: The same thing occurred again this past April, albeit on a larger scale, involving 22 people in the United Kingdom (13 in England, eight in Scotland, and one detained on an E.U. arrest warrant) as well as an unreported number so far in Germany. The investigation also overflowed into other E.U. countries, namely Belgium, the Czech Republic, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Portugal, Spain and the Netherlands.

In Germany, officials and tax investigators swept 230 offices and residences, including Deutsche Bank AG, Munich-based HVB Group (the second largest private German financial institution
and retail bank), and RWE AG, a German electric and natural gas public utility headquartered in Essen.

All detentions and raids across the European Union occurred on April 28 in an aggressive attempt to round up carbon emissions trading cheaters at every level. In this particular sweep, Germany is looking at 180 million euros ($239 million) in tax evasions by 150 individuals at 50 companies. In the United Kingdom, the Revenue & Customs office, or HMRC, targeted 81 sites.

The VAT tax varies according to the E.U. country levying it, and the product or the nature of the service delivered. Thus it is possible to buy carbon credits without the tax (or at a lower tax rate, i.e., Poland), and resell them in high-VAT countries.

The E.U. carbon emissions trading fraud is huge, but perhaps nothing compared to the potential for cheating that will become available in the United States once Waxman-Markey, or some similar scheme for reducing carbon emissions, emerges from the Senate to become law.

Read more>>

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Climatewire: The nuclear industry has found some environmental allies to sell it to utilities.

At the Nuclear Energy Institute conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, environmentalists and progressives pitched in to dismiss lingering fears about safety. The industry, on the verge of building its first new plants in the country in 30 years thanks to federal support, also fared well in the new bill by Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), which includes tax incentives, expanded regulatory risk insurance, a $54 billion loan guarantee fund and an expedited licensing process (E&E Daily, May 13).

There’s no more Three Mile Island; no one’s lost their life to nuclear,” said Progressive Policy Institute President Will Marshall. “Nuclear energy’s been decoupled from the nuclear arms race. And now we have climate change.”

“There’s a cognitive dissonance in the progressive and environmental community around people’s desire to see action to slow global warming and the reality that renewable fuels are pretty far off in the future in terms of their ability to displace baseload generation now,” Marshall added.

Stewart Brand, author of the 1968 counterculture classic “Whole Earth Catalog” and the new “Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto,” explained his conversion in a worldwide context.

Environmentalists would much rather see China resorting to nuclear instead of coal-fired power to fill its exploding demand, he said. “Poverty is green,” he said. “The five-sixths of us who are getting out of poverty are getting out of a low-material lifestyle and using more material. Any person who wants to hold them back will be sorely disappointed.”

Brand also prophesied that mainstream environmental groups would soon follow his lead. While groups like the Sierra Club and Environmental Defense Fund “cannot suddenly say they are for nuclear because they’ll lose two-thirds of their membership, there is movement.”

Brand claimed that since former Greenpeace leader Patrick Moore began working with NEI in 2007, Greenpeace itself has toned down its anti-nuclear rhetoric.

“It’s not pro-nuclear, but it’s backing off of being anti-nuclear,” he said.

No new nuclear possible in Calif., PG&E responds

At least one utility official urged restraint. Peter Darbee, CEO of Pacific Gas & Electric, pointed out that California has two strikes against nuclear: a law prohibiting any new plants until the construction of a permanent waste repository, and a loading order for utilities that prioritizes energy efficiency and renewables over conventional energy resources.

“California is a very heterogenous environment,” he said. “Let’s move ahead with nuclear in those areas where there’s uniform support for it. Let’s begin in areas where there’s the least resistance and have a successful experience.”

“If the legislation changed and we had a good track record, we’d look at nuclear, but I think that’s some years down the road,” he added. “Given the order they’ve laid out and the companies that have jumped out to take a look at nuclear, let them move ahead and demonstrate that we in America can do this and do this well.”

Brand responded with a call for optimism. “Jerry Brown’s probably going to be governor again,” he said of the California Democratic gubernatorial candidate, currently the state’s attorney general. “He’s got an open mind about nuclear. Pretty soon we should be able to go to governors and say, ‘Let’s do it all. Nuclear, hydrogen, plug-ins, small and barge-mounted reactors.’”

He dismissed concerns of nuclear weapons proliferation and radioactive waste disposal.

Dry cask storage is “a pretty good place to keep the stuff for 50 to 100 years while we think about it, whether to reprocess it or use it in fourth-generation plants,” he said, referring to on-site, cement-encased storage. As for permanent storage, he advocated a deep-underground repository like the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the site 2,150 feet underneath the New Mexico desert that has been storing medium-level radioactive waste since 2004.

“When you’re done, you pour some concrete on top of the whole mess and walk away,” he said. “Any idiot who wants to dig down 3 miles in the future is welcome to any messes they might encounter.”

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Greenwire: A large rotating cyclone of cold water is pushing into the southern body of the Gulf of Mexico’s Loop Current and now appears likely to destabilize or even sever the current and the oil it contains from its connection to Florida, scientists said today.

While the BP PLC oil spill has begun to enter the current, a powerful stream that could transport a small part of the slick to the Florida Keys in about a week, there are also signs that less oil — at least on the surface — has taken the turn south that was feared.

Over the past weeks, small ocean flows spinning off the body of the Loop Current, known as cyclones or eddies, have pushed and prodded the Gulf slick. In particular, one counterclockwise eddy east of the oil’s main body has determinedly dragged the crude toward the main current, resulting in its current entrainment (Greenwire, May 18).

However, imagery today has shown that, while filaments of oil have escaped into the current, “the main pool of oil is remaining up there in the eddy” and not progressing south, said Mitch Roffer, an oceanographer at the scientific consulting firm ROFFS.

More importantly, Roffer said, satellite shots this morning showed that an eddy farther south along the Florida coast is expanding in size and strength. That cyclone appears likely to destabilize or even sever the Loop Current, greatly reducing the oil threat to the Florida Keys and beyond, he said.

“If it forms, it’s going to pull a lot of the oil away from Florida,” Roffer said. There are no guarantees, he added, “but it looks very likely that this is forming.”

Such a beheading is common to the current, which becomes more unstable as it pushes deeper into the Gulf of Mexico. Typically, a forceful counterclockwise cyclone near southwest Florida “punches through the Loop Current,” severing the flow from its connection to the Atlantic, said Nan Walker, the director of the Earth Scan Lab at Louisiana State University’s School of the Coast and Environment.

“It looks like that kind of scenario is imminent,” Walker said.

After a severing, the warm rotating water of the Loop Current’s head — called a “ring” — begins to flow west toward Texas. But the ring can dawdle, too, and sometimes reattaches with the main current. Such fluctuations defy forecasting and remain an active area of research (Greenwire, May 5).

“At this stage, it’s a watch and waiting game,” Walker said.

Loop rings tend to survive for about six months as they drift toward Texas, said Frank Muller-Karger, a professor of biological oceanography at the University of South Florida. Scientists have little idea how much oil could be captured by such a ring and pulled westward.

Even if the large southeastern eddy does not sever the current, it could capture oil that would have otherwise made its way to the Florida Keys, said Villy Kourafalou, a Gulf of Mexico modeler at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.

‘Impossible to predict’

It is too soon for East Coast residents to breathe a sigh of relief, however. Oil is still bobbing 120 miles off Tampa’s coast, captured in the northern eddy, and before the Loop Current expires — if it does — it could still surge north and entrain more of the oil, Walker said. Or it could be caught in a ring and flow westward.

The oil tendrils — which federal officials have called a “sheen” — are extremely visible on satellite imagery, suggesting to Walker that there is heavier oil present in the northern eddy than has been suggested. The government may be employing some “wishful thinking” when they call it a sheen, she said.

Also, there is little certainty about how much oil has been captured by the Loop Current in deeper waters. Since much of the oil has been broken up by dispersants and is unlikely to reach the surface, it will tend to spread sideways through the Gulf, Muller-Karger said.

“Just the same we see at the surface, where the oil is being entrained into the Loop Current, I can imagine that the same thing is happening at depth, that oil is being entrained and moving around and spreading with these currents,” he said. “Now what the impact is? It’s impossible to predict.”

“Based on the size of the plume and the estimates that we’re hearing of what is being injected at the bottom, this is a very large problem,” Muller-Karger added.

The deep ocean is not a complete unknown, and oceanographers are working with the government to model how the oil may be spreading, Kourafalou said.

“We know that there are counterflows and counter-rotating eddies … and we know that circulation is much slower,” she said. “Some data sets exist and have allowed the study of basic underlying dynamics. What does not exist is a comprehensive, sustained, observational system.”

While the Loop Current may be headed toward a severing, that will not stop oil from slowly spreading across the Gulf, especially when the hurricanes begin to hit, Walker said. Some of the oil is almost certain to affect countries like Cuba and Mexico, Muller-Karger added.

“This is a problem,” he said, “that we’ll have to deal with for years, as opposed to months.”

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From Green Right Now Reports

Chevron and the Marine Corps Logistics Base Albany in Southwestern Georgia today announced the start of construction for the Department of Navy’s first landfill gas cogeneration project. When completed in 2011, the project will produce 1.9 megawatts of renewable electric power and steam by burning landfill gas collected from a nearby landfill.

Chevron Energy Solutions said it also will complete industrial lighting retrofits in 82 buildings and expand the existing energy management control system. When combined with the cogeneration project, these measures are projected to reduce the base’s purchase of utility power and reduce MCLB’s carbon emissions by 19,300 tons annually, equivalent to removing 16,000 cars from the road.

“This project is important to the Department of the Navy, the Marine Corps and Dougherty County. And with the help of Chevron Energy Solutions we will surpass our federal renewal energy goals, and fulfill our aspiration of becoming the ‘greenest’ Marine Corps installation in the nation,” Col. Terry V. Williams, commanding officer of MCLB Albany, said in a statement. “In addition to providing renewable power and energy security and reliability to MCLB, the project provides a valuable long-term source of revenue for Dougherty County. It took the hard work of many different partners to make this project a reality.”

Chevron Energy Solutions will maintain the landfill gas-to-energy facility, pipeline and landfill gas processing equipment. The new facility will house a dual-fuel engine generator, a stack heat recovery steam generator and two dual-fuel boilers. The primary equipment can operate on landfill gas or natural gas, which provides energy security benefits. MCLB’s use of renewable power will increase to 19 percent, which exceeds the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 mandate of 7.5 percent renewable power use by 2013.

The project is expected to be completed by April 2011.

Spare a thought for the cows when you’re surfing the net in the coming years, won’t you? Their manure will be shoveled and turned into fuel, so companies such as HP can power their data centers and save the world. More »










Renewable energy – Energy – Technology – Renewable – United States

Filed under: Advice, Health, Hormone Diet

Natasha Turner, N.D. is a Toronto-based naturopathic doctor. She is the founder of the Clear Medicine wellness boutique and author of the bestselling book The Hormone Diet. Each week in her column for That’s Fit.ca, Dr. Turner advises readers on how … Read more

 

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Green Right Now Reports

The leading renewable energy trade association in the United Kingdom, Renewable UK, is celebrating a report released today that shows that offshore wind power generation in the North Sea could eclipse the power generated by oil and gas production in the same region.

“This is a hugely exciting piece of research which sets out compelling factual evidence of the huge potential of the UK’s offshore renewable energy resource,” said Peter Madigan, head of Offshore Renewables at RenewableUK.

“As an association we have long been saying that the North Sea will become the Saudi Arabia of wind energy, and today’s tonne of oil and employment comparisons amply bear this out. Just as 30 years  ago, the North Sea could be our ticket for economic growth. We are looking forward to the new Government putting in place the policy framework to make this happen”

The report, published by The Offshore Valuation Group, a coalition of government and industry organizations, concluded that using less than one third of the “available offshore wind” could generate electricity equivalent to that of 1 billion barrels of oil — the amount produced annually by North Sea oil and gas production. It defined the wind available as that which could be practically developed using known technologies.

Job growth also would soar with the robust development of offshore wind, the report found. Using one-third of the wind capability of the North Sea would produce an estimated 145,000 new jobs in the UK.

Developing about one-third of the amount of “practical” wind power also would enable Britain to export wind by 2050. This would be possible if the EU developed an interconnected super grid and Britain pursued wind aggressively until it had an installed capacity of 169 GigaWatts of wind power.

“The infrastructure deployment required is similar in scale to that of oil and gas in recent decades. The major expansion of the supply chain this needs will not happen on its own, however, but will take strong and continuing support from government and industry in the coming years,” according to the report, developed by the Boston Consulting Group.

This degree of wind development also would save 1.1 billion tons of carbon emissions, reducing emissions by 30 percent relative to 1990 levels.

The Boston Consulting Group developed the analysis in collaboration with the Public Interest Research Centre.

From KEYE-Austin

A University of Texas grad student is hitting the road Wednesday to show how we can go green with natural gas vehicles.

Castlen Kennedy is embarking on a 10 day journey traveling 2,300 miles from Austin to Boston, Mass. in a vehicle that only uses natural gas.

On the trip, Kennedy will provide a real-life look at the benefits and challenges of using the alternative fuel for her graduate thesis.

Castlen says that natural gas is actually a domestic resource that we have a lot of here in the United States.  It burns a lot cleaner than diesel or traditional gasoline. It typically costs about 30 percent cheaper than gasoline, so the fact that it’s domestic, cleaner and cheaper makes it an attractive alternative fuel option.

You can follow Kennedy on her trip on her website greenamericanroadtrip.com.