Yahoo! Green: ENERGY

Wind power could be stored as ice

Megan Treacy — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:16:00 PST

A perfect way of storing electricity generated by wind turbines has been elusive so far. Ideas like super-sized batteries, compressed air, and hydroelectric storage have all been floated. One company though thinks the answer could be as simple as making ice.

Calmac has come up with a storage system called IceBank that uses the energy generated at off-peak nighttime hours to make ice. That stored ice is then used for cooling purposes during high-demand daytime hours. The company claims that reducing electricity demand for cooling can cut energy costs by 20 to 40 percent. That reduction also means fewer emissions from power plants.

This a great solution for harnessing wind power that might otherwise go to waste during night-time hours. And it's pretty low-tech -- no need for lithium or rare earth minerals - just a souped up ice maker.

via Treehugger

Five simple steps to save

Marie Oser — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:51:49 PST

Saving energy saves money. And with Americans using a million dollars worth of energy every minute of every day of the year,¹ there are a lot ways to save money through simple, smart and more efficient choices.

These decisions can also help cut down on the 40,000 pounds of CO2 that is emitted to create all this energy.

By following just a few of these tips, you can make a significant dent in your energy bill and help cut thousands of pounds of CO2 emissions.

1. Better refrigeration

Refrigerators are the largest users of electricity among household appliances, so consider the following when using or purchasing your fridge.

Avoid setting refrigerator temperatures colder than necessary. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommends that refrigerators be set at 37 degrees F and freezers at 3 degrees F.
Make sure the energy saver switch is turned on and check gaskets around the doors to make sure they are clean.
Test tightness of the door seal on refrigerators and freezers. If the seal doesn’t hold a dollar bill tightly when the door is closed, it’s time to adjust or replace the gasket.
Water dispensers and icemakers help to maintain a more constant temperature; however they can increase energy use by up to 20 percent.

2. Smarter cooking

There are a lot of ways to cook the same dish, so before you buy new appliances, use what you have more effectively. Think about the following when you’re in the kitchen,

Use the oven when you can instead of the cook top. Surface units heat continuously, but as a rule insulated ovens heat about one-third of the time it is in use.
Avoid opening the oven door to peek; oven temperatures can drop as much as 50 degrees every time the oven door is opened.
Only use the self-cleaning oven cycle for big cleaning jobs and it is a good idea to start the cycle while the oven is still hot from baking.
Use small appliances, such as toaster ovens, microwaves, electric frying pans and crock-pots in place of the oven to save time and energy.

3. Friendlier appliances

When you’re in the market for new appliances, the first best step is to look for the Energy Star Label.² An Energy Star refrigerator, clothes dryer, dishwasher or water heater will save thousands of dollars over the lifetime of the product while conserving resources.

Other new appliance considerations,

Appliances account for about 20 percent of household energy use. Determine your household needs before purchasing a refrigerator or freezer. One that is too large wastes energy.
Top and bottom freezer units are more energy efficient than side-by-side models. Bottom freezer models use about 16 percent less energy and top freezer models use about 13 percent less energy.

4. Lighter lighting

We’re all sick of hearing the same tip – “Avoid standard incandescent bulbs”. We keep hearing about it for good reason. If every U.S. household replaced one standard light bulb with a compact fluorescent bulb, we could save the same amount of energy as a large nuclear power plant produces in one year.³

Other lighting considerations,

Use one high-watt bulb instead of several low-watt bulbs and use dimmer controls, high-low switches or three-way bulbs to adjust the level of light.
For maximum use of natural daylight consider skylights and solar tubes when remodeling or designing new construction.

5. Get the most from your heating and cooling

Regardless if you are hesitant to lower the temperature in your house this winter, you should be getting the most of the heat you are pumping into it. The first best and easiest step is to make sure that your air vents, radiators and baseboard registers are unobstructed by furniture, carpeting or window treatments. If air vents are adjustable, set them in the open position in the winter and closed in the summer.

Other heating/cooling considerations,

Schedule annual tune-ups for the furnace or heat pump. Maintenance checks can help keep the apparatus running smoothly and efficiently.
Shade room air conditioners from the sun to reduce workload and either clean or change the filters regularly.

Marie Oser is a best-selling author, writer/producer and host of VegTV. Follow Marie on Twitter: http://twitter.com/vegtv

Sources:

http://powerscorecard.org/scorecard.cfm Pace University, White Plains, NY
Special offers and rebates for Energy Star consumers.
http://powerscorecard.org/scorecard.cfm Pace University, White Plains, NY

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203 MW wind farm completed in Utah

Megan Treacy — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:29:00 PST

It's great to see some of the large wind farm projects that were just ideas a couple of years ago become reality. First Wind's Milford Wind Corridor project has just seen the completion of its first phase -- 203.5 MW in Millard and Beaver Counties in Utah, the largest renewable energy facility in the state.

The wind farm consists of 97 turbines and will be able power 45,000 homes. Southern California Public Power Authority is purchasing all of the electricity generated over the next 20 years on behalf of the cities of Los Angeles, Pasadena, and Burbank.

Construction on the wind farm began almost exactly a year ago. Over the next few years, the wind corridor will expand to include four more phases totaling over 1 GW of wind energy capacity.

via Press Release

What's at stake in the Copenhagen climate talks

Douglas Fischer — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 06:34:00 PST

(Photo: NASA)

This is the consequence of failure at Copenhagen: A marked shift in scientific effort from solving global warming to adapting to its consequences, a hodge-podge of uncoordinated local efforts to trim emissions -- none of which deliver the necessary cuts -- and an altered climate.

Climate experts, scientists and negotiators say that, absent international agreement, the children and grandchildren of those living today will negotiate a world where planetary geo-engineering is a part of daily life, sea-walls defend coastal cities, the world's poor are hammered by drought, floods and famine and our planet is heading toward conditions unseen for the last 100 million years.

The December talks are, in other words, the last, best chance to change course before chaos descends.

"The choice facing the present generation is an awesome one," said former Vice President Al Gore during a speech before the Society of Environmental Journalists last month. "Never before has a single generation been asked to make such difficult and consequential decisions that will have implications for all succeeding generations."

Failure, Gore added, would be "catastrophic" -- not only given the urgency of changes already underway, but because it challenges the efficacy of the rule of law as "an instrument of redemption."

Collapse in Copenhagen could not just become an obstacle to further progress, however. It also might force society to confront choices and decisions few in the scientific and policy world want to face.

"Copenhagen is mitigation," said Guy Brasseur, director of the Climate Service Center in Hamburg, Germany. "If that fails, we move to adaptation and geo-engineering."

Adaptation will require hundreds of billions of dollars on the low end. It will force a vast transfer of wealth, technology and aid from industrialized counties to developing ones. That buys no more than a Band-aid for those most at risk, said Saleemul Huq, head of the climate change group at the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development.

"We've failed our primary task of preventing harm," said Huq, lead author of the adaptation and mitigation chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fourth assessment report. "Now we are going to be tasked with protecting those most vulnerable to harm. And soon we are going to be confronted with globally catastrophic harm."

"There really is nothing to do but adapt today."

That's where Copenhagen comes in.

The diplomatic gathering, from Dec. 7 to 18, has one goal: create an "ambitious global agreement incorporating all the countries of the world" to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. It will be the 16th in a line of negotiations extending back 20 years, some more successful than others, all aimed at curbing humanity's appetite for fossil fuel.

There is deep pessimism that it will succeed. Deep divides on how best to tackle the problem exist between developed countries. Even deeper divides separate developed from developing worlds.

But there have been surprises before.

At the 2007 talks in Bali, all signs pointed to failure until delegates awoke the day after the talks were to end and discovered key players had worked through the night to reach an agreement.

"You don't know the answer before you actually get there, and very often you don't know the answer before the last couple of days," said Doug Boucher, a climate expert for the Union of Concerned Scientists who has participated at several international talks.

"It's really the extreme pressure of the final deadline that gets countries to make the compromises, make the bargains necessary to get to the final agreement."

And there will be pressure.

Previous negotiations all pointed to 2009 as the year to draw a line in the sand, but it's more than just a diplomatic deadline. By virtually every metric -- emissions, deforestation, fuel use, land development, economic growth -- business-as-usual projections point to catastrophe.

"Civilization will experience the greatest disruption in its history," said Jeffrey Kiehl, a senior scientist at NCAR's climate change research program. "We're applying a forcing to the planet that it hasn't seen for tens to hundreds of millions of years, ... when there was no ice at either pole."

"I don't think we want to go down that path."

The effect of those forcings is a matter of much speculation and study. What has become increasingly clear is that many of the most sophisticated climate models have underestimated the earth's capacity for abrupt and radical shifts -- swings that make many of the worst-case economic and climate forecasts from just a few years ago look almost rosy.

A recent report by the United Nation Environment Programme found many upper-range predictions deemed probable over the long term by its climate change panel two years ago are already occurring.

Author and reporter Dianne Dumanoski noted in her recent book, "The End of the Long Summer," that the only thing certain about the coming century is "its immense uncertainty."

"It will take conscious effort to resist taking refuge either in despair - in the conviction that 'it's too late' -- or in the alternative, to bask in groundless, sunny optimism that 'we'll figure out something, because science always does.' "

Addressing this planetary emergency will require a new map, Dumanoski said -- a rethinking, in effect, of civilization itself. Social systems must be retooled to withstand severe disruption. Climate change must be seen as far more than just an "environmental" dilemma or even an energy issue. Indeed, she added, humanity must come to see that seemingly small, inconsequential choices in every aspect of modern society can have -- and are having -- a profound and deleterious impact on the planetary system. "There is no hope for accommodation in the current path," she said.

****

Efforts to change all this are already falling far short of what many analysts consider necessary, said David Victor, a professor at the University of California, San Diego's Laboratory on International Law and Regulation who studies climate policy. These failings, he wrote in an essay published in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy, arise from "a political logic that will soon be difficult to rectify." Deep cuts are costly. They are difficult to sustain, require radical change, and will, for many countries, be hard to administer.

Hence the need, many experts agree, for the pressure of a global agreement.

The status quo isn't working, they add: Countries and companies are eyeing each other warily, floating proposals for tepid cuts with the promise of steeper reductions if the rest of the world antes up as well.

Australia in August tried to commit to the globe's most aggressive reduction scheme: a modest 5 percent cut in emissions from 2000 levels by 2020 with a promise of a 25 percent cut if other developed nations went along. It never got out of the country's Senate.

In Washington, D.C., climate legislation has been eclipsed by the health care debate, and key Democratic lawmakers say a far-reaching House bill should be sharply scaled back. California's progressive efforts to reduce emissions have been swamped by budget crisis.

"Countries need to have a sense that other main contributors to the problem ... are moving together toward a solution," said Jennifer Morgan, director of climate and energy policy for the World Resources Institute. "Countries will likely not go to the outer edges of what's possible."

But what's possible? The list of chores is daunting.

Scientists say greenhouse gas emissions must be cut 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050 to avoid the worst disruption. By comparison, the maligned Kyoto Protocol called for the industrialized world to trim emissions between 6 and 8 percent from 1990 levels by 2012.

Emissions from the 40 industrialized nations agreeing to binding cuts are down five percent - on target to meet Kyoto. But that's only because the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent economic decline of much of the Eastern Europe that has sent emissions in those countries plummeting.

Take out those countries and add developing nations, and global emissions have jumped 10 percent since 1990, according to the United Nations.

What's more, by 2050 the world population is expected to near 9 billion. That's the equivalent of adding 10 more United States to the globe - along with all the roads, fast food joints, sewage treatment plants, factories and power plants, homes and stores that accompany growth.

Indeed, it's the growth that's the problem, most climate experts argue. America's average per-capita carbon footprint is about 20 tons of planet-warming emissions a year. A typical European's is 10 or 12 tons. In China, 4 tons and growing. But some three billion people worldwide emit less than a ton a year. (A sustainable global per-capita footprint -- one that avoids the worst warming -- is about 4 tons per person, scientists figure.)

Those three billion are the poorest of the poor: they heat with wood, cook with dung, have little or no access to electricity or clean water.

How to let them partake in a First World economy without cooking the planet is another major stumbling block awaiting delegates in Copenhagen.

****

For the scientists, their job in some ways is done. Climate disruption is now a political question, an economics issue, a security threat.

"Clearly it's hard to think how we could better present the case," said Brasseur, the Climate Service Center director. "The science has been very clear."

"It is now up for society to decide."

And signs do suggest society is starting to decide: China is talking with the U.S. on emissions reductions and has launched a Green Revolution with the goal of catching Europe by 2020. Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt of Sweden, who assumed the EU presidency in July, has called on European nations to tax carbon emissions regardless of global negotiations.

There is time, Brasseur said, but not much: If delegates cannot seal the deal in Copenhagen but can make sufficient progress to deliver an agreement within five years, the talks can be considered successful. WRI's Morgan, who has spent a decade playing key roles at UN climate talks, takes a harder line. After December, there is not enough time to get a treaty ratified and in place by 2012, when Kyoto expires, she said. Countries and industries need to know what market mechanisms and signals will be in place post-Kyoto.

Amid the contention, there is one bright spot: Industrialized countries have realized they have an obligation to help the world's poor, said Huq, the London-based adaptation expert.

Of the many pieces to the climate treaty puzzle, this is the area closest to agreement, Huq said. He is confident Copenhagen will produce some consensus on this point.

"There is simply no way (delegates) can look themselves in the mirror and not do anything about it," he said. "This now is no longer disputed territory."

In some ways, that's the great irony of climate change. So many of the initial impacts from a carbon-intensive lifestyle are first hitting those who use the least amount of carbon: Drought in the Sahel, floods in Bangladesh, changing agriculture patterns in India, parts of Asia and Africa, increased water stress for millions living downslope of the Andes and Himalaya.

That will change, scientists predict, and discussion over how to adapt will move quickly from the Third World to the First.

Soon -- absent steep cuts and the pressure of a global treaty -- politicians across the United States will confront questions that make budget woes and health care costs seem downright quaint, said Brasseur.

"Where will I get my water? What is my strategy (for adaptation)? .... How am I going to have enough food to feed all of California?" he said, rattling off a hypothetical list.

By then the solutions may carry a frightful cost.

"The later we take action, the more we have (climate) impact," Brasseur said.

"And that impact is going to be irreversible."

Douglas Fischer is editor of Daily Climate, one of The Daily Green's trusted sources of information. This post is republished with permission.

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Obama’s one-year environmental review

Ted Nelson — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 07:27:38 PST

On the one-year anniversary of Obama’s election, the New York Times has run an article assessing Barack on some of the issues which have defined his presidency to date. One of the areas covered is energy and the environment.

The analysis is not very in-depth, divided into one paragraph about his campaign promises and one about the action he’s taken in office.

A headline atop the Energy and Environment section sums its contents and Obama’s record on the issue up nicely: “Some progress, but the big fight is still ahead.”

As a candidate, Barack Obama called for a transformation in the way the United States produces and consumes energy to address global warming and to reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil. He supported an economy-wide cap-and-trade system to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by forcing utilities and industries to pay for the right to emit carbon dioxide and other pollutants. Some of the revenue was to be returned to consumers to cover higher energy costs; some was to be invested in renewable energy projects. He also called for much higher mileage standards for cars and light trucks as a way to cut oil imports.

President Obama, using executive rule-making authority, achieved a notable deal with automakers that will increase fuel efficiency and reduce tailpipe emissions by more than 30 percent by 2016. The stimulus package enacted early in the year included about $80 billion for renewable energy programs, transportation projects, energy efficiency, modernization of the electricity grid and research on capture and storage of carbon emissions. But the cap-and-trade proposal has stalled in Congress, stymied by industry lobbyists and regional concerns about job losses and higher energy prices. Mr. Obama’s pledge to tackle global warming in earnest fell victim to his and Congress’s focus on health care for much of the year and will have to wait until 2010 at the earliest.

While the administration and like-minded Congresspeople have not yet passed cap and trade or other comprehensive emissions reduction legislation, they have clearly modernized and rationalized the American policy approach towards energy and the environment.

While health care has been the national obsession for the past several months, energy and environment may get their day in the sun relatively shortly. The Copenhagen Convention is coming up in December, and that should thrust the issue onto the national stage in a big way.

The United States has spent the last decade acting as a barrier to global action on climate change, and Copenhagen is a great opportunity to take a leadership position on the issue. Surely the search for international consensus will drive a national conversation on how to deal with environmental and energy policy.

What perhaps most strikes me about this article is that it’s a promising sign that the two subjects, energy and environment, are now so intrinsically linked. The connection between energy use and its environmental impact has become second nature. Establishing an understanding of this link in the public consciousness is essential for making progress on the environmental sustainability of our society.

We are still doing more talking about the problem than enacting solutions, but we can now finally say that the solutions are well underway. Areas from biofuels to electric cars to renewable electricity to energy efficiency to organic food are gaining momentum and large corporations are going beyond simply meeting regulations, finding ways to drive down costs and increase revenues through sustainability initiatives.

There is still a lot that the Obama administration can do on the energy and environment front over the next three years, and year one shows us that the will is there.

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Are wind farms ugly or beautiful?

Editors of E / The Environmental Magazine — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 07:18:00 PST

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

EarthTalk is a Q&A column from E / The Environmental Magazine

Dear EarthTalk: I don’t understand why many people oppose wind power just because they have to look at the turbines. If you ask me, wind turbines are much nicer looking than coal-fired, waste-to-energy or nuclear power plants. -- Michael Hart, via email

Whether it’s a wind farm, a coal-fired power plant, a nuclear reactor or even just a big box store, there are always going to be locals opposed to it, declaring “not in my back yard!” (NIMBY).

As to the attractiveness of wind farms, people do seem to come down on one side or the other rather vehemently. Those in favor of wind development have been known to extol the visual virtues of a horizon full of windmills not only for the turbines’ graceful sculptural lines but also for the fact that their very presence advertises the coming of a modern, almost futuristic age of clean, renewable energy.

Writing in the online magazine Contemporary Aesthetics, Yuriko Saito waxes eloquent about the visual appeal of wind farms when created thoughtfully. “[I]t is possible to create an aesthetically pleasing effect by choosing the color, shape and height of the turbines appropriate … to the particular landscape, making them uniform in their appearance and movement, and … arranging them in proportion to the landscape,” he says. “One writer admires the windmills in Sweden as ‘graceful objects’ because ‘the slender airfoils seem both delicate and powerful … while their gentle motion imparts a living kinetic nature’.”

On the flip side, detractors begrudge wind turbines for destroying their views -- a classic NIMBY stance. According to Saito, opposition to wind farms stems from their being sited on previously “open, unhindered lands” and as such “are viewed as machines intruding in a garden.” He adds: “[T]hey are almost invariably decried as ‘marring,’ ‘spoiling,’ ‘ruining,’ and ‘intruding on’ the otherwise relatively natural landscape, such as desert, open field, mountainside, and…ocean, and for creating an ‘eyesore’.”

Respondents to a survey by the British magazine Country Life listed wind turbines as the most egregious type of architectural blemish across England. They disliked wind farms even more than other “eyesores” -- such as highway service areas, conventional power stations and ugly office buildings -- because of the size of the turbines, some of which are 300 feet tall, and their intrusion on the landscape.

Opponents of a proposed wind farm in the waters of Massachusetts’ Nantucket Sound cite similar gripes. The builder, Cape Wind Associates, has campaigned for seven years for approval of the development, to be located 16 miles off the shore of Nantucket Island. Homeowners, politicians and some evidently conflicted environmentalists have mounted stiff opposition to the facility, which would appear from shore as distant white smears on the horizon. The decision rests with the U.S. Interior Department, which, despite stated desires to expand offshore wind energy, is taking its time on the highly contentious matter.

But with wind now the hottest renewable energy source going, those opposed to seeing windmills better get used to it. In 2008 wind power provided 1.5% of global electricity -- having doubled its output every year now for five years in a row -- and should account for as much as eight percent by 2018.

GOT AN ENVIRONMENTAL QUESTION? Send it to: EarthTalk, c/o E/The Environmental Magazine, P.O. Box 5098, Westport, CT 06881; submit it here or via email. Read past columns here and check out the recent book Earthtalk: Expert Answers to Everyday Questions about the Environment

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Major oil companies investments in biofuels

Ted Nelson — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 07:34:48 PST

The status quo isn’t a problem for big oil companies, who seem to be constantly breaking their own record profits. However, these corporations know that they must also look to the future and sustain their competitive edge.

The competitive landscape of the future is not clear for the oil industry, with financial, political, and environmental considerations coming into play.

The technologies and processes behind various renewable energy sources are improving, and may eventually lead to a renewable product that is cost competitive with oil.

Even if no renewable source is strictly cost competitive, the overall cost to society may be deemed lower because of the carbon pollution associated with oil. This will lead, and is already leading to political pressure and regulations. And it’s not just the price of renewables coming down that oil companies have to worry about, but also the price of oil going up as global energy demand rises.

Oil companies have been aware of these forces for some time now, and have been investing in a range of renewables.

Recently, major oil companies seem to be sharpening their focus and concentrating on commercially viable biofuels. This pragmatic approach may spring from a recessionary mindset, but also speaks to the evolution of biofuels to the point where there are commercially viable alternatives on the near horizon.

The specific competencies and competitive advantages that have made oil companies successful are easily transferable to biofuels. These companies are good at producing, distributing, and marketing transportation fuels, which is what the biofuel industry requires.

Below is a list of recent investments in biofuels by oil majors, from an October 19th article in the Wall Street Journal. While these investments are significant and seem to represent a trend in the industry, WSJ author Guy Chazan also points out that they represent only a small fraction of these companies investment budgets.

Any feelings of hypocrisy and greenwashing are understandable, but to accomplish all of its most ambitious goals the green movement needs big business’ muscle behind it.

BP

Investments of around $1 billion in ethanol-expansion efforts in Brazil.
Grant to the Energy Biosciences Institute of California, Berkeley, and the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
Partnership with DuPont to construct a biobutanol demonstration plant in the U.K. next to an ethanol plant.
Joint Venture with Verenium, a maker of cellulosic ethanol.

Chevron

Joint venture with Weyerhaeuser to make fuel from biomass such as switchgrass.
Grants to Georgia Institute of Technology and University of California at Davis for biofuels research.

Exxon Mobil

Invested $600 million in an algae-to-fuel start-up, Synthetic Genomics.

Petrobras

Planning to invest $2.8 billion in biofuels over the next five years.

Shell

Working with Canada’s Iogen to produce fuel from wheat straw, and with Choden Industries of Germany to make fuel from wood residue.
Invested in Codexis, which is developing enzymes that rapidly turn plants into fuel.
Partnership with Virent Energy Systems, a company planning to produce biogasoline using technology that can process various kinds of feedstock.

Total

Invested in Gevo, a biofuels company that makes renewable fuels from agricultural waste.

Solar projects battling for water

Megan Treacy — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:34:00 PDT

Construction of renewable energy projects has revealed some serious environmental issues that will have to be dealt with as we speed toward a clean energy future. We recently wrote about the conflict between land conservation efforts and renewable energy projects in deserts out west. Land that is ideal for solar energy production is also pristine land in need of protection.

In California, a similar conflict is arising between solar projects and water conservation. Solar farms demand a lot of water, a resource that is stretched very thin in the arid areas where they're being developed. A large solar farm can use upwards of 500 million gallons of water a year for cooling purposes and there are currently 35 big projects slated for development in California desert.

A "dry cooling" technique exists that uses 90 percent less water than "wet cooling," but it's more expensive and reduces the efficiency of the solar plant. Even so, some plants are giving in and going the dry route.

Solar plants are fighting with state regulators to get the water they need. Some are succeeding, while others are failing. Just with land conservation, there doesn't seem to be one right side here. Ideally, a new technique for cooling will be developed that doesn't require large amounts of water or a dip in efficiency.

via Green Inc.

Why Obama's $3.4 billion smart-grid investment matters

Jim Motavalli — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:07:28 PDT

The DeSoto Next Generation Solar Energy Center in Florida will be large enough to serve the entire city of Arcadia, whose very name suggests some kind of modern-day post-oil paradise.

Here's what the 25-megawatt facility, the largest solar installation in the U.S. with 90,000 solar panels, looks like on video:

But there are clouds in the solar sky, and its name is the electric grid.

President Obama, in Arcadia on October 27, was only too happy to align himself with hopeful symbols like Arcadia and its promise of 100 percent clean utilities producing renewable electricity. But he also used it as the backdrop for the announcement of $3.4 billion in stimulus funding for the smart grid. It's desperately needed.

The DeSoto Next Generation Solar Energy
Center: Needs a smart grid. (Florida Power
& Light rendering)

As Obama pointed out, "To realize the full potential of this plant and others like it, we've got to do more than just add extra solar megawatts to our electrical grid. That's because this grid-which is made up of everything from power lines to generators to the meters in your home-still runs on century-old technology. It wastes too much energy, it costs us too much money, and it's too susceptible to outages and blackouts."

Obama made an appropriate analogy -- to the tangle of roads that existed in the U.S. before the interstates were announced (as a defense measure!) by President Eisenhower in the 1950s. "It was a tangled maze of poorly maintained back roads that were rarely the fastest or the most efficient way to get from point A to point B," he said, and that is the grid today: local power plants and small regional networks, barely capable of communicating with other grids or even with their own customers.

This is a huge challenge if we truly want to switch to renewable energy, because the wind and sun are located in inconvenient places such as east Texas and North Dakota. One of the reasons T. Boone Pickens killed his massive Texas wind farm was because the grid just couldn't deliver his plentiful energy.

Obama: Plugged in. (Photo: NASA)

The smart grid is also crucial to make the switch from gas-guzzlers to electric cars because plugging millions of EVs into the peak usage times in the current infrastructure is a recipe for melted transformers and blackouts. But electricity is use it or lose it, and we're currently wasting billions of kilowatt-hours at night when there's low demand.

With a smart grid, customers will have pricing incentives to charge only in late evening, and touch-screens in their cars (as well as cell phone apps) to make setting up a charge as easy as programming a VCR (well, easier than that).

The Obama Administration outlined how the money will be spent:

$1 billion for empowering consumers to cut bills and use off-peak electricity through giving them access to smart meters and dynamic pricing schemes;
$400 million for improving electricity distribution, transmission and stability with digital monitoring and increased grid automation;
$2 billion for enabling the optimum use of smart meters, appliances and thermostats, all in the interest of helping components of the Smart Grid to play better with other parts. This fund, the bulk of the stimulus package, will also help communications with plug-in hybrid cars and battery-electric vehicles, as well as with renewable energy sources.
$25 million for expanding a manufacturing base for smart meters, transformers and appliances-though such a small amount of money is unlikely to go all that far.

The $3.4 billion includes funding for a million in-home smart meters, 170,000 smart thermostats and 175,000 other "load control devices. It's also supposed to jump-start a market for smart appliances, though just how isn't spelled out.

The Obama administration said this project will leverage $4.7 billion in private investment and, of course, create tens of thousands of green jobs. The administration has gotten quite adept at that claim, and with our current dismal job prospects such employment is sorely needed. Where is Van Jones when we need him?

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California crowned most energy efficient by ACEEE

Megan Treacy — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:19:00 PDT

The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) released their third annual state energy efficiency scorecard yesterday and the most energy efficient state was, no surprise, California, while Wyoming was ranked dead last.

The organization judged all 50 states plus D.C. on six criteria: utility-sector and public benefit programs and policies; transportation policies; building energy codes; combined heat and power; state government initiatives; and appliance efficiency standards. States could amass 50 points among the areas.

The report found that the recession had little effect on energy efficiency programs and some states like Maine, Colorado, Delaware, D.C., South Dakota and Tennessee made huge leaps in energy efficiency initiatives.

The top ten states are: California (1); Massachusetts (2); Connecticut (3); Oregon (4); New York (5); Vermont (6); Washington state (7); Minnesota (8); Rhode Island (9); and Maine (10). The bottom ten are: Arkansas (41); Missouri (41); Louisiana (41); Georgia (44); Alaska (45); West Virginia (45); Nebraska (47); Alabama (48); Mississippi (49); North Dakota (49); and Wyoming (51).

You can view each state's score and a list of its policies here.

via Press Release