10. Our Energy Future

Archive of Past Articles for Chapter 10

2009 October 20. Study: Shifting the world to 100% clean, renewable energy by 2030 - here are the numbers. BY Louis Bergeron, Stanford Report. Excerpt: Most of the technology needed to shift the world from fossil fuel to clean, renewable energy already exists. Implementing that technology requires overcoming obstacles in planning and politics, but doing so could result in a 30 percent decrease in global power demand, say Stanford civil and environmental engineering Professor Mark Z. Jacobson and University of California-Davis researcher Mark Delucchi.
...Jacobson and Delucchi used data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration to project that if the world's current mix of energy sources is maintained, global energy demand at any given moment in 2030 would be 16.9 terawatts, or 16.9 million megawatts.
They then calculated that if no combustion of fossil fuel or biomass were used to generate energy, and virtually everything was powered by electricity – either for direct use or hydrogen production – the demand would be only 11.5 terawatts. That's only two-thirds of the energy that would be needed if fossil fuels were still in the mix.
In order to convert to wind, water and solar, the world would have to build wind turbines; solar photovoltaic and concentrated solar arrays; and geothermal, tidal, wave and hydroelectric power sources to generate the electricity, as well as transmission lines to carry it to the users, but the long-run net savings would more than equal the costs, according to Jacobson and Delucchi's analysis.
"If you make this transition to renewables and electricity, then you eliminate the need for 13,000 new or existing coal plants," Jacobson said. "Just by changing our infrastructure we have less power demand."...

2009 October 13. Governor signs bills that boost solar power. By David R. Baker, SF Chronicle. Excerpt: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed several bills Sunday that will tweak the way California's electricity market works, encouraging solar power and phasing out some rules created during the state's electricity crisis.
One bill will require California utilities to buy surplus solar power from homeowners who generate more than they use. Another bill will expand the state's "feed-in tariff," a system that sets a price for renewable power that utilities buy from businesses with midsize solar arrays.
Another piece of legislation will raise the electricity rates of customers who use relatively little power, ending a rate freeze put in place during the energy crisis of 2000-01. The same bill also will allow a limited number of large electricity customers - such as businesses or schools - to leave the utilities and buy power from other companies....

2009 May 28. Hard Hats Swarm to Smart Energy. By Liz Galst, NRDC OnEarth. Excerpt: On an early spring morning in a classroom in New York City's hardscrabble East Harlem neighborhood, a group of four dozen young adults listens intently to a presentation by Elizabeth Yeampierre, president of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance.
... Brandon Ingram, a Bronx native sitting in the front row, rises. He wears the lozenge-shaped glasses of a budding hipster and holds aloft Van Jones's best-selling 2008 book, The Green Collar Economy.
"I've been reading this," Ingram says, displaying the cover for all to see. "I want everyone in the room to hear it." He reads aloud a passage that spells out a bright green future for job seekers: in 2006, there were 8.5 million jobs (and by the end of 2007, half a million new ones) in renewable energy and energy-efficient technologies, and the sector produced nearly $1 trillion in revenue and more than $100 billion in industry profits.
Ingram's colleagues are equally impressed. They are classmates in a 12-week green-construction training program run by Strive, a nonprofit group based in New York City. For many of them, long unemployed, work in the expanding green sector could be the break they've been waiting for. The program teaches both "hard" and "soft" job skills. At the practical level, students learn how to audit and then insulate a leaky house and construct new, energy-efficient buildings. They also learn the basics of public speaking and personal presentation -- hence all the snazzy ties in the room....
Job training programs like Strive, offering skills in everything from energy-efficiency retrofitting to the manufacture and maintenance of wind turbines, are springing up across the country. Together they represent a significant shift in the American workforce and, perhaps, in the environmental movement. President Barack Obama's $787 billion federal stimulus package promises at least $1 billion for green-job training; millions more are being invested by foundations, state and local governments, and private interests....
The idea that blue-collar occupations -- make that "green-collar" occupations -- can help heal the earth while providing stable, well-paying employment was once simply a fantasy of a few underfunded dreamers. But in 2003 that fantasy came to life through the work of two pioneering nonprofits: Sustainable South Bronx, in New York City, and Baltimore's Civic Works. Now green-job training programs serve a broad spectrum of the population and attract a scale of financial backing that surprises even some of their earliest advocates....

2009 May 26. In Hot Pursuit of Fusion (or Folly). By WILLIAM J. BROAD, NY Times. Excerpt: LIVERMORE, Calif. ..."Bringing Star Power to Earth" reads a giant banner that was recently unfurled across a building the size of a football stadium.
The $3.5 billion site is known as the National Ignition Facility, or NIF. For more than half a century, physicists have dreamed of creating tiny stars that would inaugurate an era of bold science and cheap energy....
In theory, the facility's 192 lasers - made of nearly 60 miles of mirrors and fiber optics, crystals and light amplifiers - will fire as one to pulverize a fleck of hydrogen fuel smaller than a match head. Compressed and heated to temperatures hotter than those of the core of a star, the hydrogen atoms will fuse into helium, releasing bursts of thermonuclear energy.
The project's director, Ed Moses, said that getting to the cusp of ignition (defined as the successful achievement of fusion) had taken some 7,000 workers and 3,000 contractors a dozen years, their labors creating a precision colossus of millions of parts and 60,000 points of control, 30 times as many as on the space shuttle.
...In February, NIF fired its 192 beams into its target chamber for the first time.... skeptics dismiss NIF as a colossal delusion that is squandering precious resources at a time of economic hardship. Just operating it ... will cost $140 million a year. Some doubters ridicule it as the National Almost Ignition Facility, or NAIF....
Dr. Moses, while offering no guarantees, argued that any great endeavor involved risks and that the gamble was worth it because of the potential rewards.
He said that NIF, if successful, would help keep the nation's nuclear arms reliable without underground testing, would reveal the hidden life of stars and would prepare the way for radically new kinds of power plants.
"If fusion energy works," he said, "you'll have, for all intents and purposes, a limitless supply of carbon-free energy that's not geopolitically sensitive. What more would you want? It's a game changer."....

2009 May 10. Efficient Power Use Attracts Investors From the Green Side. By Claire Cain Miller, The NY Times. Excerpt: Venture capital is moving away from alternative energy and returning to one of its traditional strengths: improving the efficiency of energy consumption....

2009 May 7. Sea 'snake' generates electricity with every wave. By Colin Barras, NewScientist. Excerpt: Anaconda, a giant rubber "snake" that floats offshore and converts wave energy to electricity, is a step closer to commercialisation. An 8-metre long, 1/25th scale version is currently undergoing tests in a large wave tank in Gosport, UK, and a full-size working version could be a reality in five years.
Harnessing the power of waves is an attractive proposition because they are much more energy dense than wind. But wave power remains the poor relation of the renewable energy sector due to the difficulties of cheaply operating machinery in the harsh marine environment. The world's first commercial wave farm only began operating last year, off the northern coast of Portugal.
A variety of other designs are in testing around the world, but none are as unusual as the Anaconda. The rubber snake is filled with freshwater – to help deter sea creatures from setting up a home inside – and sealed at both ends to create a semi-rigid balloon that floats at the sea's surface.
The tube is anchored at one end and as waves wash along its length they exert pressure on the snake that is transmitted by the water inside. This forces Anaconda's walls to expand outwards into the wave troughs where they are under less pressure, forming "bulge waves" that travel along the Anaconda's length.
These waves are similar to those that pass through the human circulatory system and can be felt as the pulse in the wrist and neck, says Rod Rainey of Atkins Global, co-inventor of the Anaconda. When each bulge wave reaches the end of the snake it keeps a turbine spinning to generate electricity....

2009 March/April. The Rooftop Revolution. By Mariah Blake, Washington Monthly. Excerpt: A little-known policy is turning sleepy central Florida into a green energy hub. Could it do the same for America at large? This winter, as Congress was scrambling to pass the stimulus package, the bottom fell out of the renewable energy sector.... Trade groups like the American Wind Energy Association, which as recently as December was forecasting "another record-shattering year of growth," began predicting that new installations would plunge by 30 to 50 percent. Solar panel manufacturers that had been blazing a trail of growth announced a wave of layoffs....
But there is one place where capital is still flowing: Gainesville, Florida. ...Tim Morgan ... intends to rent roof space from eighty Gainesville businesses and install twenty-five-kilowatt solar generating systems on each of them, for a total of two megawatts-a project that would nearly double Florida's solar-generating capacity. ...Paradigm Properties, a residential real estate company, plans to install photovoltaic arrays on fifty local apartment buildings and its downtown headquarters. Achira Wood, a custom carpentry outlet, is plastering the roof of its workshop-roughly 50,000 square feet of galvanized steel-with solar panels. Interstate Mini Storage is doing the same with its sprawling flat-roofed compound. Tom Lane, who owns ECS Solar Energy Systems, a local solar contractor, told me he's planning to expand his staff from eleven to at least fifty. "The activity we've seen is just explosive," he said. "I've been in the business thirty years and I've never seen anything like it."
Why is the renewable energy market in Gainesville booming while it's collapsing elsewhere in the country? The answer boils down to policy. In early February, the city became the first in the nation to adopt a "feed-in tariff"-a clunky and un-descriptive name for a bold incentive to foster renewable energy. Under this system, the local power company is required to buy renewable energy from independent producers, no matter how small, at rates slightly higher than the average cost of production. This means anyone with a cluster of solar cells on their roof can sell the power they produce at a profit. The costs of the program are passed on to ratepayers, who see a small rise in their electric bills (in Gainesville the annual increase is capped at 1 percent). While rate hikes are seldom popular, the community has rallied behind this policy, because unlike big power plant construction-the costs of which are also passed on to the public-everyone has the opportunity to profit, either by investing themselves or by tapping into the groundswell of economic activity the incentive creates....

2009 March 11. Atmospheric ‘Sunshade’ Could Reduce Solar Power Generation. NOAA. Excerpt: The concept of delaying global warming by adding particles into the upper atmosphere to cool the climate could unintentionally reduce peak electricity generated by large solar power plants by as much as one-fifth, according to a new NOAA study....
“Injecting particles into the stratosphere could have unintended consequences for one alternative energy source expected to play a role in the transition away from fossil fuels,” said author Daniel Murphy, a scientist at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.
The Earth is heating up as fossil-fuel burning produces carbon dioxide, the primary heat-trapping gas responsible for man-made climate change. To counteract the effect, some geoengineering proposals are designed to slow global warming by shading the Earth from sunlight.
...Murphy found that particles in the stratosphere reduce the amount and change the nature of the sunlight that strikes the Earth. Though a fraction of the incoming sunlight bounces back to space (the cooling effect), a much larger amount becomes diffuse, or scattered, light.
On average, for every watt of sunlight the particles reflect away from the Earth, another three watts of direct sunlight are converted to diffuse sunlight. Large power-generating solar plants that concentrate sunlight for maximum efficiency depend solely on direct sunlight and cannot use diffuse light....

2009 Feb 27. Selling the Sun. by Michael Behar, OnEarth magazine - NRDC. A Man, A Plan, and the Dawn of America's Solar Future. "I am a capitalist," announces Jigar Shah, the 34-year-old founder of SunEdison. ...An iconoclast among greens, he's a devoted environmentalist who champions market economics and believes American business acumen can conquer climate change. Shah has spent the past six years leveraging his convictions to build North America's largest and most successful provider of solar energy.
In 2003, Shah launched SunEdison to smash the decades-old paradigm that required anyone wanting solar to pay huge installation costs up front. Depending on its size, a rooftop array or a ground-based solar farm can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $10 million. This infuriated Shah, who has always believed that having to own the means of producing solar power is woefully out of step with how the energy industry operates. "Do you want to be in the power-plant business?" he asks. "Or do you just want to buy solar power?" Imagine having to own and operate a satellite to get DirecTV and you begin to understand why Shah scorned the prevailing model for solar energy.
...For Shah's part, he didn't invent any groundbreaking technologies. He just repackaged ones that already existed and convinced people to buy them. SunEdison customers pay nothing for their solar systems. That's right, zero. Instead they sign what is known as a power-purchasing agreement, or PPA. These agreements are commonplace in the coal, oil, nuclear, and natural gas industries (the Hoover Dam was financed in part with PPAs). But Shah figured out how to make PPAs profitable for solar, something that nobody had been able to do before. When SunEdison installs a solar array, the customer agrees under a PPA to buy the electricity it produces at a set price for at least 10 years. "When we priced out owning the system ourselves, it didn't make sense," Buckley tells me. "We wanted a way to establish price certainty in a volatile market. SunEdison gave us a long-term hedge against that price uncertainty. We're paying less for electricity and reducing our carbon impact. And 15 years down the road, when the price of electricity is higher, the savings will be even more attractive."....

2009 January 12. Gulf Oil States Seeking a Lead in Clean Energy. By Elisabeth Rosenthal, The New York Times. Excerpt: ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — With one of the highest per capita carbon footprints in the world, these oil-rich emirates would seem an unlikely place for a green revolution.
...Still, the region’s leaders know energy and money, having built their wealth on oil. They understand that oil is a finite resource, vulnerable to competition from new energy sources.
So even as President-elect Barack Obama talks about promoting green jobs as America’s route out of recession, gulf states, including the emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, are making a concerted push to become the Silicon Valley of alternative energy.
They are aggressively pouring billions of dollars made in the oil fields into new green technologies. They are establishing billion-dollar clean-technology investment funds. And they are putting millions of dollars behind research projects at universities from California to Boston to London, and setting up green research parks at home.
...This new investment aims to maintain the gulf’s dominant position as a global energy supplier, gaining patents from the new technologies and promoting green manufacturing. But if the United States and the European Union have set energy independence from the gulf states as a goal of new renewable energy efforts, they may find they are arriving late at the party.
“The leadership in these breakthrough technologies is a title the U.S. can lose easily,” said Peter Barker-Homek, chief executive of Taqa, Abu Dhabi’s national energy company. “Here we have low taxes, a young population, accessibility to the world, abundant natural resources and willingness to invest in the seed capital.”
...For the rest of the world, the enormous cash infusion may provide the important boost experts say is needed to get dozens of emerging technologies — like carbon capture, microsolar and low-carbon aluminum — over the development hump to make them cost-effective....

2008 Dec. Pelamis Wave Power. Marine-power firm Ocean Power Technologies... New report suggests Great Britain could derive 20 percent of energy needs from ocean power...
ScottishPower is going big with tidal, as Scottish waters open up for the first commercial wave and tidal projects in the U.K....
Google captured headlines with news of its patent for floating data centers... floating platform designs with its reliance on wave energy converters to power the floating grid.

2008 December 27. Win, Win, Win, Win, Win... By Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times. Excerpt: ...I could only cringe when reading this article from CNNMoney.com on Dec. 22: “After nearly a year of flagging sales, low gas prices and fat incentives are reigniting America’s taste for big vehicles. Trucks and S.U.V.’s will outsell cars in December ... something that hasn’t happened since February. Meanwhile, the forecast finds that sales of hybrid vehicles are expected to be way down.”
...That is why I believe the second biggest decision Barack Obama has to make — the first is deciding the size of the stimulus — is whether to increase the federal gasoline tax or impose an economy-wide carbon tax....
...The two most important rules about energy innovation are: 1) Price matters — when prices go up people change their habits. 2) You need a systemic approach. It makes no sense for Congress to pump $13.4 billion into bailing out Detroit — and demand that the auto companies use this cash to make more fuel-efficient cars — and then do nothing to shape consumer behavior with a gas tax so more Americans will want to buy those cars. As long as gas is cheap, people will go out and buy used S.U.V.’s and Hummers.
...A gasoline tax “is not just win-win; it’s win, win, win, win, win,” says the Johns Hopkins author and foreign policy specialist Michael Mandelbaum. “A gasoline tax would do more for American prosperity and strength than any other measure Obama could propose.”...

2008 December 22. At a Sleek Bioenergy Lab, a Lens on a Cabinet Pick. By Kenneth Chang and Andrew C. Revkin. Excerpt: EMERYVILLE, Calif. — The Joint BioEnergy Institute, which encompasses the fourth floor of a high-tech office building here in a neighborhood of biotech companies, radiates a sleek ecological modernity: floorboards manufactured of recycled materials and laminated to look like bamboo, trendy office furniture and laboratories stocked with new equipment...For years, Dr. Chu has been unambiguous in stating that carbon dioxide emitted by cars, power plants and industry is a direct cause of global warming and that urgent action to slash emissions is needed to avoid upheaval of the planet’s climate.He has not said anything publicly about his plans or goals as energy secretary, and he has not talked to the news media since being selected. But his actions as Lawrence Berkeley’s director, including the creation of JBEI, offer hints of how he might harness the 17 national laboratories — or at least the ones not dedicated to nuclear arms research — to address climate and energy issues.JBEI, whose mission is to use so-called synthetic biology to convert plant cellulose into fuel, moved into its Emeryville home last May. It is one of several major forays by Lawrence Berkeley into alternative fuels, an area where the lab conducted almost no research before Dr. Chu became director in 2004...Biofuels, fermented and distilled from plants, may offer a solution. Although the burning of biofuels still emits carbon dioxide, it is the same carbon dioxide that the plants had sucked out of the air...

2008 November 24. Spain city sets up solar cemetery. BBC News. Excerpt: A Spanish city has found an unusual place to generate renewable energy - the local cemetery.
Santa Coloma de Gramanet, near Barcelona, has placed 462 solar panels over its multi-storey mausoleums.
Officials say the scheme was initially greeted with derision, but families who use the cemetery eventually supported the idea following a public campaign.
There are now plans to erect more panels at the cemetery and triple the amount of electricity generated.
The cemetery was chosen for the project because it is one of only a few open, sunny places in the crowded city, which has a population of 124,000 crammed into 4 sq km (1.5 sq miles).
The installation cost 720,000 euros (£608,000) but will keep about 62 tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere every year, said Esteve Serret, a director of Conste-Live Energy, the company that runs the cemetery and also works in renewable energy.
"The best tribute we can pay to our ancestors, whatever your religion may be, is to generate clean energy for new generations," he said.
...The panels will create enough energy each year to supply the needs of 60 homes....

2008 October 22. Solar parking garage generates buzz. By Margaret Jackson, Denver Post. Excerpt: Gov. Bill Ritter flipped the switch Wednesday on one of the largest solar parking structures in the country.
The 1.75-megawatt solar-power system was built on three parking garages at Belmar, a mixed-use project in Lakewood developed by Continuum Partners.
Designed and installed by San Jose, Calif.-based SunPower Corp., the system uses more than 8,000 solar panels. Other partners in the project include MMA Renewable Ventures and Denver-based Oak Leaf Energy Partners, a project-development and consulting firm for renewable-energy transactions....

2008 October 6. A New Flexibility With Thin Solar Cells. By Henry Fountain. Excerpt: Photovoltaic cells, the basic building blocks of solar panels, are more efficient and less costly than ever. But manipulating cells (which are usually made of semiconductor materials) and incorporating them into different panel designs is not necessarily easy.
John A. Rogers of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and colleagues have come up with a novel method for creating extremely thin solar cells that can be combined in flexible, even partially transparent, arrays....
The technique involves creating a series of precisely spaced “microbars” on a block of single-crystal silicon. These bars, which have a thickness of a few micrometers, have doped regions that create p-n junctions, the main feature of most photovoltaic cells.
Through an etching process, the bars are undercut so they can be lifted off the remaining silicon using a block of rubbery material. They can be transferred to a substrate of another material, and this transfer-printing process can be repeated many times to build a cell....
The technique may allow the fabrication of solar arrays with a variety of characteristics. For example, the researchers say it would be possible to print the cells on rollable plastic sheets that would be easy to transport and install....

2008 Sep 29. Lawmakers at Impasse on Incentives for Renewable Energy. By ROBERT PEAR. NYT Times. Excerpt: WASHINGTON - The House and the Senate conceded Monday that they were in a stalemate over proposals to provide tax incentives for the production and use of renewable energy, leaving the future of the nascent industry in limbo.
Tax credits for investing in solar energy and producing wind energy will expire at the end of the year unless Congress resolves the impasse, and lawmakers said they saw no immediate prospect of an agreement.
The deadlock comes at a time when economists and politicians of all stripes are saying the United States must rapidly develop solar, wind and other energy sources as alternatives to oil.
"Congress is furthering our dependence on foreign sources of energy - dirty, polluting sources of energy," said Rhone Resch, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group. "It's scaring away investment, just as our industry is beginning to get a toehold. Solar projects are already being delayed."...

2008 September 23. Solar Panels Are Vanishing, Only to Reappear on the Internet. By KATE GALBRAITH, The New York Times. Excerpt: DESERT HOT SPRINGS, Calif. - Solar power, with its promise of emissions-free renewable energy, boasts a growing number of fans. Some of them, it turns out, are thieves.
Just ask Glenda Hoffman, whose fury has not abated since 16 solar panels vanished from her roof in this sun-baked town in three separate burglaries in May, sometimes as she slept....
Police departments in California - the biggest market for solar power, with more than 33,000 installations - are seeing a rash of such burglaries, though nobody compiles overall statistics.
...Last November, someone tried to sell solar panels stolen from a toll road in Newport Beach for $100 each on eBay. Detectives from the local police department entered the bidding and won the panels, which were worth nearly $1,500 apiece, according to Sgt. Evan Sailor, a Newport Beach police spokesman.
When Nathan Tyrone Mitchell, a resident of Santa Monica, showed up to hand over the panels, the police greeted him with handcuffs.
Mr. Mitchell, who was charged with possession of stolen property, has pleaded not guilty. His lawyer, Charles Stoddard, said that his client had bought the panels from someone on Craigslist and then tried to resell them on eBay for a profit. "Our contention is that Mr. Mitchell is just an innocent purchaser who kind of got caught up in this thing," Mr. Stoddard said.
...For Tom McCalmont, president of Regrid Power, a solar installation business near San Jose, the problem hit home in late June. His own headquarters was struck by thieves, who took more than $30,000 worth of panels from the roof.
The panels were disassembled expertly, he said, leading him to suspect that someone in the solar industry had done it....
"This is the crime of the future," Mr. McCalmont said....

2008 August 23. Stationary bike designed to create electricity. By Nick Czap, Special to The Chronicle. Excerpt: Like a number of highly motivated people, David Butcher starts every day with a workout. His poison: 45 minutes on a stationary bicycle.
Fitness is part of the incentive, but Butcher's primary motivation is a long-standing, and possibly obsessive, quest to generate his own electricity. So Butcher's stationary bike...is not your standard-issue exercise machine: It's a homemade power plant.
Butcher designed his ingeniously simple pedal generator for maximum comfort and efficiency: As the rider pedals, a wooden flywheel drives an electric motor, which generates an electric current that flows into a bank of salvaged lead-acid batteries for storage. A buried cable connects the batteries to a set of conspicuous orange outlets (denoting the off-the-grid energy source) in Butcher's home office, where he works as a Web project manager. The orange outlets power several devices, including a computer monitor (but not the computer), cell phone chargers, a high-efficiency area light and a small Roomba robotic vacuum.
...When he took up his pedaling regimen two years ago, Butcher tipped the scales at 180 pounds. Today, at age 53, he weighs a lean 150 and possesses a pair of legs that wouldn't look out of place on the Olympic cycling squad. Butcher's pedaling has become so efficient that he has pretty much abandoned his car (electric, incidentally) in favor of bicycling, reducing his carbon footprint still further.
...The combination of these positive impacts inspired Butcher to market the plans for his invention, and to date he's sold more than 300 sets of blueprints around the world....

2008 Aug 14. Washington Elementary Goes Solar. By Rio Bauce, Berkeley Daily Planet. Excerpt: Yesterday, construction workers for the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) laid down 480 solar panels on the roof of Washington Elementary School as part of a project by Kyoto USA, a climate change group located in Berkeley.
...After current superintendent Bill Huyett took over, he continued support for the project, and yesterday it was finally finished.
"The School Board had an interest in going solar," said Huyett. "We started this project for several reasons. Firstly, we wanted to set a good example for the students. Renewable energy is good for the planet. Secondly, we wanted to become more green. And lastly, we saw that it had a financial benefit: it reduced our electrical bills." The solar panels system at the Washington School is a 103-kilowatt photovoltaic system, which will reduce greenhouse gases by 721 tons per year. This is the equivalent of taking 119 cars off the road.
...Jane Kelly revealed the next school on her group's radar, saying, "We want to get Berkeley High School to have solar panels."

2008 Aug 14. Two Large Solar Plants Planned in California. By MATTHEW L. WALD, NY Times. Excerpt: Companies will build two solar power plants in California that together will put out more than 12 times as much electricity as the largest such plant today, the latest indication that solar energy is starting to achieve significant scale.
...The plants will cover 12.5 square miles of central California with solar panels, and in the middle of a sunny day will generate about 800 megawatts of power, roughly equal to the size of a large coal-burning power plant or a small nuclear plant. A megawatt is enough power to run a large Wal-Mart store.
The power will be sold to Pacific Gas & Electric, which is under a state mandate to get 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010.
...Though the California installations will generate 800 megawatts at times when the sun is shining brightly, they will operate for fewer hours of the year than a coal or nuclear plant would and so will produce a third or less as much total electricity.
OptiSolar, a company that has just begun making a type of solar panel with a thin film of active material, will install 550 megawatts in San Luis Obispo County. The SunPower Corporation, which uses silicon-crystal technology, will build about 250 megawatts at a different location in the same county.
The scale is a leap forward.
...Both are good at producing power at a time of day when the prices tend to be high, in the afternoon....

2008 July 24. Work Begins on Washington School Solar Panels. By Riya Bhattacharjee. Excerpt: Washington Elementary is set to become the first school in the Berkeley Unified School District to go solar, once construction of photovoltaic cells on its roof is completed in August. Work to replace the school's roof began at the end of June, district officials said, and solar panels are expected to go up in the next couple of weeks.
Estimated to cost $1.2 million, the HELiOS (Helios Energy Lights Our Schools) project is expected to cover 100 percent of the main building's electricity needs and is being funded by grants from the Office of Public School Construction, PG&E and district money.
...Tom Kelly of Kyoto USA, who spearheaded the proposal along with his wife Jane Kelly, said he was happy to see the project get underway.
"The Washington community is very excited about it," he said. "The installation is likely to lead to educational opportunities for the kids. The cost of electricity from utilities is skyrocketing, so this investment in solar is likely to pay off very quickly. And it's helping to reduce the amount of pollution and global warming gases-created by the burning of fossil fuels to produce the electricity the old-fashioned way."
...The bids for the photovoltaic system and the new roof, Kelly said, came in at $900,000.
Kelly said Kyoto USA was already looking at its next school. ..."We'd very much like to do the high school," he said.
...To help finance the project, the organization is building a framework for a "community offset fund" so that donors will be able to offset their greenhouse gas emissions by making a tax-deductible contribution to a local project like HELiOs.

2008 July. Home photovoltaic systems for physicists. By Thomas W. Murphy Jr, Physics Today. Excerpt: In 2007 I built a PV system to power my living room. Though reasonably well informed on the semiconductor physics of PV junctions, I felt unsuitably prepared to evaluate the practical realities of owning and operating a personal solar PV system. Because I believe physicists can play a role in our energy future that extends beyond the confines of advanced research, I want to share my experiences in the hope that others might develop home PV projects. What better way to motivate innovation in the alternative-energy sector than to get a talented pool of physicists engaged on a personal level?
Residential PV systems range from very small arrangements that generate less than 100 W to those generating more than 5 kW. They can be integrated into the local electricity grid—in which case they're called grid-tie systems—or can be standalone battery-based systems. Hybrid systems are tied to the grid but have battery backup. In the US, most states allow net metering of grid-tie systems, in which consumers pay only for electricity not produced by their own PV systems...Overproduction is seldom rewarded with a check from the electric utility, however, as is done, for example, in Germany.
By offsetting electricity bills, properly sized grid-tie systems can recover the cost of installation in as little as 8 years in states with rebate programs—though 15 years is a more typical time frame... For the sake of learning, I implemented two parallel systems. One used a 64-W triple-junction thin-film flexible panel to power the lighting. The other used a 130-W polycrystalline silicon panel to run the entertainment system...
perfectly clear day with the Sun straight overhead may deliver as much as 1000 W/m2 of solar flux across all wavelengths. A typical polycrystalline PV panel can convert about 16% of that to electrical power...
...Average energy demand is...the most important parameter in sizing the system...
For instance, two hours of TV watching per day at 100 W plus 22 hours of 8-W off-state power consumption (2 W for the inverter, 6 W for the entertainment equipment) yields about 400 Wh per day. Note that the energy used when the appliances are off is about the same as when they are on!...Such discoveries are part of the unanticipated learning that happens when one experiences PV power firsthand. They make us far more efficiency-minded, something we'll need for our future...

2008 July 15. Country, the City Version: Farms in the Sky Gain New Interest. By BINA VENKATARAMAN, NY Times. Excerpt: What if "eating local" in Shanghai or New York meant getting your fresh produce from five blocks away? And what if skyscrapers grew off the grid, as verdant, self-sustaining towers where city slickers cultivated their own food? Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, hopes to make these zucchini-in-the-sky visions a reality. Dr. Despommier's pet project is the "vertical farm," a concept he created in 1999 with graduate students in his class on medical ecology, the study of how the environment and human health interact.
... Dr. Despommier estimates that it would cost $20 million to $30 million to make a prototype of a vertical farm, but hundreds of millions to build one of the 30-story towers that he suggests could feed 50,000 people.

2008 July 4. Japan Sees a Chance to Promote Its Energy-Frugal Ways. By MARTIN FACKLER, The New York Times. Excerpt: KUMAGAYA, Japan — With its towering furnaces and clanging conveyer belts carrying crushed rock, Taiheiyo Cement’s factory looks like an Industrial Revolution relic. But it is actually a model of modern energy efficiency, harnessing its waste heat to generate much of its own electricity.
The plant is just one example of Japan’s single-minded dedication to reducing energy use, a commitment that dates back to the oil shocks of the 1970s that shook this resource-poor nation.
Now, with oil prices hitting dizzying levels and the world struggling with global warming, the country is hoping to use its conservation record to take a rare leadership role on a pressing global issue. It will showcase its efforts to export its conservation ethic — and its expensive power-saving technology — at next week’s meeting in Japan of the Group of 8 industrial leaders.
Japan is by many measures the world’s most energy-frugal developed nation. After the energy crises of the 1970s, the country forced itself to conserve with government-mandated energy-efficiency targets and steep taxes on petroleum. Energy experts also credit a national consensus on the need to consume less.
“Japan taught itself decade s ago how to compete with gasoline at $4 per gallon,” said Hisakazu Tsujimoto of the Energy Conservation Center, a government research institute that promotes energy efficiency. “It will fare better than other countries in the new era of high energy costs.”

2008 June 30. Solar Water Heaters Now Mandatory In Hawaii. Environmental News Network. Excerpt: Hawaii has become the first state to require solar water heaters in new homes. The bill was signed into law by Governor Linda Lingle, a Republican... Hawaii relies on imported fossil fuels more than any other state, with about 90 percent of its energy sources coming from foreign countries, according to state data...
State Sen. Gary Hooser, vice chairman of the Energy and Environment Committee, first introduced the measure five years ago when he said a barrel of oil cost just $40. Since then, the cost of oil has more than tripled.
"It's abundantly clear that we need to take some serious action to protect Hawaii because we're so dependent on oil," Hooser said. "I'm very pleased the governor is recognizing the importance of this bill and the huge public benefits that come out of it."...

2008 June. Utility Solar Assessment Study. Solar Catalyst Group-Coop America. Excerpt: Solar power has been expanding rapidly, growing an average of 40 percent per year since the beginning of this decade. In the past five years, global solar installations have expanded more than fourfold from approximately 600 megawatts (MW) in 2003 to nearly 3000 MW (the equivalent of three conventional power plants) in 2008.
Many industry analysts and experts believe that solar offers the promise of contributing a significant percentage of America's and the world's energy needs moving forward. How much could it reasonably contribute? Today, solar still represents a minuscule amount of U.S. energy supply-less than one tenth of one percent of total electricity generation. What would it take to dramatically increase this number to make solar a significant portion of electricity use, transforming the way U.S. utilities think about solar in the process? Our research indicates that the solar contribution could be quite considerable, realistically reaching 10 percent of total U.S. electricity generation by 2025 by deploying a combination of solar photovoltaics (PV) and concentrating solar power (CSP).
...solar offers a number of significant benefits to utilities struggling with the complex issues of today's energy landscape. These benefits include:
--Solar can offer a price hedge against volatile and increasing costs for fossil fuel resources like coal and natural gas. Once installed, solar provides stable fixed prices to utilities and users.
--Solar is becoming a cost-effective peak generation resource.
--Within a decade, solar power will be cost-competitive in most regions of the U.S. on a kilowatt-hour (Kwh) basis.
--Compared to coal, nuclear, and gas-fired power plants, solar has no fuel costs, low maintenance costs, and will provide credits, rather than costs, in a carbon-regulated world.
--Solar PV is a widely available resource, suited to most locales around the nation....

2008 May 30. As Oil Prices Soar, Restaurant Grease Thefts Rise. By SUSAN SAUL, NYTimes. Excerpt: The bandit pulled his truck to the back of a Burger King in Northern California one afternoon last month armed with a hose and a tank. After rummaging around assorted restaurant rubbish, he dunked a tube into a smelly storage bin and, the police said, vacuumed out about 300 gallons of grease. Nick Damianidis, an owner of Olympia Pizza and Pasta in Arlington, Wash., has had oil stolen. The man was caught before he could slip away. In his truck, the police found 2,500 gallons of used fryer grease, indicating that the Burger King had not been his first fast-food craving of the day.
Outside Seattle, cooking oil rustling has become such a problem that the owners of the Olympia Pizza and Pasta Restaurant in Arlington, Wash., are considering using a surveillance camera to keep watch on its 50-gallon grease barrel. Nick Damianidis, an owner, said the barrel had been hit seven or eight times since last summer by siphoners who strike in the night.
"Fryer grease has become gold," Mr. Damianidis said. "And just over a year ago, I had to pay someone to take it away."
Much to the surprise of Mr. Damianidis and many other people, processed fryer oil, which is called yellow grease, is actually not trash. The grease is traded on the booming commodities market. Its value has increased in recent months to historic highs, driven by the even higher prices of gas and ethanol, making it an ever more popular form of biodiesel to fuel cars and trucks.
In 2000, yellow grease was trading for 7.6 cents per pound. On Thursday, its price was about 33 cents a pound, or almost $2.50 a gallon. (That would make the 2,500-gallon haul in the Burger King case worth more than $6,000.)....

2008 April 30. Chevron Energy Solutions Completes First Phase of Contra Costa Solar Project. Chevron Energy Solutions and the Contra Costa Community College District (CCCCD) have completed the first phase, 2.65 megawatts of solar car ports, is the largest solar power installation ever constructed for an institution of higher learning in North America. The final phase will add 534 kilowatts this year.
...The program includes three types of improvements: a 3.2-megawatt solar power generation system comprising photovoltaic panels mounted on 34 parking canopies in six parking lots at Contra Costa College, Diablo Valley College and Los Medanos College ...high-efficiency lighting and energy management systems ... as well as high-efficiency heating, ventilation and air-conditioning equipment ...
...and high-voltage electrical system replacements ...The solar installation is expected to generate about four million kilowatt-hours of power each year, supplying up to half of CCCCD's peak electricity needs. This renewable power will offset the production of about 5.6 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions annually - equivalent to removing 629 cars from the road or planting 636 acres of trees.

2008 March. Solar Cooker Review. Excerpt: In October 2007, [Gabriele Simbriger-Williams, SCI Board Member] took part in an evaluation of the solar cooker project in Iridimi refugee camp in Chad. Iridimi has become the temporary shelter for 18,000 refugees driven out of their villages in Darfur, Sudan, by Janjaweed militias and the Sudanese government. This semi-desert region has very limited firewood resources and cannot sustain the influx of thousands of refugees and their need for household energy. Since the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) provides only about a third of the refugees' firewood needs, women and girls have to leave the camp to collect more, exposing them to attack and rape by bandits, Janjaweed and the local population that resents having to share its meager wood resources.
Something needed to be done. With UNHCR approval, Derk Rijks of the Dutch KoZon Foundation started a solar cooker demonstration project in 2005. Solar Cookers International (SCI) has provided technical and financial support since the beginning. ... CooKit solar cookers were introduced in Iridimi as part of an effort to reduce reliance on scarce firewood and lessen the ecological footprint of the camp. By minimizing the need to leave camp and collect wood, refugee women are safer.
These women now earn income by manufacturing CooKits in Iridimi and training more women to use them. Thus far, 4700 women have been trained in solar cooking and over 15,000 solar cookers have been distributed, two or more to every household depending on family size. In October 2007, the security situation was good enough that a team could visit the camp and assess the acceptance and effectiveness of the project....

2008 Feb 8. Studies Deem Biofuels a Greenhouse Threat By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL NY Times. Excerpt: Almost all biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels if the full emissions costs of producing these "green" fuels are taken into account, two studies being published Thursday have concluded. The benefits of biofuels have come under increasing attack in recent months, as scientists took a closer look at the global environmental cost of their production. These latest studies, published in the prestigious journal Science, are likely to add to the controversy.
These studies for the first time take a detailed, comprehensive look at the emissions effects of the huge amount of natural land that is being converted to cropland globally to support biofuels development. The destruction of natural ecosystems - whether rain forest in the tropics or grasslands in South America - not only releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere when they are burned and plowed, but also deprives the planet of natural sponges to absorb carbon emissions. Cropland also absorbs far less carbon than the rain forests or even scrubland that it replaces.
Together the two studies offer sweeping conclusions: It does not matter if it is rain forest or scrubland that is cleared, the greenhouse gas contribution is significant. More important, they discovered that, taken globally, the production of almost all biofuels resulted, directly or indirectly, intentionally or not, in new lands being cleared, either for food or fuel.
"When you take this into account, most of the biofuel that people are using or planning to use would probably increase greenhouse gasses substantially," said Timothy Searchinger, lead author of one of the studies and a researcher in environment and economics at Princeton
University. "Previously there's been an accounting error: land use change has been left out of prior analysis." ...The clearance of grassland releases 93 times the amount of greenhouse gas that would be saved by the fuel made annually on that land, said Joseph Fargione, lead author of the second paper, and a scientist at the Nature Conservancy. ....

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