T. Boone Pickens in putting his money where his mouth is
By MB-BigB | May 15, 2008
We told you last month about how T. Boone Pickens, the founder of Mesa Petroleum was talking about building the world’s biggest wind farm. Some great quotes - ‘”You need a giant plan for America. Not the pissant 83 megawatt [windfarm] deals being stamped all over the country. There needs to be a huge plan from someone with leadership. It’s going to take years to do, but it has to start now.” Only then, he explains, can the US stop what he regards as the madness of a flood of money flowing out of America to the oil producers of the Middle East. “That money is going God knows where - a few friends, a lot of enemies. We’ve got to stop it.”‘
Today, Pickens announced that Mesa Power, Pickens’ new energy company, has placed an order with General Electric for 667 wind turbines, his first step in what will be a 4 gigawatt wind farm. The 667 turbines cost about $2 billion and will produce about 1,000 megawatts of power, which is enough energy to power about 300,000 houses. GE expects to start delivering the initial order of 667 wind turbines to the Mesa Energy site in the Texas Panhandle beginning in 2010 and continuing into 2011. Pickens plans to have the entire 4 gigawatt farm completed by 2014.
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Project Better Place shows off electric car bound for Isreal
By MB-BigB | May 12, 2008
The joint venture between the Silicon Valley startup Project Better Place and Renault-Nissan, showed off its prototype all electric Renault sedan in Tel Aviv on Saturday. The project, which has the endorsement of Isreal’s government, hopes to have Isreal become the first country in the world to have large numbers of electric cars. Kickoff is planned for 2010.
The project has a business model similar to cell phones - car owners will pay a monthly subscription fee for the batteries, and will be able to recharge their batteries either at home or the office or at recharging grid stations scheduled to be built across Isreal beginning in 2009.
While the car currently has a limited range, the project backers say that it is ideally suited to a smaller country like Isreal - daily commutes and distances between most places in Isreal make the car’s range not an issue. For longer drives, owners will be able to swap out the battery at about 150 swap stations that will be built around the country. The swap will take about the same time as it takes to fill up your gas tank. Otherwise, car owners will just be able to charge their batteries at home, at the office, or at charging stations.
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Slowing down the internet saves energy?
By MB-BigB | May 7, 2008
According to NewScientistTech, it does. Actually, what scientists at the University of California and Intel Research Labs are finding is that by delaying data flow into a network for just a few milliseconds, data centers can achieve energy savings of up to 50%.
This small delay is enough to smooth out bursts and lulls in the overall data flow, which allows the network hardware to run at an overall slower speed. Another technique allows data to be grouped into fewer and larger bursts, which would let the hardware go into sleep mode in the short time between chunks of data. You pick your technique depending on the size of the network and the usage. During times of less traffic (nights and weekends, for example), you could use the sleep technique, while during periods of heavy traffic, you would switch to the smoothing technique. Simulations are showing between 40 to 80% savings of the energy used by the network’s hardware with these techniques.
Microsoft is also getting into the act. Researchers at Redmond are testing something called load skewing, where new connections are sent to servers that are already active and have other connections and are busy. This allows the low load servers to go into sleep mode. Of course if the load on the busy servers starts to increase, then the idle servers will be pressed back into duty. In a 45 day real world test on Microsoft’s chat system, they cut energy use by about 30%, “without any perceived effect in user experience.”
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Will the Volt go all electric?
By MB-BigB | May 6, 2008
PetroZero.org bring us this intriguing interview with Bob Lutz, VP of Product Development at GM. While answering a question as to whether the GM E-flex system could operate without batteries, Mr. Lutz turned the question around and talked about the possibility of GM doing a “Volt that’s cheaper, without engine and all the plumbing, and have a pure electric with more range.” In other words, in order to meet a California mandate for zero-emissions cars, GM was considering making a 100% all electric Volt.
Read the full article here.
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Wind farms sprout in western New York
By MB-BigB | May 4, 2008
Wyoming County in western New York has undergone quite a boom in wind turbine installation, as the county that has 43,000 people and 46,000 dairy cows is home to 67 turbines generating 100 megawatts of electricity, all of which is being fed into the national power grid. Noble Environmental Power, the company behind the turbines, plans to build 84 more turbines this year. All told, it represents a $450 million investment for the company.
There appears to be quite a wind power boom in western New York, because, as Sherry Grugel, Noble’s western New York community outreach associate, say, Wyoming has “really, really great wind - probably the best overall in New York state.”
Noble looks for areas that have low population density and great wind - Wyoming County fits the bill.
Noble has signed easement rights agreements with many of the farmers in the county. Theese agreements allow Nobel to build turbines and access roads in exchange for payments of about $7,000 a year per turbine. In addition, payments that Noble has made to the town of Eagle have allowed Eagle to eliminate some of its taxes, which seems to have lead to a small construction boom for the town.
Other companies that have projects planned in the western New York area include First Wind, Airtricity Inc. of Ireland, and Tonawanda Creek Wind LLC.
‘Cattle rancher Anthony George has one Noble wind turbine on his 75-acre farm in Eagle. The turbine sits about 1,500 feet from his home, and the noise is minor, George said.
“Today I can’t hear it at all,” he said, then added, “I don’t know if I’d want one sitting 1,000 feet from the house.”
But as they graze in the tower’s shadow on warm days, George said, “The cattle actually seem to like it.” ‘
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Philly Inquirer - info on the Chevy Volt
By MB-BigB | May 4, 2008
The Philadelphia Inquirer has a nice article on the 2010 targeted Chevy Volt - the electric car being designed by General Motors. The reporter talks with Ed Welburn, the head of the GM design team (and who grew up in the Philadelphia area) about the latest developments. The team has been working hard to reduce the drag coefficient, which will help to extend the range of the batteries. The latest changes have added six miles to the Volt’s battery only highway range.
While I don’t think there’s been much word at all about pricing, the article points out that the Volt is expected to be “priced in a middle-class ballpark.”
“It’s a Chevy, so it has to be affordable,” GM spokesman Mike Albano said.
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Green Giants: The World’s Biggest Clean-Energy Projects
By MB-BigB | April 30, 2008
A pretty good synopsis of some of the world’s largest clean-energy projects is on tap at Forbes.com. From Bahrain’s new building-integrated wind turbine skyscraper to the London Array project that will be the world’s largest offshore wind form, there’s a bunch of large scale projects on the horizon. Forbes has some nice pictures of these clean-energy projects too!
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SUNRGI says: Affordable solar power possible in a year
By MB-BigB | April 29, 2008
USA Today reports that SUNRGI, a Silicon Valley start-up with big plans, says that they have developed technology that will deliver solar power in about one year at prices competitive with coal-produced electricity. If they can pull it off, it would dramatically cut the cost of solar electricity, and put SUNRGI far ahead of other solar cell producers.
SUNRGI uses a ’concentrated photovoltaic’ system that uses lenses to magnify the sun’s rays - as much as 2,000 times. SUNRGI expects to start producing the solar panels by mid-2009, and they’re targeting a price that will mean it’ll cost about 7 cents a kilowatt hour - and that price includes installation. “We’re bringing the cost of solar electricity down to be competitive with” fossil fuels, says Bob Block, a co-founder of SUNRGI.
While other companies use concentrated photovoltaics in their systems, SUNRGI says that their product is different. While others magnify the sun about 500 times, SUNRGI says that their lenses can magnify the sun 2,000 times because their product has the ability to cool the germanium-based semiconductors from 3,300 degrees to close to ambient temperatures. When concentrating solar cells get too hot, they can melt - an issue that SUNRGI says that it has solved. SUNRGI also says that they have a very efficient semiconductor that converts 37% of the sunlight to electricity, which is more than double the industry’s average.Now SUNRGI is not yet mass producing their modules, so much remains to be seen. As Stow Walker of Cambridge Energy Research Associates says, “Moving from the lab to the market in two years is typically not what happens.” So we’ll see if SUNRGI’s claims will come true or if this is another example of another company making grandiose claims that never seem to come true.
One thing that’s not part of the article, but let’s hope that SUNRGI and other companies are considering -all the heat that’s being generated could be used to heat water - so you could get a twofer with these cells - electricity and solar generated hot water.
You can check out SUNRGI’s web site here
Update 5/7/08 - MIT Technology Review has some more information about Sunrgi, their process, and the people behind the company. Two things of note - the company is working on capturing the waste heat from the cells and converting that to useful energy. According to Sunrgi’s electronic’s engineer Thomas Forrester, the company currently has some patents pending on designs to use the waste heat and converting that to useful energy. Also, most of the people behind the company have expertise in manufacturing. Forrester says, “The question people ask us is, why hasn’t any other solar company done this? Well, we’re taking a different approach that directly applies principles from chip manufacturing. That’s one of the keys to our technology.”
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New source for Biofuels discovered by researchers from the university of Texas at Austin
By MB-BigB | April 25, 2008
Researchers at the University of Texas have created a microbe that produces cellulose that can be turned into ethanol and biofuel. If production can be scaled up, the microbes can produce a large portion of the country’s transportation fuel. The cyanobacteia also secretes glucose and sucrose along with cellulose. Glucose and sucrose can be used to produce ethanol. “The cyanobacterium is potentially a very inexpensive source for sugars to use for ethanol and designer fuels,” says Dr. David Nobles Jr., a research associate in the Section of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology.
The cyanobacteria developed by Professor R. Malcom Brown Jr. and Dr. Noble use sunlight as an energy source, and the glucose, cellulose and sucrose can be continually harvested without hurting or destroying the bacteria, which means that it truly is renewable.
Dr. Nobles made the new cyanobacteria by inserting a set of cellulose-making genes from a non-photosynthetic “vinegar” bacterium, Acetobacter xylinum. The new bacteria creates a relatively pure gel form of cellulose that can be easily broken down into glocose because it doesn’t have any lignins in it, unlike cellulose from plants.
Of course there’s alot of work ahead with this. While they’ve been able to achieve a 17 fold increase in productivity in their lab using photobioreactors, but those types of efficiencies will need to be achieved in the field and on a much larger scale.
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New solar carport goes online at East LA College
By MB-BigB | April 23, 2008
East Los Angeles College has just turned on a 1.2 megawatt solar farm spread over a 3-acre 530 spot parking log in Monerry Park, California. The farm consists of 5,952 solar panels - its expected to provide up to 45% of the college’s electricity. Currently, the solar farm is performing even better than expected, says Raoul L. Wood, the Chevron Energy Solutions project manager, since the California skies have been clear and sunny even more than usual lately. Chevron Energy Solutions designed the farm. An additional benefit is that students can now park their cars in the shade.
This project is part of a plan from the Los Angeles Community College District to take the entire nine colleges in the District off the grid by getting all of their energy from alternative sources. Los Angeles voters approved more than $2.2 billion in bonds to fund the program.
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