Renewable Energy Hub

It’s a one-two green punch for the trucking industry: today the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey announced a program with the U.S. EPA to help get rid of older trucks with dirty emissions, and just yesterday the company New Energy Technologies announced another step forward for device that can harvest sustainable kinetic energy from trucks as they, well, keep truckin’ on.

If you ever grew up on an urban truck route (which I did), the idea of green trucks might seem like an oxymoron but hey if the trucking industry can get their sustainability act together then by golly you betcha just about any major commercial sector can (except for maybe this one).

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Here’s one electricity storage technology that’s been around for over 20 years, under the radar, but might be due for a resurgence in interest with the addition of more wind power to the grid.  Wind tends to blow at night when we don’t need it.

Steffes Electric Thermal Storage makes devices that store excess off-peak renewable electricity very simply, as heat, by heating up electric coils surrounded by ceramic bricks in a sealed container. The ceramic bricks are thermal sinks. They soak up the heat slowly, and when triggered to, can release that heat, just as slowly, providing low-cost heating.

Excess electricity generated can be stored at any time, like at night from excess wind power, and then released at any time it’s needed; on demand, in the form of heat.

Because it is useful for businesses and homeowners, it is distributed energy storage.

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Given the state of the economy you’d think they’d be pinching every penny but it appears that the State of Arizona has money to burn – perhaps literally.  Last week the House voted in favor of a bill that would use old tires to fill abandoned mines.  The bill’s supporters cite the growing problem of used tire dumps, but apparently they don’t keep up with the latest business news.  Magnum D’Or and InfoSpi are just two of the rapidly growing number of companies that see the potential for recycling those tire dumps into real money – and creating more green jobs to boot.

Squandering an opportunity to make money is bad enough, but the Arizona bill does something much worse.  Tires burn, right?  Doesn’t everybody know that?   Tire fires are hard enough to put out when they’re in open dumps.  The idea of stuffing millions of tires into abandoned mines sounds a little less than common sensical… that is, if you know anything about underground mine fires…

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At the Wall Street Journal’s recent ECO:nomics conference, the “only CEO-level event focused on the relationship between the environment and the bottom line,” the CEOs of some major energy companies expressed their impatience at the US’ slow and unclear movement to take action on climate change and clean energy.

Royal Dutch Shell chief executive Peter Voser said that the industry needs “certainty on the carbon price, certainty on legislation.” Shell is a member of the US Climate Action Partnership.

American Electric Power chairman Michael Morris, regarding climate change and clean energy legislation, said, “We need this done. America needs to lead the world [in clean technologies].”

And FPL Group chief executive Lew Hay reiterated, “We need some certainty about the economics.”

These top CEOs are getting impatient, and there is no question why. The bottom line is, if the US is going to lead the global economy (or even be a significant player in it), it needs to get cracking on clean energy legislation.

In a similar manner, the question the Center for American Progress (CAP) recently decided to pose is this: “Is the US already out of the clean energy race?”. They have just released a report on this topic.

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A Florida Power and Light hybrid of solar and gas at the Martin Next Generation Solar Energy Center in Florida could provide a road map for helping shepherd utility-scale solar past regulatory roadblocks. Perhaps by combining solar with fossil energy plants (that are always somehow on the fast-track ) we can finally ease utility-scale solar into the marketplace.

At the hybrid gas/solar plant in Martin, a relatively modest 70 MW heliostat solar thermal power plant – but which is nevertheless second in size only to its much larger US heliostat solar thermal prototype that totals 354 MW – SEGS, that has operated since the ’80’s in California’s Mojave – is to be grafted onto an existing natural gas plant; one that is itself the largest in the US.

The capacity of the natural gas plant has been gradually built up over the years. It comprises three 800 MW steam-generating units, two 450 MW combined-cycle units and two 160 MW combustion turbine peaking units, and now totals 3,800 MW.

However, the solar portion is large enough so that because of the size of each source, this pilot project will definitively answer the question: “But is this doable at full-scale?” Small solar projects already sometimes use a small gas turbine for cloudy days backup, but this is a first at this scale.

Larger  similar heliostat-based solar thermal projects Brightsource (440 MW) Solar Reserve (150 MW) and Abengoa (250 MW) are currently bogged down in the regulatory review pipeline in California. The difference?  Theirs are not married to natural gas plants.

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It should come as no great surprise that walking with a prosthetic limb is difficult. According to a newly published paper on prosthesis, walking with a prosthetic foot requires 23 percent more energy than walking naturally. This is because a natural gait returns and recycles energy in an efficient way, but a prosthetic limb [...]
Posted in: Human Power, Inventions

A team of researchers at Yale University has developed a new kind of magnetic, lead free solder that could be used to manufacture electronics more cheaply and efficiently.  That would be a big boost for efforts to manage the growing problem of electronic waste disposal and recycling, because conventional solder is made from lead, a known health hazard.

Lead is a heavy metal that was commonly used in house paint and gasoline in the U.S.  Those uses were banned after the discovery that lead is a potent neurotoxin, but lead solder continues to be permitted in U.S. manufacturing.  That creates a huge problem in the electronic waste stream, and it also impedes U.S. companies from entering global markets where anti-lead regulations are growing.

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On Friday, Vice President Joe Biden and U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced $600 million in awards for 191 transit projects across the nation. The transit projects are aimed at transforming the nation’s infrastructure and creating thousands of jobs.

With this announcement, the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) met its ambitious deadline of awarding 100% of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funding for transit by March 5, 2010.

In total, since the ARRA was announced by Obama in February, 2009, the FTA has awarded 881 grants totaling $7.5 billion.

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…And this little piggy is facing an $11 million fine for inflicting “relentless and extreme” clouds of pig manure odor upon several families near a gigantic factory farm in Berlin, Missouri.  The award, which was announced on March 5, was decided by a jury against industrial hog producer Premium Standard Farms, Inc.  The company processes about 200,000 hogs per year, generating 83 million gallons of manure and liquid waste yearly for the past eleven years.  That stuff all goes into lake-sized lagoons and ends up spread over the company’s 4,300 acre compound, with predictable results.

If only Premium Standard had invested in a few biogas digesters! Digesters convert raw manure into reusable methane gas and fertilizer.  The dairy industry is starting to convert to sustainable digester-based manure management through programs like Vermont’s Cow Power, and the U.S. EPA is encouraging the entire agricultural sector to make the switch through its  AgSTAR biogas program.  So what was holding Premium back?

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Fresh on the heels of IBM’s breakthrough in low cost solar, Magnolia Solar Corporation has announced that its low cost thin film technology maybe coming soon to a solar array near you.  The company has just won a $1 million Department of Energy grant for advancing the technology in partnership with the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at the University at Albany in New York.

Like IBM, Magnolia Solar is focused on delivering genuinely clean (as opposed to “clean coal” clean), high efficiency solar energy that can compete on the market with fossil fuels, while helping to shift photovoltaic technology away from a reliance on heavy metals.

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