Congress should pass a renewable electricity mandate and other incentives to encourage renewable power sources separately from climate change legislation, Iowa Gov. Chet Culver, a Democrat, said Tuesday. Culver is the chairman of the Governors’ Wind Energy Coalition, which includes the governors of 29 states. “We don’t want these things to get caught up in the broader debate and discussion that will only slow us down,” Culver said.
The coalition released a report on Tuesday that made several recommendations to Congress to develop the wind energy sector. The list includes a renewable electricity standard that requires 10 percent of power to come from renewable sources like wind, solar, and biomass by 2012 and tax breaks targeted at clean energy projects.
The report did not, however, include a recommendation for a cap on carbon dioxide to address global warming, which has been pared with the renewable production standard and tax breaks in legislation Congress has considered.
Rhode Island Gov. Donald Carcieri (R), the vice chairman of the wind energy coalition, agreed with Culver that Congress should set aside the climate debate. The focus of the report was on supporting a domestic renewable energy industry and that advocates should not get “mired down … in this broader debate” on global warming. “Right now, this is about jobs,” he said.
Environmentalists have insisted that incentives for renewable energy and other components of energy policy move together with greenhouse gas reductions. The climate piece is critical they argue not just from an environment perspective. Capping emissions is also key to the development of a clean-energy industry because it puts a price on carbon and makes non-emitting sources like wind power more cost competitive.
Culver and Carcieri warned that other countries would capture renewable manufacturing capacity if the United States does not act soon on the report’s recommendations, and that debating climate legislation could create unhelpful delays.
The governors also call for revamped electric grid through a streamlined siting process for transmission lines to carry the renewable energy from remote areas where it is often produced to the high-population “load” centers that need the power.
Legislation in Congress would give federal regulators greater control of the process. Developers now complain the process is encumbered by the local, state and federal level.
States have resisted broader authority for federal regulators in the past, and the report provides little detail about how the siting process could be accelerated other than to say there should be better coordination between the various parties.
The government should also do more to encourage the development of offshore wind energy resources, the report states.
The Hill
http://thehill.com/
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
New Vending Machines Keep Drinks Cold Without Warming Planet
There’s a new hybrid in town, except this one doesn’t drive. It’s a vending machine that chills soft drinks, and may in turn cool the planet.
The kingpin of soda, the Coca-Cola Co., is changing the face, and footprint, of the refrigeration industry by replacing its conventional fleet of vending machines with a climate-friendly model. The reason is most vending machines rely on a type of refrigerant known as hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), a chemical hodgepodge that despite its incredible power to cool the air can also be 1,430 times more harmful to the climate than global warming’s main culprit, carbon dioxide (CO2).
“We talk about fighting fire with fire,” said Bryan Jacob, director of energy and climate protection for Coke, who says CO2 is nonflammable, nontoxic, comparatively inexpensive and readily available. “In the right application, CO2 can be a solution to climate change.”
Around the time of the new millennium, academic research emerged on how HFCs affect global warming. Yet, it took the publication of the Velders Report in 2009, predicting a dramatic rise in HFC use due to steady growth in the refrigeration industry, for HFCs to join the list of other infamous greenhouse gases — CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. The report’s silver lining is its mention of natural alternatives, including CO2, ammonia, and hydrocarbons (propane and isobutene).
“The proof that natural refrigerants work is our grandparents had refrigerators charged with ammonia, propane and carbon dioxide,” says Kert Davies, director of research for Greenpeace, which has been promoting natural refrigeration technology since 1992 as an alternative to methods that harm the ozone layer and climate systems. Natural refrigerants have been successfully used abroad for decades.
“We’re working with huge companies that are all working on solid alternatives to HFCs,” says Davies, naming Coca-Cola, Unilever and Pepsi-Co. “Coke prefers compressed carbon dioxide, although they also utilize hydrocarbons.”
Like most refrigerants, CO2 works by removing heat from the air. As it evaporates it absorbs the heat, chilling the air inside the machine. The main difference between CO2 and other refrigerants is that CO2 must be used at a much higher pressure, which necessitates stronger pipes.
After Coca-cola realized that the largest part of its carbon footprint — 40 percent — came from its refrigeration equipment, it began testing HFC-free technologies and rolled out its first climate-friendly machine in 2002. Today, it has about 120,000 HFC-free units in the market, preventing 630,000 tons of CO2 equivalent over their 10-year lifetime — that’s similar to saving 86 acres of trees. The company’s goal is for all new equipment to be HFC-free by 2015.
The trend is catching on.
PepsiCo installed 35 new, HFC-free vending machines in Miami just in time for the Super Bowl. These utilize hydrocarbons — think propane and butane — refrigerants already popular in Europe. Ben & Jerry's ice cream company is launching its own version of this technology at stores in the Washington, D.C., and Boston areas. Meanwhile, General Electric is seeking approval to sell home-use refrigerators in the U.S. using a hydrocarbon refrigerant.
“We expect to continue using both technologies — CO2 and hydrocarbons,” says Bryan Jacob of Coca-Cola. “We also hope new technologies will emerge with the ultimate goal being the elimination of HFCs.”
HuffingtonPost
http://huffingtonpost.com/
Wind Turbines might actually add to warming
A new paper suggests that wind turbines, installed broadly, might actually change the climate themselves just by disrupting the normal flow of the wind:In a paper published online Feb. 22 in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, [the MIT researchers] Wang and Prinn suggest that using wind turbines to meet 10 percent of global energy demand in 2100 could cause temperatures to rise by one degree Celsius in the regions on land where the wind farms are installed, including a smaller increase in areas beyond those regions.
Their analysis indicates the opposite result for wind turbines installed in water: a drop in temperatures by one degree Celsius over those regions....
In the analysis, the wind turbines on land reduced wind speed, particularly on the downwind side of the wind farms, which reduced the strength of the turbulent motion and horizontal heat transport processes that move heat away from the Earth’s surface. This resulted in less heat being transported to the upper parts of the atmosphere, as well as to other regions farther away from the wind farms. The effect is similar to being at the beach on a windy summer day: If the wind weakened or disappeared, it would get warmer.
Alternative Energy
enn.com
Norwegian Company Develops World’s Largest Wind Turbine
The proposed rotor diameter of this machine is 475 feet. Obviously, these gargantuan dimensions make it difficult to imagine many places able to accommodate such a device. Fortunately, the floating design makes the turbine suitable for open ocean use.
In addition to being the world’s largest wind turbine, the proposed machine (which is to be built by the Norwegian company Sway), will also be the most powerful. A single floating turbine will be able to generate 10-megawatts to power more than 2,000 homes. These figures make this proposed new design at least three times more powerful than the existing wind turbines in use today.
The floating design gives this generator a huge advantage over other wind-power generators because the device can be placed in deeper water. The machine’s tower is a floating pole filled with ballast beneath the ocean’s surface. This gives the world’s largest wind turbine a low center of gravity, which prevents tipping. The generator is anchored to the sea floor with a single pipe and a suction anchor. This design allows the turbine to tilt 5-8 degrees as well as rotate freely to generate power from any wind direction.
Sway plans on installing the device in 2011. The prototype of this machine will cost an estimated $67.5 million dollars. Sway plans on testing the design on land first in Oeygarden, Southwestern Norway. If the design is successful, Sway will continue testing seafaring prototypes.
Currently, Norway is one of the world’s top oil and gas producers. Despite this fact, Norway generates most of its own power from hydroelectric plants. Norway’s dedication to designing and building the world’s largest wind turbine showcases the countries commitment to alternative energy, and serves to further illustrate how important this cause actually is. If the world’s largest wind turbine is a success, it will mark a major stride in humanity’s quest to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels.
Wind Energy News
Monday, March 15, 2010
Nevada Wind Turbine Factory to Create 1,000 Jobs, Backers Say
A consortium of Chinese and American renewable energy firms said last week that they had chosen Nevada as the location of a 320,000-square-foot wind turbine manufacturing and assembly plant. The turbine plant, whose precise site has yet to be announced, will create an estimated 1,000 long-term manufacturing jobs in the state and is expected to be up and running by 2011.
Two companies leading the development of the Nevada facility, A-Power Energy Generation Systems, a Chinese renewable energy technology manufacturer, and the U.S. Renewable Energy Group, a private equity firm, are also key players in a controversial $1.5 billion, 600-megawatt wind farm project under way in West Texas.
The companies subsequently said that at least 70 percent of the turbine components for the Texas wind farm would be manufactured in the United States. Now it appears some turbines for the Texas project may come from the Nevada facility.
Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, along with three other Democratic senators, recently introduced legislation that would apply a so-called “buy American” standard to all renewable energy projects that seek stimulus funds, requiring them to rely on goods manufactured in the United States.
Currently, this provision applies only to government-sponsored projects. As a result, roughly three-quarters of the stimulus’s $1.9 billion in wind-energy grants distributed so far have gone to foreign-owned companies, according to an analysis by the Investigative Reporting Workshop, a nonprofit journalism program affiliated with American University.
Matt Rogers, a senior adviser to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, confirmed that this analysis was likely accurate, but said that although the stimulus funds may have gone to foreign companies, the funds created 17,000 United States jobs and supported investments in the United States worth roughly $10 billion.
The Nevada project does not appear to be seeking stimulus funds, with its backers stating that it will be built using private financing.
A spokesman for A-Power and the U.S. Renewable Energy Group also said the companies had not yet received — or even applied for — any stimulus funds for the West Texas wind farm project.
New York Times
http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com
Europe's Biggest Solar Plant Set to Open in Italy
MILAN (AFP) - Europe's most powerful solar power plant is set to start operations in Italy later this year, the US company building the installation on an area as large as 120 football pitches said on Thursday.
The plant in Rovigo near Venice in northeast Italy will take up 850,000 square metres (9.15 million square feet) and produce 72 megawatts, SunEdison said in a statement announcing the start of construction.
The current biggest plant in Europe, located in Spain, produces 60 megawatts and the second biggest, in Germany, 50 megawatts, SunEdison said.
"The photovoltaic park in Rovigo province is a milestone in the development and establishment of solar energy in Italy," SunEdison's general manager for Italy, Liborio Francesco Nanni, said in a statement.
The total investment will be between 200 million and 250 million euros (273 million and 342 million dollars), the company said.
Energy production will begin in the second half of 2010 and the plant will be fully operational by the end of the year, said SunEdison, which is working on the project in conjunction with Spanish banking giant Santander.
During its first year of operations, the plant will cover the electricity needs of 17,000 households and will prevent the emission of 41,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
SunEdison, a subsidiary of US company MEMC Electronic Materials, is the top solar power company in the United States and the third biggest in the world. Italy is second to Germany for solar power production in Europe.
HuffingtonPost
http://huffingtonpost.com/
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