SOLAR TODAY Blog

According to the San Jose Mercury News, Pacific Gas & Electric has signed a deal to buy 106.8 megawatts of power from San Joaquin Solar, a subsidiary of Martifer Renewables, a Portuguese company. Martifer plans to build a concentrating solar plant near Coalinga, and will use a quarter-million tons of agricultural waste annually as a biomass fuel to extend power generation beyond sunset.

The biomass hybrid approach may be the first of its kind. Previously, hybrid CSP plants have burned natural gas to keep the electricity flowing at night. Fresno County is said to produce 2 million tons of agricultural waste annually — cattle manure, grass clippings and the non-edible stalks and hulls from grain crops.

The plant is scheduled to produce power in 2011.

The June issue of Fast Company runs an interview with T. Boone Pickens, the Texas oil tycoon who announced last month a plan to build 4,000 megawatts of wind turbines in West Texas, complete with his own transmission lines.

Pickens is out outspoken about peak oil, imported oil, global warming, gas taxes, production tax credits and ethanol, among other subjects. He wants the renewable energy tax credit renewed. He predicts that gasoline will sell for $6 to $8 per gallon within five years and advocates a gas tax to suppress demand. He thinks generous support for domestic ethanol is better than sending $700 billion a year out of the country for imported oil. He thinks we can supply nearly all of our incremental need for electricity through development of wind power.

And over the weekend he told Living on Earth “I think solar will be next, and I hope I’m still around to be in the solar deal.”

The Bureau of Land Management says it’s received 130 applications to build solar, wind and geothermal power projects in Southern California deserts, and has asked for a moratorium on new applications.

According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, the pace of applications has accelerated during the past year. Interest is high in building power plants near existing transmission lines.

Groups as disparate as the Sierra Club and off-road trucking clubs have voiced opposition to disturbing desert landscapes with new construction. The Sierra Club opposes construction of new transmission lines, and favors distributed generation on urban rooftops.

Could a fault line open between advocates of non-polluting energy and habitat preservationists? Watch this space.

The U.S. Department of Energy on Monday reported that the nation could get 300,000 megawatts — 20%  of its electricity — from wind turbines by 2030, using existing technology. Wind currently supplies about 1% of U.S. power.

According to the National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colo., putting up 75,000 new wind turbines and the transmission lines to support them would:

• Reduce carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation by 25 percent in 2030.
• Reduce natural gas use by 11%;
• Reduce water consumption associated with electricity generation by 4 trillion gallons by 2030;
• Increase annual revenues to local communities to more than $1.5 billion by 2030; and
• Support roughly 500,000 jobs in the U.S., with an average of more than 150,000 workers directly employed by the wind industry.

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San Diego, May 6: Wind and solar are now mature, cost-effective technologies that can compete effectively with traditional utility-scale generation – even without subsidies.

That was the consensus among speakers at this morning’s ASES plenary session on renewable energy technologies. Some key points:

Photovoltaics: Jigar Shah, chief strategy officer at SunEdison

• Photovoltaic installations have been growing 41% per year since 2001. It’s now a $6 billion industry, equal to the wind turbine industry.
• Based on the rate of growth of renewable technologies, an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by electric utilities is in fact achievable. It will require the creation of 48 gigawatts of new carbon-neutral generating capacity each year. This can be done over 10 years with a combination of new wind, solar, geothermal and biomass capacity, along with energy efficiency improvements.
• Distributed generation is faster to install than utility-scale generating plants, and doesn’t require the slow, expensive creation of new transmission lines. It’s therefore less expensive than central power generation.

Concentrating Solar Thermal: Chuck Kutscher, National Renewable Energy Lab

• At 14 cents per kilowatt hour, CSP now competes successfully with natural gas as intermediate generation, and utilities like it as a hedge against spiking gas prices.
• The U.S. resource for new CSP is about 300 times richer than new hydroelectric power, or any other conventional resource. If 2% of Colorado’s San Luis Valley were developed for CSP, it would supply twice the state’s peak load and could export power to other states.
• A high-voltage transmission line from the U.S. Southwest could supply the Eastern states at their peak evening-hour loads.

Wind: Ed DeMeo, president of Renewable Energy Consulting Services, Inc.

• It’s feasible that we could get 20% of our electricity from wind by 2030.
• The price of wind power has dropped to less than 6 cents per kilowatt hour, easily competitive with “conventional” utility generation.
• Integration costs are now less than 10% of wholesale energy costs.
• Unlike thermoelectric plants, wind requires no cooling water. Widespread adoption of wind could reduce utility water use by 17%, while avoiding the construction of 80 gigawatts of new coal plants.

Transmission: Craig Cornelius, principal at Hudson Clean Energy Partners

• More transmission capacity is needed to bring renewable electricity to growing markets. The barriers are chiefly political and regulatory.
• It takes seven to 10 years to plan, permit and build a new power line because the wheels of government grind very slowly and often encounter local opposition.
• It’s possible to reduce utility-generated greenhouse gases to the 1950 level within a realistic time frame.

By Seth Masia
SOLAR TODAY

An Earth Day breakthrough slipped past us: Rock Port, Mo. threw a “green switch” and became the first municipality in the U.S. powered entirely by wind turbines.

Can’t find Rock Port on the map? It’s an agricultural crossroads town of 1300 independent-minded souls, about 75 miles south of Omaha and a few miles east of the Missouri River.

Over the past year, a crew of 500 workers put up four 1.2 mW Suzlon wind turbines, on 250-foot towers, generating more electricity than the town can use. The municipal utility district therefore sells the excess to Missouri Joint Municipal Utitlities, a consortium of 31 cities. The towers sit on the crest of Loess Hills, municipal land just west of town.

The project was funded through Wind Capital Group of St. Louis, which has been building wind farms in Missouri since 2004. The company now has four farms complete or under construction in the state, totalling about 160 mW capacity, with plans in place to build 1400 mW across ten states.

It’s been fashionable for a couple of years for medium-sized corporations to claim they’re powered entirely by wind (or at least by renewable energy credits). SOLAR TODAY recently reported on the first school district to run entirely on wind. We ought to begin tracking firsts of steadily increasing size and importance: The first university campus run entirely on renewable energy? The first public transport system? The first county? The first investor-owned utility? The first island nation? Send us your firsts!

NEW YORK, April 21 (from EPRI) – Energy efficiency improvements in the U.S. electric power sector could reduce the need for new electric generation by an additional 7 to 11 percent more than currently projected over the next two decades if key barriers can be addressed, according to a preliminary analysis of potential energy savings released today.

The draft findings were presented by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) during an Edison Foundation conference.

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By Seth Masia
SOLAR TODAY

On March 14, NPR’s Science Friday did an hour on concentrating solar power, with Mark Mehos (NREL), Fred Morse (Abengoa) and David Mills (Ausra). A listener called in with a question: What’s the effect of excess heat bounced back from the mirrors into the atmosphere?

The answer is that there’s none. The solar array creates no new heat — it simply intercepts some of the sun’s heat and converts it to other forms.

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