Archive for the 'Green Energy' Category

From Dirty to Green–and the Sooner, the Better

by Editors @ Saturday, January 28th, 2012. Tags: , ,
Filed under Environment, Green Energy, Green Industry, Technology, militarism

The Essentials for the Necessary

Transition to a Renewable Energy Economy

By Jon Rynn
SolidarityEconomy.net via AlterNet.org

Jan 28, 2012 - Fossil fuels are going to disappear, whether we like it or not. Petroleum, natural gas, and coal are becoming scarcer, harder to extract and a greater danger to the global climate.

If we proceed with business-as-usual, energy companies will take advantage of increasing scarcity to dominate the world economy by vacuuming up more money from the 99%. They will be able to ally with military and financial institutions to construct an energy-military-financial complex that could eventually reduce most of the rest of us to a form of debt peonage.

On the other hand, if we could possibly elect a government that does what governments do best – build infrastructure – we can avoid a world of global warming and economic collapse by building enough wind farms, solar panels, and geothermal systems to power our economy and ignite a sustainable, broad-based period of economic growth. Of course, this will require a sea-change in the direction of the political system, along the lines of the Occupy movement, but there is too much at stake to throw up our hands in despair.

The unfolding energy drama presents progressives with several dilemmas. Some are suspicious that oil scarcity can be used as a ruse by the oil companies and speculators to spike prices. Roger Altman recently argued that a larger supply of fossil fuels will lead to less international tension. More generally, progressives sometimes fear that advocating for less oil use will be seen by the public as an attack on the American Dream of a car in every garage and a single family home for every family.

But in addition to problems of scarcity and extraction, fossil fuels are bringing us towards extremely dangerous climate change. We need to have some answers or else the Right will simply keep up with the chant of “Drill baby drill.” It's time to counter with, “Build, build, build!"

Dirty fuels Create an Unsustainable economy

The question of the future of the supply of fossil fuels is not an easy one to answer. Oil producing nations, for instance, are not at all transparent about their supplies. Technologies constantly change, and so do environmental hazards. However, if we look at the current state of fossil fuel industries, it should be clear that we are in trouble.

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City Solar: Steal This Idea for Your Town

by Editors @ Tuesday, January 17th, 2012. Tags:
Filed under Energy, Green Energy, Green Industry

Big New Solar Array For Green-Driven Raleigh

By Kristy Hessman
SolidarityEconomy.net via EarthTechling.com

Although North Carolina is the 10th most populous state in the U.S., it it ranks just 22nd in installed photovoltaic (PV) solar capacity, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. But don’t blame the city of Raleigh for that. Raleigh recently turned on a 1.3-megawatt (MW) solar photovoltaic array. It’s said to be the largest utility-scale solar power project on government property in the state.

The solar array sits on a 10-acre site and is a coordinated effort between the city of Raleigh, Progress Energy Carolinas, Southern Energy Management and NxGen Power. The solar PV array is expected to generate an estimated 1.7 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per year. The system is also expected to decrease overall carbon dioxide emissions by more than 1,300 tons annually, the same amount of emissions from the use of about 140,000 gallons of gasoline, according to Southern Energy Management.

Sustainability efforts are taking place throughout the city of Raleigh, and not just in the solar sector. The city has identified a number of areas in which it can incorporate sustainable measures to provide a better place to live for future generations. Those initiatives include preparing for a variety of green transportation options like participating in Project Get Ready. The program prepares for the availability of electric plug-in and hybrid vehicles.

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High Design: Oceans of Renewable Energy

by Editors @ Wednesday, December 7th, 2011. Filed under Green Energy, Green Industry

New Wave of Ocean Energy to be

Trialed off the Coast of Australia

(Click Drawing to see how it works)

By Ben Coxworth
SolidarityEconomy.net via Gizmag.com

Dec 5, 2011 - Anyone who has ever been scuba diving in a bull kelp forest will tell you - the stuff does not stand still. The marine aquatic plant consists of a long skinny-but-tough stem (or stipe) that is anchored to the sea floor and topped with a hollow float, from which a number of "leaves" (or blades) extend to the surface.

The result is a seaweed that extends vertically up through the water column, continuously swaying back and forth with the surging waves.

The researchers at Australia's BioPower Systems evidently looked at that kelp, and thought, "what if we could use that swaying action to generate power?" The result was their envisioned bioWAVE system, which could soon become a reality, thanks to a just-announced AUD$5 million (US$5.1 million) grant from the Victorian Minister for Energy and Resources.

At the base of each bioWAVE system would be a triangular foundation, keeping it anchored to the sea floor. Extending up from the middle of that foundation would be a central column, topped with multiple blades - these would actually be more like a combination of the kelp's blades and floats, as they would be cylindrical, buoyant structures that just reach to the surface. The column would join the foundation via a hinged pivot, allowing it to bend or swivel in any direction.

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New Breakthough Coming in Wind Energy

by Editors @ Wednesday, December 7th, 2011. Filed under Energy, Green Energy, Green Industry, High Road Economics

Higher Altitude ‘Tethered Wing’ Doubles Output

PBS Report on Wind Energy Innovation

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The ‘Red Plot’ in a Green Trojan Horse

by Editors @ Saturday, November 26th, 2011. Tags: , ,
Filed under Climate, Economic Democracy, Energy, Green Energy, Green Industry, Socialism

Capitalism vs. the Climate

By Naomi Klein
SolidarityEconomy.net via The Nation, Nov 9, 2011

 

There is a question from a gentleman in the fourth row.

He introduces himself as Richard Rothschild. He tells the crowd that he ran for county commissioner in Maryland’s Carroll County because he had come to the conclusion that policies to combat global warming were actually “an attack on middle-class American capitalism.” His question for the panelists, gathered in a Washington, DC, Marriott Hotel in late June, is this: “To what extent is this entire movement simply a green Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine?”

Here at the Heartland Institute’s Sixth International Conference on Climate Change, the premier gathering for those dedicated to denying the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet, this qualifies as a rhetorical question. Like asking a meeting of German central bankers if Greeks are untrustworthy. Still, the panelists aren’t going to pass up an opportunity to tell the questioner just how right he is.

Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who specializes in harassing climate scientists with nuisance lawsuits and Freedom of Information fishing expeditions, angles the table mic over to his mouth. “You can believe this is about the climate,” he says darkly, “and many people do, but it’s not a reasonable belief.” Horner, whose prematurely silver hair makes him look like a right-wing Anderson Cooper, likes to invoke Saul Alinsky: “The issue isn’t the issue.” The issue, apparently, is that “no free society would do to itself what this agenda requires…. The first step to that is to remove these nagging freedoms that keep getting in the way.”

Claiming that climate change is a plot to steal American freedom is rather tame by Heartland standards. Over the course of this two-day conference, I will learn that Obama’s campaign promise to support locally owned biofuels refineries was really about “green communitarianism,” akin to the “Maoist” scheme to put “a pig iron furnace in everybody’s backyard” (the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels). That climate change is “a stalking horse for National Socialism” (former Republican senator and retired astronaut Harrison Schmitt). And that environmentalists are like Aztec priests, sacrificing countless people to appease the gods and change the weather (Marc Morano, editor of the denialists’ go-to website, ClimateDepot.com).

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Learning from China Is the Better Path

by Editors @ Wednesday, November 9th, 2011. Tags: , ,
Filed under China, Energy, Green Energy, Green Industry, Technology

Solar: Smart Policies, not Trade War

By Adam Browning and Jigar Shah
SolidarityEconomy.net via Politico.com

Nov 8, 2011 - The German company SolarWorld recently filed a trade complaint against China. The claim: China’s government has unfairly supported its domestic solar industry, and the U.S. solar industry can’t compete.

If there’s wrongdoing afoot, it should be addressed. But it is important to remember the big picture—the solar industry exists in a globalized market, and solar’s market growth depends on continuing to bring down costs. A trade war with China could close off America’s $1.9 billion net solar exports, raise prices for local solar markets (reducing U.S. solar demand) and hurt consumers and the more than 5,000 U.S. companies that support solar installation.

Countries around the world have cumulatively invested tens of billions of dollars in solar energy over the last five years — a tremendous increase over the previous decade. That’s true of China — just as it’s true of Spain, Taiwan, Malaysia, India, Germany, Italy, Japan and the U.S. This investment has paid off in spades — global manufacturing capacity has soared. In the United States, solar is the fastest growing energy source.

It’s true that the U.S. share of solar investment lags behind China’s. Sadly, Uncle Sam’s investment in solar also falls far short of its support for fossil energy resources — which have a century-long history of continuing federal support. U.S. government subsidies for nuclear, oil, coal, gas and fossil fuels add up over $380 billion over the next five years, according to the Green Scissors report. Historically, fossil fuels receive annually about 13 times more than incentives going to all renewables, according to a recent report by DBL Investors.

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Save Those Mountaintops! Close Out Those Coal mines! Wind Energy in West Virginia

by Editors @ Tuesday, November 1st, 2011. Tags: , , , , , ,
Filed under Energy, Environment, Green Energy, Green Industry

Cool Energy-Storage Projects Popping up; Expect a Lot More

AES\'s Laurel Mt. Wind Farm

By David Roberts

Grist Magazine

Oct 28, 2011 - Tracking the politics of clean energy can be a surreal and dispiriting experience. D.C. is so swamped in fossil-fuel money, fossil-fuel lobbyists, and fossil-fuel-owned pols that the conventional wisdom is absurdly pessimistic about clean energy: It's unreliable, it costs too much, it can never work, blah blah.

Meanwhile, out in the real world, costs are plunging and the intermittency problem (insofar as it's actually a problem and not a talking point of the fossil crew) is being solved.

There are two ways to solve it: one is connecting more renewables over a wide geographic area, which generally requires more transmission lines and grid upgrade (for intriguing news on that front, see here); the other is adding energy storage, so solar and wind plants can provide power even when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. That's what today's post is about.

I give you the Laurel Mountain wind farm, in West Virginia, (in the picture above):

That's 61 1.6-MW wind turbines, for a total of 98 MW. And here is the massive bank of lithium-ion batteries that the wind farm will be connected to:

AES\'s lithium ion battery farm on Laurel Mt.

That's the world's largest lithium-ion battery farm -- 32 MW worth of storage, courtesy of A123 Systems. The AES power company just announced yesterday that the wind/storage power system is up and running in full commercial operation. All told, it will feed 260,000 MWh a year into the power market along the Eastern seaboard. (For details, check out the full story at Forbes.)

It won't be the world's largest for long, though. Some time late next year, Duke Energy will switch on a 36-MW battery storage system, the world's (new) largest, attached to the company's 153-MW Notrees Windpower Project in west Texas. The storage system will use the proprietary dry-cell battery technology of a very cool company called Xtreme Power. The systems contain both dry-cell batteries and sophisticated power control technology, so they not only store power, they enhance grid reliability. As the CEO explained it to me a few years back, the storage system basically presents itself to the grid like a highly dispatchable power plant.

The energy-storage industry is still in its infancy. Over 99 percent of the energy storage installed globally is made up of pumped hydro, whereby surplus power is used to pump water uphill and then the water flows down, turning turbines, when spare power is needed. That's a solid, reliable way of doing things, but its efficiency isn't that great and it faces some geographic limitations. Tons of new and alternative technologies are coming online as we speak, though: compressed air, flywheels, molten salt, and several different kinds of batteries, including the distributed batteries in electric vehicles.

Discussions on storage often end with, "for now it's too expensive." In most cases, that's true, but it's misleading to treat the affordability question as though it's a binary switch, as though someday storage will flip from being too expensive to affordable. Right now, some forms of storage are cost-effective in some applications given some markets and regulations and some accounting methods. (See above!)

What will happen is, that small pool of affordable storage applications will grow larger, not only because the technology will advance but because accounting methods will change (full lifecycle cost accounting over extended time periods makes storage look a lot better), regulations will change, markets will change, and the engineering culture inside power utilities will change.

All this will happen, I predict, much faster than even the most optimistic projections now have it. Even as a kind of resigned fatalism-bordering-on-nihilism has gripped the political conversation, out in the world, clever people are doing ambitious, exciting things. Don't let politics fool you: This is an amazing time to be involved in clean energy.

David Roberts is a staff writer for Grist. You can follow his Twitter feed at twitter.com/drgrist.



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Smart Grid: Backbone of Green New Deal 2.0

by Editors @ Friday, September 30th, 2011. Filed under Energy, Green Energy, Green Industry, High Road Economics

4 Reasons Why The Smart Grid

Energy Net Has Failed To Take Off

By Boyd Cohen
SolidarityEconomy.net via Fast Company

Since performing research for my book, Climate Capitalism [1] (written with Hunter Lovins) a few years ago, I have become increasingly convinced that the smart grid has the potential to be one of the "holy grails" in the clean tech revolution. I believe that the smart grid can be the enabling technology that allows all kinds of other low-carbon innovations to flourish.

The smart grid will give industrial, commercial, and residential consumers real-time access to energy consumption and costs, which will lead to demand side reductions (i.e. energy efficiency). It also promises to support distributed, renewable energies from rooftop solar panels to electric vehicles (EVs). Combined with smart homes, the latter could even be used to power a consumer's home for a few days in the case of power outages, which could be reduced [2] in frequency, volume, and duration with help from smart grids.

With corporate behemoths like GE, Cisco, and IBM as well as hundreds (if not thousands) of tech startups already in this space, why hasn't the smart grid become more ubiquitous? Unsurprisingly, Europe seems further down the path with the potential to leverage wind power from the North Sea Grid and solar power from southern Europe in a continental supergrid. But why hasn't the U.S. made more progress towards smart grid connectivity?

I think one of the biggest challenges is the industry's lack of stakeholder engagement from consumers (corporate and residential) and politicians. When utilities have in the past held referendums regarding the investment in smart grid technologies, the vote [3] does not always go in their favor. This is often because consumers believe that the costs outweigh the benefits. More needs to be done to clearly establish the business case for smart grid adoption. Of course, I am not alone in recognizing this issue. The Smart Grid Consumer Collaborative [3] is focused squarely on the problem. And Katharine Brass, the Program Manager for GE's Ecoimagination program, recently argued [4] that the biggest barrier to more widespread adoption is consumer perception.

Security Concerns. In today's world of heightened concerns over terrorism and increasingly sophisticated hackers, there is no wonder many worry about the vulnerability that our energy system could be exposed to if it truly were as IT-focused (and dependent) as we envision. This is a legitimate concern being addressed by the industry, as evidenced by the forthcoming Smart Grid Security Summit [5] to be held next week in San Diego.

Standards. To Fast Company readers, this will sound like a familiar problem. Numerous technology providers are offering a range of technology solutions ,from smart meters to grid automation software--and many of them have a vested interest in using proprietary, closed standards. The smart grid will only succeed on a large scale if technology suppliers agree to work on an open standard.

Regulatory and Policy Support. The U.S. has a difficult landscape for bringing the energy industry into the 21st century. We have a mix of federal regulation and state legislation, as well as some level of autonomy at the municipal level. A great book that explains this issue is Smart Power: Climate Change, The Smart Grid, and the Future of Electric Utilities [6]. Guido Bartels, IBM’s head of Global Energy and Utilities, Chairman of GridWise Alliance and an adviser to the Obama Administration, has also spoken up [7]about the need for more regulatory action to provide the proper incentives for the adoption of smart grid technology.

I have no doubt that we will see continued progress towards the adoption of smart grid technology in the U.S. And yes, there has been progress. More than 20 million smart meters have already been installed in the country, with approximately 60 million planned for near-term installation. However, the barriers discussed above are legitimate challenges that the industry and its stakeholders need to overcome.  For example, in the past few months, BC Hydro encountered opposition from consumers and municipalities in British Columbia to its smart reader rollout because of fears about low-level radiation.  For now, BC Hydro has committed to moving forward with or without community support. Perhaps the utility should consider addressing barriers number one and four for their next phase of the smart grid deployment.

[Image: Flickr user pgegreenenergy [8]]

Boyd Cohen, Ph.D., LEED AP, is a climate strategist helping to lead communities, cities and companies on the journey towards the low carbon economy. Dr. Cohen is the co-author of Climate Capitalism: Capitalism in the Age of Climate Change [9].

Links:
[1] http://www.climatecapitalism.org
[2] http://www.fastcompany.com/1777665/if-new-york-city-becomes-the-smartest-city-in-the-world-how-will-it-prepare-for-future-hurri
[3] http://www.smartgridnews.com/artman/publish/Business_Customer_Care/PG-E-s-Muscle-Not-Enough-to-Lift-Prop-16-in-the-Face-of-Anti-Smart-Grid-Consumer-Sentiment-2588.html
[4] http://gigaom.com/cleantech/ge-the-greatest-barrier-to-the-smart-grid-is-perception/
[5] http://www.smartgridsecuritysummit.com/
[6] http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Power-Climate-Electric-Utilities/dp/1597267066
[7] http://gigaom.com/cleantech/qa-ibms-energy-chief-on-the-future-of-smart-grid/
[8] http://www.flickr.com/photos/26715412@N03/4358236808/sizes/z/in/photostream/
[9] http://www.amazon.com/Climate-Capitalism-Age-Change/dp/0809034735



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Solar Power to the Poor! Green Energy Making Green Jobs and a Better Life

by Editors @ Wednesday, September 28th, 2011. Filed under Green Energy, Solidarity Economy, Third World

In Rural India, Solar Power

is the Cheap and Easy Option

Photo: A small, ground-mounted array of solar panels stands in front of a thatched hut in rural southern India CHEAP ENERGY: Solar panels make electricity in the hot Indian sun. (Photo: premasagar/Flickr)

By Chris Turner
SolidarityEconomy.net via Mother Nature Network

Sept. 21, 2011 - Harish Hande launched his Indian solar company to dispel the myth that renewable energy was too expensive for the world's poorest people. The wealthy West could learn a lot from his math.

As right-wing opponents of renewable energy grandstand in Washington about the collapse of Solyndra, trotting out all the old hobby horses about price and competitiveness and the rest, I’ve decided this is a fine moment to let India’s most innovative solar energy entrepreneur teach us some remedial math.

The entrepreneur in question is Harish Hande, founder of the Solar Electric Light Company of India, aka SELCO. Hande is a graduate of India’s elite Indian Institute of Technology and the University of Massachusetts, and unlike many electrical engineers, he decided to focus on the socioeconomics of implementing technology rather than the technology itself. After graduating, he launched SELCO in 1995 and soon found a fantastic investment partner in E+Co., an innovative international development organization specializing in social entrepreneurship.

Hande will tell anyone who will listen — including me in an interview for my book, "The Geography of Hope," back in 2006 — that he built his company to dispel three myths. He was interviewed recently by the Indian Express newspaper, and here’s how he explained it:

The fundamental [premise in founding SELCO] was how to balance social, economic and environmental stability at the same level. And to destroy myths like the poor can’t afford technology, the poor can’t maintain, and thirdly that you can’t run a commercial venture while trying to meet social objectives.

Hande rejected the idea that renewable energy was too expensive for the hundreds of millions of Indians with no household electricity at all, dispelled the notion that the poor can’t manage a small loan and keep their power system running, and demonstrated that a development project could also be a profit-making enterprise.

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Green Jobs: How About Public-Funded Demand for Public Utilities?

by Editors @ Monday, August 22nd, 2011. Filed under Green Energy, Green Industry, Unemployment

Infographic Of The Day:

Do Green Jobs Really Exist?

By Cliff Kuang
SolidarityEconomy.net via Fast Company

Not only do they exist, but they just might provide jobs for those in manufacturing, and in middle America.

Color me cynical, but for a long time, I assumed that all the political blather about green jobs meant only one thing: They were fake. But according to this infographic by Column Five for solar-power company 1Bog, green jobs are very much real--and in fact might be one of the only places in this awful economy where a person can hope to get a decent manufacturing job.

Granted, we're not experiencing the hockey-stick growth you might expect from such a burgeoning field. As the top-most chart shows, the green economy expanded three times faster than the economy as a whole, in the decade ended in 2007. (Who knows exactly what that ratio looks like now, but we're betting that it's larger.)

If you look at the "Top Jobs in Renewable Energy" pie chart near the top, you get a pretty good indication of how many green jobs rely on proven technologies that can scale -- namely, hydroelectric, solar, and wind, trailed quite distantly by geothermal, wave energy, and all the other energy generators that seems to exist only on green-tech blogs.

But perhaps the most surprising part of the chart above is the kind of jobs that the green-tech sector is creating: These aren't positions for Ph.D eggheads and white-collar middle managers, but rather middle-class workers who just a decade ago might be been classified as blue-collar. Nearly 69% of all green-economy jobs are middle-class, middle-income positions -- compared to just 43% of all American jobs.

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Green Energy and Hot Summers

by Editors @ Thursday, August 18th, 2011. Filed under Green Energy, Green Industry, High Road Economics

Texas’ Wind Industry is Praised

Again for Helping State Avoid Blackouts

By Bill Dawson
SolidarityEconomy.net via Texas Climate News Journal

Aug 16, 2011, West Texas - During February, the chief executive of the agency that operates Texas’ electric power grid gave “a special word of thanks” to the state’s wind industry for producing electricity that helped the state avoid even worse blackouts than did occur as dozens of coal and gas generating units failed in the frigid weather.

Once again this month, ERCOT, the grid agency, is praising the wind industry – this time for helping avoid blackouts as 100-plus temperatures covered the state and power demand bumped against the maximum production capacity.

Wind power’s critics have belittled its potential to help meet peak hot-weather demand in Texas, because summertime winds in West Texas – where proliferating wind turbines have made Texas the No. 1 wind-energy state – typically increase late at night, when power demand slacks off.

But this month, wind generation produced more power than anticipated, especially from the state’s growing collection of turbines near the Gulf Coast, where afternoon winds were strong.

Wind advocates understandably hastened to tout wind energy’s assistance in staving off power outages. Meanwhile, various reports this month indicated the state’s wind industry continues to expand, although at a slower pace [PDF] consistent with a national slowdown in the face of competition from low natural gas prices and an uncertain future for federal wind subsidies. Following is a roundup of some recent developments.

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Green Energy: High Design Borrows from Mother Nature

by Editors @ Monday, August 8th, 2011. Filed under Green Energy, High Road Economics

Schools of Fish Help Squeeze More Power from Wind Farms

By Hamish Pritchard

SolidarityEconomy.net
via BBC News Science Reporter

Schools of fish have shown engineers how to squeeze much more power from wind farms.

A new wind farm design mimics a school of fish to exploit wind turbulence, and could dramatically improve power output.

Familiar propeller-style wind turbines with large sweeping blades have almost reached their limit of efficiency.

But in a wind farm, they must be spaced widely apart to avoid turbulence from the other turbines.

This has limited wind farm power output to around two watts per square metre of land at favourable sites.

But redesigned wind farms could perhaps get up to 10 times more power from the same land.

A test array in the California desert takes a whole new approach to the problem, according to a study published in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy.

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How High Design Does More with Less

by Editors @ Friday, July 22nd, 2011. Filed under Green Energy, Green Industry, High Road Economics

 

Twice the height of the Empire State

EnviroMission plans Massive

Solar Tower for Arizona

By Loz Blain

SolidarityEconomy.net via Gizmag.com

July 21, 2011

EnviroMission's solar tower: coming to Arizona in 2015

EnviroMission's solar tower: coming to Arizona in 2015

An ambitious solar energy project on a massive scale is about to get underway in the Arizona desert. EnviroMission is undergoing land acquisition and site-specific engineering to build its first full-scale solar tower - and when we say full-scale, we mean it! The mammoth 800-plus meter (2625 ft) tall tower will instantly become one of the world's tallest buildings. Its 200-megawatt power generation capacity will reliably feed the grid with enough power for 150,000 US homes, and once it's built, it can be expected to more or less sit there producing clean, renewable power with virtually no maintenance until it's more than 80 years old. In the video after the jump, EnviroMission CEO Roger Davey explains the solar tower technology, the Arizona project and why he couldn't get it built at home in Australia.

  • EnviroMission's solar tower: coming to Arizona in 2015
  • EnviroMission's solar tower: coming to Arizona in 2015
  • EnviroMission's solar tower: coming to Arizona in 2015
  • EnviroMission's solar tower: coming to Arizona in 2015
  • How Solar Towers Work

Enviromission's solar tower is a simple idea taken to gigantic proportions. The sun beats down on a large covered greenhouse area at the bottom, warming the air underneath it. Hot air wants to rise, so there's a central point for it to rush towards and escape; the tower in the middle. And there's a bunch of turbines at the base of the tower that generate electricity from that natural updraft.

It's hard to envisage that sort of system working effectively until you tweak the temperature variables and scale the whole thing up. Put this tower in a hot desert area, where the daytime surface temperature sits at around 40 degrees Celsius (104 F), and add in the greenhouse effect and you've got a temperature under your collector somewhere around 80-90 degrees (176-194 F). Scale your collector greenhouse out to a several hundred-meter radius around the tower, and you're generating a substantial volume of hot air.

Then, raise that tower up so that it's hundreds of meters in the air - because for every hundred metres you go up from the surface, the ambient temperature drops by about 1 degree. The greater the temperature differential, the harder the tower sucks up that hot air at the bottom - and the more energy you can generate through the turbines.

    The advantages of this kind of power source are clear:

  • Because it works on temperature differential, not absolute temperature, it works in any weather;
  • Because the heat of the day warms the ground up so much, it continues working at night;
  • Because you want large tracts of hot, dry land for best results, you can build it on more or less useless land in the desert;
  • It requires virtually no maintenance - apart from a bit of turbine servicing now and then, the tower "just works" once it's going, and lasts as long as its structure stays standing;
  • It uses no 'feed stock' - no coal, no uranium, nothing but air and sunlight;
  • It emits absolutely no pollution - the only emission is warm air at the top of the tower. In fact, because you're creating a greenhouse underneath, it actually turns out to be remarkably good for growing vegetation under there.

The Arizona Project

While this is not the first solar tower that has been built (a small-scale test rig in Spain proved the technology more than a decade ago) EnviroMission has chosen to build its first full-scale power plant in the deserts of Arizona, USA.

The Arizona tower will be a staggering 800 metres or so tall - just 30 meters shorter than the colossal Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world's tallest man-made structure. To put that in context - it will stand more than double the height of the Empire State building in New York City, and it'll be as much as 130 meters in diameter at the top. Truly a gigantic structure.

Currently undergoing site-specific engineering and land acquisition, EnviroMission estimates the tower will cost around US$750 million to build. It will generate a peak of 200 megawatts, and run at an efficiency of around 60% - vastly more efficient and reliable than other renewable energy sources.

The output has already been pre-sold - the Southern California Public Power Authority recently signed a 30-year power purchase agreement with EnviroMission that will effectively allow the tower to provide enough energy for an estimated 150,000 US homes. Financial modelling projects that the tower will pay off its purchase price in just 11 years - and the engineering team are shooting for a structure that will stand for 80 years or more.

Considering that a large city like Los Angeles requires total power in the region of 7,200 megawatts, you'd have to build a few dozen solar towers up to the same size as the Arizona project if you wanted to completely replace the existing, primarily coal-based energy supply for that city's 3.7 million-odd residents. So it's not an instant solution - but then, its short projected payback period and virtually zero operating costs make it a very sound economic proposition that competes favorably against other renewable sources.

Under the terms of the pre-purchase agreement, the Arizona tower is due to begin delivering power at the start of 2015. Watch this space!



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Why Not Solar Installers as Worker Coops?

by Editors @ Thursday, July 21st, 2011. Filed under Green Energy, Green Industry, Solidarity Economy

Solar Is Making Cents

in San Antonio, Texas

By Emily Simone
SolidarityEconomy.net via ApolloAlliance.org

July 20, 2011 - Solar San Antonio, a local nonprofit solar energy advocacy organization, began its Bring Solar Home campaign in the fall of 2010, after the Department of Energy (DOE) designated San Antonio as a Solar America city. Although the DOE identified San Antonio as a good candidate for solar energy investment, “the two major barriers were the high up-front cost of solar and lack of information,” explains Lanny Sinkin, Solar San Antonio’s executive director; “the Bring Solar Home campaign is designed to overcome both of these barriers.”

“Bring Solar Home” is an initiative to introduce homeowners to solar installation businesses and provide consumers with information and advice to help them make decisions about installing home solar units. Solar San Antonio’s Bring Solar Home campaign connects a homeowner’s application for home installation to a number of installers, and narrows down the bid to three companies.

There are three requirements of the installation companies contracted for residential installations. First, the company must be pre-approved by the city’s municipal utility, CPS Energy. Second, the installer must be a member of Solar San Antonio. Third, it must sign an agreement outlining the company’s involvement with the larger Bring Solar Home campaign. Once an installation is complete, it is inspected by the city and the utility. “We also monitor each project and how it’s doing to make sure it’s a good experience for the customer,” Mr. Sinkin explains.

Home solar installation presents a high up-front cost, and this barrier is one of the main challenges to Bring Solar Home’s goals for San Antonio’s homes. The average installation costs $25,000-$27,000. “Solar PV pays for itself in 8-10 years and last for about 25-30 years,” explains Sinkin. Solar photovoltaic panels are just one method of capturing solar energy. Mr. Sinkin notes, “solar hot water costs much less than an electric water heater, and it pays for itself in fewer than three years.”

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The Energy ‘Low Roaders’ vs. New Jobs

by Editors @ Tuesday, July 19th, 2011. Filed under Environment, Green Energy, High Road Economics

Koch Brothers Declare War on Offshore Wind

By Keith Harrington
SolidarityEconomy.net via grist.org

July 15, 2011 - The Koch brothers have now turned their firepower against offshore wind. The war over America’s coastal-energy future has officially begun, and the result could determine whether we see wind turbines or catastrophic oil spills along our coastlines in coming years.

The opening salvo came in early July, when everyone’s favorite climate-hating, fossil-fuel-loving industrialist villains, the Koch brothers, released a so-called “cost-benefit analysis” of New Jersey offshore wind development plans through their front group Americans for Prosperity.

The focus on New Jersey is no big surprise. Fresh off their recent success in manipulating the state’s Republican Gov. Chris Christie into backing out of the Northeastern cap-and-trade system known as RGGI, the brothers grim are honing in on what they see as a weak spot in the clean-energy movement’s eastern front. Hoping to score a knockout blow, the duo have packed their offshore wind "analysis" with distortions.

Topping the report’s list of misrepresented facts are the jobs benefits. In fact, forget about misrepresentation; the report actually failed to represent those benefits altogether. Considering the impressive job-creation numbers cited in a range of other studies on offshore wind, it’s hard to imagine how any analysis that wasn’t commissioned as an intentional piece of fiction could have made such a glaring omission. Indeed, a study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory indicates that the 1,000 megawatts of offshore wind power New Jersey is planning to build could result in nearly 5,000 construction and maintenance jobs. Adding to the imbalance of the Kochs' equations, their report completely discounts wind power’s benefit as a relief valve against foreign-oil dependence or New Jersey’s need to import electricity from other states.

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