Month: November 2011

Chicago Trib:

Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas has signed a 10-year deal with Peoria-based Caterpillar under which the American company will recondition turbine parts to boost Vestas’ servicing capabilities.

A Vestas official declined to say what the deal was worth, but the company said the arrangement would help it provide a parts and repairs service, which is expected to grow into a 700 million-euro ($963 million) business by the end of 2011.

In 2010 the service business was worth 623 million euros, and it has been increasing rapidly, Phil Jones, head of Vestas’ spare parts and repair operations said.

“We do some remanufacturing work, but Caterpillar has a global network and deep expertise in this area with good facilities so it makes good sense to partner with them,” he told Reuters.

Remanufacturing means returning end-of-life components to like-new condition, Vestas said.

The global deal with Caterpillar covers the remanufacturing of minor components and sub-component repairs in support of Vestas’ internal repair sites, Vestas said in a statement.

One of the most important spurs to the spectacular growth of the American Wind  industry (a third of all new electric capacity in the U.S. over the past four years) has been the Production Tax Credit – a subsidy meant to help level the playing field for the developing renewable industry against the entrenched and overwhelmingly subsidized old energy/fossil fuel sectors.  The PTC has a history of being a political football, and the growth of the industry shows exactly how, when the credit has periodically been allowed to expire, wind installations suffer, dropping between 73 and 93 percent. The current PTC is scheduled to expire in 2012, and wind developers are rushing to install capacity in anticipation that the law will, once again, be allowed to lapse.

Business needs predictability. PTC has been the tool that provides that for the wind industry, at least until we can get to a national Renewable Portfolio Standard, or Feed in Tariff.

New Energy News:

“U.S. Representatives Dave Reichert (R-WA) and Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), members of the tax-writing House Committee on Ways and Means, today introduced the American Renewable Energy Production Tax Credit Extension Act (H.R. 3307). This bipartisan bill extends the tax incentive for the production of wind power, geothermal power, hydropower, and other forms of renewable energy through 2016…

“H.R. 3307 provides a clean, 4-year extension of the existing production tax credit…It was created in the Energy Policy Act of 1992 and has frequently been extended in year-end packages of expiring tax provisions, as well as in the Energy Policy Act of 2005. The current incentive is set to expire next year for wind and in 2013 for other renewable energy forms…”

American Wind Energy Association:

Wind energy means 75,000 jobs across the U.S. today and could support 500,000 American jobs across the country in manufacturing, construction, engineering, development and other fields less than 20 years from now according to a U.S. Department of Energy study.
The recent stability of the Production Tax Credit has provided the foundation of wind energy’s transformation of a new manufacturing sector based on American ingenuity: wind has supplied more than a third of all new electric capacity in the U.S. over the past four years.

Surveys consistently show that Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of clean wind energy and the Made-in-the-USA jobs that it helps create. Wind energy received 89 percent public approval in a recent poll.”

Continue reading “Graph of the Day: Wind Production Tax Credit”

 Scientific American:

Plants have been using a green pigment for billions of years to capture sunlight, turning it into a flow of electrons and storing its energy in the chemical bonds of big organic molecules (also known as food). Given that successful history, chemist Michael Graetzel of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and his colleagues turned to a compound similar in shape and color to chlorophyll when they set out to build a better solar cell.

Graetzel’s work could be the precursor to tinted windows that also produce electricity—an advance that could lead to entire buildings generating power, rather than just the rooftops. In a paper in the November 4 issue of Science, Graetzel and his colleagues outline how they took two big steps to making such dye-sensitized solar cells more common in the marketplace: They improved efficiency and lowered the cost of the cells.

…the new cell can convert slightly more than 12 percent of the sunlight in the visible spectrum it absorbs into electrical current at a higher voltage than previous such cells. With tweaks to the dyes to help them absorb infrared light, the researchers suggest they may achieve efficiencies of 15 percent. That draws closer tosolar cells made from highly purified silicon that can convert roughly 20 percent of incoming sunlight.

“[The] key benefits are light weight and flexibility as well as transparency and multicolor options for building-integrated photovoltaic glass panels,” argued the team of researchers in an e-mail to Scientific American (think: color-tinted glass in windows that also produces electricity). “The new cells will be produced ultimately at significantly lower cost than conventional devices.

..such solar cells work better in weak light—like plants that thrive in the diffuse light of a cloudy day or in the shade of a forest—where they can efficiently absorb much more of the incoming sunlight than other photovoltaics. That means the dye-sensitive design may find a use where and when sunlight is not as intense. “They may not do as well at noon,” says materials scientist Michael McGehee of Stanford University, but “they can perform better earlier and later in the day. For that reason, the gap in performance isn’t as large as it may seem.”

Accuweather:

Rain continuing to soak parts of northern Italy on Monday has extended the threat of flooding following last week’s deadly storms

Last Friday, flooding turned deadly in Genoa, where 14 inches of rain fell within six hours, according to the UK’s Telegraph.

Torrents of runoff swept through streets, scooping up cars and inundating hundreds of shops, the BBC said. The flooding killed six people.

Last week, Climate Scientist Mike Mann won a big one for the Planet. But the fight he’s in concerns anyone who believes in intellectual and academic freedom.

Chris Mooney: 

…Michael Mann — who is quickly becoming the Galileo of climate science — triumphed over the conservative American Tradition Institute, and ongoing attempts at scientist-harassment.

More specifically, Prince William County Circuit Court Judge Gaylord Finch both allowed Mann to join the case that ATI is pursuing against the University of Virginia to get Mann’s emails, and allowed UVA to back out of an agreement with ATI to let it review some of Mann’s emails that the university is nevertheless claiming are exempt from disclosure

Facing South: 

It’s part of a lawsuit brought by the American Tradition Institute, a free-market think tank that wants the public to believe human-caused global warming is a scientific fraud. Filed against the University of Virginia, the suit seeks emails and other documents related to former professor Michael Mann, an award-winning climate scientist who has become a focus of the climate-denial movement because of his research documenting the recent spike in earth’s temperature.

By suing the university, the American Tradition Institute wants to make public Mann’s correspondence in an effort to find out whether he manipulated data to receive government grants, a violation of the state’s Fraud Against Taxpayers Act.

The way to find out if scientists manipulated data, is to examine the data. The fact that Mann’s data has been available online from the publication of the very first “Hockey Stick” graph demonstrates that this fishing expedition is not about data – it’s about power, intimidation, and a national strategy by the Koch financed right wing “think tanks” to turn the Freedom of Information act, meant to be a means to shed sunlight on the dark corners of government and bureaucracy, into a new tool of surveillance and oppression, to silence free speech, and curtail thought at academic institutions across the country.

As the screen shot from my recent video on the climate-gate emails shows, Mike Mann’s data has always been freely available to whoever wanted it.

The Guardian: 

After a day-long court hearing on Tuesday, a judge in Manassas, Virginia, granted Mann’s petition to join a lawsuit against the American Tradition Institute, an industry-funded thinktank that promotes scepticism about man-made climate change.

In an email, Mann called the decision a “good day” for academic freedom: “I don’t think there is any way to view this as anything other than a win for us, and for science more generally.”

Judge Gaylord Finch also granted a petition from the University of Virginia, Mann’s former employer, to revisit its earlier decision to let lawyers for the ATI have access to the emails before they were made public.

Scientists had seen the demands for documents and private correspondence as an attempt to intimidate Mann and other climate scientists. Virginia’s attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, has also pursued the emails.

ATI is pursuing similar legal action against the Nasa scientist James Hansen, according to an investigation of the industry group.

But if you thought this was just about climate science, you are mistaken. This is the template for a new strategy of McCarthy-ist, authoritarian oppression and witch hunting.

New York Times: 

The latest technique used by conservatives to silence liberal academics is to demand copies of e-mails and other documents. Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli of Virginia tried it last year with a climate-change scientist, and now the Wisconsin Republican Party is doing it to a distinguished historian who dared to criticize the state’s new union-busting law. These demands not only abuse academic freedom, but make the instigators look like petty and medieval inquisitors.

The historian, William Cronon, is the Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas research professor of history, geography and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin, and was recently elected president of the American Historical Association. Earlier this month, he was asked to write an Op-Ed article for The Times on the historical context of Gov. Scott Walker’s effort to strip public-employee unions of bargaining rights. While researching the subject, he posted on his blog several critical observations about the powerful network of conservatives working to undermine union rights and disenfranchise Democratic voters in many states.

In particular, he pointed to the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative group backed by business interests that circulates draft legislation in every state capital, much of it similar to the Wisconsin law, and all of it unmatched by the left. Two days later, the state Republican Party filed a freedom-of-information request with the university, demanding all of his e-mails containing the words “Republican,” “Scott Walker,” “union,” “rally,” and other such incendiary terms.

Continue reading “First, They Came for the Climatologists….”

I’ve posted on one of the critical “problems” of booming renewable energy deployment in Germany – negative pricing – utilities forced to give away power due to torrents of renewable energy.   Now negawatts are coming to America, and one of the solutions (besides new transmission lines) will be yet another energy storage option  you read about here. 

NYTimes:

For decades, electric companies have swung into emergency mode when demand soars on blistering hot days, appealing to households to use less power. But with the rise of wind energy, utilities in thePacific Northwest are sometimes dealing with the opposite: moments when there is too much electricity for the grid to soak up.

So in a novel pilot project, they have recruited consumers to draw in excess electricity when that happens, storing it in a basement water heater or a space heater outfitted by the utility. The effort is rooted in some brushes with danger.

In June 2010, for example, a violent storm in the Northwest caused a simultaneous surge in wind power and in traditional hydropower, creating an oversupply that threatened to overwhelm the grid and cause a blackout.

As a result, the Bonneville Power Administration, the wholesale supplier to a broad swath of the region, turned this year to a strategy common to regions with hot summers: adjusting volunteers’ home appliances by remote control to balance supply and demand.

When excess supply threatens Bonneville’s grid, an operator in a control room hundreds of miles away will now dial up a volunteer’s water heater, raising the thermostat by 60 more degrees. Ceramic bricks in a nearby electric space heater can be warmed to hundreds of degrees.

For Bonneville, the full dangers of excess supply first hit home during the June 2010 emergency, when a severe storm whipped through the region. The transmission network had so much power that the agency turned off all its fossil fuel generation, gave electricity away to neighboring networks and even told the system’s only nuclear plant to slash its production by 78 percent, a highly unusual step.

The region squeaked through, but the agency was stretching its resources “to their limits,” said Doug Johnson, a spokesman for Bonneville. At one point the system was running almost entirely on renewable energy. 

Energy storage is not new, but it’s being pushed to the fore as renewable energy begins to deliver on it’s promise.

Continue reading “Cyclone in your Basement: Torrents of Wind Power push Utilities to Find Storage Options”

Obviously Paul Krugman read my post last week about the Moore’s Law driven transformative power of solar energy.

NYTimes:

For decades the story of technology has been dominated, in the popular mind and to a large extent in reality, by computing and the things you can do with it. Moore’s Law — in which the price of computing power falls roughly 50 percent every 18 months — has powered an ever-expanding range of applications, from faxes to Facebook.

Our mastery of the material world, on the other hand, has advanced much more slowly. The sources of energy, the way we move stuff around, are much the same as they were a generation ago.

But that may be about to change. We are, or at least we should be, on the cusp of an energy transformation, driven by the rapidly falling cost of solar power. That’s right, solar power.

If that surprises you, if you still think of solar power as some kind of hippie fantasy, blame our fossilized political system, in which fossil fuel producers have both powerful political allies and a powerful propaganda machine that denigrates alternatives.

These days, mention solar power and you’ll probably hear cries of “Solyndra!” Republicans have tried to make the failed solar panel company both a symbol of government waste — although claims of a major scandal are nonsense — and a stick with which to beat renewable energy.

The Koch Brothers funded astro-turf “citizens group”, Americans for Prosperity has this ad in heavy rotation precisely because they know that the Moore’s law driven earthquake in energy production threatens the Oil Industry’s 19th century model of economic power and influence.

Krugman continues:

But Solyndra’s failure was actually caused by technological success: the price of solar panels is dropping fast, and Solyndra couldn’t keep up with the competition. In fact, progress in solar panels has been so dramatic and sustained that, as a blog post at Scientific American put it, “there’s now frequent talk of a ‘Moore’s law’ in solar energy,” with prices adjusted for inflation falling around 7 percent a year.

This has already led to rapid growth in solar installations, but even more change may be just around the corner. If the downward trend continues — and if anything it seems to be accelerating — we’re just a few years from the point at which electricity from solar panels becomes cheaper than electricity generated by burning coal.

Remember 1993? Back then, the personal computer was still the province of oddball geeks and the occasional gamer. I couldn’t imagine why I would need one. By 1996, we were all on line 3 hours a night checking email, and net surfing. Not because the government mandated it, but because it was so damn cool that the world came rushing to it.

Wind is here. Solar is coming. The Koch Brother’s Tea Party is about to get crashed, big time.

OK, I’m joking. But for a second there, you wondered, right?

What happens when, in a world taken over by the anti-science right, we take away scientists rights of speech, suppress their right to discuss freely amongst themselves, and even defund the very apparatus for observing objective reality?

Daily Galaxy:

A huge chunk of black rock bigger than four city blocks is speeding toward us at more than 30,000 miles an hour. Scientists say the asteroid will miss us, but it will be barely more than 200,000 miles away when it passes Earth at 11:13 p.m. Tuesday, and in cosmic terms that’s whisker close.

NASA and astronomers at the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, CA will be tracking the fast-moving object with the center’s 36-inch telescope, as will scientists at other observatories around the world.

The scientists have estimated the possible effect which a clash with an asteroid of this size could cause to the Earth and namely – a 7-magnitude earthquake and a 20-meter tsunami, leaving a 6-kilometer crater.

The asteroid was detected six years ago by Robert S. McMillan, director of the University of Arizona’s Spacewatch project, whose telescopes atop Kitt Peak near Tucson survey the skies nightly for what NASA calls NEOs, or Near Earth Objects.