Group items tagged

If California expands its renewable power generation to be a third of electricity delivered in the state by 2020, it may cost $60 billion, the state's utility regulator said in a report issued on Thursday. It is more costly to make electricity with renewable power -- solar, wind, geothermal and other sources that emit no or low amounts of global-warming greenhouse gases -- than with natural gas, nuclear and coal power plants.

The election of Barack Obama has put the wind back into the sails of the renewable energy sector, where investor confidence had been badly punctured by the credit crisis. Clean technology and green energy stocks have soared as City analysts predict a major boost from the incoming president. Solar Integrated Technologies rose by 30% yesterday after increases of 22% by Renewable Energy Corporation and 16% by the wind turbine maker Vestas in the 24 hours before, when they were helped upwards by oil prices returning to above $70 a barrel.

Growing power consumption and the U.S. administration's plan to rely more heavily on renewable generation sources will increase the demand on America's already overloaded electricity grid and require major investment in transmission and distribution networks. Upgrading power transmission and distribution systems is likely to cost as much as installing new generating capacity over the next 20 years. While Congress provided an extra $4.5 billion of funding for grid improvements in the recent fiscal stimulus, federal loan guarantees and other support, far more investment will be needed if the administration's targets for renewable generation are to be realized.

As I read through the 2008 International Energy Agency (IEA) World Energy Outlook, I had the distinct impression that I was reading contributions from people with completely opposite points of view. The pessimist warned that we are facing a supply crunch and much higher prices. The optimist in the report said that oil production won't peak before 2030. This trend held in the section on renewable energy. The optimist noted that renewable energy is expected to ramp "expand rapidly." The pessimist noted that biofuels are predicted to only supply 5% of our road transport fuel in 2030. And so the report goes, part rampant optimism and part rampant pessimism.

The tax breaks benefit the wind and solar energy industries and encourage energy-efficiency improvements to existing homes. Other facilities that generate electricity from renewable sources such as biomass, hydropower, landfill gas and ocean currents also qualify for the credit. Facilities will have to be in place by 2012 to be eligible for the credit. Of the $20 billion, more than $13 billion of it is focused on renewable energy projects. This is mostly due to the tough time that these projects have when it comes to finding financing in current market conditions. Homeowners can get a tax credit of up to 30-percent on upgrades for energy-efficient furnaces, hot water boilers and other energy savings improvements.

The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), the first multinational agency focused solely on spreading clean energy across the globe, officially launched this week. The expectations are that the agency will help governments and private industry to expand renewable energy installments throughout the industrialized world, where investments are already on the rise, while also assist the developing world acquire the expertise to establish its own clean energy industries.

The US renewable energy sector is capable of meeting President-elect Barack Obama's pledge to double US production within three years, but the ongoing financial crisis will challenge the industry in 2009, analysts and industry experts said. Currently, renewable energy sources comprise 7% of the US energy supply, according to the US Energy Information Administration. In a speech last week, Obama reiterated his pledge to make development of the sector a major part of his economic stimulus package.

Got your attention now? That amount of oil equivalent, three cubic miles, is how much the world uses in a year if you take into account all sources of energy, says Ripudaman Malhotra of SRI International's Chemical Science and Technology Laboratory in Greentech Media. What's more, is that by 2050 at current rates of increase the world will consume nine cubic miles of oil. Pretty sobering, but what is more sobering (it does indeed feel like cold water thrown on the renewable energy industry) is that to replace that amount of energy usage with renewable sources is nigh impossible. Here's Malhotra on the challenge laid before us in a nutshell:

The state of New Hampshire's Climate Change Policy Task Force this week released the New Hampshire Climate Action Plan and announced the creation of a public/private partnership that will oversee and guide the plan's implementation. "Here in New Hampshire, we already recognize that climate change poses serious risks to the health of our citizens, to our quality of life and to our economic future." -- New Hampshire Governor John Lynch The plan sets a long-term goal of achieving an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels by the year 2050. Renewable energy measures in the plan include setting a goal of ensuring that 25 percent of the state's energy comes from renewable sources by 2025, upgrading the state's grid and encouraging the use of waste-to-energy projects.

In remarks focused on the promise of renewable energy and demand-side management, US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Jon Wellinghoff on Wednesday suggested that there may never be another new nuclear or coal power plant built in the country. Pointing to upwards of 1,000 GW of potential wind energy in the Midwest and West, new solar power production and storage technologies and emerging hydrokinetic power resources, Wellinghoff asserted that renewables are poised to play a substantial, gap-filling role in the US energy picture.

UC-Berkeley professor of energy Dan Kammen is well-known around the country and throughout the world for his work in renewable energy science and policy. Recently, he and a team of academics, entrepreneurs, business leaders and policymakers released a 141-page report, 18 months in the making, called "The Gigaton Throwdown'' that outlines a path for a dramatic expansion in the development and deployment of renewable and low-carbon energy. The team focused on what it would take for nine different technologies to reduce the annual emissions of carbon dioxide and equivalent greenhouse gases by a least 1 billion metric tons, or one gigaton, by 2020. A copy of the report has been widely distributed on Capitol Hill, and has been presented to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a colleague of Kammen's. The Mercury News talked to Kammen about the report, some of its conclusions and whether it can have an impact on U.S. energy policy. The interview was edited for clarity.

Congress is all but abandoning President Barack Obama's goal of producing fully one-quarter of the nation's electricity from renewable sources - wind, solar and the like - by 2025, though a push for at least some increase is making headway. Both the House and Senate are considering legislation that would establish the first national requirement for electric utilities to generate a certain percentage of their power from renewable energy - from wind turbines and solar cells to biomass and geothermal sources.

Engineers and entrepreneurs are rushing to explore alternative sources of efficient and renewable energy in New Jersey and elsewhere in the country. A Rutgers School of Business-Camden professor has strong words of caution as projects involving wind farms and photovoltaic cells proliferate.

Reuters has a report on some of the roadblocks obstructing grid expansion (and thus construction of many large scale renewable energy projects) in the US - Alternative energy faces power line "bottleneck" in U.S. West. President Barack Obama aims to double alternative energy production over three years, but how much "green" power will come from the U.S. West is uncertain if the sunny and wind-swept region cannot overcome a shortage of power lines. Installing large solar installations and dotting landscapes with wind turbines across the western United States would be, technically speaking, straightforward, and potentially popular with the renewed interest in domestic energy sources amid rising economic, environmental and security concerns.

Yesterday, House Democrats revealed their proposed stimulus package totaling $825 billion. As hoped, money for renewable energy and efficiency make up 54 billion of those dollars. The biggest proportion, $11 billion, would go towards creating a smart grid, which is dramatically shy of the $400 billion Al Gore thinks should be set aside. Here's a list of some of the larger energy incentives. * $11 billion for investment in smart-grid technologies * $8 billion in loan guarantees for renewable energy and transmission * $6.9 billion for energy efficiency help to state and local governments * $6.7 billion for retrofits to federal buildings * $6.2 billion for home weatherization, targeted at low-income families * $2.4 billion for carbon sequestration * $2 billion for loans guarantees and grants to automobile battery-makers

Push through a bulletproof revolving door in a nondescript building in a dreary patch of the former East Berlin and you enter the control center for Vattenfall Europe Transmission, the company that controls northeastern Germany's electrical grid. A monitor displaying a diagram of that grid takes up most of one wall. A series of smaller screens show the real-time output of regional wind turbines and the output that had been predicted the previous day. Germany is the world's largest user of wind energy, with enough turbines to produce 22,250 megawatts of electricity. That's roughly the equivalent of the output from 22 coal plants--enough to meet about 6 percent of Germany's needs. And because Vattenfall's service area produces 41 percent of German wind energy, the control room is a critical proving ground for the grid's ability to handle renewable power.

In the US, the Californian desert and the Mid-West plains are ideal locations for solar and wind energy plants. In the UK the Scottish Highlands and Welsh mountains have the highest winds in the UK. These locations have similar characteristics - great resources for renewable energy generation, but limited grid infrastructure and not many people. Hundreds and in some cases thousands of miles of new expensive, high voltage grid infrastructure is needed in these key locations to transport green energy to areas of high demand - the big cities. This grid infrastructure is both expensive and geographically extensive.

The $825 billion economic stimulus package unveiled by Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday contains billions of dollars in tax breaks for renewable energy and spending for energy efficiency and transmission. The legislation, aimed at boosting the recessionary U.S. economy, would provide $20 billion in tax cuts for alternative energy including a multi-year extension of the production tax credit for wind, geothermal, hydro power and bioenergy. The bill also contains tax credits for research and development on energy conservation and efficiency.

Bruce Sterling points to Alexis Madrigal's project to create a history of American renewable energy development - The Lost History of American Green Technology. You'll soon be able to cruise around a map of green tech history in America and scroll through a timeline of the major events in the history of the industry. "Right now, I'm working on building an American Green Technology Historical Registry that will mark out the places that have been important for wind, solar, hydrokinetic, geothermal, and other renewable power sources. You will be surprised when you see the results. It's not just northern California, it's Ohio and Boise, Florida and Death Valley, Texas and Montana, York, PA, and Rutland, Vermont.

When the "Clean and Renewable Energy Construction Act" was introduced in the Missouri Senate, the bill's title evoked images of new wind turbines sprouting from the northwest Missouri plains and solar panels lining St. Louis rooftops. A more fitting image might be two more massive cooling towers rising in Callaway County. While the legislation proposed last month may one day aid the development of more renewable energy or a next-generation coal-fired power plant, there's little doubt that its primary purpose is helping AmerenUE build a second nuclear reactor. It would do so by removing a key barrier - a 1976 law that prohibits the utility from charging customers for the plant before it's complete.