Green Options

Through its Texas subsidiary Horizon Wind Energy, the giant Portuguese company EDP Renewables; the second largest wind company in the world, intends to almost triple its US projects to $4 billion worth of new wind energy projects in the United States through 2012.

This year alone Horizon Wind Energy installed $1.5 billion worth of wind power, adding 800 megawatts of clean energy to the grid to bring its US total to more than 2,500 MW in 21 states.

The CEO attributes the expansion to our new renewable energy incentives.

The US paper industry is one of the three non-fossil-energy industries that will be affected under the Clean Energy Jobs & American Power Act; the climate bill being attempted in the Senate; to regulate the industries that emit over 25,000 tons/yr of carbon dioxide. Cement-making and steel production are the other two.

So it would be instructive to see how the European paper industry has fared under the Kyoto-triggered EU Emissions Trading System; providing a real world test-case. If faced with the same carbon constraints as European counterparts; how might our paper industry in the US adapt and evolve ?

If the European experience is anything to go by; they’ll do fine, it seems.

Storage is needed to harvest the full yield available from intermittent sources of energy like wind and solar. One of the options is compressed-air storage; till now only possible in underground caverns. But SustainX Energy Solutions; a Dartmouth College start-up  that got $4 million in VC funding from Polaris Venture Partners and Rockport Capital this year is working on compressing and storing air in cheap off-the-shelf shipping containers.

Over the next two years SustainX  will try to develop a way to cram 4 megawatt-hours worth of stored energy into each 40-foot long container and to reduce the energy that it currently takes to compress and release air by about 70%.

The goal? A renewable energy storage system with the portability and scalability of a battery and the economy and capacity of a cave. Make that a portable cave.

California has just updated its Air Resources Board website to give consumers a wide range of information about all the alternative power cars coming out next year, from electric cars to diesel hybrids.

The new site—driveclean.ca.gov—offers well-organized data that ranks vehicles according to various emission and cost characteristics and provides tools to compare models on a variety of qualities, including the new incentives that low carbon emission vehicles qualify for: up to $5,000 for cars, and up to $15,000 for electric trucks or vans.

One aspect of the site is revolutionary: For the first time Americans will be able to compare models based on how many grams of CO2 each spews per mile.

DOE’s new renewable energy Venture Capital unit ARPA-E has just funded an entirely new kind of liquid battery innovation from MIT professor Donald Sadoway, that works like an aluminum plant running in reverse; producing power instead of consuming it.

Under the ARPA-E program at the DOE, the Obama administration has provided record-setting funding for advanced breakthroughs in renewable energy technology - that could propel America to the front of the post-oil age economy.

Just 37 technologies were selected for their potential transformational impact in the world, out of 3,600 applicants. Of the 37 winners; Sadaway’s has received the most funding; with $7 million.

Here’s a transformer idea for city messenger services from design student Adam Schacter. This tiny EV would carry small cargo loads efficiently in its upright mode. In that configuration, the vehicle would be able to fit three to a parking space. But for days when you had a larger load, you’d simply flip down the back and pull it out wider to become a little pickup truck. Even flipped down into a truck, it would fit two to a parking space.

A new analysis from Accenture, Betting on Science; Disruptive Technologies in Transport Fuels, identifies 12 technologies that have the potential to be gamechangers, disrupting fossil fuel demand and reversing course on the disastrous climate changing trajectory that we are on. And, the report says, they could do it within five years.

But rather than simply cheering on these exciting developments, Accenture goes a step further and does a complete analysis of each one’s chances in the marketplace and legislative incentives; because the challenge of moving past fossil fuels can’t be left to the invisible hand.

In a nearly unanimous vote just last summer, members of Maine’s Fox Island Electric Cooperative decided to invest in wind to power the island.

Today the $14.5 million Fox Islands Wind project officially goes on line with a ribbon-cutting event, marking the completion of Maine’s first island wind project; the largest community-owned wind project on the East Coast.

As part of developing new energy resources that don’t emit carbon dioxide, the DOE is funding 9 trials that use supercritical CO2 to extract more geothermal energy.

The idea started in 2000 at Los Alamos National Laboratory; when physicist Donald Brown thought of pumping geothermal fluid using supercritical CO2 - a pressurized form that is part gas, part liquid; instead of water.  Theoretically this should flow more freely through rock than water, because it is less viscous than water.

Then, six years later; in modeling the technology Lawrence Berkeley hydro-geologist Karsten Pruess projected that not only should it perform as expected but that it would also yield a 50% hotter geothermal resource.

Now the DOE is funding this promising research with $16 million in nine trials to see if this will work in the real world.

VW’s new electric concept car is not due out of vaporware world until 2013, a bit later than most of the autoworld’s introduction of electric vehicles. But the eUp! may be worth waiting for.

The styling harkens back in time to the original wagon designed for us simple volks—the Beetle. Just as in that class defining car, for the eUp! simplicity, purity and durability are to be the guiding forces, say the design team of de Silva, Bischoff and Manzoni.

For example, that iconic VW logo on the front? Concealed neatly behind it is the integrated charging port.