Green Options

Google is doing a lot these days to help the environment. Now, they have just filed to buy and sale wholesale electricity. Are they looking to enter the utility market?

This is something very interesting, and perhaps powerful, that I recently ran across. You want solar? Sign the Solar Bill of Rights©.

Hudson Clean Energy Partners (HCEP) set a $1 billion target for its first fund, a new clean energy investment fund, and just announced this week that it has reached its target despite the difficult economic conditions worldwide.

Led by two industry veterans with much individual success, HCEP is looking to help spur and capitalize on a great global push for clean tech and clean energy (including renewable power, alternative fuels, energy efficiency and storage). The firm seems to show a lot of faith in solar power technology, in particular.

A new report by Network for New Energy Choices (NNEC) — Freeing the Grid — shows which states make it easy for people to sell electricity to the grid and which make it difficult. In addition, the report compares the current situation with the situation in 2007.

Overall, there has been a lot of progress on this issue since 2007, but there are still several lagging states as well.

The idea of using electric cars to store energy for the power grid is a good one, I think. Unfortunately, it may be too expensive at this time to make any sense, according to one recent cost analyst. The same high cost problems that have hindered electric cars in the past mean it may not make sense for the future even beyond 2020, unless the costs come down.

Then again, advancements in battery technology seem to be happening on a daily basis, so maybe it doesn’t make sense today, but tomorrow could be a different story.

Most of us have been in this situation before; you’re up late cranking away at some work project or homework assignment as thunder and lightning dance outside your window, shaking the whole house. Then the power goes out. All your work is gone, as is your time, and you’re left with frustration and darkness until the power goes back on.

Yet imagine if power outages were a thing of the past? Electric cars could provide the answer, as well as a boost to the U.S. power grid. The U.S. Department of Energy is lending funds to several automakers, including Detroit Electric and Chrysler, in a bid to promote these technologies.

Obama discussed a big project long overdo and sorely needed today — modernizing the US electric grid. But it is more than discussion. $3.4 billion in Recovery Act funding is going towards this new project.

This is the most money ever awarded for clean energy in a single day from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act!

Obama spoke at the opening of the Florida Power and Light’s (FPL) DeSoto Next Generation Solar Energy Center (the nation’s largest PV electricity center) to announce and discuss the various benefits of this project.

A big factor limiting solar and wind power growth across the US is the current transmission network. It is disconnected. A new project proposed by Tres Amigas LLC in New Mexico would link the nation’s main power grids and, therefore, give hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of households links to already existing renewable energy sources.

Where is the grid going, big or small?

Scientists at Pennsylvania State University have discovered a solution to the problem of reliable storage for alternative energy: a bacteria that can convert electricity to methane when combined with CO2.

Any surplus power from wind, solar, or tidal sources is fed into the bacteria and combined with CO2 from the atmosphere to create methane for storage. Methane is a clean-burning gas and 80% of energy fed into the process was retained at the end.

Legacy electricity grids, the current distribution systems used for a century in the US, are highly inefficient…7%, never makes it to the user, lost at the transmission and distribution levels…..Environmentalists and others have been pushing for smart-grid technology for over a decade because it will enable consumers to use less electricity and benefit the environment.