Green Options

A contract has just been signed to deliver 600 gigawatthours a year of solar power between the US division of Spain’s giant Abengoa, and PG&E in California. Abengoa Solar hopes to succeed where BrightSource recently failed to overcome local NIMBY issues and Senator Feinstein, in its plan to site a 250 MW solar thermal plant in the made-for-solar Mojave Desert.

Is Exelon’s departure from the US Chamber of Commerce a harbinger for the entire utility sector? Or, is there a divide emerging within the industry?

It is easy enough for solar companies to sign contracts under new RPS laws requiring utilities to buy more and more renewable energy. But building any new power sites or transmission is fraught with difficulties, even when these are for a societal good like renewable energy.

But BrightSource has been creative in finding sites for its utility-scale solar thermal plants. Here’s a new example.

They have just made a deal with Nevada housing developer Coyote Springs Land Company to site a 960 MW solar thermal plant on 12 square miles of a 43,000 acre housing development planned before the economic real estate apocalypse. Some solar was part of Coyote’s original plan for its golfing community 50 miles north of Las Vegas, but not 12 square miles of it!

Now with housing in free-fall, the expertize of housing developers comes in handy to help us meet the need for more renewable energy. Solar power developers could piggyback on the experience of housing developers with the know-how to get through red tape.

This could be how renewable power overcomes siting hurdles - and how the construction industry digs its way out of a deep recession. A marriage made in heaven.

California power utility PG&E rejects the position of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over global warming and leaves the organization in protest.

Since the Renewable Portfolio Standard began in 2002, the California Public Utilities Commission has now approved contracts for more than 8,600 megawatts of new renewable energy, nearly all of it solar, signed with the state’s largest utilities. Most of the state’s renewable energy already on the grid till now has been wind power.

It’s not surprising that Outside Lands, a three-day music festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, wants to bill itself as being “green”. After all, the fest takes place in one of the country’s most beautiful parks. But does the festival, now in it’s second year, succeed in its aspirations of sustainability? Read below to find out.

As PG&E ramps up renewable power in response to the California RPS requirement that it get 33% of its electricity from renewables by 2020; it has been exploring ways to add that much renewable power to the grid while smoothing out the ups and downs of wind energy, which often peaks at night.

The utility needs a way to turn sometimes-too-much wind into anytime-always-there electricity.

The solution? Simple tech. Underground compressed air.

With compressed air energy storage; air is compressed and then pumped in natural underground reservoirs. The air is released later and converted into electricity. With enough storage, even fickle wind could actually supply base-load power.

So PG&E has applied for DOE smart grid stimulus funding under The Recovery Act; to build a compressed air energy storage project with output capacity of 300 megawatts. They are applying for $25 million.

By comparison, building a plant to burn fossil fuels would cost around $850 million for the same 300 megawatts of fossil energy.

Editor’s Note: This is a guest contribution by Elaina Medina of Portland General Electric.

This week Portland General Electric welcomed news it was named a strategic participant and Oregon was named one of five test markets for the largest rollout of EVs and an associated charging station network in U.S. history.

Editor’s Note: This is a guest contribution by Elaina Medina of Portland General Electric.

We are anticipating a large turnout at this year’s “EV Awareness Day” on Saturday, July 11, at Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland, Ore. Portland General Electric is proud to sponsor this annual event hosted by the Oregon Electric Vehicle Association.

The PGE team will be on hand to show off its new PGE plug-in hybrid electric vehicle and talk to attendees about our network of more than a dozen charging stations we are installing across the Portland-metro area and Salem.

The prospect of green jobs has proven very attractive to Californian job seekers. According to a survey released this week by the Vote Solar Initiative, a solar advocacy group, more than 5,400 people are participating in solar job training programs this year in the state.

“It is clear that Californians of different economic and educational backgrounds are all looking to solar to provide much-needed career opportunities, and the state’s training institutions have stepped up to meet that rising demand,” said Claudia Eyzaguirre, the author of the report, in a press release.

But it’s not clear whether the state will have enough jobs to support these trainees. Part of that will depend on the kinds of jobs they are training for.

Now PG&E in California, is planning to take their ability to tap renewable energy to a whole new level: solar power in space.“Solaren says it plans to generate the power using solar panels in earth orbit, then convert it to radio frequency energy for transmission to a receiving station in Fresno County. From there, the energy will be converted to electricity and fed into PG&E’s power grid.” ~ Next100.com

Solaren hopes to begin launching before 2016. The satellites will deploy the solar panels so they dock automatically together in orbit, resulting in an orbital power plant weighing roughly 25 tons if back here on Earth.

The advantages of space solar power include:

• energy that can be harnessed at all times, even at night or when it’s cloudy.
• baseload power delivery that makes efficient electricity possible for meeting customer demand.
• an underlying technology that is mature since it is based on communications satellite technology.

Before all this happens however, PG&E needs approval from the California State Legislature, through the California Public Utilities Commission for this Solaren Space Based Energy Contract. Currently, Solaren is preparing to launch space rockets containing the solar panels and they have been working with United Launch Alliance (a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and The Boeing Company) on such launches.