November 18th, 2009

California Dreamin' revisited

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 5:47 pm

Categories: Blogroll, conservation, energy, engineering, environmental health, green tech, housing, law & politics, renewable energy, solar, wind

Tags: California, BV, Telecom & Utilities, Harry Fuller

I recently blogged about the future of greentech in the State of California in the current state that state is in. Can greentech enable California to get its mojo back?

Well, here comes a blog report on how the state’s goal for alternative energy use could invigorate the statewide economy. One thing California has is plenty of sunshine, especially in those parts of the state with the least amount of water from Palm Springs to San Diego and northward toward Santa Barbara.

Can California get one-third of its electricity from renewable by the 2020 target? That’s the official state target. Sure, the state government’s in deep money trouble. Furloughs of workers, cutbacks in services–standard across the state agencies and universities. But much of California has cash, especially some of the little tech companies most of us have heard of: Intel, Google, Cicsco, Oracle, Apple to name a few landowners in Silicon Valley. And the state has hugely productive agribusiness. Then there are all those parking lots in the San Diego and Los Angeles sprawl. Think this conjures up dreams of a solar powered future?

Some think it may lead to high value for roof space that faces south, or value in covering parking lots with solar collectors. And it would mean re-thinking and re-engineering the electric grid.

Earlier this year the state’s Renewable Energy Transmission Initiative (RETI) issued a report on what’s needed to bring desert solar-generated electricity to the California urban areas which are mostly along the coast. RETI projected billions and billions in cost. But now one of their consultants, Black and Veatch, says smaller rooftop and subrurban solar farms could decentralize power production. BV says the cost of solar panels is decreasing, as an unwritten corollary to Moore’s Law would suggest. Even in crowded Silicon Valley there are hundreds of days of sunshine yearly plus hundreds of square miles of roofs and parking lots, so, what are we waiting for?

Black and Veatch also see much more harvesting of wind energy, another plentiful California resource.

November 17th, 2009

Ford turns to wind power

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 5:35 am

Categories: Blogroll, Europe, cars & traffic, conservation, energy, engineering, green tech, renewable energy, wind

Tags: Turbine, Wind Energy, Ford Motor Co., Telecom & Utilities, Harry Fuller

Ford is going to be using wind power. Not to actually power their cars, but to power a car factory in Belgium.

Ford of Europe announced that its plant in Genk, Belgium will now be generating electricity through two gigantic wind turbines, each with a height of 150 metres. Installed by local energy company, Electrabel, each unit has an output of two megawatts of power, enough to power 2,500 private homes. The wind turbines will deliver a significant part of the electrical power needed in the Genk Plant, production home of the Mondeo, S-MAX and Galaxy models.

Wind is not a new Ford investment. Ford’s Dagenham Diesel Centre in the UK became the world’s first automotive plant to meet all its electricity needs from two giant on-site turbines.

A third turbine is expected to come into service in Dagenham in 2010, allowing the plant to remain 100 per cent powered by wind-generated electricity, following the installation of a new 1.4/1.6-litre Duratorq TDCi engine production line. A new three-bladed turbine, provided by Ecotricity, will be commissioned to produce two megawatts of electricity, enough to power more than 1,000 homes.

November 11th, 2009

California Dreamin'... or fantasizing?

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 9:24 pm

Categories: Blogroll, air pollution, cars & traffic, conservation, energy, engineering, environmental health, federal government, green tech, law & politics, petroleum, renewable energy, research, solar, wind

Tags: California, Government, Internet, Transportation, Vertical Industries, Harry Fuller, innovation, business, jobs,

Can California once more emerge as the global tech center? A recent NPR program explored the challenges and promises of greentech California style. Amid further state budget problems, California’s governor is counting on greentech to help revive the once Golden State’s economy. Just this week an electric truck and bus company opened its new headuqarters in Stockton. Here is EVI’s website. The company said it moved to California because that’s where they expect most adoption of the electric vehicle tecnology.

The new California gold rush, as it is being characterized, will inevitabley arouse oppisition. What will huge solar farms or wind farms do to land use and wildlife?

Of course from the invention of the transistor through the Apple Mac to the iPOd, Calfironia was where it happened first. Then there was the Internet, from Netscape, Yahoo and Excite to Google and on to YouTube, California has constantly been a center for reinventing technology. Can you imagine Cisco, Oracle or Pixar located anywhere but California?

But this time around every nation on earth is looking for the next generaton of energy and green tech. Governments are watching and investing. The Internet grew out of a DARPA project but once it went public there was little government aid or interference. That will not be true with anything important in the energy sector, anything involving the electricity grid, transportation or even massive water systems. Everybody’s playing for keeps this time.

November 11th, 2009

A flip of the on switch: Utah wind project goes online

Posted by Heather Clancy @ 6:32 am

Categories: conservation, energy, environmental health, green tech, renewable energy, wind

Tags: Project, Turbine, Utah, Telecom & Utilities, Heather Clancy

The California cities of Los Angeles, Burbank and Pasadena just got a new source of energy: The 203 megawatt Milford Wind Corridor Project, which is now online.

The 97 turbines located in Milford, Utah, will power about 45,000 homes in southern California with clean wind energy. This is the first phase of the project, which has already brought about $86 million to the Utah economy. It took about a year to get these turbines in place. The construction was handled by RMT, an environmental consulting and wind farm development company, and the project was backed by developer/owner First Wind, which is based in Boston. There were many many supporters for the project at the state, federal and private sector level.

This press release goes through more specifics of the project.

November 4th, 2009

Remember Kerry-Boxer?

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 3:45 pm

Categories: Blogroll, Kyoto Protocol, air pollution, biofuel, building, cars & traffic, climate change, conservation, energy, engineering, environmental health, federal government, fossil fuel, geothermal, global warming, green tech, law & politics, nuclear power, petroleum, renewable energy, solar, water, weather, wind

Tags: Page, Outsourcing, It Operations, Business Operations, Outsourcing & Subcontracting, Harry Fuller

Well, now it may become Kerry-Graham-Lieberman-Boxer. And opponents of nuclear energy may go nuclear over the nuclear option. Not only will the next version of the Senate’s energy and climate change bill include more nuc, it may also include even more offshore oil drilling than is called for by the previous Kerry-Boxer. What’s not known: how many more pages will be added? The now-old bill had less than a thousand pages.

Meanwhile, Republicans on the committee considering Kerry-Boxer insist there needs to be a full economic analysis of its proposals, all 900+ pages worth.

Meanwhile we’re five weeks away from the start of the international climate talks in Copenhagen where the U.S. negotatiors will show up with lots of good intentions and little more. The World Wildlife Fund, focused more on other species with no votes and no money, issued a report asking the nations of the world to re-industrialize. Essentially they’re calling for completely retooling the planet’s energy systems to lower emissions and curtail global warming and the extinctions that it’s expected to trigger. Wall Street wouldn’t like that one bit.

November 2nd, 2009

Kerry-Boxer bill battle set for Tuesday

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 11:27 am

Categories: Blogroll, air pollution, biofuel, building, cars & traffic, climate change, conservation, energy, environmental health, federal government, fossil fuel, geothermal, global warming, green tech, law & politics, mass transit, nuclear power, petroleum, renewable energy, solar, water, wind

Tags: Bill, Pollution, Harry Fuller, Kerry-Boxer bill, U.S. Senate, cap and trade, public opinion, rogue nation, greenhouse gas, emissions

The Republicans are not going to be present, but a U.S. Senate committee will apparently move ahead to approve a massive energy and air pollution regulation bill. This is the Kerry-Boxer bill. There’s a rule loophole that will allow Commitee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) to move ahead with no Repubs present.

Here you can peruse the entire bill, all 959 pages of it.

The bill currently contains cap and trade and tighter emission standards than the bill passed by the House last spring. I blogged earlier on the political problems this Kerry-Boxer bill faces.

It’s very clear there’s little public agreement in the U.S. about global warming, or what we should do about it. In the eyes of much of the rest of the world this once again makes the U.S. a rogue nation. Tops in greenhouse gases, along with China, but not willing to admit we need to do anything about it.

November 1st, 2009

The current system is stacked against greentech in big buildings

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 11:39 am

Categories: Blogroll, air pollution, building, conservation, energy, engineering, environmental health, fossil fuel, geothermal, green tech, housing, law & politics, recycling, renewable energy, solar, water, wind

Tags: Green Technology, Harry Fuller' Other World Computing, wind turbine, OWC, Illinois, LEED, Larry O'Connor, building design, geothermal heating, electricity

The current financial systems in the United States makes it very difficult to build a large building using green technology. Most large buildings are built with loans. Those loans are based on standard commercial building costs. So much for warehouse space, so much for office space, etc. There is no margin for the added costs of putting in greener tech or better insulation or windows.

OUTSIDE THE SYSTEM
I recently had the pleasure of speaking with one American CEO who actually went outside the banking system to get his new company headquarters built with the best of current green tech. The loan from the bank paid for a minority of the project, the rest was self-funded by Other World Computing (OWC) in Woodstock, Illinois. CEO Larry O’Connor says his company has always been conservatively run. The don’t like debt and don’t franchise, don’t over-expand.

It can be clearly shown how green tech makes the building more efficient and cheaper to operate. Yet the entire commercial lending and building system is based on least cost, highest profit. There’s no flexible formula to take into account energy or other operating costs or savings. The loan is so much per square foot, take it or leave it.

As O’Connor described it to me, “The bank doesn’t change the appraisal value of building, they do it on square footage. That’s a potential hinderance on long-term green investments.”

The assumption is recent years has been: buy land, build cheaply, flip the commercial space and move on. Let the next sucker worry about energy costs. Of course, at the construction stage it’s more costly to put up a wind turbine or install a geothermal heating system. But those are systems that deliver real savings to the building operator every year. O’Connor told me the geothermal heating system was 10% of the total project cost, way more than a standard gas furnace. But OWC will never pay a cent for natural gas heating, and has a greatly reduced carbon footprint as well.

OWC has built a headquarters he hopes will be in use for decades. No flipping here. So as they looked at green tech for power and water and paper, etc., they realized there’s a great ROI despite the higher original cost. Sure it’s cheaper to build an office building with single pane windows, standard electric or gas heating, powered by the local grid. But those operating costs, month after month, add up. And the company becomes hostage to vicissitudes of the marketplace for energy, water, paper.

As I blogged about OWC earlier, their offices are wind-powered, they have extensive LEED certified green tech for water and heating, a permeable parking area that collects and then cleans run-off, and numerous other clean tech features. O’Conner said the technology is not new, but there’s little incentive or even loan mechanism to get the tech in use for large buildings.

Naively, I asked about the great tax breaks and rebates for putting in greentech. That’s for your home or mine. Office buildings: zilch. O’Connor said they made these green choices because the ROI is so clear and it frees his company from the almost certain grief of the next energy price run-up.

O’Connor said all the tech in their building was installed by local contractors using standard equipment. He said it’s important to work with a design firm that really knows LEED buildings and green tech. That’s where the whole system gets put together before any site work is done. For OWC’s new green HQ it was Harris Architects in Palantine, Illinois.

October 28th, 2009

Hearings on climate, cap'n'trade, energy

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 4:07 pm

Categories: Blogroll, air pollution, biofuel, cars & traffic, climate change, conservation, energy, environmental health, federal government, fossil fuel, global warming, green tech, law & politics, mass transit, nuclear power, petroleum, renewable energy, solar, tidal, water, weather, wind

Tags: Cap-and-Trade, Senate Committe, Harry Fuller

A Senate Committe is hearing testimony on all sides of the energy, global warming, cap and trade issures. No minds will be changed, but we should see if there’s some way to capture all that hot air, use it to turn a turbine.

It’s the public hearings on the Kerry-Boxer energy and climate bill. C-Span has provided some live coverage of the hearings. They also have archives that you can watch on their website. C-Span does not allow excerpts to appear on youtube.

The White House would like to see this bill passed and they’re working on corporate execs to get behind the cap and trade provision. That means setting standards so lenient that everybody profits except the atmopshere.

Not all Dems favor this current bill with its 900+ pages. And as we blogged here a few weeks back, the elected officials are piqued that the appointed EPA may beat them to the punch in regulating greenhouse gases. Republicans on the committee may simply miss the meetings so there’s no quorum for the necessary procedures to get the bill out of committee. Most of the right-wing groups that lobby Congress hate the very idea of what they call “cap-and-tax.” Much of vocal opposition to any version of the Kerry-Boxer bill comes in the form of “it’ll cripple our economy, kill jobs, etc.” I can recall the exact same arguments were used years ago to try to stop legislation that curtailed emissions that were leading to greater ozone holes and acid rain. Those problems were finally dealt with and, guess what, the economy has been more crippled by business practices than anti-pollution regs. We never seem to learn much from history, do we?

Testifying before the committee were three cabinet secretaries: Transportation, Energy and Interior, the head of the EPA and the Federal Energy Regulatory Committee (FERC). Groups representing businesses and environmental interests, city and state governments will be heard from. Among Wednesday’s witnesses: Dan Reicher, Google’s Dir. of Climate & Energy Initiatives.

Here’s the website of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee. The committee is chaired by liberal Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and the minority leader on the committee is global warming denier Senator James Imhofe (R-OK). It fits. California is a major oil importing state and we know that Oklahoma is an oil exporter. Boxer is co-author of the bill and her state has a lot of greentech start-ups. Imhofe says it will re-work the entire U.S. economy and he wants to know what effects the bill will have. He’s worried the price of Oklahoma crude might drop. One committee member argued that we Yanks invented nuclear power and should build a hundred nuclear plants and electrify half our cars and trucks and not need a tax on carbon, so there!

The three days of hearings wrap up tomorrow. The bills’ official poetic moniker: “S. 1733, Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act.”

You wanna read the bill? Here’s the full PDF. So don’t believe the blather when some say “I never saw the bill before we voted.”

And here are a series of summaries put together by the proponents of the bill.

One provision of the bill that is more stringent than the bill passed last spring by the House: it calls for a 20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, not just 17%. That gives everybody something to fight over.

October 26th, 2009

Midwest tech firm now wind driven

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 2:52 pm

Categories: Blogroll, air pollution, building, conservation, energy, engineering, environmental health, geothermal, green tech, recycling, renewable energy, solar, water, weather, wind

Tags: Other World Computing, Telecom & Utilities, Harry Fuller

Other World Computing (OWC) is in McHenry County, Illinois, and now their power comes from the wind. OWC claims the title of “first 100 percent on-site wind powered technology manufacturer/distributor in the U.S.” It’s using Vestas-made wind turbines for all its daily electricity needs.

The new OWC Wind Turbine will generate an estimated 1,200,000 kWh (kilowatt hours) per year – more than double the 500,000 kWh per year of energy the OWC building operations require. Under Illinois law OWC can sell that unused electricity back to the local electric company.

OWC says its wind turbine installation was designed to produce power at wind speed as low as 9 mph. The OWC campus averages wind speed of 10-15 mph. The wind turbine sits atop a tower 131 feet high. The blades extend the turbine’s total height to 194 feet. The blade housing can rotate 360 degrees so it can turn facing into winds up to 150 mph. During extreme winds, the blades automatically go “flat” with the narrowest point into the wind and in essence, shut the turbine down until it senses safe operational wind speeds. Whenever there isn’t adequate wind power generation, the local utility company will remain as the backup power source for OWC. Additionally, in the event of a combined wind and utility company power blackout, OWC has two additional on-site backup power systems so it can continue serving its customers without interruption.

OWC HQ’s OTHER GREEN INITIATIVES

• Geo-thermal ground-coupled heat pump system

• Fiber optic rooftop light-harvesting technology

• High insulation value glass windows and exterior sunshade technology for reduced cooling costs

• High insulation value materials throughout the building for reduced energy use

• “Smart” sensors to detect and adjust energy in unused rooms

• Permeable Paver system for environmentally friendly run-off water handling

• Bio Swales landscaping for water conservation

• Use of native plants and prairie grasses for water conservation

• Sloan Waterless Urinals and dual-mode toilets for water conservation

• Sloan high-efficiency hand driers in washrooms for energy/paper savings and a drinking water filtration system to eliminate need for delivered water

• Company-wide recycling with near-zero waste generation

• Low-impact cleaning products

On their website OWC bills itself as 100% wind-powered. It is primarily an Apple and Mac service and sales company that supplie numerous iPod and iPhone add-ons. They’re based in Woodstock, Illinois, northwest of the Chicago conurbation.

Vestas, which made the wind turbine, is a century-old Danish company which claims 20% of the world wind turbine market.

October 19th, 2009

The real-life energy battles are NOT fought in Congress

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 2:36 pm

Categories: Blogroll, conservation, energy, federal government, fossil fuel, law & politics, water, wind

Tags: U.S. Congress, Energy Battle, Harry Fuller

Here’s another sign that whatever happens on energy in Congress, if anything, will be a sideshow: the EPA plans to reject a permit for a new coal mine in West Virginia. The planned mine would be yet another mountaintop removal. That is a direct slap at Big Coal in the most coal-dependent state in America. No more: mine, baby, mine.
This will be the first time such a permit has been rejected since the Clean Water Act was signed into law in 1972 by President Nixon. The EPA will veto a permit for the coal mine that was issued previously by the Corps of Engineers, never accused of being overly protective of the planet. This will surely end up in court and lengthly litigation, not to mention highly toxic fulminations in the U.S. Senate. Both Senators from West Virginia are Democrats and both are opposed to the EPA exercising its power this way in their state.
The coal company execs are shocked, shocked, I tell you.
WEST VIRGINIA COAL
Here are some facts showing the importance of coal to the state’s economy and politics. Like $2 billion in payrolls annually. West Virginia, dominated by the coal industry, is the second poorest state in the U.S. Sound familiar? We electricity users get cheap energy, West Virginians get screwed and the local environment gets trashed. And now the EPA has effrontery to break up this business cycle?

GREEN OR GHASTLY?
It’s not simply coal that’s controversial in West Virginia. Is a wind farm green or ghsatly? Local activists are now fighting against a planned mountaintop wind farm. Meanwhile other green activists are asking for a mountain top wind farm, instead of another coal mine blasting off the peak.