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One Building that Proves Solar Power Can Be Profitable
In central France lies Poitiers, a city rich in Roman architecture and medieval history. Modern building in Poitiers is constructing a new sort of history, however, an energy-efficient, solar-powered and potentially profitable history. Sipea, a local non-profit builder of social housing in the city, is installing solar electricity at its headquarters to sell back to [...]

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Why Geothermal Power Deserves More Hype
Here at CalFinder Solar, we focus mainly on residential solar power, and for good reason. Solar energy is chock-full of benefits for homes, humanity and the earth as a whole, and will definitely play a primary role in the coming transition to renewable power. But the issue of intermittency, a significant disadvantage for solar power [...]

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Electric Car with Fuel Cell Range Extender Due in Late 2010

Proton Power Systems and Smith Electric Vehicles have teamed up to produce an electric car with fuel cell range extender. This terminology will most likely go over better with battery electric vehicle fans than the term hydrogen fuel cell hybrid vehicle.

Most likely the term electric car with fuel cell range extender was chosen because the electric car without the range extender has a range of about 100 miles. By adding the Proton Power PM200 fuel cell the car picks up another 86 miles in range. Had those numbers been swapped, however we’d most likely be calling this a fuel cell hybrid electric vehicle.

The first commercial EV with FC range extender will be rolled out in Germany in the last quarter of 2010. The first customers will be fleet operators and local authorities. It makes sense that the first vehicles would rollout in Germany which is part of the European Union Hydrogen Highway system.

Germany, which has an area of 137,000 square miles has 30 hydrogen fueling stations in place with a commitment to the acceleration in building more H2 stations over the next 5 years. By comparison, California has an area of 164,000 square miles and has 27 hydrogen fueling stations operational, but not all are open to the public.

Visit the original post at: Fuel Cell News

Five unsung cleantech executives
The Cleantech Group’s upcoming Cleantech Forum in San Francisco will feature familiar names, and 5 names you’ll recognize in time, writes Cleantech’s Greg Neichin.

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$19 Million for New Energy Efficiency Projects in San Francisco

Energy efficiency may not have the glamor of solar power or wind power, but it’s also a critical and immediate solution to cutting pollution.

Today, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom announced $19.2 million in funding for energy efficiency programs through the San Francisco Energy Watch program and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

In the announcement, Newsom highlighted the creation of new local jobs through the programs and outlined the total energy and financial savings from the San Francisco’s energy efficiency work on city buildings during the last 6 years.

“San Francisco’s energy-efficiency programs demonstrate how protecting the environment creates jobs and helps businesses and property owners save money,” said Mayor Newsom. “To dramatically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, we have to be responsible stewards of our buildings and facilities. That’s why we are leveraging all these funds to create green jobs and further our environmental goals.”

Of the $19.2 million, $11.5 million is new funding for free on-site assessments of energy savings as well as the installation of energy-efficient lighting, refrigeration, heating, air conditioning, and food service equipment at greatly reduced costs. This program, in its first phase, has already delivered over 2,000 energy efficiency retrofits to mid and small-sized businesses and multi-family housing in San Francisco.

From the $7.7 million San Francisco was awarded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) for energy efficiency programs that conserve energy in municipal buildings (including health centers, county jail buildings, and cultural centers), $3.1 million will now be used to conduct energy efficiency upgrades to an array of facilities in the city (including the Ella Hill Hutch Center and Southeast Health Center). These upgrades will result in nearly $3 million dollars in savings each year.

JobsNow

The recent expansion of the city’s energy efficiency programs have been aided by JobsNow employees that have been trained to introduce the Energy Watch program to San Francisco businesses. JobsNow is a stimulus-funded jobs program created by the City to put unemployed citizens to work. The program has already put nearly 1,700 San Franciscans back to work.

“We go to local businesses and tell them how they can save money by working with our program, installing new light bulbs and the like,” said Lee Williams of the JobsNow program. “Our team has learned so much by working with this program. We are all so happy to have this job. But to have a job where we also learn so much and do something we can feel good about, now that’s exciting.”

SF Environment’s combined energy efficiency programs dating back to 2001 have reduced the city’s overall energy use by 29 MW. The city expects to gain an additional 6 MW savings from these initiatives—totaling 35 MW — enough to power over 30,000 San Francisco residences.

More great news from the great city of San Francisco!

Image Credit: Mike G.K. via flickr under a CC license

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“Carbon Tax” More Popular than “Cap-and-Trade” with US Voters

Well, it is a surprise to me, and probably to a lot of people. But news from the US Climate Task Force and Fortune 500 is that US voters prefer a straight carbon tax over cap-and-trade once they are educated a little bit on the two options. This is what a recent survey shows. The survey finds that American voters actually prefer a carbon tax by a ratio of more than 2:1!

Why might this be the case?

People are a bit averse to taxes. We all know that. However, according to Frank Luntz’ major new study on climate and energy issues, people really want to see “accountability for businesses and corporations.” Maybe once they understand what a carbon tax is compared to cap-an-trade, people feel that a carbon tax would take care of that issue most effectively. This is the first thought that comes to my head.

Of course, the concern that comes to my mind immediately after that is that once the issue hits mainstream media more, the anti-climate and clean energy crew would use the word “tax” to their advantage to scare the hell out of the general populous. But, of course, they will do the same with “cap-and-trade” and perhaps just as effectively.

Another issue that may have put the carbon tax higher in the minds of US voters is the fact that the second highest priority for people regarding “energy reform” (which they strongly supported) was that it “minimize new government bureaucracy.” Perhaps, with a cap-and-trade system looking so much more bureaucratic, people wanted to stay away from that more than the carbon tax.

The US Climate Task Force and Fortune 500 have their own list of some specific reasons why people seemed to favor a carbon tax, (the last of which I just conjectured about above). “Voters’ preference for a carbon tax approach to energy and climate change policy is grounded in a range of specific perceived benefits, including the notion that a carbon tax would have a greater positive impact on the environment, be better for the U.S. economy and for U.S. taxpayers, and also do more to achieve other important priorities, such as incentivizing energy-efficient behavior and minimizing new government bureaucracy.”

This preference for a carbon tax was “broadly shared among a diverse array of audiences and holds up across partisan and geographic divides.”

With a proposed bill still a priority but spending a lot of time in the back rooms of Congress right now, perhaps a shift from a cap-and-trade system to a carbon tax system is still an option.

The survey was conducted by telephone and included about 1,000 respondents from August 24-31, 2009.

via ecopolitology

Related Stories:
1) Hollywood Getting into the Action [Video]
2) Who’s More Powerful than Obama?
3) Who Wants a Climate & Energy Bill? 83 Leading US Companies

Image Credit: Denise Cross via flickr under a CC license

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Astounding Discovery: Marine Algae Using Quantum Mechanics Principles for Light Harvesting

Professor Greg Scholes, the lead author of the study published recently in Nature, says: “There’s been a lot of excitement and speculation that nature may be using quantum mechanical practices. Our latest experiments show that normally functioning biological systems have the capacity to use quantum mechanics in order to optimize a process as essential to their survival as photosynthesis.”

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Investorideas.com Creates New Cleantech Investing Social Network at Socialgo.com
POINT ROBERTS, WA and DELTA, BC - February 4, 2010 - Investorideas.com, a leading global investor and industry portal for the cleantech sector announces it has created a new cleantech investor social network at www.socialgo.com

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A thousand barrels a second by Tertzakian (2007) (review)

Peter Tertzakian has a double education in geophysics and economics and is “Chief Energy Economist” at a Canadian energy investment company. His book “A Thousand Barrels a Second: The Coming Oil Breakpoint and Challenges facing an energy dependent world” was published in 2007, but was, based on the contents of the book, presumably written up around 2005.

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Visit the original post at: Energy News

A thousand barrels a second by Tertzakian (2007) (review)

Peter Tertzakian has a double education in geophysics and economics and is “Chief Energy Economist” at a Canadian energy investment company. His book “A Thousand Barrels a Second: The Coming Oil Breakpoint and Challenges facing an energy dependent world” was published in 2007, but was, based on the contents of the book, presumably written up around 2005.

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Visit the original post at: Energy News

Biofuel Developments
I woke up in Switzerland this morning after having spent the past 3 days in the Netherlands. Later today I travel to Germany. The weather here is cold. I love Europe, but do not miss riding my bike in rain that is 1 degree above freezing (as I had to do in the Netherlands on Tuesday). Switzerland is blanketed with snow; the country from the air looks like a Christmas card. I have been told that there is even more snow in Dresden, which is my next stop.

I have been trying to keep up on energy news, and there have been some interesting developments. The previous essay has also hit the 200 comment mark (Blogger is clearly not designed to deal with over 200 comments), so it’s time to put something else out there. A number of people have either commented here or sent me an e-mail about the recent LS9 news:

Bacteria rebuilt to make oil

Researchers have engineered a common type of bacteria to produce biodiesel and other goodies from plain old plants. The microbial trickery, detailed today in the journal Nature, promises to add “nature’s petroleum” to America’s energy supply within the next few years.

“We’ve got a billion tons of biomass every year that goes unused,” said Jay Keasling, a co-author of research study and chief executive officer for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute, or JBEI. “We’d like to turn that into fuel.”

Keasling emphasized that the study published in Nature was a “proof of concept” rather than the demonstration of a commercially viable process. He and his colleagues are looking for a process that would utilize as much of the feedstock as possible, and not just the hemicellulose. “We got about 10 percent of the theoretical maximum yield, and we will continue to work on this to try to increase the yield,” he said.

One of the funders for the research is LS9, a California-based biotech company that intends to market fuels and other microbe-produced chemicals. “I’m reasonably optimistic that we’re going to have high-level production of these kinds of biofuels in the next couple of years,” Keasling said. Check out this Berkeley Lab news release to learn more about the research.

I have written a number of articles about LS9 (see LS9’s Oil-Crapping Bugs from three years ago), which I could summarize in this way. There are metabolic pathways that produce molecules that are very close to the structure of fuels. Our bodies produce fats, which aren’t chemically that far removed from diesel. It is probably technically possible to tweak those metabolic pathways to produce drop-in replacements for transportation fuels.

On the other hand, it is going to be technically quite challenging. So I deemed this a very interesting approach (in fact I have called it a Holy Grail), but I don’t place the odds of commercial success very high. If enough companies are attempting this, maybe someone will make it work, but the odds for any individual company to succeed in this area will be low in my opinion.

Then there was Shell’s announcement on a sugarcane ethanol JV in Brazil:

Shell, Cosan Sign $12B Brazilian JV Pact

LONDON (Dow Jones)–Shell International Petroleum Company Ltd, a unit of Royal Dutch Shell PLC (RDSA), and Cosan S.A. (CZZ) said Monday they have signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding, or MoU, to form a $12 billion joint venture in Brazil for the production of ethanol, sugar and power, and the supply, distribution and retail of transportation fuels.

-Shell will also contribute its 50% share interest in Iogen and its 14.7% share interest in Codexis.

Sugarcane ethanol is also a story that I have covered in great detail:

Brazilian Ethanol is Sustainable

The key to the success of sugarcane ethanol as a true competitor to fossil fuels is the fact that massive amounts of bagasse end up at the sugarcane plants. That bagasse is then essentially free fuel for driving the ethanol process - and the logistical issues of getting biomass to the plant are already worked out. If you had to go out and harvest bagasse for use as fuel, then it would be a totally different process. But all of those logistical steps - including the labor and energy of getting the bagasse to the plant - are already being done as a result of processing the sugarcane.

At the plant, the bagasse has been pulverized and washed during the processing of the sugarcane, so it is a relatively clean fuel that has had many ash components washed out. Burning bagasse for fuel means that sugarcane ethanol isn’t nearly as dependent on cheap fossil fuels as is the case with some flavors of ethanol. For this reason, I am a fan of sugarcane ethanol as a model of how to do biofuels in a sustainable manner (not that sugarcane production as is often practiced is completely sustainable, but it is definitely in the right direction in my opinion).

On the other hand, we have to bear in mind that tropical countries have certain advantages with respect to rainfall and solar insolation, and just because Brazil can do it doesn’t mean temperate climates can follow the same model:

http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/2006/06/lessons-from-brazil.html

That’s all the time I have for now. Bis bald!

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Riversimple Fuel Cell Car Project Continues to Plod Along

People are getting more and more excited about green automobiles, so it was kind of surprising to see such a neutral reaction to the Fuel Cell Car by Riversimple. While this project has a very interesting slant from other cars that we have seen in this niche, it was met with a very lukewarm [...]
Posted in: Fuel Cells, Hydrogen Fuel, Transportation

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Leilani Münter’s ‘Eco Dream-Team’ Announces NASCAR Green Challenge
Daytona Beach, Fl. - When Leilani Münter gets behind the wheel, people watch. But if she has her way at Daytona’s ARCA Series race on February 6th, they’ll also listen. This is one driver who is using the platform of the raceway to educate fans about climate change, and the steps they can take in the race to save the planet.
Visit the original post at: Renewable Energy News - RenewableEnergyWorld.com