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New report defines true cost of wind turbine operations & maintenance

Independent wind energy analysts have been working with Wind Energy Update to determine exactly how much turbine operators and investors can expect to invest in operations and maintenance over coming years – and how such costs can be mitigated.

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Weekly Intelligence Brief: February 22 – March 01

This week’s news roundup includes wind energy development on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf; Mitsubishi Power Systems; NS Power; NOVA; Iberdrola Renovables; RWE Innogy; Gamesa & BARD; and Centrica.

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Hydrogen Fuel Prices at the Pump and Costs to Consumers

Last week I talked about the price of converting fossil fueled vehicles into H2ICE cars. So, this week I thought I would follow up and talk about the price at the pump of hydrogen fuel to consumers.

Right now, consumers can convert their own cars, trucks and other vehicles to run on hydrogen. Or they can become a part of Project Driveway and test drive a vehicle for free for several months or they can become part of the Honda FCX Clarity program and lease a hydrogen fuel cell car for around $600 per month.

If you’re lucky enough to find yourself driving a hydrogen car, the first question you may ask is about where you would go to find a hydrogen fueling station. This hydrogen fuel locator page lists several resources that will aid in this endeavor.

Another question frequently asked is how much does a person pay at the pump for compressed hydrogen fuel? Now, this has nothing to do with the costs to produce hydrogen as this is a whole different discussion, too lengthy to take on here.

But, since I was curious about the price at the pump charged for compressed hydrogen gas I made a few phone calls, sent a few emails and even Tweeted in order to take a survey.

According to the California Fuel Cell Partnership (CaFCP) listed in Twitter, “In CA, you can’t sell hydrogen as a retail fuel. The regulations 2 allow retail sales are expected to be complete within the next 18 months.”

So I asked about the hydrogen fueling station in Irvine, California (which at least a couple of years ago when I was there) had a posted price of $4.99 per kilogram (equivalent to a gallon), and CaFCP replied, “The price is there as an educational tool to show what the cost of h2 can be and to give the station a realistic feel.”

So, I decided to call the West Los Angeles Shell Station, which is a regular gas station in Santa Monica, California that also has a hydrogen pump. I asked Nely Lopez, who works at the station what the price is at the pump and he told me that for now hydrogen is free, but he doesn’t know how long it will stay this way.

Since Shell has U. S. hydrogen fueling stations in California, New York and Washington, DC I decided to call their national headquarters in Houston, Texas to see if hydrogen fuel was free at all Shell stations nationwide.

I talked to Jerry Wilt who said he was in charge of the Shell Hydrogen program. He told me that hydrogen fuel was indeed free right now at all of the Shell hydrogen fueling stations and pumps while they were in the demo phase. He didn’t know how long this phase would last, however.

But, though I did find out that hydrogen fuel was free at these stations, I also found out that free hydrogen was not true for all stations in the U. S. When I contacted Tony Lindsay, R&D Manager, Hydrogen and Advanced Technology, he told me a different story for his hydrogen pump.

Mr. Lindsay told me about his hydrogen station in Des Plaines, Illinois just outside of Chicago, “We have set the price at $3.49 per kg because this was our calculated goal of production from our on-site small scale steam methane reformer (based on $0.60 per therm natural gas).”

Because hydrogen fuel cell cars and refueling stations are considered emerging technologies right now, there is no across the board standardization in the U. S. marketplace. Whereas hydrogen fuel prices at the pump in one location may be free, another one may charge. This will work itself in the months and years to come as hydrogen used as fuel becomes more standardized and more of a norm and less of a demonstration as it is right now.

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Nanotube Ink-Treated Office Paper Could Make Batteries More Potent

Yi Cui, a researcher from Stanford and his team have succeeded making office paper into an electrode by dipping it into nanotube ink. The resulted dipped paper becomes a strong, flexible and highly conductive material that could be incorporated into lightweight batteries or serving as an electrode in high-energy ultracapacitors. The nanotube-treated paper can store much more energy than classic batteries.

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MIESC’s Printable Battery at International Rechargeable Battery Expo

Printable batteries have long been sought after, but only recently scientists have been able to figure out a way to make them in a viable technological process. Mie Industry Enterprise Support Center (MIESC) has built a prototype lithium storage battery in the form of a sheet, by using only printing technology.

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University of Central Florida Researchers Confirm Battery Breakthrough Developed by Planar Energy
ORLANDO, Fla. – March 1, 2010 (Investorideas.com Renewable/Green Newswire) – Researchers at the University of Central Florida’s (UCF) Advanced Materials Processing and Analysis Center (AMPAC) have verified findings by Planar Energy that could lead to dramatic cost and performance improvements in large format batteries required for practical electric vehicles.

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Solar Stocks; GT Solar International (NASDAQ: SOLR) Announces Secondary Offering of 25 million Shares of Common Stock by a Selling Stockholder
MERRIMACK, N.H. – March 1, 2010 (Investorideas.com Renewable/Green Newswire) – On March 1, 2010, GT Solar International, Inc. (NASDAQ: SOLR), announced a secondary offering of 25 million shares of its common stock by one selling stockholder

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U.S. EPA Unearths Green Jobs in Brownfields

The U.S. EPA has launched a program to push to recover brownfields for renewable energy generation. The initiative, called RE-PAL for RE-Powering America’s Land (pdf alert), is focusing on solar energy, wind and biomass projects that provide local economic benefits in the form of new jobs.  In doing so, RE-PAL pulls together five powerful trends: the use of low cost “green remediation,” the repurposing of brownfields to revitalize blighted communities, the generation of energy locally instead of building expensive new power plants, the promotion of green jobs, and the development of genuinely clean, renewable energy options for communities that refuse to tolerate new fossil fuel energy facilities.

Surely RE-PAL can’t be an accidental an acronym for a program like this, so let’s give our new best friend a shout-out.  The program is kicking off with a study of twelve sites spread across the U.S. including one in Puerto Rico, but in fact it’s been flying under the radar on an ad hoc basis for a while now, racking up some impressive brownfields-to-energy credits along the way.

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“Local Energy Revolution” in the UK?

Ed Miliband, energy and climate change secretary in the UK, is outlining plans this week to start a “local energy revolution” in the UK.

This system would make it easier for local councils to generate electricity and sell it to the grid. It allows them to individually or jointly form renewable energy companies

This builds on a coming and much-anticipated feed-in tariff incentive scheme for the country.

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