Eideard

Ain’t any cloud of smoke hovering overhead either!

Norway has opened the world’s first osmotic power plant, which produces emissions-free electricity by mixing fresh water and sea water through a special membrane.

State-owned utility Statkraft’s prototype plant, which for now will produce a tiny 2-4 kilowatts of power or enough to run a coffee machine, will enable Statkraft to test and develop the technology needed to drive down production costs.

The plant is driven by osmosis that naturally draws fresh water across a membrane and toward the seawater side. This creates higher pressure on the sea water side, driving a turbine and producing electricity…

Statkraft, Europe’s largest producer of renewable energy with experience in hydropower that provides nearly all of Norway’s electricity, aims to begin building commercial osmotic power plants by 2015…

Osmotic power, which can be located anywhere where clean fresh water runs into the sea, is seen as more reliable than more variable wind or solar energy.

Cripes – it’s been too many decades since I encountered osmosis. Reverse osmosis, pressure-driven, is pretty common here in high desert country. Purifying brackish underground reservoirs into potable water.

RTFA. Sounds interesting and productive.

A second plant that converts cow dung into energy for homes opened in the Netherlands.

Manure from cows at a nearby dairy farm will be fermented along with grass and food industry residues, and the biogas released during the process will be used as fuel for the thermal plant’s gas turbines.

The heat generated will be distributed to around 1,100 homes in the area around Leeuwarden in the north of the Netherlands, the plant’s operator Essent said in a statement.

Firms in Europe and elsewhere have been investing in biogas plants and this is the second of its scale running on cow manure in the Netherlands. It follows another plant that Essent opened in January.

Why is this restricted to cow poop? Seems to me any kind of poop could be used – along with the scraps and garbage our civilization manages to produce.

Think of what we could get from a regular session of Congress.

The barefoot solar engineers, Talsa Miniaka, Pulka Wadeka, Minakshi Diwan, and Bundei Hidreka, live in Tinginapu, in the Eastern Ghats of Orissa. They now have a contract to build 3000 solar-powered lanterns for schools and other institutions and they are training other people in the community.

Bravo!

Ken Weaver had a problem with his past. A decade of scheming, stealing and prison made for many inconvenient truths. So by the time Texas licensed him to provide phone and electric service, he had constructed a heroic history.

The college dropout from Duncanville became a dual-degreed university graduate and varsity football legend. The carpenter was transformed into a corporate vice president who developed resorts in Brazil.

The fake pedigree, as well as state inattention, allowed Weaver into the lucrative deregulated utilities market. He was one of a breed of entrepreneurs who saw opportunity in selling expensive electricity to people living on the economic edge.

Weaver’s Freedom Power developed a track record of cutting power to customers in midsummer, despite a state-imposed moratorium on cutoffs during a heat emergency. It also compiled the highest rate of consumer complaints in Texas and one of the highest rates of rule violations of any electricity provider in the state.

The Public Utility Commission, which is supposed to protect consumers in the deregulated market, ultimately fined Weaver’s company $21,050 for a few electrical cutoffs. But it took no other action even after The Dallas Morning News informed it of Weaver’s criminal history and false statements his company made in filings to the commission…

The PUC had little to say about Weaver. One current and two former commissioners said they didn’t know him. Staff lawyers declined to speak on the record.

RTFA. Long and absurd tale of deceptions we’re supposed to accept. The Dallas Morning News cut right through the lies and deceit in a few weeks; but, the Texas Public Utilities Commission never figured it out. They say.

Cyprus has moved closer to reaching the European Union’s renewable energy target by 2020, with the birth of the first wind park on the island.

Expected to be operational by the summer of 2010, the 200 million euro, 82 megawatt (MW) wind farm will be the largest of its kind in the Mediterranean region.

“It is a very big project. Normally in Europe – especially in Greece and Spain – they consider 20 to 30 MW a huge project, so 82 MW is a massive project. It is the biggest in the region,” Akis Ellinas, chairman of D.K. Wind Supply Ltd., told Reuters in an interview ahead of the ground breaking ceremony on Thursday…

Once operational, the site — which is the first to benefit from the new 20 year fixed rate tariff recently approved by the Cyprus government and the EU Commission — will be home to 41 turbines, equivalent to producing 10 percent of the island’s total energy generation capacity.

Bravo!

The Commerce Department has unveiled the first 77 “smart grid” standards aimed at removing a major barrier to the implementation of digital grid technologies.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology draft report (pdf) highlights 31 standards with “relevance” to smart-grid development and another 46 standards as “potentially” applicable to the smart grid.

“Central to this report is cybersecurity,” Secretary Gary Locke said at the GridWeek conference in Washington, D.C. “We need to do it right, but we cannot take forever because everything else depends on the foundation of our cybersecurity efforts.”

While NIST has held three workshops that drew more than 1,500 participants to work on the initial standards, the agency will also collect comments for 30 days on the draft report. After that, NIST will release the final standards report, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission will decide which standards will be authorized, as mandated by the 2007 energy bill.

NIST plans to release the final “phase 1.0″ report by the end of the year.

Some of my favorite skeptics from the gene pool of do-nothings, know-nothings, at the big blogs on the hill will now have a chance to spend the next few months whining. Anything to perpetuate inaction.

No doubt the cybersecurity tasks referenced above are already moving to stricter codification. This can prove to be a useful test.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

A team of environmental scientists from Harvard and Tsinghua University has demonstrated the enormous potential for wind-generated electricity in China. Using extensive meteorological data and incorporating the Chinese government’s energy-bidding and financial restrictions for delivering wind power, the researchers estimate that wind alone has the potential to meet the country’s electricity demands projected for 2030.

The switch from coal and other fossil fuels to greener wind-based energy could also mitigate CO2 emissions, thereby reducing pollution…

China has become second only to the United States in its national power-generating capacity — 792.5 gigawatts per year with an expected future 10 percent annual increase — and is now the world’s largest CO2 emitter. Thus, added McElroy, “the real question for the globe is: What alternatives does China have?”

While wind-generated energy accounts for only 0.4 percent of China’s total current electricity supply, the country is rapidly becoming the world’s fastest-growing market for wind power, trailing only the United States, Germany, and Spain in terms of installed capacities of existing wind farms.

Development of renewable energy in China, especially wind, received an important boost with passage of the Renewable Energy Law in 2005; the law provides favorable tax status for alternative energy investments. The Chinese government also established a concession bidding process to guarantee a reasonable return for large wind projects…

Read the rest of this entry »

On World Population Day this year India’s new health and welfare minister came out with an idea on how to tackle the population issue: Bring electricity to every Indian village so that people would watch television until late at night and therefore be too tired to make babies.

That statement raised eyebrows across this vast country — but what are the realities and reactions from families who make up the second largest population in the world..?

With family planning and free contraceptive programs the Indian government has long tried to encourage families to have only two children.

Overall government statistics show the birth rate is coming down. The numbers show 14 of India’s 35 states have reached the two child per family target. But the push is failing in other states, especially in villages and among the poor and illiterate where the fertility rate is as high as 3.5 children per woman.

There are all kinds of reasons — from the desire to continue having children until a son is born to lack of access to contraceptives.

Aside from a chuckle at a halfway measure like this – one fact does stand out worldwide. The better educated women get to be, the less likely they are to restrict their lives to child-bearing and household labor.

That doesn’t downrate the “traditional” decisions. It just means that with more choices, with a greater understanding and more opportunities, women begin to avail themselves of that wider range.

“A license to print money”

Xcel Energy is proposing a new penalty on Colorado residents who generate their own renewable electricity.

The “infrastructure upkeep fee” could range between $20 and $200 per year, the Denver Post reports. Customers who buy and install their own solar panels would essentially be asked to keep paying for some of the energy they’re no longer using from Xcel’s electricity grid.

“It’s only fair everyone pay for the system,” an Xcel spokesman said, noting that the grid provides a “backup” for solar users.

Huh? Is there any other industry that could get away with proposing something like this? Your customers don’t need your product anymore, so you propose making them pay for it anyway, just in case they need it again someday?

What’s really going on here is the beginning of a potentially massive powershift, one in which Xcel and other large utilities’ customers are increasingly becoming the competition by generating their own electricity. Xcel has a strong record of supporting renewable energy, so long as it’s the one generating the profits.

These are the sort of schmucks who’ve been in charge of so-called public utilities all my life. They get a guaranteed profit structure. State regulators band over backwards [and forwards] to keep them happy. And, of course, you and I pick up the tab.

Thanks, Mike Herron

Like early adopter utilities in California, Texas and Florida, Maryland’s largest utility will soon be rolling out smart grid technology, right in Charm City. Baltimore Gas and Electric Company (BGE), a subsidiary of Constellation Energy, announced Monday that it plans to deploy 2 million smart meters for all of its customers. The rollout will cost an estimated $500 million over five years, but could save BGE’s customers $2.6 billion.

BGE has only filed its smart meter plan with the state regulator — the Maryland Public Service Commission (PSC) — but the utility asked the commission to move quickly on its proposal so that it can also apply for federal smart grid stimulus funds for the project. BGE hopes to get a $200 million grant from DOE stimulus funds, and will file for the funds by August (the deadline for proposals), hoping to receive them by October.

While the program will cost $500 million to deploy and will partly be paid for with rate hikes of up to $1.24 per month for electric customers and $1.52 for gas customers, BGE says savings will be higher than costs by a ratio of 3 to 1. That data comes from BGE’s pilot smart meter trials, which involved 3,000 homes between July and November of 2008. In those trials, BGE found that customers reduced their energy consumption by up to 37 percent during peak electricity periods, and saved $100 on their energy bills.

I imagine replacing your existing electric meter with the new variety shouldn’t be more difficult for your meter reader than it was to replace our old original with a wifi-equipped version a couple years back. The critters only plug-in like a giant glass toadstool fuse – yank out the old and shove the new one into place.

Took longer for the meter dude to walk from his truck around to the back of the house and back – than it took to actually change out the meter. Of course, I don’t now what’s required after that; but, I’d hope it can be accomplished from electricity central station.