Tag Archives: Engineering

Jobs for the Future: Energy Efficiency creates Employment — ECEEE

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Energy efficiency initiatives create jobs, and normally very good jobs.  Recent analysis shows that between 17 and 19 net jobs can be created for every million euros spent.

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>Jobs to improve energy efficiency in all end-use sectors are of high value.  Many require technical qualifications, such as engineering or architectural degrees.  Many require re-training from existing jobs. There will be a demand for financial specialists, construction engineers, behaviour specialists, project managers, auditors, data base managers, policy analysts and the like.  And these jobs are available to all, regardless of age or gender.

The hard work of creating these jobs begins once the Directive is finally approved.  The long-term policy framework needs to be in place and the funding and implementation strategy need to be well developed. But in the longer term, opportunity is knocking at the door, and it deserves a welcome mat.<

See on www.eceee.org

Fukushima leaks will keep fisheries closed indefinately

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Some Japanese fisheries face a long-term threat from the steady trickle of radioactive water from the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>Last month the plant’s owner, Tepco, finally admitted what many had suspected – that the plant was leaking. Now Japan’s Nuclear Regulatory Authority is calling the situation an emergency, and says Tepco’s plans to stop the leak are unlikely to work.

The problem is that groundwater is entering the damaged reactor buildings, picking up radioactive elements like caesium and seeping out to sea. Tepco has spent months pumping the water to the surface and storing it in tanks, and sinking wells to lower the water table.

[…] Given that Tepco is unlikely to stem the leaks from Fukushima any time soon, the fishing ban could continue for a long time. “People ask when will it be safe, and we can’t answer that,” says Buesseler. “The only thing you can do is stop the source, and that’s a huge engineering challenge.”<

See on www.newscientist.com

Net Metering And Rooftop Solar For The Utility Of The Future

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Net metering makes small-scale renewable energy, such as rooftop solar panels, more affordable by crediting the “distributed generation” owners for the excess energy they produce.

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>Why the new focus on net metering?  The cost for rooftop solar panels has fallen 80% since 2008, including 20% in 2012 alone.  Installed rooftop solar energy has increased by 900% between 2000 and 2011.  As consumers install more rooftop solar panels and net meter them, utility revenues will decrease.

Net metering policies vary from state-to-state, including the amount of the payback for excess energy.  The most favorable policy for distributed generation owners is an excess energy credit equal to the full retail energy rate consumers pay for energy, i.e. the amount consumers are charged for using energy.  Most states use this measure.  However, utilities claim this prevents them from recovering their full costs and overpays distributed generation owners, unfairly shifting costs to other consumers.  Utilities say the credit should be equal to the utilities’ wholesale energy cost at the time of day when excess energy flows back to the grid.

Despite attempts by utilities to change net metering policies, state regulators are keeping these policies intact.  Earlier this month, the Idaho Public Utilities Commission rejected Idaho Power’s request to pay less than the full retail rate and to impose higher charges on net metering consumers.  Last month, the Louisiana Public Service Commission rejected similar requests by Louisiana utilities.  More recently, Arizona Public Service Company raised the issue in a ne[…]<

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Glut of Natural gas squeezes biofuel market

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Farm Power Northwest has built five anaerobic digesters in Oregon and Washington in recent years, but the brothers who founded the company say the outlook for new projects has lost its luster.

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>The Mount Vernon, Wash.-based company, founded by brothers Daryl and Kevin Maas, uses manure from dairy farms to create methane gas, then burns it in generators and sells the resulting electricity to power utilities.

[…]

While power utilities paid up to 9 cents per kilowatt-hour several years ago for digester-produced electricity, the rate has now fallen to 5 cents per kilowatt-hour, said Kevin Maas.

The reason is the price of natural gas — a common fuel for electrical generation — has plummeted as domestic production has skyrocketed. Natural gas is now trading at below $4 per thousand cubic feet, compared with nearly $13 per thousand cubic feet in 2008.

That’s because new technology known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has greatly increased the amount of natural gas that can be economically extracted from the ground.

With the cost of natural gas so much lower, other energy feedstocks like biogas from digesters become less competitive, experts say.<

See on www.capitalpress.com

Renewable Energy or Efficiency for the Data Center: Which first? #GreenComputing

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New advancements in green technology and design are making the idea of a green data center into a reality.

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>Without doubt, the facility is a triumph of advanced environmental design and will serve as a template for future construction. Indeed, activity surrounding renewable-based data infrastructure is picking up, with much of it being led by the burgeoning renewable energy industry itself. VIESTE Energy, LCC, for example, has hired design firm Environmental Systems Design (ESD) to plan out a series of data centers across the U.S. that run on 100 percent renewable energy. A key component of the plan is a new biogas-fed generator capable of 8 to 15MW performance. The intent is to prove that renewables are fully capable of delivering reliable, cost-effective service to always-on data infrastructure.

The question of reliability has always weighed heavily on the renewables market, but initiatives like the VIESTE program could help counter those impressions in a very important way, by establishing a grid of distributed, green-energy data supply. In fact, this is the stated goal of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), which has gathered together a number of industry leaders, including AMD, HP and GE, to establish a network of distributed, green data centers that can be used to shift loads, scale infrastructure up and down and in general make it easier for data users to maintain their reliance on renewable energy even if supply at one location is diminished. In other words, distributed architectures improve green reliability through redundancy just as they do for data infrastructure in general.

But not everyone on the environmental side is convinced that renewables are the best means of fostering data center efficiency. In a recent article in the journal Nature Climate Change, Stanford researcher Dr. Jonathan Koomey argues that without populating existing infrastructure with low-power hardware and data-power management technology first, data operators are simply wasting precious renewable resources that could be put to better use elsewhere. For projects like the NWSC and VIESTE, then, renewables may make sense because they power state-of-the-art green technology. But not as an industry-wide solution–renewables won’t make sense until hardware life cycles run their course.<

See on www.itbusinessedge.com

Wireless Transmission of Energy in Buildings – Building Automation

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Energy harvesting wireless technology becomes more attractive for OEMs as a basis technology for products and solutions that contribute to a building’s efficient energy management. The wireless modules gain their power from the surrounding environment…

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>Energy harvesting technology enables batteryless automation devices and systems to make buildings more energy-efficient based on sustainable, resource-saving technologies that eliminate the need for batteries. […]

In a complex commercial building scenario, EnOcean Link can be implemented on a central device, like a control server, which controls the whole building, holds the automation intelligence, and can be physically located outside the building (in the cloud). Several gateways in the building record radio telegrams from thousands of distributed batteryless wireless sensors and relay receivers, and send back information or command data when needed. These gateways are connected to the control server by a backbone, which does not have to be based on EnOcean radio, or even be wireless. The middleware, located in the central unit, interprets all telegrams received by the gateways and provides them to the automation system.

High energy efficiency goals demand flexible automation systems for all kind of buildings that cover several areas. This particularly affects retrofit projects, where the intelligent control of energy consumption is the key factor for a building’s improved energy and carbon footprint. Energy harvesting wireless technology fulfills the demands for today’s and tomorrow’s automation and energy management systems. […]<

See on www.manufacturing.net

New Report: The Pulp and Paper Industry Can Save Jobs by Becoming More Energy Efficient

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“The pulp and paper mill industry may be able to avoid large cuts in jobs by reducing energy costs.”

wklc's avatarWEST KOOTENAY LABOUR COUNCIL

http://inthesetimes.com   Saturday Jul 20, 2013 10:00 am

By Kari Lydersen

The pulp and paper mill industry may be able to avoid large cuts in jobs by reducing energy costs.   (Ann Baekken/ Flickr / Creative Commons).

The complex relationship between efficiency, productivity and employment has been debated at great length by academics and policymakers, who often come to widely differing conclusions about whether jobs will inherently be sacrificed as industry gets more efficient. A prime example is occurring in the U.S. pulp and paper industry, which, over the last decade, has seen productivity and exports grow, even as hundreds of mills closed and 100,000 workers—30 percent of the industry’s workforce—lost their jobs.

But a new report released last week by the environmental think tank World Resources Institute (WRI) proposes that by investing in overhauls that increase energy efficiency, thereby cutting costs on electricity and improving productivity, the country’s paper…

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Community Energy Storage Project Stalls

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Two years ago, AEP Ohio kicked off one of the largest community energy storage projects in the nation, funded in part by the U.S. Department of Energy. The pilot, however, did not go very far.

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>AEP and S&C, which was the vendor for the pilot, declined to speak specifically about the project and the shortcomings of the batteries, although the two will continue to work together on a much smaller scale.

Small scale is exactly where community energy storage is at. It’s not only the scale of the batteries that are small (compared to megawatt, grid-level storage), but also the scale of utility uptake. “We haven’t seen any mass deployment,” said Mike Edmonds, vice president of strategic solutions for S&C. “It’s a very young market.” Instead, utilities are dipping their toes in the water by testing just a few units.<

See on theenergycollective.com

Congress and Light Bulb Regulation | The Energy Collective

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Light bulbs, as you may recall, have become a perennial excuse for certain federal legislators to whip up the conservative base, by railing again new federal energy efficiency standards.

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

Relamping projects have been an easy way to score energy efficiency gains in buildings since the 1990’s.  Inefficient incandescent light bulbs have given way to fluorescent tubes, compact fluorescent and now LED technology.

Within these stages of development each form of lighting have seen their own evolution.  The driving forces for these increases in lighting efficiency are economic starting back with the 1970’s energy crunch.

Taken from a blog on CFL development & history:

“In 1973-74 the oil crisis took place and lamp companies needed to reduce wattage in their linear (tube) lamps to compensate. Many people had four bulb fixtures and were removing two bulbs, to save energy, therefore dropping sales by half. This forced lamp companies to create energy efficient solution.

Ed worked on creating lamp with reduced wattage by adding krypton and a conductive tin coating inside. This helped lower the wattage from 40 to 35 watts but he wanted to get down to 30 watts. He continued to work and finally the wattage went from 35 to 34 and eventually 32 watts!”
http://bit.ly/149GANs

See on theenergycollective.com

It’s Time Our Policies Reflect The Fact That Energy And Water Are Fundamentally Intertwined

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For a long time, we’ve overlooked the inextricable relationship between water and energy use.  Coal, nuclear and natural gas plants use enormous amounts of steam to create electricity.  Producing all of that steam requires 190,000 million gallons of water per day, or 39% of all freshwater withdrawals in the nation.

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>The longstanding division between energy and water considerations is particularly evident in the case of energy and water management.  These resources are fundamentally intertwined: Energy is used to secure, deliver, treat and distribute water, while water is used (and often degraded) to develop, process and deliver energy.

Despite the inherent connection between the two sectors, energy and water planners routinely make decisions that impact one another without adequately understanding the scientific or policy complexities of the other sector.  This miscommunication often hides joint opportunities for conservation to the detriment of budgets, efficiency, the environment and public health, and inhibits both sectors from fully accounting for the financial, environmental or social effects they have on each other.

This lack of collaboration between energy and water planners is especially dire considering Texas is in midst of an energy shortage that is exacerbated by the multi-year drought.  Without adequate planning, we could someday have to choose between keeping our lights on and turning on the faucet.<

See on blogs.edf.org