Tag Archives: Power Production

Dynamic Energy – A Leader in Energy Solutions | Combined Heat & Power

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See on Scoop.it – Green Building Design – Architecture & Engineering

Dynamic Energy develops energy projects that reduce customers’ expenses, improve operating efficiency, provide an attractive return on investment, and help achieve sustainability goals.

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

CHP Financing – Direct Purchase

There are many reasons why now is a great time for CHP. Dynamic can provide multiple financing options including:

Purchasing a CHP system provides many benefits including:
• Traditional bank financing
• Federal 10% Investment Tax Credit
• Accelerated depreciation (MACRS)
• Aggressive state level incentives
• Locked forward natural gas contracts
• Significant thermal & electrical savings

Power Purchase Agreement
A Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) provides the host customer power and heat at a discounted rate, with no capital requirement. A third party investor owns the CHP system and eneters into a long term power contract with the host. PPAs provide the following benefits to host customers:

• No upfront cost or capital required
• Projects are cash flow positive from day one
• Predictable energy pricing & hedge against electricity prices
• No system performance or operating risk and no maintenance
• Align with organizational sustainability goals
• Press and media outreach

[For example of financing options, not intended as a corporate endorsement.]  DT

See on dynamicenergyusa.com

Could Some Midwest Land Support New Biofuel Refineries?

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Millions of acres of marginal farmland in the Midwest — land that isn’t in good enough condition to grow crops — could be used to produce liquid fuels made from plant material, according to a study in Nature. And those biofuels could, in theory, provide about 25 percent of the advanced biofuels required by a 2007 federal law.

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

But some researchers in the field aren’t convinced the resource is nearly that big. Adam Liska at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln says a lot of this acreage is in the Great Plains, which wouldn’t produce a reliable crop year after year.

“One year you may have high rainfall and high crop yields and be able to sustain your facility, [but] the next year you may have a drought,” Liska says.

Indeed, Brent Erickson […] says nobody has plans just yet to use this kind of plant material to make biofuels. […]

“Every region of the country has some form of biomass — so the Northwest would have sawdust and wood waste; the California area might have rice straw or wheat straw, … Refiners in the Midwest are looking at corn cobs, and a plant that’s actually operating in Florida uses dead citrus trees.”

“As this technology progresses we’re going to see a great diversification of biomass supply,” Erickson predicts.

… Timothy Searchinger, an associate research scholar at Princeton University.

The 27 million acres identified in the latest study would provide less than 0.5 percent of our national energy demand, he says. And the more we try to expand biofuels, the more we risk displacing crops for food, or chopping down forests, which store a huge amount of carbon.

Searchinger says Europe has recently recognized those potential hazards and is scaling back its biofuels ambitions.

“They realize that it was a mistake, and their compromise for the moment is essentially to cap what they’re doing and then they promise by 2020 to phase out all government support for biofuels.”

See on www.opb.org

Renewables Move up the Rankin’s

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Renewables Move up the Rankin’s.

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China’s Energy Market Forecast: “Contrary to observations of recent coal-electricity negotiations, views expressed on the China Coal Market Summit, held on Dec. 21, 2012, generally predicted 2013 a better year for coal-fired power generation.”

The Negawatt Revolution — Solving the CO-2 [& Energy] Problem —

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Introduction

“My 1976 article entitled “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” which appeared in Foreign Affairs, suggested two ways in which the energy system could probably evolve over the next fifty years or so, using the United States as an example. If you divided by something like a factor of nine or ten, you would get Canada.”…

“If the U.S. spent only enough on efficiency to keep up with growth and demand for electric services, plus the net retirement of generating capacity, we would have almost enough capital left in surplus to double our rate of investment in durable manufacturing industries.”

The Importance of Electrical Efficiency

“Why do I concentrate on electricity? First, because it is by far the costliest form of energy. Each cent per kilowatt-hour is equivalent in heat content to oil at $17 dollars a barrel, roughly the world oil price. So the electricity we buy, even in Canada where it is quite cheap, is equivalent to heat at many times the world oil price. Therefore saving electricity is more financially rewarding than saving direct fuels. In addition, electricity has enormous capital leverage because central electric systems — the whole systems — are about 100 times as capital intensive as the traditional direct fuel systems (you know, Texas and Louisiana and Alberta oil and gas — the sorts of things on which our economies were built). In fact a quarter of all the development capital in the world goes to electrification.

“Also electricity has huge environmental leverage. Power plants burn a third of the fuel in the world. They account for a third of the CO2, therefore, released from the burning of fossil fuel. In my own country they release two thirds of the sulphur oxides and a third of the nitrogen oxides. What’s more, every unit of electricity you save at the point of use saves typically three or four units of fuel, namely coal at the power plant. And in socialist or developing countries that ratio is more like five or six to one.

So you get the most environmental benefit from saving electricity, as well as the most financial benefit.”

See on www.ccnr.org

Taking energy efficiency seriously

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See on Scoop.it – Green Building Operations – Systems & Controls, Maintenance & Commissioning

Despite the lack of attention paid to the issue during this year’s presidential campaign (at least, before Sandy came along), Barack Obama’s first term was a bit of a quiet revolution for climate change policy in America…

“More than 13 percent of the $700 billion American Recovery Act went to energy spending, most of it green. … the largest portion – $32 billion –went to energy efficiency and retrofitting projects. This was the biggest such investment in the history of history. It may even have finally heralded the arrival of a “Negawatt Revolution”….”

“Still, the right incentive structures to encourage the necessary investments in energy efficiency are not yet in place. Energy bills are still viewed by customers in terms of monthly costs that would go up because of short-term investments rather than yearly ones that will ultimately go down because of long-term savings….. The Negawatt Revolution may have begun in earnest during these past four years, but we can’t afford to wait until 2037 for it to finally reach its full potential. The possible benefits to the environment – and the economy – are too great for us to continue to forego.”

See on www.startribune.com