Tag Archives: Solar Power

Are developing Microgrids the Answer to supply next generation Electricity Markets?

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Managing the effect of intermittent renewables on the grid is one of the critical challenges we address in making the transition to renewables. One of the primary goals of grid modernization (aka “Smart Grid”) is to adapt grid management to account for the effects of intermittency in real time.

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>Microgrids are one possible solution to these challenges. Microgrids, part of the Smart Grid toolbox, are autonomously managed and powered sections of the distribution grid that can be as small as a single building, or as large as a downtown area or neighborhood. Automation and digital communications are used to manage rooftop solar, small scale combined heat and power systems and storage systems, along with matching supply to demand.  Heating or cooling may also be a part of a microgrid. Microgrids can efficiently manage smaller sections of the grid, according to the local demand patterns and availability of renewable resources. They can also disconnect, or “island” from the larger grid to provide higher reliability.

Can microgrids reduce complexity and increase options for electricity market participants? What are the major barriers to microgrid implementation, and how might they be overcome? Are there other approaches, besides the microgrid, that might be employed as well?<

See on www.ourenergypolicy.org

Waste Heat Energy Recovery – ThermoAcoustic Refrigeration for Transportation Industry

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Revisiting the Automotive ThermoAcoustic Refrigerator – ATAR

Diagram of Simplified ThermoAcoustic Engine

I wish to further investigate the idea of thermoacoustics for waste heat recovery processes.  Also, will in future look into latest developments in thermoacoustics, including any applications, studies, reviews or products and manufacturers.

In today’s new economy of energy efficiency, there are technologies available that are worth further investigation that can be utilized for improved performance.  Automotive air conditioning is one industry which could bear further scrutiny, where running compressors consume valuable fuel, decreasing the energy efficiency and increasing operating cost of a vehicle.

For professional drivers where fuel consumption increases will come out of pocket, the utilization of air conditioning is an important consideration.  The idea of using the waste heat in the exhaust system to provide the cooling energy necessary to provide air conditioning is a novel approach to improving vehicle efficiency and comfort.  The concept of thermoacoustic refrigeration is not new, and was previously reviewed by concerns of the ozone layer depletion and refrigerants, which ultimately lead to changes in the refrigeration and HVAC industries.

See original reference paper presented at 2005 Proceedings of Acoustics:  http://bit.ly/17qwTYK

Reshaping Corporations: Can Divestment Work?

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With enough collective action, mass divestment campaigns can be effective in creating social change. 

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>To be effective, a huge amount of money must be withdrawn from a company. Where boycotting unites individual buyers to have impact, individual stockowners aren’t likely to make a huge enough hit with divestment or negative investing for a corporation to take notice. Institutional owners, though, could impact a company or industry because collectively they control vast amounts. 

The Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaign

The current student campaign to divest from fossil fuels is interesting. For example, Harvard has $30 billion in endowment while Yale has $16.7 billion.

While it’s clearly not all in one company or industry, what kind of impact could university endowments have if they withdrew from fossil fuel companies and allied industries? By my count, there are well over a hundred campaigns at universities around the nation, and there are additional groups working to get towns and communities to join the fight. As a collective action, the potential for these divestment campaigns is fascinating to ponder.

Mass Divestment Creates Cultural Change

Perhaps the most important thing divestment shares with boycotting is publicity.  The attention that a mass divestment can bring to an issue could be profound. The student fossil fuels divestment effort is garnering national media attention, and rather than fizzling out seems to be gaining momentum. This attention could be as effective as actual divestment for dealing with climate change and fossil fuel issues. 

As Cecelie Counts wrote in January, divestment was just one tool used to combat apartheid and bring change in South Africa. I don’t know if there will be mass divestment among universities, but I suspect that this campaign will be successful in the long run because it’s educating a generation and could create the cultural change necessary to pursue long-term alternatives, change policy and pressure energy companies to adapt.<

See on csrwire.sharedby.co

Applied Thermodynamics: Organic Rankine cycle – Wikipedia

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Duane Tilden‘s insight:

We have all seen the Rankine Cycle engine, most typically as the inefficient steam locomotive.  The modern efficient designs use turbines to convert heat energy from two reservoirs of different temperatures to mechanical energy.

The Organic Rankine Cycle engine uses a fluid – vapor phase change other than water/steam and a wide range of compounds are available including proprietory mixtures.  These mixtures allow for the conversion to mechanical energy in a wide range of applications and temperatures.  Two such applications would be waste heat to energy and geothermal energy systems.

See on en.wikipedia.org

Debunking the Renewables “Disinformation Campaign”

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Misleading coverage fuels policy uncertainty and doubt, reducing investment security and industry development. Disinformation hurts the industry and retards its—and our nation’s—progress

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

The Fox Business example is not a singular incident. Some mainstream media around the world have a tendency to publish misinformed or, worse, systematically and falsely negative stories about renewable energy. Some of those stories’ misinformation looks innocent, due to careless reporting, sloppy fact checking, and perpetuation of old myths. But other coverage walks, or crosses, the dangerous line of a disinformation campaign—a persistent pattern of coverage meant to undermine renewables’ strong market reality. This has become common enough in mainstream media that some researchers have focused their attention on this balance of accurate and positive coverage vs. inaccurate and negative coverage.

Tim Holmes, researcher for the U.K.’s Public Interest Research Centre (PIRC), points out press coverage is important because it can influence not only “what people perceive and believe” but also “what politicians think they believe.” […]

The disinformation campaign about job creation is not limited to Europe. A Cato Institute article claimed that if people believe a commitment to renewables will fuel job growth “we’re in a lot of trouble.” Yet in 2012 alone, more than 110,000 new U.S. clean-energy direct jobs were created, and in 2010, the U.S. had more jobs in the “clean economy” than in the fossil-fuel industries. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reportsthat direct employment in May 2012 totaled 181,580 for oil and gas extraction, 87,520 for coal mining, and 93,200 for iron and steel production. BLS doesn’t similarly classify solar or wind jobs, but reputable analysts have determined from bottom-up industry surveys that in September 2012, for example, the U.S. had 119,016 direct solar jobs (89 percent full-time, the rest at least half-time), up 27 percent in two years—more than in steel-making or coal-mining. Had you heard that before? Why not?

THE COST OF DISINFORMATION

The sad truth is that the debate on clean and renewable energy is unbalanced, and seldom by accident. The CCGroup’s study showed that only 10 percent of articles focusing on renewables even contained comment from a spokesperson from the renewable energy industry. This violates basic journalistic standards. Renewables must be a part of their own conversation. Much of the conversation on renewables is misinformed and misrepresented. And when bad news does happen, says ACORE president and retired U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn, opponents of renewables are pushing it “as if it’s the only news. They are dominating the conversation through misrepresentation, exaggeration, distraction, and millions of dollars in lobbying and advertising.”<

See on blog.rmi.org

Creating Value: Energy Retrofits for Buildings

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Buildings in the U.S. consume[…] 42 percent of the nation’s primary energy and 72 percent of its electricity. Much of that energy is needlessly wasted through inefficient design and operation.

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>Rather than examine energy costs in isolation, our approach assesses how energy and sustainability improvements add value to all parts of a property or company. This approach is not revolutionary, but rather more comprehensive, applying industry-accepted valuation methods to the full set of retrofit value contributions, including saved energy costs, health and productivity benefits, reputation and leadership, and risk reduction.

Energy investment (and resultant property outcomes) should be treated as one of many factors that influence value, including location, tenant mix, quality of design, and more. Evaluating retrofits within the broader context of property/company value enables a logical, defensible calculation and assessment of a deep retrofit’s relative contribution to value. Previous attempts to value energy retrofits have ignored retrofits’ value contributions and overlooked standard approaches to valuing properties and companies.<

See on www.rmi.org

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[…]<

See on blogs.edf.org

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

Water Stress Threatens Future Energy Production

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When we flip on a light, we rarely think about water.  But electricity generation is the biggest user of water in the United States.  Thermoelectric power plants alone use more than 200 billion gallons of water a day – about 49 percent of the…

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>Large quantities of water are needed as well for the production, refining and transport of the fuels that light and heat our homes and buildings, and run our buses and cars.  Every gallon of gasoline at the pump takes about 13 gallons of water to make.

And of course hydroelectric energy requires water to drive the turbines that generate the power.  For every one-foot drop in the level of Lake Mead on the Colorado River, Hoover Dam loses 5-6 megawatts of generating capacity – enough to supply electricity to about 5,000 homes.

In short, energy production is deeply dependent on the availability of water.  And, as a report released last week by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) makes clear, as climate change brings hotter temperatures, more widespread and severe droughts, and lower river and lake levels, the nation’s energy supply is becoming more vulnerable. […]

One particularly interesting figure in the report compares the water requirements of seven different types of electric power facilities – nuclear, coal, biopower, natural gas combined-cycle, concentrated solar, photovoltaic solar and wind.  The last two come out as by far the most water-conserving electricity sources.  In contrast to the 20,000-60,000 gallons per megawatt-hour needed for nuclear and coal plants with “once-through” cooling systems, PV solar and wind require only negligible quantities.<

See on newswatch.nationalgeographic.com

Renewables & Energy Efficiency Can Cut Power Plants’ Water Use 97% by 2050

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Investing in renewables and energy efficiency could reduce power plants’ water withdrawals by 97 percent from current levels by 2050 and cut carbon emissions 90 percent from current levels, according to a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists…

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>The report warns that a “business-as-usual” approach would keep emissions within 5 percent of current levels and water withdrawals would not drop significantly until after 2030. And while utilities’ ongoing shift to natural gas would decrease water use in the coming decades, the study says its ongoing requirements could still harm water-strained areas. This shift to natural gas also would do little to lower the power sector’s carbon emissions.

More than 40 percent of US freshwater withdrawals are used for power plant cooling, the report says. These plants also lose several billion gallons of freshwater every day through evaporation.

Further, increasing demand and drought are putting a greater strain on water resources. Low water levels and high water temperatures can cause power plants to cut their electricity output in order to avoid overheating or harming local water bodies. Such energy and water collisions can leave customers with little or no electricity or with added costs because their electric supplier has to purchase power from elsewhere, as occurred during the past two summers.<

See on www.environmentalleader.com