Category Archives: burn free generation

Germans Wonder About America – Will they ever get serious

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Unfortunately I believe the answer is NO. Americans will never get serious about renewable energy until it is so far behind the rest of the world that it becomes embarrassed. By then it will be too late for us to take advantage of creating our own industries.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_germany_is_getting_to_100_percent_renewable_energy_20121115/

How Germany Is Getting to 100 Percent Renewable Energy

Posted on Nov 15, 2012

By Thomas Hedges, Center for Study of Responsive Law

There is no debate on climate change in Germany. The temperature for the past 10 months has been 3 degrees above average and we’re again on course for the warmest year on record. There’s no dispute among Germans as to whether this change is man-made, or that we contribute to it and need to stop accelerating the process.

Since 2000, Germany has converted 25 percent of its power grid to renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and biomass. The architects of the clean energy movement Energiewende, which translates to “energy transformation,” estimate that from 80 percent to 100 percent of Germany’s electricity will come from renewable sources by 2050.

Germans are baffled that the United States has not taken the same path. Not only is the U.S. the wealthiest nation in the world, but it’s also credited with jump-starting Germany’s green movement 40 years ago.

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Electric Car Triumphs – Fitting award for the President’s re-election

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Finally someone made a car that is better than one powered by gasoline. Really that is all they have to do.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Energy-Voices/2012/1113/Tesla-Model-S-wins-Motor-Trend-s-Car-of-the-Year.-Are-electric-cars-here-to-stay

Tesla Model S wins Motor Trend’s Car of the Year. Are electric cars here to stay?

Tesla Motors made history Tuesday when the Tesla Model S became the first all-electric vehicle to win Motor Trend’s Car of the Year award. Will Tesla’s honor silence critics of the electric car industry?

By David J. Unger, Correspondent / November 13, 2012

he Tesla Model S nabbed one of the auto industry’s most coveted awards this week when Motor Trend named the electric vehicle as their 2013 Car of the Year.

It is the first time in Motor Trend’s 64-year history that the award has gone to a vehicle not powered by an internal combustion engine.

“It drives like a sports car, eager and agile and instantly responsive,” wrote Angus MacKenzie, editor-at-large of Motor Trend Magazine. “But it’s also as smoothly effortless as a Rolls-Royce, can carry almost as much stuff as a Chevy Equinox, and is more efficient than a Toyota Prius.”

The announcement is a boost for an EV industry labeled a failure by some analysts and politicians.

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Denmark Goes Solar Fast – Unlike the duffuses in the United States

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I know that Dufus is at the same time a village name in Ireland as well as a clan name. So excuse me if I use the America slang term for the stupidest person around. But the United States’ economy and its economic policy have been led by angry stupid old white guys for way too long. Coal is dead. Natural gas is an illusion and nuclear is a joke. I say, “let’s get on with it”.

http://um.dk/en/news/newsdisplaypage/?newsid=25147b44-3dce-4647-8788-ad9243c22df2

Denmark reaches 2020-goal for solar energy before time

12.09.2012  14:24

Already this year, Denmark will reach the 2020 Government goal of 200 megawatt solar cell capacity.

Huge interest for solar energy solutions has made the amount of solar cells multiply much faster than expected. This is made possible by favourable framework conditions. In fact the solar cell capacity will be a hundred times bigger this year compared with 2010. Currently 36 MW capacity is being mounted every month.

Danish energy sector players, Dansk Energi, Energinet.dk and DONG Energy, estimate that this development will result in 1000 MW by 2020 and 3400 MW by 2030.

 

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Bill Gates Is A Butthead – It takes everyone pitching in to make a change

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There is so much wrong about this piece but I understand his sentiment. We have to get going soon or his children’s future and his grandchildren’s future are at stake. But that wouldn’t be true if he would have gotten the message 20 years ago.

http://gigaom.com/2011/05/03/bill-gates-energy-solutions-need-to-be-big-not-cute/

Need to Be Big, Not Cute

To solve the world’s energy problems and combat a rise in global warming, the solutions need to be dramatic and powerful. And definitely not cute. That’s the blunt assessment of Bill Gates, who dismissed smaller scale technologies like residential solar installations as being “cute” but ineffective.

To solve the world’s energy problems and combat a rise in global warming, the solutions need to be dramatic and powerful. And definitely not cute. That’s the blunt assessment of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who dismissed smaller scale technologies like residential solar installations as being “cute” but ineffective.

Speaking at the Wired Business Conference in New York, Gates sounded a now familiar call for innovation in clean energy production. But he said the challenge of meeting the world’s growing energy needs while reducing the rise of carbon emissions won’t be handled by smaller deployments of technology. For example, he said solar panels attached to homes and connected to smart grids is no match for the real impact of large remote solar installations.

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Wind Works – A great accumulator

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I forgot to give this website credit for yesterday’s post. That is a small journalistic boo boo and I will clear that up now.

http://www.wind-works.org/

What Can Be Found on This Site

This site contains information about my books, an archive of my articles, and descriptions of my workshops on wind energy and Advanced Renewable Tariffs. This site also contains an extensive collection of articles and technical reports on electricity feed laws or renewable energy tariffs. I’ve been an outspoken proponent of feed laws since the late 1990s when I urged the American Wind Energy Association to call for them nationally.

Photography

My photos are stocked by Still Pictures in London. For more on my photography and for photo tours of several wind farms as well as a sampling of wind energy icons, see the photos section of this site.

 

Small Turbine Testing

Beginning in 1997 I’ve measured the performance and noise emissions of small wind turbines at the Wulf Test Field in the Tehachapi Pass. For more information on this work, visit Wulf Test Field.

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Wind Power In Germany – Killing time until the presidential election is over

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Yes it is true I am distracted by world events. But to be fair to wind power they are tearing it up in Germany.

http://energy.aol.com/2012/10/08/the-green-republic-germany-s-wind-energy-boom/?a_dgi=aolshare_linkedin

The Green Republic? Germany’s Wind Energy Boom

Published: October 8, 2012

The German wind industry sits at the heart of a European energy market preparing for a disruptive transformation intended to promote integration and allow the rich wind resource of the North to fuel continent-wide growth, without the risks of nuclear power and reliance on foreign energy producers.

It is a comprehensive, ambitious vision that in Germany alone the environment minister Peter Altmaier has compared in scale to the country’s painful post-Communist reunification.

The EU is preparing to release its latest communication on an integrated energy market ahead of a goal of operational integration it has set for 2014. The energy market remains one of the rare nation-state functions that has hardly been impacted by European integration at all, despite the EU’s origins in a post-WWII agreement over the continent’s coal sector.

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The Future Of Solar Is Uncertain – At least at the utility level

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Not much to say about this. Conference summaries are always difficult to interpret. You miss all the personal conversations, updates, and sense of the future. Still it is a snapshot.

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Utility-Scale-PV-Developers-Confront-Future-of-Solar-Project-Business

Utility-Scale PV Developers Confront Future of Solar Project Business

They want the “doable renewables.”

Herman K. Trabish: November 1, 2012

Building utility-scale PV solar projects is getting tougher. Greentech Media’s U.S. Solar Market Insight conference concluded with a discussion between experienced developers about the challenges and opportunities.

Moderator and GTM Research Senior Analyst Shyam Mehta asked them to first review the last year.

“In summer of last year, the IOUs issued RFPs, the first in over two years,” 8minutenergy CEO Martin Hermann recalled. “More than 70,000 megawatts of applications were submitted. They shortlisted about 2,500 megawatts.”

The ISO queue has dropped from 80,000 megawatts to 50,000 megawatts and utilities are “looking very diligently to see if there are any show stoppers” before signing contracts. In this “tough competition for PPAs,” Hermann said, developers are “monetizing or cancelling their portfolios.”

In three years, explained SunEdison (NYSE:WFR) General Manager Attila Toth, the U.S. solar market will be 50 percent distributed generation and 50 percent utility scale projects. But about 85 percent of the 3.5 gigawatts to 3.8 gigawatts of utility projects “is already spoken for, in the queues and has company’s names written on it. There is a very limited opportunity in the utility segment.”

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New Solar Plan Should Speed Things UP – If you care about this planet

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This article represents public policy that could make a difference.

http://www.denverpost.com/energy/ci_21759106/plan-streamline-solar-development-west-okd

Plan to streamline solar development in West OK’d

By JASON DEAREN Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO—Federal officials on Friday approved a plan that sets aside 445 square miles of public land for the development of large-scale solar power plants, cementing a new government approach to renewable energy development in the West after years of delays and false starts.

At a news conference in Las Vegas, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar called the new plan a “roadmap … that will lead to faster, smarter utility-scale solar development on public lands.”

The plan replaces the department’s previous first-come, first-served system of approving solar projects, which let developers choose where they wanted to build utility-scale solar sites and allowed for land speculation.

The department no longer will decide projects within the zones on a case-by-case basis as it had since 2005, when solar developers began filing applications. Instead, the department will direct development to land it has identified as having fewer wildlife and natural-resource obstacles.

The government is establishing 17 new “solar energy zones” on 285,000 acres in six states: California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico. More than half of the land—153,627 acres—is in Southern California.

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Solar Panels Go Plastic – Light weight and easy to mount, what’s not to like

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Here is the MIT report.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428423/new-solar-panel-designs-make-installation-cheaper/

 

New Solar Panel Designs Make Installation Cheaper

Companies in Germany and China have made simpler designs that make it easier and quicker to mount panels to roofs.

With solar panel prices falling more than 80 percent in the last few years, many solar companies are turning their attention to reducing the cost of installing them. Two leading solar companies, Solon Energy, based in Berlin, and Trina Solar, based in Changzhou, China, have announced new designs for mounting solar panels to roofs—the companies say these designs can reduce the installation time by more than half, greatly reducing labor costs. The new designs reduce or eliminate the tools and hardware needed to install solar panels, and standardize solar installations, which have largely been ad hoc, reducing the time needed to design them.

While solar panels themselves used to account for most of the cost of large solar installations on commercial rooftops, the modules now account for about 40 percent of the cost. The rest comes from things like the necessary hardware, power electronics, and labor—which alone accounts for about 30 percent of the total.

Mounting solar panels on the flat rooftops of commercial installations typically involves anchoring long metal racks to the roof to create a framework that will angle the panels toward the sun and hold them together. Installers bolt the panels to this frame, wire the panels together, and electrically ground the racks.

 

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Utilities In The United States Still Battle Solar After 50 Years – When will they give up

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The coal companies and the utility companies in this country are morally repugnant and ecologically a disaster.

http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Solar-energy-is-ready-the-U-S-isn-t-3988796.php

Solar energy is ready, the U.S. isn’t

By Ken Wells
Published 5:07 p.m., Sunday, October 28, 2012

Clean energy has become a dirty word in presidential politics.

In their second debate, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama each tried to outdo the other’s love of fossil fuels: Obama extolling his record on oil and natural gas production, Romney vowing to take “advantage of the oil and coal we have here.” The Republican candidate has ridiculed the administration’s $535 million loan guarantee to Solyndra, the bankrupt solar panel maker, and accused Obama of living “in an imaginary world where government-subsidized windmills and solar panels could power the economy.”

The candidates’ coolness to renewable energy comes at a time when the domestic supply of traditional energy sources, such as oil and natural gas, is at an all-time high. And yet this failure to make the promise of renewables a keynote in the debate is a huge missed opportunity. In particular, it ignores the dramatic reduction in the cost of photovoltaic solar power worldwide and the considerable benefits to U.S. consumers and the environment.

Political roadblocks

The untold story of this campaign is that what killed Solyndra may turn out to be a boon for the nation. “Economically and technologically, the game is over,” said Bill Powers, a San Diego engineer and board member of Solar Done Right, a group that proselytizes for rooftop solar power. “The hang-ups in the U.S. are strictly political.”

Over the past five years the price of photovoltaic panels has plummeted 75 percent, due largely to a glut of Chinese-made panels. The fall in prices rendered technically advanced photovoltaic panels, like those produced by Solyndra and other U.S. companies, too expensive to compete.

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