All In One Boat

Poking around to follow up a story I read in the Klamath Fall Herald and News back in February, I came upon this wonderful resource right in Marin County.

The Geothermal Education Office has all sorts of on-line information, from a slide show to a database of where geothermal sites are in use.

What got me interested originally was hearing, on a snowy disk-slipping day of ice in Klamath Falls, that the sidewalks there are warmed by geothermal energy and thus kept free of snow. The Oregon Institute of Technology is located in Klamath Falls and naturally enough has a large interest in understanding geothermal and making use of it in this energy hungry, self-suffocating world of ours. The several proposals listed here are pretty interesting. For the particularly wonkish among you a list of consultants and equipment manufacturers is provided. And here is a list of some states and communities with geothermal resources in their bag of energy tricks. Get hot!

“Investors and utilities intent on building solar power plants are increasingly turning to solar thermal power, a comparatively low-tech alternative to photovoltaic panels that convert sunlight directly into electricity. This month, in the latest in a string of recent deals, Spanish solar-plant developer Abengoa Solar and Phoenix-based utility Arizona Public Service announced a 280-megawatt solar thermal project in Arizona. By contrast, the world’s largest installations of photovoltaics generate only 20 megawatts of power.

In a solar thermal plant, mirrors concentrate sunlight onto some type of fluid that is used, in turn, to boil water for a steam turbine.

Solar Thermal

In Portland, Oregon, at the Lucky Labrador micro brewery, beer brewing has returned to it’s founding roots: fermentation by sun power. It’s thought that the first taste of beer came in Mesopotamia when barley or other grain being made into a kind of edible mush fermented and revealed the euphoric pleasures of alcohol. It’s more complicated today, but rising energy costs and a certain business sense is bringing it all back home.

Solar Flare will be pouring only at the Lucky Lab brewpub on Hawthorne Boulevard where it was brewed. Sixteen solar panels on the roof are the most visible part of a $70,000 system designed and installed by Ra Energy of Portland.

Glycol pumped through the panels and then to a heat exchanger and computer-controlled valves warmed Portland city water from about 55 degrees to more than 100 degrees in cloudy February.

“Come spring and summer, the system should keep a 900-gallon tank of water heated to 180 degrees,” said Gary Geist, co-owner of Portland’s three Lucky Labrador pubs. Pointing to a big natural gas heater in the brewery, he said, “that boiler should just sit there all summer.”

Thanks to federal and state tax credits and renewable energy grants, Geist expects the system to pay for itself in two to four years. “It makes sense because of the incentives and the level of the technology now,” he said, “and it’s just the right thing to do, especially here in Portland.”

The Oregonian: John Foyston

“For the U.S. solar photovoltaic industry, December 17, 2007 was a historic day. That was the day the largest photovoltaic solar systems in the United States were activated. One was a 14-megawatt solar farm covering 140 acres opened at Nellis Air Force Base, near Las Vegas. The other was an 8.22-megawatt photovoltaic array covering 80 acres in Alamosa, Colorado, the largest solar PV plant in the United States supporting substation loads for a major public utility.”

Solar Crossing

“Could concentrated solar energy be used to reverse combustion and convert carbon dioxide back into gasoline? That’s what scientists at Sandia National Laboratories, in Albuquerque, NM, aim to find out by building a novel reactor that can chemically “reenergize” carbon dioxide.

The device uses a two-stage thermochemical reaction to break down carbon dioxide to produce carbon monoxide, says Nathan Siegel, a senior member of technical staffat Sandia’s Solar Technologies Department and one of the researchers developing the technology. “Carbon dioxide is a combustion product, so what we’re doing is reversing combustion,” he says. The carbon monoxide can then readily be employed to produce a range of different fuels, including hydrogen, methanol, and gasoline, using conventional technologies. ”

Carbon Dioxide to Fuel

As I’ve noted before, response to Global Warming seems to be reaching critical mass, with kindergarteners to CEOs of Fortune 500 companies understanding and responding in big ways and small. Solar installation on homes has gone from being something for the wild-eyed and back-woodsers to something the most ordinary of owners is asking themselves about. An initiative in Marin County by a transplanted New Yorker has created a kind of buyer’s consortium bringing the average cost of installation from $23,380 to $15,220.

Max first distributed flyers in her neighborhood, then approached her local Lincoln San Rafael Hill Neighborhood Association and finally went to the city’s umbrella group of neighborhood associations.

“It just kind of grew. More and more people said they were interested,” she said, adding that she ended up with a group of between 250 and 300 interested residents. From there came … an offer by a Marin solar company to provide discounted installations for every resident and business in the county.

Solar Consortium

Doesn’t say how many householders have actually signed contracts but some steps forward have begun.

It is interesting to watch reports of opposition rising around the world to wind farms. We’ve seen it from Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard to Vermont to North Carolina. Now we hear, from travel writer Joanna Kakissis, of similar opposition in the idyllic Greek Isles.

THE tiny Greek island of Serifos, a popular tourist destination, depends on its postcard views of sandy beaches, Cycladic homes and sunsets that blend sea and sky into a clean wash of color. So when a mining and energy company floated a plan earlier this year to build 87 industrial wind turbines on more than a third of the island, the Serifos mayor, Angeliki Synodinou, called it her “worst nightmare.”

She imagined supersize wind towers looming over the island, destroying romantic vistas, their turbines chopping the quiet like a swarm of helicopters. The project is now stalled, and Ms. Synodinou doesn’t regret it. “No one would come here,” she said. “Our island would be destroyed.”

Debating Wind Energy

It’s interesting that wind farms in some places bring good feelings to the viewer — clean energy, a certain aesthetic of rotation in white over green fields, a memory of coal grimmed faces and lungs to be repeated no more. In other places, the towers seem to be a continuation of the industrial ethic, the super-construction overwhelming all, the threat to migrating bird-life.

Perhaps as technology and inventiveness continue to respond to the certain threat of fossil-fuel extinction we will find better, smaller scale solutions. Already hydro power is being generated (in small quantities) by micro turbines on free flowing streams instead of by giants in the bases of enormous dams. How to harness the motion of leaves in the trees to light our way? Or perhaps the only true solution is solar, captured in both field-arrays and micro dishes.

As in all of nature the decision will arrive as we learn to adapt to the conditions at hand. I only wish we had begun several decades ago instead of waiting until the tipping point had begun its great tip…

Rancher and local developer John McBride walked over to his electric meter Tuesday afternoon and pointed to the numbers ticking backward, as electricity was fed into the grid from his new micro-hydroelectric plant.

The custom-built system works both as gravity-fed irrigation and as a power plant — producing up to five kilowatts of electricity per hour

Micro Hydro

Well, I don’t think I’d like living next to Solar Richard but his monomania is paying off on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

At Mr. Thompson’s urging, the new mile-long Tacoma Narrows Bridge is on its way to being lighted with solar power, a project toward which the state has contributed $1.5 million. And if all goes as planned, there will be electricity left over to feed back into the city’s power supply.

Solar Richard

“Berkeley is set to become the first city in the nation to help thousands of its residents generate solar power without having to put money up front - attempting to surmount one of the biggest hurdles for people who don’t have enough cash to go green.

The City Council will vote Nov. 6 on a plan for the city to finance the cost of solar panels for property owners who agree to pay it back with a 20-year assessment on their property. Over two decades, the taxes would be the same or less than what property owners would save on their electric bills, officials say.”

“This is how Berkeley’s program would work:

A property owner would hire a city-approved solar installer, who would determine the best solar system for the property, depending on energy use. Most residential solar panel systems in the city cost from $15,000 to $20,000.

The city would pay the contractor for the system and its installation, minus any applicable state and federal rebates, and would add an assessment to the property owner’s tax bill to pay for the system.

The extra tax would include administrative fees and interest, which would be lower than what the property owner could obtain on his own, because the city would secure low-interest bonds and loans, officials say. The tax would stay with the property even if the owner sold, although the owner would have to leave the solar panels.

The property owner would save money on monthly Pacific Gas & Electric bill because electricity generated by the solar panels would partly replace electricity delivered by the utility.”

Berkeley Goes Solar

“Growing and burning many biofuels may actually raise rather than lower greenhouse gas emissions, a new study led by Nobel prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen has shown.1 The findings come in the wake of a recent OECD report, which warned nations not to rush headlong into growing energy crops because they cause food shortages and damage biodiversity.

Crutzen and colleagues have calculated that growing some of the most commonly used biofuel crops releases around twice the amount of the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N2O) than previously thought - wiping out any benefits from not using fossil fuels and, worse, probably contributing to global warming. The work appears in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics and is currently subject to open review.”

Bio Fuels and Global Warming

“A solar power system being installed on the roof of San Francisco International Airport’s Terminal 3, together with additional planned energy efficiency projects at the airport, is expected to reduce energy use by 15 percent within a few years, city officials said Thursday.

More than 2,800 solar modules are on the terminal’s roof, and Mayor Gavin Newsom and other city officials stood among them Thursday to say the city’s plan is to have many more such announcements of renewable projects in coming years.

The solar modules, manufactured by Suntech, a Chinese maker of photovoltaic cells and modules, are expected to generate a yearly savings of 628,000 kilowatt hours, enough to provide energy for 300 homes.

It is also expected that the solar energy will be sufficient to power all the daytime lighting at Terminal 3.”

Solar SFO