Posts Tagged ‘generation’
Renewables exceed 20% of Germany’s energy production
In the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, tens of thousands of German citizens took to the streets calling for the phase out of atomic energy. In May, the German government bowed to public pressure and unveiled its plan to shut down the country’s 17 nuclear power plants by 2021 – with the possibility that three will continue operating until 2022 if the transition to renewable energy doesn’t go as quickly as hoped.
Providing some hope that Germany will achieve its ambitious goals, Spiegel Online International has quoted a newly released…report that says, for the first time, renewable sources accounted for more than 20 percent of the country’s electricity generation…
According to the report, renewable energy sources provided 18.3 percent of total demand in 2010, but the first six months of 2011 saw that figure rise to 20.8 percent, while Germany’s total usage remained steady from 2010 at 275.5 billion kilowatt hours…
Of the 57.3 billion kWh provided by renewable sources in the first six months of 2011, wind power was the dominant source supplying 20.7 billion kWh (7.5 percent of total production), followed by biomass with 15.4 billion kWh (5.6 percent), photovoltaic solar with 9.6 billion kWh (3.5 percent), hydroelectric with 9.1 billion kWh (3.3 percent, and waste and other sources providing 2.2 billion kWh (0.8 percent).
Solar power saw the biggest jump, increasing by 76 percent over 2010 with the BDEW citing the reduction in the price of photovoltaic installations as a result of increased competition and the decision of the federal government not to cut subsidies for private solar-power generation as initially planned as the main reasons for the increase.
“Because of the volume of new photovoltaic installations and the amount of sun during the spring, solar energy knocked hydroelectric from third place for the first time,” said the BDEW.
Two points worth making. First – the economies of scale really play well with photo-voltaics. It’s a technology where small but noticeable advances are being made in both cost of production and efficiencies of energy production. Second – German voters are already sophisticated enough to ignore the hypocrisy of fossil fuel facility builders who whine about continued subsidies. Fact is – all fossil fuel plants rely on taxpayer subsidy for construction. There’s little difference in passing along subsidies to consumers with home installations.
I spent most of the past half-century as an advocate for nuclear power generation. From early days working in the field, it was clear that properly-run there was no need for safety concerns. Over that time the only disasters which have occurred were the result of bureaucratic malingering. Which can happen in any industry. The difference being that falling-down stupid about safety with nuclear power can be fatal on a large scale.
More important, we’ve just about reached the point where the cost of production of electricity via photo-voltaics matches the cost of construction and production of nuclear facilities. That will continue to diminish while the opposite happens with nuclear projects. And there will never be shutdown dangers associated with natural disasters using photo-voltaics.
Solar Roadways gets grant to build prototype solar parking lot
What do you need to generate a lot of electricity from photoelectric solar cells? A lot of surface area. What is a lot of the surface of the United States covered in? Roads. Put those two ideas together, and the idea of turning the nation’s highways into solar farms doesn’t sound too odd, does it? Well, maybe it doesn’t until you consider that you’re talking about taking electronics – electronics that are typically somewhat delicate and rather expensive – and purposely putting them on the ground where heavy vehicles will zoom over them at high speed…
Replacing crushed stone and tar with LEDs and capacitors seems so unlikely that when Solar Roadways was awarded $100,000 to construct a small, 12′ by 12′ prototype system in 2009, infrastructure blog The Infrastructionist gave the effort its “Dubious Green Scheme” award and labeled Solar Roadways not just “harebrained” but “totally batshit crazy.”
As it turns out, that initial panel impressed the Department of Transportation enough that Solar Roadways has now been given $750,000 to take it to the next step: a solar parking lot. Constructed out of multiple 12′ x 12′ panels, the smart parking lot will do more than the asphalt alternative. It will warm itself in cold weather to melt away snow and ice. A layer of embedded LEDs can be used create traffic warnings or crosswalks. Electricity leftover from those tasks could be used to charge electric vehicles or routed into the power grid. The electrical components will be embedded between layers of hardened, textured glass – this may sound fragile, but is already tough enough that some areas use the material for sidewalks.
Parking lots, driveways, and eventually highways are all targets for the panels. If the nation’s system of interstate highways was surfaced with Solar Roadways panels, the results would be more than three times the amount of electricity currently consumed. Of course, at $100,000 per 12′, costs would need to come down significant bit before that could happen.
Obviously, the editors never compared the cost of building solar roadways to typical American highway boondoggles. The record is held by a project near and dear to my heart – Boston’s Big Dig. A three-and-a-half mile tunnel that ended up costing over $14 billion.
Plus he’s extrapolating from the first 12′ x 12′ panel. The parking lot project will reduce square foot cost as will further ramping up towards capacity production. All of which he doubtless knows. 
India can’t seem to find a good professional hangman
Mammu Singh – one of the last and best – retired, now deceased
India has 1.2 billion people, among them bankers, gurus, rag pickers, billionaires, snake charmers, software engineers, lentil farmers, rickshaw drivers, Maoist rebels, Bollywood movie stars and Vedic scholars, to name a few. Humanity runneth over. Except in one profession: India is searching for a hangman.
Usually, India would not need one, given the rarity of executions. The last was in 2004. But in May, India’s president unexpectedly rejected a last-chance mercy petition from a convicted murderer in the Himalayan state of Assam. Prison officials, compelled to act, issued a call for a hangman…
The nation’s handful of known hangmen had either died, retired or disappeared. The situation was not too surprising, given the ambivalence within the Indian criminal justice system about executions. Capital punishment was codified during British rule, with hanging as the chosen method, but recent decades of litigating and legislating limited the actual practice to “the rarest of rare cases.”
Today, even prison officials encourage death row inmates to draft appeals. “At times, we also help the person draft the petition,” said K. V. Reddy, president of the All-India Prison Officers Association, who opposes capital punishment. “Normally, everybody sympathizes with a person who has spent a number of years in prison…”
It seemed the search had reached a dead end, at least figuratively. Then Mammu Singh’s eldest son, Pawan Kumar, decided to enter the family business. Ten days after his father’s death, Mr. Kumar applied for government certification as a hangman.
“I just want to continue the family legacy,” Mr. Kumar said recently, inside the tiny room where he lives inside a low-income housing complex. “I’m the fourth generation. You don’t see many volunteers coming forward. I’m serving my country.”
The pay is not very good for hangmen, partly because of the paucity of hangings, but also because the job is considered contract work. Still, Mr. Kumar works as a hawker, selling clothes from the back of his bicycle, and he welcomed the possibility of a $75 monthly retainer for being a hangman.
The workload could increase in the future. India has put to death at least 50 convicts since becoming an independent nation in 1947. And the trends suggest that the number of people convicted on capital charges could rise. Nationally, India had 345 people on death row by the end of 2008, according to national crime statistics…
Mr. Kumar…has been invited for an interview with prison officials this month.
My feelings are always mixed over capital punishment. Years ago it was demonstrated that it served little to deter capital crimes. And it costs more – generally – to deal with the sum of appeals generated by a death penalty. But, I can’t help feeling it is just compensation to the body politic for some crimes.
Bingaman backs nuclear in new clean energy standard
The White House on Monday won a key endorsement for its proposal to boost U.S. electricity generation by clean energy sources as the head of the Senate’s energy panel said he could back the idea of including nuclear power in the fuel mix.
In his State of the Union speech to Congress last week, President Barack Obama proposed the United States produce 80 percent of its electricity from clean energy sources, such as wind, solar, “clean” coal and nuclear, by 2035.
Democratic Senator Jeff Bingaman, who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said he supports including nuclear power in the White House’s clean energy standard as long as renewable energy sources like wind and solar also benefit.
“If we can develop a workable clean energy standard that actually continues to provide an incentive for renewable energy projects to move forward, and provide an additional incentive for some of the other clean energy technologies, nuclear being one, I would like to see that happen,” Senator Jeff Bingaman told reporters…
Bingaman said he has been in discussions with the White House over the last week on how to come up with a legislative proposal that would win bipartisan support in the Senate…
Such a bill would have a more difficult time clearing the Republican-controlled House of Representatives…
Analyst Christine Tezak said the best way for a clean energy standard to pass Congress is for the president to address some of the energy concerns of Republican lawmakers, such as expanding oil drilling and speeding up government approval of permits for energy exploration…
Yes, let’s don’t forget the traditional bosses of the Republican Party. Take your history all the way back to Standard Oil, watch the oil barons nudge their buddies from Wall Street finance aside while they exercise royal prerogative and demand opposition to any alternatives to fossil fuel profits.
Public support for nuclear power continues to grow
The majority of Americans who favor nuclear-generated electricity hit a new high this year, according to a poll that now suggests growing support for President Barack Obama’s aid to the nuclear industry.
Sixty-two percent of 1,014 U.S. adults, who were surveyed March 4-7 by Gallup, said they favored nuclear energy as one way to meet national electricity needs.
Though a majority of Americans has long supported nuclear power, Gallup said the latest rating is the highest since it began polling on the issue in 1994.
Hoping to advance climate legislation in Congress, Obama announced $8.3 billion in loan guarantees for new plant construction in February. The guarantees will help build the first new U.S. nuclear power facilities in nearly three decades.
Gallup’s latest findings show Republican support for nuclear power a new high of 74 percent this year, up from 71 percent a year ago.
Democratic support stands at a bare majority of 51 percent, down slightly from 52 percent in 2009, the poll showed.
Let me give you my cynical analysis of this breakout.
The Dem wobbles are about right for a party with little core recognition for Green issues. Even Al Gore steps outside the Democrat Party’s purview for most of his politicizing. Green voters – like me – often reject the boring, tedious, cowardly pace of traditional party politics.
Republicans mostly add support because [a] corporate barons will profit instead of Green start-ups – and Republicans will kiss corporate butt even when they’re nothing more than water-carriers; and [b] it’s an alternative to the capital-A Alternatives favored by liberals and progressives, Green activists. Response rules rather than being a proponent.
Nuclear power’s time has come!
For decades, pioneering environmentalist Stewart Brand, the founder and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, opposed the use of nuclear power. Now he sees it as vital to efforts to combat climate change.
Earlier this month, Brand made the case for nuclear power in a debate with Stanford University professor Mark Jacobson at the TED Conference in Long Beach, California. (TED is a nonprofit that stands for technology, information and design and is dedicated to “Ideas worth spreading.”)
His outspoken support for nuclear power comes as the White House has been pushing for the first new nuclear plants in the United States in three decades…
Brand says his turnabout began in 2002, when the Global Business Network, a consulting organization he co-founded, did a project on climate change for the U.S. Secretary of Defense. In an interview with CNN.com, Brand said the project showed him that the globe’s climate can change abruptly: “It goes over some tipping point and suddenly you’re in a situation that you don’t like and you can’t go back. That got me way more concerned about climate as a clear and present danger than I had been.”
Looking for a surefire way to cut greenhouse gases, Brand said the alternative to burning coal became clear: “We already had a very good supplier of …electricity. It worked like mad and was as clean as it could be — and that was nuclear.
“Looking at nuclear more closely made me look at coal more closely and I got to realizing what a horror it was across the board, and as I learned more about nuclear, I started learning all this stuff that my fellow environmentalists had been careful not to let me know about.”
Brand spoke to CNN.com Wednesday. Halfway down the page is the edited transcript.
Working days while studying engineering at night school, I was a technician in an R&D lab for a key vendor to builders of nuclear power plants starting back in the 1950′s.
I never had a problem with the science or safety solutions we were capable of within the nuclear power industry. Cripes, I still get checked-on every decade or so because the building I worked in had been the pilot plant for cladding uranium power rods. Never a peep after more than a half-century.
What turned me from support for the industry was the overwhelming corruption of cost-plus budgeting from Uncle Sugar. Guaranteed padding the cost of construction, manufacture, production – with diminished concern for quality control or modernizing design. It was a cash cow, a welfare plan for companies like Westinghouse.
But, knowledge and science advance even if politicians don’t. Other countries like France continued with new generations of design and fiscal oversight, kept the wheel turning. I’m pleased to see Stewart Brand never stopped learning.
US firm in mega-deal for China solar power plant
The Mausoleum of Genghis Khan
US energy group First Solar has signed a preliminary deal to build the world’s biggest solar power plant in China.
The 10-year project would result in a two gigawatt plant – enough to power three million Chinese homes – at Ordos City in Inner Mongolia.
First Solar will begin constructing a 30 megawatt demonstration project in June next year…
“We’re proud to announce this precedent-setting project. It represents an encouraging step forward to the mass scale deployment of solar power worldwide to mitigate climate change concerns,” said First Solar boss Mike Ahearn.
The project would operate under a feed-in tariff that would guarantee the price of electricity produced by the plant over the long-term, the company said.
“Discussions with First Solar about building a factory in China demonstrate to investors in China that they can confidently invest in the most advanced technologies available,” said Cao Zhichen, vice mayor of the Ordos municipal government.
Ordos City rocks on a Friday night!
And everyone gets a deal on a cashmere sweater…
Southern Comfort dumps cable TV for online advertising – only
Southern Comfort is taking its $8 million marketing spend online to reach its target market of 21- to 29-year-olds. Last year, the brand spent $6 million on late-night cable TV and another $1.5 million on magazines. All of that is going away.
Now, SoCo plans to spend $10 million online, where the money reaches far more prospective consumers than the same spend offline. The brand plans to buy ads for streaming TV episodes on Hulu and on the web sites of NBC, CBS, Fox and FX; it will also pick up ads on Facebook, Playboy, Thrillist and Break.com, among a number of others…
Because spirits advertising is forbidden from prime-time television, SoCo is having a tough time reaching its target audience. Plus, the folks the company wants to sell to are spending more of their time online. A Forrester Research survey released last week reported that Generation Y (ages 18 to 29), spends the most time online of any age group — more than 19 hours per week. Plus, Internet use across the board is exploding, up more than 115 percent over the past five years. During the same period, time spent reading magazines dropped 6 percent. It seems the best place to reach a younger audience is online, especially for an alcohol brand.
Lena DerOhannessian, SoCo’s U.S. marketing director, told AdAge, “As we’ve focused more on 21 to 29, TV becomes less and less effective at reaching that audience.” Because spirits advertising is compressed into a very short time slot, SoCo found that it was ending up with multiple alcohol ads within one show, or even one “pod” or commercial break. “That was just a game we didn’t want to keep playing.”
An experiment I’ll be watching like a hawk. Along with all the big boys.
The inability to quantify and analyze hard data from traditional advertising methods has driven companies bonkers for decades. No way at all to track eyeballs. Now – it takes more than click-throughs to determine what’s actually producing sales – but, the hard part of measuring the start of the process is comparatively easy online.
Photo-Voltaic power generation reaches grid parity for the first time
First Solar appears to have reached an important and, for many solar companies, elusive target: grid parity, or the point where photovoltaic electricity is as cheap as conventional electric power.
Pacific Crest analyst Mark Bachman ran some calculations on First Solar’s 12.6 megawatt solar system for Sempra Generation, a subsidiary of California utility Sempra Energy. Instead of focusing on the cost per watt, which Bachman said investors have put too much emphasis on, he looked at the cost per kilowatt-hour.
Bachman priced the Sempra plant at 7.5 cents per kilowatt hour, which is below the U.S. grid parity price of 9 cents per kilowatt-hour. First Solar’s plant didn’t rely on subsidies, he notes.
The industry leaders will be those companies that can deliver electricity at or below grid parity pricing without the aid of subsidies while also delivering superior return to shareholders. Currently, only First Solar can claim these achievements, in our view.
Other companies are also pushing for the grid-parity goal. Greentech Media reported that Cypress Semiconductor CEO T.J. Rodgers said: “that power from crystalline silicon solar panels will be cheaper than coal power by 2012 when transmissions lines, utility bureaucracy and other factors are added in. ‘We are zeroing in on parity,’ Rodgers said. ‘We’re going to match PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric) by 2012. Within a couple of years, the price of solar will be just as cheap.’ “
Bravo. The best news I’ve heard since Election Day.
UK engineers call for green power from household waste
Household rubbish should be used to produce green power rather than being sent for recycling, according to energy experts.
At a briefing to launch a new report by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers on dealing with waste, the authors said that converting waste could provide up to a fifth of the UK’s electricity needs in future and help the country meet its renewable energy targets.
The UK produces more than 300m tonnes of waste every year, enough to fill the Albert Hall every two hours. Most of this is buried in landfill, though new EU legislation will require a 50% cut in the practice by 2013…
Energy can be harnessed from waste in several ways, depending on the type. The two proven methods are combustion, where waste is burned to produce electricity and heat, and anaerobic digestion, a biological process where waste is treated to produce methane, which can then be used for fuel. The former is most suitable for dry waste while the latter is best for wet or organic waste.
There are fewer than 50 small-scale energy-from-waste plants operating in the UK at the moment, a combination of combustion plants and anaerobic digesters. This compares to several thousand in countries such as Denmark and Germany.
I clamber up alongside the fence-sitters in this either/or discussion. Folks looking for a magic bullet rarely comprehend natural complexity.
If push comes to shove, I’m on the side of producing energy instead of recycling. I’d rather replace finite consumables with our detritus. Of course, it doesn’t sound as if the Brits are any better than we Yanks when it comes to either practice.
