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A guest post from Mark Louis who has begun a very useful habit of preparing Alternative Energy Roundups on a roughly weekly basis.

Lamar Advertising Co. in Florida is making advertising a green enterprise:

Lamar Advertising Co. will start retrofitting all billboards across Florida with wind and solar energy systems. The company intends to complete the operation by 2012 at the cost of about $12.5 million — the Department of Energy will provide $2.5 million while the remaining cost will be borne by Lamar.

The project will cover 1,370 billboards across eight markets throughout
Florida with most of the billboards located along interstates and at thoroughfares. Not only will the billboards be powered by wind and solar energy systems, they will also function as small power generating hubs feeding the surplus electricity to the grid. The combined capacity of the billboard energy systems will be about 1 MW.

WePower, a California-based sustainable energy solutions company, estimated that if all of the 500,000 billboards along the interstates were to switch to wind energy generating power at a wind speed of 10 miles per hour, they would generate 16.8 billion kWh of electricity. It would be enough to power 1.5 million homes in annually and would prevent 5.3 million tonnes of carbon emissions from entering into the atmosphere.

There’s an interesting new design for wind turbines:

FloDesign has raised $40 million of venture capital financing in two rounds after winning the MIT Clean Energy Entrepreneurship Prize as well as the Ignite Clean Energy Competition in 2008. The company was awarded an $8.3 million grant in 2009 also, as part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s highly competitive Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) program, which supports the development of “transformational” energy technologies.

The company was founded in 2007, after leveraging its knowledge of turbine design based on the jet engine technology. Its shrouded wind turbine design is expected to deliver more than three times the amount of energy as traditional wind turbines for the same size rotor. The rotors of its turbines are very small in size and they can be easily installed and utilized at places where there is high consumption of power but there is no space for conventional wind turbine towers; airports, for instance. It’s significantly smaller compared to other wind turbines and also costs a lot less to install and operate. With the help from MassCEC’s Renewable Energy Trust the Massachusetts Port Authority has already shown a keep interest in deploying FloDesign’s wind turbine technology.  It works by channeling wind into a vortex that spins the blades and generates electricity.

Remember that story about the EPA cleaning up Brownfield sites for possible renewable energy use? It’s okay if you don’t.  Anyway, that project is starting to bear fruit:

The utility company National Grid has teamed up with solar specialist Rivermoor Energy to build a 1-megawatt solar array at a former industrial site in Haverhill, Massachusetts. The new project is more than double the size of its closest competitor, a 425 kilowatt solar array located on the site of a former brownfield in Brockton. The new installation is another notch on the solar belt for Rivermoor, which also started construction on the largest rooftop solar installation in Boston earlier this year.

Beyond that, the whole idea of reclaiming brownfields to create new green jobs in sustainable energy by reclaiming brownfields has been taking off with a big push from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It’s a restorative approach that offers a stark contrast with the destruction caused by fossil fuel harvesting, the latest example being British Petroleum’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The idea behind reclaiming brownfields for sustainable energy is partly one of simple expediency. Many of these abandoned or underused industrial sites have usable roads and utility hookups in place, helping to lower the cost of new construction on the site. Many are located near existing communities, raising the possibility of creating new local jobs that would reduce the impact of long distance travel. Both of these aspects are essentially conservationist, maximizing the use of existing resources to create new energy generating capacity. The brownfields concept also ties in with the trend toward distributed energy, in which sustainable energy is harvested at or near its point of use.

Japan has embarked on a new project involving Tokyo’s taxis:

Due to a government-funded pilot project to test emission-free cars, the world’s first taxis with easily replaceable batteries hit the streets of the Japanese capital on Monday.

Japan’s energy agency has launched the purpose-built vehicles that can run on easily swapped batteries, rather than wait to be recharged or switch to other fuels. Three cars based on the Nissan Dualis will operate as normal taxis. “Tokyo can become the capital of electric vehicles,” said Kiyotaka Fujii, president of the Japanese unit of Better Place.

According to the company, ordinary Tokyo taxis can clock up as many as 300 kilometers a day, the city being world’s largest taxi market with 60,000 cabs more than London, New York and Paris combined.

Green Mountain College in Vermont has embraced biomass energy:

The new combined heat and power (CHP) biomass plant will burn woodchips, and is projected to provide 85% of the school’s heat and generate 20% of its electricity. Number six fuel oil will now be used mainly as a backup to heat campus buildings. GMC estimates it will burn about 4,000-5,000 tons of locally harvested woodchips each year as the primary fuel. The $5.8 million plant will pay for itself over eighteen years through savings on fuel costs.

In the new plant, woodchips are fed into a boiler and heated at a very high temperature with low oxygen, until the fuel smolders and emits gas. On the back side of boiler, oxygen is added and the gas ignites—the resulting steam is circulated through existing pipes for heat and hot water. The steam also activates a turbine which will produce 400,000 kWh of electricity.

Don’t have access to solar power where you live? Talk to your neighbors:

Community gardening is taking up a new energetic form across the country. Rather than rows of corn, leaf lettuce and heirloom tomatoes, friends and neighbors are planting solar gardens. The power of the collective solar will is already evidenced by the successes of organizations like One Block Off The Grid (1BOG) and companies like SolarCity that offer group buying discounts. But those installations still involve individual homes with individual solar arrays. Increasingly, homeowners are taking advantage of net metering and feed-in tariff (FIT) laws to communally install solar “gardens” in one location off-site from their homes.

Solar gardens present an alternative for renters, condominium residents and homeowners with shaded or otherwise obstructed rooftops. These solar outcasts represent the latest in creative solar power adoption. Solar gardens are groups of solar panels creating solar energy together but owned by a group of people.

To facilitate this new solar movement, one innovator, Joy Hughes, started the Solar Panel Hosting Company and SolarGardens.org (as explained in a recent ecopolitology blog). The concept involves homeowners installing solar panels on a rooftop nearby. You, the individual, monitor and record the energy production from your specific panels, subtract your home usage and collect a check. It’s the same as if the panels were on your own roof, only with benefit of group buying and cheaper, bulk installation. The ultimate goal is that anyone, no matter their financial status or credit score, can own their own solar panels.

Washington, Maine, Vermont and Massachusetts have laws enabling group solar, and Oregon, Indiana, and Florida have feed-in tariffs that allow for some monetary reward, even profit.  Senator Mark Udall has introduced the SUN Act, a bill that would give equal federal tax breaks to solar panels hosted off-site.

Hydrogen has always been alluring to those looking to cut automotive emissions, but it can be expensive.  Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory may have solved the problem of cost:

Hydrogen would command a key role in future renewable energy technologies, experts agree, if a relatively cheap, efficient and carbon-neutral means of producing it can be developed. An important step towards this elusive goal has been taken by a team of researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California, Berkeley. The team has discovered an inexpensive metal catalyst that can effectively generate hydrogen gas from water.

“Our new proton reduction catalyst is based on a molybdenum-oxo metal complex that is about 70 times cheaper than platinum, today’s most widely used metal catalyst for splitting the water molecule,” said Hemamala Karunadasa, one of the co-discoverers of this complex. “In addition, our catalyst does not require organic additives, and can operate in neutral water, even if it is dirty, and can operate in sea water, the most abundant source of hydrogen on earth and a natural electrolyte. These qualities make our catalyst ideal for renewable energy and sustainable chemistry.”

Hydrogen gas, whether combusted or used in fuel cells to generate electricity, emits only water vapor as an exhaust product, which is why this nation would already be rolling towards a hydrogen economy if only there were hydrogen wells to tap. However, hydrogen gas does not occur naturally and has to be produced. Most of the hydrogen gas in the United States today comes from natural gas, a fossil fuel. While inexpensive, this technique adds huge volumes of carbon emissions to the atmosphere. Hydrogen can also be produced through the electrolysis of water – using electricity to split molecules of water into molecules of hydrogen and oxygen. This is an environmentally clean and sustainable method of production – especially if the electricity is generated via a renewable technology such as solar or wind – but requires a water-splitting catalyst.

Guess what? Americans really want electric cars:

Nissan Motor Co said on Thursday it is on track to book 25,000 U.S. orders for its Leaf electric vehicle by the end of the year and the automaker will be making money on the green car.

Nissan has taken 8,000 U.S. reservations for the hatchback, set to go on sale in the United States in December, since it started taking orders nine days ago, Mark Perry, Nissan’s North America director of product planning and strategy, told Reuters on the sidelines of an industry conference.

“We are on a double time march (for launch),” Perry said. “We are on our way to have 25,000 firm orders by December.”

While the cost of the Leaf is high, Federal tax credits of $7,500 will cut the Leaf’s retail price to about 10 percent over the $23,000 starting price for a Prius. State incentives could cut the cost further. In California, credits could reduce the Leaf price to $20,280.

As I’ve said before, while it’s great that we want to buy electric cars, it’s not enough to have just the cars.  To make these vehicles viable to all Americans, we need to build an electric vehicle infrastructure.  Charging stations in parking garages and hotel & restaurant parking lots.  Stations right next to highway exits and on street corners.  Transitioning to an electric fleet will require a massive undertaking, and hopefully we will be up to the challenge.

The Department of Agriculture & EPA are teaming up to promote biogas:

The EPA and USDA believe the $3.9 million their collaboration will provide over the next five years will help farms overcome obstacles preventing them from recovering and using biogas. Right now, there are about 150 on-farm manure digesters across the country that turn methane into biogas. Estimates are that 8,000 farms could put in digesters and recover the equivalent of the greenhouse gases of 6.5 million passenger vehicles a year while producing 1,500 megawatts of energy.

Poo!

And more poo!:

A new $2.4 million biogas and energy efficiency project at a sewage treatment plant in Washington State will capture methane gas from the treatment process and recycle it as fuel to run equipment at the plant, saving the sewage agency more than $228,000 yearly in utility costs. That’s a pretty decent payback, especially since $1.7 million of the total was chipped in by Puget Sound Energy, the local utility company. Along with the efficiency upgrade, the biogas project will greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the treatment plant and save about 2.8 million kilowatt hours yearly (enough to power about 210 homes), relieving pressure on the local grid and helping to obviate the need for new fossil fuel burning power plants in the region.

The project, which is located at the Budd Inlet Treatment Plant, is just one of a veritable flood of new methods for reclaiming valuable resources from what is, let’s face it, the ultimate renewable energy feedstock.

I know you rely on me for all poo-related news.

The Defense Department is investing in an Ithica battery manufacturer:

The U.S. Department of Defense has its eye on Ithaca — in hopes that groundbreaking battery technology being developed here could help boost national security.

It is investing $1 million in Ithaca-based company Widetronix to support the production of tiny self-charging batteries that can last anywhere from 25 days to 25 years.

Earlier investment from the Navy helped the Cornell University spinoff company develop silicon semiconductor materials upon which to build the tiny batteries, and an additional $1.2 million from The Solar Energy Consortium will enable the small startup to double its staff and expand its facilities at the South Hill Business Campus.

Google has made its first investment in wind energy:

Google Inc. has invested $38.8 million in two North Dakota wind farms, the Internet giant’s first direct investment in utility-scale renewable energy generation.

The Mountain View, Calif., company said in a Monday blog post that it invested in wind farms built by NextEra Energy Resources, a unit of FPL Group Inc. The wind turbines, made by General Electric Co., generate 169.5 megawatts of power, enough to serve more than 55,000 homes.

While VA Governor Bob McDonnell may be lobbying big oil for more off shore drilling, a new study suggests he would be better served investing in off shore wind energy:

Researchers identified 25 leasing sectors that could generate 3,200 megawatts of offshore wind generating capacity without interfering with shipping lanes, Navy training or space launches from NASA’s Wallops Island facility on the Eastern Shore. The Navy and NASA have expressed concerns about offshore energy developments, and NASA has stated serious reservations about ocean structures within its flight path.

Turbine manufacturing in Virginia would decrease the capital costs of wind projects by 15 percent and generate an investment of $403 million in the local economy.

Within two decades, 9,700 to 11,600 jobs could be created with the development of 3,200 megawatts of offshore wind.

Research on the environmental impacts to shore and sea birds is scant and will require additional studies. A separate report will address that issue in June.

Louisiana State University is embracing biofuels:

LSU Dining serves hundreds of students every day, but the cooking oil used in one dining hall feeds something other than mouths — the University’s lawnmowers.

After it is used to make meals for students, cooking oil from the 459 Commons is converted to biodiesel and used to fuel the lawnmowers maintaining the University’s landscaping.

Facility Services has supplemented its regular petroleum diesel with biofuel for about two years, said Fred Fellner, assistant director for Landscape Services.  The biodiesel is mixed with regular diesel to create a mixture called B20 or B30, which contains 20 or 30 percent biodiesel, respectively, Fellner said.

Today’s obligatory poo story comes from China:

The manure from the 250,000 cows at the Huishan farm, located in Shenyang, China, will be converted into biogas and is expected to produce 38,000 MWh a year through four GE JMS420 Jenbacher gas engines. The energy generated will be sold to the state grid in China.

One of the features of the project is the utilization of fuel circulation. In addition to the use of biogas for power generation, the liquid (residual from biogas production) will be used to nourish the grass in the pasture, and the solid waste can be sold as organic fertilizer, thus the surrounding land will become a base for organic agriculture.

When the new biogas power generation project is completed, it will be the world’s largest cow manure project. It will not only serve China’s national economic and environmental development goals, but it also is expected to reduce about 180,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year.

It’s not enough to create green energy.  You also need to be able to transmit it.  Caliornia took a step this week to accomplish that goal:

Southern California Edison (SCE) announced yesterday that the first phase of their Tehachapi Renewable Transmission Project (TRTP) was completed. When all phases are developed, TRTP will include a series of new and upgraded high-voltage transmission lines capable of integrating electricity from wind farms, solar and other generation resources to deliver 4,500 megawatts of power, enough for 3 million homes.

The completed segment of TRTP is capable of delivering 700 megawatts according to Theodore F. Craver Jr., chairman, president and chief executive of SCE’s parent corporation, Edison International.

SCE predicts it will invest $21.5 billion to expand, green and strengthen the region’s power grid over the next 5 years. A total of $5.5 billion is directed toward the transmission grid.

In the last few round-ups, I mentioned a push by the EPA to “recycle” brownfield sites and use them to house renewable energy projects.  This push is  starting to bear fruit:

As capable as he was of creating bold visions, Gregory Adanin could not have imagined this moment. The Ventower Industries founder stood atop a post-World War II-era industrial landfill, where the blue sky on that sunny Michigan spring day belied both the smokestacks towering on the horizon near Lake Erie and the grimy history of the ground underneath his feet.

The contrasts didn’t stop there. Gathered with him in this setting, which juxtaposed rural wetlands and farmhouses in one direction against old-industry infrastructure in another, was a small crowd of between 150 and 200 people. Among them, standing atop the 20th-century industrial landfill, was an impressive contingent of dignitaries that included Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm (D), U.S. Representative John Dingell (DMich.), and a host of other officials…

He certainly will remember it, though, and not because of who was there. On that day, March 30, Adanin and the assembled gathering were celebrating the groundbreaking for Ventower Industries’ new wind energy tower manufacturing plant, to be located in Monroe, Mich. Ventower is the brainchild of CEO Adanin, who worked to make the plant happen for close to two years, from the time he first started meeting with economic development officials, many of whom were present that day. The company aims to supply wind turbine manufacturers with towers.

The 115,000 square-foot plant, scheduled to come on-line March 2011, will employ 150 new workers.

It was thought by many that the approval of the Cape Wind energy project may spur an off shore wind energy movement throughout the country.  Well, it’s started:

The next day, in New Jersey, a company called Fishermen’s Energy launched a buoy to measure wind speed and temperatures to determine the best location to site turbines. If all goes as the company hopes, construction on up to 100 offshore turbines could begin next year, says spokeswoman Rhonda Jackson.

In Delaware, where another offshore project is in the works, officials also were watching the federal government’s decision closely. “People that I know were not doing anything else that morning, waiting for that announcement,” says Willett Kempton, a wind energy expert at the University of Delaware. “It was a month of buildup.” The Delaware proposal recently cleared a hurdle of its own when the U.S. Interior Department last month issued a “Request for Interest” from developers interested in locating turbines in federal waters.

Similar offshore wind projects are being considered in Maine and Maryland. Meanwhile, a Virginia Coastal Energy Research Consortium report last month found that 10 percent of that state’s energy could come from offshore wind. In Rhode Island, however, the Public Utilities Commission sank a plan to build eight offshore turbines. Regulators cited the high cost of the power the project would produce. Gov. Donald Carcieri, a backer of wind energy, called it “an extraordinarily short-sighted and narrow-minded decision.”  A 2008 report from the U.S. Department of Energy found that the United States could get 20 percent of its energy from offshore wind turbines, many of them in the Atlantic.

Iowa continues to become a leader in alternative energy production:

Clean technology company Fiberight announced today that it has started “commenced production at the nation’s first commercial cellulosic ethanol plant using enzymatic conversion technology and industrial / municipal solid waste (MSW) as feedstock.” According to a company release, Fiberight converted a former first generation corn ethanol plant in Blairstown, Iowa to cellulosic biofuel production. Following a total $24 million investment, the facility will be scaled to final commercial production capacity of approximately 6 million gallons of biofuel per year in 2011.

One overlooked source of carbon-free energy could be hydropower.  And apparently, it could be a substantial source of energy:

The U.S. has about 100,000 MW of hydropower capacity. However, a study by Navigant Consulting Inc. shows that the technical potential is around 400,000 MW.

The study estimates the industry could add 60,000 MW of new capacity by 2025. But NHA, which commissioned the study, said an increase of that size “will not occur without a series of changes to the status quo, including improvements in certain aspects of the regulatory process for hydropower development.”

Up to 700,000 jobs could be created by 2025 if the potential for new capacity is met, the study shows.

According to the study, there are 5,140 MW of undeveloped hydropower potential in the NE US alone. If that potential was met by 2025, it would create more than 159,000 jobs in the region.  Part of the problem is the various levels of red tape that must be broken through to build new projects.  The Recovery Act included a 30-percent investment tax credit and grants for building new hydropower capacity at existing plants and non-powered dams.

The Department of Energy dished out a substantial amount of money today:

U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu today announced the selections of projects for investment of up to $62 million over five years to research, develop, and demonstrate Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) systems capable of providing low-cost electrical power. This funding will support improvements in CSP systems, components, and thermal energy storage to accelerate the market-readiness of this renewable energy technology. Accelerating breakthroughs in renewable energy technologies supports the Administration’s strategy of diversifying the U.S. energy portfolio to increase our energy independence while fostering a fast-growing clean-energy economy.

“Developing low-cost, renewable energy generation is crucial to meeting our nation’s increasing demands for electricity,” said Secretary Chu. “By investing in the development of low-cost solar technologies we can create new jobs and pave the way towards a clean-energy future.”

And, speaking of solar, researchers in Germany have made a breakthrough:

A team of German researchers has nudged aside a U.S. record for thin film solar efficiency, previously held by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory at 19.9%. The new German solar conversion efficiency record of 20.1% is for CIGS thin film solar technology, which is based on a compound of copper, indium, gallium, and selenium. According to a report in Electro IQ, the team from the Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research achieved the result in laboratory tests, using a co-evaporation process that is scalable to commercial production – at least in theory.

Meanwhile, a U.S.-Korean research team based at Oregon State University is on to a new low cost process for manufacturing thin film photovoltaic cells based on a variant of CIGS, copper indium diselenide (CIS). Put the two together and we may be taking yet another step forward in making sustainable solar energy cost-competitive with fossil fuels.

And finally, somewhere Lindsey Graham is rolling over in his grave:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said in a statement today that passing a climate and energy bill this year is “impossible” after the Gulf oil spill and the Democrats’ new push on immigration reform. Sens. John Kerry (D-MA) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) apparently weren’t listening.
Kerry and Lieberman released a statement today announcing their plan to roll out a climate and energy bill on Wednesday.

In their statement, they seemed to imply that events of the last few weeks had helped the climate bill’s prospects: “We are more encouraged today that we can secure the necessary votes to pass this legislation this year in part because the last weeks have given everyone with a stake in this issue a heightened understanding that as a nation, we can no longer wait to solve this problem which threatens our economy, our security and our environment.”

There was no immediate comment from President Graham.