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1. PHOTO: Tesla's Model S Revealed! …Or Not
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2. Congress Spares Energy Spending, Credits in Compromise Stimulus Bill
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3. Timeline Revealed for DOE Loan Program: Don't Get Your Hopes Up
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4. Energy Harvesting Gets Four Legs and Fur
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5. Daily Sprout
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6. Beneath the Push for a National Grid, Eminent Domain Battle Brews
PHOTO: Tesla's Model S Revealed! …Or Not
Katie Fehrenbacher - Automotive
As part of the optimistic newsletter from Tesla this week — the one detailing hopes for a cash-flow positive Roadster this summer and a $350 million DOE loan later this year — the electric vehicle startup showed off this sneaker pic of its next vehicle, the Model S. It’s about as revealing as a burka, but hey, it’s something. Here’s a little peek at the car that Tesla plans to reveal on March 26 in Southern California.
Congress Spares Energy Spending, Credits in Compromise Stimulus Bill
Josie Garthwaite - Energy
The House and Senate have made a tentative deal on the stimulus bill, and plan to vote on a compromise version of the package tomorrow. At $789 billion, the bill is some $40 billion leaner than either of the versions proposed by the two legislative bodies. Full details of the compromise bill have yet to emerge, but what has come out suggests that energy escaped the Congressional carving knife.
According to an AP report, lawmakers have allotted a total of $50 billion for energy programs in the compromise version, compared with $54 billion proposed in the House last month. If lawmakers and then President Obama give the green light to this version, production tax credits for wind energy will be extended through 2012, and for geothermal and marine energy through 2013. Below are more highlights — from BusinessWeek and the AP:
- Weatherizing Homes: $6.4B
- Smart Grid: $11B
- Renewable Energy Loan Subsidies: $13.9B
- State Energy Efficiency and Clean Energy Grants: $6.3B
- Federal Building Efficiency Improvements: $4.5B
- Plug-in Hybrid Tax Credit: Up to $7,500 per family
- Advanced Research Project Agency for Energy: $400M
- Tax Incentives for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency (over 10 years): $20B
Hear Microsoft, IBM, Dell and Cisco execs at GigaOM’s Green:Net.
Timeline Revealed for DOE Loan Program: Don't Get Your Hopes Up
Josie Garthwaite - Energy
Energy Secretary Steven Chu wanted checks cut in four weeks. Today, the director of the Department of Energy’s much-delayed loan guarantee program for clean energy technology, David Frantz, revealed what he sees as a realistic timeline: In testimony today before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, he said that while the program will begin disbursing loans this year, guarantees for projects that require environmental impact statements will not go through until 2010. This means more waiting for the program’s first round of 16 finalists, including Solyndra, Beacon Power and Tesla Motors (which has also requested low-interest loans under a separate DOE program).
Frantz acknowledged that the program “faced challenges in its first few years,” referring to a lack of support from Bush administration officials. But that’s changed. With a new team in the White House, he said the program has “a new sense of energy to make these decisions.” Nonetheless, he added that more delays could ensue if new funding requests for the program are not approved by next month.
The last administration’s Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Andy Karsner, said the loan program — and the DOE at large — face bigger problems than money. Karsner advocated for the creation of a clean energy bank — a new government entity that could relieve the DOE of responsibilities it was never meant, and is not equipped to handle: namely, the actual rollout and financing of technology. “The guts of what we do at the DOE well is science and technology,” he told the Committee. Once things get out of the R&D phase, he said, the DOE is “handcuffed” by its position as a civil service agency.
Kevin Book, a senior analyst for Friedman Billings Ramsey & Co., agreed on the question of competence. You can’t expect scientists to be financiers, he said, and “you certainly can’t have the bankers become the scientists.”
Hear Microsoft, IBM, Dell and Cisco execs at GigaOM’s Green:Net.
Energy Harvesting Gets Four Legs and Fur
David Ehrlich - Big Green
Energy harvesting has been getting interest from a number of different sectors for tiny, energy-saving applications, and now it’s making its way down to the nanoscale. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have attached a tiny muscle-movement-driven generator to a hamster and let him loose in his little hamster wheel, running and scratching, to show that energy can be harvested from irregular body movements (hat tip to MIT’s Technology Review).
The system uses a piezoelectric-based nanogenerator where the stretching of a nanowire creates electricity. Zhong Wang, a materials science and engineering professor who led the research, told the Technology Review that this is the first time a generator has been shown to get energy from small, irregular motion — irregular in terms of frequency of motion as well as amplitude of power. This opens the door for possible uses in implantable medical devices that get their power from muscle stretches, heartbeats and bloodflow.
Putting energy harvesting nanodevices into bodies may be a few years away, but there are some energy harvesting systems that are already on the market, or at least much closer to market, including wireless sensors, regenerative braking, and even bumps in the road. And it’s not just startups that are getting in the game.
Chipmaker Freescale Semiconductor is working with McLaren Electronic Systems on a project that could give Formula 1 race cars a turbo boost from power collected through regenerative braking. EnOcean, a spinoff of electronics and industrial engineering giant Siemens, makes wireless modules for building automation systems that can grab energy from ambient sources including solar, heat and vibration.
And then there’s the charge-up-your-iPhone-while-you-walk application, with M2E Power developing an electromagnetic system to power up portable devices. There are even ways to get power from everyday, ambient radiation. Scientists at the Idaho National Laboratory are working on getting power using nanoantennas that can absorb infrared energy.
Pretty soon, everything that moves, makes heat, or emits any kind of excess energy could be used to to power up tiny devices, or at least take some of the burden off primary power sources in home appliances or cars. Forget about putting a tiger in your tank — in the future, maybe you’ll stuff a few hamsters in there instead.
Hear Microsoft, IBM, Dell and Cisco execs at GigaOM’s Green:Net.
Daily Sprout
Josie Garthwaite - Misc
Let’s Make a Deal: Spending on clean energy, energy efficiency and public transit in the latest stimulus bill is exactly halfway between the House and Senate versions — the House had approved $72 billion, the Senate $68 billion. — Gristmill
Bingaman for Ethanol Boost: With corn ethanol plants closing almost every week, and many technological hurdles remaining for commercial cellulosic ethanol, Senator Jeff Bingaman, Chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said the government should consider allowing higher ethanol content in gasoline blends. — NYT’s Green Inc.
Impax Backs Waste-to-Energy Startup: UK-based Impax Asset Management has invested $6 million in the waste management company New Earth Solutions to support the launch of a waste-to-energy offshoot. — Clean Edge
Vestas Banks on U.S. Market: Turbine maker and sector bellwether Vestas is hedging its optimistic 2009 outlook based on what happens in the U.S. market. While company expects other markets to “do their part,” it fears the U.S. market may not recover from near-total “collapse” last quarter. — WSJ’s Environmental Capital
Gearing Up for the Smart Grid: Michigan’s Consumers Energy today announced it will be the first utility to buy SAP AMI Integration for Utilities software package, a move that’s indicative of the wave of change sweeping across the power industry. — Triple Pundit
Hear Microsoft, IBM, Dell and Cisco execs at GigaOM’s Green:Net.
Beneath the Push for a National Grid, Eminent Domain Battle Brews
Josie Garthwaite - Energy
Siting is a thorny issue for any major infrastructure project — after all, who wants a freeway in their backyard? For the pending transmission grid buildout, the challenge could be even greater because of a key difference between the Interstate Highway System that President Eisenhower championed a half-century ago and the thousands of miles of transmission lines proposed to connect abundant renewable energy resources in rural regions with urban centers: It’s all about exits.
Highways have on- and off-ramps, and so towns along the route can see some of the benefit. High-voltage direct-current transmission lines, while efficient for long distances, aren’t designed to drop off electricity along the way — they’re basically no-exit highways, according to Lester Lave, who co-directs Carnegie Mellon’s Electricity Industry Center and testified at a Senate hearing about the renewable portfolio standard this week. (As noted on the Green Inc. blog, it’s possible to add “off ramps,” but it’s very expensive.) As a result, states may not be as willing to seize land for the project as they were for Eisenhower’s interstate, as the New York Times explains.
Spain-based energy giant Iberdrola Renewables’ Don Furman said at the Senate hearing this week (he heads up North American development, policy and regulation for Iberdrola) that laying thousands of miles of new transmission lines to connect regions with abundant wind and solar resources to energy-hungry cities involves all the challenges of constructing the interstate highway system: “NIMBY” resistance to siting, cross-border planning and permitting, and uncertain cost recovery.
Lave countered that, while the grid is undoubtedly “a piece of national infrastructure,” it differs from an interstate highway in who uses it — and therefore who should coordinate and pay for it. Here’s Lave’s thinking: If Wyoming wants to sell wind power to Southern California, let the two states or utility commissions work it out. If T. Boone Pickens wants to bring wind power to the Texas grid, let him install the transmission lines (if you’re Pickens, by the way, that means lobbying the Texas legislature to let y0u annex land). When it comes to building a no-exit transmission line, Lave said, “I don’t see what the justification would be for making that a federal facility.”
To be sure, there are ways to get interstate transmission lines muscled into being despite regional roadblocks. The Department of Energy can designate National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors. Since acquiring this authority in 2005, the department has designated two corridors — one of which covers the entire state of New Jersey. The designation is not carte blanche approval for transmission lines, but it’s the first step in a process that lets the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission permit projects that have been delayed (or denied) at the state level. As a last resort, it can use eminent domain — a controversial process.
A renewable portfolio standard could grease the wheels for the national grid, giving states without abundant renewable power resources a mandate to tap clean energy from elsewhere — and an incentive to back transmission lines.
Hear Microsoft, IBM, Dell and Cisco execs at GigaOM’s Green:Net.
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