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1. Gore, Reid Plug the Electric Superhighway
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2. Greener wedding show Friday on Portland's eastside
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3. Attend the Uptime Institute's Lean, Clean & Green, April 13-16
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4. Geothermal Power Heats Up in a Down Economy
Gore, Reid Plug the Electric Superhighway
Katie Fehrenbacher - Policy
The comparison between the two industries has been kicked around as long as the energy industry has been talking about the smart grid, smart meters and building-out power transmission infrastructure. But it’s even more timely today. This afternoon Senator Harry Reid unveiled a proposal to invest in building out an electrical transmission network that can connect clean power, like solar and wind, generated in remote areas to the greater smart grid.
Reid’s proposal for building power lines to connect clean power to the larger grid — what he called an electric superhighway — is expected to be added into the upcoming energy bill. At the Wall Street Journal conference Gore said he hopes to see the upcoming energy bill, and Reid’s electric superhighway portion, debated in Congress in the next few months. The renewable energy industry is happy about Reid’s plan — The American Wind Energy Association said in an emailed statement that it looks forward to working with Reid to form a consensus over: “interconnection-wide planning, interconnection-wide cost allocation, and consolidated permitting."
At the conference Gore took the information/energy networks comparison a step farther. He noted that the Internet started out with large stations serving as centralized connection points, and said that the energy network will slowly move from centralized generation to distributed generation. As the Internet was built out “the computing power was shifted to the periphery — the same thing will happen to renewable energy.”
But boosting distributed clean power generation will take a long time, Gore said, and we don’t have time to wait. That’s because renewable power is just too expensive right now. Other panelists, like PG&E’s CEO Peter Darbee, pointed out throughout the day that rooftop solar panels are just far more expensive than centralized solar power plants. It was cheap computing and Moore’s law that delivered the shift to distributed computing at the edge of the network from a more centralized system. But given there’s just not the equivalent force pushing down the cost of renewables, who knows how long will it take clean power to follow suit.
Image courtesy of wikimedia.
Hear Microsoft, IBM, Dell and Cisco execs at GigaOM’s Green:Net.
Greener wedding show Friday on Portland's eastside
Shelby Wood, The Oregonian - Find a green (dentist, mechanic, etc...)
Attend the Uptime Institute's Lean, Clean & Green, April 13-16
Celeste LeCompte - Uncategorized
If you're an IT executive in today's market, you must be thinking about getting back to basics—thrift and efficiency. And this probably means reducing capital investment. Did you know that one of the fastest and simplest ways to reduce capital investment is to change your IT spending patterns and purchase energy-efficient IT equipment in your next technology refresh? Attend the Uptime Institute's 4th Annual Research Symposium, Lean, Clean & Green — the only global conference on no-compromise data center computing, peak availability, resiliency, productivity, energy efficiency and environmental sustainability — to find out more. The Uptime Institute will also provide in-depth information on how to configure, manage and operate your IT systems to reduce both capital and operating expenses with little or no capital expenditure.
Register now for this great event, to be held on April 13 -16, at the Hilton New York. You'll go home with ideas you can implement immediately to save you thousands. Earth2Tech readers can start saving now: Get $1,000 off the full ticket price with discount code 09SYMP1595.
Geothermal Power Heats Up in a Down Economy
David Ehrlich - Big Green
2009 could prove to be the year of geothermal in the U.S. The number of new geothermal projects in the country has risen 25 percent since last August alone, according to report out this week from the Geothermal Energy Association, an industry trade group.
But what’s behind the boom? Geothermal represents less than one-half of one percent of the electricity produced in the U.S., so it’s not exactly taking the energy industry by storm, and there is a global credit crunch going on.
According to the report, the increase is the result of new geothermal land leases from the Bureau of Land Management, as well as new projects contracted by the U.S. Navy. The Navy’s Geothermal Program Office, which manages and develops geothermal resources for the entire military — not just the Navy — recently added 10 new geothermal projects to its pipeline, totaling 262 MW. Meanwhile in December, the BLM sold leases for 194,410 acres of land for geothermal development in Oregon, Idaho and Utah. Ormat Technologies, Enel, and Raser Technologies were the top three buyers for the leases, with Ormat shelling out $4.4 million for 80,982 acres.
There have been a total of 23 new projects in development since last August, according to the Geothermal Energy Association, representing an additional 1.5 GW of power.
Perhaps the timing is due to advancements in next-gen geothermal tech, which thanks partly to the magic touch of Google, has seen renewed interest. Last August, Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org, announced $10.3 million in investments in a new form of geothermal called enhanced geothermal systems.
In traditional geothermal, power plants are set up near naturally occurring pockets of steam and hot water. With enhanced geothermal, which is still in the demonstration phase in various projects around the world, those conditions are replicated by fracturing hot rocks and pumping water into the system to make steam. Depending on how deep you drill, enhanced geothermal has the potential to be used anywhere on Earth, instead of relying on naturally occurring geothermal fields.
Yesterday, the Department of Energy said it was putting up $84 million for enhanced geothermal, with $35 million for research into engineered geothermal reservoirs, and $49 million for demonstration projects that can produce at least 5 megawatts per year.
But there’s still plenty of untapped traditional geothermal in the U.S., and even though Google’s investment was focused on next-gen technology, traditional geothermal may prove to be a more attractive, and safe, prospect in a shaky economy. So far, it’s one of the only commercially proven renewable power source that can deliver baseload power. And the U.S. is already a world leader in geothermal power, with over 3 gigawatts of installed capacity spread over eight states.
Price will undoubtedly continue to be another factor when it comes to evaluating geothermal. Some recent reports have said traditional geothermal is cheaper per kilowatt-hour than coal, with Credit Suisse pegging the price at 3.6 cents per kilowatt-hour, vs. 5.5 cents for coal. But geothermal still has high upfront costs, including the time and money spent on exploration. And Scientific American points out that Credit Suisse’s low-ball price includes things like tax incentives, which won’t last forever, as well the assumption that there’ll be cheap financing available for the construction of the geothermal plants — which isn’t likely in these economic times.
But despite those hurdles, it looks like there’s a big future for geothermal. There’s a long line of 126 geothermal projects in the works in the U.S., including the 23 in development since last August. And who knows? Maybe it will soon account for a full one percent of the electricity produced in the U.S. some day.
Hear Microsoft, IBM, Dell and Cisco execs at GigaOM’s Green:Net.
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