Super Bowl Going Green
Sterling Planet today announced a partnership with the National Football League (NFL) Environmental Program and Florida Power & Light (FPL) Sunshine Energy program for business customers to make Super Bowl XLI and the NFL Experience Football Theme Park both 100% renewable energy events. This year’s NFL championship game will be the first Super Bowl to use 100% renewable energy.
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Community Based Renewable Energy
One of the most effective ways to make a lot of renewable energy with just a little patch of land is to use a large wind turbine. Solar too is always better when there is a lot of it. However large scale wind and solar don’t come cheap. One way around the high cost of these projects would be to get together with a bunch of your friends and neighbors and pool your resources.
This would allow you to buy a very large wind turbine, or set up a field of solar for your neighborhood, use the energy from it and sell the rest. The offset of not having an electric bill combined with the revenue sharing would be used to pay back your part of the investment. You would in essence be your own little neighborhood power company.
There is only one problem…
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Not Quite Green In The “Palm” Of Our Hands
Recently, there have been a lot of posts on the blog about renewable energy, its merits, and various forms. My awesome mom sent me a link to an article that appeared in the New York Times business section today. It is about palm oil and how it had once been thought to be about the best of biofuels and quite heavily used in Europe. Now there seems to be recent studies showing that plantation practices could heavily offset the carbon savings that the fuel has created for its users. A very good lesson for approaching things in a more w-holistic manner.
when scientists studied practices at palm plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia, this green fairy tale began to look more like an environmental nightmare.
Rising demand for palm oil in Europe brought about the clearing of huge tracts of Southeast Asian rainforest and the overuse of chemical fertilizer there.
Worse still, the scientists said, space for the expanding palm plantations was often created by draining and burning peatland, which sent huge amounts of carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
Become enlightened here!
Get It Where You Can
Geothermal power in Alaska, hmmm. Seems counter-intuituive to me. Turns out there are hot springs in Alaska - they’re just not very hot (comparatively). Traditional geothermal generators require steam. That means the water has to be hot (not just the 212 F temperature you are thinking)! From Wikipedia
The most common process is the steam flash process, which incorporates steam separators to take the steam from a flashing geothermal well and passes the steam through a turbine that drives an electric generator.
Commercial exploration and development of geothermal energy to date have focused on natural geothermal reservoirs—volumes of rock at high temperatures (up to 662°F or 350°C)
This process requires sources of heat close to the surface.
Although geothermal energy is present everywhere beneath the Earth’s surface, its use is possible only when certain conditions are met: (1) The energy must be accessible to drilling, usually at depths of less than 2 mi (3 km) but possibly at depths of 4mi (6–7km) in particularly favorable environments…
Do I have to have steam? Not necessarily.
A more efficient utilization of the resource can be obtained by using the binary process on resources with a temperature less than 360°F (180°C).
So what is this “binary process”? The Wiki gets a bit too technical so I’ll take over.
Simply put, utilizing heat without using steam is like a heat pump for your house. You take a second system (hence, binary) to utilize the temperature differential - you are moving heat. When substances heat they want to expand. When gasses heat they REALLY want to expand. You keep them under pressure until you are ready to use this energy. In the case of the home heat pump you typically let the gas expand in some coils, that makes the coils cold, then you blow air across the coils to cool your home. With power generation it’s a bit more intense. You let this hot gas out of a nozzle and spin a turbine to produce electricity.
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It’s Not How Much You Use It’s How Much You Waste
Rt’s post about fun ways to garner more energy from the maw of waste led me to recycle a post from way back here is a fun little graphic.
This image and the massive amounts of data that went into making this sweet chart is from The Lawernce Livermore National Lab’s Energy Flow Trends.
Smarts = Efficiency
This is relatively old news but I’m fond of it because it is so darned clever. Who knew gas pipelines had step-down (they call them “letdown”) stations like electricity does? The difference is there is a whole lot of mechanical stuff going on that has to be compensated for (along with a “breeze”, when you decrease pressure you decrease temperature). Currently the gas companies use fuel to reheat the lower pressure gas. Tsk, tsk, tsk.
To transport natural gas across the continent, natural gas pipelines operate at high pressures and considerable energy must be injected to achieve the pressures required. This high pressure must be reduced when the gas enters lower pressure systems that deliver gas to homes and businesses. Currently, there is no commercial use made of the energy that is lost at that stage. Additionally, when pressure is reduced, the gas cools. To ensure reliable pipeline operations, the cooling must be offset — by burning some gas in boilers, reheating the supply to an acceptable temperature.
Here is a much more productive solution. Use a turbine to create electricity when you reduce the pressure. Clever, no? But there’s more. If you use a fuel cell to produce more electricity you can use the waste heat (those puppies get VERY hot) to warm the low pressure gas - eliminating the need for boilers. Sweet.
…announced initiating production of the first multi-megawatt hybrid product, generating ultra-clean electricity while recovering energy normally lost during natural gas pipeline operations.
Operating at natural gas pipeline letdown stations, the system generates 2.2 megawatts (MW) of ultra-clean electricity.
With the new DFC-ERG system, high-pressure gas passes through a turbine, capturing some of the energy that was otherwise lost, and turns it into usable electricity. The integrated fuel cell also electrochemically converts some of the gas into low-impact, environmentally friendly electricity. Finally, heat normally generated by the fuel cell warms the gas to its proper distribution temperature — thus eliminating the boiler (and its emissions).
At 2.2 Mw it’s like having a single tower wind farm that runs 24 hrs a day. Since these would be installed at letdown stations along natural gas pipelines it would be very distributed power close to energy users (that’s why there is a letdown station there).
The combined system can achieve electrical efficiencies over 60 percent, with low noise and virtually zero smog emissions.
It’s not like this is going to satiate our energy appetite but I’ll take every 100 Mw we can get - especially since this was formerly wasted energy. Now, will the gas transport comapanies take advantage of this? How can we find out if they do/don’t?
Emissions Based Parking Permits
In many big cities you have to pay to park, imagine if you had to pay based on how much Co2 your car pumped out. Sounds like a great way to make people understand how their choice of automobile effects the rest of us. Well wonder no more because in London they are giving it a shot. With a graduated scale based on how big your cars engine is, the parking fees range from $0 for a Honda Insight, and $588 for a Porsche 911 Carrera coupe (many are not aware that high performance cars have some of the highest emissions and lowest gas mileage).
From here
…
Owners of Honda Insight gasoline-electric powered vehicles would pay nothing for a parking permit. Vehicles with the largest engines, would pay 300 pounds a year. These include Jaguar X type 2.0-liter gasoline sedan, a Porsche 911 Carrera coupe with a 3.6- liter engine, a 2-liter gasoline Renault Espace and a Range Rover with a 4.4-liter engine, according to the examples given by the council.
 for owners of gas-guzzling vehicles, such as Porsches, Jaguars and Range Rovers, under a plan to reduce pollution.</p>
"submit Emissions Based Parking Permits to digg.com")
Shades
Original post by Scytle
San Francisco LGBT Center ‘Rays The Roof’ With A New Solar Installation
Pacific Gas and Electric Company and the San Francisco LGBT Community Center yesterday celebrated the unveiling of The Center’s new state of the art solar energy system. Senator Carole Migden, Assemblymember Mark Leno, San Francisco Treasurer Jose Cisneros and San Francisco Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting joined the celebration along with several hundred community members who could see live readings of the new system’s power generation and the amount of greenhouse gas emissions the system has avoided.
“The San Francisco Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Community Center is truly a San Francisco icon, and today the Center is demonstrating yet again its leadership on an issue that is dear to all of us — the environment,” said Tom King, CEO, PG&E. “This is the first of many more solar projects that PG&E will be donating to San Francisco as part of our $7.5 million city-wide solar investment.”
The system, manufactured by SunPower and installed by Sun Light and Power, composed of 96 panels rated at 215 watts each is expected to produce over 27,000 kW hours of renewable, green power that will have zero greenhouse gas emissions and will save the Center nearly $5,000 annually in energy costs. The installation of the rooftop solar system, a project managed by The Foundation for Environmental Education, cost $170,000.
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Got Wind?
Unlike some snobs on the East Coast there are some people on the Gulf Coast who think an offshore wind farm is a wonderful thing.
The Gulf Coast is littered with the carcasses of unused oil equipment. Now those structures are being repurposed to build the first offshore wind farm in the United States.
The turbines are bound for an 18-square-mile area roughly 10 miles off the coast of Galveston, Texas, where the first offshore wind farm in the US is under construction.
…a Stanford University study that identified the Louisiana-Texas coastline as one of the best spots in the US for wind power. Average wind speed is exceptionally high, and it blows hardest during the hottest hours of the day, when demand for power is at its peak and electricity prices are highest.
WEST signed a contract to deliver 150 megawatts, which should take roughly 50 windmills. A test turbine is scheduled to be in operation this summer; the rest should be spinning by late 2008. Another 50 or so could follow by 2010 if demand warrants.
Don’t the good news just keep comin’ :)
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