FROM THE MANAGER
Happy 2008 to you all!
Thanks for thinking of us in the 2007 year whether you were a buyer or just a reader. We need to sell product for a profit to stay in business but we also want to offer non-buyers resources that will allow them ideas on how to lead a more complete life through personally saving energy.
“Solar Today” and “Home Power” are two of the leading resources that report on alternative energy and sustainable living issues and lifestyles. If you read each monthly, we congratulate you. If you do not, you might give them a look since they will give you good ideas about how you may either tweak or totally change your lifestyle to gain more energy independence.
“DSIRE” offers a nice list of programs each state offers toward deferring alternative energy installation costs for home and business.
This Green Topics has the theme of alternative energy modalities that are less reported and perhaps you may not have heard of unless you read the publications mentioned above.
You certainly have heard of wind power but may have not heard of a DC(direct current) Europe-wide grid that is being considered. “Where the Wind Blows” discusses this.
“Promise of Renewable Energy Blooms with Algae” is a great article about oil derived from a popular bio source.
“Efforts to Harvest Ocean’s Energy” is about wave-powered electric generation in the Northwest of the USA.
The last article “It’s Inconvenient Being Green” is humorous I feel in that it speaks of the conflict between personal wants and needs and what is best for our environment and how the two are not always in tandem.
We will say that we may or may not agree with all the views and expressions of the writers of these articles but we find the discussion useful.
Thanks for reading and browsing,
Porter
General Manager
Where the Wind Blows
Plug in your toaster – or your television or your vacuum cleaner-and the electricity that surges through it is an alternating current. The question of whether the world would be powered by direct current (DC), in which electrons flow in one direction around a circuit, or by alternating current (AC), in which they jiggle back and forth, was decided in the 1880s. Thomas Edison backed DC. George Westinghouse backed AC. Westinghouse won.
The reason was that over the short distances spanned by early power grids, AC transmission suffers lower losses than DC. It thus became the industry standard. Some people, however, question this standard because over long distances high-voltage DC lines suffer lower losses than AC. Not only does that make them better in their own right, but employing them would allow electricity grids to be restricted in ways that would make wind power more attractive. That would reduce the need for new conventional (and polluting) power stations.
AC/DC/PC
Wind power has two problems. You don’t always get it where you want it and you don’t always get it when you want it. According to Jurgen Schmid, the head of ISET, an alternative-energy institute at the University of Kassel, in Germany, continent-wide power distribution systems in a place like Europe would deal with both of these points.
The question of where the wind is blowing would no longer matter because it is almost always blowing somewhere. If it were windy in Spain but not in Ireland, current would flow in one direction. One a blustery day in the Emerald Isle it would flow in the other day.
Dealing with when the wind blows is a subtler issue. In this context, an important part of Dr Schmid’s continental grid is the branch to Norway. It is not that Norway is a huge consumer. Rather, the country is well supplied with hydroelectric plants. There are one of the few ways (but not the only way) that energy from transient sources like the wind can be stored in grid-filling quantities. The power is used to pump water up into the reservoirs that feed the hydroelectric turbines. That way it is on tap when needed. The capacity of Norway’s reservoirs is so large, according to Dr Schmid, that should the wind drop all over Europe-which does happen on rare occasions-the hydro plants could spring into action and fill in the gap for up to four weeks.
Put like this, A Europe-wide grid seems an obvious idea. That it has not yet been built is because AC power lines would lose too much power over such large distances. Hence the renewed interest in D.C.
Westinghouse won the battle of the currents in the 1880s because it is easier to transform the voltage of an AC current than of a DC current. High voltage is the best way to transmit power (the higher the voltage, the smaller the loss), but high voltage is not usually what the user wants. Power is therefore transmitted along high tension AC lines and then “Stepped down” to usable voltages in local sub-stations.
Edison was right, however, to argue that DC is the best way to transmit electricity of any given voltage. That is because the shifting current of AC runs to earth more easily than DC does. To avoid this earthing, AC lines have to be built a long way from the ground-and the higher the voltage, the farther away they need to be. At 400 kilovolts, a standard value for long distance transmission an alternating current 30 meters (100 feet) from the ground has a fortieth of the loss of a similar cable at ground level. But even at this height an overhead DC line will eat an AC line at distances more than 1,000km (600 miles), while ground-level DC will beat AC at distances as short as 30km.
Dr. Schmid calculates that a DC grid of the sort he envisages would allow wind to supply at least 30% of the power needed in Europe. Moreover, it could do so reliably- and that means wind power could be used for what is known in the jargon as a base-load power supply.
Base-load power is the minimum required to keep things ticking over-the demands of three o’clock in the morning, or thereabouts. At the moment, this is a supplied by traditional power stations. These either burn fossil fuel and thus contribute to global warming, or use uranium, which brings problems such as how to get rid of the waste, as well as political opposition.
Through wind power has its opponents; too, its environmental virtues might be enough to swing things in its favor if it were also reliable. Indeed, a group of Norwegian companies have already started building high-voltage DC lines between Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Germany, though these are intended as much to sell the country’s power as to accumulate other people’s. And Airtricity- an Irish wind-power company – plans even more of them. It proposes what it calls a supergrid. This would link offshore wind farms in the Atlantic Ocean and the Irish, North and Baltic Seas with customers throughout northern Europe.
Airtricity reckons that the first stage of this project, a 2,000 turbine-strong farm in the North Sea, would cost about $2.7 billion. That farm would generate 10 gigawatts. As equivalent amount of coal-fired capacity would cost around $2.3 billion so, adding in the environmental benefits, the project seems worth examining. Such offshore farms certainly work. Airtricity already operates one in the Atlantic, and though it currently has a capacity of only 25 megawatts, increasing that merely means adding more turbines.
Nor is this the limit of some people’s vision. The global Energy Network Institute, based in San Diego, California, reckons high-voltage DC lines could be used to bring solar energy to market from places such as the Sahara. Wind and geothermal power could be gathered from as far afield as South America and Siberia. Such a globalised market has its attractions. Whether the world is ready for the Organization of Electricity Exporting Countries to take over the OPEC, though, remains to be seen.
Economist Magazine
Promise of Renewable Energy
Blooms with Algae
The 16 big flasks of bubbling bright green liquids in Roger Ruan’s lab at the University of Minnesota are part of a new boom in renewable-energy research.
Driven by renewed investment as oil prices hover at about $90, Ruan and scores of scientists around the world are reacting to turn algae into a commercially viable energy source.
Some varieties of algae are as much as 50 percent oil, and that oil can be converted into biodiesel or jet fuel. The biggest challenge is slashing the cost of production, which by one Defense Department estimate is running more than $20 a gallon.
“If you can get algae oils down below $2 a gallon, then you’ll be where you need to be. And there’s a lot of people who think you can,” said Jennifer Holmgren, director of the renewable fuels unit of UOP LLC, an energy subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc.
Researchers are trying to figure out how to grow enough of the right strains of algae and how to extract the oil most efficiently.
During the past two years they’ve enjoyed an upsurge in funding from governments, the Pentagon, big-oil companies utilities and venture-capital firms.
The federal government halted its main algae-research program nearly a decade ago, but technology has advanced and oil prices have climbed since then, and an Energy Department lab announced in late October that it was partnering with Chevron Corp., the second-largest U.S. oil company, in the hunt for better strains of algae.
“It’s not backyard inventors at this point at all,” said George Douglas, a spokesman for the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “It’s folks with experience to move it forward.”
A New Zealand company demonstrated a Range Rover powered by an algae-bio-diesel blend last year, but experts say it will be many years before algae is commercially viable. Ruan expects some demonstrations plants to be built within a few years.
Converting algae oil into biodiesel uses the same process that turns vegetable oils into biodiesel.
But the cost of producing algae oil is hard to pin down because nobody’s running the process start to finish other than in a laboratory, Douglas said. One Pentagon estimate puts it at more than $20 per gallon, but other experts say it’s not clear-cut.
If it can be brought down, algae’s advantages include growing much faster and in less space than conventional energy crops.
An acre of corn can produce about 20 gallons of oil per year, Ruan said, compared with a possible 15,000 gallons of oil per acre of algae.
An algae farm could be located almost anywhere. It wouldn’t require converting cropland from food production to energy production. It could use seawater.
And Algae can gobble up pollutants from sewage and power plants.
The Pentagon’s research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is funding research into producing jet fuel from plants, including algae.
The agency is already working with Honeywell’s UOP, General Electric and the University of North Dakota. In November, it requested additional research proposals.
As the single largest energy consumer in the world, the Defense Department needs new affordable sources of jet fuel, said Douglas Kirkpatrick, the agency’s biofuels program manager.
“Our definition of affordable is less than $5 per gallon, and what we’re really looking for is less than $3 per gallon, and we believe that can be done,” he said.
Associated Press, Steve Karnowski
Efforts to Harvest Ocean’s Energy
Open New Debate Front
Chris Martinson and his fellow fishermen catch crab and shrimp in the same big swell that one day could generate an important part of the Northwest’s energy supply. Wave farms, harvested with high-tech buoys that are being tested here on the Oregon coast, would strain clean, renewable power from the surging sea.
They might make a mess of navigational charts ,too
“I don’t want it in my fishing grounds,” said Mr. Martinson, 40, who docks his 74-foot boat, Libra, here at Yaquina Bay, about 90 miles southwest of Portland. “I don’t want to be worried about driving around someone else’s million-dollar buoy.”
The Coastal Northwest is one of the few parts of the West where water is abundant, but people are still fighting over it. Amid concerns about climate change and the pollution caused by generating electricity with coal and natural gas, Oregon is looking to draw power from the waves that sound its coast with forbidding efficiency.
It might seem a perfect solution in a region that has long been ahead of the national curve on alternative energy. Yet the debate over the potential damage – whether to the environment, the fishing industry or the stunning views of the Pacific – has become intense before the first megawatt has been transmitted to shore.
“Everyone wants that silver bullet,” said Fran Recht of the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission. “The question is this as benign as everyone wants to say it is?”
The first federal permit to conduct testing for a wave energy farm off the coast of the United States was awarded in February to a company that wants to study the ocean area near Reedsport, Ore., 60 miles south of here. Three more permits have since been approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Major technical and financial obstacles remain, and energy generated from waves is not expected to start contributing to the electrical grid in the United States for several years. Yet like wind energy in its early stages in the 1980s, wave energy is considered promising, perhaps inevitable, with the potential to one day provide 5 percent to 10 percent of the nation’s energy supply, according to some projections.
Oregon, Washington and Northern California, where the Pacific Ocean first meets land in the contiguous United States after gathering momentum for thousands of miles beneath westerly winds, have the potential to generate four times as much energy from waves as states on the East Coast, according to studies by the Electric Power Research Institute.
All of the permits approved have been in Oregon, where transmission lines run close to the coast, making them easier to tap into, and where state government encourages business to explore new forms of energy.
With state support, Oregon State University is testing a wave energy buoy it plans to deploy off the coast here next spring.
Finavera Renewables, a Canadian company with an office in Portland, has conducted tests near the Yaquina Head lighthouse here, and has a permit to do more testing near Coos Bay. Ocean Power Technologies, the company planning the project near Reedsport, has received a preliminary permit to test the potential for a wave farm it says could generate up to 50 megawatts of electricity. A typical coal burning plant produces about 600 megawatts.
Several kinds of technology are being tested. Some would use buoys that hold turbines turned by waves. One type being tested at Oregon State would create energy from the relative movement between a fixed spar and a buoy that rises and falls with waves.
The Reedsport project could transmit energy to shore through an outflow pipe once used by a now-defunct timber mill. That convergence of old economy and new reflects what supporters of wave energy say is fitting symmetry for a region that has evolved from an extraction-based economy built on logging to one striving to use natural resources in ways that are environmentally sound.
But some environmentalists and fishermen worry that the recent rush for renewable energy is more about politics, big business, and the next big thing than it is about clean energy. They warn that too little is known about what effect wave farms might have on migrating fish and whales.
“The tendency with new technology is always to minimize the downside,” said Ms. Recht, of the fisheries commission, which works with conservation agencies and the fishing industry to protect fish populations. “I’m not prepared to take new risks unless we’re conserving and respecting the energy we already have.”
Nancy Fitzpatrick, the administrator of the Oregon Salmon Commission, which is financed by the fishing industry , said: “IS it going to impact us? Going way back to the dams, we find out later that of course, yes it affected salmon and migration. So we don’t want to be stuck in a situation like that with wave energy.”
For now, wave parks are expected to be built two or three miles off shore and over as much as several square miles. Supporters say they will barely be visible, if at all.
Philip D. Moeller, a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and a supporter of wave and tidal energy projects said the government was “not allowing these to go into sensitive areas.” Mr. Moeller added, “We haven’t defined sensitive area, but the point is we’ll be cognizant of that.”
He said the commission was encouraging wave energy companies to seek a new five-year “pilot license” the commission has created specifically for wave and tidal energy projects. The license, which could be gained in six months, would let companies set up a short-term wave farm to test technology and demonstrate success to wary investors. If environmental damage became evident, he said, the equipment could be removed from the ocean fairly quickly, something that is far more complicated with dams.
“Let’s get this stuff in the water and find out what is has to offer,” Mr. Moeller said. “Consumers want green power, and this is an option.”
New York Times, William Yardley
It’s Inconvenient Being Green
My condition began when I read of a couple in New York City who had vowed to live a whole year without toilet paper. They were conducting an experiment in environmentally low-impact living as research for a book, they said. For a year they would eschew transportation that emits carbon dioxide, shun foods wrapped in plastic packaging and, most dramatically, conduct the elimination of their waste without the aid of wasteful paper products. I mull the logistics of paperless hygiene as I load a family-size pack of Charmin Ultra Soft into my Subaru Forester. According to the plastic packaging, each roll contains 569 ft (or 52 square meters, which sounds a lot better) of murdered tree. Like the bear in the commercial, I squeeze it tight. I like my toiler paper. I like it a lot.
I am not particularly eco-conscious. But I am increasingly eco-anxious. Every day, it seems, I hear of some new way the world around me is going aggressively green. Workers in Portland, Ore., are cycling to the office. Ireland has slapped a tax on plastic bags. Incoming freshmen at California colleges are asked to keep their Red Bulls in thermoelectric fridges. David Duchovny says he recycles, has solar power and drives an electric car. Now every time I purchase a single-serving water bottle, I hear the opening theme from The X-Files.
So it was with some relief that I learned that ecoanxiety is a diagnosable condition. A so-called ecotherapist in Santa Fe, N.M. reportedly sees up to 80 patients a month who complain of panic attacks, loss of appetite, irritability and what she describes as some sort if a twitchy sensation in their cells. Eco-anxiety is not new- the etymology website Wordspyt found it mentioned a 1990 Washington Post article-but it’s only now becoming widespread. Environmental consciousness is no longer just another lifestyle choice, like open marriages or joining the circus; it has been upgraded to moral imperative. That forces Americans to add environmentalism to their already endless checklist of things to fret about. Did I remember to turn out the kitchen light? Couldn’t I memorize the directions to my job interview instead of print them out? Why, for the love of Pete, did I use a napkin to wipe my mouth when I have here a perfectly good sleeve?
Recently I have spent considerable time considering my environmental failings, if not actually doing much about them. Like the average American household, we own two cars. Between my husband and me, we drive 13,000 miles (21,000km) a year, making our country 520 gal (2000L) of gas more dependent on foreign supplies. The thermostat in our 2,200 sq-ft (200sq m) house is set at 70 degrees F. It takes 6,6960 kW-h a year to power our computers, halogen lights and plasma TV. My child went through an industry-calculated average of 4.4 diapers a day for 34 months, which amounts to 4,488 soiled Huggies in some landfill. So far this year, I have traveled 34,574 miles (or 55,6363km, which sounds a lot worse) by air. According to the calculator on Climate Crisis.net, my household produces 15 tons of carbon dioxide a year. The average is 7.5. Mine is the Sasquatch of carbon footprints.
Anxiously I ponder the ways I might reduce my shoe size. I have seriously considered banning Christmas gifts this year to avoid the senseless consumption of sheer stuff, but I don’t want my kid to say she saw Mommy dissing Santa Claus. I could theoretically ride a bicycle to work but I am concerned that somewhere along the eight miles of highway, I will have a seizure. I have looked into yurts, but they are not a popular housing alternative in New Jersey.
The reasons for not going green usually boil down to one, so elegantly put by a frog who had no choice in the matter: It’s not easy being green. It’s easier to toss leftovers into the 13-gal Hefty bag than figure out how to use the compost bin that sits just outside. It’s easier to drive to the grocery store than to plant my own vegetable garden. It’s easier to keep my job writing for a magazine that prints 3.25 million copies a week than it is to start over in a new career designing suburban yurts.
Yes, the truth is inconvenient. But I’m trying. I am attempting to reverse my eco-unconsciousness, if only to assuage the twitchy sensation in my cells. I have installed the low-energy lights I bought at Home Depot, even though they make my living room look like a gas-station toilet. I look for products at the grocery store with the green recycling thingy on the package and then place my purchases in reusable burlap bags. I potty trained my kid. When I die, I plan to be placed a natural in a shallow hole and become fertilizer for a dogwood tree. But there’s one thing I won’t give up. If he wants my toilet paper, Al Gore himself will have to pry it from my cold, biodegradable hands.
Time Magazine, Lisa Takeuchi Cullen
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