Green Wombat

Feds to Issue $2 Billion in Loan Guarantees for Clean Energy Projects

The U.S. Department of Energy has selected a massive solar power plant to be built in California and Tesla Motors' planned electric car factory in New Mexico as two of 16 projects eligible for up to $2 billion in federal loan guarantees. Such guarantees can prove critical in securing financing for untested technologies like the distributed power tower design planned for a 400-megawatt solar energy plant to be built by BrightSource Energy of Oakland, California, in Southern California's Mojave Desert. Silicon Valley's Tesla Motors intends to produce its WhiteStar electric sports sedan at the New Mexico factory. (The company's first vehicle, the Roadster sports car, is being built in the U.K.)

"DOE's action today will pave the way for federal support of clean energy projects using innovative technologies and will spur further investment in these advanced energy technologies," the Energy Department said in a statement. Other projects invited to submit final applications for the loan guarantees range from so-called clean coal power plants to fuel cell factories to biofuel production facilities.

Dean Kamen's Stirling Solution

photos: green wombat
In a world of Stepford executives who never deviate from the corporate party line, there's something refreshing about an entrepreneur willing to take a tumble - literally - for his latest innovation. In uber-inventor Dean Kamen's case that meant crashing his Stirling electric hybrid scooter in front of Green Wombat and a photographer. In June, Green Wombat visited Westwind, Kamen's estate outside Manchester, New Hampshire, to talk to the Segway inventor about his plans to install a Stirling heat engine in an electric car made by Norway's Think. (See "Have You Driven a Fjord Lately?" in the August issue of Business 2.0.) But first, Kamen wanted to demo the scooter (photo above) to show how a virtually greenhouse gas-free Stirling engine could extend the range of an electric vehicle by trickle-charging the battery. As he zooms down the driveway, the scooter goes sideways - its weight distribution needs some tweaking - sending the inventor flying into the grass. "Say you're in Bangladesh or anywhere in the world where people don’t have electricity," says Kamen, dusting himself off and not missing a beat. "You get home and you plug your house into it." He shows off power plugs behind the scooter's seat.  "It’s your power system, it’s your heating system, it gives everybody electricity. When you leave in the morning, you drive away with your local power plant."

Over the past decade, Kamen, who made a fortune as inventor of the insulin pump and other medical devices, has spent some $40 million developing Stirling engines. They can use virtually any fuel source to heat a sealed container containing a gas - hydrogen or helium, for instance - that expands and contracts to drive a piston and produce electricity. (The scooter uses a small can of propane as the fuel source.) "We run two villages in Bangladesh on Stirlings that run on freakin' cow dung," says Kamen, who envisions Stirling engines powering the world's off-the-grid villages and using the waste heat produced by the engine to purify water.

But Kamen needs to get to mass production to realize that dream and that's where Think comes in. Kamen met Think CEO Jan-Olaf Willums last year at MIT.  "I took him up to New Hampshire and we spent half the night speculating about how cool the world could be if you put the right technologies in the right place at the right time," says Kamen. "I need some killer app to put this thing into production. And one way to do that would be to create the world’s first hybrid Stirling electric car." So Willums shipped a Think City to Kamen, who is now modifying the two-seater coupe to carry a Stirling engine (photo at right) powered by veggie oil, for instance. ("You could drive across the country, stopping a McDonald's to fill up," says Kamen.) That would not only extend the Thinks range by hundreds of miles but turn the car into a mobile generator. When electricity demand peaks during the day, thousands of Thinks plugged in at office parks could feed power back to the grid so utilities like PG&E (PCG) and Edison (EIX) could avoid having to fire up planet-warming power plants. The Stirling engine would then recharge the car's battery for the commute home. When we last spoke in July, Kamen had the autmotive version of the Stirling engine up and running. The next step is to hook it up to the City and see if it'll work as planned. You probably won't see a Stirling in a Toyota (TM) or Ford (F) but the device gives Think another power plant to offer its customers.

“If you have enough Thinks out there you would literally change the architecture of the grid,” says Kamen, taking Green Wombat for a drive around Westwind and past his wind turbine before parking the blue Think City near his pair of Enstrom helicopters. (He keeps the Think in a garage that also houses his 1898 steam-driven car and a 1913 Model T.)  Kamen heads to the control room of his 33,000-square foot house. An Internet-enabled blue box called a Teletrol controls the home’s power systems, including a Stirling engine about the size of an air conditioner that can act as a backup generator or a mini power plant that kicks on when electricity demand soars. Kamen invented the Teletrol and his company of the same name remotely operates the heating and air-conditioning systems of buildings like the Sydney Opera House. Kamen, of course, would like to see a Teletrol in every house, acting as the interface between your Web-enabled Think and the grid (and, ideally, the Stirling engine that sits in your basement or utility room.)

"The big advantage is once we’re in production with that engine, where it will really be uniquely valuable is to the 1.6 billion people on this plant who’ve never used electricity," says Kamen. "We will become the Con Edison of every village in Asia, Africa and Central America."

 

 

IBM Expands Energy Business

Big Blue has signed an $84.4 million deal with Spanish utility Iberdrola, one of the world's largest producers of renewable energy. IBM (IBM) will open an "Innovation Center" at Iberdrola in Salamanca to develop new information technologies and provide services for the utility.  Meanwhile, IBM also is creating a "Global Center of Excellence for Nuclear Power" in France to develop software and consulting services for the design, construction and operation of nuclear power plants. IBM is capitalizing on the global warming-triggered revival of interest in nuclear power as an alternative to coal-fired plants. France obtains 80 percent of electricity from nuclear power. "Nuclear power plant license extensions and new plant construction are driving the need for sophisticated risk modeling and information tools," said Guido Bartels, general Manager for IBM Global Energy and Utilities Industry, in a statement.

Fuel Cell Maker to Power Toys

Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies has inked an agreement with a major toymaker to develop a line of hydrogen-powered toys. Horizon makes industrial-strength fuel cells but the Singapore-based company is probably best known for its solar-and-hydrogen-powered toy car called the H-Racer. (The company also has developed a very cool hydrogen-powered jet.) Horizon and Hong Kong's Wah Shing Toys, which describes itself as one of the world's largest toy companies, will develop energy storage systems designed to replace some 500 million alkaline batteries used annually in toys. "Building on its fuel cell technology, Horizon is developing a new generation of non-toxic energy storage devices that would feed small fuel cell power systems designed into next-generation toys and that could be re-used hundreds of times," the company said in a statement. Horizon already makes a hydrogen fuel cell conversion kit designed to replace standard batteries in remote-controlled toy cars.

California Approves Cow Power Project

photo: stones 55
The California Public Utilities Commission on Thursday gave the green light for Bakersfield startup BioEnergy to supply up to 3 billion cubic feet of bovine biogas - methane extracted from cow manure - to utility PG&E (PCG). As Green Wombat wrote previously, thats enough really natural gas to power 50,000 homes. But the project will start small, with the first methane digester installed at BioEnergy founder David Albers' own 3,000-cow dairy in Fresno County. The 10-year contract calls for BioEnergy to install digesters - which strip out the potent greenhouse gas methane from cow poop - at dairies around California's Central Valley. The digesters will scrub the resulting gas of impurities and pipe it to power plants to be used to generate electricity. Ideally, this is a classic win-win for the environment and the economy.

California's nearly 2 million cows, most living on industrial-scale dairies, create a huge and costly waste problem. According to the PUC order approving the BioEnergy deal, a single thousand-pound dairy cow each day produces 10 pounds of "volatile solids" - that's bureaucratese for poop - which can be transformed into 72 cubic feet of biogas. Dairy owners can dispose of that burden, clean up the environment and turn crap into cash by cutting deals with companies like BioEnergy. PG&E benefits as the biogas produced counts toward a state mandate that it obtain 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources b y 2010. Such projects typically produce some sort of green "credits" that can be used toward meeting emissions limits or can be sold on carbon trading markets. PG&E will retain some of those so-called environmental attributes produced by the cow power project though the PUC said it remains to be decided just how they might be applied when California's cap on greenhouse gas limits comes into force.

The BioEnergy contract - and one PG&E has signed with another company, Microgy - covers only a small percentage of California's bovine biogas production potential. Depending on how dairies are treated under the state's global warming law, more dairy owners, utilities and entrepreneurs may come to realize the power of cow power.

The Prius of Power Plants

illustration: Inland Energy

The California Energy Commission has greenlighted an application to build the U.S.'s first solar-natural gas hybrid power plant in Southern California's High Desert. The plant will be built on a former Air Force Base outside Victorville - about 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles - and would integrate a 50-megawatt solar trough power station into a 500-megawatt natural gas-fired plant. Solar energy would produce 10 percent of the plant's electricity during peak demand times to lower greenhouse gas emissions from the facility, according to the application. The project is being developed by Newport Beach's Inland Energy for the city of Victorville. "We felt there was a direct analogy between the way renewable resources are used and hybrid cars," Inland Energy executive VP Tom Barnett told Green Wombat.  "Electric cars have their limitations but hybrids have taken off. We felt same concept applied to a power plant. We have a solar power plant with the reliability of a combined natural gas cycle plant. We set out to figure out how to integrate solar thermal with gas."

The Victorville 2 plant will use solar trough technology. Fields of parabolic mirrors heat oil or another liquid to create steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine. Several solar trough power plants built in the nearby Mojave Desert in the 1980s and '90s by Luz continue to operate. Some of those plants use natural gas to extend their operating time - say, when its cloudy or when the sun begins to set. So why did Inland Energy decide to make solar a relatively small part of its plant rather than the main power producer? Reliability, says Barnett. "We really didn’t like that idea because we wanted the ability to provide a baseload plant." In other words, Victorville 2 will generate power 24/7. While the plant will supply electricity to the local area, it also will connect to the grid operated by Southern California Edison (EIX), the utility that powers Los Angeles. "We have the best solar resources in world located in close proximity to one of world’s largest cites," Barnett notes.  "The fact that we’re just over the hill from L.A. makes this a valuable resource."

And building a solar-powered conventional natural gas plant means that that it may qualify for a federal investment tax credit. The solar component will also be attractive to California's investor-owned utilties, which must get 20 percent of their electricty from renewable sources by 2010 and 30 percent by 2030. "We hoped initially that we would have been able to put a much larger solar facility in the overall plant, but we felt 50 megawatts was the optimal ratio," Barnett says, noting it may be possible to eventually expand the size of the solar fields at the plant, set to begin operation in 2010. He sees opportunity to build more hybrid plants or retrofit existing plants that supply power to PG&E (PCG), San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE) and other utilities. "There's a land rush on for solar," he says. "Everyone's looking at this."

PG&E and the Power Grid of the Future

For my Business 2.0 story on the "Interactive, Renewable Smart Power Grid," I had the chance to sit down with Hal LaFlash, director of renewable energy policy and planning for California utility PG&E (PCG). Once the scourge of environmentalists, PG&E has transformed itself into one of the greenest and most forward-looking big utilities in the nation. Which makes perfect sense: During California's disastrous experiment in deregulation, PG&E largely got out of power production business and now focuses on power transmission. The utility's revenues are set by regulators so it has no incentive to increase consumers' consumption of electricity. That means LaFlash spends his time thinking about where PG&E is going to buy its electricity in a carbon constrained world, especially now that California's global warming law bans utilities from buying power from out-of-state coal-fired plants, currently the source of 20 percent of the Golden State's electricity. While natural gas-fueled plants will continue to play a big role in providing power - PG&E just broke ground on a 530-megawatt plant, it's first new power plant in two decades - alternative energy from wind, solar and biomass will be a growing part of the company's power portfolio as it faces a deadline to source 20 percent of the electricity it sells from renewable energy sources by 2010. But LaFlash is thinking decades down the line, when the power grid looks more like the Internet - distributed, interactive, open-source - than the dumb, one-way network of today that pushes dinosaur molecules from a carbon-spewing power plant to your home.

Take cow power, for instance. California is home to some 1.7 million cows and more than 2,000 dairies, concentrated in the state's smoggy Central Valley. PG&E has agreed to buy biogas from dairies that have installed methane digesters. The digesters extract methane - a potent greenhouse gas - from cow manure and use it to power electricity-generating turbines to run the dairy or send it via pipelines to power stations.  That in turn will improve the Central Valley's air quality. "We're also looking at using orchard trimmings to supply smaller, decentralized biomass plants," LaFlash says. "We're also doing a lot with marine technologies and wave energy up the coast." He envisions the day when cities themselves become power generators as skyscrapers are built or retrofitted with solar cells integrated into walls, windows and roofs.

One of the more intriguing PG&E initiatives is a program to develop technology to tap plug-in hybrid cars to power the grid during peak demand. (The utility has been talking to Toyota (TM) about building such a car.) Here's how it would work: if you participate in the program, PG&E's technology would know when you plugged in your car for recharging - whether at home, work or at grandma's house. When electricity demand surges, the grid would tap the car's battery to avoid having to bring power from non-renewable sources online. "It'll take millions of them to have an effect," LaFlash says of plug-in hybrid cars. "But the size of the California auto market makes this the place to start." Such technology would be part of the coming smart grid, which will communicate with sensors embedded in washing machines, air conditioners and other household appliances to allow power to be distributed where it is needed most.

One renewable energy source you probably won't see grow in California anytime soon is nuclear power. State law prohibits the construction of new nuke plants until there's a place to put radioactive waste.

 

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Cow-Powered, Biodiesel, Solar Inauguration

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was sworn in to his second term today and, fittingly, the week's inaugural celebrations  highlighted green power.  The governator, of course, has shown how a red politician in a blue state could win a landslide re-election by turning green. Thus, Thursday's "Leading the Green Team" event was reportedly carbon neutral. Electricity was supplied by a generator powered by bovine biogas - methane extracted from cow manure at Joseph Gallo Farms using digester technology from Microgy. The company earlier this year signed a deal to supply bovine biogas to California utility PG&E (PCG). Additional power came from a second generator fueled by biodiesel made from soybean oil and a 3-kilowatt solar panel array from Silicon Valley company Akeena Solar. According to PG&E - a Schwarzenegger supporter and backer of California's landmark global warming law - the alternative energy sources cut in half the greenhouse gases usually emitted at such events. To make the inaugural shindig completely carbon neutral, PG&E said it was purchasing carbon dioxide reductions from van Eck Forest, a Humboldt County woodland certified as a carbon sink. Now if they could just do something about the governor's Hummers. 

California Cow Power: Poop Pays

photo originally uploaded by ukidlucas

The California Energy Commission has released a report on a program that transforms cow manure into power by extracting methane - a potent greenhouse gas - from bovine poop and using it to fuel electricity-generating turbines. The conclusion: Cow power can make money for dairies and make them energy self-sufficient as well as provide electricity to the grid. But - there's always a but - the Byzantine regulatory structure that favors entrenched utilities is frustrating the widespread adoption of bovine biogas.

Cow power is an alternative energy fuel that should be the perfect solution to a host of environmental problems. It takes cow manure, a widespread source of global warming - there are a couple million cows in California alone - and an environmental waste that costs farms millions of dollars a year to dispose of, and turns it into a clean, green source of electricity. As Green Wombat wrote about Vermont's use of cow power, there are also other environmental and financial benefits.

The California Energy Commission report shows that there's cash in cow crap. For instance, the 9,900-cow Hilarides Dairy outside Tulare in the Central Valley has installed a state-subsidized methane digester system that could provide all its electricity from cow manure. In November, the dairy saved $15,547 in electricity costs. But as was the case with other dairies reviewed by the report, the Tulare farm has been reluctant to fully ramp up cower power. Why? For one thing, there's no system in place that lets dairies sell excess power they generate to Pacific Gas & Electric (PCG), Southern California Edison (EIX) and other California utilities. That discourages dairy owners from spending the money to operate methane digesters. Second, the state's "net metering" law - which credits dairies for excess electricity they generate - is so convoluted and stacked in the utilities favor as to make investments in cow power a risky bet.

The bottom line: If you're going to invest in alternative energy like cow power, you need to make an equal, if not greater investment, in making sure there's a level regulatory playing field. When it comes to energy, there's no such thing as a free market.