Category Archives: Alternative Energy

Ultimate Re-Use: Storage Container Buildings

Posted on by
Reply

A new type of architecture has been infiltrating the traditional world for years; homes, condominiums, offices, and all other manner of buildings are being built from industrial storage containers that we would normally see on the back of an 18-wheeler or a shipping barge. The containers are easily stacked, and work quite well for the inhabitants once they are properly insulated, and turned into homes.

These new structures are subtly environmentally-friendly, in the most obvious way. We are all familiar with the chant “Reduce, re-use, recycle,” and this type of construction is a legitimate way of re-using the excess industrial storage containers that are finished with their initial use.

Shipping container architecture has been around for several years, but this topic presently comes to light again because the American firm Lot-EK, once again, takes it to a new level.

Their soon-to-be constructed Anyang Public Art Project (APAP) Open Art school in Korea has made news, and that’s not surprising at all upon taking a look. This is a project meant to engage the local community with its open structure, including an amphitheater layout, leading down to the river it is set along. The building will feature offices, open galleries, open meeting space, as well as work space for researchers; as has been the trend with these buildings, the non-traditional shape takes nothing away from the functionality of the new structure. These structures are a method of waste-management that results in beautification and functionality wherever they are planted: The ultimate re-use!

Need to Know: It’s not impossible to ween ourselves off of coal & oil

Posted on by
Reply

Need to Know PBS’ new weekly news magazine—Need to Know—has been covering some interesting stories. The fifth episode aired last week, and included the piece below on the Danish isle of Samso’s effective elimination of fossil fuels within the past decade. FYI: rapeseed is what most of the planet calls canola, and the Danish subsidies for wind appear to be less than those in the U.S. 1.

They’ve also had some compelling coverage of the gulf spoil including Big Oil’s Chernobyl and A chance encounter on the Gulf Coast with a BP engineer

1. Wind is subsidized at 30% of capital cost in Denmark. Ignoring any state incentives, there is a 2.2¢/kWh federal tax-credit. At typical costs and an average operating capacity of 50%, this amounts to a subsidy of up to: 2.2¢/kWh × 10yr × 8,760 hr/yr × 50% × 2.5MW × 1,000 kW/MW ÷ 100¢/$ = $2.4 million / $3.5 million = 68% (not accounting for erosion by inflation)

Large corporations making large investments in renewable energy

Posted on by
3

Money doesn't grow on tree ! But investing in them is the best way to capture the Carbon by pfala 21st century green initiatives are sparking life in today’s economy. Particularly, there have been a few major investments in renewable energy technologies that have positively influenced the stock market. In recent news, ProLogis, a distribution warehouse provider has made a tremendous investment in solar rooftop implementation in Southern California totaling 11.1 megawatts But what impact is this type of investment really having on our planet and economy?

The master agreement between Southern California Edison (SCE) and ProLogis has positively influenced the company’s stock. The company is able to provide such power through the direct installation of over 4 square kilometers (1.6 square miles) of rooftop panels that will effectively power the entire facility. The project is considered to be “multi-phase,” and will be a progressive installations beginning with nearly ¼ square kilometers. ProLogis currently maintains solar projects on 32 buildings throughout France, Germany, Japan, Spain and the United States.

With large size and and flat roof structure of facilities such as Prologis’, installation of solar power is a natural solution to powering the facility, and obtaining added value from the structure. Vice President of renewable energy for ProLogis states “Our partnership with SCE works well for both parties—we have flat, available roof space and local construction management expertise in place to support the growth of SCE’s renewable energy program.” This is one such example of how electric companies are working with larger organizations to promote sustainability and renewable energy. FedEx is another, earlier adopter of similar systems.

Online service giant Google recently made their biggest renewable energy investment in history. With projects beginning back in 2007, Google has pursued sustainability and renewable energy efforts as wise business investments and as a natural extension of their unofficial motto “Don’t be evil.” On May 3rd a press release went out stating Google’s 38.8 million dollar investment in two North Dakota wind farms. “On Friday we made our first direct investment in a utility-scale renewable energy project—two wind farms that generate 169.5 megawatts of power, enough to power more than 55,000 homes.” Rick Needeham, (Google’s Green Business Operations Manager), wrote within that Google is greatly interested in discovering new opportunities to invest in renewable energy projects that really ”push the envelope.” With enough energy to power nearly 55,000 homes, Google is making a tremendous impact on sustainability for our planet.

With Google’s acquisition of wind turbines in North Dakota, they are able to produce nearly 170 MW of power. Combined, this is a whopping 194.6 MW of clean energy, driven to both business and residential. With lessened maintenance costs and new job openings, these investments are major players in the welfare of our economy as well. It’s with efforts from both energy and non-energy groups that we begin to see hope for the future of our planet.

Edited by Jerrad Pierce

Home Energy Retrofits Outperform Microsoft

Posted on by
3

Home energy efficiency retrofits in Boston have a 39 percent return over five years compared to Microsoft's 7 percent.

Times are tough. If you’ve been unemployed in the last few years, your savings have probably dwindled as you’ve struggled to make ends meet. If you haven’t lost your job, then you’ve hopefully been saving and investing small amounts. But the stock market has been a mess over the last five years, and interest rates for CD’s and treasury bonds are tiny.

If you’re fortunate enough to have money to invest, where should you put your money to guarantee a good return?

Here’s a new investment idea for you: a home energy retrofit. Make your home more energy efficient through low-tech and cost-effective measures like insulation, furnace replacement and sealing your heating ducts.

Huh? Why put money into your house with home prices going the way they’ve been. Well, this isn’t about increasing the resale value of your home: though you can expect that it will at least help. All you really need is to live in your home for five years for this to work in your favor due to the lower utility bills you’ll see every month.

To illustrate the impact of doing a home energy retrofit as an investment, here’s a simplified example.  Let’s say five years ago, a homeowner in Boston named Diane was deciding between buying $10,000 of Microsoft stock as an investment and spending that same amount of money on a home energy retrofit to reduce her utility bills.  What would have been the better five-year investment?

The Microsoft stock worth $10,000 in June 2005 would have turned into just $10,700 five years later (a return of 7 percent over five years), including the increase in stock price and the dividends paid out over the course of the five years. But it turns out that the home energy retrofit would have been the much better investment.  If Diane had spent $10,000 on a retrofit for her 2,000 square foot home in Boston, including attic and wall insulation, sealing and insulating ducts, and air sealing her home to eliminate drafts, the investment would have returned 38 percent over five years, in terms of lower utility bills and increased resale value: even assuming that she only gets back half of the value of her investment at the end.

So…  Retrofitting your home is a better investment than the stock market. And that doesn’t even consider the fact that you’ll be more comfortable in your home and you’ll help reduce our country’s dependence on foreign energy sources.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to do a home energy retrofit, who to do it, and how to get as much of it paid for by your utility and the government, estimate your home efficiency then request an energy assessment for a report with recommendations and expected paybacks.

Global Warming Solutions Act

Posted on by
3

Boston Harbor - Seen from the Top of Mystic River Bridge. In Foreground, Massachusetts Port Authority Shipping Facility Has New Equipment That Permits Direct Loading from Ship to Freight Train 02/1973 by The U.S. National Archives If you’ve been itching to voice your opinion on state global warming legislation, now’s your chance! Public hearings are being held across the state next month to discuss the Greenhouse Gas Emissions Target and Draft Committee Implementation Plan for 2020.

A little background:

In August 2008, Governor Patrick signed into law the Global Warming Solutions Act (GWSA), an Act that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions economy-wide by 2050, with a 2020 target set between 10 and 25 percent below 1990 levels.  Massachusetts has already promulgated greenhouse gas reporting regulations under the Act; 2009 emissions will be the first year reported. The Act requires that by January 1, 2011 the Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs (EOEEA), develops an implementation plan for achieving the reductions required to meet the 2020 target.

The Commonwealth’s technical consultant completed an analysis demonstrating that state and federal policies now in place, or anticipated, have Massachusetts on track toward emissions reductions of 18 percent by 2020. On Earth Day, April 22, 2009, the Secretary announced that hearings would be held around the state to take public comment on a 2020 reduction target between 18 percent and 25 percent. The Secretary also recently released a draft report on this topic: Cost Effective Greenhouse Gas Mitigation in Massachusetts: An Analysis of 2020 Potential.

If you have expertise in the area, or just want to show support for clean energy legislation in the state of Massachusetts, please take note of the hearing dates and locations!

P.S. See also June 3rd‘s Panel on Federal Climate Legislation.

MIT & NSTAR partner for efficiency

Posted on by
Reply

Earth as MIT's Great Dome Just announced this morning:

In an effort to dramatically cut energy use at one of the country’s premier academic and research institutions, NSTAR and MIT are teaming up to launch the single most aggressive efficiency project in NSTAR history. Dubbed “MIT Efficiency Forward,” the program has a goal of cutting electricity use by 15 percent over three years through innovative programs, substantial student, faculty, and staff engagement, and the piloting of new technologies and approaches at MIT.

Read the rest of the press release.

ecO ‘lectrc’ty where art thou?

Posted on by
1

green power by S Migol Did you know that you have the option to choose who makes your electricity? Since deregulation in 1997, NSTAR no longer generates electricity. This is why there are separate charges on your utility bill for generation and distribution.

One of the hopes of utility deregulation in the late 90s was that it would allow for market forces to create a cleaner energy supply. The idea was that if customers were not forced to buy energy from their local utility they might express demand for less damaging electricity generation. Many academics and environmentalists were worried though, that consumers would instead focus on cost and become blind to other energy attributes, or remain ignorant of the specific ties and between power generation and the environment. This belief seems well-founded since more than five years into deregulation, fewer than 4% of Massachusetts customers had chosen competitive suppliers.

Bay State policy makers foresaw the difficulties for individuals in overcoming inertia to become informed and make the switch to another provider, an therefore included a novel clause in the deregulation act providing for something known as community choice aggregation. Community choice allows municipal governments to go through the competitive supplier selection process on behalf of all of their residents, permitting them to take advantage of the resulting collective bargaining power. Although Cambridge has not availed itself of this option, dozens of communities have, including those served by the well-known Cape Light Compact. Therefore, you are most likely receiving electricity through NSTAR’s default or standard offer service. Because NSTAR no longer runs power plants it acts as a de facto aggregator itself, and through an annual bidding process selects a provider for customers without a competitive supplier.

How green is this supply? What if you want something different? NSTAR began offering a wind-based power supply a little over two years ago, but there are other options available. At one point many businesses sought to be competitive suppliers in Massachusetts, but very few remain in the residential sector. Fortunately NSTAR provides a more up to date database of competitive suppliers. Simply search for your rate class (typically 01 for residential and 02 for small business) to obtain a list of alternative electricity suppliers.

Although it is still listed, Just Energy no longer offers service in Massachusetts. Neither Alternative Energy Resources nor Angora has publicly available information, and both did not respond to inquiries. The table below summarizes the information I was able to gather about the remaining residential competitive suppliers in Massachusetts. Prices are ¢/kWh for December 2009.

New England AverageNSTAREasy EnergyDominionHorizon
BasicGreen 50Green 100BasicGreen 50Green 100
Biomass6.0%10.1%12.4%2.1%0.2%
Hydro5.4%3.0%1.0%8.0%35.5%74.9%7.1%1.1%
Solar3.1%6.2%
Wind50.0%100.0%3.4%6.4%0.9%
“Renewables”3.3%8.0%5.0%
Incinerator0.5%3.0%0.6%
Landfill gas0.5%0.3%
Nuclear14.4%29.0%15.0%35.0%14.0%28.8%35.6%
Coal8.9%16.0%7.0%13.0%6.0%15.8%53.3%
Diesel2.1%
Natural gas38.0%35.0%17.0%27.0%16.5%35.1%7.5%
Oil24.6%10.0%5.0%11.0%4.5%2.9%0.6%
“Other”5.4%6.5%2.4%
Base9.229.229.228.68.68.6
Premium0.841.41.252.5

Sources:

China Cleans Up

Posted on by
1

Vacuum Solar Tubes ChinaChina exceeded U.S. investment in clean energy for the first time last year with deployments totaling $34.6 billion. The country still has a long way to go to clean up it’s emissions—China surpassed the US as the global leader in C02 emissions several years ago—but they’re moving quickly to clean up their act.

Technology Review posted a slide show today profiling some of the new technology they’re committing to including offshore wind, utility-scale solar power, DC transmission lines, massive nuclear deployments, and coal with carbon capture and sequestration.

I was happy to see vacuum tube solar hot water included in Tech Review’s lineup. Not the most cutting edge technology, but one in ten Chinese people now use these highly efficient heaters for domestic hot water.

Is trash to energy part of the solution?

Posted on by
1

The Incinerator by jimmyboyhay When it comes to environmental discussion, waste management is an environmental concern that many feel needs to be addressed. Many also feel that clean energy innovations are needed to ensure a greener earth. Yet, what many fail to realize is that the solution to the garbage and clean energy problem may be garbage itself.

Denmark has installed a number of garbage plants that take trash and make it into energy. These plants are at the forefront of waste/energy technology. How they operate is that the waste taken into the plant is incinerated which creates heat that generates steam for a turbine that goes on to run generators that create electricity and even heat. Statistics have shown that plants like the ones in Denmark, while creating new forms of energy, also help to cut down on waste caused emissions. 0.56 metric tons of CO2 is emitted from these conversion plants, which is considerably smaller than the 3.35 metric tons of CO2 that is emitted from landfills. Denmark has shown that there are other answers to waste problem than the common practice of landfills, but some countries like the United States are still hesitate to make the change.

There are over 13,000 active and inactive landfills in the United States alone. These landfills make up 54% of the nation’s waste management, which compared to the 4% in Denmark shows the differences in the way garbage is taken care of between the two countries. The negatives of landfills are that they take up space, have been known to leak toxins, and have almost six times the emission rate than that of trash energy plants. So what is stopping the United States from embracing the change? Well, it may be coming from an unlikely opponent: environmentalists.

Some environmentalists feel that incinerators, even ones that help to create energy, are counterproductive to the cause. In their opinion, incinerators promote a waste culture instead of a culture based around recycling. Yet, many American organizations like the Clinton Global Initiative (an international aid and philanthropy organization started by former President Clinton and adviser Doug Band back in 2005) see carbon emissions as the true environmental problem regardless of where it comes from. This is why CGI has worked tirelessly to create green initiatives that cut down on CO2 emissions.

What the waste conversion plants in Denmark have shown is that there are plenty of solutions to environment worries around the world waiting to be utilized. The United States may not be eager to join just yet, but the victory is that the world is thinking of ways to create cleaner energy even if it’s from a trashy source.