Energy and Business

Plants such as soybeans and sunflowers produce oil that can be used to make biofuels. Although these crops have received a lot of media attention in the last several years, they require intensive management and may not be sustainable in the long term due to rising development and production costs. We believe a different type of oil crop that holds great promise for the future is micro-algae.

Extensive research was conducted to determine the utilization of microalgae as an energy source, with applications being developed for biodiesel, ethanol, and bioplastics. Independent studies have demonstrated that algae are capable of producing in excess of 30 times more oil per acre than corn and soybean crops. Biodiesel produced from algae contains no sulfur, is non-toxic and highly biodegradable.

In April PetroSun Inc announced the algae-to-jetfuel teaming relationship with Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). The companies are working to transition algal biofuel technology to the commercial sector for government contracts.

PetroSun has made twenty acres of ponds available at its Rio Hondo, Texas facility for research and development related to an algae-to-jetfuel project.

http://www.petrosuninc.com/alternative-energy.html

Image [via] mytimes.com

Mayor Bloomberg of New York has recently announced some big administrative decisions to aid the Big Apple in reaching sustainability. He recently declared that by October one thousand New York cabs would be converted to hybrid energy. The vehicles would run on both gasoline and electric power, and are expected to serve as a model influencing other big cities to make similar decisions. Within five years, the goal is to have all 13,000 cabs converted, which should eventually reduce the carbon emissions by half. Bloomberg was quoted saying, “It will be the largest, cleanest fleet of taxis anywhere on the planet.” The mayor has also sought renewable energy developments by erecting windmills on waters, bridges and skyscrapers. He is requesting investors and private companies to fund research with one of the motives to reduce the city’s highly taxed power grid. At a recent Las Vegas alternative energy conference Bloomberg said, “When it comes to producing clean power, we’re determined to make New York the No. 1 city in the nation.”

[via] GOOD Magazine

[via] science.nationalgeographic.com

Mayor Bloomberg is proposing a “green” plan that has the potential to drastically change the New York City skyline and shores. It is part of his effort to make New York the most energy efficient city in the nation.

The mayor’s “windmill power plan” is the boldest environmental proposal yet from the billionaire independent who has been trying to make energy efficiency a legacy of his administration.

Speaking at a major conference on alternative energy Tuesday night in Las Vegas, Bloomberg proposed putting windmills on top of city bridges, and skyscrapers, and turbines in the Hudson and East Rivers.

In terms of offshore locations, aides to the mayor told CBS 2’s Magee Hickey that the city is looking at the generally windy coast off of Queens, Brooklyn and Long Island for the turbines which could provide 10 percent of the city’s electricity in just 10 years.

The plan also includes the use of solar panels, possibly on the roofs of public and private buildings:

“When it takes to producing clean power, we’re determined to make New York the number one city in the nation,” said Bloomberg.

To show how serious he is, the mayor had lunch with T. Boone Pickens - the oil baron trying to build the world’s largest wind farm in Texas - to talk about possibilities for such technology in New York City. Bloomberg gave companies until September 19 to submit innovative proposals to make the city “greener” by 2030:

“It would be a thing of beauty if when Lady Liberty looks out on the horizon she not only welcomes new immigrants to our shores but lights their way with a torch powered by an ocean wind farm,” the mayor said.

[via] wcbstv.com

Image [via] fortheplanet.files.wordpress.com

The New Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year for 2006 was carbon-neutral–counteracting the release of carbon dioxide–which gives you some sense of the fad that is carbon offsets. With the success of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, there is a rising wave of guilt about the carbon dioxide that we each produce in the course of our daily lives, and carbon offsets gave us a way to erase that CO2 along with the guilt. Carbon-neutral is just a cooler, sexier, trendier way of communicating the same “guilt-free” consumer mentality that American culture is known for – e.g. “fat-free,” “low-cal,” etc. The truth is carbon offsets like those that TerraPass sells are a lot more complicated than all that. The principle behind an offset is that to compensate for your own carbon dioxide emissions, you buy a share in a project that is actively reducing carbon emissions somewhere in the world – including renewable energy projects, reforestation schemes, bio fuel production, and anything else that might be a carbon sink or prevent carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. We recognize the value of these carbon offsets while also acknowledging their limitations:

Carbon Offset Pros:

In cases where emissions are inevitable, offsets provide a way to do something to balance the effects.
Offsets are a source of investment for renewable energy and other projects to mitigate climate change, therefore filling the void that some governments have left by not stepping in to regulate and/or limit carbon dioxide emissions.

In many cases, offsets are a catalyst for change in the developing world, where renewable energy projects funded by the developed world could be the basis of a sustainable growth and development curve going forward.

Carbon Offset Cons:

Buying offsets makes people feel that it is okay to pollute if they simply compensate for their actions by buying credits.

Offsets are unlikely to be as effective and permanent in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as we are in emitting the carbon dioxide to begin with.

The industry is almost completely unregulated and therefore largely not held accountable for the emissions promises it makes.

Our Bottom Line: Although we support the idea of purchasing offsets from a reputable company to mitigate inevitable carbon emissions, we think that the term carbon-neutral is misleading, because it lends too much credit to the effectiveness of the nascent carbon offset industry. It also takes attention away from non-global warming related environmental issues and what we can do individually to reduce our impact and need for offsets. For example, carbon offsets should be used in combination with the other environmentally responsible travel practices like selecting an environmentally-friendly hotel or choosing an environmentally-friendly destination, not as an indulgence that can be bought to pardon all of our environmental sins.

[via] www.simplegreenchoices.com

Photo [via] flagstaffphoto.blogspot.com

Distributed Power!

When it comes to energy independence, something is excellent in the state of Denmark.

Before John McCain and Barack Obama say another word about America’s energy future, maybe they should go to Denmark.

Denmark has done what other countries only dream of doing: achieved energy independence. While Europe’s overall energy imports rose 2.4% in 2006, Denmark’s energy imports fell to -8%. In fact, the European Union as a whole scores 54% on the scale of energy dependency. Denmark scores -37%.

“Denmark is the model that the United States should be following,” said Steve Pullins, executive director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Modern Grid Initiative.

How did they do it? Distributed energy.

Unlike traditional “centralized” systems, distributed energy relies on small power-generating technologies like solar panels or ultra-efficient natural-gas turbines built near the point of energy consumption to supplement or displace grid-distributed electricity.

Consumers cannot only draw power from the grid, but can feed power into it as well. For instance, homes equipped with solar-power panels could feed unused electricity back into the grid, adding to the total available supply.

Other related technologies like demand response, consumer-side controls and energy storage are expected to play an equally important role in distributed-energy networks. The key feature of a distributed system is so-called “smart metering,” which allows power to flow in both directions.

In 2005, Denmark’s distributed-energy networks generated nearly half the country’s electricity while cutting carbon emissions by nearly half from 1990 levels. In July, Denmark announced plans to deploy the world’s most extensive smart-grid infrastructure, which could make distributed energy the country’s primary source of electricity before long.

In the U.S., the movement faces constraints from a familiar place: power companies. Distributed energy aims to decouple profits and consumption so that power companies have a greater incentive to invest in energy-efficiency technologies that drive distributed-energy networks. Changing that relationship is even more critical than technological innovation.

Read the full article on www.forbes.com/energy

If harnessing the sun’s energy for your home still isn’t enough efficiency for you, consider a new development by MIT scientists: power-generating windows.

Although the technology won’t be commercially available for about three years, it could open up whole new doors windows in renewable energy when it does hit the market. Ordinary glass or plastic is painted with a series of dyes that act as “organic solar concentrators,” which absorb some wavelengths of light while sending others through to light the room. The dyes then redirect and re-emit the absorbed light parallel to the pane toward solar cells at the window’s edges.

Not only does this let you kill two birds with one sunbeam — powering your house indirectly and lighting your room directly — but this technology concentrates the light before harnessing it, which, according to the researchers, multiplies the amount of electrical power each solar cell generates by a factor of more than 40. These windows should also be more affordable than traditional solar panels, since they don’t require mobile mirrors that follow the sun and their solar cells don’t require cooling like rooftop cells do.

Two graduate students and a postdoctoral fellow who worked on the project are starting a company, Covalent Solar, to sell the technology.

By Russell McLendon. BGM

[photo via] Donna Coveney/MIT

Solar water heaters are mandatory in all homes in Israel.

China, second to the US in total wind potential, plans to produce 30 gigawatts of wind power by 2020, enough to power between 13 and 30 million Chinese households.

The first plant to generate electricity using geothermal energy is in Tuscany. It began producing electricity in 1904 and today provides power for about a million Italian households.

What can I do? I am only one person and everything seems so hopeless. I might as well give up.  Do you know that feeling?

Well, whenever I feel like that I go look for stories of inspiration, and this morning a friend showed me just that.  I was told about the Pickens Plan. The one man with the plan is Mr. T Boone Pickens, a second-generation oil and gas man from Texas.

Now he is using his experience and wealth to make a difference in how America thinks about energy. See him explain it all in his own words here.

Pickens claims he saw the oil crisis coming. Our dependence on foreign oil has increased from 24% in 1970 to nearly 70% today.  He points out that our dependence on foreign oil forms the intersection of the three most critical issues America currently faces: the economy, the environment and our national security.

So he sat down and formulated a plan for a solution.  It turns out that America is blessed with the world’s greatest wind power corridor running straight through Texas and abundant reserves of clean natural gas. Pickens intends to make good use of these.

The Plan calls for building new wind generation facilities that will produce 20% of our nation’s electricity and allow us to use natural gas as a transportation fuel. The combination of these domestic energies can replace more than one-third of our foreign oil imports.  According to Pickens the plan can make a big difference in as little as 10 years!

To make sure that this change will happen Mr. Pickens and his people are thinking ahead.  Part of their mission: “On January 20th, 2009, a new President will take office, and we are organizing behind the Pickens Plan now to ensure our voices will be heard by the next administration.  Together we can raise a call for change and set a new course for America’s energy future in the first hundred days of the new presidency, breaking the hammerlock of foreign oil and building a new domestic energy future for America with a focus on sustainability.”

Another way this plan is going to work is through a shared vision. The Pickens Plan website is full of ways to become part of the plan. You can connect it to your Myspace or Facebook. There are tons of images, badges and videos, all made ready for you to help spread the word.

If you want to be part of the Pickens Plan to start changing America’s future today then go to their website and join.

“Danish experience from the past 15 years shows that offshore wind farms, if placed right, can be engineered and operated without significant damage to the marine environment and vulnerable species.

The comprehensive environmental monitoring programmers of Horns Rev Offshore Wind Farm and Nysted Offshore Wind Farm confirm that, under the right conditions, even big wind farms pose low risks to birds, mammals and fish, even though there will be changes in the living conditions of some species by an increase in habitat heterogeneity.

The monitoring also shows that appropriate siting of offshore wind farms is an essential precondition for ensuring limited impact on nature and the environment and that careful spatial planning is necessary to avoid damaging cumulative effects.

Due consideration to limiting the impacts on nature together with positive attitudes towards offshore wind farms in local communities and challenging energy policy objectives at national and international levels means that prospects look bright for future offshore expansion.

Wind power, as a renewable source of energy, produces no emission and is an excellent alternative to conventional electricity production based on fuel such as oil, coal or natural gas.”

[via] www.capecodtoday.com