Joint Venture For Russia

Siemens makes a bid for Russia’s wind power through joint venture

July 16 2010 

By: Honey Garcia

Because Russia is situated in different climactic zones, the country boasts of vast wind energy potential, providing roughly 32.6 terrawatt-hours to 71.7 TWh annually. Siemens entered into a strategic partnership with two Russian companies to establish a joint venture that will put the German engineering conglomerate in the forefront of Russia’s wind energy industry. Pictured here is the city of Moscow.

The joint venture between Siemens, Rostechnologii and RusHydro will set up production facilities for wind turbine components, as well as be in charge of the sales and services of wind turbines in Russia and other countries. Siemens will also put up three more wind turbine component factories in the United States and China this year, while manufacturing facilities in India and Britain are also planned.

“In the coming five years we intend to install wind turbines with a total capacity of 250 MW to 500 MW per year,” said René Umlauft, chief executive of Siemens’ renewable energy division. Siemens (FWB:SIE, NYSE:SI), who will retain a majority stake in the joint venture, plans to install at least 1,250 MW of capacity in Russia by 2015, which will help the country achieve its targeted 5,000 MW of installed wind capacity by 2020.

In 2008, the Russian government set a target of 4.5 percent, or 22 gigawatts, renewable energy usage by 2020. If the country achieves this goal, Russia would have installed 7 GW of wind capacity, the Russian Wind Energy Association predicted.

Because Russia is situated in different climactic zones, the country boasts of vast wind energy potential, providing roughly 32.6 terrawatt-hours to 71.7 TWh annually. This is mostly concentrated along seacoasts, in the vast territories of steppes, and in the mountains.

The northern and eastern regions of Russia are also believed to be among the regions with the most favorable conditions for wind energy generation. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s renewable energy initiative even estimated that exploiting just 25 percent of Russia’s total wind potential will produce about 175,000 MW of power.

While there is more than 1,700 MW of wind projects under development and another 3,000 MW to 3,500 MW in the pipeline, this is apparently not enough to sustain the country’s energy use. “Russia is not yet showing significant signs of growth in wind energy. Its installed capacity hasn’t increased over the past few years and remains at 11 MW, which considering the size of the country, is practically insignificant,” said Chistian Kjær, executive director of the European Wind Energy Association.

The lack of legislative mandates such as renewable portfolio standard or feed-in tariffs can be a hindrance to the progress of renewable energy development in the country. According to Anatoli Kopylov, vice president of the Russian Wind Energy Association, the current legislation does not provide any financial incentives to improve renewable generation capacity in the country, and there are still no subsidized connection costs for projects smaller than 25 MW.

The country’s economic instability also poses a problem as it discourages capital investment for renewable energy projects.

The World is Blue

The World is Blue: How Our Fate and The Ocean's are One

By: Umbra Fisk
June 23, 2010



As you all know, I am a bookworm of the highest order. In fact, I’m such a bookworm that my compost worms have their own library. I think it’s important to surround them with good literature, but they just keep eating the pages. And so must we all surround ourselves with good matter to fertilize our minds. It is high time the Umbra Book Club has another book to read!

And so it is with great pleasure that I announce this month's book. Drum roll please ... Our book to kick off the summer is Sylvia Earle's The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One.

Why did I choose this book, dear readers? No one says it better than Sylvia Earle, the Oceanographer, Aquanaut, National Geographic "Explorer-in-Residence", herself:

About the Author

Known worldwide as the Ambassador for the Ocean, Sylvia Earle is also TIME magazine's first "Hero for the Planet" and National Geographic's first "Explorer-in-Residence". She is former NOAA Chief Scientist, and the first person to walk untethered at the lowest depth ever 1,250 feet. She is a major force in the establishment and growth of the world's marine sanctuaries and was personally responsible for convincing former President Bush that the recently named sanctuary in Hawaii should be protected. She is founder and director of  'Deep Ocean Research and Exploration', which designs instruments for deep-sea exploration. She is author of 15 books on the ocean.

This book tie-in to National Geographic's ambitious 5-year ocean initiative focusing on overfishing is written in National Geographic "Explorer-in-Residence", Sylvia Earle's accessible yet hard-hitting voice. Through compelling personal stories she puts the current and future peril of the ocean and the life it supports in perspective for a wide public audience.

"Even if you never have the chance to see or touch the ocean, the ocean touches you with every breath you take, every drop of water you drink, every bite you consume. Everyone, everywhere is inextricably connected to and utterly dependent upon the existence of the sea."


This book is a reminder of the beautiful blue part of our planet that sustains us. We're seeing so much damage with the ongoing oil spill in the Gulf it's time we pay attention to the beauty of the ocean and how we can protect and save our "life-support system."

It's a fact-filled, inspiring ode to the oceans. A page-turner. It's also a very fine read at the beach!

Ethanol Gets Skewered

Ethanol Gets Skewered 


By: Tom Philpott
Jul 16 2010



In its calm and measured way, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just delivered a blistering assessment of the environmental value of corn-based ethanol. The CBO had been charged by Congress to calculate just what the public is getting for its investment in ethanol production: specifically, the $0.45/gallon tax credit that gasoline blenders get for mixing ethanol into the fuel supply. In 2009, 10.8 billion gallons of corn ethanol got used in such a manner, costing the federal Treasury $5.16 billion in reduced tax revenue.

What did we get for that fat wad of cash, in environmental terms? The question is critical, because that long-entrenched tax break is set to expire later this year -- and the ethanol industry is scrambling to extend it, with the full support of the Obama administration, Associated Press reports.

As the CBO report [PDF] makes clear, the environmental case for the tax break is bankrupt. The reports runs 28 pages, but I can boil it down to two points.

1) Subsidizing corn-based ethanol is an mind-numbingly expensive way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Using the friendliest assumptions possible (note that some prominent researchers argue that ethanol actually generates more GHG emissions than gasoline), CBO reckons that by supporting ethanol through the tax break, taxpayers are shelling out about $750 for every metric ton (2,205 pounds) of carbon kept out of the atmosphere by ethanol. To put that number in perspective, note that the carbon-offset company Terrapass values 1,000 pounds of emissions reductions at $5.95. Converting that to metric tons, Terrapass charges about $13 to do what the ethanol industry is charging $750.

If greenhouse gas reductions are the goal, merely handing $5.16 billion to Terrapass to buy offsets would be about 57 times more effective than subsidizing ethanol production. Of course, from my perspective, a far more effective use of that money would be to invest in technologies and infrastructure that reduce energy consumption altogether, like mass transit. But using it to encourage people to convert corn into car fuel is surely madness.


2) Corn-based ethanol is really just a clever way to convert natural gas and coal into car fuel.

The CBO report states the case bluntly: "Because the production of ethanol draws so much energy from coal and natural gas, it can be thought of as a method for converting natural gas or coal to a liquid fuel that can be used for transportation."

The CBO is referring to the fact that it requires lots of energy to convert a bushel of corn into engine fuel, and most ethanol plants are powered by natural gas; the rest by coal. And that doesn't account for the vast amount of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer needed to grow the corn in the first place. Synthesizing nitrogen, too, requires huge amounts of natural gas.

The environmental devastation associated with coal use is well-known. As for natural gas, it's often hailed as a "clean" alternative to other fossil fuels; but that reputation is crumbling as the the natural gas industry comes to rely more on the highly polluting process of hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," which has its own nasty baggage. Overall, the CBO's assessments could be summarized like so: The environmental benefits of propping up corn-based ethanol production are scant at best -- and extremely expensive.

Now, ironically, even if the $0.45 per gallon tax break ends on schedule later this year, we'll still see increased ethanol production over the next several years. That's because the 2007 Energy Act established a "renewable fuels mandate" that requires steadily increasing corn-based ethanol production until 2015, when it's due to top off at 15 billion gallons (up from last year's 10.8 billion gallons).

The corn ethanol juggernaut, no matter how absurd, will not be denied. But lavishing it with billions in tax breaks on top of the mandate can not be justified.

Time Lapse Video: Coal Fired Powered Plant

View this time lapse video of a coal-fired power plant:

http://vimeo.com/8756755

Solar Energy is Rising Star in Ohio

Solar energy is rising star in Ohio

July 18, 2010
By: Dan Gearino
The Columbus Dispatch

John Witte, president of Advanced Distributed Generation, checks an Ohio Air National Guard array holding more than 8,000 solar panels near Toledo Express Airport.

A 2008 bill says that by 2025, 0.5percent of electricity must be solar. From the ground, the 80 acres of solar panels seem to go on forever, arranged in rows like the cornfield that used to be here. The project was completed last month in Wyandot County. At 12 megawatts, it is by far the largest of its kind in Ohio history. Now imagine an even bigger plan - 25 times bigger. That is what American Municipal Power of Columbus announced last month.

Observers greeted the proposal with a mix of wonder and skepticism. The AMP project would be one of the largest in the country. But the company has no experience with utility-scale solar projects, and few details have been released since the initial announcement. One thing is certain, regardless of whether the plan happens: Solar power is on the rise in Ohio, as utilities work to meet the benchmarks of a 2008 state energy law. "We're starting to hit a growth spurt," said Eric Zimmer, CEO of Tipping Point Renewable Energy in Dublin, an energy consultancy involved with solar projects. "I think we're all figuring it out day to day."


Long-term perspective

AMP's plan is the wild card. The nonprofit utility said it will build capacity of 300 megawatts in a series of projects across several states and over several years, with plans to break ground on the first segment this year. Marc Gerken, AMP's chief executive, argues that the plan makes sense for the municipal utilities that his company serves. "We're under a different business model," he said last week. "We look at things from a long-term perspective for a long-term return." He sees solar power as "peak" capacity, which means it would be relied upon for the hottest months of summer, when power demand is at its highest and the sun is shining brightest. That would cover electricity needs that otherwise would be met by peaking plants, which are typically gas-fired power plants that are used for only brief periods each year.

"We looked at this and said, 'How can we drive the cost down and provide peaking resources?'" he said. Another consideration is the possibility of federal environmental rules that would increase the costs of traditional power sources such as coal. If the older sources become more expensive, renewable sources become more attractive, he said.

A Maryland company, Standard Energy, would oversee the construction and own the solar assets. The financing would be made possible by AMP's commitment to buy the electricity for its customers. At some point, AMP's customers will need to sign on to the plan. The clients are 128 municipal utilities in six states, 87 of them in Ohio. The largest central Ohio customer is Westerville's city-owned utility. Solar arrays would be built near the member communities. That would provide several types of cost savings: First, many of the solar modules would be manufactured in the state, so there would be little freight cost to get them to the project sites. Second, the short distance between the projects and the end users would save on the cost of transmitting the power.

An impressive number

For some perspective, the country had 429 megawatts of solar power installed last year, according to preliminary figures from the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group. Of that total, 85percent was from small systems installed on homes and businesses. Only 15 percent, or 66 megawatts, was from utility companies. In that context, some observers wondered whether AMP's plans for a 300-megawatt project was a misprint. It wasn't. "I've seen an announcement with a very impressive number, but I don't know the details," said Mark Shanahan, Gov. Ted Strickland's top adviser on energy issues. "So it's very hard to assess what the timing is going to be. And obviously, we don't know how much of that is going to be in Ohio." One solar-energy expert noted that a project's plan, on its own, has little meaning. "A lot of announcements don't actually turn out," said Ken Zweibel, director of the George Washington University Solar Institute. He estimates that 300 megawatts of solar power would cost more than $1 billion to build. Gerken, who declined to give a cost estimate, isn't shying away from the 300 figure. In response to skeptics, he pointed to AMP's track record on renewable energy, including several major hydroelectric projects and a wind farm. Norm Johnston is not one of the skeptics. The Toledo-area businessman is chairman of Ohio Advanced Energy, a coalition of renewable-energy businesses. Based on his experience developing solar projects, he thinks 300 megawatts is feasible. "I wish them good luck," he said. "If they would build even a part of that in Ohio, I would love to see our Ohio supply chain supply it."

The industry has had a series of big projects announced, scheduled to be built in the next five years. The largest is a 550-megawatt project being developed in California for use by Pacific Gas and Electric Co. Known as the Topaz Solar Farm, the array will cover about 10 square miles in a part of the country that has some of the country's most- abundant sunlight. The developers hope to be done by 2014.

Three other projects would be 300megawatts each: two in California and one in New Mexico. Each is scheduled to be complete by 2015, according to the Solar Electric Power Association, another trade group.
They are all photovoltaic projects, meaning they use solar panels to generate electricity. There are other kinds of solar power, including using solar plates to generate heat, that are not included in this list. One of the most important variables is the cost of solar panels. Lately, those costs have dropped because of an oversupply. Prices might rise in the short term, but developers of solar projects expect costs to fall in the long term as the components become more common.

While Ohio is just beginning to develop solar power, the state is already a leader in manufacturing the components. Companies such as First Solar and Xunlight, both in the Toledo area, produce thin-film photovoltaic panels, a light and flexible material that is helping drive down the cost. The presence of component manufacturers is what inspired a state law that led to the Wyandot County project. Two years ago, Strickland signed Senate Bill 221, a measure that requires utilities to produce 25 percent of their electricity from so-called advanced sources by 2025. At the time of passage, Ohio had virtually no utility-scale solar installations. "Ohio had this core industry growing in northwest Ohio around solar, and it was important to specifically create a requirement for local deployment," Shanahan said. Solar power was the only energy source that got its own piece of the pie in the law. Solar must compose 0.5percent of overall electricity by 2025, which translates to roughly 400 megawatts.

Greg Alexander of Dovetail Solar & Wind installed panels in July in Westerville.


Notably, the law applies only to investor-owned utilities, a group that includes American Electric Power, FirstEnergy, Duke Energy and Dayton Power and Light. Rural electric cooperatives and municipal utilities, such as AMP's clients, are exempt.

So far, AEP has made the largest investment in meeting the requirement. The Columbus-based utility helped develop the Wyandot project and has a contract to buy all the power produced there. AEP now has enough solar capacity to meet the benchmarks for 2010 through 2012. (AEP and AMP are not affiliated, despite their similar names and the fact that both are based in Columbus.)

To meet subsequent goals, AEP plans to commission a series of solar arrays that would produce about 12megawatts each. The next one likely will be announced next year. As a rate-regulated utility, AEP passes its costs directly to its 1.5million Ohio customers. But the law is unclear about whether the company can charge customers for the full cost of developing solar projects. Without clarity on that point, the company will do just enough to meet the solar requirement and little more. "It's prudent to piecemeal this," said Mark Gundelfinger, who oversees renewable energy programs for AEP in Ohio.

That's more than other utilities are doing. The other three investor-owned power companies have yet to break ground on anything approaching the size of the Wyandot array. Instead, they have asked for, and received, exemptions from state regulators. If that process continues for several years, advocates for solar energy are worried that the benchmarks will be essentially meaningless.

Advocates for solar energy were disappointed last year when none of the companies met the first-year benchmark, which was 0.004percent of overall electricity produced. Shanahan, Strickland's adviser, urges patience. The failure to meet the first-year goal was a matter of scheduling, he said, because the law had just gone into effect, and major utility projects require years of lead time. "It's a speed bump," he said.


Ohio sunshine

The top reason for the inaction is cost. On a per-megawatt basis, a solar array costs up to six times as much as a coal-fired power plant to develop, according to AEP. And then, once the plants are built, solar-power output varies based on season and weather, while coal is constant.

There is also an issue of scale. AEP's smallest coal-fired plant, located in Pickaway County, has more than 10 times the capacity of the Wyandot solar array. And the largest coal plants have more than a hundred times the capacity. Ohio's weather is not an asset for solar power. According to the government's National Renewable Energy Lab, the sun shines more than 50 percent brighter in the southwestern United States than in the Great Lakes region and the Northeast. Solar advocates like to rebut that with one word: Germany. That country has the most solar development in the world, even though it gets less sunlight than Ohio. "We get over 130 percent of the amount of solar that you get in Germany," said Johnston, the Toledo-area businessman. "Anywhere in Ohio. Even in Cleveland."

Solar's Long and Winding Road

Solar’s long and winding road
July 8th, 2010


In 1969, the Nixon White House asked a young assistant professor of engineering at the University of Maryland whether solar energy made sense for America. "Absolutely", he replied.

Four decades later, Fred Morse is still trying to persuade the government to put its muscle behind solar. Last week, he scored a big victory. In his weekly radio address on July 3, President Obama announced that the Department of Energy had awarded a $1.45 billion loan guarantee to Abengoa Solar, a Spanish company where Morse is senior advisor for U.S. operations, to build one of the largest solar power plants in the world near Gila Bend, Arizona.

President Obama said:

"Once completed, this plant will be the first large-scale solar plant in the U.S. to actually store the energy it generates for later use, even at night. And it will generate enough clean, renewable energy to power 70,000 homes."

What he didn’t say is that the plant, called Solana, has been in the works since 2007, when Abengoa bought an old alfalfa farm on which to site the plant. If all goes well, it will begin to make electricity in 2013. That’s right–six years, at least, to build a power plant with mostly proven technology.

'You’re a patient man', I told Fred Morse when we spoke the other day by phone. “I have to be,” he replied. Forty years waiting for an industry to be born will do that to you.

Fred is a neighbor of mine in Bethesda, Md., and we belong to the same (green) synagogue, Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation, so we’ve chatted occasionally about solar. I’ve been struck by the time that’s required to bring big solar plants that require public subsidies to market, so when the news broke that Abengoa’s plant had cleared a big hurdle, we arranged to talk again.

One reason why the government agencies involved are taking such a long look at the Solana plant is its size, Fred explained. The plant is expected to cost as much as $2 billion, it will create about 1,600 jobs during construction and generate up to 280 megawatts of power (30 of which will be needed to run the plant itself.) Solana will need about 900,000 mirrors, which will be made near Phoenix, and about 97,000 receivers, which will be made by a German firm called Schott Solar in Albuquerque.

“The amount of steel in the structure, to hold the mirrors, is enough to build a second Golden Gate bridge. It’s big. It’s very very big,” Fred said.

The plant uses a technology known as Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) or solar thermal technology, which uses parabolic mirrors to focus the sun’s heat on a fluid which then heats up 700 degrees, heating water to create steam to run turbines. Here’s an artist’s rendering:

Size tends to be a good thing when building power plants; economies of scale keep costs down. But the regulatory agencies whose approval is needed–they range from the Arizona Department of Transportation to the White House Office of Management Budget–tend to take a closer look when people start talking about billions of dollars.

For example, Arizona Public Service, the utility company that has agreed to buy the electricity generated by Solana, had to get approval from the Arizona Corporation Commission to build the plant. Even after federal subsidies are factored in, the power will cost about 19% more, according to this 2008 blog. (Natural gas prices have dropped since then, so the differential is probably even greater.) APS has agreed to buy $4 billion worth of electricity from the plant over the next 30 years, in part because to comply with a state law requiring utilities to generate at least 15% of their electricity from renewable sources.

You’d think that with a 30-year $4-billion revenue stream that Abengoa, a well-established company with more than $4 billion euros in revenue last year, could obtain financing for the project on the private market … but no. By the fall of 2008, when state regulators okayed the project, the credit markets had frozen. “It was clear that it was going to be very difficult to finance Solana without a federal loan guarantee,” Fred said.

The DOE and OMB analyzed the application for more than a year before giving last week’s conditional okay. Under the provisions of the Energy Act of 2005, the source of the financing, Abengoa had to demonstrate that the plant was innovative, which it is, because it will include new technology enabling energy to be stored for up to six years. But they also had to assure DOE and especially OMB, which tends to be risk-averse, that the storage technology would work because the government is wary of putting its money behind risky schemes. This is the kind of fine line that companies have to negotiate to obtain tax money.

Fred, who worked for DOE for 13 years, understands the dynamic well.

“As a taxpayer, I don’t want to see a big project die in the field and waste a lot of money,” he said. “On the other hand, you want to encourage projects that are innovative and new, and Congress appropriated money to cover some of that risk.”

Another two dozen or so Concentrating Solar Power projects are in various stages of development, most requiring loan guarantees. Morse is rooting for them to succeed, and fast. “We have to build more because you cannot get your supply chain all cranked up, and then have to stop,” he said.

Abengoa wants to build a second large U.S. plant in the Mojave Desert, for which it has a signed power purchase agreement with PG&E Corp. It’s also building plants in Spain, Algeria, Morocco and Abu Dhabi.

This is all encouraging news, but none of it is happening fast enough. We don’t have another 40 years to wait around for this industry to get going.

Solar-Powered Plane Takes 24-Hour Flight

Solar-powered plane takes 24-hour flight
July 7, 2010
London, England (CNN)

Solar Impulse took to the skies on Wednesday on a 24-hour test flight. A solar-powered aircraft which one day hopes to circle the globe has started a 24-hour test flight in Switzerland. Solar Impulse took off shortly before 5 am GMT, Wednesday from an airfield in Payerne, 80 miles northeast of Geneva. The plane is being piloted by Andre Borschberg who will fly the plane to a height of nearly 28,000 feet (8,500 meters) throughout the day.

During the evening the plane will slowly descend to an altitude of 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) where it will remain for the rest of the night, before Borschberg attempts a dawn landing.

Solar Impulse has a wingspan of over 63 meters, the same as an Airbus A340 and is nearly 22 meters long. It weighs 1,600 kilograms and has nearly 12,000 solar cells attached to its wings and horizontal stabilizers.
The plane is also equipped with four electric engines and has a top speed of 70 kilometers per hour.

"The goal of the project is to have a solar-powered plane flying day and night without fuel," co-founder of the project, Bertrand Piccard said. The Swiss adventurer, who piloted the first non-stop balloon flight around the world in 1999 in the Breitling Orbiter III said the test flight was "crucial for the credibility of the project." The challenge to fly a solar plane around the world was officially announced in 2003. If the 24-hour flight is successful, a second airplane will be designed to fly much further next year, with the aim of flying across continents and the Atlantic Ocean.

In 2012, the team hope to fly Solar Impulse around the world in five stages.