This has been coming for a while - reported in the Guardian this morning:
“Britain must build “at least” eight new nuclear power stations during the next 15 years to replace its ageing plants and contribute to a “post-oil economy” that is cleaner and much more efficient than in the era of “cheap energy and careless pollution”, Gordon Brown signalled last night. The first new reactors could feed electricity into the national grid by 2017.”
Question is (aside from the debate on nuclear danger), can the UK build these fast enough before the old power stations are redundant? It can take around ten years to make a nuclear power stations, Greenbang heard the other day.
Greenbang’s been trying to think up stories of Maine for a new wind farm project that’s finally going ahead there. 20 minutes and a glass of wine into the quest she’s realised she knows nothing of the place aside from Stephen King’s books are all set there and Mash’s Hawkeye came from the US state.
So she’s just going to ignore the attempt at a bad anecdote, get on with the story and have another glass of wine.
The state on the top right corner of the US map has given final approval to a $270 million wind power project in its western mountains. According to Sea Coast Online:
TransCanada Maine Wind Development Inc. (a lot of thought went into the title) plans to erect 44 wind turbines on and near Kibby Mountain, just east of Coburn Gore. If built today, the 132-megawatt project would be New England’s largest wind farm, generating enough electricity to power 50,000 homes. The company has said it hopes to have the wind farm fully operational by the fall of 2010.
A spat has broken out in the US over the extent to which America can turn to wind power to reduce its dependence on oil. The former oil man T. Boone Pickens has released his plan to wean the US off imported oil by turning instead to wind power and natural gas as alternative sources of energy. Pickens, a geologist who started his own oil exploration company in the 1950’s, calls the US the ‘Saudi Arabia’ of wind power and believes that 20% of the country’s electricity could be produced by building wind facilities in the corridor that stretches from the Texas panhandle to North Dakota where the greatest wind speeds in America can be found.
The involves producing suficient wind power within 10 years to divert 20% of the natural gas now used to fuel power plants for use in cars and trucks. Pickens has been talking up wind power for some time and it’s not like he’s not putting his money where the wind is. Just north of the Texas town of Sweetwater, his Mesa Power company is currently building the largest wind farm in the world. At 4,000 megawatts — the equivalent combined output of four large coal-fire plants — the production of the completed ‘Pampa’ facility will double the wind energy output of the United States.
Now he is turning up the heat by publishing his plan - http://www.pickensplan.com/ - and by starting a PR and advertising campaign aimed at pushing renewable energy to the top of the Presidential election campaign. Pickens says, “Neither presidential candidate is talking about solving the oil problem. So we’re going to make ‘em talk about it.”
While Pickens campaign may be already pushing with the wind (according to CNN.com, at least 21 states and the District of Columbia have already set deadlines or goals for utilities to obtain electricity from clean, renewable sources instead of fossil fuel-burning plants) it has not met with universal approval. The Institute for Energy Research, whose views on the need to tackle climate change should be labelled skeptical at best, have come out with a lengthy and detailed document which attempts to point out the pitfalls with the plan and with wind power in general.
The IER says wind power is intermittent, unreliable and difficult to transmit. Perhaps a bigger problem for any rapid expansion of wind power is the current shortage of key components of wind turbines, as reported in Renewable Energy World magazine yesterday. They say that, as a consequence of rapid market growth, especially in booming markets such as the US, Europe and China, wind turbine demand continues to outstrip the world’s cumulative supply capacity. This supply problem is not expected to be resolved anytime soon, as the critical parts in question are also used in agriculture, ship propulsion, rotating equipment for power stations, transportation, and mining machinery.
Whether T. Boone Pickens plan will be the catalyst for reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil remains to be seen. But with a personal fortune estimated at somewhere above $4bn, he certainly has the ability to keep the debate centre stage and it will be interesting to see whether either of the two Presidential candidates endorse any parts of the Pickens Plan into their own energy policies.
Having spent the first seven years of her life there Greenbang always had a soft spot for Sheffield. She occasionally yearns for the Monty Python ‘warm handful of gravel’ and ‘working 14 hours down mill’ but there’s now another reason to love the city.
Sheffield based ITM has just announced a home hydrogen generator which will be available to buy within two years. To test the device the company also had a Ford Focus converted to run on hydrogen. The announcement should help overcome one of hydrogen’s stumbling blocks, availability.
According to the release:
It has taken scientists and chemists at the company’s Sheffield research base, currently Europe’s largest electrolyser and fuel cell development centre, eight years to create a low-cost means of manufacturing hydrogen. Its patented electrolyser-based refuelling station uses a unique low-cost polymer which dispenses with the need for expensive platinum and can be manufactured at 1 per cent of the cost of traditional membrane materials.
The demonstration vehicle can travel 25 miles on a single recharge of hydrogen from the refuelling station, allowing it to complete most average commuter journeys without the need for the back-up petrol supply. If the hydrogen is compressed the range can be extended to 100 miles.
The Ford Focus was chosen by ITM Power because it is one of Europe’s top-selling models. In its converted form, it is effectively a bi-fuel vehicle, capable of being switched back to petrol if the hydrogen supply is exhausted.
A spokesperson for the company told Greenbang the device “would be available for roughly the same cost as a domestic boiler, so 1,800 to 2,000 pounds.”
The device can be powered by renewable energy such as a home wind turbine but the company believes most will come from the grid giving an anticipated cost of 80p per litre of hydrogen.
According to Aaron Bezalel, the marketing director of Israeli SDE Energy, wave power is both the strongest and cheapest form of power available. He does, probably, have to say that however; the company has just signed a $600m deal to supply a string of wave power plants across China’s coast. Providing the initial testing is successful the completed network will be a 100 megawatt plant.
According to the release:
Two joint venture companies, formed in Hong Kong by S.D.E and the investors for the implementation of the agreement, will build an initial model in Guangzhou province in southern China. In the event the model proves to be successful, they will launch the establishment of sea wave power plants throughout China. The process is subject to the approval of the Government of China, which is meant to purchase the entire quantity of electricity generated.
According to the company China’s coast, it seems faces several problems when trying to go green.
Nuclear power plants and hydroelectric stations are highly susceptible to earthquake damage; the country is hit by more than 4 typhoons a year, making the building of wind farms extremely difficult, and solar systems are not cost effective.
It all sounds great but Greenbang isn’t quite convinced by the figures sited in the release. Whilst she can believe that, ’sea waves have the potential to supply 4 times more energy per square meter than wind’, she’s less convinced that this generation methos ‘could supply 500 times more than the electricity requirements of the whole world population.’
There’s a group of organisms called extremophiles, ones that have evolved to cope with conditions under which most organisms would simply curl up and die. The organisms often have great applications, for example, enzymes taken from bacteria found in geysers has enabled the sequencing of the human genome.
Another one, it seems, may also hold the key to producing enough hydrogen to shift away from oil, this time an organism found in the pit of a collapsed volcano. According to Science Daily scientists from across the world have formed a team to unlock the process refined by a billions-year old archaea. The U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute will expedite the research by sequencing the hydrogen-producing organism for comparative genomics.
Jeremy Leggett - a very wise chap - was quoted in the Times saying that if, as the Russians ‘predict’ (or encourage), the price of oil shoots up to $250 a barrel, solar energy will become a much more viable option.
“It’s now inevitable, and I used the word advisedly, that solar electricity is going to be cheaper than electricity from gas and coal,” he said. “It’s straight manufacturing economies of scale, while we all know what is happening to oil and gas.”
Cost has so far been a drawback to solar, but if the price of oil keeps rising as fast as it is, how true Jeremy’s words could soon be.
As such, this caught Greenbang’s eye today.
“Canadian Solar has signed five new sales agreements in Italy and the Czech Republic in the past three weeks. The customers covered under these agreements are WSW in the Czech Republic, and Arco Energy, AC Service, Ravano Green Power and Albatec of Italy.
The total volume of shipments for 2008 for the above mentioned new agreements totals 14.9 MW and reflects sales of CSI’s regular module products. The sales will be realized in the second half of 2008 and are in addition to existing shipments to customers in Germany, Spain, USA, Korea and China.”
Greenbang is starting to get very excited about the Olympics. It’s now less than a month until the world’s athletes head to the Beijing smog. She had been afraid that the pollution might have made the times too slow and that several more athletes would boycott the event for health reasons.
But Beijing has been cleaning up its act slightly, increasing public transport, taking half the government cars off the road and making its 3.3 million private car owners drive into the city only on alternate days. The city will revert back to normal on the 20th September, making it seem like greenwash, but it’s a start.
In addition to these measures the Autochannel.com has reported that 20 hydrogen fuel cell hybrid vehicles will go to Beijing for the Olympics service.
The 20 hydrogen cars are reportedly the first new energy vehicles permitted to go on the roads in China. All have covered the 300km safety test and have gone through other safety and endurance trials.
You’ve got to love the Japanese response to their Prime Minister, Yasuo Fukuda. On the 9th of June Mr Fukuda called for a tenfold increase in solar power by 2020. Within a month Showa Shell Sekiyu, the Japanese subsidiary of Shell and the country’s fifth-largest oil refiner, announced plans to invest 100 billion yen (about £470 m) in a solar-panel megaplant,
Construction is planned to begin in 2011, the location is yet to be decided.
Speaking to AFP an unnamed spokesman stated ‘the new plant would have an annual capacity of 1,000 megawatts, equivalent to that of a regular-sized nuclear power reactor, and outdistancing Sharp’s domestic plant, [announced last month] which has an estimated 710 megawatts a year.’
You’ve got to love New Zealand. It has everything, stunning scenery, mountains, isolation, hobbits (it’s true) and shortly a $60m (NZ) geothermal power plant. That’s about £23m.
According to the Associated Press (reprinted on CNN Money), Contact Energy has contracted Ormat to build the power plant at Tauhara geothermal field in the center of New Zealand’s North Island. Construction is expected to be completed within 23 months from the contract date.
Whilst the AP had no figures on power, Bloomberg has stated the plant will be a 23.3 megawatt binary generator. The plant, to be commissioned in 2010, is the first stage of a larger development.
This has been coming for a while - reported in the Guardian this morning:
There’s a group of organisms called extremophiles, ones that have evolved to cope with conditions under which most organisms would simply curl up and die. The organisms often have great applications, for example, enzymes taken from bacteria found in geysers has enabled the sequencing of the human genome.
Greenbang is starting to get very excited about the Olympics. It’s now less than a month until the world’s athletes head to the Beijing smog. She had been afraid that the pollution might have made the times too slow and that several more athletes would boycott the event for health reasons.
You’ve got to love the Japanese response to their Prime Minister, Yasuo Fukuda. On the 9th of June Mr Fukuda called for a tenfold increase in solar power by 2020. Within a month 
You’ve got to love New Zealand. It has everything, stunning scenery, mountains, isolation, hobbits (it’s true) and shortly a $60m (NZ) geothermal power plant. That’s about £23m.