by Peter Asmus

Wind turbine technology has become a fully commercial venture, but the recent rapid growth of the wind industry has strained its supply chain to meet demand in a timely manner. Furthermore, unexpected component failures, especially electronic controls, gearboxes, generators, and rotor blades, have driven up operations and maintenance costs.

During the course of the research for a new report just published by Wind Energy Update, it ultimately became clear that reliable and verifiable data on wind industry operations and maintenance cost trends is quite rare. In fact, there are no current widely available data sets illustrating these wind industry costs.

Proprietary research, reviews of scarce secondary sources and anecdotal evidence obtained through confidential interviews with wind industry owners and operators and component suppliers suggest that operations and maintenance expenses are double or even triple what was originally projected, particularly with the latest class of multi-megawatt machines now permeating the global wind market.

Of course, nearly all machine and electrical components have a certain chance of failure within their design lifetime, and wind turbines are no different. Savvy operators can make problematic turbines look better through innovative in the field operations and maintenance strategies, and vice-versa.

Nonetheless, the wind industry’s promises of delivering cost effective clean renewable energy to combat global climate change is being compromised by higher than expected component failure rates. Gearboxes allegedly designed for a 20-year life are breaking down prematurely across most major manufacturing brands, are failing after only six to eight years of operation.

The key, therefore, to long-term profitability for the wind industry is reducing the risk of operations and maintenance, whether through superior designs, higher quality manufacturing, smarter component transportation techniques, and more strategic installation and field operations (or most likely, all the above).

“Just a one percent improvement in operations and maintenance makes a huge difference on the bottom line,” said one 30-year veteran of the wind industry in the report (which provided confidentiality for those it quoted). “Improved performance is not free, but you’re still not paying for fuel. Operations and maintenance is a much better use of capital.”

This same source made the following startling admission:

"Engineers are still scratching their heads when it comes to gearboxes. Even though gearboxes are certified to operate for 20 years, none of them on today’s market last more than 8 years. It turns out that designing wind turbines is tougher than rocket science since the humongous stresses on gearboxes goes all the way down to the microscopic level."

Given the scope of today’s operations and maintenance challenges, owner-operators, component suppliers and manufacturers have no incentive to reveal component failure data because the problems are so widespread. Revealing this data will dampen enthusiasm for wind power, which now has widespread public and policy support.

Why would anyone want to harm their potential bottom lines?

As one large wind turbine fleet manager bluntly stated, “We have the data on O&M costs, but we don’t even share it with the manufacturers. I’ve seen their data, and it is all wrong. The problems are way, way worse than they realize. If you keep a turbine long enough, it will fail.”

The true costs of wind industry operations and maintenance are also clouded by the fact that the majority of current wind capacity is just now coming out of warranty, so most owner-operators do not have access to data about their own wind projects!

On top of that, operations and maintenance costs are affected by specific turbine designs, the nature of site-specific wind resources, siting criteria, terrain and existing support infrastructure.

The majority of those interviewed said larger project operations and maintenance costs range from one to 2.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared to an early estimate by the largest U.S. manufacturer of just .5 cents per kilowatt-hour. At 2 cents per kilowatt-hour, operations and maintenance costs are roughly equal to the federal production tax credit offered in the United States as a subsidy to make wind cost-competitive.

A long-term veteran of the wind industry, now stationed in Europe, who was involved with first-generation turbines in California in the early 1980s, made this poignant observation:

"[Operations and maintenance] at .5 cents per kilowatt-hour? All of the current figures I’ve seen for operations and maintenance don’t reflect long-term reality. Interestingly enough, even at these high operations and maintenance cost levels, wind projects can still pencil out, especially in Europe."

A warning: generalizations and averages are helpful, but operations and maintenance challenges are often quite site and project specific, with major differences evident between the United States and European markets (as well as Asia and the rest of the world).

A turbine may perform adequately in a typical terrestrial regime with a capacity factor of less than 20 percent in a moderate wind regime in Germany, but exhibit extreme fatigue in a hostile cold marine or scalding hot desert environments and operating at a 35 percent capacity. Terrain and wind regimes play a big role in long-term performance, as do siting protocols, availability of adequately trained labour force, and the quality of component manufacturing.

The current economic recession is a much needed pause, allowing the entire wind industry — including its increasingly large and diverse supply chain — to make a mid-course correction and prepare for the next boom in deployments lying just around the corner.

The industry can no longer afford uneven component quality, long lead times for component replacements, and the high costs attached to catastrophic wind turbine failures.

Now is the time to plan for ways to boost returns on investments by planning ahead and more accurately forecasting operations and maintenance costs — and then respond with corresponding strategies, including a greater reliance upon both condition and performance monitoring systems which can alert operators to potential problems ahead of time.

The key to reducing operations and maintenance liabilities is preventive maintenance substituting for unscheduled maintenance. Here is a list of the primary findings derived from a Wind Energy Update survey conducted for this report:

- The percentage of wind turbines still under warranty during the time of Wind Energy Update survey was 79 percent. Due to this fact, most owner-operators don’t even know what their exact costs of operations and maintenance are. Due to the unexpected high failure rates of major components with the most recent class of multi-megawatt turbines, original equipment manufacturers have no motive to share their failure rate data with owner-operators, let alone researchers trying to publicize these facts.

- Operations and maintenance costs for wind power are far higher than originally projected, particularly in the United States, now the world’s largest wind power market.

- Europe’s emphasis on preventive rather than reactive maintenance results in overall lower operations and maintenance costs than the United States: a 2 to 5 percent advantage if resource factors are accounted for.

- According to this Wind Energy Update survey, the percent change in wind farm return on investment was negative 21 percent with a standard deviation of 13 percent. This underperformance of wind assets is most likely attributed to both differences in power production and operations and maintenance costs over original estimates.

- The same surveys showed that the percentage of total wind initial project costs invested in operations and maintenance was 3 percent with a standard deviation of 3 percent. Many project owner-operators had originally estimated operations and maintenance at one percent of initial project costs.

- Finally, the average values of operations and maintenance costs obtained from surveys were $0.027 per kilowatt-hour. This compares to early estimates by one of the world’s dominant turbine suppliers of $.005 per kilowatt-hour.

Part of the challenge facing the wind industry as it scales up turbines to more efficiently capture the kinetic energy from the wind is pure and simple science. While the weight of larger rotors is designed to capture wind energy increases by the cube, power generation only increases by the square.

In other words, increasing rotor lengths from 40 to 80 metres increases weight (and turbine cost) by a factor of 8, but energy capture only by a factor of 4.

New, more radical designs such as two-bladed rotors, direct drive turbines without gearboxes and even various vertical axis designs are now coming to market as designers seek new innovations to address this fundamental dilemma.

Reprinted with permission from Cleantechies

by David Ferris

The Unstoppable….Solar Lobby?!? A skirmish this week in Arizona revealed that the solar industry, while still adolescent, is developing some political brawn. A bill in the state legislature proposed expanding the definition of "renewable" to include nuclear power, a move that would have allowed the state's lone nuclear plant to fulfill Arizona's mandate to receive 15% of its electricity from renewables. Solar companies howled, including Suntech Power Holdings, which threatened to cancel its first U.S. factory in Arizona. Days later, the proposal was retired.

Walmart to Suppliers: Go Green or Else Walmart announced a goal of cutting 20 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions from its supply chain by the end of 2015. By using its unparalleled purchasing leverage, Walmart intends to force greener behavior on the part of its vendors, like it or not. Suppliers may reduce carbon by focusing on raw materials, manufacturing, transportation, customer use, or end-of-life disposal.

Meanwhile, Ben & Jerry's goes 100 percent fair trade.

If You Pollute It, We Will Come The Environmental Protection Agency said it would explore building renewable-energy projects on polluted industrial "brownfields" sites, many of which are well-supplied with power transmission to feed the grid. Also, Chevron announced plans to build a concentrating photovoltaic solar plant on the tailings of a molybdenum mine it owns in New Mexico.

Hummer R.I.P while Hybrids R-I-P As the Hummer died, hybrid and electric cars continued their confident merge onto U.S. highways. Toyota said it will sell a hybrid RAV4 by 2012. Not to be outdone, Volkswagen announced plans for a hybrid Jetta in 2012, a hybrid Passat and Golf in 2013, and that same year, its first all-electric models. Meanwhile, Tesla announced it would lease the Roadster for the not-inconsiderable sum of $1,658 per month.

March of the Penguins This week the Antarctic melted apace, as an enormous survey of Antarctic sealife showed that global warming is altering its ecology. In an unseemly bid for attention, the continent also calved an iceberg so large that it threatened to disrupt world ocean currents.

A Dangerous Rise in Global Shrugging The Obama administration launched www.climate.gov as the go-to portal for all climate needs. Not that anyone age 18 to 35 cares; according to a new survey, when it comes to global warming, youngsters don't really give a damn.

Photo credit: Cam World - http://camworld.org

Reprinted with permission from The Ferris Files

by Chris Nelder

Judging by the excitement around the unveiling of the Bloom Box, you’d think it was the Second Coming.

The green blogs fell all over themselves repeating the breathless “Holy Grail” speculations in Lesley Stahl’s 60 Minutes report, which was indistinguishable from an in-house marketing puff piece.

Bloom Energy’s media blitz ended eight years in stealth mode, and the star-studded coming-out ceremony on Wednesday featured notables such as board member Gen. Colin Powell, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, legendary VC John Doerr of Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield & Byers, Google co-founder Larry Page, eBay CEO John Donahoe, and Wal-Mart COO Bill Simon.

The market could dwarf the Internet, they said. It’s like another Google. It’s a “disruptive technology” akin to cell phones replacing land lines. It will slash CO2 emissions and replace the grid. It’s twice as efficient as grid power generation. Its technology is based on common beach sand, not expensive and corrosive materials. It will “change the world.” (Cue Tom Waits’ “Step Right Up.”)

They congratulated themselves with bear hugs and “I love you, man”s.

Bloom Energy CEO KR Sridhar’s laid out his bold vision: Bloom Boxes would provide affordable, abundant, reliable, clean electricity to every home and business and light up the dark areas of the world — in a decade. It’s “a market size that starts with a ‘T’,” not a ‘B’, he said at the company’s 2002 launch.

After a decade of studying energy, such claims instantly arouse my skepticism. I had to take a closer look.

What It Is

The Bloom Box is a mini power plant based on fuel cell technology. Fuel cells use an electrochemical (not thermal) process to separate the protons and electrons of the fuel and then pass the electrons through a circuit to generate electricity. At the end of the process, the protons and electrons recombine along with oxygen.

If the fuel is pure hydrogen, the emissions will be pure water, but if the fuel is a hydrocarbon, emissions will also contain carbon dioxide.

Fuel cells aren’t new. The first was invented by a Swiss-German chemist in 1838, and at least 20 different designs now exist. A long history of companies has attempted to bring a cost-effective and practical device to market, and in the last decade hundreds of millions of dollars have been poured into their research and development.

None have achieved real commercial viability yet. According to data assembled by Fuel Cells 2000, fewer than 1,000 units are in operation or planned worldwide. One of the top public U.S. fuel cell manufacturers, Fuel Cell Energy, Inc. (NASDAQ: FCEL) has a mere 90 installations worldwide, and its stock has been moribund since 2002.

What’s new about the Bloom Box is that it claims to be high efficiency (producing more power with less waste heat than other fuel cells), small, relatively cheap, and able to run on a variety of fuels including natural gas, landfill gas, and biogas. Its solid oxide design reportedly uses zirconium oxide for the proton-exchange membrane.

Let’s have a look at the numbers, assembled from Bloom’s statements and various blogs.

One cell produces 25 watts. A “residential sized” stack of cells produces 1 kilowatt (kW), which Sridhar claims could be on the market at a price point of $3000 in five years.

A 100 kilowatt system (before incentives) costs $700,000 to $800,000. For my purposes I’ll take the high estimate and call it $8,000/kW.

Most units will run on natural gas. Assuming the gas costs $7 per million BTU, the cost of generation is in the $0.13 to $0.14 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) range, before subsidies. After factoring in the federal 30% investment tax credit, the $2,500/kW California rebate, and the claimed 10-year lifespan, the unit should produce power for roughly $0.08 to $0.10/kWh. The average retail grid power price in the U.S. is about $0.11/kWh.

Under those metrics, the company claims it will take three to five years to pay itself off, including the cost of swapping out the used-up fuel cell stack twice during the 10-year warranty period or not. This strikes me as a highly dubious claim.

The CO2 emissions when running on natural gas are reportedly 0.8 pounds/kWh, as compared with 2 pounds/kWh for coal-fired plants and 1.3 pounds/kWh for natural gas-fired plants. Hence the squishy claim that the unit produces power with “half the emissions” of grid power from natural gas.

What It Isn’t

First, a 1 kW unit isn’t enough to power a house in the U.S. I know from my experience in the solar business that 2.5 kW on an averaged demand basis is more like it.

Peak demand loads can be much higher. For example, a hair dryer, a microwave, and a toaster together could draw more than 5 kW. Large houses can need 10 kW or more on average. So even at Sridhar’s $3000 price point for a 1 kW unit, a residential application would cost more like $7500.

But long experience in watching “breakthrough” devices like this come to market tells me that one has to discount the initial claims by at least a factor of two. So the real price point will probably be closer to $6000/kW in five years, or $3000 in ten, in which case the unit might never pay itself off in a residential application over the 10-year warranty period.

A quick calculation by Editor Rembrandt Koppelaar at The Oil Drum also questions the payback period. Assuming $0.10/kWh for grid power and an $800,000 cost for a 100 kW unit, he calculates it would pay itself off in 15 years — five years longer than its expected lifespan.

The eBay installation featured in the rollout offers a final example. The scant available information about this installation suggests that it consists of five 100 kW units, at a cost of $800,000 each, which have saved the company $100,000 in grid power costs over nine months. If that surmise is correct, then the $4 million installation will pay for itself in 30 years.

Second, since nearly all customers will run the unit on natural gas, it doesn’t fulfill the claims of clean, abundant, or cheap power.

If my expectation of a global natural gas peak in the 2020-2025 range is correct, it could in reality make the situation worse, by moving significant loads to natural gas just as supply starts to flatten out.

In effect, it would allow us to crawl farther out on the fossil-fuel limb just before it cracks.

It definitely won’t make sense to use solar power to crack water into hydrogen and oxygen in order to use the hydrogen in a fuel cell. It would be far more efficient, and cheaper, to simply use the solar power.

Third, the suggestion that it will “replace the grid” is simply nonsense. Few of the customers in the commercial market will generate all of their power with Bloom Boxes (the high-profile campuses currently testing the units get 15% of their power or less from them), and most buildings already have grid connections. The units might eventually replace some of the load carried by utility power plants, but that’s about it.

Even a residential application would not eliminate the need for grid power unless it was sized to meet peak loads, which would not make economic sense.

Finally, and most importantly, there is the scale problem. I don’t know what universe you’d have to live in to think that a company currently producing one unit a day is going to put several billion of them into operation in one decade, or even five. Particularly if your outlook on capital markets for the next five decades is informed by an education in peak fossil fuels.

The Verdict

The Bloom Box doesn’t belong in any discussion about renewable, clean power, or changing the world.

The main effect of the device would be to transfer some of the power generation load off centralized coal plants and onto distributed natural gas plants.

Few customers — and probably only commercial and industrial ones, at that — will have the option of running it on biogas or landfill gas. For the slightly more than half of the homes in the U.S. that even have a natural gas line, it won’t make economic sense.

Therefore, I do not expect it to become a viable residential application. Nor do I expect it to light up the Third World without installing a network of natural gas lines — in itself, an unlikely proposition.

A fair comparison would be to a standard natural gas-fired backup generator. A quick Google search finds an 18 kW Briggs & Stratton natural gas backup generator for $4,200. If $3,000 will get me a 1 kW Bloom Box, then an 18 kW device would be $54,000. Is that a price premium any homeowner would pay for slightly reduced emissions?

For another cost comparison, at $8000/kW, rooftop solar (after incentives) is cheaper today. As long as you have a functioning grid, the 24 hour, 7 day benefit of a fuel cell (assuming uninterrupted natural gas supply) wouldn’t be worth the cost premium over solar. And once it’s installed, a solar PV system consumes no fuel, and produces no emissions.

By time a Bloom Box goes for $3,000/kW, my bet is that solar will still be cheaper. Should natural gas prices go to $15 or $20 in the next decade (a not unreasonable proposition) then solar will be half the price, or less, and the payback period for the fuel cell would lengthen considerably.

What it can do is allow commercial customers to claim some green cred for reduced emissions while paying close to the going market rate for power.

However, I expect a solid handful of more mature companies (like FuelCell Energy, Kyocera, UTC, and Ballard Technologies) to give them a run for their money.

If the Bloom Box does, in fact, sport a 50% efficiency gain over utility plants — which I think still needs to be proven — then that should confer an advantage on it in the form of carbon reduction incentives. That may be the best advantage the Bloom Box has.

There are certainly important intangible benefits in distributed generation and baseload (24 hour, 7 day) capacity, as my readers well know.

However, the Bloom Box’s reliance on natural gas cannot be overlooked, and it appears that nearly everyone has overlooked it here.

The short lifespan of the device and the need to swap out the cell stack every five years must be factored in as well. The cost of maintenance and the availability of service technicians are important questions that still loom over the Bloom.

By comparison, a rooftop solar installation is low tech, low maintenance, and far more durable.

In short, I view the Bloom Box as a modest gain over the status quo in natural gas fired power supply. A world-changer it is not.

Too Big To Grail

The most interesting part of the Bloom Box story is the social aspect.

Lesley Stahl’s gushing 60 Minutes take on the Bloom Box was, in so many ways, a paragon of everything that’s wrong with energy coverage in the media.

She was in hot pursuit of “the next big thing,” and found the unit to be “awfully dazzling” in a market “worth bazillions.”

“I’m installing a power plant!” she exclaimed with childlike glee, as she peeled the shipping packaging off a new unit.

She was obviously very impressed that the technology was an inversion of an invention that could produce oxygen so people could live on Mars.

Her opening statement, “In the world of energy, the Holy Grail is a power source that’s inexpensive and clean, with no emissions,” is either a complete non-sequitur, or a concise demonstration of her energy illiteracy. One leans toward the latter explanation after watching her ask if the box could use solar as a power source, and Sridhar’s humoring affirmation.

The pressure is clearly on the MSM to make some noise for Holy Grails.

There is also something telling about the appetite for hope in the way the blogosphere lapped up the excitement around the unveiling. The appeal to authority of the brass on stage clearly worked, producing uncritical comments like “Gee whiz, $400 million in capital, it clearly works, it’s cheap, and fits in my backyard? I’m in!”

The fact is that the energy problem is too big to grail. Or, as the peakists say, “There are no silver bullets, only silver BBs.”

BBs as in Bloom Box.

I want to be clear. I spent nearly two decades in the computer industry before I got seriously into energy. I used my first computer (a very early, educational prototype) at the age of five, in 1969. I saw the computer revolution firsthand, and I know the power of technological development.

But I also know that the ingrained optimism of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs — as much as I love them — simply does not translate to the challenge of generating or saving hard BTUs. No single technology will save us. Moore’s Law does not apply here. The history of energy is littered with the bodies of enterprising souls just like them.

One thing I will say: Only a venture capital firm with the power of Kleiner, Perkins could coordinate such a media blitz and star-studded unveiling, and wow the socks off the media. My hat is off; they scored a major coup with this one.

I remain staunchly rooted in numbers and of the mind that it’s better to have no hope than false hope, because it pushes us toward real solutions.

The Doomsday clock is ticking. It’s time to put aside childish things, retire the phrase “Holy Grail” permanently, and get real about energy.

Reprinted with permission from Green Stocks Central

by Deborah Warner

What is Green Power?

Green power refers to electricity that is supplied entirely or in part by renewable energy power sources like wind, solar, geothermal, hydropower, and various forms of biomass (plant-derived) materials. Some states are already offering green power options to energy consumers in the form of competitive power retailers, or through green pricing programs offered by regulated utilities. In fact, more than 50% of US retail energy customers have the option of purchasing electricity directly from an electricity supplier.

Consumers can also support the increased use of renewable energy by purchasing green energy certificates, which are discussed in more detail below.

Why should I buy green power?

When you purchase a green power product you’re supporting the increased development of renewable energy sources and reducing the demand for non-renewable fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas. By shifting your energy reliance from non-renewable to renewable sources you reduce your carbon footprint and stimulate the economy.

How can I buy Green Power?

First, you need to determine whether your state allows retail electricity competition. Google the “Status of State Electric Industry Restructuring Activity map” prepared by the U.S. Energy Information Administration to find out.

If your state has not implemented electricity market competition, you still may be able to purchase green power through your regulated utility. More than 600 regulated utilities in over 30 states now offer “green pricing” programs.

Green pricing programs are a service option offered by utilities that allows customers to reduce the percentage of non-renewable energy they use and increase the percentage of renewable energy. To do this, customers pay a premium on their electric bill to cover the above-market cost of acquiring renewable energy resources.

To find out what green power options are available in your state, visit the Department of Energy’s Can I Buy Green Power in my State? web page, where you can click on your state to view available green power products.

But what if you don’t have access to green power through your utility or a competitive electricity marketer? You can still support increased renewable energy usage by purchasing Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) also known as green tags, green energy certificates, or tradable renewable certificates.

Here’s how RECs work. As an energy consumer, you continue to use conventional energy provided by your local utility, but you purchase certificates that pay for the production of renewable energy. For every REC you purchase, one megawatt-hour (the equivalent of 1000 kilowatt-hours) of renewable electricity is generated and delivered to the nation’s power grid. This offsets and reduces the amount of conventional, non-renewable energy that is generated, for off-the-grid consumption. To put this in perspective, on average, one kilowatt-hour (kWh) of renewable power eliminates a little more than a pound of carbon emissions.

A variety of organizations offer RECs, and you don’t need to switch from your current electricity supplier in order to purchase these certificates.

Green Power Evaluation and Certification

So how can you be sure that your green power purchase will really benefit the environment? A number certification programs, as well as advertising and marketing guidelines, have been developed in the U.S. to help address green power product credibility. These programs help consumers verify green power claims and learn how to make environmentally sound choices among competitors.

For more information on these programs, check out the Department of Energy’s Consumer Protection page. And don’t miss our interviews featuring some of the leading REC companies. They’re coming in March.

Reprinted with permission from Green Tech TV

The burning of solid urban waste, sludge from water treatment plants, and livestock slurry could generate more than 7 percent of Spain’s electricity needs, according to a new report. Researchers at the University of Zaragoza say incineration of these materials has the potential to produce up to 20.95 terawatt hours annually. In 2008, that would have met 7.2 percent of the nation’s electricity demand, according to the report published in the journal Renewable Energy. And burning solid urban waste rather than allowing it to reach landfill sites could prevent “pernicious” impacts, such as the release of methane and other gases into the atmosphere, researchers said. “It gives added value to waste, because it can be seen as a type of fuel with zero cost, or even a negative cost if taxes are paid to collect it,” said Norberto Fueyo, a researcher at the university’s Fluid Mechanics Group and lead author of the study.

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

by Tina Casey

Innovalight of Sunnyvale, California has just won a key patent for a new process that will significantly lower the cost of manufacturing silicon solar cells. Working with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the company has come up with a way to apply silicon ink to silicon wafers without using the expensive vacuum-based process typically in use today.

Innovalight’s process is based on an inkjet type technology for manufacturing solar cells. Compared to conventional vacuum processes, the inkjet method is significantly less expensive, and far more energy efficient. It also allows for a higher rate of production than conventional vacuum based methods.

Silicon Ink Solar Cells, Innovalight and NREL

Innovalight’s new method is based on “atmospheric processing” that eliminates the need for conventional vacuum systems. NREL has been devoting significant resources to developing technologies to bring the method into commercial use and lower the cost solar cells. A key component is the Atmospheric Processing platform, which includes a robotic 3-D inkjet system. Atmosphere within the platform can be precision controlled and monitored, to enable researchers to develop and refine the process.

Record Breaking Solar Cell Efficiency

Efficiency records for solar cells are falling so fast it’s hard to sort them all out, especially with so many new materials and technologies pouring into the market. Let’s just say that NREL and Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems have both certified that Innovalight’s new silicon ink processed solar cells have a conversion efficiency of 18%, which is apparently a record for that sort of technology. With several interlocking materials and processes, the company is aiming for an efficiency of 20%.

Silicon Solar Cells and the Quantum Dot Connection

Innovalight and NREL have also collaborated on research into the energy conversion potential of quantum dots (nanocrystals, aka qdots) that could lead to further improvements in silicon solar cell efficiency. The effect, called multiple exciton generation (MEG) was thought to occur only in qdots of semiconductor materials that are not used in solar cell manufacturing – and which contain toxic metals such as lead. The new research shows that MEG also occurs in silicon , which is nontoxic. This opens the door to greater efficiency, without the need to introduce more toxic materials into the environment, by capturing more of the energy from silicon solar cells that is currently lost as heat.

Solar Cell Tattoos and Solar Graffiti, Too

Ink-based solar is coming into its own, which opens up the possibility of applying

solar cell “paint” directly onto buildings – or even onto people. A low cost spray-on version of solar cell technology is not far behind: scientists at the University of Texas at Austin and at Australian National University are among the teams developing a low cost, spray-on ink that could be used on rolls of plastic or stainless steel, and New Energy Technologies has even developed a transparent solar cell spray that could be applied to windows.

Reprinted with permission from Cleantechnica

by Tina Casey

Joule Biotechnologies, Inc. has just announced that a lease agreement has been signed for a new facility in Leander, Texas, which will serve as a pilot plant to develop the company’s solar powered system for producing ethanol and other biofuels. The energy efficient process is based on photosynthetic microorganisms and it operates without the use of conventional biomass or algae biofuel processes.

CleanTechnica and Gas 2.0 have been eagerly following Joule’s progress, and the company has already produced ethanol and diesel at a lab scale rate. It plans to start ethanol production this year at the pilot plant, with diesel to follow early next year. Once operating at full scale, the facility has the potential to deliver at the rate of 25,000 gallons of ethanol per acre yearly, and 15,000 gallons of diesel. That could be the tip of the iceberg, because the same process can also yield a variety of high-value chemicals in addition to biofuels.

Biofuel from Sunlight and Microorganisms

Joule prefers to call its system “solar fuel,” and rightfully so. The heart of the process is the company’s proprietary SolarConverter, which contains photosynthetic organisms in a bath of brackish water and nutrients, with carbon dioxide fed in. While the concept is similar to producing algae biofuel, there are several significant twists. The organisms are not algae, they are bio-engineered proprietary organisms that produce and secrete fuel without the need for costly fermentation processes, extraction or refinement processes. The system also skips the need to collect and transport large quantities of biomass.

Low Cost, Energy Efficient Solar Fuel

Joule calls its process Helioculture, and aside from its non-use of conventional biomass it has a number of environmental advantages over conventional biofuel production. The use of a highly efficient solar powered process is number one. Running a close second is the use of brackish water rather than potable water (or having to power water filtration equipment). The system is also designed to take in waste carbon dioxide, which would add it to the growing list of carbon-capturing opportunities. As a carbon capturing operation, Helioculture can operate on a large scale, but the SolarConverter modules are also designed to custom fit facilities of any size.

Texas Leading Stampede Away from Fossil Fuels

Big oil may be in for a rough ride if the Leander facility delivers on its promises, because Joule estimates it can produce ethanol at an energy equivalency of $50 per barrel and diesel at $40 per barrel. It seems that Texas is to play host to one of life’s little ironies, as the state’s signature industry is rapidly being elbowed aside by alternative energy including the world’s largest wind farm, along with the growing recognition that Texas has the top solar energy potential in the U.S.

Reprinted with permission from Cleantechnica

There has been growing talk about a clean-tech race between China and the U.S., often cast in ominous tones. But the quest to develop and implement renewable energy can be one where both nations win.

by Christina Larson

At a factory in Wuxi, China, workers lift solar panels onto conveyor belts, while others in white lab coats move between machines as they check on a process for etching and engraving silicon wafers to form solar cells.

This scene in itself isn’t remarkable. But there is a new sort of excitement about the work. China’s production of solar panels has grown quickly in the past two years; it is it now the world’s leading exporter. When Matt Lewis, a representative of the California-based nonprofit ClimateWorks, visited the factory in October, he said it reminded him of his native Silicon Valley: The workers, even ordinary line workers, had a sense that they were part of building the future, the hot new industry.

This comparison makes some in the United States, and especially in Washington, nervous. Thomas Friedman has used the bully pulpit of his influential New York Times column to warn that the United States is engaged in a global green-tech competition with China, whose potential dominance represents a “new Sputnik.” (“How do you say ‘clean your clock’ in Chinese?” he wrote.) This notion, conjuring residual memories of the days in which U.S. rivalry with Soviet Union was crystallized in the space race — when the word “Sputnik,” the name of the Soviet space program, inspired quivers of anxiety about America’s political and economic prowess and its existential place in the world — has today struck a resonant chord in Washington, drawing upon existing fears and mistrust of China.

While some U.S. politicians and commentators still paint China as the global pollution villain, especially after the disappointing outcome at Copenhagen, others are beginning to take green China seriously — as a threat. Last fall, for instance, when Senator Charles Schumer got wind of a planned wind farm in west Texas, announced by a partnership of American and Chinese companies, that would use some wind equipment made in China and potentially create new jobs across the Pacific, he recommended blocking stimulus money from the project, rather than help boost green China. The stimulus money “is supposed to create jobs in America,” he wrote in a letter to Energy Secretary Steven Chu. (The new wind farm would also have created 300 jobs in Texas, but Schumer was worried that a greater number could be created in China.)

Last month, a front-page Sunday piece by Keith Bradsher of the New York Times took the competition metaphor a step further and declared that China was in fact already winning the green-tech race. The article, “China Leading Race to Make Clean Energy,” made the rounds in Washington with its assertion that China had passed the U.S. and several western European countries to become the word’s top manufacturer of both solar panels and wind turbines; it quoted the CEO of a private equity firm in Beijing saying, ominously, “Most of the energy equipment [of the future] will carry a brass plate, ‘Made in China.’”

The Times article also raised another spine-tingling geopolitical comparison — this time not likening Beijing to the latter-day USSR, but to the modern-day Middle East. “[China’s] efforts to dominate renewable energy technologies,” Bradsher wrote, “raise the prospect that the West may someday trade its dependence on oil from the Mideast for a reliance on solar panels, wind turbines and other gear manufactured in China.” In other words, China might become the Saudi Arabia of alternative energy; the implication seems to be that not only might green China pose an economic threat, but the sheiks of Beijing might soon wield undue political influence over a “dependent” United States.

Few business stories have ever been imbued with so much gravitas, so many fears, so many metaphors, so much geopolitical speculation, as the recent articles and coverage of China’s growing green-tech manufacturing sector.

Behind these fears, there is something worth probing — and some myths worth dispelling. Just what are Americans afraid of? To distill the cloud of anxiety, there seem to be three chief fears. The first is very tangible — jobs. The second is about America’s place in the world — will the U.S. remain a global leader in innovation? And the third is about leverage — will the U.S. control its future, or be beholden to a foreign energy gatekeeper, one that exerts undue pull on its economic or foreign policy?

“Even when you are looking at these big numbers that are coming out of China today, I think it really pays to give a close look at what is actually happening on the ground,” says Elizabeth Economy, director of Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The River Runs Black. “Then you begin to get a different, more nuanced picture than what is blasted on the business section of the New York Times.”

The first essential fact to be aware of is that most news stories about China’s greentech gains are about manufacturing. China is becoming the wind-turbine factory to the world for much the same reasons it has long been the TV and t-shirt factory to the world: lower wages, lower land prices, fewer regulatory and other requirements, etc. This isn’t particularly surprising, and it shouldn’t be seen as a reversal of the status quo. What’s changed most dramatically in the last five years has been growing global demand. With significant government investment, Chinese factories have planned for and stepped up production accordingly.

Yes, this is bad news for U.S. cities like Detroit, where planners have recently been retrofitting old hot-rod factories into wind-turbine factories, such as an old Ford Thunderbird plant in Michigan that’s being converted into a green-tech manufacturing center in a bid to boost the local economy.

Manufacturing in China, especially low and medium-tech manufacturing, has certain clear economic advantages. But it’s also worth considering a few other facts. Most of the green manufacturing jobs that the U.S. stands to “lose” haven’t in fact been created yet; China will gain thousands of new jobs, but not necessarily at America’s expense. Moreover, the United States will still gain many new green-collar jobs, in installation and maintenance, which can only be locally based, as well as sales teams, conference planners, and other positions already arising to support the growing green-tech field.

Besides green-tech hardware, there’s also the question of the technology that enables it. Who will be responsible for the innovation that drives the low-carbon future? At present, America still has significant advantages — including the world’s leading university system and the entrepreneurial culture and venture-capital spigots of technology hubs, particularly Silicon Valley. “Intellectual property rights have done a lot to hamper China’s development of green technology,” says Linden Ellis, U.S. director of nonprofit China Dialogue. “People would rather come to Silicon Valley and develop a technology where they know it will be protected by the law, right down to every line, than go to China and try to develop a technology there where maybe the components will be cheaper and there is a lot of interest, but people do not trust that their findings will be protected.”

Similar concerns have, for the past two decades, grounded Beijing’s attempts to build a domestic airline industry, considered the pinnacle of high-tech manufacturing. Foreign companies and top-notch engineers have simply been unwilling to share technology with China (Boeing has even avoided building factories in China, for fear of commercial espionage). The result: Planes that fly from Beijing to Shanghai today are still built by Boeing and Airbus.

Of course, most green-energy equipment won’t match the complexity of assembling something like Boeing’s new Dreamliner, but the airplane situation sheds light on two points: that cheap labor is hardly the only factor driving business decisions, and that, despite substantial government support, China’s domestic aerospace engineers have not yet produced research to rival that of Western competitors. (China’s university system and research labs are famously politically constrained, limiting their ability to attract top global talent.)

Of course, China would like to change this. Beijing is doing its best to both allay the fears of international partners and to nurture its own homegrown innovators. A program known as the “State High-Tech Development Plan,” launched by Beijing in March 1986 and nicknamed the “863 Program," aims to develop top scientists in China and to incubate cutting-edge technology projects in energy and other sectors. So far, its results have been modest over two decades: birthing a family of computer processors known as Loongson, and some technology used in the Shenzhou spacecraft. While the 863 Program’s track record should certainly dispel Western assumptions that no good research can come from China, it also disproves the notion that money alone can clone a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Sergey Brin.

This should allay some anxiety in Washington about America having fallen behind, but it is not a reason to become complacent. America has neither relinquished, nor is forever assured, her innovation crown.

Meanwhile, folks in the green-tech and environmental frontlines — as opposed to politicians and commentators — don’t see a “race” at all. “I do not see such a pattern exists,” says Wen Bo, a Beijing environmentalist. “The clean-tech war is overblown from the start,” says Richard Brubaker, an American environmental entrepreneur in Shanghai. To them, the green-tech “race” is not one that one side wins and the other loses, but a scenario where partnerships are sought out and the final equation doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game.

“For now at least, there is a great symbiotic relationship with California and the east coast of China on green technology,” says Linden Ellis. “Where California has the know-how, the technology, the universities and programs dedicated to developing technology, people who are interested in piloting it on a very expansive scale, or trying new combinations, often seek out research partners in China.” Similar partnerships can exist even when the focus shifts from research to commercial activity. Kevin Czinger, the CEO of a Santa Monica-based electric car company that partners with a Chinese battery company, noted in a New Yorker article that if the U.S. would stop feeling threatened by China’s progress on clean technology, it might begin to recognize its own strengths in this field.

It is telling what is left out of the increasingly dominant “U.S. versus China” green-tech “race” narrative. For starters, there are a lot of other countries at work developing green-tech and becoming significant green-tech markets — the low-carbon future, after all, isn’t solely a G-2 aspiration. Yet because the politics are different (there’s not the anxiety of the reigning superpower nervously eyeing the new kid on the block), the green aspirations of any country not named China are viewed through an entirely different prism by U.S. commentators. Germany, for instance, is home to the world’s top two solar manufacturing companies. Yet we don’t read headlines about Old Europe “cleaning our clock” to the 21st century.

“You haven’t seen this green-tech race raised over last 10 years while the Europeans have been innovating in this space more than the U.S.,” says Charles McElwee, an international environmental lawyer for Squires, Samson, and Dempsey based in Shanghai, “although that would have made more sense [than a U.S. versus China frame].”

Even as China’s solar panel exports grow, it continues to purchase clean locomotives from an American company, GE. Germany has developed world-class “green” metro cars, with China being a top customer. And French companies are among the world’s top innovators in water solutions. In other words, green-tech encompasses a lot more than windmills and solar panels — and progress in developing it can be a two-way street.

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

Researchers in the Middle East are developing a technology they say will convert saltwater-tolerant crops into jet fuel, creating a biofuel that doesn’t consume huge amounts of fresh water or take land away from food crops. The Masdar Institute in the United Arab Emirates is creating a demonstration farm that will use a system called integrated seawater agriculture, in which seawater would be transported via canal to a desert-based farm that combines fish and shrimp farming with cultivation of mangrove trees and salicornia, whose seeds can be converted into fuel. The effluent from the fish farming will be used to fertilize the salicornia plants, which are grown in saltwater-irrigated fields, said Scott Kennedy, the project leader. The runoff of that irrigation, which by that point would be even saltier, would be used to grow the saltwater-tolerant mangrove trees. The oil-rich salicornia seeds would then be processed into biofuel suitable for blending in jet fuel, researchers said. One potential challenge for the project, experts noted, is the damage that high salt levels will likely inflict on machinery used to harvest the salicornia.

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

Fifty-five major industrial powers that produce nearly 80 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions have submitted voluntary CO2 reduction targets, but a top UN climate official says they still fall short of what’s needed to limit future temperature increases to 2 C (3.6 F). Meeting a Jan. 31 deadline established at the December climate summit in Copenhagen, the European Union set a goal of reducing emissions 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020; Japan pledged to slash CO2 emissions by 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020; the U.S. set a more modest target of reducing carbon dioxide emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020; and China vowed to cut the so-called “carbon intensity” of its economy — the amount of CO2 produced per unit of gross domestic product — by 40 to 45 percent by 2020. Some conservationists hailed these targets as an important step in slowing global greenhouse gas emissions, but Janos Pasztor — the top climate advisor to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon — said that even with these voluntary reductions “it will still be quite difficult to reach 2 degrees.” Meanwhile, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao reversed an earlier position and said he supports the ratification of a binding global agreement on CO2 reductions at the next major round of climate talks in Mexico City this December. Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360