electricity

Ice Can Help Power Grids During Peak Use

- Adam Clare

Air conditioners use a ton of energy and when everyone has their’s running the load on the power grid can be pushed to the limit. At night, when it’s generally cooler, the power grid isn’t being used nearly as much. A company called Ice Energy is using that extra night time capacity to make ice, which is then used to cool buildings as a compliment to exiting AC setups.

The building owner gets cheaper power, and the utility gets a solution to its peak power problems, said Mike Hopkins, executive vice president of corporate development. That all comes at a cost of roughly $2,200 per kilowatt of installed capacity, a figure that’s quite competitive with other forms of distributed energy storage, he said.

It’s a growing business. Ice Energy is now roughly halfway through fulfilling the 53 megawatts of Ice Bear units it has contracted to provide its biggest customer, the Southern California Public Power Authority, which buys power for municipal utilities around the SoCal region. That relationship also led the company to relocate from Windsor, Colo. to Glendale, Calif. last month, and to decide to focus on California as its key market, Hopkins said.

Read more.

Iceland Thinking of Electrifying Europe

- Adam Clare

Iceland uses sustainable geothermal energy production to provide power and hot water to its people and now they are thinking of exporting surplus power to Europe. They are wrapping up their research into the feasibility of running so much electricity underwater to Europe and if it’s completed even more people can benefit from renewable energy.

Plus, just imagine how rich Iceland can become from supplying cheap renewable energy to the rest of Europe.

The project aims for the exportation of some five terawatt-hours (or five billion kilowatt-hours) each year, Jonsdottir said.
At current power prices in Europe, that corresponds to between 250 and 320 million euros ($350-448 million) in exports annually, and is enough to cover the average annual consumption of 1.25 million European households.
“The idea is to meet demand during peak hours in Europe, as well as some base load,” Jonsdottir said, refusing to estimate how much the project might cost to implement.
Landsvirkjun, which is state-owned, produces about 75 percent of all electricity in Iceland

Read the rest of the article.

World’s Largest Wind Farm to Exist in Romania

- Adam Clare

Bloomberg is reporting that a Spanish company will be building the world’s largest wind farm in Romania. Romania’s current energy production system is well suited for wind power, hopefully neighbouring countries will follow Romania’s lead.

Iberdrola SA won approval to build the world’s largest onshore wind-energy project in Romania, requiring at least $2 billion in investment through 2017.

The Spanish utility said today it acquired rights from the Romanian government to build 1,500 megawatts of capacity. That’s almost five times the power coming from Europe’s largest wind complex and triple what’s proposed offshore Massachusetts in a project opposed by the late U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy.

Iberdrola, which became the world’s biggest wind-farm owner by using government incentives and charging above-market electricity rates for clean energy, now operates in 10 markets including the U.S. and U.K. The Romanian mega-park, near its operations in neighboring Hungary, may extend the Spanish company’s lead over second-ranked wind producer FPL Group Inc. of Florida.

Read the rest at Bloomberg.com

Solar Tower Provides Plenty of Power

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Solar power continues to prove to the world that the sustainable energy choice is a good and efficient source of electricity generation. Solar towers that rely on mirrors aimed at the tower to produce heat are a great way to spin a turbine to provide power for a lot of homes, I don’t understand why places with lots of sun and a lot of land don’t use more of these types of power plants. I’m looking at you Australia.

Read more about concentrated solar towers.

UBS Wealth Management, moreover, is predicting that the relatively small market for concentrated solar power tends to expand, with projected growth of almost 20 gigawatts in new capacity over the next decade. UBS analysts Gianrento Gamboni and Christoph Hugi, refers to the new projects in the United States and Spain as they say “After a long period of stagnation, the market is evolving more dynamically.”

What is a solar power tower?
One square kilometer of land holds the capacity – depending on the specifities of location – to generate as much as 100 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity per year through solar thermal technology. To make it clear, this amount is enough to run 50,000 residents.

One option to produce this energy is the solar power tower, which is a type of solar thermal plant that uses a tower to receive the sunlight, focused upon it via an array of flat, movable mirrors (ie. heliostats). These focused rays heats the water and the steam produced powers a turbine. As you see, no pollutants are emitted in producing the electricity.

Today liquid sodium is commonly used instead of water to store the energy during brief interruptions in sunlight or in night time.

Nanosolar Takes Solar Power to the Next Level

- Adam Clare 8 Comments

A relatively new startup called Nanosolar has announced that they have $4 billion in contracts to sell their solar panels that produce $1 per watt. That is a low enough price point to take on those awful fossil fuels.

The key to their success is how they propose electric utilities make use of their technology. You can read all about it in Wired.

Two big announcements marked its coming out party: The company has $4 billion in contracts and can make money selling its products for $1 per watt of a panel’s capacity. That’s cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels in markets across the world.

Specifically, the company’s management thinks it can help utilities avoid the difficulties of getting big coal and nuclear power plants built by offering the option to build small solar farms they can set up close to cities.

“Cost-efficient solar panels such as ours can be deployed in 2- to 20-megawatt municipal solar power plants that feed peak power directly into the local distribution without requiring the expense of transmission and with a plant deployment time as short as six months,” said Nanosolar CEO Martin Roscheisen in an e-mail to Wired.com. “Coal or nuclear can’t do that, can’t do it as cost efficient and can’t do it as rapidly deployable.”

Thin-film solar has been a major focus of U.S. alternative energy research and development efforts since the early 1980s because it was seen as a true “breakthrough” solar technology. Silicon cells are easy to manufacture, dependable and efficient, but some researchers viewed them as inherently limited. As they are currently produced, they require a lot more silicon than thin-film solar cells. They might reach efficiency levels of over 40 percent, but they’d never compete with fossil fuel energy sources, even with carbon taxes.

Thin-film solar was different. On the one hand, it was definitely harder to make efficient cells. However, it allowed researchers to dream of printing semiconducting chemicals onto a metal sheet and having it convert photons into electricity. Thin-film cells seemed like they’d be perfect for the applications researchers imagined like “solar shingles” for building-integrated solar installations.

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