THIN FILM SOLAR PANELS

Archive for April, 2011

Greenfire Energy, a novel geothermal/CCS startup that is attempting to extract geothermal energy using injected CO2 as the working fluid instead of water, has been selected to receive $2 million in funding from the Department of Energy.

The DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy has awarded GreenFire Energy the funding as part of $20 million in investment in cutting-edge geothermal technologies.

If successful, Greenfire Energy’s pilot will demonstrate a way of generating baseload geothermal electricity at lower temperatures, that not only conserves water but also geologically sequesters carbon dioxide. Low temperature geothermal is a much more widely available resource in the US than high temperature.

The company will use naturally occurring CO₂ deposits at a depleted gas field for the test of what they call CO₂E™. The four partners – a geologist, a chemist, an environmental specialist and an oil industry technologist – believe that their proposed technology holds the promise of lower capital costs than regular geothermal.

There are several advantages to using carbon dioxide rather than water as a geothermal drilling fluid. It has a lower viscosity than water, which makes it easier to inject into rock formations. It can be brought to a supercritical state – a state of matter with the qualities of both a gas and a liquid. It can be kept in that state much easier than water, which requires higher heat and pressure.

This reduces the need for cooling towers and pumps and makes it more efficient at shallower depths and lower temperatures. So the technology expands geothermal potential nationwide, and being shallower, lowers drilling costs, and of course, conserves water.

CO₂ also increases volume with increases in temperature, much more than water does, and “that’s what’s powering our system” GreenFire President Mark Muir told Penelope Kern at Energy Prospects.

Muir told her he is not sure whether they will use a closed loop binary system for the pilot, but if they go with a binary system, they will use underground rocks to heat CO₂ into a supercritical state which will then be used, once it returns to the surface, to heat a second fluid that will spin turbines to create electricity.

The supercritical CO₂ will be cycled through the system over and over to generate power, but each time, some of the CO₂ – between 5 and 60 percent, each cycle – will stay permanently trapped underground.

All of the cutting-edge geothermal technologies selected for trials with the total of $20 million in funding from the DOE work on ways to take advantage of low-temperature geothermal resources, which are more widely available nationwide. The funding is woefully inadequate for fostering innovation. Greenfire Energy alone projects that its total costs from start-up through demonstration-phase operations will be $32 million.

Image Gretar Ívarsson
Susan Kraemer @Twitter

Related articles

• DOE to leverage fossil energy expertise to develop and explore geothermal energy resources (greencarcongress.com)
• DOE Taps Oil and Gas Expertise for Low-temp Geothermal Development (renewableenergyworld.com)

A Colorado law allowing for the creation of solar gardens represents another step in the effort to feed solar electricity to the grid from smaller players. It sets an example for other states and communities that are interested in supporting renewable energy from an expanded variety of suppliers.

Last year, Colorado passed the first state law to create community solar gardens (CSGs). A recent release of the draft rules for CSGs “…may open the floodgates, turning distributed solar power into democratic solar power,” wrote Renewable Energy World.

Not long after, Solar World announced the first solar garden in the city of El Jebel, on land that was considered otherwise unusable, “making it the perfect site for solar panels.”

“Clean Energy Collective (CEC) sold the parcels of solar to residents for as little as $725,” Solar World reports. “CEC predicts a 67% increase of community solar energy in the next five years.” That’s significant.

“Year-round and seasonal residents of the Roaring Fork Valley have bought individual portions of the array for as little as $725 per panel, or $3.15/kW,” wrote Colorado Energy News about the attractive pricing. “Local utility coop Holy Cross Energy will then credit members’ utility bills directly each month at $0.11/kWh based on how much solar each member owns in the array.”

A community solar garden is a 2-megawatt (MW) or smaller solar PV project that has 10 or more subscribers living in the same county.  The solar garden can be built by businesses, non-profits, or utilities. However, CSG operations must be handled by an organization that is solely devoted to the solar garden and its subscribers, much in the way special taxing districts are structured.

By the end of 2013, Colorado utilities will be required to purchase 6 MW of output from CSGs that are operating. But the road to building the required supply infrastructure has not been easy to construct.

“Community solar power can offer unique benefits in the expansion of solar power, from greater participation and ownership of solar to a greater dispersion of the economic benefits of harnessing the sun’s energy. But community solar faces significant barriers in a market where the ‘old rules’ favor corporate, large-scale development. New rules – better community solar policy and regulations – are needed to remove these barriers,” John Farrell wrote last September, in reviewing the draft rules for Energy Self Reliant States.

The Solar Gardens Institute, in partnership with the Colorado Renewable Energy Society, will hold the inaugural SOLAR GARDEN SYMPOSIUM on May 6, 2011. SGI welcomes installers and industry professionals to come and learn more about off-site solar.

SGI writes it is the “industry-leading Subscriber Management Organization, and we are proud to be supporting community and low-income renewable energy projects.”

Related Stories:

• U.S. Sen. Mark Udall Unveils Community Solar Gardens Bill
• Nation’s Most Effective Solar Community Purchasing Program Descends Upon Los Angeles
• Freeing the Grid

America’s military has taken a number of steps towards alternative energy and an energy-independent future, but military operations still require the transportation and distribution of other resources as well – namely:  water.

Water is heavy, requires tons of specialized equipment to transport, and is absolutely mission-critical.  A new process, however, aims to “lighten the load” of military water transport by extracting drinkable water from the same diesel fuel used to run helicopters, tanks, and generators.  This process – being developed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory – captures water from burning diesel fuel, and is efficient enoughto theoretically produce 1 gallon of water from 1 gallon of diesel.  The process also removes a number of contaminant particles, allowing for up to 85 % of that water to be drinkable.

The “trick” behind the innovative process is an inorganic membrane that uses capillary action to condense water from the diesel engines’ exhaust.  As the exhaust runs through a series of ceramic tubes, pores sin the tubes absorb the water vapor, which passes through to the other side.

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory is pushing for full-scale development of its system within the next few years, at a cost of just 6 million USD.  If the process works at “full scale”, it may also help bring drinkable water to developing nations and help aid disaster relief efforts, like those currently underway in Japan.

Source:  Popular Science.

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When I last chatted with NRG Energy CEO David Crane, he explained to me how the nuclear disaster in Japan had created an environment of uncertainty for U.S. nuclear projects, and specifically for the expansion of NRG’s own South Texas nuclear plant. That’s partly because Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the beleaguered utility that owns the damaged nuclear plants in Japan, was supposed to be an investor in NRG’s nuclear project. Well, this afternoon in a note to investors, NRG Energy says it will be providing no more money for the development of the South Texas Project units 3&4, and will be recording a first quarter 2011 pretax charge of about $481 million.

Ouch. NRG said in a statement that given the “diminished prospects” of the South Texas nuclear project it “will not invest additional capital in the STP development effort.” At the same time, NRG said it would fully support any of its current or future partners if they want to continue to develop STP 3&4 units. (Crane will be speaking at our Green:Net 2011 event this Thursday April 21, in San Francisco).

The design work for the project had already essentially been halted, as NRG Energy waited for a review of the industry by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in the wake of the incident at the Fukushima reactors in Japan. The NRC is reviewing all nuclear projects built and under construction in the U.S. to see if there could be any lessons learned from the Japanese nuclear incident. Nuclear industry executives fear the NRC review process will be very lengthy and will paralyze any new nuclear projects in the pipeline, which was what happened in the aftermath of the nuclear incident at Three Mile Island in 1979.  Crane told me last month that he hoped a NRC review process wouldn’t last any longer than 3 months.

CPS Energy, which had been in discussions to purchase the nuclear power from NRG’s expanded plants, had already suspended its talks to buy the power. CPS also owns over 7 percent in the expansion project.

The U.S. hasn’t built any new nuclear reactors in decades, thanks to fears after Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. The short-term costs of nuclear construction after the Japanese nuclear disaster is expected to soar in the short term, and development of new nuclear technologies from some startups could be stalled as well. Nuclear technology has also crept along because of the low price of natural gas.

NRG’s decision to cut its losses so to speak, is an even greater indication that the Japanese nuclear disaster has set back development of nuclear power in the U.S. by many years. Other countries, like Germany, are moving even more swiftly to halt the construction of nuclear plants.

NRG will be holding a conference call later today to provide more details on its decision.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• A 2011 Green IT Forecast
• Green IT’s Q4 Winners: Wind Power, Solar Power, Smart Energy
• 10 Greentech Companies to Watch in 2011

Beleaguered Japanese utility Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has released dozens of photos and videos of its damaged nuclear reactors and the clean up effort underway by its brave workers. Last week the Japanese government upped the rating of the situation at the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plants to a level 7, the same as Chernobyl, and the highest ranking on the international scale, after new data showed that more radiation than previously thought had leaked out several weeks ago.

Here’s 25 of TEPCOs photos:

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):