Researchers want oil and gas drillers to adopt geothermal technology
By Brooks Hays for UPI: Researchers at the University of North Dakota believe geothermal energy production should be a significant part of America's future energy portfolio.
But to get the industry off the ground, proponents are looking to an industry not normally associated with renewable energy -- gas and oil drillers.
"Oil- and gas-producing sedimentary basins in Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, and North Dakota contain formation waters of a temperature that is adequate for geothermal power production," researchers wrote in their new study on the subject, published this week in the journal Geosphere.
Geothermal energy requires heat, and natural sources of heat lie deep within the ground. Gas and oil drillers have already built the infrastructure to access deep-lying natural resources. Of course, gas and oil drillers want gas and oil, not heat. But in their quest for gas and oil, they get heat nonetheless. Cont'd...
How Solar+Storage Could Protect Multifamily Affordable Housing from Power Outages
Clearly, states are beginning to focus on providing clean energy power solutions in the face of ever increasing severity of storms and the need to have resilient power available for disaster response.
UK solar power industry proposes emergency plan to save renewables
Mark Tran for The Guardian: The solar power industry has proposed an emergency plan to rescue renewables, which it says would add just £1 to consumer bills by 2019, on top of the £9 a year that clean technology subsidies cost bill payers.
The scheme is a response to government plans to cut subsidies for rooftop solar panel installations by 87% from 1 January. The Solar Trade Association (STA) has warned the move could cost up to 27,000 jobs and waste public money already spent on supporting the technology.
Solar companies are already going bust as a result of the changes, with an estimated 1,000 jobs lost so far. On Friday, a company backed by the billionaire inventor Elon Musk pulled out of the UK, blaming the government for not supporting the technology.
Zep Solar UK, which is owned by SolarCity where the Tesla boss is chairman, was the fourth UK solar business to close in a fortnight. SolarCity blamed cuts to solar subsidies announced by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) in the summer.
The STA plan would include higher initial tariffs for subsidies to make investing in the technology viable, with reductions set out to allow the government to control costs and give the industry certainty. The plan would ensure that families, farmers, housing associations and community groups could continue to be involved in the move towards low-carbon power and give them more control over their energy, the STA argues. Cont'd...
Duke scientists making algae biofuel more viable
By Teresa Meng for The Chronicle: A Duke University professor has been awarded a $5.2 million U.S. Department of Energy grant to explore ways of making algae a cost efficient fuel source.
The Duke-led Marine Algae Industrialization Consortium, comprised of both universities and energy companies, aims to lower the cost of algae oil, which can be used in place of fossil fuels. The team is working to identify algae proteins that can be used in protein-based nutritional products in order to make the entire algae farming process more cost-efficient. Zackary Johnson, Arthur P. Kaupe assistant professor of molecular biology in marine science, is the principal investigator of MAGIC and has been researching algae biofuels for eight years.
“The goal of the research is to drive down the cost of algae biofuel by increasing the value of proteins within algae,” Johnson explained.
Johnson and his team at MAGIC are trying to use multiple ways so that algae grown for biofuel extraction can also be sold after oil is extracted from the algae. Proteins in algae could be used for nutritional products such as poultry feed, fish feed or even food for humans. Extracting and selling these proteins would lower the overall production cost of extracting oil from the algae. In the future, algae proteins as food sources might even be a sustainable approach to feed the world.
Algae biofuel has the potential to become a major source of sustainable energy because it can be produced quickly, easily and in high quality, Johnson said. Cont'd...
The Importance of Pyranometer Temperature Response
One of the main parameters affecting the real-world measurement of solar radiation by pyranometers is temperature response.
Technology Helps Wind Industry Through PTC Debate
Despite the historic success of tax credits in helping to move renewable energy industries forward, the reality is that these credits might not be renewed. Industries will have to rely more heavily on the savings possible through equipment and technology improvements.
How a Manmade Tidal Lagoon Could Change the Future of Clean Energy
FEARGUS O'SULLIVAN for CityLab: Just outside the Welsh city of Swansea, the U.K. is planning one of the most innovative power plants ever constructed. It’s not the plant’s size that is striking, though it could ultimately provide power to 155,000 homes for 120 years. It’s the source of its power that breaks ground: tides channeled into an artificially constructed lagoon.
Granted full planning permission this June, the Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon will be the world’s first ever plant to generate electricity using this method. Should it prove successful, the plant’s template could be adopted worldwide as a way of generating green power while simultaneously providing sea wall protection to coastal communities. Cont'd...
Increasing Wind Turbine AEP with Vortex Generators
Vortex Generators are small attachments made from durable material that energizes the flow around the blade and reduce flow separation.
As California Rolls Out More Solar Power, Regulators Could Undercut The Industry
Ken Silverstein for Forbes: The fall season is kicking off a sizzling solar power debate in California and one that has the potential to undercut the state’s climate mission.
Utility regulators there are in discussions over how to balance the interest of rooftop solar generators with the utilities on which they will still depend. Just how those hearings are resolved with have implications for the rollout of renewable energy not just in California but also around the country.
At issue is something called “net metering,” which is technical term used to measure the amount of money that rooftop solar generators should get paid relative to retail electricity prices. Utilities, generally, want to offer them the wholesale rate for what they send to them over the grid. Those are expensive wires to maintain and ones that all customers will use, even those who power their homes with solar panels. That’s because the sun is not always shining and the utilities would then have to provide them electricity over their networks.
The present net metering rules in California were set a dozen years ago, with the intent that they would expire when solar penetration reached 5 percent at any of three investor-owned utilities: Edison International’s SoCalEd, PG&E Corp. and Sempra Energy, which is nearing the threshold. Generally, those utilities are paying customers the full retail value for their electricity generated and transmitted. Cont'd...
UK - It could be lights out for solar power under this government
Terry Macalister for The Guardian: Ministers rightly wring their hands over the 2,200 jobs being lost at the 98-year-old Redcar steelworks hit by low-cost Chinese competition. But they seem deaf to warnings of 27,000 jobs being potentially lost in a brand-new industry now facing crisis due to their own clumsy cuts.
Almost 1,000 redundancies have already been made by the solar panel installersMark Group and Climate Energy. No one in the industry believes this will be the end of the sad story.
The latest flashpoint for “green” developers is the government plan to slash the feed-in tariff – which subsidises people installing solar panels on their home – by almost 90%. Meanwhile, an energy-efficiency regime has been scrapped with only a vague promise of a future replacement.
If these were isolated examples, then companies might be willing to hang on in the hope of better things to come. But they are the latest in a series of cuts not just to solar but also to onshore wind, and come at a time when it seems maximum effort is being expended on removing roadblocks to shale-gas frackingand nuclear power. Cont'd...
Infinite Possibilities of Internet of Things (IoT) in Renewable Energy Sector
Here is how the internet of things technology can drive the next revolution in the global renewable energy industry
Energy Production in Motion: The Advantages of Single-Axis Solar Tracking Systems
Despite the fact that tracking systems are more complex than fixed-tilt systems, they represent the future of the industry and a glimpse of all that is possible in terms of solar energy capacity.
Energy From Stars
This paper proposes possible new energy sources. One of these sources can be the "energy from stars".
Cloaking Principle Could Boost Solar Cell Performance
Invisibility cloaking may be a long way from reality, but the principle could help improve the performance of solar cells in the near term.
In a series of simulations, researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have demonstrated how cloaks made of metamaterials or freeform surfaces could eliminate shadows cast by energy-harvesting components onto the active surfaces of solar cells.
Contact fingers, which extract electric current, cover up to one-tenth of the surface area of a solar cell. By guiding light around these features, more of the sun's energy could be captured by the solar cell.
"Our model experiments have shown that the cloak layer makes the contact fingers nearly completely invisible," said doctoral student Martin Schumann. Cont'd...
Two Explosions a World Apart: From Disaster Comes New Power
How Roys Poyiadjiss and Martua Sitoruss Partnership is Creating the Largest Biofuel Plant in Japan
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