Alternative Energy in the News

As Akron gets ready to host the Green Energy Expo tomorrow, we find good news about solar and geothermal in two NYT articles today.

California will benefit greatly from two new solar power plants being built there. From the article by Matthew Wald:

The plants will cover 12.5 square miles of central California with solar panels, and in the middle of a sunny day will generate about 800 megawatts of power, roughly equal to the size of a large coal-burning power plant or a small nuclear plant.

One of the plants will be built using the a new thin film material while the other will use crystal silicon. The article notes that the solar plants will provide their highest energy during the afternoons when demand is highest.

Thanks to forward looking governments in some states, solar developments are surging ahead. Here's a company that has invented a solar film that may very well replace costly PV panels.

The other NYT article by Liz Galst focuses on geothermal heating systems. The demand is huge and the payoff to consumers worried about reliance on petroleum products for home or business heating is very attractive. The article states that for large commercial buildings, the savings could begin in only two to three years.

Geothermal systems, it should be noted, provide both heating and cooling using a heat pump that circulates water through pipes down into the earth, where only 6 ft below temperatures are a steady 55 degrees. The Akron Zoo's Komodo Dragon house is heated and cooled using a geothermal system. The pipes can be placed either horizontally at 6 feet under or vertically from 200 to 300 feet down.

It sounds like a no-brainer that Americans should become leaders in adopting and developing this technology. Heating and cooling from the benign depths of the earth or from filthy coal plants or dangerous nuclear plants -- what is there to debate? The House of Reps has given an ok for a push in this direction, but the Senate has yet to act. From the article:

The industry may find sales and workloads booming even further should Congress pass and the president sign the Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act of 2008. The legislation, sponsored by Charles B. Rangel, the New York Democrat who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, would extend tax credits of up to $4,000 through the end of 2014 to homeowners who have ground source heat pumps installed. (The bill offers no aid to businesses.) The House approved the bill in May, and it is awaiting action in the Senate.

The biggest problems with geothermal is that demand is far surpassing the available supplies, equipment and especially skilled workers. When politicians talk about green collar jobs, this is an area they should be acting upon, not just talking possibilities.

Most public school systems have "career education" tracks that have traditionally trained students for careers in heating and air conditioning, auto mechanics and the building trades. I wonder how many school systems have begun to switch over to the trades of the future that are rapidly becoming the trades most needed right now?

If I walked down Kenmore Blvd, would I find a store front business with a heat pump contractor employing kids trained at Kenmore High School in geothermal system technology? How long do I have to wait for that to happen? As the NYT article states, "With this kind of growth, mom and pop shops can benefit as much as any of the big guys..."

Thinking Solar in NE Ohio

As the last week of summer break for this teacher draws to a close, I'm happy to report that the thesis writing project is also reaching the final stages. There are a few holes left to fill in and then it must be examined by my academic advisers who will no doubt have valuable critiques that call for revisions here and there. But the bulk of it feels like it will stand on two legs and make its way through the official channels and eventually end up in electronic format for all to peruse.

I look forward to blogging regularly once again as well as having more time for participation in local events both environmental and theatrical. After attending last night's E4S session on commercial applications for solar power investment, I feel a wee bit more hopeful about Akron's chances of stepping forward and taking leadership in becoming energy efficient. The need to educate the public and private sectors remains paramount.

Last night we looked at solar installations at some forward-looking NEOhio businesses. Lake Erie Business Park near Toledo is installing a massive solar panel display on their roof. Prospective renters will benefit from lower energy costs, making this incubator highly attractive.

What most people don't get is how many grants and tax credits are available for commercial solar installations. Panel members at the presentation last night put up their figures for a number of installations and we could see how the initial cost figures are rapidly reduced by taking advantage of both federal and state assistance. Sorry I didn't take the time to write down the exact figures, but I can tell you we were all impressed to see 100k plus projects whittled down to a start up figure of between 20 and 30 thousand dollars.

The biggest hill to get over is resistance to invest in something that takes five to ten years before savings show up in energy expenditures. And yet, the solar panels (which are the most expensive part of the package) are good for 50 years. The electrical apparatus (not nearly so costly) will need to be replaced once every 20 years. Meanwhile, we know for sure that energy costs are on the rise. Both First Energy and AEP are petitioning to raise rates -- not just slightly, either! AEP is pushing for a 45% rate increase! First Energy is going for at least a 15% increase over the next three years.

If you live in or near the Akron area, don't forget the Green Energy Expo this Saturday at the JS Knight Center. It's free to attend and features an exposition of 50 plus vendors as well as a keynote address by Dr Lonnie G Thompson, on Retreating Glaciers: A Paleoclimate Perspective from the World's Highest Mountains. Dr Thompson was a featured adviser to Al Gore in the making of the Inconvenient Truth documentary. The afternoon will feature breakout sessions on a wide array of green energy issues, including solar, wind, wood gasifcation, LED lighting, energy efficiency, creating a sustainable office, investing in the green economy, and much much more -- and as cannot be stated too often -- it's free and open to the public!

September 10 -- put this date on your calendar so that you will attend the next E4S Akron session, at which the group working on Akron's Greenprint will be presenting some of their ideas and soliciting responses.

Ten million solar roof tops

I was happy to read that Senator Sanders of Vermont is sponsoring a bill called the Ten Million Solar Roof Tops Act of 2008. IF passed, this act will provide government incentives for that will cover half of the cost for businesses and homes that choose to install solar panels. Sanders is quoted as saying:

"We can reverse greenhouse gas emissions. We can break our dependence on foreign oil. Transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels can be a tremendous boom for the United States economy and create millions of good-paying jobs. This is a win, win, win situation."

Yes indeed, it could be a winning scenario -- except that the idiotic Bush regime just brought all solar projects to a halt, imposing a two year moratorium so they can do more planning. What? These people can't plan and carry out projects at the same time?

Meanwhile, a report card on how the G-8 countries are meeting their goals to reduce carbon emissions to combat climate change reveals that the U$ is in last place. Great Britain has done the most to reduce carbon emissions, followed closely by France and Germany -- however, "none of the countries are making improvements large enough to prevent temperature increases that scientists think would cause catastrophic climate changes." According to the article the UK, France and Germany are only half way along the road to achieving a standard that will actually reduce emissions and put a halt to increasing temperatures.

This is scary stuff. I have to wonder about the wisdom of solar moratoriums in the face of overwhelming evidence that we need to be putting huge focused and united efforts into making radical changes in the way we produce and consume energy.

Ten million solar roof tops is a good start -- but we need many more millions than that to have an effect on global warming. Meanwhile, I hope my rooftop can be one of the first ten million.

Akron Area Solar Energy Tour

The sun was beating down today, with temperatures in the upper 80s. What a perfect day to go on an Akron area Solar Tour.

Thanks to the home-owners who shared their passive and or active solar abodes with us. I took the western leg of the journey, jumping off before the Akron Zoo, as I've already seen the new geothermal Komodo Dragon House already.

Crown Point Ecological Center in Bath was the first stop on the journey to check out a passive solar barn, so situated and designed that it maintains comfortable warmth throughout the winter.


From there our solar adventure took us to State Rd on the eastern edge of Medina county. Here way back in the woods, we visited a passive solar home built with sustainable materials. The house used a geothermal heating system and was situated so that the winter sunlight would have the greatest heating effect, while in summer leafy trees help to keep it cool.

Total cost for heat and electricity in this house goes from a low of $45 to a high of $145 during the year. The heating is radiant and embedded under the flooring.

On the outside, shingles made of sawdust and cement help to keep the house warm in winter and cool in summer. Local and recycled woods were used on the interior. The owner uses no carpeting and has made sure that there are no toxic paints, stains or lacquers. The architecture was creative and inviting, featuring an upper loft area, and beautiful spacious living areas up and down. This two bedroom home was built for a total cost of $380K on land the owners had invested in 30 years ago.

The next house on the tour was an active solar powered home with a mighty display of photovoltaic panels mounted on a slope above and to the rear of the house.

In the basement, we were shown the instrumentation, pipes, and collection points for both the solar and geothermal operations.

If you ever wondered what solar power looks like on the inside, take a look:








































During the drive from one site to the next, my eyes fell upon huge new mansions built along Ira road. Each house was situated on acres of land, just like a medieval manor house, and indeed that is what they most resemble. Tall, wide and entirely ostentatious, with three and four car garages, you can bet that each has a "great room" and that none of them were built with any regard for sustainability and energy efficiency.

It was clear from this tour that building a "green" house and detaching oneself from the energy grid is not for those of us living on a modest budget. The homes we saw today were lovely, but they were very large and in zip code areas where land is definitely not cheap.

The solar energy tour I'd like to go on, would feature passive and active solar energy systems built into public housing for urban dwellers. It would also take us to old housing stock that had been refitted for solar energy with added insulation and renovations made from non-toxic and sustainable materials. Let's face it, who really could benefit from lower energy bills? And who could benefit from raising their children in non-asthma inducing environments?

Mayor Plusquellic's "greenprint" for Akron needs to address what is being built in our city and the first place to examine are the building codes and the materials that are to be used in construction. Green housing will continue to be a hobby for the rich as long as we mindlessly allow construction to continue with the same old lack of concern for the planet and each other.

Get Ready for the Fall Solar Energy Tour

September arrived today, along with a post card from Green Energy Ohio announcing their annual Ohio Solar Tour, to be held October 5 - 7. The tour will include hundreds of sites featuring solar, wind, biomass, green design and energy-saving technologies, organized into guided and open house tours that are free and open to the public.

There will be an Akron-area tour on Sunday, October 7th. You can take a virtual tour of green energy sites throughout Ohio via the GEO web site, but you must register to enter the site. Once in, I took a look at the three sites listed for Summit County and was shown a private residence in Akron that has solar panels on both the roof as well as additional panels placed in the yard. From there, I was steered toward Cuyahoga Falls which has installed solar panels to light bus stops around the city as well as on three of its schools. The third Summit site is the Crown Point Ecology Center in Bath with a passive solar designed building that on the coldest day in winter has maintained 83 degrees inside.

Looking around the state, I see that Cuyahoga and Franklin counties have 30 sites to visit each. The Toledo area has 11 sites and Lorain has 8, and then a smattering of sites here and there, while most of Ohio's counties are still waiting for green energy to appear in buildings either private or public. Meanwhile all that untapped energy keeps falling to the earth:

Hanging it out to dry

My electric bill rose to $53.77 for the month of June. In May, I had reached a new low of 42.28 through a combination of replacing all bulbs in my house with CFLs and by turning off power strips that hold all my computer related devices and various chargers. What changed in June? High temperatures have kept me running an air conditioner and a room fan for most of the month, often for 18 hours a day. So I discover I am paying about 11 dollars per month for cooling.

It strikes me that my bill would have been higher yet, except I began hanging out my laundry to dry once school was out and the sun began heating up. Hanging out the laundry was the norm when I was a kid in the 50s. I quite enjoy revisiting this old chore every summer. There's something intrinsically pleasurable about neatly pegging up the shirts, the pants, the towels and the undies to flap away under golden sun and blue skies. And then to caress and smell the clean dry clothes before unpegging and folding into a clothes basket, having saved the drier from a 20 minute run. Meanwhile, Oberon the amazing Huskador Retriever waits for the laundry to dry

It made me wonder two things -- how many people still hang out their washing and how to put up a poll on that topic at the Village Green? I found the poll instructions and all that's left is to ask you:

How often do you hang out your washing to dry?
	every day
	twice a week
	once a week
	once in a blue moon
	never
pollcode.com free polls

Solar Conference

I wanna go solar! After a morning at the Solar 2007 Conference in Cleveland, I was convinced. Solar panels on my roof -- oh, if only!

For 5K, I can get a portable solar panel about the size of a ping pong table that can sit anywhere outside and simply plugs into my electrical system, offsetting a good amount of electricity that is probably coming from a nuclear plant or coal. For a heck of a lot more money, I could be completely off grid.

The exhibit hall was rocking and it wasn't even noon yet. I looked at miniature and portable panels that can be used to recharge batteries, cell phones and other electronic devices. And I picked up a huge bag full of information to read on solar, geothermal and wind energy sources.

A lot of the exhibits were really technical. People were displaying various materials, hardware, software, electrical systems -- even an electrical car to plug in and charge on your solar powered system.

In one corner of the exhibition room, job openings in the solar business were posted and many young people were checking them out. Dustin Hoffman famously received the sage advice of "Plastic" as a metaphor for his generation. I'd say that the new word for the current generation has got to be "solar." And may it signify something more positive than plastic!

I found an educator's display table with lots of resources for teaching solar and alternative energy in the classroom. Other tables had piles of the latest books on a wide variety of solar topics, including how to build your very own outdoor solar oven. I joined Green Energy Ohio, which is the central clearing house for alternative energy information in Ohio.

It was very encouraging to see so many people in attendance. The Solar 2007 Conference at the Cleveland Convention Center is going on until July 12th and the exhibition hall is open to the public at certain times of the day. Check here for all the details and be sure to look for the solar coffee maker, somewhere outside of the hall on the west side:

A weekend for the planet!

Lots of worthwhile events this weekend!

Kick off a global call for peace tonight at the opening of Yoko Ono's art exhibit at the Meyers Gallery, University of Akron. Details here.

Rock the world for global warming awareness by holding or attending a Party for the Planet. Not only do you get to watch Al Gore's Live Earth in a friendly setting, you will also get to see video footage of the presidential candidates answering Moveon.org's questions about the environment. Members will be polled to see which candidates are winning the votes for their environmental stances. More info here.

And let us not forget the National Solar 2007 Conference in Cleveland. Sunday is the day I'll be attending. Public Day for the conference will feature a trade show with over 130 clean energy vendors. I'm going to do some comparison shopping to see if a single school teacher with an old home and low mortgage can afford to go solar. Public Day will also feature consumer presentations, job recruitment, and a Green Energy Ohio public forum featuring congresswoman Marcy Kaptur speaking on the latest green energy initiatives.

Sunday, July 8, 2007
10:00 am - 5:00 pm

Location: Starts & Ends from the Cleveland Convention Center
(500 Lakeside Ave, Cleveland, Ohio 44114)

Can we go solar now, please?

On a nose-bitingly frigid day like today, we might well warm ourselves a bit by thinking about solar energy. The front of my house faces due south. I would love to have a solar-powered solarium attached at that end. Unfortunately, my roof tilts east and west. Surely somebody has invented some kind of solar collector that can fit over top of a roof like mine. That sounds less fanciful than the idea of erecting solar deflectors up in space to counter global warming.

Maybe I can find out at this event happening in Cleveland, July 7-13, 2007:

WELCOME TO SOLAR 2007

The National Solar Energy Conference is the largest and most inclusive solar and renewable energy conference in the U.S. each year. SOLAR 2007, taking place in Cleveland, Ohio, will explore the theme “Sustainable Energy Puts America to Work .” The National Solar Energy Conference combines a premiere technical conference, plenary and forum sessions exploring both the conference theme and the most timely topics of the day, a Renewable Energy Products and Services exhibit that showcases manufacturers, dealers, distributors, installers and other related businesses and services, and workshops, tours and special events of interest to professionals and consumers.

SOLAR 2007 will feature the following:

36th Annual ASES Annual Conference
32nd Annual National Passive Solar Conference
2nd Annual Policy, Advocacy and Marketing Conference
Green Energy Ohio Annual Meeting
Renewable Products and Services Exhibition

Register on-line starting March 15!

For further information, click on the image above.

The sponsor of the above conference, The American Solar Energy Society, has just published a nuts and bolts "How To" report on achieving energy efficiency using renewable energy sources. Amazing! Some people are actually working on the problem at hand as if their might be some urgency to the problem. The greatest unspoken truth of all the inconvenient ones we are facing in the 21st century is that there are 6.7 billion plus human beings on the planet sucking up all the petroleum, coal and gas and burning it and taking down the climate at the same time.

Notice that the conference is for all possible sustainable and renewable energy sources -- not just solar. Their report examines each possibility in detail as well as looking it within context of operating with the other sources. For example, plug in vehicles charging during the night hours when the electric grid is not used so heavily. They are looking at viable, practical roads toward reducing dependency on carbon-producing fuels.

Here's a list of chapter titles and authors:

ENERGY EFFICIENCY

OVERALL ENERGY EFFICIENCY
by Joel N. Swisher, Ph.D., P.E.

BUILDINGS
by Marilyn A. Brown, Ph.D., Therese K. Stovall, and Patrick J. Hughes, P.E.

PLUG-IN HYBRID ELECTRIC VEHICLES
by Peter Lilienthal, Ph.D., and Howard Brown


RENEWABLE ENERGY

CONCENTRATING SOLAR POWER (CSP)
by Mark S. Mehos and David W. Kearney, Ph.D.

PHOTOVOLTAICS (PV)
by Paul Denholm, Ph.D., Robert M. Margolis, Ph.D., and Ken Zweibel

WIND POWER
by Michael Milligan, Ph.D.

BIOMASS
by Ralph P. Overend, Ph.D. and Anelia Milbrandt

BIOFUELS
by John J. Sheehan

GEOTHERMAL ENERGY
by Martin Vorum, P.E. and Jefferson W. Tester, Ph.D.

APPENDIX
The Science and Challenge of Global Warming
by Charles F. Kutscher, Ph.D., P.E.

You can download the entire report here.