Michael Kanellos 05 04 09, 2:30 PM

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More 2030 Goals: Smart Grid Harmony

2030. It's one of those years you see goals pegged on a lot these days. California, for instance, wants to update the building code so that new commercial buildings will be net zero on energy by 2030.

Now, the IEEE, the large and influential standards body, has set forth a program entitled IEEE P2030 to come up with standards for smart grid interoperability and two-way communication.

2030 is not when the first planning meetings will end. It is, ideally, when these things can be implemented.

The first P2030 meetings will take place at Intel headquarters in Santa Clara on June 3 through 5. Turn right at the Marriott and keep going. It's the blue building on the right.

General Electric execs have estimated that 41 gigawatts could be wrung out of the grid just by making it 5 percent more efficient.

Eric Smalley 05 04 09, 11:53 AM

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Burning Ethanol, Guzzling Water

If you learned that someone had invented a car that runs on water, you’d probably be thrilled. But if you found out that the car consumes 50 gallons of water for every mile driven, you might wonder if it’s worth it.

Of course any vehicle that requires 50 gallons of any liquid fuel is a nonstarter given the volume and weight of the fuel, but for the purposes of this thought exercise the issue is using up all that water.

Something very like this scenario is rapidly becoming a reality, and is even mandated by law. It turns out that producing ethanol from corn uses an awful lot of water, and the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 requires the U.S. to produce 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol annually by 2015.

A study by researchers from Rice University, Clarkson University and Missouri University of Science and Technology found that it takes 500 to 4,000 liters of water to grow feedstock to produce one liter of ethanol, depending on the crop and where it’s grown.

Given an 800-to-1 water-fuel ratio and a car that gets 16 miles per gallon of ethanol (ethanol has a lower energy density than gasoline, which means lower mileage), you’d use 50 gallons of water per mile. This is the case for Nebraska-grown corn. You’d use 23 gallons per mile for Iowa corn and 115 gallons per mile for Texas sorghum.

The 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol mandated by 2015 is only about 10 percent of the transportation fuel the U.S. is likely to use that year, but producing it will require the equivalent of 44 percent of the corn grown in the U.S. in 2007. Agriculture today accounts for 80 percent of the water consumed in the U.S., and our freshwater supply is already under a lot of pressure.

The water-use scenario is very different for cellulosic feedstocks, particularly drought-resistant plants like miscanthus that require far less water. In theory, many types of grasses can be grown without any irrigation.

This makes efforts to come up with economical and scalable cellulosic biofuel production all the more urgent. Sorting out the land-use issues around biofuels is challenging enough without worrying about water.

Eric Smalley is the editor of Energy Research News. He has written about technology since 1987 and has freelanced for many publications including Discover, Scientific American, Wired News and The Boston Globe on topics ranging from quantum cryptography to global warming.

Michael Kanellos 05 04 09, 11:40 AM

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Do Green Buildings Really Lower Sick Days?

The short answer to that question is "yes," says Bruce King, author and structural engineer. (Bruce will also speak at our Green Building Symposium in Menlo Park, Calif. on June 11.)

“It’s documented,” he said.

Tt is tough to trace the lower number of sick days to fewer VOCs or other chemicals in the air, however. Instead, it’s because there is typically more natural light and less air conditioning. In short, they are comfortable, inviting places to work. Conventional buildings indirectly encourage people to work at home more often.

It stands to make sense. Larry Vertal, the senior strategist at AMD and its green chief, told us last year that its LEED Platinum Lone Star campus in Texas has become a recruiting tool.

“It is one of the soft things that many companies don’t understand but it is crucial in the retention and moral of employees,” Vertal said. “It is amazing how the highest talented people will grill you about your sustainability practices in job interviews. … We’ve seen a lot more interest in it, so it really does matter.”

Eric Wesoff 05 04 09, 5:00 AM

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Skyline Solar Officially Emerges From Stealth

Concentrating Photovoltaic Power (CPV) is hard to do.

If you’re in the High Concentration PV sector, you’re faced with the challenge of precision optical design, precision tracking and mechanical feedback requirements, and material issues. You’re also using compound semiconductor photovoltaic chips, which is a good thing because they’re a very efficient material but a bad thing because their suppliers are low efficiency firms who are just starting to enter commercial commodity production.  Solfocus, Concentrix Solar, and Amonix are amongst the many players in this crowded zero-billion-dollar market.

HCPV players are also subject to be victimized by their own hype and bad poetry (see Poetry Slam With Sunrgi).

If you’re a Low Concentration PV player, you were likely funded when the price of silicon was very high a few years ago.  And now that the price of silicon has stabilized – most of your value proposition has vanished (see SV Solar RIP).

Skyline Solar is stepping into this fray with a very different approach.

We broke news of Skyline Solar’s funding in October of last year (see VC Rumor Mill: Skyline Solar Funding). But now the firm is officially emerging from stealth-mode and we had a chance to speak with their Vice President of Marketing, Tim Keating, about Skyline’s technology and market strategy.

“We’ve been a quiet company – focusing on our product. We are tooling for higher production, collecting data and working on certification,” said Keating.

“Soon we’ll be unveiling a demo power plant,” he added.

Skyline Solar is working on what they call High Gain Solar, aiming to get tracking silicon performance at thin film prices. In order for it to meet pricing goals, “It has to be built, shipped and deployed in a very inexpensive fashion.” The company claims to be using “excess capacity from the auto industry” to do some of its metal bending and fabrication which stacks compactly for easier shipment and assembly.

The system (see picture above) uses silicon rather than triple-junction PV cells, slightly curved reflectors, integrated single-axis trackers and passive heat sinks.  The concentration is in the 10X range, and according to the company uses one tenth of the silicon of flat panel PV with the same Watts per area as conventional solar panels.

The system is vaguely reminiscent of Ausra’s linear fresnel design which uses reflectors to heat water rather than focus on silicon modules.

“Skyline Solar is focused on a single goal as a company – accelerating the deployment of solar energy to meaningfully offset fossil fuel consumption. This requires rapidly achieving grid parity and dramatically improving scalability of PV systems.” said Bob MacDonald, CEO of Skyline Solar.

Skyline received $24.6 million in Round A funding from New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Alf Bjorseth, founder of Renewable Energy Corporation and Scatec Solar, et al. as well as a $3M DOE Solar America Initiative grant (see CPV: Stuck in the Middle and 150 Solar Startups Part 2: CPV).