Solar Millennium Likes Dry Cooling After All

Solar Millennium said Monday it plans to use dry cooling for its solar thermal power project in Nevada.

The Berkeley-based company announced the switch, which could add to its project's costs but win it some goodwill from lawmakers and environmentalists, after its plan to use as much as 1.3 billion gallons of water per year for its project met strong opposition from residents of Amargosa Valley.

Using air cooling could cut the water use by 90 percent from the original proposal, the company said. Dry cooling techniques are generally more expensive and lead to lower efficiency for the plant. But water is a precious commodity in the deserts of western states, where many solar thermal power plants are under development.

Solar Millennium is proposing to build one or possibly two solar power plants with 242-megawatt of generation capacity each. Each power plant would cost about $1.5 billion to build, the company said.

The developer has signed a memorandum of understanding with Nevada utility NV Energy to build the project. The two haven't disclosed how they would finance the project.

Although solar power plants generate cleaner electricity than coal-fired plants, they are not immune to the strong environmental opposition that zeroes in on these projects' proposed land and water use.

Another solar thermal power plant developer, BrightSource Energy, has opted to use dry cooling for its first, 440-megawatt project in the Mojave Desert of California.

Solar Millennium is also developing projects in the desert of California to sell power to Southern California Edison.

Google’s PowerMeter vs. Microsoft’s Hohm: A Scorecard

Ever wanted to know the difference between Google's PowerMeter and Hohm, the energy management console from Microsoft, but never had the time? Me too. Luckily, VentureBeat has done it. Some of the differences are pointless; some are interesting. (Disclosure: I'm rooting for the several startups in this market and not for either one of these guys.) Here are some of the highlights:

• Hohm provides users with more general conservation recommendations, like window caulking, installing a programmable thermostat, other home weatherizing techniques. Google doesn’t do this. Something of a plus in my book.

• Google doesn't plan to charge for it. Microsoft won't charge consumers directly. Instead, it will sell ads and ultimately charge utilities for the service. Again, advantage Microsoft. If Google really wanted to be generous, it can start giving out stock options or sharing its ad revenue with publishers. Just a thought.

• Hohm will track gas consumption too. PowerMeter will not. A huge plus for Hohm.

• Google's name is better.

• Google is working with AlertMe and The Energy Detective. No thermostats in Hohm's court yet.

• Google let's you access information from your iGoogle page. Microsoft makes you log in.

Electrification Coalition: U.S. Needs One-Quarter EVs, PHEVs by 2020

A coalition of automakers, smart grid, shipping and energy companies has set out an ambitious goal for an American electric transportation revolution – make one-quarter of the United States' light vehicles "grid-enabled" electrics and plug-in hybrids by 2020.

Without reaching that tipping point, the Electrification Coalition's goal of boosting the number of electric light vehicles from 1.3 million today to more than 250 million by 2040 – and cutting the country's oil dependency by about 75 percent in the bargain – will be hard to reach.

Simply put, that's because it will take a critical mass of plug-in vehicles to make the infrastructure for charging them worth building, coalition members said in a Monday press conference (see Electric Vehicles Could Surpass Grid or Support It).

To get there, the coalition is asking the government to target "electricity ecosystems," or large cities where local infastructure could be built to support from 50,000 to 100,000 electric vehicles by 2013, Reuters reported.

To boost that, the coalition is asking the federal government to offer tax credits of up to 75 percent of the cost of that public infrastructure to support a charging network. It would also like consumers to have access to those tax credits for home charging equipment (see Green Car Congress).

The coalition also wants tax credits to cover up to half the cost of IT upgrades for utilities to manage charging networks that can sell and buy power to grid-enabled vehicles (see IBM Tests Smart Charging in Denmark and A V2G Test: Pool Electric Cars for Grid Needs).

Members of the coalition include Nissan Motor Co. (see Green Light post), Pacific Gas & Electric, NRG Energy, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Coulomb Technologies (see Green Light post), FedEx Corp, Coda Automotive, Bright Automotive, A123 Systems and GridPoint (see Green Light post).

U.S., Japan to Cooperate on Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Research: WSJ

The U.S. and Japan will begin to cooperate on "advanced fuel cycle technologies" for nuclear plants, or reprocessing nuclear waste, according to the Environmental Capital blog on the Wall Street Journal.

Reprocessing helps get rid of nuclear waste, which is why both France and Japan have been big advocates. But it also means generating and moving around quantities of plutonium. If captured, that plutonium could be used for a dirty bomb. The U.S. killed a reprocessing plan, which only enjoyed lukewarm support, in the '70s. The collaboration is a sign that the Department of Energy will take another serious look at reprocessing Yucca Mountain, after all, isn't going anywhere soon.

If fusion works, it could also help reprocess nuclear waste. Lawrence Livermore National Labs has promoted the idea of fusion reactors. In these, spare neutrons from fusion reactions are channelled into a blanket of nuclear waste from fission power plants to cause more fission reactions. Ideally, this would generate power from fission without running the risk of chain reactions.

Suntech to Set Up Factory in Phoenix Area

Suntech Power plans to build a factory in the Phoenix area and start production in the third quarter of 2010.

The company hasn't settled on the location for the factory yet. That should come "in coming weeks," the company said.

The factory would start with a capacity to produce 30 megawatts of solar panels per year. Suntech executives have said previously that the company would ship solar cells from its China manufacturing complex to the U.S. factory for panel assembly.

It was back in May this year when Suntech formally announced its plan to set up a factory in the United States. In June, Suntech's Roger Efird said the company was planning a 100-megawatt factory that would start operating in the first quarter of 2010. The company had narrowed down the list of potential factory sites to Arizona and Texas before deciding on the former. 

The company said it's looking for a factory space of 80,000 to 100,000 square feet, which would enable Suntech to add production lines later if demand from the U.S. market improves.

Despite legislation that has created financial aid programs this year for manufacturing solar energy equipment and installing them, the U.S. market hasn't experienced a dramatic rise in demand. Many analysts and investors say the full impact of these federal grants and tax incentives won't likely be felt until next year.

Globally, the solar industry saw a decline in sales for the first time ever this year. 

DOE, USDA Hand Out $24M in Biomass Grants

The Department of Energy and the Department of Agriculture gave out $24 million in biomass research grants on Friday to boost research ranging from more efficient ways to turn biomass into fuel, chemicals and energy to better breeds of switchgrass and other feedstocks.

Friday's grants ranged in size from $1 million to $4.2 million, and most of it -$19.5 million - comes from USDA. The idea is to promote technologies to make bioenergy, as well as bio-based chemicals and products, cheaper and easier to adopt.

Several grants are going to find new ways to make biochemicals as well as biofuels. Biochemicals represent smaller, but often more lucrative, markets for the wide range of technologies - genetically modified microbes, oxygen-free superheating, chemical processes - that seek to turn food and non-food biomass alike into useful products.

One winner, Englewood Colo.-based Gevo, won up to $1.78 million from USDA to improve its methods of fermenting sugars into bio-isobutanol. That's a chemical that can be turned into fuel or various products, such as PET plastics. Gevo wants to buy shuttered ethanol plants and retrofit them with its biobutanol systems, and has raised about $57 million from investors including Khosla Ventures, the Virgin Green Fund and French oil company Total SA since last year (see Green Light post).

Another winner, Hampton Falls, N.H.-based Itaconix, landed $1.86 to find a way to make polyitaconic acid from hardwood. That acid can be made into a polymer with the potential to replace petrochemical dispersants, detergents, and super-absorbents that now sell to the order of about 2 million metric tons per year, USDA announced.

As for so-called "drop-in" fuels - biofuels that need little or no modification from factory to pump - Livingston, N.J.-based Exelus won $1.2 million from DOE to work on its biomass-to-gasoline technology using low-temperature chemical processes.

To help chemical processes run more efficiently, Velocys got $2.65 million from USDA to work on its microchannel reactor technology - that is, equipment that channels chemicals and catalysts into tiny tubes to improve throughput and effectiveness. The Plain City, Ohio-based company has raised about $100 million and has projects with Toyo Engineering, Dow Chemical, DOE and the Department of Defense.

As for turning biomass into a syngas that can be burned for energy or turned into other chemicals, USDA tapped GE Global Research with a $1.6 million grant to help devise "simplified kinetic models" for biogas plants using a variety of feedstocks.

On the crop side, Oklahoma State University got $4.2 million to develop best practices for sustainable cellulosic ethanol feedstocks, the University of Tennessee got $2.35 million to compare different switchgrass varieties, and the University of Minnesota got $2.7 million to run studies on the potential for Great Lakes states' forests to meet biofuel feedstock needs.