Although the overall growth in capacity for solar and wind are growing faster than the capacity for nuclear or coal, renewables still amount to only a small percentage of the overall power generated.

And solar is still the smallest source of electricity, according to the monthly report from the Energy Information Administration.

In the first four months of the year, the U.S. consumed 1,314,683 million kilowatt hours.

Solar accounted for 205 million kilowatt hours. That's around 0.02 percent when you round up.

Wind accounted for 17,566 million kilowatt hours.  Or 1.3 percent.

Coal came to 658,750 million kilowatt hours, thereby accounting for about 50 percent still.

Nuclear and natural gas are still near the 20 percent mark.

So what does that mean? Huge opportunities for solar installers.

On the liquid fuel side, the U.S. produced 5.3 million barrels of oil a day and 1.8 million barrels a day of natural gas/plant liquid fuel in the first six months of the year. In all, the U.S. consumed around 18.6 million barrels a day. That's down from 19.9 million in 2008 and over 20 million in 2007.

Check out the link.

Baryonyx has won the right to build two large offshore wind farms in Texas and another one in the Panhandle that in the end could provide up to 3 gigawatts of power for datacenters.

If you haven't heard of the company, don't feel bad. It was just stared in May. The company was formed by experts on energy, large infrastructure projects and datacenter experts from the U.K. In a sense, it is similar to SeaEnergy Renewables, the Scottish company that plans to build wind farms in the North Sea with turbines that are in part based around designs derived from oil platforms. SeaEnergy Renewables execs come from the oil industry.

SeaEnergy, though, is partnering with established companies on its North Sea projects. It looks like Baryonyx will be the lead developer. In that sense, it sounds like Optisolar, the solar company that planned on building solar farms based around solar panels they made themselves. Although Optisolar was a startup and had barely begun to make solar panels, it won massive contracts in Canada and in California. It also secured rights to large tracts of desert land.

Optisolar had fantastic lawyers and connections in administrative state offices, sources have said. The company even got Arnold Schwarzenegger to show up at its factory opening.

Optisolar, of course, went under. First Solar bought the rights to the desert projects.

Baryonyx will be interesting to watch. The company's executives have a lot of experience and, from its success in the Texas auction, it clearly understands the policy framework around alternative energy. But these are big construction projects. Even T. Boone Pickens has had to scale back. So we shall see.

Fellow green patent enthusiast Stu Soffer brought this interesting item to my attention (Thanks Stu!): an eBay auction for the rights to a small wind turbine patent. The patent is New Zealand Patent No. 540102, and includes the international rights to PCT Application Pub. No. WO 2006/123951 ('951 application).

The '951 application is directed to a wind turbine having a rotor (1) having blades, the rotor rotatably mounted about the axis of rotor shaft (2) within housing (3).  Directional louvers, or shutters (15, 17), direct incident airflow to enhance the venturi effect and reduce drag for maximum power generation.

Though at first glance it appears the seller is only auctioning the rights to the patent application, the description of the transaction reveals that a purchaser would get substantially more than that (or less, depending on your point of view). In fact, the purchaser would also buy an obligation to enter into a partnership with the inventor:

What is being sold is the US rights to patent protection vested in a company substantially owned by the purchaser. The purchaser will have written authority from the inventor to assign the US intellectual property rights to the new company. All the inventor requires apart from the purchase price is a small shareholding of 10% of the shares in the new US company as a silent partner that the buyer will create by agreement, and acknowledgement that the invention was created by the inventor at all times. 

The seller is offering free shipping, although what this means in this context is not entirely clear.  Would the buyer receive in the mail the patent application?  A prototype of the invention?  An executed assignment?

The opening bid price is USD $27,500. The auction ends on June 24, 2009, and there have been no bids so far.

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Eric Lane is a patent attorney and intellectual property lawyer at Luce, Forward, Hamilton & Scripps in San Diego, where he is in the Intellectual Property and Climate Change & Clean Technology practices. Eric is the founder and author of Green Patent Blog, which provides discussion and analysis of intellectual property law issues in clean technology.

After two years and $1 billion in renewable energy investments, Duke Energy has purchased its first wind farm in the eastern U.S.

Duke likes wind. It’s cheap to build and easy to scale compared to other renewable energy sources. The current acquisition is one of many wind power investments from Duke during the last two years.

The wind farm (which is currently not in operation, but will be by the end of the year, according to Duke) is called The North Allegheny Windpower Project and was set up by Gamesa Energy USA. It consists of 35 Gamesa wind turbines with the capacity of 2 megawatts each.

“This acquisition immediately expands our wind power portfolio beyond the western U.S., where we have half a dozen projects already in operation or under construction,” said Wouter van Kempen, president of Duke Energy Generation Services, in a statement.

The project is located in Blair and Cambria counties, 95 miles east of Pittsburgh. All the output from the wind farm is to be sold to FirstEnergy, via a 23.5-year agreement.

The acquisition could be seen in the perspective of which renewable energy is the cheapest. At least according to Duke's market strategy. The purchase of Catamount Energy for $320 million last year boosted Duke Energy’s wind-energy supplies, and van Kempen then said one of the reasons for investing in wind is the opportunity to scale the technology relatively fast and cheap compared to other sources.

Duke Energy, based in Charlotte, N.C., says it has more than 500 Megawatt of wind power in operation and that it will rise to more than 700 Megawatt before next year.

Iowa replaced California to become the state with the second-most wind energy generation capacity in the nation, according to the American Wind Energy Association Monday.

Iowa installed nearly 1.6 gigawatts of capacity in 2008 alone and had a cumulative capacity of about 2.8 gigawatts by the end of last year, the AWEA said in its 2008 annual report. California had a cumulative capacity of about 2.5 gigawatts through last year. Minnesota followed with about 1.8 gigawatts, with Washington rounding the top five with 1.4 gigawatts.

Texas retained its No. 1 ranking with a cumulative installation of 7.1 gigawatts. The state added about 2.6 gigawatts in 2008. It not only has the right wind resources and easy permitting processes to plant wind farms, the state regulators also are moving more quickly than other states to beef up its transmission and distriution networks to ferry wind energy from remote locations to big cities. The Texas Public Utility Commission in January this year approved $5 billion worth of projects for a host of companies to build roughly 2,900 miles of power lines.

Wind energy is typically cheaper than solar power, making wind attractive to utilities that must add renewable energy to their mix by state-set deadlines. California requires its investor-owned utilities to have 20 percent renewable power by 2010. Although the utilities have been busy signing contracts to buy solar and other types of renewable power, they aren’t likely to meet that goal.

NextEra Energy Resources, formerly FPL Energy, is the country’s largest wind farm owner. It installed about 1.2 gigawatts last year and owned a total of 6.3 gigawatts by the end of 2008. That’s about 25 percent of the country’s overall capacity of 25.4 gigawatts, the AWEA said.

Iberdrola, MidAmerican Energy, Horizon, Invenergy and Babcock & Brown Wind followed NextEra in wind farm ownership.

Independent power producers still own most of the wind farms in the country; the utilities own about 15 percent of the installations. MidAmerican Energy, which serves Iowa and nearby states, owns the most wind capacity (1.9 gigawatts), followed by Puget Sound Energy (385 megawatts), We Energies (146.5 megawatts), Dominion Energy (132 megawatts) and Xcel Energy (126.9 megawatts).

The Indian company Green Infra has set a goal of having 500 megawatts of renewable energy in its portfolio by 2012. Wind energy will stand for 300 megawatts of the clean power investment while small-sized solar power projects will generate 100 megawatts. The rest will come from biomass and small gas-based projects. Green Infra is promoted by IDFC Private Equity Fund. The new green power project will need an investment of Rs 3,000 crore, according to Projects Today, the Indian projects database Website. But the investment will also be supported by various Indian Government incentives. As a commercial player in this field, Green Infra can benefit from concessional import duty on certain components of wind electric generators, excise duty exemption, get ten years’ tax holiday on income generated from wind power projects and benefit from an accelerated depreciation and loan from the Indian Renewable Energy Development Agency (IREDA). According to the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), India has had a total of 26.95 billion units of electricity generated from wind power projects during the last three years. On the same note, MNRE has fixed a target for the whole country of 10,500 megawatts coming from wind power by 2012, according to The Economic Times. And the incentives from the Government are crucial to the development. "The robust growth in the country's wind power generation is largely driven by the incentives provided by the government to companies which set up wind power farms," said Santosh Kamath, KPMG Advisory Services' Associate Director, to The Economic Times.

A post on the Green Light blog led me to an interesting Green Inc. story about a new cottage industry -- refurbishing and reselling used wind turbines. As wind turbines have become larger and more efficient, 1980s era wind-farm owners have discarded their old turbines in favor of newer models. A bunch of companies that overhaul and sell used wind turbines have emerged, including Halus Power Systems (Halus), Energy Maintenance Service (EMS), Aeronautica Windpower and Nexion DG.

The first thing I thought of as a patent attorney was the potential infringement liability.  If indeed the turbines at issue are from the 1980s, to the extent they were patented, the patents have expired by now.

But if these companies are servicing turbines made more recently, infringement could be an issue.  Under U.S. patent law, once a patented article is sold, repair of the article is permissible, but reconstruction (making an essentially new article on the template of the original) constitutes infringement. The line between repair and reconstruction is not always clear and depends on the facts of each case.  The types of refurbishment that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has held to be permissible repair include re-applying a non-stick coating to a cooking device, replacing an inner container for medical waste, and replacing disks in a tomato harvester head. By contrast, when an entirely new cutting tip was created for a patented drill bit after the existing cutting tip could no longer be sharpened and reused, the Federal Circuit found the overhaul to be reconstruction. Two key issues run through the case law on repair and reconstruction.  The first is whether the entire patented article as a whole can be viewed as having completed its useful life.  In these cases, refurbishment typically is deemed infringing reconstruction. The second is whether the whole patented article consists of a combination of unpatented parts.  In those cases, even where refurbishment is extensive and includes disassembly, modification or replacement of many of the unpatented components, the process is likely to be viewed as permissible repair. So, assuming the possibility of overhauling patented wind turbines, if the used or broken turbines still have useful life in them and consist of unpatented blades, generator, gearbox, etc., these resellers are likely to be in the clear.  On the other hand, if the turbines are spent or have anything like the patent protection of Clipper Windpower’s Liberty wind turbine, an overhaul could rise to the level of patent infringement. Another factor, of course, is authorization from the patent holder.  Halus’s website says the company specializes in remanufacturing wind turbines originally produced by Vestas, but it’s unclear whether there is some type of partnering arrangement between the two companies. Eric Lane is a patent attorney and intellectual property lawyer at Luce, Forward, Hamilton & Scripps in San Diego, where he is in the Intellectual Property and Climate Change & Clean Technology practices.  Eric is the founder and author of Green Patent Blog, which provides discussion and analysis of intellectual property law issues in clean technology.