Energy Research Project for Alternative Energy, Renewable Energy, and Green Energy Technologies

Canada will phase out older coal-fired power plants to cut the country's greenhouse gas emissions, Environment Minister Jim Prentice said on Wednesday, as it moves to make natural-gas fired plants the new clean-power standard. The new standards, expected to be firmed up by early 2011, will force electricity producers to phase out older, high-emitting coal-fired plants and require newer facilities to match the lower greenhouse-gas emissions of more efficient natural-gas fired plants. Canada has 51 coal-fired units producing 19 percent of the country's electricity and 13 percent of its greenhouse gas emissions. However, 33 of those plants will reach the end of their economic lives by 2025. Unless the operators make substantial investments to cut emissions from the aging facilities, they'll be required to shut down.

Solar energy is an enormous resource that is readily available in all countries throughout the world, and all the space above the earth. Long ago scientists calculated that an hour’s worth of sunlight bathing the planet held far more energy than humans worldwide could consume in a year. I firmly believe that India should accelerate the use of all forms of Renewable Energy (photovoltaic, thermal solar, solar lamps, solar pumps, wind power, biomass, biogas, and hydro), and more proactively promote Energy Efficiency. However, in this article, I will only focus on the use of Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) technology to meet India’s future energy needs. Concentrated solar power plants have been used in California, USA since the 1980s. More recently, Pacific Gas & Electric has signed contracts to buy 500 megawatts of solar thermal power from two solar companies. First, NextEra Energy Resources will sell 250 megawatts of CSP generated power from the Genesis Solar Energy Project to be located in Riverside, California. Second, Abengoa’s Mojave Solar project will supply the remaining 250 megawatts from a plant located in San Bernardino County, California. Subject to California Public Utility Commission approval of the power purchase agreements, construction of these solar energy generating plants is expected to start in 2010 with operations planned to begin in 2013. Both these solar thermal power projects will contribute to meeting California’s aggressive Renewable Portfolio Standard, which calls for moving away from fossil fuels to solar and other renewable energy sources that avoid pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

Solar energy is an enormous resource that is readily available in all countries throughout the world, and all the space above the earth. Long ago scientists calculated that an hour’s worth of sunlight bathing the planet held far more energy than humans worldwide could consume in a year. I firmly believe that India should accelerate the use of all forms of Renewable Energy (photovoltaic, thermal solar, solar lamps, solar pumps, wind power, biomass, biogas, and hydro), and more proactively promote Energy Efficiency. However, in this article, I will only focus on the use of Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) technology to meet India’s future energy needs. Concentrated solar power plants have been used in California, USA since the 1980s. More recently, Pacific Gas & Electric has signed contracts to buy 500 megawatts of solar thermal power from two solar companies. First, NextEra Energy Resources will sell 250 megawatts of CSP generated power from the Genesis Solar Energy Project to be located in Riverside, California. Second, Abengoa’s Mojave Solar project will supply the remaining 250 megawatts from a plant located in San Bernardino County, California. Subject to California Public Utility Commission approval of the power purchase agreements, construction of these solar energy generating plants is expected to start in 2010 with operations planned to begin in 2013. Both these solar thermal power projects will contribute to meeting California’s aggressive Renewable Portfolio Standard, which calls for moving away from fossil fuels to solar and other renewable energy sources that avoid pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

Wind power has emerged as a viable renewable energy source in recent years — one that proponents say could lessen the threat of global warming. Although the American Wind Energy Association estimates that only about 2 percent of U.S. electricity is currently generated from wind turbines, the U.S. Department of Energy has said that wind power could account for a fifth of the nation’s electricity supply by 2030. But a new MIT analysis may serve to temper enthusiasm about wind power, at least at very large scales. Ron Prinn, TEPCO Professor of Atmospheric Science, and principal research scientist Chien Wang of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, used a climate model to analyze the effects of millions of wind turbines that would need to be installed across vast stretches of land and ocean to generate wind power on a global scale. Such a massive deployment could indeed impact the climate, they found, though not necessarily with the desired outcome.In a paper published online Feb. 22 in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, Wang and Prinn suggest that using wind turbines to meet 10 percent of global energy demand in 2100 could cause temperatures to rise by one degree Celsius in the regions on land where the wind farms are installed, including a smaller increase in areas beyond those regions. Their analysis indicates the opposite result for wind turbines installed in water: a drop in temperatures by one degree Celsius over those regions. The researchers also suggest that the intermittency of wind power could require significant and costly backup options, such as natural gas-fired power plants.Prinn cautioned against interpreting the study as an argument against wind power, urging that it be used to guide future research that explores the downsides of large-scale wind power before significant resources are invested to build vast wind farms. “We’re not pessimistic about wind,” he said. “We haven’t absolutely proven this effect, and we’d rather see that people do further research.”Daniel Kirk-Davidoff, a chief scientist for MDA Federal Inc., which develops remote sensing technologies, and adjunct professor of meteorology at the University of Maryland, has examined the climate impacts of large-scale wind farms in previous studies. To him, the most promising result of the MIT analysis is that it indicates that the large-scale installation of wind turbines doesn’t appear to slow wind flow so much that it would be impossible to generate a desirable amount of energy. “When you put the wind turbines in, they are generating the kind of power you’d hope for,” he said. Tapping the wind resourcePrevious studies have predicted that annual world energy demand will increase from 14 terawatts (trillion watts) in 2002 to 44 terawatts by 2100. In their analysis, Prinn and Wang focus on the impact of using wind turbines to generate five terawatts of electric power.Using a climate model developed by the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, the researchers simulated the aerodynamic effects of large-scale wind farms — located both on land and on the ocean — to analyze how the atmosphere, ocean and land would respond over a 60-year span.For the land analysis, they simulated the effects of wind farms by using data about how objects similar to turbines, such as undulating hills and clumps of trees, affect surface “roughness,” or friction that can disturb wind flow. After adding this data to the model, the researchers observed that the surface air temperature over the wind farm regions increased by about one degree Celsius, which averages out to an increase of .15 degrees Celsius over the entire global surface.According to Prinn and Wang, this temperature increase occurs because the wind turbines affect two processes that play critical roles in determining surface temperature and atmospheric circulation: vertical turbulent motion and horizontal heat transport. Turbulent motion refers to the process by which heat and moisture are transferred from the land or ocean surface to the lower atmosphere. Horizontal heat transport is the process by which steady large-scale winds transport excessive heat away from warm regions, generally in a horizontal direction, and redistribute it to cooler regions. This process is critical for large-scale heat redistribution, whereas the effects of turbulent motion are generally more localized.In the analysis, the wind turbines on land reduced wind speed, particularly on the downwind side of the wind farms, which reduced the strength of the turbulent motion and horizontal heat transport processes that move heat away from the Earth’s surface. This resulted in less heat being transported to the upper parts of the atmosphere, as well as to other regions farther away from the wind farms. The effect is similar to being at the beach on a windy summer day: If the wind weakened or disappeared, it would get warmer.In contrast, when examining ocean-based wind farms, Prinn and Wang found that wind turbines cooled the surface by more than one degree Celsius. They said that these results are unreliable, however, because in their analysis, they modeled the effects of wind turbines by introducing surface friction in the form of large artificial waves. But they acknowledge that this is not an accurate comparison, meaning that a better way of simulating marine-based wind turbines must be developed before reliable conclusions can be made.In addition to changes in temperatures and surface heat fluxes, they also observed changes in large-scale precipitation, particularly at the mid-latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere. Although these changes exceeded 10 percent in some areas, the global total changes were not very large, according to Prinn and Wang. To investigate the effect of wind variability on the intermittency in wind power generation, the researchers used the climate model to estimate the monthly-mean wind power consumption and electrical generation for each continent, concluding that there are very large and geographically extensive seasonal variations, particularly over North and South America, Africa and the Middle East. They explain that this unreliability means that an electrical generation system with greatly increased use of wind turbines would still require backup generation even if continental-scale power lines enabled electrical transmission from windy to non-windy areas.Although Prinn and Wang believe their results for the land-based wind farms are robust, Wang called their analysis a “proof-of-concept” study that requires additional theoretical and modeling work, as well as field experiments for complete verification. Their next step is to address how to simulate ocean-based wind farms more accurately. They plan to collaborate with aeronautical engineers to develop parameters for the climate model that will allow them to simulate turbines in coastal waters.

Grants recently awarded to MIT researchers by the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) could help to pave the way for a method of generating electricity that produces no greenhouse gas emissions, and that could become a major contributor to meeting the world’s energy needs.Most energy analysts agree that geothermal energy — tapping the heat of bedrock deep underground to generate electricity — has enormous potential because it is available all the time, almost anywhere on Earth, and there is enough of it available, in theory, to supply all of the world’s energy needs for many centuries. But there are still some unanswered questions about it that require further research. DoE last year awarded $336 million in grants to help resolve the remaining uncertainties, and three of those grants, totaling more than $2 million, went to MIT researchers.Everywhere on Earth, a few miles below the surface, the bedrock is hot, and the deeper you go the hotter it gets. In some places, water heated by this hot rock comes naturally to the surface or close to it, where it can be easily tapped to drive a turbine and generate electricity. But where naturally heated water is not available at or near the surface, this process can be recreated by drilling one very deep well to inject water into the ground, and another well nearby to pump that water back to the surface after it has been heated by passing through cracks in the hot rock. Such systems are known as Engineered Geothermal Systems, or EGS.A 2006 report by an 18-member team led by MIT Professor Jefferson Tester (now emeritus, and working at Cornell University) found that more than 2,000 times the total annual energy use of the United States could be supplied, using existing technology, from EGS systems, and perhaps 10 times as much with improved technology. Tracking cracksHerbert Einstein, professor of civil and environmental engineering, was the recipient of one of the new DoE grants. Einstein studies fracturing in rocks, which is crucial in creating a new EGS site: After drilling the necessary wells, water must be pumped into one of them under very high pressure to create a network of fractures in the deep rock to allow the water to move from the injection well to the extraction well. But exactly how that process works at different depths and in different types of rock is not yet well understood.Einstein is developing computer programs that can aid in the evaluation of geothermal sites, assessing both the potential power output and any potential risks, such as the triggering of seismic activity. Such triggering has already resulted in the premature closing two years ago of one test installation, in Basel, Switzerland, after some minor earthquakes (the largest being magnitude 3.4) were felt in the area.The planned software is based on programs Einstein has developed to assess proposed tunnel sites and landslide risks. “What these decision tools do is allow you to consider the uncertainties, of which there are a lot,” he says. As is the case with tunnel construction, a great deal of the uncertainty with EGS has to do with the kind of rock encountered in the drilling and how that rock will fracture under pressure. Einstein’s software will be adapted to address the higher pressures encountered in the very deep boreholes needed for geothermal fields.Einstein suggests that the risks from seismic triggering are largely sociological, because the events seen so far, at least, are too small to produce any serious damage. “I think that’s a red herring,” agrees Professor of Geophysics M. Nafi Toksoz, another DoE geothermal grant recipient, referring to the issue of induced earthquakes. “We know that every time we drill into the Earth, we alter the state of the stress in the rock.” As a result, small earthquakes do occur regularly near oil and gas wells, deep mine shafts for coal or minerals, and even from the pressure of water when a reservoir fills up behind a new dam. “Wherever there are existing faults, they will induce mostly minor quakes.”Toksoz’s grant (with research scientists Michael Fehler and Haijian Zhang of MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences as collaborators) will fund research at a test EGS installations in Utah, Nevada and California to develop ways of detecting and analyzing the fractures that form in the deep rock and how water actually flows through them. “Enhanced or Engineered Geothermal Systems (EGS) can be a enormous contributor to the world’s renewable energy portfolio,” says Curt Robinson, executive director of the Geothermal Resources Council in Davis, Calif., a nonprofit educational group. He says EGS could play a significant role in meeting energy needs if there are better ways of analyzing potential sites to improve the odds of success; government policies to create a favorable business climate for investors; and better technologies for identifying good sites and for lower-cost drilling under high-temperature conditions. Einstein says geothermal electricity has the potential to take the place of essentially all stationary (that is, not transportation-related) power sources. “Basically, you could replace everything that’s around,” including the “baseload” power plants that can operate at any time, unlike sources such as solar or wind power. “So that’s certainly very promising,” he says. “It’s not completely infinite, but for all practical purposes it is.”Probing underground One of the remaining questions in practice is whether an EGS plant will lose efficiency over time, as minerals carried by the water begin to clog up the cracks in the deep rock. While test plants have been operated in the United States and elsewhere for limited amounts of time, there has not yet been such a plant that has operated over a span of years, so “we don’t know how long these things will work at their maximum output,” Einstein says, and if their performance begins to drop, “can you restimulate the well?” to get it back to original levels. These questions require further research.Seismologist Fehler, recipient of another of the DoE grants, uses small earthquakes as a tool: Like ultrasound used to get images inside the body, the natural vibrations from small earthquakes can be used as a way to probe the subsurface to understand how water is moving deep below the ground. “It’s a remote-sensing tool,” he says.This is similar to a method used in oil exploration, where the subsurface is analyzed by measuring the way vibrations from explosions or surface “thumpers” are distributed through the soil and rock below. An array of microphones or micro-seismometers picks up the vibrations at various points, and computers then reconstruct an image of the subsurface from the relative timing of the vibrations from the source to the receiver.At most geothermal installations built so far, Fehler says, earthquakes have been so small that “you can record them, but you don’t feel anything at the surface.” But seismic triggering is an issue because it has affected companies’ ability to continue operations because of social, economic and political factors, he says. “We have to figure out how to try to control it,” he says, mostly by choosing sites carefully, away from population centers. The U.S. Department of Energy is holding a workshop on that question in February.The basic principles have been demonstrated. “We know it can be done,” Toksoz says. “But quite a lot of technology still needs to be proven in terms of commercial feasibility.” The remaining questions are essentially economic and engineering ones related to the costs and difficulties of deep drilling, not basic technology, he says.

AP - A U.S. solar power company said Saturday it will help build a series of solar thermal power plants in China, as the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases tries to decrease its heavy reliance on coal, imported gas and oil.

AFP - The US government has taken a harder line on greenhouse gas emissions produced by factories, refineries and power plants by mandating energy efficient means for expansion, the Environmental Protection Agency said.

A clean tech fund that was the brainchild of George W Bush has come under fire for promoting coal power plants in developing countries. The World Development Movement, a UK-based lobby and campaign group, has "slammed" a UK government plan to put nearly £400 million into the World Bank's Clean Technology Fund (CTF). And earlier this week, the US government revealed that none of its 2009 budget would go to the fund.