Scituate turbine talks off to slow start

By Jessica Bartlett, Town Correspondent

December 5, 2012

Boston Globe

After more than two months of discussions, neiighbors and the owners of Scituate’s industrial wind turbine have made little progress in settling their differences.

Neighbors have been meeting with Board of Health officials since late September, rallying against the turbine after the structure allegedly started causing health problems to many nearby residents.

Although the Board of Health has formed a Steering Committee consisting of neighbors, turbine owners, and town officials, and despite meetings in October, November, and December, the turbine has kept spinning and discussions within the Steering Committee have been slow going.

“Not withstanding that two members of the Board of Health acknowledged that there is evidence to suggest there is an issue, there has been nothing [done] besides a Steering Committee commissioned,” said Tom Thompson, a spokesperson for the community group. “In the meantime, families like the McKeevers are experiencing health issues….I don’t see how anyone in the community can be pleased with that level of progress.”

The McKeever family, which lives on the Driftway, have even published YouTube videos showing the shadow flicker – a strobe-like effect caused by the blades spinning in sunlight – in their home.

Elsewhere in Scituate, residents have submitted dozens of complaints to the Board of Health, saying that the turbine is causing sleeplessness, dizziness, and headaches.

To get to the bottom of the issue, Board of Health officials plan to commission a study to look at the noise and shadow flicker effects on the neighborhood, to be paid for by the turbine owners.

The scope of that study, and the parameters of the engineering company, will be determined by the recently formed Steering Committee.

However, the Steering Committee has yet to meet, and residents remain frustrated that nothing concrete has been accomplished.

“I don’t think there has been any progress made thus far,” Thompson said.

Issues surrounding the Open Meeting Law had to first be figured out before the group could meet. Additionally scheduling issues with the Director of Health, Jennifer Sullivan, has caused some delays, Thompson said.

“As the head of the staff, she has a significant role, and it makes sense that her inability to attend these meetings or make herself available would have a negative impact on pace,” Thompson said.

Yet according to Gordon Dean, owner of the turbine, the delays in meeting are mostly the fault of the community.

"We’ve tried to be responsive," Dean said. "[At the Monday meeting], Mr. Thompson took responsibility for the fact that there hadn’t been a meeting and nothing presented at this point in time. He said it is on their shoulders. He said he would check at the end of this week how their consultant is doing. …we are waiting. We can't control it if they don’t want to sit down until they have heard from their consultant."

Furthermore, Dean said the Board of Health had been cautious up to this point, which he supported.

Despite delays, the community group hopes to meet before Christmas.

In preparation for that meeting, the community group is forming their scope of work for a potential study, a document that should be ready next week. Dean said that his side has presented possible scopes from consulting firms he had approached to get an initial cost estimate.

The Department of Environmental Protections has also provided the town with a scope of study that is currently taking place in Fairhaven.

"DEP suggested that if town is thinking of using [the study] for enforcement that the final scope should be reviewd by the DEP," Dean said.

At this point, the hope is to finalize a scope of work within the month to put a request for proposal out to bid at the start of the year.

“We would like to have a formal meeting of the Steering Committee to hopefully agree on a scope to be presented to the Board of Health,” Thompson said. “We know the [Board of Health’s] next meeting is scheduled for Jan. 7 and hopefully at that time they will agree on a scope and it will be issued to engineering firms…and we will determine t that time what the next steps are.”

Though there may soon be decisions about what a study will focus on, funding for the study has yet to be determined.

Dean agreed to fund a study looking at the noise of the turbine, but has had yet to publicly say whether Scituate Wind LLC would fund a study including shadow flicker.

Despite this hang-up, Thompson said he isn’t concerned.

“Clearly the issues in play relate to noise and shadow flicker, any engineering study commissioned by the town needs to reflect both of those nuances, or it's not an all encompassing study,” he said.

Yet Dean said a study of shadow flicker had already taken place, and it isn't clear how flicker may play a role in the latest study.

"We’ve already paid for a shadow flicker study, and we don’t understand what people are asking for," Dean said. "It’s an easy mathematical thing based on the sun and the turbine…we just don’t understand what people are suggesting we do differently, so we’re waiting to get a neighborhood proposal on flicker."

http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news/scituate/2012/12/scituate_turbine_talks_off_to.html

Plymouth Town Meeting petition proposes wind turbine moratorium

By Christine Legere

Boston Globe 

September 5, 2012

With seven wind turbines queued up for construction in Plymouth, a group of residents has submitted a petition for a fall Town Meeting article that would set a two-year moratorium on more permits. 

During the break, the Planning Board would conduct a “comprehensive review of the existing bylaw . . . in light of the reported health impacts and widespread litigation in neighboring communities,” the proposal states.

As part of the process for fall Town Meeting, which will convene Oct. 20, the Planning Board will hold a public hearing on the warrant article at 7:15 p.m. Monday in Town Hall.

The petition’s author, Kerry Kearney, said he isn’t against wind energy. “I just don’t think they should be built so close to residents,” he said.

Plymouth was one of the first communities in the state to enact a wind-energy bylaw, in 2005. The town’s Energy Committee chairman, John Corcoran, said the bylaw was originally drafted to allow construction of a municipal wind turbine near the waste-water treatment plant to generate a little income for Plymouth.

“It was going in an area that everybody could accept,” Corcoran said. The turbine was never built, but the bylaw, following a review by the state, was expanded to allow for wind projects on private property in addition to those on municipal land.

Since the bylaw’s enactment, the Zoning Board of Appeals has approved special permits for turbines in four locations: on bogs off Head of the Bay Road; near Hedges Pond Road; near Walmart at Colony Place; and the Balboni commercial-industrial property off Camelot Drive.  

No turbines have been completed, but the Balboni tower is under construction.

Kearney said the biggest flaw is the local bylaw’s distance requirement, which allows a turbine to be no closer than its full height, from the ground to blade tip, from a neighboring property line.

“There are lots of examples of where there are turbines three tower heights away from residents, and people are still struggling with health problems,” Kearney said.

Kearney’s home on Treetop Lane is close to the targeted location of two proposed turbines off Hedges Pond Road in south Plymouth. The proposal was ultimately abandoned due to public outcry.

A later plan for a single wind turbine off Hedges Pond Road, about a half mile from Kearney’s property, received its local permit, but is stalled by a court appeal by neighbors.

South Plymouth bog owner Keith Mann is on track to soon begin construction on his four 492-foot-tall wind turbines, although his project had also been delayed by court appeals filed by neighbors.

Mann said last week he has reached settlements with the neighbors of three wind turbines and expects a settlement soon with neighbors of the fourth. The turbines, which will stand in his bogs off Head of the Bay Road, should be up and running by fall 2013, Mann said.

Public resistance to turbine projects has been considerable in many area communities.

An industrial-size turbine, proposed by the Trustees of Reservations for Cohasset’s Turkey Hill, has been tied up in court for two years. Milton’s proposal for a 2-megawatt machine remains the subject of an appeal from the neighboring Granite Links Golf Club, although the town expects a settlement to be reached within the next two months. 

Pushback from concerned residents in Duxbury caused the town’s Alternative Energy Committee to halt plans for a municipal wind turbine late last year.

And in Kingston, neighbors of three privately owned industrial wind turbines and a fourth on the town’s landfill, and known as Independence, have drawn outcry from neighbors who say the whirring blades are causing health problems ranging from ringing ears and chronic headaches to vertigo and sleep disturbance.

State officials recently agreed to conduct noise studies of the Kingston turbines, similar to ones they did in Falmouth and Fairhaven.  

Mann said he thinks turbines have been given a bad name because of the noise from an older wind turbine in Falmouth. “Modern wind turbines are much quieter,” said Mann, who added extensive noise studies, projecting the impacts of his four turbines, had been conducted.

“There’s a lot of science behind it,” Mann said. “But there are always going to be some who feel there should be no noise.”

Plymouth planning technician Patrick Farrah, who is working with a subcommittee on amendments to the town’s wind energy bylaw, said the panel may step back to see what happens with the petition article next month.

“If there’s a moratorium, it will give us a chance to look at our options,” he said.

Petition articles with sufficient signatures are automatically placed on the Town Meeting warrant, but are reviewed by the town’s attorneys.  Based on the legal review, Town Manager Melissa Arrighi said, some sections of the moratorium proposal may need adjustment for Town Meeting to act on it.

For instance, she said, the proposed bylaw would stop building permits from being issued for approved turbines during the moratorium. Those projects, however, would be grandfathered, and could therefore move forward with construction after the moratorium, Arrighi said.

http://www.boston.com/yourtown/2012/09/05/plymouth-town-meeting-petition-proposes-wind-turbine-moratorium/wpuHoTraASmDS9jQvfFurO/story.html

Projects to Add Wind Power for City Gain Momentum

By MIREYA NAVARRO

New York Times

February 28, 2012

Despite Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s long-expressed dream of putting wind turbines on skyscrapers and bridges, the constraints of an urban landscape have so far proved too challenging for reliable wind power in the city, energy experts said. As a result, New York City has been largely inactive — and behind the national curve — in embracing wind power.

But that is about to change. This spring, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection will solicit plans for the first major wind project, the installation of turbines atop the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island. And city planners are working on zoning changes, now under review by the City Planning Commission, to allow turbines up to 55 feet high on the rooftops of buildings taller than 100 feet, and even taller turbines on commercial and industrial sites along the waterfront.

But the biggest potential for supplying wind power to the city lies offshore, where the Bloomberg administration is supporting an application filed last September by a coalition led by the New York Power Authority to lease a swath of the ocean floor for a wind farm 13 miles off the coast of the Rockaways in Queens.

City officials say they are ready to take advantage of their coastal proximity to seek bigger renewable-energy projects and quicken the pace toward cleaner air and the jobs and economic benefits that would accompany those projects. A study commissioned by the city last year said wind farms could play a major role in replacing power now generated by the Indian Point nuclear power plant in Westchester County. The plant supplies up to 25 percent of consumption in Consolidated Edison’s service area, including New York City.

“When you’re talking about huge wind, offshore is really a unique opportunity,” said Farrell Sklerov, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Environmental Protection.

The proposal for the offshore wind farm, which is scheduled for a public hearing before the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management next month, is considered a game changer in that it would start at 350 megawatts but have the potential to double its capacity — eventually generating enough electricity to power a half-million homes in New York City and Long Island.

The plans are in the initial stages, but they are part of a push by states along the Eastern Seaboard to make wind power a significant staple of their energy mix. The region lags behind the West and Midwest, where flat, open spaces are plentiful and wind turbines already supply up to 20 percent of electric power in some states.

“We certainly have an ocean in our backyard that can host these turbines,” said Katherine Kennedy, clean-energy counsel at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “If we can develop wind and solar, all of a sudden we look like a European city.”

Through most of the last decade, turbines have been springing up all over the country, including in dairy farms in upstate New York. As a result, New York State, which has set a goal of deriving 30 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2015, now ranks 12th among the states in wind power installations, with 1,400 megawatts, or enough to meet 2 percent of the state’s electricity demand, says the American Wind Energy Association, a trade group.

Some states got a lift this month when federal officials from the Department of the Interior cleared the way for companies to seek federal leases in wind-energy areas off New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia, speeding the process to approve wind projects.

Environmental groups say New York has been less focused on tapping into wind than some of these neighboring states but this year the New York Department of State is expected to identify the most viable locations for offshore wind farms with an eye toward protecting shipping, commercial fishing and ocean habitats — an approach that experts say should save time and red tape and help attract developers looking to begin such a project.

Long processes to win approvals and the higher cost of wind compared with less sustainable sources of electricity are not the only obstacles to developing wind installations. The projects must also withstand public scrutiny. Despite support from environmental groups, the only federally approved offshore wind project to date, Cape Wind in Nantucket Sound off the coast of Cape Cod, has been stalled, in part by opposition over aesthetics and the impact on American Indian artifacts and burial grounds, among other issues.

Bonnie Brady, executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, opposed a proposed wind farm three-and-a-half to five miles off Jones Beach in Long Island over concerns about the potential harm to fish. The project was ultimately derailed in 2007 by high costs. Ms. Brady said the proposal off the Rockaways, while farther offshore, was still worrisome. It calls for at least 70 wind turbines that could each soar 430 feet above the water.

“The biggest problem we have is that there’s really no science to either support or negate wind power as something that wouldn’t affect the fish negatively,” she said. “If there’s a problem, once you’ve done the damage, who’s responsible?”

While more expensive to produce than wind power, solar energy is more suited to cities, energy experts said, because it can be harnessed more discreetly from thousands of rooftops. New York City has so far grown its solar production to seven megawatts, a modest amount but well over its practically nonexistent wind production. This runs counter to what is occurring in the rest of the state and the country, where wind installed capacity, 46,000 megawatts, vastly outpaces the 3,800 megawatts of solar.

Some New York buildings are already experimenting with private wind production, like the Eltona apartments in the Melrose section of the Bronx. But they have found that they do not get enough wind to make turbines a reliable source of power. City planners are revising zoning regulations to allow more private turbines, but still concede that wind turbines may not thrive here unless they are on or near the shore.

City officials say the former environmental wasteland known as Fresh Kills is an ideal location. The Department of Environmental Protection will, in the next two months, ask for wind and solar proposals to develop 75 acres of the landfill, with the goal of adding 15 megawatts of energy, enough to power 3,300 homes. Officials said at least a third of the production would be wind power.

The Fresh Kills plan could double the city’s solar output, but it is the wind turbines that excite the Staten Island borough president, James P. Molinaro, who has lobbied for a wind farm for years, and persuaded the state to finance a study that showed the site could support seven 400-foot turbines.

City officials say it has taken them this long to evaluate the challenges of installing wind turbines on the landfill’s unique subsurface.

Fresh Kills closed as a landfill handling the city’s residential garbage more than a decade ago and is now undergoing a transformation into a 2,200-acre park.

“It’d change the biggest tragedy that ever happened to Staten Island and convert it to something wonderful,” Mr. Molinaro said. “Windmills that would give us clean energy in a beautiful park. It’d be a model for the rest of the world to look at.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/29/nyregion/new-york-to-renew-push-for-wind-power.html?pagewanted=print

Lines go up to ferry wind energy to major cities

By KATE GALBRAITH

Published: October 21, 2011

SWEETWATER — Enormous transmission towers stand beside a West Texas country road, waiting for electric wires to be strung through them. Nearby, the task of threading wires through the steel towers is already under way, as men in hard hats shift equipment into position.

“We’re going to work 12 hours a day through Thanksgiving,” said Pat Hogan, a consultant with McCurley Enterprises, a company helping with the construction. The only real break comes around midafternoon on Sundays when, he said, “you can get your clothes cleaned or go to the grocery store.”

The rush to build transmission lines is part of Texas’ efforts to promote wind power, which provides 8 percent of the state grid’s electricity. Across the state, thousands of miles of wires are being strung at a cost that has soared to an estimated $6.8 billion. The main purpose is to ferry wind energy from remote areas like Sweetwater — already home to many big wind farms — to major cities like Dallas and Fort Worth. Texas leads the nation in wind production, and the lines are intended to nearly double the state’s wind capacity.

The build-out, which Texans will pay for in future electric bill increases projected at about $5 a month per customer for years, has been contentious. Some Texas landowners have fought to prevent the lines from crossing their property, even though they receive a one-time payment for hosting them.

Travis Besier, the manager of transmission right of way for Oncor, a Dallas-based utility overseeing construction of the largest chunk of lines (including the Sweetwater segments), said that payments for an easement could range from around $3,000 to $10,000 or more an acre, depending on factors like the property’s proximity to a large city.

In some cases, Mr. Besier said, Oncor has needed eminent domain proceedings, in which the utility can take the land if negotiations with the landowner fail.

For businesses in Sweetwater, which normally cater to energy-company workers and tourists attending the town’s springtime Rattlesnake Roundup, the construction has brought a boom. One recent morning at Big Boy’s Bar-B-Que began with Oncor ordering $265 worth of sandwiches, according to Gaylan Marth, the restaurant’s owner.

“What a way to start off!” Mr. Marth said.

Christy Silva, general manager of the Best Western hotel in Sweetwater, said that her business had increased by about 35 percent because of the transmission work — although she is aware that at some point the construction will end and the workers will leave.

All lines are supposed to be completed by the end of 2013. Work is going smoothly, builders say, though there are hitches. Workers must always beware of rattlesnakes and bad weather, including high winds.

Andy Weaver, co-owner of Weaver Construction Texas, a company doing grading work for Oncor, said that because of the drought and tighter water restrictions, he had trouble getting enough water (necessary for processing the material) while preparing a substation site near Brownwood. “You couldn’t find a driller in Texas to drill you a water well,” he said. He was eventually able to buy water from ranchers and farmers with wells.

Wind developers, for their part, are eagerly awaiting the completion of the lines, which should spur more activity in West Texas, including the area around Sweetwater, where currently some turbines must stop spinning at windy times because there are not enough wires to carry out the power. The Panhandle, the windiest region in the state, albeit one with relatively few turbines because of its remoteness, is also poised for more development.

But Andy Bowman, president of Pioneer Green Energy, a renewable energy developer, said that much near-term wind activity is focused on South Texas — where the state has not ordered construction of new transmission lines for wind. Austin Energy, for example, recently announced plans to buy coastal wind power for a relatively low price. (Coastal winds tend to be slower but better matched to electricity use patterns than West Texas winds.)

“It’s an interesting turn of events that we’re seeing wind being competitive on the market again,” even before the lines are built, Mr. Bowman said.

kgalbraith@texastribune.org

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/us/lines-go-up-to-ferry-wind-energy-to-major-cities.html?src=recg

How to Build a Greener City

Bike lanes, micro wind turbines, pneumatic garbage collection—and other ways to make urban areas more environmentally friendly


Wall Street Journal

By MICHAEL TOTTY

Can cities be part of the environmental solution instead of part of the problem?

The question isn't an idle one. Urban populations around the world are expected to soar in the next 20 years, to five billion from more than three billion today. If the current rate of urbanization holds steady, cities will account for nearly three-quarters of the world's energy demand by 2030. Most of the increase will come in rapidly developing countries like China and India; China's cities alone will have to deliver water, housing, transportation and other services to 400 million additional urban dwellers by 2030.

"There's going to have to be new forms of energy, new ways of delivering energy and new forms of infrastructure," says Warren Karlenzig, president of Common Current, a consulting firm on sustainable cities based in San Anselmo, Calif. "All this will be necessary to allow cities to operate the way they do now."

So, cities aren't going to have be made a little greener; they're going to have to be rethought from the ground up. The goal: compact living environments that require less resources and that get the most out of the land, water and energy they do use.

It wasn't long ago that the idea of using "green" and "city" in the same sentence seemed absurd. Cities were considered a blight on the environment: energy-hogging, pollution-spewing, garbage-producing environmental hellholes. But in recent years, they've begun to be seen as models of green virtue. City dwellers tend to walk more and drive less than their suburban counterparts, and dense urban development encourages transit use. Apartment living generally means lower per-household energy use.

Building on these strengths, planners and developers are devising innovative solutions to meet urbanites' energy, water, transportation and sanitation needs well into the future.

Some improvements are fairly easy, such as switching to energy-efficient LED lighting in buildings and streetlights, or setting aside bike lanes and widening sidewalks to encourage alternatives to driving (although such moves aren't without political hazards, as a recent battle over bike lanes in New York shows). Others are more ambitious, requiring new construction or even an extensive rebuilding of city infrastructure—consider what is needed to add a second set of pipes for a water-reuse system.

Some of the most ambitious projects—and the greatest source of innovative ideas—are the dozens of "eco-city" developments in the works or on drawing boards around the world. Projects like the Songdo International Business District near Incheon, South Korea, are testing grounds for the latest in green technologies.

But green initiatives aren't just found on blueprints for new cities. Chicago, for example, has about 350 green-roof projects covering more than 4.5 million square feet.

Of course, many of these initiatives can be expensive, with high up-front costs. Urban planners say savings from lower energy bills and other operational efficiencies can more than cover the added expenses, but the break-even point can be years out. Still, cities—unlike the average homeowner considering rooftop solar panels—can take a long view and make investments with a decades-long payback.

So, how can cities—old or new—take green to a new level? Here's a look at some of the ways.

District Heating In a typical office building, heating and cooling account for nearly two-thirds of total energy use. So an alternative to traditional electricity or natural-gas HVAC systems can go a long way toward making cities greener. One solution: tapping the excess heat produced by nearby utilities or industry. A network of pipes distributes the heat, which can be used for hot water, space heating and in absorption chillers to provide air conditioning in the summer. These district heating systems are considerably more efficient—capturing up to 90% of the available energy—than in-building boilers. And they can tap any number of heat sources, including high-efficiency natural-gas turbines, large-scale solar thermal systems, biomass incinerators or furnaces in a steel mill. Common in Europe, high-efficiency district heating systems are being used in South Korea's Songdo IBD and are in the plans for other eco-city developments.

Micro Wind Turbines The giant windmills that dot the countryside aren't suitable for cities, where vibrations can rattle windows and the noise would be annoying. So developers are turning to microturbines. These small generators sit atop commercial or residential buildings and are designed to take advantage of the quirks of big-city wind patterns—lots of turbulence and frequent, sudden shifts in direction. The turbines are generally small, rated at one to three kilowatts each. But when installed in arrays and combined with high-efficiency solar panels, they can generate a large share of a building's energy needs, especially when the structure is equipped with a full set of energy-saving features. A handful of companies provide micro wind systems around the world, and the devices, while more expensive per kilowatt than bigger systems, have been installed at scores of locations, including PepsiCo Inc.'s Chicago office building.

Pumped Hydro Storage/Micro Hydropower Wind and solar power are notoriously fickle, producing more power than needed at some times and less than needed at others. A city that wants to rely on such intermittent sources needs to find a way to bank that power. One technique: pumped hydroelectric storage. When wind or solar power is plentiful, electricity is used to pump water to an upper reservoir; later, when power is needed, the water is allowed to flow downhill, turning turbines in the process. (The lakes have the added benefit as open-space landscaping.) Large-scale pumped-hydro systems are increasingly used for storing energy, and many isolated towns rely on small-scale micro hydro plants to generate electricity. Adding a pumped-storage capability isn't technically difficult, but it's expensive, especially on a small scale, and current technology generally requires a large "drop," or change in elevation to produce much power—though companies are working on lower-flow hydro turbines that can work in more level settings.

Walking and Biking When it comes to transportation, dense urban areas like Manhattan already have an advantage over suburbs: By packing people, jobs and services close together, they reduce the need for many car trips and provide the density to support bus and transit services. Green-city planners do even more, designing streets so that walking is safe, convenient and interesting—with wide sidewalks, landscaping and abundant crosswalks—and providing separate designated bicycle lanes. Songdo's 1,500 acres are designed so that most shops, parks and transit stops can be reached in less than a 15-minute walk, and the city also has a 15-mile network of bike lanes.

Personal Rapid Transit Not every urban trip can be made on foot, bicycle or public transit. Cities can encourage greener auto choices by providing electric-vehicle charging stations in parking garages. A futuristic solution: personal rapid transit, or PRT—pod-like, self-powered vehicles that can carry as many as six passengers. The vehicles can travel along dedicated roadways, like an automated airport transit system, or on streets equipped with buried magnets. There are no fixed schedules or routes; passengers pick their destinations, and a central computer guides the car without intermediate stops. Although still a novelty, PRTs are operating at Heathrow International Airport near London and at the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in Masdar City, an eco-city development in Abu Dhabi. Masdar, however, has put on hold plans to deploy the pod cars throughout the entire planned two-square-mile development.

Pneumatic Garbage Collection Even the greenest cities produce lots of garbage, which creates two problems: collecting the trash and getting rid of it. On the collection side, a centralized waste system, using an underground network of pneumatic tubes, can replace the fleets of trucks that block traffic, tear up streets and burn fossil fuels. The tubes can collect garbage from both households and outdoor trash bins and carry it to a centralized collection and sorting facility. Though some systems handle only food waste, others are set up to handle separate streams for paper and other recyclable trash. The systems are used in scores of cities world-wide; a pneumatic trash-collection system on New York's Roosevelt Island has been in operation since 1975.

Waste to Resources Getting to zero waste is as important to cities as getting to zero carbon. This doesn't mean just encouraging residents to recycle—cities also can deploy technologies to tap the energy and other valuable resources buried in the trash. Advanced anaerobic digesters process organic garbage waste and the sludge left over from treating wastewater to produce biogas, which can be burned for energy; more common in Europe, the technology is just being deployed in the U.S. for handling municipal garbage. High-temperature plasma-arc gasifiers can consume nearly the entire waste stream, making a synthetic gas that is burned to produce electricity; the leftover slag can be used in building materials. One novel approach under consideration by the PlanIT Valley project, an eco-city development planned for northern Portugal: Aluminum cans are processed with water and energy, producing aluminum oxide and hydrogen, which can then be used to power fuel cells. But because aluminum oxide requires tremendous energy to make aluminum, it may be more economically feasible just to recycle aluminum containers.

Green Roofs Rooftops, which take up a fifth of urban surface area, can be used to support solar panels or wind turbines, but they're otherwise underutilized. Covering the tops of buildings with grasses, shrubs and other plants can deliver a host of benefits. Though often more costly than traditional coverings, green roofs can provide insulation and trim a building's heating and cooling needs. They absorb rainwater, reducing the load on storm-water systems, and filter what water does run off so it can be used for many domestic needs. They also filter air pollutants.

Mr. Totty is a news editor for The Journal Report in San Francisco. He can be reached at michael.totty@wsj.com.
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424053111904009304576535113877346554-lMyQjAxMTAxMDEwMjExNDIyWj.html?mod=wsj_share_email#articleTabs%3Darticle

Can EVs solve wind power puzzle?

By John Roach, contributing writer at msnbc.com.

Electric vehicles outfitted with a $10 computer chip can help streamline the addition of wind power to the electric grid, according to a study that shows how the two types of technology could piece together the puzzle of our green energy future.

One of the biggest hurdles utilities face with the addition of wind power and other renewable sources of energy to the grid is where and how to store excess generation for use when people actually need it. Until that happens, if the wind blows when nobody needs electricity, for example, the energy is wasted.

"If I could wave my magic wand and have anything, new types of technology that allow you to store large amounts of energy cheaply would be fantastic," Steve Kern, a power supply and environmental affairs officer with Seattle City Light, told me along with a group of reporters this July on a trip sponsored by the Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources.

Kern was speaking at a hydropower dam in the North Cascades that supplies 17 percent of Seattle's electricity. The utility occasionally lets water spill over the dam instead of through its turbines because there is no place to store the excess generated electricity.

Despite the storage limitations, Renewable Portfolio Standards require utilities to add more sources of energy such as wind to the grid. In the Pacific Northwest, 10 gigawatts of wind power will come online by 2019, for example. The conundrum is how to effectively manage the wind's fickleness.

EVs absorb the wind
The new study put out by the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory shows that plug-in electric vehicles equipped with so-called Grid Friendly charging technology could help utilities better utilize this additional wind energy.

The technology essentially ramps up and down the rate at which the battery is charged depending on availability of electricity, Michael Kintner-Myer, a staff scientist at the lab and a co-author of the new report, told me on Monday.

The chip, which is added to the vehicle battery or charging station, reads the signal of the voltage and current at the outlet, he explained. Utilities in the United States try to maintain this metric, called frequency, at 60 hertz.

When there's more demand for electricity than is being generated, the frequency drops. When there is more generation than needed, like when the wind blows in the middle of the night, the frequency speeds up.

"We are evaluating what the frequency is … and in the over-generation mode we really ramp up the charging current to its maximum and if it is under generation, we ramp it down," Kintner-Myer explained.

This starting and stopping of the charging cycle allows electric vehicles to absorb the excess wind power when it is generated. Doing so reduces the need for backup power plants to keep the grid in balance, according to PNNL.

This grid-friendly approach contrasts with another, potentially more robust, load management system known as vehicle-to-grid technology, which maintains a two-way communication between the car battery and the electric grid.

In this scenario, the battery is a storage device as well as a generator, providing electricity to the grid when demand rises. This causes more wear and tear on batteries and requires a more complex and expensive integration with the grid, according to Kintner-Myer.

"From a cost-benefit process, I think we have a higher value," he added.

This benefit of the Grid Friendly approach comes if about 13 percent, or 2.1 million vehicles in the Northwest Power Pool, which covers Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming, are equipped with the technology, according to the PNNL study.

In addition, about 10 percent of the cars would need access to charging stations during the day in order to absorb excess wind energy. "That means for utilizing these vehicles for grid applications, you don't have to have a one-to-one ratio of public-to-private charging stations," Kintner-Myer said, noting that has been a concern within the energy industry.

His team is negotiating with a public utility in the Pacific Northwest to demonstrate the feasibility of the technology, which he said is available today. In fact, similar chips were tested in home appliances on the Olympic Peninsula a few years ago.

No silver bullet
Kern, with Seattle City Light, told me today that the Grid Friendly technology can help, "but it is not going to be the silver bullet" he longs for.

One problem from the utility perspective, he noted, is an obligation to customers to provide power when they want and need it. And, for most owners of electric vehicles, that means when cars are parked in the garage at night.

So, if electric-vehicle owners plug in their cars but the wind's not blowing, "I still have to have the underlying supply to backstop that wind," he noted

http://futureoftech.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/09/13/7745749-can-evs-solve-wind-power-puzzle?chromedomain=cosmiclog

Small wind industry struggling

By Peter Asmus
Special to The Sacramento Bee

Last Modified: Sunday, Sep. 4, 2011 - 12:10 pm

The U.S. wind turbine industry was created by farmers more than a century ago. First tapped to pump water in places such as the Central Valley's Stockton – once known as the "City of Windmills" – and then to generate electricity, small scale wind turbines have long been held as symbols of self-reliance. The technology offers a host of economic, environmental and reliability benefits, spurring economic development in often depressed, rural regions of the United States and the world, powering farms, ranches, schools and homes.

With large utility-scale wind farms sprouting up across the nation, the small wind industry – providing individual turbines for on-site use – is also growing up. General Electric is investing in the sector, and the devices are now available at national chains such as Home Depot.

Despite these positives, there are also some dark clouds threatening the small wind market. For example, recent scams in California tried to soak up state funding, halting the nation's most popular rebate program for small wind turbines. In response, consumer protection groups have increased efforts to require that products are "certified" to be eligible for government incentives, a sign that the industry is finally coming of age.

The good news is that California still ranks among the top 10 U.S. markets for small wind power; the bad news is that the hold on the nation's longest-standing small wind incentive has hurt sales during a recession, resulting in important lost economic activity for the state. And while the United States has traditionally dominated the small wind market, growing activity in Europe and China is challenging the domestic small wind industry in new ways.

A small wind history lesson

Shortly after the Gold Rush in the Sierra Nevada was over, the first small windmills were popping up in California. Instead of grinding grain – which was the primary application in Europe – these American windmills pumped water. The center of this new kind of "wind farming" was in Stockton. One visitor to the region commented that Stockton's nickname of "City of Windmills" appeared "appropriate to the traveler who approaches the town on a windy day and at a distance sees little save a multitude of great arms revolving furiously above the trees and house tops."

Sacramento, too, was known for wind farming. In 1859, Jacob Dickerson's windmill took first prize in the Sacramento State Agricultural Fair, and he boasted that more than a hundred of his locally manufactured windmills were still working.

At the time, close to a dozen windmill manufacturers were located in Northern California. Initially, these windmills were made of wood. But competition from manufacturers back East led to the introduction of steel windmills in the early 1890s. Nonetheless, aided by mail order houses such as Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, out-of-state firms continued to offer cheaper alternatives than in-state producers. By 1905, only four California firms employing 19 workers remained in business, two of them in San Jose. By 1914, only one firm endured.

It was do-it-yourselfers tinkering in their backyards that started the small wind movement to generate electricity in the United States in the rural Great Plains, places where utilities did not extend electricity service. The nascent wind industry then faced a challenge from the public power movement in America, prompted by Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, which led to a massive effort to expand the electric grid. Some wind farmers even threatened to dynamite the massive transmission towers that would traverse their properties.

The most successful small wind energy entrepreneur in history was Marcellus Jacobs, who came up with a wind turbine that became the unrivaled mainstay for "off-the-grid" rebels in the United States. He secured more than a dozen patents on what came to be the world's first state-of-the-art small wind electricity generator. The first Jacobs wind turbine in 1922 consisted of a rear axle from a Model T and a fan from an old water pumper. In his heyday, he employed up to 260 people and produced more than $50 million worth of wind turbine machinery before closing his doors in the 1950s. Jacobs' turbines are still on the market, being manufactured since 1986 by Wind Turbine Industries Corp. in Prior Lake, Minn.

Today's small wind landscape

While massive utility-scale wind turbines like those that dot the landscape at Montezuma Hills in Solano County have surged as a global industry – representing more than half of the new power plant capacity installed in the United States last year – the small wind industry has been struggling. According to Pike Research, approximately 97 percent of all small-scale renewable energy installations are solar photovoltaics, an option that requires less maintenance and that has enjoyed investments, first from large Japanese companies such as Sharp Electronics, and more recently from low-cost Chinese firms.

Momentum had been shifting. In 2008, a small wind federal tax credit was offered by the government for the first time, but it was capped at $4,000; in 2009, this cap on federal tax credits was removed and consumers were also allowed a 30 percent federal grant option. A surge in applications for complementary state subsidies made the small wind industry a victim of its own success, with many state small wind programs shut down or put on hold, including California's, which was one of the first states to offer rebates for small wind in the mid-'90s.

California's story has a twist. The California Energy Commission received more than 1,500 applications for incentives for small wind turbines within the past year. Unfortunately, about 85 percent of the requests, totaling $38 million, were for rebate amounts close to or equal to the total installed cost of the entire small wind turbines and linked to a single firm: DyoCore of Carlsbad. There was something clearly wrong, leading to a staff investigation which revealed that DyoCore made false claims on performance with energy production pretenses more than seven times what is theoretically possible.

In response, the Energy Commission called timeout this spring, realizing that consumers had little interest in, or the expertise to, verify performance claims. In late July, the Energy Commission staff initiated a formal legal complaint against DyoCore, seeking removal of the turbine from the eligibility list for rebates, and asking the state attorney general to prosecute, if warranted.

Unfortunately, the suspension of the nation's largest small wind incentive program has penalized the entire industry. Yet it has also added momentum to implement testing standards and certification requirements. The Small Wind Certification Council is now seeking to incorporate certification requirements into state funding programs for small wind turbine to offer consumers a clear guide on performance and safety with "apples to apples" comparison ratings. Go to www. smallwindcertification.org/ applicant-turbines/.

U.K. is hot global market

A new policy comparison Web tool funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, and which is now available at www.windpolicytool.org, can calculate paybacks for consumers on their investments for small wind turbines in all 50 states. An analysis performed by eFormative Options, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory verifies that California is still in the top 10 – assuming its program gets back on track later this year. Other states that rank highly include New York, Oregon and Vermont.

Nearly all domestic manufacturers of small wind turbines confirm a rough year in 2011 due to uncertainty surrounding availability of state financial incentives. "There is always a push and pull in the market," observed Chad Palmer of Wind Turbine Industries Corp., which sells a 20 kW Jacobs machine and had a banner year in 2010. He said that his firm is setting its sights offshore by seeking certification in order to sell into the U.K. market, which is probably the hottest global market right now, with Italy also coming on strong.

Bergey Windpower of Norman, Okla., is also seeking certification to sell into the U.K. market. "They have an excellent Feed-In Tariff program in the U.K., which pays 40 to 50 cents per kilowatt-hour, and great wind, especially to the north, in Scotland," said Mike Bergey, the company's CEO.

Here at home, other barriers to success include competition from Asia. "We've lost millions of dollars to cheap, substandard imports, which are selling at half the cost of mainstream companies. And that's why we are such strong supporters of certification standards," Bergey added. Even the nation's most successful company, Southwest Windpower, which sells the smallest turbines for the residential market, is reporting that sales in 2011 in the United States have dropped substantially over the past year, and that the firm now expects the majority of future income to come from overseas.

Globally, the United States is clearly losing its long-standing global leadership position on small wind to Britain. According to a market forecast prepared by Pike Research, the U.S. small wind market is expected to grow at a compounded annual rate of 16 percent until 2015, accumulating more than 51 megawatts of small wind capacity that year. During that same year, the U.K. will add 56 megawatts, a corresponding growth rate of 23 percent.

The small wind industry's other wild card is China, which became the world's largest wind power market in 2010, and which has historically played a critical role in reducing manufacturing costs due to low labor rates. While quality control issues still persist, China is now looking to expand its presence and market share in the international small wind arena.

The small wind industry may never reach the success of either the utility-scale wind industry or solar photovoltaics. But California and the nation would benefit immensely from a growing small wind market and recapturing the global leadership role the country has enjoyed for more than a century. What better way is there to diversify and democratize the regional energy economy than with a technology that pulls clean energy right out of thin air?

http://www.sacbee.com/2011/09/04/3881544/small-wind-industry-struggling.html#ixzz1XGxhiUZg