Archive for the 'Renewable Energy' Category

Landfill Energy Project in the Works in Charleston
By Will Jones / WSAZ

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (WSAZ) — A new project in the works in Charleston will turn garbage into electricity.

It is called the “Landfill Gas to Electricity” Program and Charleston will be the first city in the state to have such a site.

The landfill will produce enough electricity to power more than 2,000 homes.

“This is a renewable resource. So it’s constantly regenerating itself, so as long as waste continues to come into the landfill the landfill will continue to produce gas and more gas,” said Thomas Loehr from Charleston Clean Energy.

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Texas completes $1 billion wind energy complex
By  Candace Lombardi / CNet News

One of the world’s largest wind farms is now operational in the area surrounding Roscoe, Texas, E.ON Climate & Renewables (EC&R) announced Thursday.

The series of 627 wind turbines providing a 781.5-megawatt capacity covers about 100,000 acres and four Texas counties. But it’s not an isolated wind farm per se, nor a uniform series of turbines.

The wind complex is a collaborative wind project with the community that included negotiations with over 300 landowners, and a mix of different turbines made by several companies including Mitsubishi, General Electric, and Siemens.

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First Solar to Build World’s Largest Solar Power Plant in China
By John Duce and Indira A.R. Lakshmanan / Bloomberg.com

Sept. 9 (Bloomberg) — First Solar Inc., a U.S.-based renewable energy company, will build the world’s largest solar power plant in China as the country plans to increase non- polluting electricity generation.

The plant would be about thirty times larger than existing solar power stations operating in Europe, Dulce Qu, a Beijing- based spokeswoman for company, said by telephone today. The 2,000-megawatt complex will be built in Ordos City, Inner Mongolia, China by 2019, Tempe, Arizona-based First Solar said yesterday. One mega watt is enough to power 800 U.S. homes.

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Energy stocks open mixed as crude extends gains
By Jim Jelter / Market Watch

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Oil and gas stocks edged narrowly higher at the open Wednesday as crude-oil futures extended their winning streak to a third straight session. Early trades sent the NYSE Arca Oil Index

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By Erin Ailworth / Boston.com

A state board yesterday approved plans to build a natural gas plant in Brockton, but left local officials with the power to veto the plant’s construction by choosing whether to grant the zoning exemptions needed to build the 350-megawatt facility.

The state Energy Facilities Siting Board, a division of the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities, did not grant the exemptions because it “concluded that the proposed project’s environmental and energy supply benefits do not outweigh expected local impacts,’’ according to a statement.

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By Matthew L. Wald / The New York Times
July 13, 2009

WASHINGTON — While most lawmakers accept that more renewable energy is needed on the nation’s grid, the debate over the giant climate-change and energy bill now before Congress is exposing a fundamental rift. For many players, the energy not only has to be clean and free of carbon-dioxide emissions, it also has to be generated nearby.

The division has set off a fight between Eastern and Midwestern politicians and grid officials over parts of the bill dealing with transmission lines and solar and wind energy. Many officials, including President Obama, say that the grid is antiquated and that thousands of miles of new power lines are needed to allow construction of wind farms and solar fields in the most promising spots. Many of the best wind sites are in the Midwest, far from the electric load in populous East Coast cities.

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The Associated Press / Forbes.com
July 10, 2009

DENVER — Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, who has made promoting renewable energy a cornerstone of his administration, on Thursday called natural gas “a mission-critical fuel” that is essential to the state and nation’s economy.

“Natural gas is a vital part of the new energy economy, a permanent part of the new energy economy, not a bridge fuel, not a transition fuel, but a mission-critical fuel,” Ritter told a crowd of industry officials at the Colorado Oil and Gas Association’s annual conference in Denver.

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Los Angeles Times
July 12, 2009

Ayear ago the Oracle of Oil, T. Boone Pickens, reinvented himself as the Wizard of Wind, launching a $58-million ad campaign to boost alternative energy and vowing to spend $10 billion to build the world’s largest wind farm in the Texas Panhandle. It was a startling move from a staunch conservative who had made a fortune in the Texas oil fields, raising hopes that both ends of the political spectrum were coming around to the same point of view about weaning the country from its reliance on oil.

And then, last week, the Pickens plan foundered. Pickens announced that he was scrapping the wind farm. It’s too late to take back the $2 billion worth of wind turbines he has already ordered, so instead he has decided to place them in smaller projects around the country.

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Declaring “The Panhandle’s time is now,” the chairman of OGE Energy Corp. told shareholders Thursday he expects wind and solar energy to play a growing role in the electric utility’s future.

The Oklahoma Panhandle has wind and it has great sun resources, which puts it in position to take advantage of the political push to convert a growing percentage of the nation’s power supply to renewable energy sources, said Pete Delaney, chairman, president and chief executive of OGE Energy Corp.

Speaking at an annual shareholders meeting, Delaney was peppered with questions from shareholders interested in knowing more about the company’s plans to use wind and solar energy.

Delaney told investors OGE Energy Corp. only gets about 2 or 3 percent of its power from wind energy, but he expects that to increase to 15 to 20 percent in the next 10 or 15 years.

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By John Dorschner The Miami HeraldFor a year, while the green movement was at its height, Florida environmentalists, new solar companies, utility lobbyists and state regulators spent thousands of hours trying to determine how much of the state’s power supply should come from renewable energy sources like solar and wind.

They did it because the Legislature in 2008 ordered them to do it. After sifting through thousands of pages of documents and sitting in lengthy workshops, the Public Service Commission sent its recommendations to the 2009 Legislature. A renewable-energy bill passed the Senate but died in the House. The result: A year of work wasted.

Among the major victims: The ballyhooed Babcock Ranch project, which is trying to become the first solar-powered city in the world, and thousands of construction workers who would have been hired to build new power plants.

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