Organizers and Leaders: Start Here

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Comment by Richard Barnard on September 8, 2009 at 9:49am

Solyndra - New Solar Plant in Fremont, CA

http://gov.ca.gov/press-release/13204/

Richad Barnard

Comment by Dr. Hans J. Kugler, PhD on September 7, 2009 at 9:31pm

Let's face it: Neither CNG nor propane is THE clean energy solution of the future! BOTH ARE CARBON FUELS THAT, IN THE LONG RUN, NEED TO BE ELIMINATED. OK as a transition and, because the US has good amounts, a good energy source for US energy independence (hopefully replacing imported oil).
They are both cleaner burning than gasoline, and MUCH cleaner burning than coal; both produce mainly CO2 and a small amount of water when burned.
Coal is the real polluter; besides producing 100% CO2 when burned, coal also contains large amounts of toxic minerals like mercury, cadmium, arsenic, others.
With "clean coal" - - there is really no such thing as clean coal - - some of the toxic minerals are removed.
In the US alone, the major polluter "clean coal" still contributes to putting 49 TONS of mercury into the environment and into oceans - - - to such a degree that now pregnant women are advised not to eat fish (the mercury would harm the developing fetus).
The toxins, contained in slush "fly ash" are stored in humongous ponds (-poisons forever-), and recently we had one of those ponds broken and the slush spread all over the land, poisoning it for hundreds of years to come, getting into rivers and waterways and killing everything in it.
But you rarely hear about that; the coal industry has everybody (paid off?) under control.
The worst way of mining coal is strip mining - - - a true environmental disaster. But - - - the coal strip mining industry put $ 38 million into the Obama campaign - - this administration just assured W-VA congressman (also coal lobbyists) that it would not stand in the way of 24 future strip mining projects. What a shame!

The solutions:
AS A START: Learn about real problems, don't drink the water, pray a lot, install a PV system on your house, and buy a plug-in hybrid.
and check out www.ElToroEXPOSED.com

Comment by Dave Clement on September 7, 2009 at 1:26pm

Upcoming CNG displays in Arizona
Creative Energy Fair, Prescott Valley- Sat Sept 26th, 10-6:00
VSCC Alt Fuels Seminar, Gateway Community College, Phx Thurs Oct 1st
9-1:00
We will have CNG displays and/or presentations on CNG at these events and will be signing up people for thePickens Plan also.
There will be some brand new CNG suppliers as well as some of our old standbys there also!!
Please see EVENTS on this site for more information-
http://www.push.pickensplan.com/events

Dave

Comment by Lee Taylor on September 6, 2009 at 8:17am

News about a new Propane program in the Southeast:


OCEAN SPRINGS — Converting a vehicle to cleaner propane fuel saves money and the environment, and a coalition led by Blossman Gas of Ocean Springs has received $8.62 million in stimulus funds to bring the alternative fuel technology to the Southeast.

The grant, requested by Virginia's state energy department, will convert 1,500 vehicles to propane and create the country's first autogas corridor, where the vehicles can be refueled, from Washington, D.C., to Mississippi and Florida. The total cost of the project is $29 million.

Blossman Gas partnered with American Alternative Fuel to form Alliance AutoGas and roll out 1,500 vehicles that can run on propane. Another 3,000 will be retrofitted outside the grant, said Blossman President Stuart Weidie.

* Gallery:TANK TECHNOLOGY

Some customers look at the economic advantages of autogas, the term given to propane fuel for vehicles. "It's economical," said Weidie, priced more than $1 per gallon less than gasoline. Autogas also keeps a vehicle engine running three times longer with fewer oil changes.

Weidie said more of their customers see converting to autogas as an opportunity to do their part for the environment. Propane fuel reduces carbon monoxide emissions by 28 percent and hydrocarbons by one-third, he said. Others appreciate that autogas reduces dependence on foreign oil. Nearly all of the propane used in the United States comes from within the country and Canada.

"This sounds too good to be true," one person told Weidie, who told him autogas is used extensively throughout Europe. The United States is behind in the technology because the country had such cheap energy. "It's just now evolving," he said. Autogas provides the same power and performance, and the vehicle can switch over to regular gasoline if a propane fuel tank isn't available.

Blossman introduced propane fuel in the 1980s, when fleets of police and school vehicles in Mississippi operated on the alternative fuel. That experience is one of the reasons the autogas corridor will run to the state.

"We're based here in Mississippi," Weidie said of Blossman Gas. "Ocean Springs is still our home office." The corporate office is in Ashville, N.C., in the middle of the company's territory of 64 stores from Washington, D.C., to coastal Mississippi.

The AutoGas Corridor Development Project has three components: the equipment, the conversion centers and the fueling network. Weidie said key to the program is installation of the Prins Conversion System by certified installers. Blossman Gas will build the refueling centers, including eight that will be open to the public. The pumps look like regular gas tanks but the nozzle screws into the propane tank that is installed inside the trunk of the car and is more impact-resistant than the car's regular gas tank. For large fleets, the refueling equipment will be installed at the company, school or police departments' sites, Weidie said.

Alliance AutoGas also will be available at the five Blossman Gas locations in South Mississippi, in Waveland, Gulfport, D'Iberville, Ocean Springs and Pascagoula, and 12 others throughout the state.

Weidie said they are primarily starting with fleet conversations under the Department of Energy stimulus grant, but personal vehicles also can be converted if Alliance AutoGas has the Environmental Protection Agency-approved systems for the vehicles. Crown Victorias, which are used for police cars and taxis, can be converted now and the equipment will be available in next 30 days for Ford 250 and 350 vans. Compact cars also will be able to be retrofitted, and Weidie said some of the automakers are building autogas fueled vehicles.

Weidie said the company has 12 employees solely focused on potential prospects for autogas, and its Alliance AutoGas partners were careful not going to the market too early. "We wanted to get it right the first time," he said.

Privately owned, Blossman Gas is the largest independent propane company in the United States and the 10th largest overall.
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Comment by Dr. Hans J. Kugler, PhD on September 5, 2009 at 3:53pm

Actually you DON'T NEED electricity storage with your home PV systems.
The system comes with a new meter which runs backward when you produce more electricity than what you use.
A key here is - - - what utility companies try to refuse - - - that you should get paid if, at the end of the month (or 6-month period) it turns out that you produced MORE electricity than what you used.
Away from everything, or not connected to a utility grid, you may want to use some deep-cycle storage batteries (often available at auctions from the military that use them to quick-start jets).

Comment by Dr. Hans J. Kugler, PhD on September 5, 2009 at 3:40pm

William, and other interested parties:
First, I never refuse(d) to comment about any problem.
Most people, if asked when electricity needs are highest, will respond :"at night."
But this is definitely not the case. Actually electricity needs are highest mid to early afternoon (around 1:30 to 3). And that's the time when things can get critical; more electricity is used than what can actually be generated - - - and severe emergencies arise with power line overload, and transformers and capacitors blowing, etc.
The Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI.org) addressed this with "The Intelligent Garage." Thousands of electric cars (also being charged by PV panels overhead), plugged in to an intelligent grid (- like the one overseen by Siemens in Germany, Wallstreet Journal 9.4.09-) could supply some of this much needed electricity, and use of other non-essential electric units (like washing machines, air conditioners, etc.) would be automatically shortened or turned down. Thus peak demand - - a highly critical factor - - would be reduced.
There is time enough to replenish the "borrowed" electricity before driving home.
Most EVs and plug-in hybrids don't need fully recharging. According to the Dept. of transportation about 90% of daily round-trips are 19 miles or less.
EVs and plug-in hybrids also come with a range-extender, a combination of a small lawnmower type motor and a generator which, if turned on, will produce electricity if needed.
Relative to electricity demands during the day, nighttime electricity demands are extremely low; some coal-fired electricity stations are actually turned off, and with hydroelectric plants they even stop turbines. With this cheap nighttime electricity, relative to expensive daytime electricity, charging plug-ins and EVs is estimated to cost less than $ 2.50 per 100 miles.
Combine Wind and PV electricity, and the chance that you run out is close to zero - - - especially if an "intelligent grid" would recognize possible problems.
Add to this the - - approximately 30 - - projects that are in final stages of storing electricity for nighttime use, PROBLEM SOLVED.
One of those storage problems, using salt, was mentioned in one of the recent posts here (Scientific American).
Please watch RMI's Amory Lovins testify in Washington about nuclear energy, quoted in my post below.
Hope everybody has seen the 72 Datsun, converted to electric, that is beating BMWs and Corevettes on the drag strip.
For more answers, check out ElToroEXPOSED.com.

Comment by amy oconnor on September 5, 2009 at 3:00pm

For home-level solar storage you need Deep Cycle Batteries -

You can purchase these at retail stores or online for a variety of prices
although they seem to be kinda pricey....At make-a-solar-panel.com
you can buy a DIY kit to make either solar panels or a wind generator....
AND he says he can tell you where to get these expensive batteries for like $20
a piece....which seems worth the cost of admission alone !!!

Comment by amy oconnor on September 5, 2009 at 2:33pm

-OR-

PG&E wants to store wind, solar energy

David R. Baker, Chronicle Staff Writer

Thursday, August 27, 2009
Holding nature's breath (Chronicle Graphic)

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. wants to take energy from wind farms and solar power plants and store it underground.

In a rural corner of Kern County, PG&E plans to build a facility that would use energy from renewable power plants to compress air and pump it into an underground reservoir. The pressurized air would later be fed into a turbine to generate electricity.

The San Francisco company on Wednesday applied for a $25 million federal grant to pay for designing the facility. The total cost of the project, which could take five years to complete, would top $300 million, most of it paid by the utility's customers.

The idea of using compressed air to store large amounts of energy could solve one of renewable power's biggest problems - variability. Wind farms generate nothing when the wind doesn't blow. Solar plants, obviously, are useless at night.

PG&E's project would take wind power generated at night - when the winds in California blow their hardest - and use it to store compressed air in a formation of porous rock. During the day, when the winds die down, the facility could generate as much as 300 megawatts for up to 10 hours. A megawatt is enough to power roughly 750 homes at any given moment.

The idea has been tried in Alabama and Germany, but not in California. If it proves economical, it could be replicated anyplace with appropriate rock formations underground as well as strong sunlight or strong wind.

"You need the right geology, but it's not a really rare geology," said PG&E spokesman Jonathan Marshall. "If we can move this forward, it can be done around the country."

E-mail David R. Baker at dbaker@sfchronicle.com.

Comment by amy oconnor on September 5, 2009 at 2:32pm

Like this, William - perhaps they are on to something good here !!

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-to-use-solar-energy-at-night&print=true

How to Use Solar Energy at Night

Molten salts can store the sun's heat during the day and provide power at night

By David Biello

Near Granada, Spain, more than 28,000 metric tons of salt is now coursing through pipes at the Andasol 1 power plant. That salt will be used to solve a pressing if obvious problem for solar power: What do you do when the sun is not shining and at night?

The answer: store sunlight as heat energy for such a rainy day.

Part of a so-called parabolic trough solar-thermal power plant, the salts will soon help the facility light up the night—literally. Because most salts only melt at high temperatures (table salt, for example, melts at around 1472 degrees Fahrenheit, or 800 degrees Celsius) and do not turn to vapor until they get considerably hotter—they can be used to store a lot of the sun's energy as heat. Simply use the sunlight to heat up the salts and put those molten salts in proximity to water via a heat exchanger. Hot steam can then be made to turn turbines without losing too much of the original absorbed solar energy.

The salts—a mixture of sodium and potassium nitrate, otherwise used as fertilizers—allow enough of the sun's heat to be stored that the power plant can pump out electricity for nearly eight hours after the sun starts to set. "It's enough for 7.5 hours to produce energy with full capacity of 50 megawatts," says Sven Moormann, a spokesman for Solar Millennium, AG, the German solar company that developed the Andasol plant. "The hours of production are nearly double [those of a solar-thermal] power plant without storage and we have the possibility to plan our electricity production."

Using mirrors to concentrate the sun's energy is an old trick—the ancient Chinese and Greeks both used it to start fires—and modern power plants employing it might provide a significant source of renewable energy without any greenhouse gas emissions.

That is a step forward in its own right, but such power plants are limited to generating energy only when there is sunshine. So engineers have tried a number of different technologies to store the sun's energy so that such power plants can be more broadly employed. They have tried batteries but too much of the energy that goes in is not returned, and they tend to be too expensive, according to an analysis from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colo. Compressing air or pumping water uphill are more promising, but the opportunities to do that are limited by the number of caverns and the availability of water and reservoirs.

Melting salts at temperatures above 435 degrees Fahrenheit (224 degrees Celsius), however, can deliver back as much as 93 percent of the energy, plus the salts are ubiquitous because of their application as fertilizers.

"There's a term called round-trip efficiency. Basically, it's a measure of how much electricity is produced if the thermal energy that's generated is first stored and then used compared to just directly taking the energy. That number is around 93 percent," explains NREL senior engineer Greg Glatzmaier. "[For] things like compressed air and mechanical type storage, there's more significant losses," an average of at least 20 percent over all the various technologies.

The Andasol 1 power plant, which cost around $380 million (300 million euros) to build, is the first to actually use the technology, so it remains to be seen how it will work in commercial practice. But U.S. government laboratories—NREL as well as Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M.—have already proved the technology can work in demonstration projects that employed it, like the Solar Two power tower outside Barstow, Calif.

Solar Millennium is so confident the technology will work that a twin solar-thermal power plant (Andasol 2) is already near completion. "It will start operations at the beginning of summer—May or June," Moormann says.

And Arizona Public Service Co. (APS) has contracted with Abengoa Solar to build a 280-megawatt solar thermal power plant—dubbed Solana or "sunny place"—70 miles (110 kilometers) southwest of Phoenix on nearly 2,000 acres (800 hectares) of land. "One of the great things about molten salt technology is that you can get more out of the pure solar resources, more energy out of the same facility," says Barbara Lockwood, manager for renewable energy at APS. "It's an alternative that provides us with additional green energy," as much as 1,680 megawatt-hours when cloudy or after sunset.

But that extra energy comes at a cost. First, the power plant has to be enlarged so that it is both generating its full electrical capacity as well as heating up the salts. In the case of Andasol 1 that meant covering 126 acres (50 hectares) with long rows of troughs and pipe. And then there is the additional expense of the molten salt storage tanks, according to Moormann.

All told, that means thermal energy storage at Andasol 1 or power plants like it costs roughly $50 per kilowatt-hour to install, according to NREL's Glatzmaier. But it doesn't add much to the cost of the resulting electricity because it allows the turbines to be generating for longer periods and those costs can be spread out over more hours of electricity production. Electricity from a solar-thermal power plant costs roughly 13 cents a kilowatt-hour, according to Glatzmaier, both with and without molten salt storage systems.

That price is still nearly twice as much as electricity from a coal-fired power plant—the current cheapest generation option if environmental costs are not taken into account. But Arizona's APS and others can then use solar energy to meet the maximum electricity demand later in the day. "Our peak demand [for electricity] is later in the evening, once solar production is trailing off," Lockwood says. That's "the reason we went that direction and are so interested in storage technology."

As efficient as solar-thermal power plants using parabolic troughs with molten salt storage systems like Andasol 1 or Solana are, they don’t capture as much of the sun's heat as is possible. Above 750 degrees F (400 degrees C), the synthetic oils used to capture the sun’s heat in the troughs begin to break down, but the molten salts can take in much more heat than that.

To allow the salts to get hotter, some companies, such as SolarReserve in Santa Monica, Calif., are developing so-called power towers—vast fields of mirrors that concentrate sunlight onto a central tower. Because of the centralized design such a structure can operate at much higher temperatures—up to 1,000 degrees F (535 degrees C)—and use molten salts directly as the fluid transferring heat in the power plant. "We are heating the salts to more than 1,000 degrees F and that results in the same inlet conditions that utilities see today on a coal-fired or nuclear power plant," says Terry Murphy, SolarReserve's president.

But such a power plant—and Murphy says the company has some 50 such projects in the pipeline and expects at least one (in the U.S. or Spain) to be operating by 2013—would cost as much as $800 million for a 200-megawatt power tower. "The first molten salt power tower built is going to be a real trial," says Thomas Mancini, manager of Sandia's Concentrating Solar Power Program. "It's going to take someone progressive enough to finance it or take a little more risk."

So researchers are also looking into salts that could be used instead of the oil in parabolic trough power plants, such as those that melt at lower temperatures and therefore would not freeze as readily during cold nights, according to Hank Price, a vice president for technology development at Abengoa Solar.

Solar Millennium is working on such a salt, according to Moormann, and Sandia has developed small quantities of a new mixture of salts, including calcium nitrate and lithium nitrate, that melt below 212 degrees F (100 degrees C). "With the lithium nitrate, it's as expensive as all the other constituents combined. Though still a lot cheaper than organic heat-transfer oils," says chemical engineer Bob Bradshaw at Sandia in California, who is leading the research. "You don't get something for nothing."

And long-term research projects are looking at other thermal storage technologies, such as storing heat in sand or creating single-tank molten salt storage. "The main goal is to find a storage technology that may reduce the actual capital cost" of adding it to a power plant, says Phil Smithers, technical services leader for renewable energy at APS, which is researching those technologies under a U.S. Department of Energy grant.

Ultimately, it will come down to how much value policymakers and consumers put on electricity that is renewable and emissions-free. "If we start valuing carbon and force a coal plant to go carbon-free via sequestration then we're at or over 10 cents per kilowatt-hour from coal," Mancini says. "Any of these technologies can get to that same 10 cents level with [molten salt] storage. Then the market will make the call."

And should Andasol 1 spring a leak or otherwise fail to deliver as expected, the damage would not be confined to a pile of salt fertilizer on the ground—it could be a setback for the entire effort to store solar energy. "We had to build the first [commercial] plant [with molten salt storage] and that's what Andasol is," Mancini says, in order to prove the technology. "It doesn't have to be perfect, but they've got to make it work."
Further Reading

* The Origin of Computing
* First U.S. "Power Tower" Lights Up California
* An Iron Key to High-Temperature Superconductivity?
* Is There a Place for Nuclear Waste?



* Cagey Solution: Will Nano Traps Make Geothermal Power Earthquake-Safe?
* Can Captured Carbon Save Coal-Fired Power?
* Top 25 Green Energy Leaders
* The Heat Is On When It Comes to Building Coal-Fired Power Plants

Comment by amy oconnor on September 5, 2009 at 2:27pm

" how can we get the word out to all the people in this state "

" not all have to be dumb red necks "

Helen
Which state are you referring to please ??

I certainly think you could have used a better phrase that would not offend hundreds, perhaps thousands of people in this Community !!

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