CleanTechnica

Cleantech startups have stopped seeing GE as an adversary and have started realizing the company can help them make a difference, Kevin Skillern, a managing director at GE Energy Financial Services, said in a keynote speech at a Thomson Reuters conference called “Financing the Cleantech Vision” in Palo Alto on Wednesday.

In spite of the recession, Skillern assured the audience that the long-term business opportunity for cleantech is still there, though it will require “a strong stomach and a lot of patience” to cash in on it. He also called climate change “one of, if not the biggest, societal challenges of our time” and said technology was an essential part of the solution.

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High-altitude winds hold enough energy to power the world 100 times over.

Though harnessing them is another issue.

You’ve heard of commercial wind turbines in farm fields, offshore turbines on the water, even small wind turbines on the rooftops of homes, but high-altitude winds are also being studied as a potential energy source.

The first-ever study of high-altitude winds by the Carnegie Institution and California State University says winds in the jet stream, about 30,000 feet up, would be the ideal source to exploit. And the sky over New York is a prime spot, along with population centers in the eastern United States and East Asia.

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The state of Massachusetts is hunting for unusual places to put wind turbines as it looks to meet an ambitious goal of producing 2,000 megawatts of windpower by 2020.

The Associated Press reports that state officials are encouraging municipal planners to look at using capped landfills as potential wind farm locations. Plans were also just announced for a military reservation on Cape Cod.

The state is hoping to jump start development, because right now, the AP reports, there are only 11 commercial scale turbines in the state. But, ther are dozens of smaller ones installed and nearly 200 other projects in various stages of planning.

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When it comes to environmental news, doom and gloom often rules the day. And it’s easy to get discouraged. But scientists from Yale University say most polluted ecosystems can recover in as little as 5 or 10 years.

The study means it’s not too late to turn things around if societies commit to cleanup, restoration and sustainability, according to Yale’s analysis of 240 independent studies. The findings appear in this month’s issue of the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE.
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Right now, there’s no wind in the Great Lakes, but lots of talk.

There’s a bit of money, too, totaling about $100,000 from the federal stimulus package, aka the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

The Great Lakes Commission has been granted $99,740 to develop a set of “Best Practices to Accelerate Wind Power in the Great Lakes and Beyond.”

The end result will be a guide to what works and what doesn’t when it comes to protecting the environment, being sensitive to community concerns and … building wind turbines in the water.

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A wind farm that was planned for the upstate New York town of Beekmantown and shot down by town officials after a collapse of a turbine at a nearby park, may be back on again.

A new developer has submitted plans to the town, the Plattsburgh Press-Republican reports. The town council voted down a plan submitted by Windhorse Power LLC in March. Among the reasons cited were contentious lawsuits filed by residents, inaction by Windhorse Power and fears of an incident similar to a turbine collapse in neighboring Altona.

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Diversified renewable energy solutions provider Leviathan Energy announced today that it will officially commence US sales and marketing efforts for the Wind Energizer, its patented technology for increasing the power output of large wind turbines.

Speaking from the American Wind Energy Association’s annual conference and expo in Chicago, CEO of Leviathan Energy, Dr. Daniel Farb, said he expects “that with the very fast return on investment the Wind Energizer can deliver, sales will be quite strong.”

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Passive structure design of “Wind Energizer” by Leviathan Energy reportedly increases wind turbine efficiency 30% in field tests.

Technological advancements in wind energy efficiency have generally come incrementally and usually made via a process of increasingly large wind turbine blades. Put simply, the model has been: longer blades = more output per turbine.

But that pattern of incremental improvements may be a thing of the past if Leviathan Energy has anything to say about it. Leviathan Energy has completed initial testing on their Wind Energizer unit and is reporting gains in wind turbine output in the ballpark of 30% — and as much as 150% at lower wind speeds.

The principle theory at work is that by placing passive objects around a wind farm it will change the circulation around a large wind turbine. The advancement is not in the turbine itself, but rather in the area around it, as such, units can be adapted to any wind turbine from any manufacturer.

“This is a disruptive technology,” Leviathan Energy CEO Dr. Daniel Farb told me via telephone from Israel last week. “We are changing the environment of the wind turbine; this is a very different approach.” Read the rest of this entry »

With all of the attention being paid to where the United States’ first offshore wind farm will be located—there are existing proposals at various stages for ocean-based offshore wind farms in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, New York and Texas—New York Power Authority (NYPA) yesterday announced a major public-private initiative for the potential development of wind power projects in the state of New York’s fresh waters of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario.

In an initiative known as the Great Lakes Offshore Wind Project, NYPA released a Request for Expressions of Interest (RFEI) to initiate efforts to develop offshore wind projects in the Great Lakes. If somehow completed before the above mentioned projects, the Great Lakes project would not only be the first offshore wind farm in the U.S., it would be the first freshwater wind farm in the world. Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: This post is a guest contribution by Frank Sesno, Emmy-award winning journalist and former CNN Bureau Chief. ”Planet Forward” is an innovative, viewer-driven program driven by the power of ideas, as citizens make their case for what they think about the nation’s energy future. The show debuts TONIGHT (8pm), in a primetime PBS special. See Frank Sesno’s last post for CleanTechnica here.

What we’re hearing at Planet Forward is rumbles of a revolution.

Some expressions are serious, some are humorous. There are essays and poems and songs. But in almost all cases, if we take this stuff at face value, we’re hearing calls for an overthrow of the old ways we drive, work, travel, get around.  

A revolution in technology and green jobs to reduce carbon emissions, deal with climate change and improve our security.  A revolution in the energy marketplace to knock the oil-igarchs around the world down a notch.  Coincidentally, this is the bottom line of Barack Obama’s hugely ambitious energy program.  And it’s what citizens and experts alike weigh in on here at Planet Forward.  

This is a place where everyone has the chance to make their case about how we use energy, where our future energy should be, and how we should think about the issue.  We’ve heard from scientists and students, CEO’s and cab drivers, defenders of coal and oil as well as advocates of wind and solar.   We’ve even got a few politicians making their case!  It’s an orchestra of voices.

What makes Planet Forward different is that we connect some of the best ideas  – rated by the online community and reviewed by our Planet Forward editorial staff –directly to decision-makers.  Some go straight to the White House.  We do all this in a prime-time television special on PBS and through follow-on webisodes here at planetforward.org.  What’s most striking is how seriously the experts take the ideas and experiences of people out in the ‘real world.’  As they should.