CleanTechnica

OceanWorksDevelopment; a group of 40 architects and planners has come up with a pretty wild and grandiose (or brilliant and visionary) solution to San Diego’s siting problems for its much needed new airport. Float the entire thing off-shore.

How serious are they? In a legally unprecedented move, OceanWorks CEO Adam Englund has booked the 40,000 square mile space on the Pacific with this claim holding “airport rights”.
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Here’s a radical perspective change for wind power. Instead of harnessing wind power to turn blades tethered to a pole, the KiteGen simply harnesses that rapid unspooling motion of kites reeling out as they release upwards.
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Somewhere in the U.S. there is a justice of the peace who still refuses to perform inter-racial marriages, but Principle Power, Inc. has no such backward looking qualms when it comes marrying two different forms of sustainable energy.  Last week the company won a $750,000 development grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to adapt its patented WindFloat platform to bring wave energy generating capability on board, along with the wind turbines for which it was originally designed.

Of particular interest to DOE is WindFloat’s innovative three-corner design, which stabilizes the platform against turbulence and enables it to be deployed in deep water where winds are more favorable to energy generation.  In addition to its obvious use in the civilian world, the marriage of wind and wave power may also prove fruitful for its application to the U.S. military’s need for non-petroleum energy sources at remote bases.

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Using just the resources that are currently commercially deployable; 31 of our 50 states, or 64% of US states could get 100% of their electricity from renewable sources in-state, and another 14 percent could generate 75 percent of their electricity in-state, according to a paper published by New Rules Project that focuses on the potential for local production.

In some ways, very local; which actually makes this a conservative estimate. For example:

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Big shifts seem to be stirring in the wind turbine market. Foreign companies are backing out of China due to China’s move to use more home-grown technology. At the same time, China is looking to expand its wind turbine sales into Europe.

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A big factor limiting solar and wind power growth across the US is the current transmission network. It is disconnected. A new project proposed by Tres Amigas LLC in New Mexico would link the nation’s main power grids and, therefore, give hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of households links to already existing renewable energy sources.

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A Florida school district was way ahead of the clean energy curve in the ’80’s. The Hillsborough School District contracted with the first companies pioneering the use of cheap excess off-peak night time power to freeze water at night which would then provide simple cooling by day for air conditioning. Some of those companies had not yet ironed out the kinks in the brand new technology, and recently the district had to find a replacement for these coolers.

A more timid school district might have run from off-peak energy storage altogether. But not Hillsborough. They are taking what they learned and applying their school of hard knocks expertise in selecting from the many companies that now provide second generation night cooling technology to power air conditioning systems.

What’s changed since the eighties is the addition of more wind power to the grid, and the likelihood of more to come with RPS legislation requiring the purchase of more renewable power in many states.

Typically most wind power comes ongrid at night; much more than can be used.

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Coal power is not base-load electricity by itself. To enable coal to reliably deliver electric power, it took the creation of an entire other national infrastructure; the trans-continental railroad system.

Without the unceasing rail-car-load delivery, every 12 hours, on the hour, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, year after year, of every next 12-hour-supply of fuel for the fire; the fire would go out, the water wouldn’t boil, the steam wouldn’t rise, the turbine wouldn’t turn; the next 12 hours of electricity wouldn’t be made. The fire must never go out.

Coal plus railroad = base-load power.

Even today, a century later, every 12 hours in this nation a trainload of coal from Wyoming or Pennsylvania or Ohio, must arrive at an electric power station near your city, to make your coal power for the next 12 hours. No trainload of coal; no coal power. What does that have to do with wind storage?

Wind plus storage = base-load power.

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European energy giant E.ON “turned on” what is reported to be the largest wind farm in the world this week, in Texas.

The farm contains 627 wind turbines on almost 100,000 acres of land near Roscoe, Texas.
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As the US finally moves into manufacturing our own clean energy, a new kind of engineering is starting to move to the forefront. Manufacturing processes engineering. Under the direction of associate professor Vinay Dayal; Iowa State U students are trying to find the way to make wind turbines roll off US assembly lines more efficiently. If we can work out cheap production processes here, we can build parts here.

The university is using a $6.3 million fund from the US Department of Energy, TPI, and and the Iowa Power Fund and has the assistance of scientists from Sandia National Labs and TPI, which operates a local turbine blade factory. Initially they are trying to see how they can boost the speed of the manufacturing process by increasing automation and by automating quality control.

They could improve the productivity of turbine blade factories by as much as 35%.
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