CleanTechnica

An amazingly high percentage of people who live down the Mid-Atlantic Seaboard from New York to Virginia want wind turbines off their coast.

Even if they can be seen from the shoreline, 67% support off-shore wind power, according to a new poll of coastal residents of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia .

If the turbines are out of sight, the level of support goes up to an astounding 82%.

A full 25% of the population of the US lives in the nine Atlantic states from Massachusetts to North Carolina. The potential is staggering.  So it is very fortunate that so many people in the middle of part of the region with such great potential for wind power feel this way.

Off-shore wind power off the Atlantic could take one third of the US population off the fossil grid.
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Iowa leads the US in the percentage of wind power on the grid. The local utility companies pay area farmers royalties of $3,000–5,000 per year so huge wind turbines can share their vast farmland acreage and feed the power to the grid. The arrangement has been so successful that 15% of Iowa’s power now comes from wind.

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Europe’s Cap and Trade has reduced fossil energy use and grown renewable energy

Here’s an example of how fossil energy companies could switch to renewable energy.  The Norwegian company  StatoilHydro is celebrating the off-shore wind inauguation this month of their Hywind pilot in the North Sea. Off-shore oil drilling companies are in a good position to leverage their expertize to develop off-shore wind; (just as fossil companies on land could also switch from oil drilling to geothermal drilling.)

StatoilHydro’s $58 million Hywind project draws on the company’s long years of experience in offshore oil and gas drilling to easily make the switch to renewable energy. Because of the long previous experience with suppliers they were able to deliver the off-shore wind project on budget and on schedule.

Siemens built the turbine, while Technip built and installed the offshore floater. Nexans Norway laid the submarine power line to the receiving station operated by grid operator Haugaland Kraft who will deliver the power to the grid

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Germany’s position as the world wind leader was consolidated today with an announcement of 40 offshore wind farms to be built in German waters more than 12 miles off the coast.

The goal is to get a total of 25,000 megawatts just from ocean-sited wind power by 2030. This would provide the first half of that; from a 12,000 MW wind farm.

Germany is only just starting to dip its toes into off-shore wind production. It signed its first offshore wind project of just 15 megawatts a few months ago with the Alpha Ventus project that was co-financed by German energy giants Vattenfall, E.on and EWE and subsidized by the German government.
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A new report says that offshore wind “provides the answer to Europe’s energy and climate dilemma” and will soon provide Europe with about 10% of its electricity demand.
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As mentioned in previous posts, the United Nations is calling on rich (developed) countries to provide developing countries with $500-600 billion a year in support to tackle climate change. A recent report declares that India needs $1.1 trillion in the next several years to cut emission growth by 50-60% by 2030. Another report from the last week says that China could cut its emissions by 30% by 2030 as well with $900 billion of investment in wind energy.

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Successfully transitioning the United States to low‐carbon electricity will require an improved
transmission infrastructure. Cities don’t grow where there’s too much wind. The best solar is far from us in our deserts.

We need to build a supergrid like the national highway system we built in the 1930’s. But a new study finds that this might be almost impossible to do in this country. A historical legacy of Balkanized ownership of multiple tiny grids and ineffective regulatory structure has hindered upgrades to and expansion of the U.S. transmission network.

In these political times of political hysteria against any kind of national common good, it will be hard to overcome a legacy that grew out of our rugged individualism.

By contrast, China and Europe have easily added more renewable power, by socializing the grid.
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Only after I snoozed my way through high school science class did science become more compelling than science fiction.

Back then, there was just no compelling reason to pay attention. Just a browzy fly buzzing in a smelly boring lab full of long agreed-upon dull principles that were really neither here nor there. In those days there were no colliding continents or hydrothermal vents or extremophile lifeforms. We looked to sci-fi for that.

Who knew that our planet would soon be busting at the seams with 7 billion of us. That our fossil fuel use would threaten our survival with climate changes — on a level unseen on the planet since Cyanobacteria made it safe it for oxygen-breathers 4 billion years ago.

Or that we would not only discover vast strange heat sources under the ocean but that we’d actually consider mining these hydrothermal vents for renewable energy: That was the sort of story you’d only find in science fiction back then.

But yet, here we are. This is not science fiction: Read the rest of this entry »

Pumped hydro storage is a simple technology already in wide use. Pump water up a hill when you have available energy, let it fall when you need its power.

But Riverbank Power; a new start-up founded by a former wind developer who wants to develop large-scale energy storage, is trying out a new idea. Instead of using hills for the height, it will go the other way. Down into the ground.

Their Aquabank would let gravity drop water underground to turn turbines and make hydro electricity. That electricity would be sent from underground to the grid day time. At night, when excess wind is available; wind powered electricity would gently push the water back up to replenish its surface source.

Video after the jump:
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As PG&E ramps up renewable power in response to the California RPS requirement that it get 33% of its electricity from renewables by 2020; it has been exploring ways to add that much renewable power to the grid while smoothing out the ups and downs of wind energy, which often peaks at night.

The utility needs a way to turn sometimes-too-much wind into anytime-always-there electricity.

The solution? Simple tech. Underground compressed air.

With compressed air energy storage; air is compressed and then pumped in natural underground reservoirs. The air is released later and converted into electricity. With enough storage, even fickle wind could actually supply base-load power.

So PG&E has applied for DOE smart grid stimulus funding under The Recovery Act; to build a compressed air energy storage project with output capacity of 300 megawatts. They are applying for $25 million.

By comparison, building a plant to burn fossil fuels would cost around $850 million for the same 300 megawatts of fossil energy.

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