*News and Events
University of Missouri-Rolla Wins American Solar Challenge Massive New Wind Power Plants Planned for Texas and Wyoming
Ten Northeast States to Cooperate to Lower Carbon Emissions
Research Advances Show Promise for Solid-State Lighting
AstroPower Accounting Crisis Leads to Delisting from NASDAQ
*Energy Connections
EIA Maps Out U.S. Household Energy Use by Region
University of Missouri-Rolla Wins American Solar Challenge
The University of Missouri-Rolla took first place last week in the American Solar Challenge, the 2,300-mile solar car race from Chicago to Los Angeles. Missouri-Rolla took the lead on the fourth day and never let it go, averaging nearly 43.3 miles per hour overall and beating the record time from the 2001 race by more than four hours.
The University of Minnesota came in second, nearly five hours behind Missouri-Rolla, while the University of Waterloo took third place. The race is sponsored by DOE, DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory,
BP Solar, and EDS. See the July 23rd press release from DOE at:
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See also the American Solar Challenge Web site:
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Meanwhile, the Houston Solar Car Team won the Dell-Winston Solar Challenge last week. The high-school team from Houston, Mississippi, logged 689.2 miles on the road (as opposed to transporting the vehicle
by trailer), hit a top speed of 64 miles per hour, and averaged 23.1 miles per hour along the 1,500-mile course. Rainy weather toward the end of the race slowed the average speed of the vehicles. This year marked the tenth anniversary of the solar car race for high-school students. See the July 24th press release from Dell Inc. at: [sorry this link is no longer available]
See also the Dell-Winston Solar Challenge Web site at:
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Massive New Wind Power Plants Planned for Texas and Wyoming
Two wind power plants totaling more than 300 megawatts in capacity will be built in Texas and Wyoming by year-end, and those are just two of eight wind projects planned for five states — yielding 636 megawatts of wind power capacity — that were announced in the past two weeks.
In Texas, Shell WindEnergy Inc. and Padoma Wind Power are building a 160-megawatt wind power plant near the town of Brazos in Scurry and Borden counties, about 90 miles southeast of Lubbock. Cielo Wind Power, LLC and Orion Energy LLC will develop the wind plant, and Green Mountain Energy Company and TXU Energy have agreed to buy all the power generated by the facility. Called the Green Mountain Wind Farm at Brazos, the plant will consist of 160 Mitsubishi wind turbines and is expected to be operating by year-end. See the press releases from Green Mountain Energy Company and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. at: [sorry this link is no longer available]
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A 37.5-megawatt wind power project is also under construction south of Sweetwater, Texas, about 40 miles west of Abilene. GE Wind Energy is supplying 25 of its 1.5-megawatt wind turbines for the Sweetwater Wind Project, considered Phase I of an eventual 400-megawatt wind power project. DKR Development LLC is building the wind plant and TXU Energy will buy all the power that it produces. See the July 22nd press releases from TXU Energy and GE Wind Energy at:
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In Wyoming, FPL Energy, LLC is preparing to build, own, and operate a 144-megawatt wind power facility in Uinta County, about 10 miles northeast of Evanston, near the southwest corner of the state. Orion Energy developed the project, which is the largest yet in Wyoming. FPL Energy will start construction later this year and complete it by the end of this year. The U.S. subsidiary of Denmark’s Vestas Wind Systems A/S is supplying 80 1.8-megawatt wind turbines for the project. See the FPL Energy and Vestas press releases at:
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New projects throughout the rest of the country include another FPL Energy project to build a 30-megawatt wind plant near Meyersdale in southwestern Pennsylvania. The Meyersdale Wind Energy Center will employ 20 1.5-megawatt wind turbines and will be complete by year-end. In Illinois, Spanish wind developer Gamesa Energia is building its first U.S. plant, a 50.4-megawatt project. The company’s U.S. subsidiary, Mendota Hills, LLC, is building the facility using 63 of Gamesa’s 800-kilowatt wind turbines. In Wisconsin, We Energies has signed 20-year power purchase agreements with the developers of three wind projects totaling 214 megawatts in capacity. Navitas Energy will develop two 80-megawatt wind projects — the Blue Sky Wind Farm and the Green Field Wind Farm — both in eastern Wisconsin, and Midwest Wind Energy, LLC will develop the 54-megawatt Butler Ridge wind farm in southeastern Wisconsin. See the press releases from FPL Energy, Gamesa, and We Energies at:
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Ten Northeast States to Cooperate to Lower Carbon Emissions
New York Governor George Pataki announced last week that nine other northeast states have agreed to join New York in a regional strategy to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. The governors of Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Delaware, Maine, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island have sent letters
expressing their interest in working with New York to develop a cap-and-trade program for carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.
Maryland has indicated that they may participate in the discussions at a later date. See the Governor’s press release at: [sorry this link is no longer available]
Governor Pataki formed a Greenhouse Gas Task Force in June 2001 and had an independent facilitator, the Center for Clean Air Policy (CCAP), work with the task force to prepare a report examining ways to reduce New York’s greenhouse gas emissions. That report, provided to the governor in April 2003, included the recommendation to take a regional approach to reducing greenhouse gases — a recommendation that the governor responded to by writing to the ten governors. Other recommendations included setting an aggressive greenhouse gas emissions target for New York, establishing a variety of energy efficiency programs, requiring that the state draw on renewable energy for a percentage of its electricity use, and establishing a greenhouse
gas emission standard for passenger vehicles. See the New York Greenhouse Gas Task Force page on the CCAP Web site at: [sorry this link is no longer available]
New York State’s most recent action to encourage clean energy use was the award of $14.5 million on July 18th to support 36 distributed generation and combined heat and power projects throughout the state. The projects will enable commercial, agricultural, and industrial energy users to generate their own electricity. The projects will also use waste heat from the electric generation equipment for productive purposes, such as space or water heating. See the governor’s press release at:
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Research Advances Show Promise for Solid-State Lighting
Separate research advances at DOE’s Sandia National Laboratories and at GE Global Research are encouraging for two different approaches to making solid-state lights. Lights made from solid-state materials,
including light-emitting diodes (LEDs), could potentially operate at much higher efficiency than incandescent or fluorescent lights, providing a new way to save energy. Already, LED traffic lights are saving energy for cities throughout the United States, but the true “holy grail” for solid-state lighting is a bright white light that can be used to illuminate homes and businesses.
Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories are using an innovative approach to solid-state lighting, building their lights from “quantum dots” — nanometer-sized dots of light-emitting material. The microscopic phosphors emit light without scattering it, so they are an efficient light source, and can be “tuned” to emit the right frequencies of light by changing their size and their surface chemistry. The trick, though, is encapsulating the dots without letting them clump together. Sandia solved that problem by chemically attaching the dots along the long-chain molecule that forms the encapsulating plastic. In the center of the plastic is an LED that
emits near-ultraviolet light; the surrounding quantum dots absorb that light and emit white light. The lights produced by the Sandia team convert 60 percent the energy supplied to them into light. See the
July 14th press release from Sandia National Laboratories at:
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Researchers at General Electric’s research organization, GE Global Research, are taking a totally different approach to solid-state lighting, building their lights from organic LEDs, or OLEDs. OLEDs can be produced from thin sheets of plastic material that could be produced using inexpensive roll-to-roll technology, much like the machines used to print newspapers. The result would be a revolutionary paper-thin light that could be applied to walls or ceilings like wallpaper. The problem tackled by GE researchers was the tendency for
one short circuit to cause an entire sheet to stop emitting light. To make a more “fault tolerant” OLED, the researchers found a way to break up the surface of the sheet into smaller sections, so that a failure in one part of the device would not cause the whole sheet to go black. See the July 8th press release on the GE Web site at: [sorry this link is no longer available]
Meanwhile, a number of companies continue to develop traditional LEDs for use as lighting sources. For instance, Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. (TAEC) has added bluish green and reddish purple LEDs to its line of high-luminosity LEDs. And Lumileds Lighting, another maker of high-luminosity LEDs, has seen its products used in everything from car headlights to stage lighting. The company plans to
produce a “warm” white light, mimicking the color of an incandescent bulb, beginning in August. See the press releases from TAEC and Lumileds at: [sorry this link is no longer available]
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AstroPower Accounting Crisis Leads to Delisting from NASDAQ
AstroPower, Inc. — a U.S. solar electric manufacturer and a leading provider of solar electric systems for residences — was removed from the NASDAQ market listings on Friday after the company failed to meet
an extended deadline to file its annual report for 2002 and its first- quarter report for 2003. In an announcement, the company cited its “ongoing review of revenue recognition matters” and noted that the
delisting meant that the stock can no longer be traded on the OTC Bulletin Board, a quotation service for over-the-counter securities. The company intends to file its reports as soon as possible, but notes that “there can be no assurance that the filing of those reports will result in the relisting of the common stock on the NASDAQ National Market or the common stock to becoming eligible to trade on the OTC Bulletin Board.” The company notes that the delisting may have an adverse effect on AstroPower’s business and operations as well as the company’s stock price. See the AstroPower announcement at:
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AstroPower has been facing a management crisis since late May, when both the president and chief executive officer and the chief
financial officer resigned their posts, and the vice-president of sales and
marketing left the company. On Friday, the company engaged Bridge Associates LLC, a nationally known restructuring and turnaround management firm, to take charge of the day-to-day operations of AstroPower and its subsidiaries and to stabilize the company’s financial position. See the AstroPower announcements at:
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ENERGY CONNECTIONS
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EIA Maps Out U.S. Household Energy Use by Region
DOE’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) has prepared a set of “residential energy maps” for nine regions of the United States. The maps are divided based on U.S. census divisions, and each map graphically displays the average annual household use of natural gas, fuel oil, electricity, and gasoline in each state. In addition, the maps indicate the amount of heating and cooling needed in each state and the average precipitation. As a bonus, the maps also show the location of coalitions participating in DOE’s Clean Cities Program.
EIA completed the new series of maps on July 10th. See the residential energy maps on the EIA Web site at:
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For more information about DOE’s Clean Cities Program: [sorry this link is no longer available]++++
| Kevin Eber is the Editor of EREE Network News, a weekly publication of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE). |
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