DOE to Help Increase Efficiency of U.S. Embassies and Consulates
DOE and the U.S. Department of State signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Monday, agreeing to conduct energy assessments and improve environmental and energy management at U.S. embassies and consulates around the world. Under the agreement, DOE will conduct evaluations of overseas facilities and identify opportunities to increase energy and water efficiency, utilize renewable energy, and implement environmental sustainability measures by utilizing Super Energy Service Performance Contracts. The State Department operates and maintains more than 18,000 facilities in more than 280 locations around the world, and has completed 62 new embassy compounds since 2001, with another 34 under construction.
The partnership will provide the State Department with the tools and resources needed to respond to the energy and water audit requirements of the Energy Independence and Security Act and the energy, water, environment, and transportation requirements of Presidential Executive Order 13423. Additionally, DOE will share the protocols that it developed under its Transformational Energy Action Management (TEAM) Initiative, which has carried out energy evaluations at DOE facilities that are expected to result in over $400 million in energy improvements. See the DOE press release and the full text of the Memorandum of Understanding (PDF 15 KB).
Report: Improved Crops Would Help Meet Federal Biofuel Targets
A new report from the Biomass Research and Development Board finds that higher corn yields and improved energy crops could make it much easier to meet the federal Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS) in coming years.
The RFS requires conventional ethanol production to increase to 15 billion gallons per year by 2016, and to meet that with current trends in corn yields would require a 4.1% increase in corn acreage. The good news is that the increase would be mostly accommodated by existing farmland in the areas that now grow most of the nation’s corn, but increased production would also cause a price increase that would cut non-ethanol corn use by 5.2% and reduce exports by 7.7%.
Although the report did not examine international effects, such a cut in U.S. corn exports would presumably spur greater production in other countries, which could lead to land use changes that would impact greenhouse gas emissions. However, higher U.S. corn yields could ease these impacts. While the report assumes a yield increase of about 2 bushels per acre per year, an accelerated increase in corn yield of about 3.1 bushels per acre per year would mitigate most corn prices impacts, as well as the impacts of corn plantings on other crop production.
The RFS also requires the production of 20 billion gallons of advanced biofuels, such as cellulosic ethanol, by 2022. Wood chips left over from wood product production and from forest fuels reduction are expected to supply about 4 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol. That provides relief for farm-based feedstocks, holding their price to about $45 per ton versus $60 per ton without the wood chips.
Agricultural residues would provide about 60% of the remaining 16 billion gallons, with corn stover comprising most of the residues, even though the report assumes that some corn stover will be left in place to maintain land quality. The remaining cellulosic ethanol will be produced from dedicated energy crops, including hay in the Northern Plains, the Mountain States, and the Pacific region, and other energy crops in the Corn Belt, the Southeast, Appalachia, and the Mississippi Delta. Most crops will probably be grown on pasture land or unproductive farmland, although some productive farmland will be shifted to energy crops, particularly in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
The report also examines the greenhouse gas (GHG) impacts in the U.S. of meeting the RFS requirements. It notes the increase in corn production will boost agricultural GHG emissions by 1.8%, the equivalent of about 8 million metric tons of CO2 emissions; a boost in corn yield could essentially eliminate the increase. However, the report does not account for international impacts or for secondary impacts on livestock production and feed production, nor does it take credit for reductions in petroleum consumption.
The report anticipates that a high price for fuel and a price of $25 per thousand tons of CO2 emissions would encourage farmers to reduce their GHG emissions, and thus reduce the impact of growing the energy crops. The report concludes with a call for research on higher crop yields, on more sustainable farming methods, and on a broad portfolio of potential energy crops. It also calls for more data on energy crops and more rigorous models to examine the impacts of growing such crops on such factors as GHG emissions. The Biomass Research and Development Board is co-chaired by DOE and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and is part of the Biomass Research and Development Initiative (BRDi), which involves six federal agencies and two executive offices. See the USDA press release and the full report (PDF 9.7 MB).
Hawaii to Feature Car Chargers and an Ocean Thermal Energy Plant
The State of Hawaii has followed the California Bay Area’s lead in committing to building an infrastructure for recharging electric car recharging. Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle announced last week the state has signed an agreement with Better Place to collaborate on both the infrastructure and the renewable energy sources needed to power a statewide network of public charging spots and battery swapping stations.
Better Place plans to begin applying for permits for the network within the next year, followed six months later by the introduction of its first electric vehicles, leading to the mass-market availability of electric cars in Hawaii by 2012. Better Place bills itself as the "world’s leading sustainable mobility operator," and last week marked its first chance to prove itself, as the company demonstrated the use of its first installed charging station, located in Tel Aviv, Israel. The company also plans to install its own operating system in the electric cars to help drivers get the most from their vehicles. See the press releases from Governor Lingle and Better Place.
Governor Lingle also announced that Lockheed Martin Corporation is teaming up with the Taiwan Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) to develop a 10-megawatt Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) pilot plant in Hawaii.
OTEC technology uses the temperature difference between the ocean’s warm surface and its chilly depths to generate electricity. Lockheed and Hawaii have been involved in OTEC since its inception, as partners in the first OTEC demonstration, a barge-mounted facility that generated 15 kilowatts of net electricity off the coast of Hawaii back in 1979. DOE was also involved in developing OTEC technology, and by 1993, DOE and the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii had teamed up to build an on-shore OTEC plant that generated up to 50 kilowatts of net electricity.
With its current revival, OTEC could be a key technology for the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative, a DOE partnership with the goal of drawing of renewable energy for 70% of the state’s energy needs by 2030. See the governor’s press release, the archived OTEC Web site from DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative Web page from DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
Company Proposes Ocean Energy Projects in Six States
Grays Harbor Ocean Energy Company LLC intends to install a wave energy demonstration system at Grays Harbor in Washington State and has applied for preliminary permits for wave energy projects off the coasts of six other states: California, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, and New Jersey.
The company holds a preliminary permit from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for its project off the coast of Washington, and it applied in late October for preliminary permits for seven sites-two in California and one in each of the other five states. On November 28, FERC accepted the applications and opened a 60-day public comment period, catching the company off guard with its rapid response. The FERC notice drew media attention in Rhode Island, and on Monday, Burton Hammer, the company’s president, published a letter on the Grays Harbor Web site, apologizing to the affected state and local officials for failing to forewarn them about the projects. See the Grays Harbor home page.
Aside from the drama of the application process, the Grays Harbor proposals have interesting technical aspects. The company is planning to install wave energy projects on relatively mobile platforms called jack-up rigs, which are used by the oil drilling industry. The rigs are towed out to sea and their support legs are jacked up, just like some types of car jacks, until the platform is suspended above the ocean.
To capture the wave energy, the platforms will feature oscillating water columns, which can be pictured as long tubes that are closed on their top ends, with their bottom ends submerged below sea level. As waves pass each semi-submerged column, they cause the air inside to be alternately compressed and decompressed. Turbines connected to the top of each column let air pass in and out, spinning the turbines to generate electricity. Grays Harbor is proposing to mount the columns in the legs of the platform. The company is also proposing to mount wind turbines on the platforms, although that would require a separate permitting process. Grays Harbor expects each platform to have a generating capacity of 10 megawatts. See the technology description on the Grays Harbor Web site.
New Technologies Show Promise for High-Efficiency Solar Cells
A number of recent technological advances suggest new pathways to solar cells that will convert a large fraction of sunlight into electricity – if the technologies can be commercialized, that is. The technologies relate to everything from the surface of solar cells to their very heart, so let’s start at the top and work our way down.
In November, researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) announced they have developed an antireflective coating that captures the entire spectrum of sunlight from any angle. The researchers stacked seven layers of antireflective coating, each about 100 billionths of a meter thick, or 100 nanometers. Each layer is composed of nanoscale rods, all positioned at an oblique angle. The arrangement allows each layer to enhance the antireflective qualities of the layer below it, resulting in a highly efficient capture of sunlight. The work was funded by the DOE Office of Basic Energy Sciences. See the RPI press release.
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) took a similar approach to boosting solar cell efficiency, but focused their efforts on the back of ultrathin silicon solar cells. The team applied an antireflection coating to the front of the cell and covered the back with multiple layers of reflective coatings and a diffraction grating, trapping light within the cell and boosting its efficiency by up to 50%.
Going back to the front of the cell, Sunovia Energy Technologies, Inc. and EPIR Technologies, Inc. have developed a glass ceramic material with nanoscale crystalline particles embedded in it that is transparent to visible light but converts ultraviolet light into visible light as it passes through. The material could be used as a cover on rigid solar modules, increasing their conversion efficiencies. See the press releases from MIT and Sunovia.
Turning to the heart of the solar cell, researchers at Ohio State University (OSU) have devised a potential solar cell material that can capture the entire visible portion of sunlight. The material, an electrically conductive plastic combined with metals, such as molybdenum and titanium, is still a long way from a functional solar cell, but it has promising properties, including the ability to generate electrons that remained in an excited energy state for a relatively long period of time.
Even better solar cell materials probably remain undiscovered as yet, but you – yes, you – could help discover them. Under a new effort led by IBM and Harvard University, people can allow their idle computers to help study the potential for organic molecules to convert sunlight into electricity. The "Clean Energy Project" is part of the World Community Grid, which draws on unused computer resources to generate solutions that can benefit humanity. It will combine quantum chemistry calculations with molecular dynamics to determine the electronic properties of thousands of compounds, and it is expected to be completed in only two years. To help the project along, IBM will pilot the World Community Grid on its internal computer network. See the press releases from OSU and IBM, and learn more about the Clean Energy Project from the World Community Grid and Harvard.
EIA: Economic Crisis to Keep Energy Prices Low Through 2009
U.S. crude oil prices have dropped from record highs earlier this year to less than $50 per barrel, and DOE’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) now expects crude oil prices to average only $50 per barrel in 2009. According to the EIA’s "Short-Term Energy Outlook," released yesterday, the "increasing likelihood of a prolonged global economic downturn" has put downward pressure on energy prices, causing the average U.S. price for regular grade gasoline to fall to $1.70 per gallon on December 8. Diesel fuel prices are also down, at $2.52 per gallon.
In fact, all fuel prices are down, which will be good news for U.S. citizens this winter. Residential heating oil prices are projected to average $2.53 per gallon during this heating season, down 24% from last year, and propane prices are expected to be 14% lower than last year. Natural gas spot prices are expected to be about 32% lower next year, but residential natural gas prices will only be about 1.3% lower this winter, in part because residential prices respond much more slowly than the spot market. U.S. petroleum consumption is projected to fall by 5.8% for 2008 as a whole, and to fall another 1% next year, while new oil production platforms in the Gulf of Mexico are expected to boost domestic crude oil production by 6.5% in 2009. See the EIA’s "Short-Term Energy Outlook."
++++
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).
Loading...