Attribution: Raser Technologies

• Speed. This plant moved from concept to production in 18 months, breaking the land-world speed record for geothermal plant development.
• Resource. This is a low temperature, high flow rate resource unlike most geothermal fields where the resource is usually in excess of 200 C. Such resources have been thought in the past to be non-viable as recently as five years ago.
• Design. Traditionally, geothermal plants are optimized for the specific resource. In this case, 50 UTC units were ganged as a pod to create a net 10MW facility.

While in the past our entries have been somewhat skeptical of Raser’s ability to get plants designed and implemented, we want to provide credit where is due. With the resource showing much larger size than initially scoped at 230MWe of potential, Raser could be a long-term and productive entrant in the geothermal and renewable energy generation field.

Once final commission occurs in the next few weeks, the power generated will be consumed by the City of Anaheim.

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In construction that took only thirteen months to complete, Acciona has commissioned the largest PV plant yet on the planet. At 600 acres, the plant hosts some 2,500 collectors each with a surface area of 1,500 square feet.

The plant is presumed to have a capital cost in the neighborhood of $250M and will be part of the Portuguese government’s E4 Energy Efficiency and Endogenous Energies policy. Overall, the objective is to install 150 MW, of which the Amareleja installation will account for around 30%.

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Are Gas Guzzler’s like this headed toward extinction?

Attribution: Sugar Mountain Farms

This morning there are reports that US drivers logged 4.3% fewer miles driven in March than the same period a year ago, that amounts to 11 billion passenger miles. With the average price of gasoline creeping toward $4 a gallon, perhaps the pain is sufficient to cause drivers to reconsider their behaviors, something education and mass transit incentives have failed to do over the past few decades. This is the largest drop in mileage since 1942.

This begs the question: When will pain at the pump start to push non-fossil fuel alternatives to the forefront and which will ultimately win?

Our bet is on electric vehicles with hybrids as a bridge. The reason is the infrastructure exists, one can imagine their parents/grandparents managing to plug-in a vehicle (imagine them managing a hydrogen or massive pressure compressed air fill up…) and biofuels are a bridge, but not an answer yet as the feedstock is expensive and in competition with food.

The outcome will be interesting to see.

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Aerial view of ArcelorMittal Steel Mill

NPR recently posted an in-depth article on bottom-cycling and waste heat recovery in industrial process as a growth area. Featured in the report was the massive ArcelorMittal steel mill in East Chicago, Indiana and its approach to becoming more efficient which includes the installation of boilers above the coke ovens, which generate on the order of 100MWe, or 2,400 MWh per day.

They’ve also taken advantage of pressure differential noticing that the gas that arrives to power their plant is delivered at 30 psi, the pressure at which the gas efficiently burns is 3 psi. So the company has installed turbines inline to harvest the energy in the pressure differential to generate even more power, about 16MWe or 384MWh per day.

The waste heat and gases from the process are also being harvested (bottom cycling) from the exhausted gases yielding a further 65-70MWe. In total, this complex is recovering around 250MWe from its various energy recycling programs offsetting 1,300,000 tons of CO² emissions per year and satisfying nearly 50% of the factories energy needs.

DOE studies suggest US industries waste enough heat to harvest an estimated 200,000MWe from the processes, nearly 20% of total present US generation capacity. Clearly, this is an opportunity for improvement and recovery of existing resources and with energy prices steadily climbing, more of these programs will undoubtably be implemented.

Links:
National Public Radio Report on Energy Recycling

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