The United Kingdom added a big chunk of offshore wind power to its already substantial portfolio when the Walney wind farm in the Irish Sea went online this week. The farm has 102 turbines and a total capacity of 367 megawatts, giving the U.K. a total of more than 1.5 gigawatts of installed offshore power.

The Walney facility (pictured) cost $1.58 billion to build and is owned by a consortium of energy companies including DONG Energy, which owns around 30 percent of all offshore wind power in Europe. They claim that the second portion of the Walney project was built faster than any other offshore farm ever, with all cables and turbines installed in less than six months. Just for comparison, the "first" offshore wind farm in the U.S., Cape Wind, has been in the works for more than a decade, and has yet to plant that first turbine in the water in spite of federal approval and victories in a number of disputes and lawsuits.

Walney's claim as the biggest in the world -- it can power up to 320,000 homes -- will not likely last very long. The London Array off the coast of Kent is scheduled to come online by the end of 2012, and it will dwarf Walney. Just in the project's first phase, 175 turbines will sport a capacity of 630 MW, enough to power two-thirds of all the homes in Kent. Phase two will eventually bring it up to a total of 1 gigawatt capacity. DONG Energy owns 50 percent of this project as well.

The Obama Administration continues to take steps toward improving the possibilities for offshore wind in the U.S., but the quick progress much of Europe manages on this is a constant reminder of how slow U.S. has been. Recent positive environmental reviews and attempts to streamline permitting processes may lead to new offshore wind leases being granted by later this year, but until the first turbine starts spinning this will remain a blight on the U.S. push for renewable energy.

Image via DONG Energy

Last summer, Alta Devices announced a record in the efficiency of an individual solar cell, at 27.6 percent conversion of the sun's energy to electricity. The same company has now set an efficiency record for an entire solar panel, at 23.5 percent. The record was independently confirmed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (part of the Department of Energy).

Alta Devices makes solar panels using gallium arsenide cells, a more efficient material than the generally cheaper silicon-based cells. To keep prices down, though, the company uses very small amounts of gallium and arsenic, creating a layer of gallium arsenide only one micron thick. They are still only in a pilot production stage for the new panels, but are apparently starting to plan for full scale, commercial production.

The efficiency records are impressive, but translating some of the best ideas to a growing market is never an easy task. As we've seen before, records falling don't necessarily change the solar market overnight. And yet every incremental improvement is an important step toward bringing solar power into a truly competitive range with fossil fuel electricity.

The president and CEO of Alta Devices, Chirstopher Norris, said in a press release last summer: "We are committed to using new scientific understanding, such as internal light generation and extraction, to push the limits of solar cell and module efficiencies while simultaneously driving production costs down through other important developments. The goal of achieving the $1 per installed watt target set by the Department of Energy has energized our entire company.”

The DOE goal he mentioned is part of the SunShot initiative. The idea is to bring solar down to six cents per kilowatt-hour by the end of the decade, which would put it right in the range of coal and natural gas. Achieving this will require improvements in a range of solar tech, from ideas like these thin gallium arsenide cells to solar thermal technology. But it would have a huge impact: according to the DOE itself, if the SunShot is achieved it "will enable solar-generated power to account for 15–18 percent of America's electricity generation by 2030." This will be quite a feat, as we're still hovering below one percent today.

Image via Lance Cheung

As the U.S. offshore wind arena continues to be 100 percent turbine-free, companies around the world are scaling up. Chinese turbine manufacturer Sinovel announced its mammoth 6-megawatt turbine will be used in a demonstration project in Shanghai's port. It will install 17 of the turbines, so "demonstration" actually means a pretty large wind farm, with a capacity of 102 MW.

Going big seems like a good choice when it comes to offshore wind power, where there are fewer constraints on the space they use. Cape Wind notwithstanding, NIMBY issues are similarly diminished, even with such huge structures.

Sinovel's is not the only 6 MW turbine around, though few are actually in operation at offshore wind farms. REpower Systems, bought by wind giant Suzlon in 2009, has a 6 MW turbine as well, as does Siemens. Last year, we wrote here about the real giant of wind turbines, Vestas's 7-MW V-164. The V-164 will clock in at a height of 135 meters with a rotor blade measuring 80 meters long. DONG Energy has said it will install as many as six of the Vestas turbines off the coast of Denmark in 2013.

Most of these huge turbines are still in demonstration or pilot phases, with the companies planning to start full-scale production in the next couple of years. This is welcome timing, as countries around the world look to expand offshore wind development. Even in the U.S., things are getting ever closer: today, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will make an announcement in Baltimore involving an improved permitting process for offshore wind development in Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, and Virginia. The more power the merrier, so bring on the gargantuan turbines.

Image via Sinovel

A story in today's Wall Street Journal by the paper's ace energy reporter Rebecca Smith describes an order just issued by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission requiring operators of all 96 reactors located in the eastern United States to reevaluate them in terms of revised earthquake risk estimates. Given added urgency by the nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima, where reactors were found to have been not designed for an earthquake of the severity that hit them, the NRC is telling owners of nuclear power plants that they must review them in light of a new seismic risk model jointly developed by the NRC, the Department of Energy and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).

The process of developing that model preceded Fukushima, a point Smith neglects to make. But the model's damage risk estimates are often significantly higher than those considered authoritative when existing nuclear power plants were designed and built. The model suggests, for example, that the worst earthquake expected in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in a 10,000 year period might be twice as damaging to structures as previously expected. (The Sequoyah plant, pictured above, is located 18 miles north of Chattanooga.)

The NRC is giving plant operators four years to complete the reassessments and report back. Predictably, critics of the industry complain that this is much too long, and that the commission already has the information it needs to order changes right now. Industry analysts observe that the process itself will be costly and that it could lead to very costly required upgrades, so costly that some plants might be closed rather than improved.

What is perhaps most notable about Smith's report is the very lively reaction it has elicited. In a half day it has inspired 75 comments and counting, many of them quite extensive. Writers range from those saying no nuclear plant should ever have been built in the first place to those saying the revised seismic assessments are just a big fuss about nothing. In between you'll find some substantial observations of interest.

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Post modified on Thursday, Feb. 2, at 1 pm EST in reaction to feedback from the Nuclear Energy Institute, which has not complained about the propriety or costliness of the NRC seismic review.

The New York Times carried a small story on an inside page this week that takes stock of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI, or "Reggie") that ten northeastern states launched in January 2009, with quarterly auctions of emissions allowances. The story, drawing on a number of independent reports, finds that emissions reductions have been greater and cheaper than expected, and have produced substantial fringe benefits in terms of lower overall electricity costs, more jobs, and greater regional independence of fossil fuel imports.

The inspiration for RGGI and cap-and-trade carbon trading systems generally was the trading system the United States invented to reduce emissions of acid rain precursor aerosols, which in the 1980s and 1990s yielded bigger and cheaper cuts in SO₂ and NOx emissions than the system's most enthusiastic proponents had predicted. The general objectives of RGGI have been to first stabilize emissions at 2002-04 levels and then reduce them 10 percent by 2018.

Among the findings about RGGI, as reported in the Times:

• Northeastern greenhouse gas emissions already are down 30 percent

• Although switching from coal to abundant and inexpensive natural gas, along with economic recession, largely account for that startling decline, the RGGI trading system accounts for 6 percentage points of the cut in greenhouse gas emissions

• An independent assessment by the Analysis Group found that RGGI has saved customers money and created jobs, as participating states have used proceeds from the auctions to promote energy efficiency and electricity generation from renewables

• Because of lower demand for allowances with the much greater than expected declines in emissions, participating states are retiring more than 90 percent of unsold credits, so as to prop up the prices of future allowances and encourage further carbon cuts

(In May last year, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie took the state out of RGGI, the whole notion of climate change having become a dirty word in Republican politics. But it's worth noting that party leaders like John McCain and Newt Gingrich had once strongly promoted cap-and-trade.)

Why indeed--it's perfectly fair to ask--bother to cut just one region's emissions when in much of the rest of the world emissions are soaring? Greenhouse gases mix freely in the atmosphere, after all, so that any one region is affected by all the world's emissions, not just its own.

The short answer is that initiatives like RGGI demonstrate the principle of emissions trading and develop the mechanics of a successful system. This Reggie seems to have accomplished already with spectacular success.

Visiting Las Vegas today, President Obama officially opened the country's first natural gas trucking corridor, a stretch linking California's Long Beach with Utah's Salt Lake City, along which properly equipped medium- and heavy-duty trucks can tank up on compressed natural gas. CNG-fueled buses will be familiar to passengers in cities from Delhi to New York. But using CNG as the main fuel for trucks is a relatively new idea, first given a high-profile pitch several years ago by famed oilman T. Boone Pickens in his "Pickens plan."

Pickens's idea was to replace the electricity we generate from natural gas with wind and use the freed-up gas as a fuel in transportation. An even better idea, however, if one is at all concerned about clean air and climate change, is to keep using natural gas to generate electricity and in fact use even more, displacing coal, while as the same time using compressed natural gas as a transportation fuel as well. Because of the revolution in unconventional gas, that scenario is now feasible, and President Obama appears to be embracing it.

When Obama was a presidential candidate Pickens had the opportunity to meet with him personally and pitch his plan. Recounting the experience to a group of reporters, Pickens told how Candidate Obama said he hoped to have something like a million hybrid and electric cars on the road within ten years; Pickens told him that if you parked a million cars outside it would look like a lot of cars, but that in fact there are 250 million cars on the road and 9 million new ones sold every year.

(As a member of that group of reporters, I seized the opportunity to pitch my version of the Pickens Plan back to Pickens. His immediate reaction was to designate me the “Al Gore” in the group because of my evident concern about global warming. Nevertheless, I advised readers that if they had to take a stake in one of just two climate policies, Gore’s or the Pickens plan, they’d do better to go for the T Boone.)

After some delay, Obama is doing just that: "The president’s plan includes," according to a White House fact sheet, "proposing new incentives for medium- and heavy-duty trucks that run on natural gas or other alternative fuels; launching a competitive grant program to support communities to overcome the barriers to natural gas vehicle deployment; developing transportation corridors that allow trucks fueled by liquefied natural gas to transport goods; and supporting programs to convert municipal buses and trucks to run on natural gas and to find new ways to convert and store natural gas."

That’s not all President Obama is doing to to flesh out general pledges he made in Tuesday's State of the Union address, and to satisfy voters he’s addressing both the country’s energy dependencies and the risks associated with long-term climate change. In Las Vegas today, he also announced the final lease sale of offshore acreage in the central Gulf of Mexico, scheduled for late June, with conditions meant to make sure that oil companies develop the leases they acquire, as The Wall Street Journal reported. That lease, says the White House fact sheet, will make 38 million additional acres available and could lead to 1 billion more  barrels of oil produced and 4 trillion cubic feet more of natural gas. The president, says the White House, has "directed the Department of Interior to finalize a national offshore energy plan that makes 75 percent of our potential offshore resources available for development by opening new areas for drilling in the Gulf and Alaska."

Also today, the president visited an air base in Colorado and took the occasion to remind people of his pledge to have the U.S. Navy purchase a gigawatt of clean electricity produced from domestically available resources like the sun and wind. Plainly, Obama is pulling out all the stops to counter Republican charges that in torpedoing a proposed pipeline linking Canadian oil sands to the Gulf of Mexico, he undermines U.S. energy independence and kills U.S. jobs. The trick for him is to appease Republicans and independents without simultaneously raising hackles among those concerned about climate.

Would the president actually say the c-word in his State of the Union? He did mention climate change but stumbled a bit over the words and confined himself to saying that prospects for getting a comprehensive carbon-reduction bill through Congress were nil. At the same time he insisted on the importance of clean air, which environmentalists appreciate means air that not only contains less pollutant but also less greenhouse gas. Just as important was what he did not say. Though he trumpeted domestic energy resources, he did not mention coal or even the promise of "clean coal."  Nor for that matter did he mention nuclear energy, which he has supported in the past. What he boosted was "clean energy"--basically wind and solar--and natural gas.

In addition to incentives to boost introduction of compressed natural gas in transportation, the administration also plans an aggressive research program: "The Advanced Research Projects Agency—Energy (ARPA-E) will announce a new research competition in the coming months that will engage our country’s brightest scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs to find ways to harness our abundant supplies of domestic natural gas to lessen our dependence of foreign oil for vehicles," says the White House. "The breakthrough technologies they will develop, whether they are for new ways to fuel our cars with natural gas or a method to turn that gas into liquid fuel, promise to break our dependence on foreign oil for our cars and trucks, allow us to breathe cleaner air, and ultimately save consumers at the pump."
 

Opponents of wind power often cite potentially negative effects on human health caused by huge turbines— from noise and related sleep problems, to the "shadow flicker" of the blades passing across windows. But a study commissioned by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and released last week found little existing evidence of harm from wind energy.

The study acknowledged the possibility of wind power-related sleep disturbances and other issues. But overall, it found the evidence on severe health effects to be unremarkable. For example:

"None of the limited epidemiological evidence reviewed suggests an association between noise from wind turbines and pain and stiffness, diabetes, high blood pressure, tinnitus, hearing impairment, cardiovascular disease, and headache/migraine."

The study, which was conducted by a panel of independent experts, also noted the lack of evidence supporting the existence of a nebulous health problem characterized as "wind turbine syndrome." 

The study might make renewable energy development a bit easier—at least for Massachusetts; the state aims to increase its 40 megawatts of wind power 50-fold (to 2,000 MW) by 2020.  Still, conflicts such as health-based NIMBY claims are inevitable.

More generally, this study adds to a limited collection of work downplaying the health effects of living near wind turbines. But because battles over energy siting are fought in courts and town halls rather than doctors' offices, it remains to be seen how big a role health concerns will play as renewable energy projects proliferate. A recent Energywise blog described a case in the United Kingdom involving supposed sleep disturbances and health problems near a wind farm; the case was settled and sealed, so few lessons can be gleaned from it.

And even a supposedly independent study like the aforementioned one in Massachusetts is not guaranteed to change all that many opinions. Attendees at a town hall debate about a wind farm in Western Massachusetts were apparently split on the study's worthiness, according to the Berkshire Eagle. Convincing everyone of wind power's importance and safety, clearly, is still a few independent studies away.

(Image via Ian Mynard)

The Netherlands is among the few European countries that remain supportive of nuclear power in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. But plans to build a new nuclear plant in the small nation have apparently been shelved due to an uncertain economic environment.

The Dutch utility company Delta NV had plans to build at least one new reactor, with a generating capacity of 1600 megawatts, at the Borssele Nuclear Power Station. This would have been a substantial bump for the country's nuclear generating capacity; the lone reactor currently at Borssele, rated at 485 MW [pictured, above], accounts for only about 4 percent of the country's electricity.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the decision to shelve the new plans for at least two or three years is a response to the Euro zone debt crisis as well as uncertainty surrounding carbon trading schemes.

But it should be noted, though, that Germany, newly opposed to nuclear power, has expressed opposition to neighboring countries' nuke plans, including those of Poland and the Netherlands. Germany wants to phase out all of its nuclear power, a process that some say will cost trillions of dollars.

Germany's gripe with its neighbors is, in my opinion, a reasonable one to at least consider. If the general movement away from nuclear power is based on a desire to avoid potentially catastrophic accidents, it makes much more sense for such decisions to be regional rather than national. Nuclear fallout, after all, does not care where the Netherlands or Poland stops and Germany begins.

(Image via Wikimedia Commons/Bodoklecksel)

Vladimir Lenin, who needs no introduction, famously or perhaps notoriously said that communism equaled Soviet power plus the complete electrification of Russia. A Russian joke had it, QED, that Soviet power equaled communism minus electrification. But we digress. What brings all this to mind was the assertion this week by Damir Novosel, at a meeting this week in Washington, D.C., that this will be a year in which regular people will be looking for the highly touted smart grid to produce real benefits--and that for present purposes, that SG =  AMI + PMU. (Smart Grid equals Advanced Metering Infrastructure plus Phaser Measurement Units)

Novosel, currently president of Quanta Technology, is a well-known top specialist on grid operations and reliability, who has worked for several of the top firms in the field including ABB and KEMA. At risk of some over-simpification, Novosel said the immediate criteria of smart grid success will be perceived benefits from advanced metering (AMI) and  phasor measurement units (PMUs)--devices that precisely measure variations in voltage and current permitting their synchronization in real time..

Advanced meters, more popularly known as smart meters, have been very widely deployed in advanced industrial countries in recent years; in the United States, the AMI rollout got a huge boost from the 2008 stimulus bill. Utilities naturally like smart meters because, over their long lifetimes, they will radically reduce meter reading costs. But there already has been considerable consumer backlash against smart metering, partly because of privacy concerns, but most often because electricity rates and bills sometimes appear to be going up rather than down following their introduction. The bottom line, Novosel reminded his engineering audience, is that to be seen as a success, AMI will have to start yielding lower energy costs, not higher—and soon.

Putting it a slightly different way, Novosel implied that smart meters will have to produce their full range of expected benefits, which can be said to include demand response (enabling customers to modify electricity usage in reaction to hourly price changes), faster and more efficient service (including automated reporting of emergencies, and greater system reliability (because utilities will be getting real-time feedback from every customer's meter). They will be seen as a disappointment, he said, if all they produce is less expensive meter reading—and, let it be said, virtually jobless meter reading—for utilities.

Novosel's message about PMUs was somewhat more technical, but it probably can be safely reduced to this: As thousands of them are being deployed on transmission lines to report voltage deviations in real time to utilities, significantly greater system reliability should result. If we don't start seeing measurable improvements in system reliability soon, they too will be a disappointment.

No doubt Novosel would be the first to say that in the longer run the smart grid should involve much more than just AMI and PMU: integration of two-way communications throughout distribution systems, a more renewable-friendly grid, power systems that in their totality are much more efficient, lower carbon emissions, and so on. But if the smart grid is seen in its first phase as a boondoggle, the next phase may be a long time coming.

In the photo: Damir Novosel

The energy wing of German company Siemens estimates that phasing out nuclear power as planned will cost the country between €1.4 trillion and €1.7 trillion (US $2.17 trillion) by 2030. As reported by Reuters, the company believes investments in renewable energy, natural gas, and other replacements for nukes will far exceed previous estimates.

In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, Germany was the first among a number of countries that announced plans to shut down nuclear reactors and cancel construction of new nuclear facilities. Germany currently gets about one quarter of its electric power from nuclear reactors, and replacing that output is clearly going to be costly. Siemens' estimate, though, far outstrips other guesses on just how much: According to Reuters, the country's second biggest utility company put the number at around €300 billion (though without a time frame). In September, the state-owned investment bank KfW said the switch would cost about €250 billion by 2020.

Among the other countries opting out of nuclear power are Belgium, Switzerland, and Mexico. The costs of these plans vary: In Switzerland, for example, about 40 percent of the country's power comes from five nuclear reactors. Analysis by a think tank called Schweizerische Energie-Stiftung suggested that replacing the reactors would cost 100 billion Swiss francs ($105 billion). Other observers predict that related increases in electricity prices will yield overall drops in the country's GDP.

The nuclear elephant in the EU's living room, of course, is France. The country gets more than 75 percent of its power from nuclear reactors, and instead of joining the exodus following Fukushima, it reiterated its commitment to nuclear energy. That hasn't stopped others from asking what it would cost to replace all of France's reactors, or at least decrease the country's dependence on the controversial energy source. One guess: Lowering nuclear's contribution to 20 percent of the country's total capacity by 2030—which would call for the shuttering of 46 the 58 reactors currently in operation—would cost €112 billion more than leaving the total at 70 percent.

Whether these countries spend in the hundreds of billions or the trillions, the cost of another accident looms over the calculations. Fukushima's cleanup will run upwards of $200 billion, while Chernobyl's has cost at least $235 billion.

(Image via Brewbooks)