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Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Renewable Energy on Farms Study Released - First to Look at Role of State-Level Policies


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USDA Blog Post:

USDA has published a study examining states’ adoption rates of distributed generation for solar and wind energy on U.S. farms. The results show that states with higher energy prices, more organic acres per farm, and more Internet connectivity adopt renewable electricity at higher rates.  For solar systems, full-farm ownership and solar resources were also significant factors.  Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) targets were found to increase state level renewable electricity adoption at the distributed-generation scale while electric cooperative prevalence in the state was found to have a negative relationship to renewable electricity adoption share.
The results of this study highlight the importance of coordinating approaches to policy formulation, and can assist states in refining their policies for promoting renewable electricity, particularly during an era of declining government budgets.
To read the study, please go to:  www.usda.gov/oce/.

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

NREL Report Firms Up Land-Use Requirements of Solar

NREL News Release:

NREL Report Firms Up Land-Use Requirements of Solar

Study shows solar for 1,000 homes would require 32 acres

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

The Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has published a report on the land use requirements of solar power plants based on actual land-use practices from existing solar facilities.
"Having real data from a majority of the solar plants in the United States will help people make proper comparisons and informed decisions," lead author Sean Ong said. The report, "Land-use Requirements for Solar Power Plants in the United States," was written with NREL colleagues Clinton Campbell, Robert Margolis, Paul Denholm and Garvin Heath.
Ong gathered data from 72% of the solar power plants installed or under construction in the United States. Among the findings:
  • A large fixed tilt photovoltaic (PV) plant that generates 1 gigawatt-hour per year requires, on average, 2.8 acres for the solar panels. This means that a solar power plant that provides all of the electricity for 1,000 homes would require 32 acres of land.
  • Small single-axis PV systems require on average 2.9 acres per annual gigawatt-hour – or 3.8 acres when considering all unused area that falls inside the project boundary.
  • Concentrating solar power plants require on average 2.7 acres for solar collectors and other equipment per annual gigawatt-hour; 3.5 acres for all land enclosed within the project boundary.
By the third quarter of 2012, the United States had deployed more than 2.1 gigawatts of utility-scale solar generation capacity. Another 4.6 gigawatts was under construction. There has been a long-running debate over the comparative land needs for various forms of energy, old and new. But that's not the purpose of the new report, Ong and Denholm emphasized.
"The numbers aren't good news or bad news," Denholm said. "It's just that there was not an understanding of actual land-use requirements before this work. However, we were happy to find out that many of the solar land use ranges and estimates used in the literature are very close to actual solar land use requirements that we found."
These land-use estimates can also be compared with other energy-production land uses. For example, a study by Vasilis Fthenakis and Hung Chul Kim of Columbia University (2009) found that, on a life-cycle electricity-output basis--including direct and indirect land transformation--utility-scale PV in the U.S. Southwest requires less land than the average U.S. power plant using surface-mined coal.
A previous NREL report, "Land-use Requirements and the Per-capita Solar Footprint for Photovoltaic Generation in the United States," had estimated that if solar energy was to meet 100% of all electricity demand in the United States, it would take up 0.6% of the total area in the United States.
This time, the data come not from estimates or calculations, but from compiling land use numbers from actual solar power plants. Every solar energy site analyzed in the study is listed in a detailed appendix.
"All these land use numbers are being thrown around, but there has been nothing concrete," Ong said. "Now people will actually have numbers to cite when they conduct analyses and publish reports."
NREL previously had released a report on land-use needs for wind power. Doing the same other generation resources including coal, natural gas and nuclear -- estimating land use via huge sample sizes -- would help inform decisions, Denholm said.
The report provides fundamental data that can be used to understand the impacts and benefits of solar. "Modelers and analysts, people looking 10 or 20 years into the future can use this report to evaluate the impacts solar energy may have," Denholm said.
NREL is the U.S. Department of Energy's primary national laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development. NREL is operated for the Energy Department by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC.
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New York buildings beat the heat with ice - Jul. 30, 2013

Some of New York's most high-profile and high-tech buildings are resorting to an ancient method to keep cool.


New York buildings beat the heat with ice - Jul. 30, 2013

Monday, July 29, 2013

China and EU strike deal on solar panels - Jul. 29, 2013

China and the European Union have reached an agreement over low-cost solar panels that should help reduce tensions between the key trading partners.


China and EU strike deal on solar panels - Jul. 29, 2013

Saturday, July 27, 2013

Packed House in Tucson, Arizona for Energy Round Table Listening Session with Rural Utilities Administrator


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USDA Blog Post:

Sorry Mr. Wolfe. As it turns out, you actually CAN go home again…and John Padalino recently did.
Padalino is the Administrator for the USDA Rural Utilities Service (RUS), a branch of USDA Rural Development. Born in south Tucson, Padalino grew up along the border where his father was a customs agent. Recently he was back in Tucson to facilitate a Rural Development Energy Round Table.
The round table was filled to capacity with participants that represented small businesses, solar companies, utilities, community action groups, tribes, contractors, and local governments.
The lively dialogue revolved around USDA’s renewable energy programs. Padalino began with a thumbnail of the various program areas—Renewable Energy for America Program (REAP), bioenergy, broadband/telecom, electric, and water. Participants gave input on how the programs are working for them…and were able to ask specific questions about projects and programs.
“This is when government works the best,” said Padalino, “when officials can have an open dialogue on how the programs are actually fitting the needs of users.”
Following the dialogue, Padalino and Arizona State Director Alan Stephens drove to Benson, Arizona, where Padalino was the keynote speaker at the Arizona Electric Power Cooperative (AEPCO) Generation and Transmission Conference.
While in Benson, Padalino received an email saying that President Barack Obama had just officially made him the administrator of RUS. He had been serving as acting administrator. The email encouraged him to get sworn in to the position at the earliest convenience.
Following the AEPCO conference Padalino and Stephens toured the USDA funded Tin Town wastewater project site with Bisbee Public Works Director Tom Klimek.
Arrangements were made to have the Bisbee City Clerk swear-in Padalino the following morning.  In Council Chambers the next morning City Clerk Gloria Gonzalez conducted the official swearing in.
“Being appointed by the President of the United States and then being sworn in to such a senior position is a memorable event under any circumstances,” said Stephens. “It was made even more so that this Arizona native could do so in the Bisbee City Council Chambers.”
Following the swearing in, Padalino and Stephens visited the Copper Queen Hospital in Bisbee where USDA had made a $7 million direct Community Facilities loan to remodel and expand the facility. They toured the new state-of-the-art emergency room.
Before heading back to Tucson for his flight back to D.C., Padalino and Stephens toured the Center for Academic Success and the Sunnyside Fire District’s new fire station in Douglas. Both projects were funded by USDA.

Friday, July 26, 2013

Wood-Boring Gribbles Intrigue Researchers





NREL News Release:

Wood-Boring Gribbles Intrigue Researchers

July 24, 2013

This is a light-enhanced close-up of a tiny crustacean's head and torso, with what looks like fluorescent-blue antennae. Three of its legs are showing.Enlarge image
A gribble is a tiny wood borer that produces its own enzyme that can devastate wood efficiently. Researchers hope that by studying gribbles they can learn ways to improve the process of turning biomass into liquid fuels.
Courtesy Laura Michie, University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom
Tiny wood borers known colloquially as gribbles make their own enzymes and use them to eat through docks in harbor towns, earning enmity from fishermen all around the world.
Now, researchers from the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and elsewhere are exploring whether that curse can be turned into a blessing for the biofuels industry.
The trouble with gribbles — that they can break down biomass into sugars even in harsh environments — might become the great thing about gribbles, as the industry searches for enzymes that can thrive in salt-rich, high-solids settings.
Gribbles (scientific name: Limnoria quadripunctata) are 1 to 3 millimeters long and have an organ called the hepatopancreas that extends almost the entire length of their bodies. This organ is where gribbles make their own enzymes. In other words, they don't rely, as termites, cows, and humans do, on the organisms that find their way into their stomachs to aid in digesting the food they eat.
The gribble enzymes also hold promise of tolerating salts better than other enzymes, likely due to the fact they evolved in a marine environment. These unique properties could teach biomass researchers how to make better enzymes that operate in a high-solids industrial environment, breaking biomass down more effectively into sugars, which can then be converted into ethanol or a renewable fuel to replace gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel.
And that could make the conversion of biomass to fuel both quicker and cheaper, say biofuels researchers from NREL, the University of Kentucky, and the Universities of York and Portsmouth in the United Kingdom. These scientists collaborated on a recent paper describing the crystal structure of a key enzyme produced by the gribble. The report was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Britain's Biotechnology and Biological Science Research Council (the BBSRC) is funding the work by U.K. researchers. The Energy Department is funding the work by U.S. researchers.

Biofuels Industry Needs Super-Tough Enzymes

This is an illustration of an enzyme breaking down a molecule.Enlarge image
An illustration of the gribble's Cel7b enzyme at molecular scale.
Courtesy of John McGeehan, University of Portsmouth
The biofuels industry needs tough, efficient enzymes that are tolerant of harsh industrial conditions. NREL Senior Scientist Gregg Beckham, one of the authors of the paper, said gribbles are marine creatures, so the enzymes in the gribbles' guts would seem to naturally thrive in high-salt environments.
Enzymes are typically harvested from fungi because fungi are responsible for most of the biomass degradation in nature. Gribbles live in inner-tidal zones, mango groves, rainforests, harbors, and coves, devouring wood where they find it.
The little wood borers drew extra attention from biomass researchers after scientists from the Universities of York and Portsmouth in 2010 published the exciting news that the gribble produces an enzyme from an important family of cellulases (specifically Family 7 cellulases), that are usually found in fungi.
The gribble, in fact, has three Family 7 enzymes, the workhorses of industrial enzyme cocktails. One of them, dubbed Cel7B, is the subject of the latest paper describing its crystal structure.
"There are striking differences between the gribble enzyme and those derived from the fungi," Beckham said. "We have some suggestions that those differences may teach us a few new tricks in engineering enzymes for enhanced performance in an industrial setting."

Enzyme Thrives in Super Salty Water

The researchers' tests of Cel7B found that it remained active at more than six times the salt concentration of the sea. It even became slightly more effective in its ability to degrade biomass as salt concentration increased, Beckham noted.
"For biomass conversion, industry wants to push up to very high solids, with very little water around. The gribble enzyme has evolved in a harsh, high-solids environment in the gribble gut, so it could very well thrive."
That's important to the bottom line because "the less water you have in the process, the smaller your reactor can be," Beckham said. The smaller the reactor, the more concentrated the sugar product is, and the more money can be saved in a biofuels production plant.
The authors of the scientific paper proposed that the enzyme can teach important things about engineering industrial enzymes for biomass conversion. The Cel7B enzyme may provide clues as to how to design particular features of enzymes for greater stability in industrial settings.

Learning How it Adapts

This photo shows a gribble, looking here like roly-poly bug, on a tree branch.Enlarge image
Gribbles live in inner-tidal zones, mango groves, rainforests, harbors and coves, devouring wood where they find it.
Courtesy Katrin Besser and Clare Steele-King, University of York.
The work leading to the paper gave the scientists a better understanding of how the organism adapts and survives — and that will be very useful as research on the gribble continues.
The U.K. researchers used X-ray diffraction to solve the structure of the gribble enzyme and biochemical techniques to understand its activity. NREL researchers applied high performance computing to simulate the structure solved by X-ray diffraction to get a dynamic picture of the enzyme.
The National Bioenergy Center and NREL's Biosciences Center were a natural fit for the project because among their most important missions is to design new and better enzymes.
Characterizing the gribble enzyme is crucial to understanding it. The knowledge acquired could help in the design of a better enzyme for degrading biomass, leading to a product that could better compete with petroleum.
Combining structural biology with molecular dynamics made it possible to characterize the enzyme at the molecular level, the researchers said. "They work really beautifully together because structural biology gives you a static picture, and molecular dynamics simulations can give you a dynamic picture," Beckham said.
Going forward, the researchers will use high performance computing to compare the gribble enzymes to similar enzymes from fungi. "We will be able to use what we learn to make better predictions about enzyme activity, whether the enzyme can be used directly in biomass conversion or can be modified to be more like fungal enzymes while retaining useful characteristics, such as the ability for some high-solids tolerance," Beckham said.
Learn more about the National Bioenergy Center and NREL's Biosciences Center.
— Bill Scanlon

NC Anaerobic Digester Receives Funding - REW - Renewable Energy from Waste

NC Anaerobic Digester Receives Funding - REW - Renewable Energy from Waste

Thursday, July 25, 2013

BMW vs. Tesla: The race heats up with the i3 - Jul. 25, 2013

BMW vs. Tesla: The race heats up with the i3 - Jul. 25, 2013

Microbial Who-Done-It For Biofuels


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New Technique Identifies Populations Within a Microbial Community Responsible for Biomass Deconstruction

JULY 25, 2013
Lynn Yarris (510) 486-5375  lcyarris@lbl.gov
 6 

 
   
News Release
BlakeThe microbial world of biomass deconstruction became more clear with a JBEI/JGI/EMSL study of a thermophillic bacterial consortium adapted to switchgrass. This splatterplot is a visual representation of the consortium’s metagenome. (Image courtesy of Patrik D’haeseleer, JBEI)
The microbial world of biomass deconstruction became more clear with a JBEI/JGI/EMSL study of a thermophillic bacterial consortium adapted to switchgrass. This splatterplot is a visual representation of the consortium’s metagenome. (Image courtesy of Patrik D’haeseleer, JBEI)
One of the keys to commercialization of advanced biofuels is the development of cost-competitive ways to extract fermentable sugars from lignocellulosic biomass. The use of enzymes from thermophiles – microbes that thrive at extremely high temperatures and alkaline conditions – holds promise for achieving this. Finding the most effective of these microbial enzymes, however, has been a challenge. That challenge has now been met by a collaboration led by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI).
Working with a compost-derived consortium of thermophillic bacterium adapted to grow on switchgrass, a leading potential fuel crop, and using a combination of metagenomic and metaproteomic technologies, the collaboration has identified individual microbial species whose enzymes were the most active in deconstructing the switchgrass biomass. Major institutes in addition to JBEI participating in this collaboration included DOE’s Joint Genome Institute (JGI), and EMSL, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a national scientific user facility at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).
“This marks the first time that the functional roles of individual microbial populations within a consortium have been linked with specific enzyme activities, in this case cellulase and hemicellulase,” says Steven Singer, director of JBEI’s microbial communities program. “Since these activities are broadly relevant to biofuel production, this is one of the first real-world applications being met by combining metagenomics and metaproteomics.”
Singer, who is also a research scientist with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)’s Earth Sciences Division, is the senior author of a paper describing this research in the journal PLOS One titled “Proteogenomic Analysis of a Thermophilic Bacterial Consortium Adapted to Deconstruct Switchgrass.” Co-authors are Patrik D’haeseleer, John Gladden, Martin Allgaier, Patrik Chain, Susannah Tringe, Stephanie Malfatti, Joshua Aldrich, Carrie Nicora, Errol Robinson, Ljiljana PaÅ¡a-Tolić, Philip Hugenholtz and Blake Simmons.
Advanced biofuels – liquid transportation fuels synthesized from the sugars in cellulosic biomass – offer a clean, green and renewable alternative to gasoline, diesel and jet fuels. However, unlike the simple sugars in corn grain, the cellulose and hemicellulose in biomass are difficult to extract in part because they are embedded in a tough woody material called lignin. Thermophilic microbes are believed to be a rich source of cellulase and hemicellulase enzymes for lignocellulosic biomass deconstruction that are active at elevated temperatures and in the presence of pretreatment chemicals such as ionic liquids.
Steve Singer directs the Joint BioEnergy Insitute (JBEI)’s microbial communities program. (Photo by Roy Kaltschmidt, Berkeley Lab)
Steve Singer directs the Joint BioEnergy Insitute (JBEI)’s microbial communities program. (Photo by Roy Kaltschmidt, Berkeley Lab)
“Natural microbial communities that deconstruct biomass, such as those found in cow rumen or compost piles, are often too complex to decipher roles for individual microbial populations,” says Singer. “However, enrichment cultures established with defined substrates and at constant temperatures offer the possibility of simplifying these complex microbial communities and identifying functional roles for specific populations within the community.”
As part of their efforts to develop a cost-effective way to deconstruct lignocellulosic biomass into sugars for fuel, researchers in JBEI’s Deconstruction Division cultivated the switchgrass-feeding, compost-derived consortium of thermophiles.
“Using pretreated switchgrass at temperatures up to 80 degrees Celsius, we demonstrated that this consortium is an excellent source of enzymes for the development of enzymatic cocktails tailored to biorefinery processing conditions,” says Blake Simmons, a chemical engineer who heads JBEI’s Deconstruction Division and was a member of this research collaboration.
To identify the functional roles of community members within the switchgrass-feeding consortium, Singer, Simmons and their colleagues first used shotgun sequencing, a powerful metagenomics technique that enabled them to determine the metabolic potential of all the members of the consortium. They then used metaproteomic measurements to identify those enzymes, predicted by metagenomic analysis, that were actually produced by the microbial community.
“Doing metagenomics by shotgun sequencing is a bit like raiding a toy store and tossing hundreds of jigsaw puzzles onto a pile,” says Patrik D’haeseleer, a computational systems biologist who holds appointments with both JBEI and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and is lead author of the PLOS One paper.
“Each individual puzzle piece may carry some useful information, but you only start to see the bigger picture once you reassemble the pieces,” D’haeseleer says. “Our collaborators at JGI used deep sequencing of millions of small pieces of DNA, and generated a partial assembly based on direct matches between the pieces. We developed a novel phylogenetic binning method to separate those partially assembled pieces into the major bacterial genomes in the consortium. This allowed us to then model the metabolic potential of all those members of the consortium.”
Analysis of metagenomic sequencing data identified the most abundant microbial populations in the consortium to be closely related strains of Thermus thermophilus andRhodothermus marinus. However, based on the assigned fractions of the switchgrass deconstruction proteome, the strains showing the most active role in switchgrass deconstruction were Gemmatimonadetes and Paenibacillus. By comparison, the more numerous Rhodothermus strain contributed fewer enzymes to biomass deconstruction
“By leveraging the unique capabilities of the JGI and EMSL with those at JBEI, we’re developing a more comprehensive functional understanding of how microbial consortia work to breakdown lignocellulose, and identifying the genes and enzymes that are responsible for this deconstruction,” Simmons says. “The list of genes and enzymes generated by this study has been placed into our expression pipeline and are being used to develop optimized cocktails that are capable of generating high sugar yields from pretreated lignocellulosic biomass.”
This research was supported by the DOE Office of Science.
# # #
JBEI is one of three Bioenergy Research Centers established by the DOE’s Office of Science in 2007. It is a scientific partnership led by Berkeley Lab and includes the Sandia National Laboratories, the University of California campuses of Berkeley and Davis, the Carnegie Institution for Science, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. DOE’s Bioenergy Research Centers support multidisciplinary, multi-institutional research teams pursuing the fundamental scientific breakthroughs needed to make production of cellulosic biofuels, or biofuels from nonfood plant fiber, cost-effective on a national scale.
DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the Unites States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.  For more information, please visit the Office of Science website atscience.energy.gov.
Additional Information
For more about the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) go here
For more about the Joint Genome Institute (JGI) go here
For more about EMSL, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory go here

Clean, Green High Performance Biofuels from Carbon Dioxide

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JULY 24, 2013
Lynn Yarris (510) 486-5375  lcyarris@lbl.gov
 38 

 
   
Science Short
Jana Mueller was the lead author on a paper reporting that the bacterium Ralstonia eutropha has been engineered to produce diesel fuel from carbon dioxide. (Photo by Roy Kaltschmidt)
Jana Mueller was the lead author on a paper reporting that the bacterium Ralstonia eutropha has been engineered to produce diesel fuel from carbon dioxide. (Photo by Roy Kaltschmidt)
Could there come a time in which the carbon dioxide emitted from natural gas or coal-burning power plants that warms the atmosphere and exacerbates global climate change is harvested and used to produce clean, green and renewable liquid transportation fuels? A pathway to that possibility has been opened by a team of researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) who have engineered a microbe now being used to produce biodegradable plastic into a strain that can produce a high-performance advanced biofuel.
“We’ve shown that the bacterium Ralstonia eutropha growing with carbon dioxide and hydrogen gas is able to generate significant quantities of diesel-range methyl ketones,” says Harry Beller, a JBEI microbiologist who led this research, which was funded through DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program. “This holds the promise of making carbon-neutral biofuels using non-photosynthetic, carbon-dioxide fixing bacteria as a less resource-intensive alternative to making these biofuels from cellulosic biomass.”
Beller, who directs the Biofuels Pathways department for JBEI’s Fuels Synthesis Division, and also is a Senior Scientist with Berkeley Lab’s Earth Sciences Division, led a previous study in which genetic engineering was used to develop a strain of the bacteriumEscherichia coli (E. coli) that made methyl ketone compounds from the glucose in cellulosic biomass. Methyl ketones are naturally occurring aliphatic compounds now used in fragrances and flavorings. Beller and his JBEI colleagues have demonstrated that methyl ketones also have high diesel fuel ratings (cetane numbers), making them strong candidates as advanced biofuels.
“We’ve shown that, with the same set of genetic modifications, R. eutropha and E. coli can make comparable amounts of methyl ketones, but R. eutropha is making the ketones from carbon dioxide while E. coli is making them from glucose,” Beller says. “This shows that the methyl ketone pathway that we’ve designed is versatile and able to function well in bacterial hosts with substantially different metabolic lifestyles.”
Micrograph shows Ralstonia eutropha bacteria in culture. (Image courtesy of Christopher Brigham, MIT)
Micrograph shows Ralstonia eutropha bacteria in culture. (Image courtesy of Christopher Brigham, MIT)
Current strategies for producing advanced biofuels that could replace gasoline, diesel or jet fuels in today’s engines and infrastructures are based on extracting fermentable sugars stored in the cellulosic biomass of green plants. Those sugars represent chemical energy that was converted from solar energy via photosynthesis and provide the carbon atoms needed to make fuels. R. eutropha is a common soil bacterium that can naturally use hydrogen rather than sunlight as an energy source for converting carbon dioxide into various organic compounds. However, native strains of R. eutropha do not produce detectable levels of methyl ketones and generate very low levels of the fatty acids that are precursors to methyl ketones.
“Since our engineered strains of R. eutropha can use fixed carbon dioxide to make methyl ketones, its biofuels don’t require many of the steps needed to convert cellulosic biomass into fuels, such as growing and harvesting the biofuel crop, digesting the lignocellulosic biomass, and enzymatically saccharifying the digested biomass to produce fermentable  sugars,” Beller says. “The resources needed for these steps could therefore be eliminated if R. eutropha were used to make biofuels directly from carbon dioxide.”
Beller is the corresponding author of a paper in the journal AEM that describes this research titled “Engineering of Ralstonia eutropha H16 for Autotrophic and Heterotrophic Production of Methyl Ketones.” Co-authors are Jana Müller, Daniel MacEachran, Helcio Burd, Noppadon Sathitsuksanoh, Changhao Bi, Yi-Chun Yeh, Taek Soon Lee, Nathan Hillson, Swapnil Chhabra and Steven Singer.
For more about the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) go here

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Energy Department, EU Partner on EV and Smart Grid Coordination


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This is an excerpt from EERE Network News, a weekly electronic newsletter.

July 24, 2013

Energy Department, EU Partner on EV and Smart Grid Coordination

Electric vehicles (EV) seem to be everywhere these days. As Secretary Moniz highlighted on July 19, plug-in hybrid sales doubled in the first six months of 2013 compared to the same period in 2012—and sales are only expected to grow as the next generation of cars and grid systems demonstrate even greater cost saving for consumers.
That is why the Energy Department launched a new center recently that will work to ensure that vehicles, charging stations, communications and networking systems work in unison with the electric grid. The Electric Vehicle-Smart Grid Interoperability Center, located at Argonne National Laboratory just outside of Chicago, will work to harmonize emerging EV and smart grid technologies.
Why is this important? The emergence of EVs brings new economic opportunities for local utilities. Large-scale capital investment by companies for the deployment of EVs, chargers and the smart grid will depend on the ability of consumers to conveniently, safely and securely charge—anywhere, anytime. This will require close linkages between the automotive and utility industries as new demand for electricity brings the need for new investments in power generation and grid systems. For the complete story, see the Energy Blog.

Berkeley Lab Shows Strategies to Achieve Low-Carbon Data Centers


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This is an excerpt from EERE Network News, a weekly electronic newsletter.

July 24, 2013

Berkeley Lab Shows Strategies to Achieve Low-Carbon Data Centers

Because data centers are responsible for 1%–2% of the world's electricity use, they are the target of considerable research into how to reduce their carbon emissions. However, assessing the true carbon intensity of data centers has not been easy. A recent perspective in the journal Nature Climate Change, co-authored by a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researcher, proposes that energy models of data centers provide "actionable guidance" to policymakers. The perspective presents the results of one such model that offers a typical U.S. data center carbon footprint, and how much its footprint is reduced through different carbon management strategies.
The research suggests that the carbon footprint reduction resulting from managing the lifecycle of IT devices (through lifetime extension and recycling initiatives) is dwarfed by that of best practice energy efficiency in the data center. Best practice efficiency reduces the emissions from data centers during their operation, employing such strategies as using the most energy-efficient equipment available, as well as server virtualization and application consolidation, which together lead to higher utilization of each server's computing capacity. The research suggests that while using renewable electricity helps reduce data center carbon emissions, this strategy must be coupled with best practice efficiency. See the Berkeley Lab press release.

Energy Department Releases Updated eGallon Prices


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This is an excerpt from EERE Network News, a weekly electronic newsletter.

July 24, 2013

Energy Department Releases Updated eGallon Prices

The Energy Department on July 19 highlighted the continued growth of electric vehicle sales—doubling in the first six months of 2013 compared to the same period in 2012—as it released its most recent pricing data showing the low cost of fueling on electricity. The national eGallon, a way for consumers to compare the costs of fueling electric vehicles versus driving on gasoline, rose slightly to $1.18 from $1.14 in the latest monthly numbers, but remains far below the $3.49 national average retail cost of a gallon of gasoline.
Plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) sales tripled from about 17,000 in 2011 to about 52,000 in 2012. During the first six months of 2013, Americans bought over 40,000 PEVs, more than twice as many sold during the same period in 2012. The latest numbers also show how the early years of the PEV market have seen much faster growth than the early years of the hybrid vehicle market. Thirty months after the first hybrid was introduced, monthly sales figures were under 3,000. By comparison, sales of PEVs, first introduced in December 2010, have soared to nearly 9,000 in the last month. At the same time, thanks to technology improvements and growing domestic manufacturing capacity, the cost of a battery has fallen by nearly 50% in the last four years, and is expected to drop to $10,000 by 2015. See the Energy Department press release.

Energy Department Invests to Save Energy in Small Buildings


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This is an excerpt from EERE Network News, a weekly electronic newsletter.

July 24, 2013

Energy Department Invests to Save Energy in Small Buildings

The Energy Department on July 17 announced an award of $10 million—matched by at least $14 million in private sector funding—for six projects to help operators of small commercial buildings save money by saving energy. These buildings are less than 50,000 square feet in size and include schools, churches, strip malls, restaurants, and grocery stores. The six projects are aimed at developing user-friendly tools and resources that can be easily deployed at any small building.
The six projects are designed to help building owners across the country save money. The New York-based BlocPower will develop a crowd-sourcing website to help market, finance, and install energy efficiency retrofits for 1,500 small buildings including churches, schools, small businesses, and non-profits in low-income communities across the country. EcoCity Partners, headquartered in St. Petersburg, Florida, will lead a pilot program to design and offer pre-packaged technology retrofit options by building type and size, business type, and climate zone to help the owners of 50 small commercial buildings identify the best retrofit approach. Ecology Action of Santa Cruz, Inc. in Santa Cruz, California, will leverage its existing network of contractors to use low-cost, high-impact tools to analyze and implement deep energy retrofits and financing options that are appropriate to small buildings, and is expected to reach about 900 small buildings in northern California.
Also, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is partnering with Architecture 2030 to develop a 2030 District program for small commercial office and retail buildings, including a technical toolkit that provides guidance and resources for building owners and operators, including buildings in Seattle, Washington; Cleveland, Ohio; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Los Angeles, California. The National Trust for Historic Preservation will partner with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to provide low-cost energy efficiency services to small businesses in California, New York, Washington State, and Wisconsin, leveraging the Trust’s National Main Street Center network of communities focused on preservation-based economic revitalization. And Southface Energy Institute will help develop simple, affordable energy efficiency evaluation and upgrade tools that meet or exceed the Architecture 2030 Challenge targets, including a 50% energy improvement in new construction and a 20% energy improvement from upgrades to existing buildings. The institute will also partner with Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Georgia Tech to develop training materials that will help local contractors to conduct energy audits for about 240 small buildings in the Atlanta, Georgia, metro area.
In the United States, the commercial building sector, of which more than 90% are small buildings, consumes about 20% of all U.S. energy. According to studies by NREL and the Department’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, small buildings have tremendous potential to save energy and improve their bottom lines. See the Energy Department's press release.

EPA Debuts Upgraded Energy Star Portfolio Manager Benchmarking Tool

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This is an excerpt from EERE Network News, a weekly electronic newsletter.

July 24, 2013

EPA Debuts Upgraded Energy Star Portfolio Manager Benchmarking Tool

The EPA on July 18 announced the release of an upgrade to its online energy management and tracking tool, the Energy Star Portfolio Manager. The upgraded tool can help businesses achieve President Obama’s call to make commercial buildings at least 20% more energy efficient by 2020. The new Energy Star Portfolio Manager delivers a more user-friendly interface, enhanced data sharing capabilities, better reporting, and for the first time, the ability to manage buildings across their lifecycle, from design through occupancy.
Tens of thousands of organizations—including school districts, retail chains, hospital systems, and local governments—currently use Energy Star Portfolio Manager to measure the energy performance, water use, utility costs, and greenhouse gas emissions of more than 40 percent of the nation’s commercial building space. The tool will continue to deliver the nearly 150 energy, greenhouse gas (GHG), and water performance metrics that owners and managers of commercial buildings use to make strategic management decisions. One of these metrics, the 1–100 Energy Star score, rates a building’s energy efficiency against similar buildings nationwide.
Energy Star-certified buildings use, on average, 35% less energy and generate 35% fewer GHG emissions than typical buildings. Studies have shown that they have lower operating costs, increased asset value, and higher occupancy rates. See the EPA press release and the Energy Star website.

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Oregon DEQ Holds Hearing on Permit Modification fo - REW - Renewable Energy from Waste

Oregon DEQ Holds Hearing on Permit Modification fo - REW - Renewable Energy from Waste

RES Polyflow Forms Company to Expand Plastic-to-Fu - REW - Renewable Energy from Waste

RES Polyflow Forms Company to Expand Plastic-to-Fu - REW - Renewable Energy from Waste

Oracle Study Says Utilities Not Yet Seizing Smart Grid Data Potential

Oracle Press Release

Oracle Study Says Utilities Not Yet Seizing Smart Grid Data Potential

North American Utilities Expect Analytics Will Drive Operational Efficiency; Less than Half are Using Big Data to Improve Customer Service

Redwood Shores, Calif. – July 23, 2013

News Summary

Utilities today accumulate enormous amounts of smart grid data, but still need to turn information into business value. A new Oracle study, “Utilities and Big Data: Accelerating the Drive to Value,” the second annual study in the Oracle Utilities Big Data series, shows utilities are increasingly prepared for the smart grid data influx compared to last year, but still struggle to fully leverage the data collected. Significant potential still exists to use this information to drive customer service and operational improvements for business value.

News Facts

Oracle’s “Utilities and Big Data: Accelerating the Drive to Value” report surveyed 151 North American senior-level utilities executives with smart meter programs to gauge:
Preparedness to handle the big data influx
How data is being used to improve operations and customer service
Future short- and long-term plans to use smart grid data
The potential of cloud-based solutions for data management and analysis
Where utilities will derive the greatest value from predictive analytics.
While more utilities say they are completely prepared this year compared to one year ago, less than half of utilities report they are using smart grid data to improve customer service and operational efficiency today.

Key Survey Findings

Preparedness Increasing, but Still Lagging: Utilities are more prepared to manage the data deluge today than they were one year ago, with 17 percent responding they are completely prepared, up from 9 percent in 2012. However, the majority still say they are underprepared. Utilities report slight improvements in information sharing and using information for strategic decision making.
Opportunity to Improve Customer Service: Fewer than half of utilities today use smart grid data to provide alerts or make other direct customer service improvements.
Big Data Skills Gap is Real: Sixty-two percent of survey respondents said they have a big data skills gap – including those who say they are prepared for the smart grid data influx.
Potential in the Cloud: While two out of three utilities are considering cloud-based solutions for smart grid/smart meter data management and analysis, only 26 percent are actually planning, implementing or maintaining a cloud solution today.
Utilities Believe in Analytics: Seventy percent of utilities said they expect predictive analytics to improve revenue protection and 61 percent said they expect it to reduce asset maintenance costs.

Supporting Quote

“Our new study shows that while more utilities today, over last year, are completely prepared to handle the big data influx from smart grid, most still struggle to get business value from the information they collect. The most progressive utilities are transforming themselves now into data-driven businesses to accelerate the opportunities big data and analytics can bring to improving customer service and operational efficiencies,” said Rodger Smith, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Utilities.Oracle Utilities Receives Highest Rating Given in MarketScope for Outage Management Systems Report

Supporting Resources

About Oracle Utilities

Oracle Utilities delivers proven software applications that help utilities of all types and sizes achieve competitive advantage, business performance excellence and a lower total cost of technology ownership. Oracle Utilities integrates industry-specific customer care and billing, network management, work and asset management, mobile workforce management and meter data management applications with the capabilities of Oracle's industry-leading enterprise applications, business intelligence tools, middleware, database technologies, as well as servers and storage. The software enables customers to adapt more nimbly to market deregulation, meet ever-evolving customer demands and deliver on environmental conservation commitments. Additionally, Oracle Utilities helps utilities prepare for smart metering and smart grid initiatives that enhance efficiency and provide critical intelligence metrics that can help drive more-informed energy and water usage decisions for consumers and businesses. For more information, visit www.oracle.com/goto/utilities.

About Oracle

Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. For more information about Oracle (NYSE:ORCL), visit www.oracle.com.