Google Dips Its Hands Into $38.8 Million Of Wind Power
May 5, 2010 by Windpower Engineering
Filed under Featured Wind Power Articles, Wind Power News, Wind Power Projects
Google made its first direct investment in a utility-scale renewable energy project — two wind farms that generate 169.5 megawatts of power, enough to power more than 55,000 homes. These wind farms, developed by NextEra Energy Resources, harness power from one of the world’s richest wind resources in the North Dakota plains and use existing transmission capacity to deliver clean energy to the region, reducing the use of fossil fuels. Through this $38.8 million investment, Google is aiming to accelerate the deployment of renewable energy — in a way that makes good business sense, too.
To reach a clean energy future, Google needs three things: effective policy, innovative technology and smart capital. Through Google’s philanthropic arm Google.org, Google has been pushing for energy policies that strengthen the innovation pipeline, and Google has been dedicating resources to developing new technologies, including making investments in early-stage renewable energy companies such as eSolar and AltaRock. Smart capital includes not only these early-stage company investments, but also dedicated funding for utility-scale projects. To tackle this need, Google has been looking at investments in renewable energy projects, like the one Google just signed, that can accelerate the deployment of the latest clean energy technology while providing attractive returns to Google and more capital for developers to build additional projects.
Google says that it’s excited about this first project investment because it uses some of the latest wind turbine technology and control systems to provide one of the lowest-cost sources of renewable energy to the local grid. The turbines can continuously adjust the individual blade pitch angles to achieve optimal efficiency and use larger blades with 15 percent more swept area than earlier generations, allowing capture of even more wind energy for each turbine. The control systems for these wind farms are also advanced and dynamic, allowing for remote 24/7 monitoring and operation to ensure maximum turbine up-time and power production. A couple of us got a chance to climb 80 meters up one of the 113 turbines to see firsthand how the rotating blade motion goes through a gearbox to turn the generator that makes the electricity.
Dept. Of Energy Gives $20.5M To Community Projects
February 9, 2010 by Windpower Engineering
Filed under Environmental Issues, Policy, Wind Power Projects
Steven Chu, U.S. Department of Energy Secretary, announced that five projects will receive a combined US $20.5 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to support deployment of community-based renewable energy projects which include biomass, wind and solar installations.
The projects selected by the Department of Energy will be leveraged with approximately $167 million in local government and private industry funding. The Department of Energy estimates that these projects will provide enough clean, renewable energy to displace the emissions of approximately 10,700 homes.
Projects selected for awards are listed below:
The City of Montpelier, Vermont plans to use $8 million from the Department of Energy to install a 41 MMBtu combined heat and power district energy system fueled with locally-sourced renewable and sustainably-harvested wood chips. The CHP system will be sized to provide heating to the Vermont Capitol Complex, city owned schools, the City Hall Complex, and up to 156 buildings in the community’s designated downtown district for a total of 176 buildings and 1.8 million square feet served.
The Forest County Potawatomi Tribe in Wisconsin will install a 1.25-MW biomass combined heat and power facility that will provide heating, cooling and electricity, a 150-kW biogas digester and generation facility, as well as three 100-kW wind turbines and three dual-axis 2.88 kW solar PV panels located at the Tribe’s Governmental Center using $2.5 million from the Department of Energy.
SMUD will recieve $5 million to install the state’s first-ever ‘Solar Highway’, which will feature 300kW of concentrating PV, and 400 and 800 kW of flat plate PV distributed on 2 miles of highway right-of-ways. SMUD will also install a full scale co-digestion process of fats, oil and grease (FOG) and liquid food processing waste with sewage to produce biogas with estimated power recovery of 1-3 MW, and install two low-NOx anaerobic digesters fed by two dairy facilities that will produce 500 kW of combined heat and power, and generate 600 kW of electricity through a molten carbonate fuel cell.
UC Davis’ proposed Waste-to-Renewable Energy (WTRE) system will get $2.5 million. The system would generate power from a renewable biogas fed fuel cell. The organic waste will enter a receiving station in which it can be collected and prepared for digestion. Once the appropriate mix has been created in buffer tanks, the waste will flow to the reactor where methanogenic bacteria will generate methane and carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, etc.
Finally, Phillips County, Colorado will get $2.5 million to help develop a 650-MW wind farm within Sedgwick, Phillips, and Logan counties in Northeastern Colorado.
