Tawanai

From Ecoworldly.com

The world’s very first floating fullscale offshore wind turbine has officially been inaugurated in the North Sea off the coast of Norway.

The turbine even has a name: Hywind. It measures 213 feet tall and weighs 5,300 tonnes, and it rests on a floating stand which is filled with water and rocks to provide balast. Three powerful cables anchor the stand to the seafloor.

StatoilHydro, the corporate energy giant which owns Hywind, plans to use it as a test for the next two years before building any more floating wind turbines. But if everything runs smoothly, they hope to set up floating turbines around the world for international partners, locations which are likely to include California, Japan, South Korea and Spain.

The biggest advantage to floating turbines is that they can operate out at sea at depths between 120 and 700 metres, much deeper than conventional offshore turbines. Winds are usually much stronger in deeper seas, meaning the new technology could also generate a lot more power.

And for those people who find wind turbines aesthetically unpleasing, floating turbines put further out to sea also mean they’ll be out of sight.

Currently floating turbines are significantly more expensive to build, but due to their many advantages, StatoilHydro believes that the costs should come down over time. “Our goal is to bring down the price to the level of fixed wind turbines that are currently installed in waters some 60 metres deep,” said Anne Stroemmen Lycke from StatoilHydro.

Hywind should begin fanning over the North Sea and generating electricity within the next couple of weeks.

Energy, Innovation, Wind floating turbine

Via Technology Review.

Stirling Energy Systems (SES), based in Phoenix, has decreased the complexity and cost of its technology for converting the heat in sunlight into electricity, allowing for high-volume production. It will begin building very large solar-power plants using its equipment as soon as next year.

The company is currently building a 1.5-megawatt, 60-unit demonstration plant that will use the company’s latest design. Stirling expects to finish that project by the end of the year. It also has contracts with two California utilities to supply a total of 800 megawatts of solar power in Southern California. The first of the plants that will supply this power could be built starting the middle of next year, pending government permits and loan guarantees from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

The projects are part of a resurgence in what’s known as solar thermal power. Various solar thermal technologies were developed starting in the 1970s, but a breakdown in government funding and incentives caused them to stall before they reached a scale of production large enough to drive down costs and allow them to compete with conventional sources of electricity. “It was a classic problem with solar. The market support to bring solar to high volume wasn’t there,” says Ian Simington, the chairman of SES and chief executive of the solar division of NTR, a company based in Dublin, Ireland, that bought a controlling share of SES last year.

Recent state mandates and incentives for renewable energy have led to a new push to commercialize the technology. There are over six gigawatts of concentrated solar power under contract in the southwestern United States right now, says Thomas Mancini, program manager for concentrated-solar-power technology at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, NM. That’s equivalent to about six nuclear-power plants. BrightSource Energy has contracts to provide 2.6 gigawatts of solar power with concentrated solar power (a previous version of this story sited only one of two 1.3 gigawatt contracts), and Solar Millenium has announced a project that would generate nearly one gigawatt of power.

Electricity, Energy, Innovation, Renewable Energy, Solar, research

Via Cisco website

Cisco today announced Smart Connected Buildings  as its latest emerging technology, a key component in delivering on its vision for Smart+Connected Communities, one of 30 key market adjacencies the company has identified.   Smart+Connected Communities addresses the growing need for sustainable energy to meet the demand of increasingly urbanized populations by providing a network-enabled blueprint for successful smart cities of the future that run on networked information.  The solution builds on Cisco’s networked sustainability platform to further utilize the network to increase energy efficiency, create new tools for ‘energy-aware’ city management, and enable economic opportunity and quality of life gains for citizens.

Buildings, Clean Technology, Energy, IT, Innovation

Daily Wireless writes about a new wireless sensor for use in buildings.

Clean Technology, Conservation, Innovation

Read more about OPEN Forum at TelecomPk.Net

Session I
Where’s the Green in Clean? Investment Opportunities, Valuations and the Funding Gap in Cleantech

Traditionally, early stage company executive and investor financial expertise has been focused on company financing. Yet, in many cases, Cleantech demands more.

Many Cleantech executives will be shepherding technologies to commercialization that will require large amounts of capital. Cleantech companies and capital sources will need to build well-informed financial relationships and new financial structures to facilitate capital deployment and allow Cleantech companies to tap into the appropriate financial sources. This need for information and collaboration is more important than ever, given the current state of traditional credit and financial markets.

This discussion will feature a wide range of investors (venture capitalists, private equity investors, hedge fund managers, public financiers, and investment bankers) to delve into the full range of financing the Cleantech industry – from seed financing of nascent inventors, venture financing of emerging-stage companies through international and cross industry joint ventures, from first commercial demonstration to utility scale project development and finance, to IPO, PIPEs and beyond.

The panelists will discuss the capital flow implications for the Cleantech sector. Where Cleantech money is really coming from, what the investment criteria is for each type of investor, where the money is going and why, and how the money is being spent.

Clean Technology, Consumers, Energy, Events, Green, Innovation

I wrote about this new venture with promising technology. Here’s a picture of a demonstration plant which  can process 25 tons of waste a day using technology developed by the startup InEnTec. (Credit: InEnTec)

Companies using similar technologies have failed in the past so lets hope that this time the effectiveness and economic feasibility is there.

Clean Technology, Electricity, Green, Innovation

Skyline Solar is a startup that has developed a cheaper way to harvest energy from the sun. Here’s how it works: the company’s solar panels concentrate sunlight onto a small area, reducing the amount of expensive semiconductor material needed to generate electricity.

The technology will bring the cost of solar power in line with the average cost of electricity, at least in sunny areas, says Ben Eiref, Skyline Solar’s director of product management. Currently, solar power can be far more expensive than electricity from conventional sources; many governments have resorted to subsidies to increase its use.

Via: Technology Review

Clean Technology, Energy, Environment, Innovation, Renewable Energy, Solar

The sun is the most abundant source of renewable energy. But all the technologies that capitalize on sunlight, including photovoltaics and biofuels, require intermediate steps and infrastructure to turn the sun’s rays into something that can be used to perform work in a machine. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are using carbon nanotubes to build small, simple waterborne machines propelled directly by sunlight. In theory, they say, these machines could be scaled up to make energy-generating pumps directly powered by the sun.

The sun-powered machines rely on water’s surface tension. Water molecules are strongly attracted to one another. These high-energy interactions can, under the right conditions, pull objects across the water.

Full article at Technology Review.

Energy, Innovation, Solar

Fast Company issued its 2009 list of most innovative companies – here is the list of those in the clean energy category.

1. NextEra Energy Resources: The top producer of wind and solar energy nationwide, serving 25 states. Its parent, FPL Group, has broken ground on the world’s first hybrid power plant, combining solar with natural gas to boost efficiency.
2. Q-Cells: The fast-expanding photovoltaic (PV) solar-cell producer turned out 150 million units in 2008 and expects to nearly double the number in 2009. Heavy investment in next-gen thin-film technology should keep Q-Cells at the vanguard.
3. First Solar: The current leader in thin-film technology, whose panels are approaching the low-cost holy grail of $1 per watt.
4. Vestas: The Danish wind giant, which boasts a 23% market share worldwide, parked a 131-foot blade outside the Democratic National Convention in Denver to symbolize its four current and planned factories in Colorado.
5. Chevron Energy Solutions: Yes, an oil company owns a leading energy-efficiency consultant and is the top installer of customized wind, solar, and biomass nationwide.
6. Pelamis Wave Power: This Scottish company built the world’s first commercial wave-power farm, off Portugal last year, with the three orange converters bobbing off the country’s Atlantic coast and powering 1,500 homes.
7. Raser Technologies: Its unique new zero-emissions plant in Utah is the first to tap vast low-temperature geothermal resources previously unusable for generating power. The company is developing seven more sites.
8. Ausra: This Australian import’s brand of solar thermal power uses cheap flat mirrors rather than PV cells. After scoring $100 million in VC financing and opening a test plant in California, Ausra plans a larger one for 2010 that will power 120,000 homes.
9. PG&E: Besides making big investments in wind and solar, the “greenest big utility” sponsors the nation’s largest smart-meter program, gave away 1 million CFL bulbs, and hooked up more customers’ solar systems to the grid than anyone else.
10. Verenium: The company’s scientists use a brew of enzymes to turn sugarcane waste into fuel at the nation’s first demonstration-scale cellulosic ethanol plant, in Louisiana. BP inked a $90 million partnership last year.

Clean Technology, Innovation business