Burning Bio News

The TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) began transmitting to its customers 300 megawatts of renewable wind power received from Iberdrola Renewables Inc.’s Streator Cayuga Ridge wind park in Livingston County, Ill. This marks the first delivery under seven contracts TVA recently signed to purchase up to 1,380 megawatts of renewable wind energy from the Midwest.

Dominion Virginia Power today asked the State Corporation Commission for permission to reduce customer rates, effective July 1, as a result of a fuel rate adjustment. The company uses a diversified mix of fuel to run its power stations to generate the electricity used by its customers. According to rate provided by Dominion the residential rate has declined from an average of 10.9 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) in March 2009, to 9.9 cents per kWh with this new rate request. – mj: not too common to hear about rate decreases these days.

The Department of Energy announced $106M in funding for 37 experimental projects that could radically change the ways that we think of “alternative energy.” These projects encompass 17 states. More than half of the recipients are universities. Funded via the “Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy” (ARPA-E), the projects focused on three areas: 1) Electrofuels (DOE also calls this direct solar fuel), 2) Advanced generations of batteries for energy storage, and 3) Innovative materials and processes for advanced carbon capture technologies.

Linghao Zhong, Penn State Mont Alto, is studing of wind collection along highways through an Environmental Protection Agency project. He and his students are trying to determine whether wind can be collected from passing vehicles and converted into electricity. Researchers want to determine whether they can collect more energy from numerous passenger vehicles or fewer tractor-trailers. They also want to identify the best time of day for collection.

A smart electrical power grid could decrease annual electric energy use and utility sector carbon emissions at least 12 percent by 2030, according to a new report from the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The report, The Smart Grid: An Estimation of the Energy and CO2 Benefits, shows a direct link between the smart grid and carbon emissions. It evaluates how different functions of the smart grid could provide substantial reduction in energy use and carbon emissions - both directly by using new technology and indirectly by making renewable energy and efficiency programs more affordable and potentially larger.

Electric rates for Dominion Virginia Power customers were reduced on Jan. 1 in accordance with changes approved by the Virginia State Corporation Commission. The SCC ordered on Dec. 16, 2009, that the interim fuel factor be reduced to 2.927 cents per kWh, which translates to a reduction of $3.83 per month for the typical residential customer.

Mark Z. Jacobson, Stanford professor and Mark Delucchi, University of California-Davis have estimated what technology shifts it would take to produce 100 percent of US energy from renewable energy by 2030. By shifting to wind , water, and solar power, the shift away from less efficient conventional technologies would lower the actual energy required by 68 percent.

U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu announced a $100 million of Recovery Act Funding opportunities for transformational energy research projects to be made available through the Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). Areas of focus included in this funding opportunity include: electrofuels, innovative materials & processes for advanced carbon capture technologies (IMPACCT), and batteries for electrical energy storage in transportation (BEEST).

Obama Administration officials today released a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed by nine Federal Departments and Agencies to make it faster and simpler to build transmission lines on Federal lands. The goal of the agreement is to speed approval of new transmission lines, reduce expense and uncertainty in the process, generate cost savings, increase accessibility to renewable energy and jumpstart job creation.

AmerenUE buys coal from Wyoming and has tapped the wind in Iowa. Next decade, it will source uranium for its Callaway nuclear plant from Russia. The St. Louis-based utility announced it plans to install turbines at Fred Weber’s St. Louis County landfill that will run on gas produced by decomposing garbage. The turbines will be capable of generating 15 megawatts of electricity.

The Vermont Public Service Board says that from now until early in 2010, the state’s electrical utilities will pay anywhere from 12 cents per kilowatt hour for landfill methane energy to 30 cents per kilowatt hour for solar energy. The board will review the rates. By comparison, the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant sells the electricity it generates to state utilities at 4.2 cents per kilowatt hour, established under a long-term contract that expires in 2012.

The Larimer County (CO) Landfill is preparing to fuel a 1.4 megawatt, $3 million power plant powered by landfill gas. The landfill power plant project will sell its electricity to Poudre Valley Rural Electric Association, which will provide the power to its customers.

The Pittsylvania County Board of Supervisors voted to allow anaerobic digesters as a special use in agricultural districts after one of several public hearings Tuesday night. The owners of VanDerHyde Dairy plan to use an anaerobic digester to process manure from their 950 cows and expand use of its byproduct to make electricity. The technology processes the waste to produce electricity, bedding and liquid fertilizer. It also produces waste heat, which can be put to use to replace hot-water production and used for in-floor heating. One of the County Supervisors was interested in restricting digester use to agricultural use only. That amendment did not pass.

UW-Madison Facilities Planning and Management plans to completely phase coal out of operations in the Charter Street heating plant by 2013. The Charter Street heating plant primarily supplies direct heating and cooling to a large portion of the over 20 million square feet of buildings on campus. Historically, the plant has consumed as much as 135,000 tons of coal per year in order to accomplish this goal.

Vermont Governor Jim Douglas today announced that another 14 energy efficiency projects have been selected to receive almost $150,000 in funding from the Vermont Community Climate Change Grant Program. All told, these projects will reduce about 100 tons of greenhouse emissions – the equivalent of taking 16 cars off the road or not burning more than 10,000 galloons of gas, the Governor said.

Microgy has entered into a multi-year, fixed price energy purchase agreement with Alcor for supplying the Huckabay Ridge facility’s electrical power and thermal energy needs utilizing a CHP process. “As part of our continuous effort to achieve operational efficiencies and to increase shareholder returns, this CHP solution allows us to eliminate parasitic consumption of our more valuable RNG((R)) product utilizing an efficient source of energy,” said Rich Kessel, President and CEO of Environmental Power Corporation. “The net effect will be an increase in operating margins, as we now anticipate producing sales of 782,000 MMBtu’s per year, an increase of 147,000 MMBtu’s over targeted production.

Governor Edward G. Rendell today announced Pennsylvania is investing more than $5.3 million in 12 innovative clean energy projects, which will generate energy, save money, create jobs and improve the environment. These innovative projects under the commonwealth’s Energy Harvest Program are funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The selected projects will leverage more than $11.6 million in private investments, create or retain more than 200 jobs, generate enough energy to power 900 homes, save more than $1.7 million in energy costs and reduce air emissions by more than 54 million pounds annually.

Officials with Iowa Lakes Electric Cooperative, near Superior, Iowa, dedicated the seven new wind turbines that were installed to supply electricity to local ethanol plants. The cooperative also dedicated another wind farm about forty miles away in Lakota, Iowa. “They’re 21.5 MW and we got them up in a compressed time table of 18-months,” said Terry Bruns of Iowa Lakes Electric Cooperative.

American Electric Power wants $334 million in federal stimulus money to build the country’s first commercial-scale system to capture carbon dioxide emitted from coal-fired power plants and bury it underground. It would capture about 16 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted by the power plant in New Haven, WV, at AEP’s Mountaineer plant. Battelle has been working with AEP on this project since 2002. Another carbon sequestration project was canceled last week which was a $92.8 million project to test carbon-dioxide burying at an ethanol plant in Darke County in western Ohio.

The Hawaii Public Utilities Commission denied a contract between Hawaiian Electric Co. and a Seattle biodiesel supplier for the utility’s new power plant at Campbell Industrial Park. The PUC ruled that the contract was not in the public’s interest and that it had the potential to cost consumers more money.