Treehugger has news of a potentially new way to do wave power with far fewer moving parts and thus way less maintenance costs.

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Their utilities will install a new digital electrical meter for homes with renewable power that tracks power used by the home separately from power generated into the grid. This is called “net billing” and allows the homeowner to be reimbursed for the power they create.

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Germany has the world’s largest photovoltaic market. They did this with an innovative program that encourages homeowners to install solar. Rather than take the net metering approach (common in the US) in which excess energy is sent into the grid with the homeowner generally getting paid for it,they instead install the solar outside the meter and send all the energy into the grid. The homeowner pays the regular bill BUT is compensated at three times the going rate for energy generated. While a rate like that would probably have to be subsidized here in the US (and lots of energy already is subsidized), the program has had spectacular results.

The tariffs have been around since 2000 in Germany and, in that time, the proportion of energy derived from renewable sources has doubled. Germany actually reached their goal of 12.5% green energy three years early and increased its target to 27% green energy production by 2020.

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Solar thermal stores heat from the sun into molten salt to be used as needed to generate power through conventional steam turbines. Thus, it can generate power any time day or night, even when the sun isn’t shining. This is a zero emissions process and the salt itself is completely non-toxic.

Renewable Energy World has an fact-filled article about how solar thermal works written by the director of development at SolarReserve, who have a 1200 acre solar thermal plant. Their website has a wealth of information.

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With Virtual Met Metering a municipality buys or leases land not necessarily in their area and installs renewable energy on it. All energy goes directly into the grid. They then receive a credit on their electrical bill for the energy generated, offsetting their own usage.

The Rhode Island legislature recently approved a municipal net metering bill. May other states follow.

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Net metering is a policy, usually set by the state and implemented by the electrical utility, that allows customers who generate renewable energy to get paid for it when it goes back into the grid.

Seems a simple enough idea, doesn’t it? Yet in practice the rules can be extremely convoluted, vary widely, and may or may not reimburse the homeowner.

New Jersey and Colorado have the most progressive net metering laws in the nation while New York and California are quite regressive.

Net metering regulations need to favor and encourage, not discourage, homeowners to install renewable power.

Renewable energy World has a useful explanation of the issues involved.

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A carbon-neutral coal plant? Sounds crazy but maybe not. Here’s the idea. Use carbon emissions from coal plants to grow algae which would then be converted to fuel for the power plant or into biodiesel and ethanol.

Preliminary tests shows the idea has promise. Let’s hope it scales and can be done on a mass basis.

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The rising price of corn is forcing ethanol plants to close, and plans to build new plants are being postponed. This could cause a shortfall of 5 billion gallons a year which would in turn force the price of gasoline up as well as pushing corn prices down.

We need ethanol and biodiesel. But ethanol is too often produced from corn, and that means using cropland once used to grow food. It can and should be made from other sources like agricultural processing scrap, plants that don’t need farmland like switchgrass, and perhaps most promising of all, from algae.

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This highly informative video by Bruce Ritchey, CEO of WaterFurnace International, details how geothermal heat pumps can be used to heat and cool homes. Not only is the cost less than with conventional systems, the systems are quiet, environmentally friendly, and require less maintenance.

These heat pumps use the stable temperature of the earth a few feet underground to store heat in the summer and use it in the winter. Thus, the energy to heat and cool the home comes from the earth itself, something which has obvious huge potential, especially in the Northeast where heating oil is becoming extremely expensive.

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The Indian Ocean island nation of Mauritius already gets 19% of its electricity by burning bagasse, the waste from sugar cane processing. They plan to increase that to 33%, and already are exporting 15 million liters of ethanol made from sugar.

Why is it that the government of a tiny island nation truly gets it about renewable energy and is taking action while the government (including Congress) of the supposedly technologically advanced United States does little except argue about it? Embarrassing, isn’t it?

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New power plants ordered by Pacific Gas and Electric Company in California will generate renewable power constantly using solar thermal plus steam turbines powered by biofuel from the nearby Central Valley. Thus they will be able to create electricity anytime, even when the sun isn’t out, and will each use a whopping 250,000 tons of agricultural waste, green waste, and animal manure annually as biofuel. Wow.

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Triple Pundit explains why being able to store renewable energy is crucial. It’s cost effective, as it can allow electricity to be released during peak hours when it’s needed and the price is higher. Also, it increases energy autonomy and also stabilizes the grid.

They have links to government sites explaining how such storage works.

Compressed air storage
Off-peak electricity is used to pump air into underground caverns, then released as needed to generate electricity.

Pumped hydroelectric
Pump the water uphill during off-peak hours, storing it in a reservoir, then release it to power hydraulic turbines.

Solar thermal energy storage
There are multiple methods for storing heat from teh sun to be used to power turbines.

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This BlueFire Ethanol video is maybe a bit heavy on the self-promotion, but explains clearly how ethanol can be produced from landfill waste, which is a double win because you get the ethanol and it frees up space in the landfill.

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A demonstration cellulosic ethanol refinery capable of creating 1.4 million gallons a year of ethanol from sugar cane waste has opened in Louisiana. It’s built by Verenium who plans new plants producing 20-30 million gallons a year.

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Switchgrass grows all over the US. It can survive drought, doesn’t need fertilizer or to be grown on cropland. Researchers have designed a stove for $3,000 that can burn the sticky switchgrass in pellet form, a comparable price to efficient home heating stoves that use wood pellets.

The northeast US in particular seriously needs to do heating some other way than heating oil. Switchgrass pellets are renewable and don’t require forests being logged to make wood pellets.

Spot heating oil is nearly $4.00 a gallon today (it was $1.97 in the winter of 2007.) Next winter in New England it could easily be more than that. Many will not be able to heat their homes at that price. But with switchgrass and a new stove (which would literally pay for itself in a year or so) they will be able to.

Switchgrass, of course, can also be used as a feedstock to produce ethanol. Amazing plant, isn’t it?

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Algenol plans to build a saltwater algae plant in the desert in Mexico. Unlike other methods that require the algae be squeezed to product the oil, they’ve GMO’ed algae to create ethanol directly, and claim the output is dramatically greater than using corn or sugar cane. And it doesn’t require using farmland better used for growing food.

GreenTechBlog has more.

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Cellulosic ethanol is made from the fibers of plants. It does not require the use of cropland.

Switchgrass is the major biomass material being studied today, due to its high levels of cellulose. Cellulose, however, is contained in nearly every natural, free-growing plant, tree, and bush, in meadows, forests, and fields all over the world without agricultural effort or cost needed to make it grow.

It can also be made from wood scrap, agricultural leftovers, and more.

Earth2Tech has a highly informative post profiling eleven companies currently building cellulosic plants in the US, including Bluefire Ethanol, who plan to create ethanol from landfill waste.

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New legislation in Germany is making geothermal electricity a viable option for the first time. Germany’s support of solar energy, mostly in the form of incentives and high return for consumers who sell excess solar power back to the grid, has made it a world powerhouse in solar energy generation and solar panel manufacturing. Now it promises to surge ahead in geothermal electricity generation.

Let’s hope President Obama implements full-tilt R&D into renewables in the US, with subsidies for early adopters. In the process of going to a clean energy economy, millions of new jobs will be created, as will a multitude of new industries. Private enterprise and venture capital in the US are making major moves towards greentech. It’s time for the US government to do the same. Clearly, many other governments already are.

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Cheap electricity from waste heat

Hospital to be heated and cooled by artificial geothermal lake

Instead of putting the airbag in the car, put the car in the airbag.

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They will have 260 ft. blades and be attached offshore to giant spar buoys thus eliminating many environmental concerns since they are not anchored to the sea bottom.

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In just a few years, wind power has gone from the fringe to the mainstream, as witness Windpower 2008, with 10,000 expected participants and GE and BP as their “tera-watt” sponsors. It’ll be held next week in Texas where T. Boone Pickens recently ordered $2bn of wind turbines to make the biggest wind farm ever.

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The problem is two-fold. Supply is not rising as prices increase because there is no excess supply. But more importantly, demand across the world is increasing fast.

In the next 17 years, plans are to move 300 million Chinese from farms to cities that have yet to be built. They will want roads, cars, buildings and streetlights. The equivalent of five New Yorks, and some 50,000 skyscrapers, are on drawing boards. Already, some 174 subway systems are under construction and a power plant is completed every month. China already has 200 cities bigger than Dallas.

China is hardly the only emerging country to be modernizing fast, just the biggest. The US (and the world) needs the equivalent of a Marshall Plan for clean energy and transportation, with any promising new technologies being shared by all. Let’s take a tip from the open source movement, and apply those principles to cleantech. Anyone can use the technologies for free with the proviso that whatever enhancements they develop are then fed back into the system for the use and benefit of all.

George Soros says the price rise is fueled by speculation, that it is indeed a bubble, but it won’t burst until the US and Britain are in recession and demand drops. Other investors and speculators say we could see $200 a barrel oil. And they could all be correct, we could see a huge price acceleration, then a crash.

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DSIRE is a comprehensive source of information on state, local, utility, and federal incentives that promote renewable energy and energy efficiency.

There’s an amazing amount of information here, well-organized and presented, detailing numerous incentives for energy available from all levels of government.

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Central Vermont Public Service is pioneering Cow Power, which turns cow manure into electricity. The five farms currently in the program produce anywhere from 1.3 million to 3.5 million KWH per year.

How it works: Cow manure is fed into an anerobic digester which creates biogas to power an electrical generator and provide heat. Excess power goes into the grid. The remaining dry, solid waste is odorless and can be used as sawdust or as bedding for animals.

So, rather than having a huge disposal problem from all that manure, it is now completely recycled.

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This new technology, using a design based on a shark or tuna tail, will create electricity from the movement of ocean water. Right now, it’s expensive, but then, all new technology is. Maybe one day it will be available in mass quantities at lower cost. It certainly looks to be low-maintenance and low-impact on the environment.

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