And for more than a century it has generated power for homes, offices and industries.

Southeast has a significant number of hydroelectric power projects, and these plants have been a reliable and relatively inexpensive source of locally produced, renewable energy for many of our communities.

But according to a draft of the recently released Southeast Alaska Integrated Resource Plan, while Southeast might have plenty of water to generate hydroelectricity, it is running short of ways to store it.

“We are storage-challenged,” said Dave Carlson, CEO of Southeast Alaska Power Agency and a member of the Advisory Work Group that assisted with the SEIRP. “(The draft plan) identified the problems we know of here, that we had more than a sense were coming. The winter time heating loads have just been skyrocketing.”

Why? Because as heating oil costs have risen dramatically over the past few years, Carlson said, “people have felt it in their pocketbooks, and have decided it’s cheaper to heat with electricity than with oil. It’s a dilemma.” Read more

Coda Holdings will make minor modifications to battery packs for its cars, which use Chinese-manufactured lithium iron phosphate cells, and sell them individually or grouped together — both for storing solar power when homeowners’ rooftop panels generate more than they use, and to help businesses reduce their peak loads. Business customers usually pay for electricity on the basis of their highest level of use.

Because the packs are designed for cars, they are already modular and thus easy to scale up or scale down. Coda plans to sell its sedan with a battery pack of 31 kilowatt-hours or 36 kilowatt-hours; both numbers are roughly what a suburban house uses per day. The stationary module will be 40 kilowatt-hours.

The batteries could also pay for themselves in places where peak-hour power costs more than off-peak power, the company says, although very few places have such “time of use” rates today.

Utilities could also use them as backup in areas where demand for electricity has grown and improvements in distribution lines would otherwise be needed. One reason for such growth is the need for juice for electric cars, which raises the idea that the batteries could be charged up in periods of low demand so that they could later be tapped into by car owners to charge similar batteries in the cars. Read more

The orchestra of mirrors track the sun throughout the day, bouncing rays up at the central tower where the heat is concentrated, converted into electricity and piped into the national grid. Only a small handful of these plants — like PS10, in the Spanish desert region of Andalucia — exist around the world.

Their growth is restricted thanks to their sizable footprints. “Concentrated solar thermal energy needs huge areas,” said Alexander Mitsos, the Rockwell International assistant professor of mechanical engineering, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in a press release.

“If we’re talking about going to 100 percent or even 10 percent renewables, we will need huge areas, so we better use them efficiently,” he said in the release.

Mitsos and colleagues have come up with a new design for CSPs that reduces the required amount of land while boosting the amount of sunlight the heliostat mirrors collect. In perhaps the most beautiful example of biomimicry yet, it’s inspired by sunflowers.

The researchers at MIT, in collaboration with RWTH Aachen University in Germany, looked at the layout of current CSP plants. They put spaces between the mirrors and staggered them like seats in a movie theater. This pattern results in shadows being cast on some mirrors, reducing the reflection of light.

Mitsos’ lab developed a computational model to evaluate the efficiency of heliostat layouts — the system divides each mirror into discrete sections and accurately calculates the amount of light each section reflects at any given moment.

Mitsos and colleague Corey Noone used numerical optimization to fiddle with the placement of the heliostats. They brought the fanned-out layout closer together, building a spiral-like pattern that reduces land by ten percent without affecting efficiency. Read more

The California Energy Commission on a 3-0 vote Thursday approved first-in-the-nation efficiency standards targeting about 170 million so-called vampire charging systems that waste as much as 60% of the electricity they suck from outlets.

The regulations generated strong opposition from appliance and consumer products makers. But they are expected to save enough electricity to power 350,000 homes, equivalent to a city the size of Bakersfield. The rules also are projected to shave an estimated $306 million a year off residential and commercial electricity bills.

“This means that we can have the devices that we like in our lives and that make our lives easier,” Commissioner Karen Douglas said. “But by taking a few relatively simple steps to improve battery chargers, we can save so much electricity, take care of the environment and save ratepayers money.”

Many currently available battery chargers already comply with the new California standards, the Energy Commission said. Most of the new technology is off the shelf and inexpensive, Douglas said.

For example, consumers might pay an additional 40 cents for an electric toothbrush with an efficient battery charger, but would save $1.19 in electricity costs over the lifetime of the product, according to a commission staff report. An upgraded battery charger would boost the price of a laptop computer by 50 cents but would save $19 in power costs.

The new rules would take effect on Feb. 1, 2013, for chargers used with consumer goods, such as phones and power tools; on Jan. 1, 2014, for industrial chargers, such as forklifts; and on Jan. 1, 2017, for commercial equipment chargers, including walkie-talkies for emergency personnel and portable bar-code scanners.

The standards are part of a more than three-decade drive in California to make appliances and buildings more efficient to cut energy use, reduce pollution and save money. California’s official energy policy gives efficiency the highest priority because it’s far cheaper than developing solar, wind and other renewable power or construction of natural-gas-fired power plants.

The effort began with air conditioners in 1977, 13 years ahead of the U.S. government. Since then, state regulations have forced appliance and electronics makers to develop electricity-sipping refrigerators, lighting and, most recently, big-screen, flat-panel television sets in 2009.

The Energy Commission estimates that those initiatives have saved ratepayers about $36 billion. They’ve also helped California to keep its per-capita energy consumption flat over the last 30 years, while the rest of the country’s power demand grew 50%. Read more

Quite a bit it turns out, but Alaska Railroad Corp. is working on it.

At an open house discussing Mat-Su and state projects at Evangelo’s Restaurant Wednesday, while there weren’t many displays strictly talking about commuter rail, a few mentioned it in passing.

One was dedicated to straightening out a tight curve south of Fairview Loop where the road connects with Fireweed Road.

The railroad says it would cost $37 million to build the new track and that it has $5.5 million already. The project would save money and time.

“Shortened passenger travel times is a key factor to help make commuter rail service between Anchorage and Mat-Su,” according to a railroad fact sheet.

It might not seem like a big deal to straighten out a short piece of track like that, but with sharp turns in a track, the trains have to slow down dramatically. For years the railroad has been straightening its track, slowly shaving down the time to run between Anchorage and Mat-Su.

“Ten years ago it took 90 minutes to get a train from Anchorage to Wasilla,” said Tom Brooks, the railroad’s chief engineer.

He said that time has been steadily reduced to 60 minutes and the realignment at Fairview Loop will shave off more time.

“That actually would take another five minutes off,” he said.

Brooks said the curves were put in back in 1919 or so when the track was first laid down. There’s a pretty significant gully there and trains don’t do well on inclines, so the track followed the grade around the gully. Brooks said it’ll take a pretty significant embankment, dozens of feet tall, to fix that problem – hence the project’s expense.

The second project the railroad is looking at is a smaller straightening project in the Eklutna area. It’s a smaller fix, but trains go into the curve at 49 mph and have to slow down to 45 mph. The fix will cost about $1.4 million and the railroad won a competitive nationwide federal grant to do the work, which should start this summer.

“It makes our trains a little happier,” Brooks said.

As the railroad steadily whittles down commute times, it does so knowing that there are other big pieces that still need to fall into place. What do you do with cars on one end and people on the other? Read more

By Katherine Tweed on Green Tech Enterprise:  Energy efficiency is often called the low-hanging fruit of a clean-energy economy. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu likes to say it’s not just hanging, it’s rotting on the ground.

The easy pickings are apparently not that easy, though. Energy efficiency programs have picked up speed in the past few years with concerns about the bottom line and/or sustainability, but those programs often come in fits and starts.

To look for more comprehensive solutions, the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) evaluated five energy efficiency programs in large workplaces to find some of what it takes to make reductions using behavior programs, rather than just retrofits.

The report examined five case studies: “Green the Capitol” in the U.S. House of Representatives; a behavior campaign at a Canadian provincial government building; “Conservation Action!” at BC Hydro; “TLC – Care to Conserve” at the University Health Network at University of Toronto; and “Tenant Energy Management Program” at the Empire State Building.

It’s worth noting upfront that four of the five facilities studied are institutions where the tenant also owns the building. Although navigating the tenant/owner relationship to achieve energy savings is more difficult, it is not impossible. With the proliferation of energy benchmarking, owners of large buildings in many cities and states are examining their energy use and looking to team up with tenants on energy efficiency.

But whatever is being done is far short of what could be accomplished. Commercial energy use is growing faster than the transportation, residential or industrial sectors.

According to anther recent report from ACEEE, “The Long-Term Energy Efficiency Potential: What the Evidence Suggests,” heating and cooling loads in new construction could be reduced 70 percent to 90 percent by 2050 with improvements in building shells. Even building shell retrofits with the latest technology could save up to 40 percent in energy.

But buildings have long life spans, and money for capital improvements is hard to come across these days. In lieu of a retrofit with the most advanced technologies, cutting energy and greening the workplace is possible (beyond replacing light bulbs). Here are 10 findings from the ACEEE.

1.     Lead From the Top. Upper management must not only take ownership of the program, but must also set the tone for the entire project. It means that upper management has to involve stakeholders in the organization early and come up with a clear plan. In the case of the Empire State Building, the Rocky Mountain Institute, which was one of the program participants, noted that project prep time could have been shortened through better coordination.  Read more

Alaskan Brewing is in the commission and testing phases of a $1.8 million steam boiler fueled entirely by the company’s own spent grain. The grain is a protein-rich material that lends itself thoroughly with the combustion technology the company has been perfecting.

The idea is that the new boiler will eliminate the brewery’s fossil fuel use in the grain drying process and displace more than half of the fuel needed to create process steam in the brew house.

The brewery is currently a fairly intensive oil-related operation, currently running the grain dryer and other process heating from oil. Engineers estimate the completed boiler will help save an overall energy usage from oil and corresponding carbon emissions by more than 70 percent. This translates to a savings of nearly 1.5 million gallons of oil over the next 10 years.

The boiler was actually built last year and did an initial startup toward the end of the year. Testing showed the need for additional modifications. The company currently is waiting for additional design modifications to come and engineers hope it will be back up within a few months.

Brewing operations manager Brandon Smith said the entire system hopefully would be completed and running by the end of the first quarter this year and no later than the second quarter.

“This fuel, nobody’s ever burned it commercially before,” he said.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has selected Alaskan Brewing for $448,366 in Rural Energy for America Program funds to support the development. Despite being a capital city, Juneau’s demographics still qualify the brewery for a rural development grant. Alaskan Brewery communications manager Ashley Johnston said the grant would hopefully offset up to 10 percent of the overall system costs. Smith said paperwork is under way for the official approval, which will be done after the completion of the project. This grant represents the highest amount an Alaska business has been awarded from the USDA Rural Development’s business division. This has been active in Alaska for three years, during which it has approved 49 projects.

USDA business and energy specialist Chad Stovall said the business division typically gets $200,000 to $250,000 a year for projects. The national office must approve anything over that amount, which was how Alaskan got its unusually high appropriation.Read more

To the latter point — occasional news about tidal, wave, and hydrokinetic energy were a welcome development. Plans for tidal turbines in India started us off, while a pilot wave power project was announced in Oregon. Meanwhile, a mapping tool is now available helping to assess tidal power resources around the U.S.

There is also increasing attention on technologies that might improve on or at least supplement traditional wind and solar energy. From an offshore turbine design that can store its own power and dole it out when necessary to floating solar panels, it is becoming clear that the overall energy picture won’t necessarily be dominated by your father’s wind turbines.

In the U.S., 2011 marked another year with exactly zero offshore wind turbines in the water — but news on Cape Wind and other projects suggests we’re getting closer. And around the world, offshore development continues apace. By the middle of this year, the European Union had more than 1,200 offshore turbines producing energy. Many countries are focusing their attentions offshore; France announced plans for another 1,200 to be built soon. Meanwhile, wind energy giant Vestas announced an equally giant offshore turbine, a mammoth 7-megawatt design.

In the geothermal realm, 2011 actually more closely resembled 2010, with a number of reports outlining some of the impressive capacity around North America but few major projects underway. Canada apparently sits atop a huge resource, and updated research sponsored by Google found an astonishing 3 million MW of geothermal power around the U.S. (the pesky extraction-associated earthquake problem notwithstanding).

All of this progress — not to mention the rapidly approaching milestone of 50 gigawatts of installed wind power in the U.S. — came in a very interesting year for energy in general. The Fukushima disaster led countries around the world to announce phaseouts of nuclear power — from Belgium to Germany to Mexico to Switzerland, while nuclear leader France seemed unshaken. Read more