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Help Solve the Energy Crisis Once and For All!!

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4 days ago

Filipinos Draw Power From Buried Heat

Ferdinand Marcos, the despot who ruled here for 21 years, is remembered mainly for the staggering quantity of his wife's shoes. But there is another Marcos legacy, and it is drawing new attention at a time of high oil prices, global warming and urgent questions about the role of government in alternative energy development.

Reacting to the early 1970s oil shock, Marcos created a major government program to find, develop and generate electricity from hot rocks deep in the ground. Since then, the Philippine government has championed this form of energy.

Geothermal power now accounts for about 28 percent of the electricity generated in the Philippines. With 90 million people, about 40 percent of whom live on less than $2 a day, this country has become the world's largest consumer of electricity from geothermal sources. Billions of dollars have been saved here because of reduced need for imported oil and coal.

"Goes to show that things aren't always the way we might expect," said Roland N. Horne, a Stanford University expert on geothermal power who has visited this country more than 20 times. "The Philippines would be in hugely worse shape without geothermal as an indigenous energy source."

In installed geothermal power capacity, the country ranks No. 2 in the world, narrowly trailing the United States, which has far more geothermal potential, far more engineering talent and far greater demand for clean sustainable power.

But unlike in the Philippines, government policy in the United States has been inconsistent. In 2006, the Bush administration cut most geothermal spending -- federal programs that received as much as $100 million a year in the 1980s shrank to $5 million. Research projects were dismantled. Scientists in the field had to find other jobs.

"Most of the federal infrastructure, the laboratories and the researchers are now gone," said Karl Gawell, executive director of the Geothermal Energy Association in Washington.

As oil and coal prices soared in the past year, and as popular demand increased for alternative energy sources, the Bush administration rediscovered geothermal. It has proposed spending $90 million over three years on research.

"That's the goods news, but the bad news is that we are going to have to relearn a lot of what the people who we just let go learned over the past 20 years," Gawell said. "The problem with our government's approach to alternative energy is that it is too short-term. You need a sustained commitment to reach this huge energy base."

At early stages of development, geothermal energy has historically been dependent in most countries on high-risk, long-term investment made by governments, not private companies.

While Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, has said little about geothermal energy, Sen. Barack Obama, his Democratic opponent, has said renewable energy -- which includes wind, solar and geothermal -- should generate 10 percent of the country's electricity within four years.

The figure now is about 4 percent, of which less than 1 percent is geothermal. But geothermal offers reliability advantages over solar and wind, mostly because geothermal fields do not stop producing power at night or when the wind stops blowing.
Ferdinand Marcos, the despot who ruled here for 21 years, is remembered mainly for the staggering quantity of his wife's... more

starr111
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1 month ago

World’s first commercial wave energy farm goes live

Earlier this week, Portugal debuted the world’s first commercial wave energy farm. Wave energy at the Agucadoura station is... more

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1 month ago

California institute seeks to make cellulosic biofuels viable within 5 years

A new institute in the San Francisco Bay Area is seeking to make cellulosic biofuel an economically viable alternative to corn ethanol and gasoline within the next five years.

The Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), a partnership between three national laboratories and three Bay Area universities, was formed in June 2007 after the U.S. Department of Energy awarded the institute a $125 million grant to develop better methods for making liquid biofuels from the natural cellulose in trees and grasses. JBEI researchers expect cellulosic biofuels to yield more energy, produce less greenhouse gases, and have less impact on the environment than other alternatives to gasoline, such as corn ethanol. The primary need for such fuels is in the transportation industry, institute scientists believe.

Switchgrass in the research lab of Professor Pam Ronald at UC Davis.
"You can't fly planes on photovoltaic panels," said Harvey Blanch, chief science and technical officer at JBEI. "You've got to have high energy content liquid fuels. There's just some applications where there's no alternative."

U.S. production of corn ethanol has surged to meet the need for alternative fuels, a trend favored by midwestern politicians but decried by many environmental experts. Cellulosic ethanol would be a major improvement over corn ethanol, said Raya Widenoja, a biofuels expert at the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental group in Washington, D.C.

Corn requires water and fertilizers to grow, which degrades soil and water quality, Widenoja said. Corn produces relatively few tons of usable biomass per acre, and corn ethanol also competes with cultivating crops for food. What's more, corn ethanol provides only about a 12 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions over gasoline, according to a University of Minnesota study.

By contrast, most cellulosic ethanol crops are grasses or scrubby trees, native plants that grow without water or fertilizer. The prairie grass miscanthus grows up to 13 feet tall and can produce 15 tons of biomass per acre, more than three times the yield of corn, according to JBEI scientists.

Growing such crops is better for the land, and far better for the atmosphere, Widenoja said. Burning cellulosic ethanol would produce 80 to 90 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions than gasoline, according to Widenoja. A new institute in the San Francisco Bay Area is seeking to make cellulosic biofuel an economically viable alternative to corn... more