My graphics design team and I came up with this conceptual drawing of a wind farm in Haines Alaska.   Depending on the size of the wind turbines, this wind farm can create from 9 to 18 mw of power.  The town right now only uses 3 to 4 MW of power.  The extra power could be used to create a hydrogen refueling station for a fleet of fuel cell powered fishing boats at the small boat harbor.

Wow - they have really spread out this AWARD for developing electric vehicle battery technology.

battery_awardee_map

Check out their press release on this - rather impressive

CONTACT:
Betsaida Alcantara
alcantara.betsaida@epa.gov
202-564-1692
202-564-4355

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 5, 2009

EPA Administrator Announces $95 Million in Recovery Act Funds to Unleash American Innovation and Create Jobs in Florida

$95 Million will go to Saft America Inc. in Jacksonville, Fla. to manufacture battery technology for electric vehicles

Nationwide, President Obama announced $2.4 billion in recovery act funding for advanced battery and electric drive components manufacturing and electric drive vehicle deployment

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. – To accelerate the manufacturing and deployment of electric vehicles, batteries, and components here in America, and create tens of thousands of new jobs, President Obama today announced 48 new advanced battery and electric drive projects, in more than 20 states, receiving a total of $2.4 billion in funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Vice President Joe Biden and four members of the Cabinet, fanned out to communities across the country to share the historic announcement.

EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson traveled to Florida to announce a $95 million grant for Saft America, Inc. to construct a new plant in Jacksonville, Fla. on the site of the former Cecil Field military base. The new plant will manufacture lithium-ion cells, modules and battery packs for military, industrial, and agricultural vehicles. These projects, selected through a highly competitive process by the Department of Energy, will significantly boost U.S. manufacturing capacity for batteries and electric drive components as well as the deployment of electric drive vehicles, helping to establish American leadership in creating the next generation of advanced vehicles.

“President Obama has called for us to unleash American innovators, engineers, workers and entrepreneurs. We need to get into the global clean energy race – and today we’re firing the starting gun,” said EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson. “This recovery funding will propel America into global leadership in innovative battery manufacturing, position our auto industry to reclaim the lead in producing the cars of the 21st century, and lay a new foundation for prosperity with new jobs in clean energy.”

Administrator Jackson appeared with representatives of Saft America, Progress Energy, and Ford Motor Company at the event today held in St. Petersburg, Fla. Progress Energy plans to deploy Ford electric vehicles to help provide service to its electric utility customers in St. Petersburg and Lake Mary.

Thomas Alcide, President of Saft America, Inc. said, “This investment in America will allow Saft to build a state of the art factory for lithium ion batteries which will bring high technology jobs to Jacksonville rapidly and make us competitive on the world markets.”

Additional funds nationwide will speed deployment of American-made Ford plug in electric vehicles.

“Ford is committed to the commercialization of plug-in hybrids and battery electric vehicles within five years and we are pleased the Obama administration is supporting these efforts,” said Sue Cischke, group vice president, Sustainability, Environment and Safety Engineering, Ford Motor Company. “This grant represents the recognition that the move toward electrification requires a partnership of vehicle providers, utilities and the government. Ford is uniquely positioned to work with its existing and new utility partners to develop the smart vehicle to grid integration that will be required for mass market acceptance of electric transportation.”

“Progress Energy is proud to partner with the EPA and with Ford on this innovative technology,” said Bill Johnson, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Progress Energy and co-chair of the Edison Electric Institute’s CEO Taskforce on Electric Transportation. “We already have one of the nation’s largest utility plug-in hybrid electric vehicle programs because we believe that plug-in hybrids and other alternative energy technologies are critical parts of our balanced solution strategy for addressing the challenges of growing customer demand, high fuel costs and global climate change. We are also investing in aggressive energy efficiency and state-of-the-art power plants as part of our balanced solution strategy to meeting these new energy realities.”

For a full list of award winners: http://www1.eere.energy.gov/recovery/pdfs/battery_awardee_list.pdf

For a map of their locations: http://www1.eere.energy.gov/recovery/pdfs/battery_awardee_map.pdf

E-Fuel Corporation, a Silicon Valley startup, has created a backyard refueling station that looks about as difficult as making beer. Okay - maybe easier than making beer as it doesn’t require all the vessel transfers. It uses water, sugar, and yeast to create ethanol. It takes ten gallons of sugar (unusual measurement for a dry product) to create one gallon of ethanol. Over a week, the system can create 35 gallons of fuel. This means you’d have to have 350 gallons of sugar on hand on a weekly basis to create the ethanol. Where do you store all that sugar? What I do really like about this though is that this is set up for the individual to create their own fuel. They are selling these now, but delivery is not until fourth quarter this year. For just $9995 you can have your own ethanol back yard refueling station.

I love the name of this one - the Freedom Fueler. It’s the home biodiesel maker. You just need to collect waste oil from your local fry house. They have several different models - the entry level one is $3495 and can produce 40 gallons of fuel with just 30 minutes of effort. With 80 gallons of waste oil and 22 gallons of methanol, you produce 80 gallons of biodiesel with a by product of 22 gallons of glycerin. Glycerin is used in hand lotions, and in creating nitroglycerin (the explosive). Additionally, biodiesel has a high clouding temperature and is not suitable for use in cold climates without putting in a winterizing additive or blending it with diesel oil.

My ideal is to have an algae biofuel system that can create 35 gallons per day of algae biofuel from a small back yard system. In my ideal system, you grow your own algae and have the compressor set up to automatically create the fuel. Considering algae doubles in size every day, you’d have to get the right strain that would grow the best for your area. The ability to do this is much further away than fourth quarter this year so I might go with this micro fuel system first while the algae biofuel technology becomes more developed.   There are varying levels of success so far with algae biodiesel, yet tremendous research is happening on this front - Ames Laboratory is testing out an idea that would produce 10,000 gallons of algae biodiesel per year on just 1 acre of land.  If they are successful, a smaller scale back yard operation producing the amount of fuel a small family needs to heat their home and fuel their vehicles is possible.

When looking at creating your own energy, energy storage is a big issue. With solar power, you’re only creating power when the sun is shining. With windpower, when the wind is blowing. With hydropower, when the water is running. It’s a basic energy source, energy sink issue (a sink is how you use or store the energy).

To date, most people have been using large banks of batteries for energy storage associated with alternative energy. Batteries are the weak link in the whole system (and the most toxic). They have about 1/5th the life of the solar panels for which they store energy.

Larger power companies are developing larger power storage schemes. The question is, can the individual use some of these energy storage schemes as well? In the picture below, the company SolarReserve uses mirrors to focus the sun on a large stack that converts salt to liquid and then uses the hot liquid to run turbines to generate power. The liquid salt holds the heat for much longer than the conventional steam turbine solar thermal designs.

I inherited a 20kw diesel generator with this property I purchased in Alaska as a corporate retreat center. I’ve owned this property for four years now, and have started the generator on several occasions - mostly out of curiousity as it hasn’t been used even as back up power for almost a decade now. It used to be the primary power generation system for the property until the power company brought power out to the property.

Just what these folks needed a 20kw gen set for is beyond me. The previous owner did have some interesting power tools in the garage - a very large compressor probably being the biggest power draw. Other than that, there is no other evidence of large power requirements out here and the home’s electrical requirements are relatively minimal. Inside the house, the largest draw is the electric dryer that at the most requires 4 kw. All cooking appliances are gas and the water and home heating is through a diesel furnace. Here is an electrical power consumption table for common household appliances. When a generator is far bigger than what is needed, it doesn’t run very efficiently.

A few years back a friend who specialized in remote power generation in the Air Force was testing out the generator. A couple local guys working on the property didn’t see why we wanted to fuss around with it since the power never goes out in this small town in Alaska. I wanted it working in case we ever needed it. When the power goes out the pumps don’t run for the water, septic systems, or the diesel boiler. The power went out the other night - for the entire town. Luckily they got the power back online within four hours and according to the long time residents, this was the longest they had ever experienced a power outage.

This gave me ample motivation to look back into my 20kw generator. With a new battery and some new antifreeze, the beast fired right up. We are having the electrician come out to verify the system is ready to cut over to the generator in the event we need it. To find out how expensive is is to generate our electricity with this diesel generator, I need to find out the BSFC for this motor. This number is fuel consumed per brake horse power per hours run. You multiply the BSFC by actual output to see how much fuel you would use. Nearest I can tell is the most this generator will consume is about a half gallon of fuel per hour to meet a peak load demand from this property. To keep this simple, lets say it uses 10 gallons of fuel per day. At $4 per gallon, that is $40 per day and $1200 per month. This makes getting that wind turbine up and operational even more attractive.

What is amazing is how the various states create electricity and who owns the power companies. According to this Nebraska state website:

“Nebraska is the only state that generates electricity entirely by publicly-owned power systems. As of July, 2008, the statewide average price for all sectors from all electric utilities is the eighth-lowest rate in the country, based on the latest federal figures. Nationally, electricity costs 49 percent more than it does in Nebraska. Across all sectors, Hawaii has the highest electricity rate (32 cents), and West Virginia has the lowest electricity rate (5.66 cents).”

Here is a state by state summary of electrical rates. It was gathered from http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table5_6_a.html.

I received an email from Barbara MacDonald of Spot that Zebra - a management consulting firm located in South Africa. Barbara was sharing with me that because of the rolling blackouts in South Africa that periodically turn off power to her office for four hours at a time during business hours that she has to create alternative energy solutions. Folks there with small businesses have set up simple back up battery solutions to handle these rolling black outs. Click here to learn more - http://www.scienceinafrica.co.za/2008/february/backuppower.htm