The Silicon Valley search engine leader Google has added a very large bit of renewable energy to its portfolio with an agreement to purchase every last watt-hour a huge Texas wind facility produces.
Accrding to a note posted today on the company's blog, Google will buy all the power generated by the 270-megawatt Happy Hereford Wind Farm in the Texas panhandle near Amarillo. No, we're not making that name up.
The power will go to the Southwest Power Pool, the regional grid serving Google's server farm in Mayes County, Oklahoma.
A member of California's fastest-flying bird species was found mortally injured at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in the Mojave Desert two weeks ago, ReWire has learned. Found on the site still alive, the bird was shipped to a rehabilitation facility by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) but subsequently died of its injuries.
Details on the incident are sketchy, but USFWS press spokesperson Jane Hendron has confirmed to ReWire that the falcon was found injured on the site of the concentrating solar facility near the Nevada state line in the first week of September, and that the falcon died shortly afterward either at the rehabilitation facility or in transit.
Formal determination of the cause of the falcon's death awaits a necropsy (the animal version of an autopsy) which will be performed at USFWS's forensics lab in Ashland, Oregon. Looming large in investigators minds as they determine what killed the falcon: the issue of the concentrated solar energy Ivanpah's mirrored heliostats focus on the facility's three 459-foot power towers, also known as "solar flux."
The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System is being built by Bechtel for BrightSource Energy, NRG, and Google on almost 4,000 acres of public land adjacent to the Mojave National Preserve.
Culver City, home to NPR, Sony Pictures, and a hopping restaurant and gallery scene, is getting nervous. The Inglewood Oil Field -- ten percent of which falls within Culver City -- was recently purchased by mining giant Freeport McMoRan, and while the company denies that fracking is taking place, Culver City residents have reason for doubt.
Prior to the sale, the former owner of the field conducted a viability study that sounds like a virtual dinner bell for hungry frackers. The report states that since 2003, sixty-seven wells were successfully fracked, and describes the tests as "representative of anticipated future hydraulic fracturing" on the field.
We caught up with Culver City Councilwoman Megan Sahli-Wells recently to discuss some of her constituents' concerns over issues related to fracking, including water pollution, air pollution and earthquakes.
Los Angeles-based alternative rockers Trapdoor Social have a reputation for environmental consciousness, ever since way back in 2011 when the band's principals Merritt Graves and Skylar Funk met while taking environmental studies courses at Pomona College.
So it's no surprise that the two would come up with a green-leaning way to promote their forthcoming album. But rather than offering their crowdsource patrons some green-tinged swag and calling it a day, Graves and Funk decided to use their promotional efforts to create some of what the marketing folks might call synergy.
Trapdoor Social's funding campaign for its next album, due out early next year, isn't actually going to fund the next album. Instead, the net proceeds from the crowdfunding campaign will go to put solar panels on the roof of an innovative and popular Los Angeles non-profit that's helped to turn thousands of young people's lives around: Homeboy Industries.
A proposed 20-acre, 2.7 megawatt photovoltaic solar project in the Oak Hills section of Hesperia may well be denied this week by the San Bernardino County Planning Commission at their meeting Thursday. The project, proposed by the Sycamore Physicians Partners group, has been the subject of local controversy in Oak Hills, a still-rural outpost at the edges of the sprawling desert suburbs of the Victor Valley.
The county's Planning Commission held a public hearing on the project in early August. Faced with vocal opposition to the solar facility from Oak Hills residents, the Commission continued the hearing to September 19 and directed the commission's staff to draft a formal denial of the project's Conditional Use Permit.
Denying the project's permit would kill the project, an act that represents a reversal by the Planning Commission. Prior to the August 8 public hearing, the Planning Commission's staff had recommended the project be approved, saying that granting the project's permit would be consistent with the area's General Plan.
ReWire reported Tuesday that a study by Fish and Wildlife Service biologists indicated that California and Wyoming were the two states with the greatest number of verifiable eagle deaths at wind turbines. That study also revealed eagle mortality in both states has risen sharply in the last few years, with all 31 Wyoming mortalities taking place since January 2009.
That's almost certainly a direct result of Wyoming's rapidly growing wind industry, which increased in generating capacity from less than 300 megawatts in 2008 to more than 1,400 by the end of 2011. But that growth slackened in 2012. Despite the approval last October of the 3,000-megawatt Chokecherry Sierra Madre wind facility south of Rawlins, the state added not a single new megawatt of wind capacity last year. That's because while Wyoming has a lot of wind power potential, it doesn't have enough transmission lines to get that power to markets.
But a major transmission project now being considered by the Bureau of Land Management and other agencies could change all that, bringing 3,000 megawatts of power from Wyoming to cities in California, Nevada, and Arizona -- and removing an obstacle to much greater expansion of wind turbines in Wyoming's eagle habitat.
- Wind Power
- PV and Solar Thermal
- Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI)
- Watts and Watt-Hours, Kilo and Mega
- 'Enough To Power X Thousand Homes'
- The Grid
- Distributed Generation
- Conservation and 'Negawatts'
- Grid Storage
- PACE Loans, Feed In Tariffs and Net Metering
- Base Load and Peaking Power
- Capacity Factor
- Renewable Portfolio Standards
- Biomass
- Transportation and Renewable Energy
- Geothermal
