Original source: http://www.renewablesbiz.com/article/10/09/supervisors-move-forward-waste-energy-project

Sep 4 – McClatchy-Tribune Regional News – Rick Longley Orland Press Register, Calif.

Glenn County approved a memorandum of understanding this week in support of a proposed solid waste conversion facility to be built east of Orland.

However, the potential foreclosure of the site property almost derailed the agreement, until supervisors were assured it likely would not occur and the agreement could be canceled if the owner were unable to fulfill her obligations.

Kara Baker of KVB, Inc. wants to build the conversion center on acreage her family owns off Highway 32 about five miles east of town near Stony Creek in the Hamilton City area.

The facility would convert solid waste from the county’s waste stream into a usable product, and extract recyclable materials so they would not go into the landfill, Supervisor Leigh McDaniel said.

It would use technology to make these items into “green” products or energy sources and should operate at 85 percent efficiency, he said, without creating pollution or troubling the neighbors.

“Do we follow our philosophy of green technology and waste management?” McDaniel asked.

“We either start this now or wait 50 years when it becomes a mandate. I say start it now.” Read more

Sep 4 – McClatchy-Tribune Regional News – Reed Fujii The Record, Stockton, Calif.

Original source: http://www.energycentral.com/functional/news/news_detail.cfm?did=16866752

DTE Energy plans to install a $100 million biomass power plant at the Port of Stockton, converting an existing coal-fired cogeneration facility to burn waste wood from urban and agricultural sources.

Port officials will consider granting a lease to the energy company during a public hearing Tuesday.

Detroit-based DTE Energy said conversion of the former Port of Stockton District Energy Facility plant at 2526 W. Washington St. to a 45-megawatt wood-burning unit would, beginning in 2013, provide California consumers 360,000 megawatthours per year of renewable energy.

With state-of-the-art pollution controls, a DTE presentation billed the Stockton project as “one of the cleanest solid-fuel-burning power plants in North America.” Read more

September 6, 2010 |  2:08 pm

Original source: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2010/09/garbage-incinerators-waste-to-energy-california.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GreenspaceEnvironmentBlog+%28Greenspace%29

Government officials from around the world used to come to Long Beach, Southern California’s industrial port city, to catch a glimpse of the future: Two-story piles of trash would disappear into a furnace and eventually be transformed into electricity to power thousands of homes.

Nowadays, it’s U.S. officials going to Canada, Japan and parts of Western Europe to see the latest advances.

The Long Beach plant, for all its promise when it began operations roughly 20 years ago, still churns out megawatts. But it is a relic, a symbol of how California, one of America’s greenest states, fell behind other countries in the development of trash-to-energy technology.

“I am having a hard time explaining why California is so far behind,” said Eugene Tseng Tseng, a UCLA  law professor who spent the last three months leading delegations on overseas tours.

While so-called biorefineries have blossomed abroad, concerns that the technique would undermine recycling efforts and worsen air pollution stalled efforts in California. With space for garbage dumps dwindling, proponents of a new breed of the technology hope to win over detractors.

Los Angeles County officials want to build three plants at a total cost of $200 million to demonstrate how far the technology has come as they scramble for alternatives to closing the world’s largest landfill and shipping trash four hours by rail to an abandoned gold mine near the Mexican border.

If they prove successful at reducing waste and producing power, there’s no guarantee they’ll usher in a new wave of garbage-gobbling technology. Efforts to pass legislation that would have given waste-to-energy plants credit toward recycling and renewable energy goals so that cities could meet state mandates hit a snag this year when some environmentalists argued that such facilities are no different from incinerators, which do not receive credits.

“We have the most aggressive goals for recycling and renewable energies but we’ve also got groups fighting us on solar, wind and now this,” said Coby Skye with the county’s Environmental Programs Division. “There are no other options if we can’t get these technologies moving forward.” Read more

Sep 2 – McClatchy-Tribune Regional News – Jenna Mink Daily News, Bowling Green, Ky.

Original source: http://www.energycentral.com/functional/news/news_detail.cfm?did=16847176

It’s created a buzz throughout the country, and now a local elementary school is one step closer to becoming the first net-zero school in the nation.

Workers began installing solar panels Wednesday on the roof of the new Richardsville Elementary School. The 77,000-square-foot, $12.6 million building will produce more energy than it consumes.

It will use geothermal piping to eliminate the need for furnaces and boilers. The walls are heavily insulated with concrete that gives the school triple the insulation of other buildings.

Even the floors are stained and polished — which reduces the effort required to buff and clean the surfaces — and energy-efficient bamboo was used to create the gym flooring.

But one of the biggest boons to the school’s net-zero status is the solar panels. Solar panels use sunlight to generate power, keeping the building running with natural energy.  Read more

Sep 02 – The Press Democrat, Santa Rosa, Calif

Original source: http://www.renewablesbiz.com/article/10/09/chicken-waste-power-plant-proposed-near-sonoma

A private company’s plan to use chicken waste to power an energy generation project south of the city of Sonoma will go before the county Board of Supervisors today.

The special board meeting starts at 8:30 a.m. and will deal specifically with the financing behind the project.

But it also will be a first chance for the public to comment on the proposed site of the facility. Two locations are under consideration, one at the Sonoma County Water Agency’s treatment plant on 8th Street East and the other on an adjacent property recently purchased by the agency.

OHR Biostar, a partnership of the Los Angeles County-based engineering firm OHR Energy and Kansas City-based BioStar Systems, has been in talks with the county for about a year.

The company wants to use waste from local egg farms to feed a manure digester that would generate methane gas and power a 1.4 megawatt fuel cell. That’s enough to serve about 2,100 typical residences, based on West Coast power usage. The company would sell gas to PG&E and electricity to the county. It would also sell leftover waste as fertilizer.

Currently waste from local egg farms is trucked to Oakland where it is used to generate power for the East Bay Municipal Utility District.

County officials say the facility will result in shorter truck trips, which will cut down on greenhouse gases, and add another local source of renewable energy.

It would be the first project in the county to use poultry waste to generate power. Several local projects produce power using cow manure from dairy farms. Read more

Power to the people

Technology and development: A growing number of initiatives are promoting bottom-up ways to deliver energy to the world’s poor

Sep 2nd 2010

Original source: http://www.economist.com/node/16909923?story_id=16909923

AROUND 1.5 billion people, or more than a fifth of the world’s population, have no access to electricity, and a billion more have only an unreliable and intermittent supply. Of the people without electricity, 85% live in rural areas or on the fringes of cities. Extending energy grids into these areas is expensive: the United Nations estimates that an average of $35 billion-40 billion a year needs to be invested until 2030 so everyone on the planet can cook, heat and light their premises, and have energy for productive uses such as schooling. On current trends, however, the number of “energy poor” people will barely budge, and 16% of the world’s population will still have no electricity by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency.

But why wait for top-down solutions? Providing energy in a bottom-up way instead has a lot to recommend it. There is no need to wait for politicians or utilities to act. The technology in question, from solar panels to low-energy light-emitting diodes (LEDs), is rapidly falling in price. Local, bottom-up systems may be more sustainable and produce fewer carbon emissions than centralised schemes. In the rich world, in fact, the trend is towards a more flexible system of distributed, sustainable power sources. The developing world has an opportunity to leapfrog the centralised model, just as it leapfrogged fixed-line telecoms and went straight to mobile phones.

Generating electricity from rice husks

But just as the spread of mobile phones was helped along by new business models, such as pre-paid airtime cards and village “telephone ladies”, new approaches are now needed. “We need to reinvent how energy is delivered,” says Simon Desjardins, who manages a programme at the Shell Foundation that invests in for-profit ways to deliver energy to the poor. “Companies need to come up with innovative business models and technology.” Fortunately, lots of people are doing just that.

Let there be light   Read more

Sep 1 – McClatchy-Tribune Regional News – Sue Book Sun Journal, New Bern, N.C.

Original source: http://www.renewablesbiz.com/article/10/09/waste-authority-turning-landfill-gas-electricity

A slow economy also slows down the amount of trash dumped at the three-county solid waste partnership’s Tuscarora landfill.

But it doesn’t slow down the methane gas emitted from decaying waste already there or the stench. Now that there is a system in place to recycle the gas to generate electricity, the Coastal Area Solid Waste Management Authority is moving more quickly to harness it.

“This time, we’re not waiting until the cell is full,” said Allen Hardison, authority director. “We are putting in the wells and lines on the first half of the third cell” at the 510-acre landfill expected to handle the trash in Craven, Pamlico and Carteret counties for 50 to 70 years. Read more

Aug 31 – McClatchy-Tribune Regional News – The Modesto Bee, Calif.

Original source: http://www.energycentral.com/functional/news/news_detail.cfm?did=16821301

The Modesto Irrigation District board today rejected a plan to generate power by burning orchard wood and other material in a biomass plant proposed for the Beard Industrial District.

Directors John Kidd, Cecil Hensley and Paul Warda voted against the project. Directors Tom Van Groningen and Glen Wild supported it. Kidd, Hensley and Warda primarily opposed the project because MID would have had to pay too much for energy from the biomass plant.

The decision came after a lengthy public hearing this morning that brought scores of people to the MID board room, many of them standing along the back wall waiting for a chance to speak.

Critics said the plant could worsen air pollution and would cost MID ratepayers too much. Supporters said the project would reduce open burning of farm waste while helping the district meet a state mandate for renewable energy.

For updates, see modbee.com or Wednesday’s Modesto Bee.

Olivera Egg Ranch in French Camp will construct an anaerobic manure digester that will create methane gas, which will be used in a 1.4-megawatt fuel cell to generate electricity.

By Reed Fujii   September 1, 2010

Original source: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-poultry-power-20100901,0,3816049.story?track=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+latimes%2Fbusiness+%28L.A.+Times+-+Business%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

An egg farm just south of Stockton is planning to use methane gas from more than 1 million pounds of poultry waste a week to help power its operations, reducing both its electricity bills and waste disposal costs.

The Olivera Egg Ranch in French Camp will install a 1.4-megawatt fuel cell that will produce enough power to run the facility. The system may also help ease relations with neighbors who have sued over noxious ammonia emissions from Olivera’s manure lagoons, which the farm currently uses for waste disposal.

G3 Power Systems Inc., a Novato, Calif., power systems company, is designing and installing the technology at Olivera using a fuel cell from FuelCell Energy Inc., a Danbury, Conn., manufacturer.

“It won’t stink anymore,” G3 Power Systems President Ray Brewer said. “It’ll all burn.” Read more

Bill Opalka | Aug 30, 2010

Original source: http://www.renewablesbiz.com/article/10/08/future-hydropower

As discussed here recently, Vermont qualified large-scale hydropower sourced from Canada as a renewable energy resource. The rationale is that carbon-free energy should be credited toward fulfilling its renewable energy goals, not just small hydro or newly built wind, solar or other resources.

But I’m wondering if a similar decision may be faced by other some states sooner rather than later.

In New England, where I live, the renewable portfolio standard (RPS) requirements are ramping up, with a key procurement date of 2015 in many places. Aside from the hundreds of megawatts of offshore wind in the permitting stages, there doesn’t seem to be the necessary land-based development pipeline needed to fulfill the various RPS requirements if the offshore wind developments aren’t done. And that doesn’t get to the issue of siting any power plants, renewable or otherwise.

Given the litigious nature of the region, it’s not too hard to imagine any and all renewable projects, let along offshore wind, being tied up in the courts for years.

So here’s one scenario, not terribly outlandish in my view that could occur in a few years.  Read more

Aug 30, 2010 — Radio Free Europe Documents and Publications/ContentWorks

Original source: http://www.renewablesbiz.com/article/10/08/kyrgyzstan-launches-new-hydroelectric-power-plant

Kyrgyzstan has launched a $200 million hydroelectric power plant, its first since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Kyrgyz President Roza Otunbaeva attended a ceremony marking the launch of the Karambata-2 project’s first unit.

The Karambata-2 project, partly funded by Russia, will allow Kyrgyzstan to generate more electricity but could divert water from its neighbors. Uzbekistan, in particular, relies on rivers that originate or pass through Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to irrigate its cotton fields and farmland.

Uzbekistan has opposed plans for large hydroelectric projects in both countries.

compiled from agency reports

Charity predicts more food shortages in Africa because of EU target to produce 10% of all transport fuels from biofuels by 2020

Original source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/30/biofuels-land-grab-friends-of-the-earth

Friends of the Earth says that biofuel crops, including sugar cane, ‘are competing directly with food crops for fertile land’. Photograph: Juan Carlos Ulate/Reuters

European Union countries must drop their biofuels targets or else risk plunging more Africans into hunger and raising carbon emissions, according to Friends of the Earth (FoE).

In a campaign launching today, the charity accuses European companies of land-grabbing throughout Africa to grow biofuel crops that directly compete with food crops. Biofuel companies counter that they consult with local governments, bring investment and jobs, and often produce fuels for the local market.

FoE has added its voice to an NGO lobby that claims local communities are not properly consulted and that forests are being cleared in a pattern that echoes decades of exploitation of other natural resources in Africa.

In its report “Africa: Up for Grabs”, the group says that the key to halting the land-grab is for EU countries to drop a goal to produce 10% of all transport fuels from biofuels by 2020.  Read more