Environmental News

by Aaron Turpen, Cheyenne Green Living Examiner

Recently, the Wyoming Tribune Eagle's Outdoors Editor Shauna Stephenson published an article about recent changes to energy rules and regulations from the nation's Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and how they would affect both Wyoming's energy producers and the conservation groups that fight them. (Yes, we need energy, but not at any cost)  Stephenson failed to ask the one fundamental question that should be driving this debate and instead focused on the partisan issue at hand.

The driving question should be: why is it Washington's decision what Wyoming does with our energy?

Being something of a tree hugger, I understand the issue of sustainability and conservation, but I am practical enough to understand that the forces at work here are not what they pretend to be.  A generally free market, Constitutional understanding of the issue immediately tells me that government, especially centralized control in Washington, will do little to "conserve" anything and a lot to bring new hazards to our great state's future.

by Aaron Turpen, Cheyenne Green Living Examiner

According to the American Wind Energy Association, Wyoming is nearing the 1,000 megawatt mark for wind energy production.  Current production, as of September, is at 986 MW with an additional 300 currently being installed.  Ad additional 500 or more is under development for the next two to three years.

While not leading the nation in total wind power production (Texas leads at nearly 8,800MW), Wyoming is certainly a national leader.  Ranked at number 11, Wyoming has the potential to be number 7 in total capacity.

Most of those plants are owned by PacifiCorp and Duke Energy.

The only facility powering Wyoming is the Happy Jack facility near the city dump outside of Cheyenne, which is owned by Duke Energy and supplies Cheyenne Light, Fuel and Power.  The Air Force's turbine is their own, of course.

Facilities range from the top of the state near Hulett to the bottom near Fort Bridger.  And everywhere in-between, right to left, up and down.  The largest facility is Seven Mile Hill, producing 118.5MW with 79 generators, installed in 2008.

Another big one is the High Plains facility that just went online this year with 66 turbines putting out 99MW of capacity.  The Glenrock facility puts out the same, in fact.

Definitely a lot of wind blowing through here, so be happy that this Holiday season, though the weather outside might be frightful, the wind... it's delightful!

Ya, I know, cheesy.

Being developed in Toledo, Ohio (no word on if the builders are related to Klinger), the Dynalifter has characteristics of both a blimp and a plane.  It combines both the light weight of an airship with the stability and handling of an airplane with an emphasis on the huge payload capacity of a true blimp.

The Dynalifter is not continually buoyant like a traditional airship, using lift from both helium and aerodynamic lift.  The helium can provide up to 80% of the lift, depending on the circumstances of the payload, but internal combustion and thrust, combined with wing lift, provides the rest as in a fixed-wing aircraft.

The company building this is called Ohio Airship.  The company hopes to have the aircraft airborne sometime next year.  The company has been developing the Dynalifter for ten years.  The current prototype is 117 feet long and was built after a weather disaster destroyed the earlier prototype OA had built two years earlier.

The disaster turned out to be lemonade when the resulting rebuilt netted the donation of a new hangar, parts for a new airship, and a resulting new iteration of the aircraft that is 500 pounds lighter.

Researchers at Tel Aviv University are working on a nano-technology that can coat glass on windows, solar panels, and other things to repel dirt, dust, and water.  The  material is being created to improve solar panels, which can lose up to 30% of their efficiency just from dust and water spots.

Creating self-washing glass for windows and solar panels is a great idea on several levels.  Brighter windows into your home mean better heating and natural light, cleaner panels mean better solar absorption and photovoltaics, and think of what it could do for automobiles, greenhouses, and more.

Once the technology goes commercial, it would be applied as a sheer coating to existing glass.  The stuff was originally invented to coat some nerve cells to battle Alzheimer's, but was not well-suited to the task.  By accident, it was realized that it could coat glass or other clear surfaces.

The material is made up of peptides which are placed into a vacuum under high pressure, nanotubes self-assemble.  These tiny nanotubes (1 billionth of a meter in length, pictured above under microscope) are naturally resistant to water and heat.  The material is also capable of storing electrical energy for short periods of time as a super-capacitor.

This last benefit could also make it ideal for coating solar cells themselves to enhance their capacity.

Well, there won't be a shortage of lithium for a while, it seems.  Although there hasn't been a lithium shortage worry or anything, Bolivia has announced that if there were, it'd be solved already.

Home of the world's largest salt flat, Satar de Uyuni (pictured at right), Bolivia is now home to an estimated 35% of the world's currently known lithium resources.  That's according to the U.S. Geological Survey, which apparently does more than just the United States.  They should change their name.

With the rise of electric cars and the near future of those electrics being based on lithium-ion batteries, Bolivia may have found their new largest export.  All electric cars, including battery electric, hybrids, and even hydrogen and similar vehicles use batteries in some fashion.  Some more than others, obviously.  Currently, the lightest and most efficient battery type is a lithium-ion battery.  Lithium makes up batteries in laptop computers, cell phones, and other gadgets as well.

Of course, there are a lot of other things that make up a lithium-ion battery.  Those items may be getting a little harder for us to find.  Such as phosphorous in the current favorite EV battery: LiFePO4.  I discussed phosphorous' growing scarcity in The Sustainability Factor.

But the good news is that we're not running short on lithium any time soon.

The idiots at Treehugger

A company called Deepwater Wind acquired the contract from Rhode Island to sell them power from a deep water wind farm off their shore.  This could eventually grow to supply 15% of the state's electrical needs.  Of course, Rhode Island is small, but still, that's a not too shabby.

The 20-year power purchase agreement will involve up to 8 wind turbines situated off shore and producing a total of 28 megawatts of power.  Rhode Island set a 20% renewable resource-based electricity goal to be reached by 2015.  This could be a big part of that.

Another offshore wind project is much larger, at 130 turbines for neighboring state Massachusetts.  Critics are protesting the $1 billion cost, however, who point out that on-shore wind turbines can come at almost half the cost.

What those critics seem to be missing is that land is at a premium in some eastern states and offshore wind actually produces more power per turbine over the long run because of steadier wind currents.

For the first year of the Deepwater project, Rhode Island will purchase power at 24.4 cents per kilowatt hour, ten cents more than their current purhcase.  As time goes on and the turbines increase, however, this rate will drop and Deepwater expects to be around the 15-17 cent/kwh by 2015 when the final turbine is in place.

This is interesting and an innovative way to get around one of the biggest problems that wind-generated electricity has: storage.  The idea is to "float" wind turbines off the coast on top of deep-water buoys.  The floating of the buoy plus the electricity generated by the turbine atop the tower will culminate in hydrogen production.  The hydrogen is then piped back to shore for storage.

The idea is a product of Maetec LLC and will be tested in the islands of the Kingdom of Tonga in the South Pacific.

The deep water buoy is for stability and the wind tower, out at sea, is not required to be as high as those nearer-to-shore.  This is because winds are generally more stable at sea because of the relatively flat surface of the water versus the surface of land.

The bottom of the buoy is a water collector as well, pulling in sea water that is then subjected to electrolysis from the power generated by the wind tower.  The hydrogen produced will be siphoned off and piped back to shore.  The portion of the line attached to the buoy is flexible and attached to a float, which then runs it back down to the seabed for a longer, rigid pipe run back to shore.  On shore, the hydrogen will be pressurized and stored.

The storage of hydrogen eliminates the largest problem with wind energy: it's fickle and isn't abundant at all times, so what to do with the excess or in times of "drought?"