The San Francisco startup Virgance has acquired a solar-power cooperative effort called 1 Block Off the Grid (or 1BOG) that will give homeowners in 20 cities the financial leverage to go green.

1BOG is about bringing communities together towards a common good. Under the plan, consumers who want to install solar panels band together into coordinated buying groups to cut a deal for their own home’s installation. The resulting savings can be excellent. According to co-founder Sylvia Venturane one of the participants in 1BOG’s inaugural program in San Francisco cut 43 percent off the list price. However the average benefit will probably be closer to 20 percent off, or $1.50 per watt that’s installed. Apply that to a $25,000 solar system, and it equates to $5,000, and rebates will reduce that still further.

Coordinated solar buys aren’t new, but it’s Virgance’s method of marketing and profiting from 1BOG that really stands out. The three founders of 1BOG will manage the 20 cities that the company is moving into themselves, combining outreach through blogs and newspapers with word-of-mouth through people joining the program, who are also operating out of self interest, knowing that larger groups equal larger savings.

The 1BOG founder will use their knowledge of solar systems to negotiate the best price for every installation. 1BOG’s takes 25 cents per watt, out of the total average savings of $1.75. So on that $25,000 solar system alone, Virgance could make almost $1,000 dollars. If enough people take advantage of the program then there could be some serious profit in this altruistic venture.

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Russia is heading towards a major economic crisis, experts predicted today, following the news that oil had collapsed to under $50 a barrel. The collapse in the value of oil is likely to have several catastrophic consequences for Russia including a possible devaluation of the rouble and a severe drop in living standards next year.

With oil prices falling steeply, and his own future at stake, Russia’s prime minister Vladimir Putin today insisted that Russia’s economy was still robust. Putin told delegates in Moscow the country would survive the current global financial turmoil which he blamed on the US.

But the Kremlin is acutely aware that any loss of confidence in the Russian economy could lead to a loss of confidence in Putin and his ally Dmitry Medvedev, who took over from Putin as Russia’s president in May. Medvedev’s biggest initiative so far has been to float an extension in the presidential term from four to six years which Russia’s loyal Duma is likely to approve on Saturday.

Putin today said his administration would do everything it could to prevent a repeat of the countries last oil-related financial crash in 1998 - which saw the savings of many ordinary Russians wiped out. But the plummeting oil price leaves him very few options. Experts suggest that Russia’s economy is now facing profound difficulties, despite two huge funds accumulated during the booming oil years.

The fall in oil prices from $147 this July to below $50 today has blown a gaping hole in the government’s budget calculations. It is now facing a $150bn shortfall in its spending plans - and will have to slash expenditure in 2009.

Today Putin sought to assure hard-up Russians that their social benefits would not be affected, promising a $20bn assistance package. “We will do everything, everything in our power … so that the collapses of the past years should never be repeated,” he said.

The oil slump, however, exacerbates Russia’s already severe economic problems. Since May Russian markets have lost 70% of their value. Russia’s central bank, meanwhile, has been spent $57.5bn in two months trying to prop up the country’s ailing currency.

“If the current trend continues with the government supporting the rouble, oil prices falling and a slowing economy we are going to have a major crisis,” said Chris Weafer, an analyst with the Moscow brokerage Uralsib.

He added: “There will be more pressure on the rouble and an extremely difficult first quarter next year.” Russia was more vulnerable than other countries because it was still an oil state, and had failed to diversify its economy, Weafer added.

Both Putin and Medvedev have blamed the Bush administration for the current financial mess. Putin today accused the US of recklessness. “Cheap money and mortgage troubles in the US have caused a real chain reaction, [and] paralyzed the global financial market,” he complained.

Russia’s state-controlled TV has also sought to portray the crisis as an American problem, largely ignoring its impact at home. This strategy was not very sensible, analysts suggested today, since job losses and salary cuts in Russia were beginning to mount.

“In terms of the trigger Putin is correct. The bomb came from the US,” Weafer said. He added, however: “The shockwaves have hit a much weaker structure than the [Russian] government has acknowledged. The economy is going to hell in a handcart.”

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Despite business spokesmen and politicians cautioning against Cap and Trade policies during recession, Obama gave pride of placement to cap and trade, saying that his administration would start off with just such a system.

“[We] will start with a federal cap and trade system. We’ll establish strong annual targets that set us on a course to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020, and reduce them a further 80 percent by 2050,” Obama said, confirming previous promises.

So it appears that the president-elect plans to keep climate change at the forefront of policy decisions, despite all the other issues pressing for attention.

Obama also took the opportunity to name the members of his Energy Policy Transition Team. Below is a video of a meeting of the Energy & Environment Policy Transition Team and interview with team member Heather Zichal.

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Kyushu Electric Power (KEPCO) and lithium-ion battery manufacturer Ener1, Inc. have signed a memorandum of understanding on working together to develop rapid recharging systems for electric vehicles. Kyushu Electric is the fourth-largest publicly traded power and utility company in Japan.

Ener1 said drivers can plug in and recharge up to 80 percent of the vehicle’s battery capacity in under 20 minutes. Kyushu Electric serves more than 8 million customers on Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost island, which includes the cities of Nagasaki and Fukuoka.

KEPCO has already developed advanced rapid charging stands and plans to customize that solution with the EnerDel High Energy Pack System. KEPCO says that its next-generation electric vehicle rapid charging station has exhibited one of the highest levels of performance for rapid charging in Japan.

The target date to have the first integrated systems available is by March, 2009. The relationship will accelerate the development and diffusion of charging systems to match the anticipated growth in electric vehicles.

The ability to rapidly recharge lithium-ion batteries will be crucial in enabling the widespread adoption of the electric vehicle, according to the partners, and it is anticipated that these systems will allow customers to recharge up to 80% of their vehicle’s battery capacity in less than 20 minutes.

There are already some significant players in the electric car-charging field, with California’s Better Place holding talks this week with the governor of Michigan. Better Place, which is developing its own car-charging network, is already working on projects in Israel, Denmark and Australia. Better Place’s vehicle partner, the Renault-Nissan Alliance, also has a project in Japan, in the Kanagawa Prefecture on Honshu, Japan’s largest island, as well as deals in Portugal, France, and the state of Tennessee in the U.S.

Ener1 took an 83-percent stake in South Korea’s Enertech International, a producer of lithium-ion battery cells in October. Ener1’s EnerDel unit has worked with Enertech before, supplying prototype and preproduction battery systems for Norway’s Think Global, which is working on an electric vehicle to be launched this year.

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US Sugar Corp. has agreed to explore building a 100-million gallon per year cellulosic ethanol facility in Clewiston, Florida with Coskata, Inc. The plant, if built, would be the world’s largest second-generation ethanol facility. It would convert left-over sugar cane material into ethanol.

Using proprietary microorganisms and bioreactor designs, Coskata says that it can produce ethanol for less than US$1.00 per gallon (manufacturing cost) almost anywhere in the world. The company uses a thermo-biochemical process—it gasifies biomass feedstock or waste to syngas, which is then fermented by microbes to ethanol.

Depending on the feedstock and with co-generation, the Coskata process can result in up to a 96% reduction of CO2 in the production of the fuel and is up to 7.7 times more energy positive compared to conventional gasoline, according to an evaluation by Dr. M. Wang at Argonne National Laboratory.

US Sugar plans to collect cane leaves from the field instead of burning them and also utilize excess bagasse from the mill. As the State of Florida takes some of the US Sugar lands out of production for the Everglades restoration project, the Coskata technology is flexible enough to also use fast growing energy crops and waste materials.

As part of the agreement, US Sugar will be submitting an application to the Florida Energy Office for a financial match to their contribution for early engineering on this project. In addition, US Sugar plans to work with the US Department of Agriculture to secure some of the loan guarantee monies that have been set aside specifically for the production of non-food based biofuels.

Coskata is in the process of building its Lighthouse commercial demonstration plant, due to come online early next year, and remains on track for a full commercial plant (the Flagship plant) for the first quarter of 2011. The Flagship plant will have a capacity of 50-100 million gallons per year, and use multiple gasifiers that process 1,500-3,000 dry tons of waste per day. Production cost of the ethanol will be less than $1.00 per gallon, and the capex for the plant will be on the order of $4-5 per gallon capacity (first plant economics).

United States Sugar Corporation is the country’s largest producer of sugar cane and refined cane sugar and is one of Florida’s major producers of oranges and orange juice products.

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‘Solar Impulse’, a 1500 kilogram solar plane with a 61 meter wing span, will be undergoing its first test flight in April, prior to attempting the first  trip around the world in May 2011.The attempt will start with a crossing of the US and the Atlantic. The plane is also expected to go into commercial production in 2011.

Pilots - Bertrand Piccard - President and initiator of the project - André Borschberg – CEO and project co-founder - image credit Solar Impulse

Solar Impulse will capture sunlight using 12,000 photovoltaic cells. Each cell is made from 130 micron monocrystalline silicon. Solar Impulse will be able to fly at night through energy stored in a 400 kilogram deep cycle battery bank, accounting for 25% of the plane’s overall weight.

image credit - Solar Impulse

Solar Impulse’s frame is carbon fibre-honeycomb composite. The underside of the wings are wrapped in a flexible film, with the upper surface made up of solar cells. Each wing has 4 pods, each containing a 10 horsepower electric motor and a polymer lithium battery. The gear box will limit the rotation of each 3.5 metre diameter propeller to 200-400 revolutions per minute.

image credit - Solar Impulse

Thermal insulation will conserve heat radiated by the batteries to allow the aircraft to continue operating  at extremely low temperatures it will encounter, down to -40 °C,  while flying at a height of 8500 meters.

The team behind SolarImpulse consists of over 50 specialists from six countries, plus an additional 100 external advisers working on the construction of the first prototypes. The project has been costed at approximately USD $100 million.

It is difficult to see how planes will be able to fly commercially on solar power alone, but then who would have have been able to predict todays airliners circling the globe everyday when the wright brothers were making their first flight.

Read more about the project at Solar Impulse

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In an executive order signed on Monday, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger committed to getting a third of California’s electricity from renewable sources by 2020. Schwarzenegger made the announcement while speaking at a solar panel factory in Sacramento.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed an executive order calling on utilities to provide one-third of their power from renewable resources by 2020. “This will be the most aggressive target in the nation,” he said.

Increased reliance on renewable energy conceivably could hike future rates, however, because of higher production costs and the need to upgrade transmission facilities. Schwarzenegger’s order came on the eve of Tuesday’s international summit on global climate change in Los Angeles.

California Executive Order S-14-08 puts the state’s renewable energy requirement at 33% by 2020, securing its place as the most aggressive renewable energy mandate in the country.

“I am proposing we set the most aggressive target in the nation for renewable energy-33 percent by the year 2020-that’s a third of our energy from sources like solar, wind and geothermal,” Governor Schwarzenegger said. “But we won’t meet that goal doing business as usual, where environmental regulations are holding up environmental progress in some cases. This executive order will clear the red tape for renewable projects and streamline the permitting and siting of new plants and transmission lines. With this investment in renewable energy projects, California has a bright energy future ahead that will help us fight climate change while driving our state’s green economy.”

Just two weeks ago, California voters rejected Proposition 7 which sought to increase the state’s renewable energy standard. Environmental groups were nearly unanimous in their opposition to Prop 7 because it created an exclusion for smaller utilities and power providers.

Schwarzenegger made today’s announcement at the site of OptiSolar’s new plant in Sacramento, which will begin manufacturing solar panels in early 2009. When fully built out, the one-million-square-foot plant will be the largest photovoltaic solar panel manufacturing plant in North America, providing 1,000 green jobs and producing approximately 2,000 solar panels per day.

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A startup based in Vancouver, Canada, called ExRo Technologies, has developed a new kind of generator that is particularly suited to harvesting energy from wind. It could lower the cost of wind turbines while raising their power output by 50 percent.

The key to the new generators efficiency is it’s ability to generate high levels of energy at variable rotation speeds. When the shaft running through an ordinary generator is turning at a steady, optimal rate, more than 90 percent of its energy can be converted into electricity. However if the speed changes, the generator’s efficiency drops dramatically. This isn’t a problem in conventional power plants, where the turbines turn at a steady rate, fed by a constant supply of energy from coal or some other fuel. But wind speed can vary wildly. Turbine blades that change pitch to catch more or less wind can help, as can transmissions that mediate between the spinning blades and the generator shaft. But transmissions add both manufacturing and maintenance costs, and there’s a limit to how much changing the blade angle can compensate for changing winds.

ExRo’s new design replaces a mechanical transmission with what amounts to an electronic one. That increases the range of wind speeds at which it can operate efficiently and makes it more responsive to sudden gusts and lulls. While at the highest wind speeds the blades will still need to be pitched to shed wind, the generator will allow the turbine to capture more of the energy in high-speed winds and gusts. As a result, the turbine could produce 50 percent more power over the course of a year, says Jonathan Ritchey, ExRo’s chief technology officer. Indeed, in some locations, the power output could double, says Ed Nowicki, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Calgary, who has consulted to ExRo.

The generator works on the same principles as many ordinary generators: magnets attached to a rotating shaft create a current as they pass stationary copper coils arrayed around the shaft. In ordinary generators, all of the coils are wired together. In ExRo’s generator, in contrast, the individual coils can be turned on and off with electronic switches. At low wind speeds, only a few of the coils will switch on–just enough to efficiently harvest the small amount of energy in low-speed wind. (If more coils were active, they would provide more resistance to the revolving magnets.) At higher wind speeds, more coils will turn on to convert more energy into electricity. The switches can be thrown quickly to adapt to fast-changing wind speeds.

Another part of the design makes the generator more responsive to changing wind speeds. Harvesting large amounts of energy requires many coils. These could be arranged inside a very-large-diameter generator, but then the rotor on which the magnets were mounted would have to be larger, too. That would make it harder to get the rotor moving, or to change its rotation speed. (The greater distance between the center of the generator and the coils increases what’s known as the moment of inertia.) The ExRo generator instead distributes the coils among several small-diameter generators–which the researchers call stacks–along the length of the shaft. Smaller diameters make it easier to change rotational speeds. The multiple-stack design also makes customizing the generator for a particular wind site easier. For a site with low-speed winds, few stacks would be needed. For a site with high-speed winds, more could be added, allowing the generator to convert more energy into electricity.

Other companies have developed designs that incorporate multiple generators, which can be activated separately, depending on wind speed. But these have to be engaged and disengaged mechanically, adding weight and complexity to the generator and increasing costs. Reducing maintenance and weight by eliminating the need for mechanical gears and clutches could allow ExRo to keep costs down. And that, says Paul Sclavounos, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, is the key consideration in determining whether to try to capture more of the wind’s energy. ExRo may have an advantage, he says, because the key to its technology is electronic control, which is inexpensive. Indeed, the company claims that a wind-turbine operator could make 57 percent more money from a turbine over the course of a year by using the new generator.

ExRo has developed and tested a lab-scale prototype. Its estimates of increased power production come from models that use data from existing wind-turbine sites. By the end of this year or early next year, the company will begin field-testing a small, five-kilowatt wind turbine. Ritchey says that the company won’t have firm figures for power production until those tests are complete. The next step will be to install larger, megawatt-scale generators in existing wind turbines.

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The passage of the Offshore Petroleum Amendment Bill by the Australian Senate last week established the world’s first regulatory framework for CO2 capture and geological storage (CCS).

The legislation establishes access and property rights in Australia’s offshore waters for geological storage of CO2, and is an important component of the Australian government’s commitment to reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 60% on 2000 levels by 2050.

Coal provides around 80 per cent of Australia’s total electricity and accounts for 32 per cent of Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Clearly, no serious response to climate change can ignore the need to reduce emissions from coal. Along with the development of renewable energy sources and the improvement of energy efficiency, the capture and storage of CO2 from fossil energy is essential.

Australia has the capacity to inject and store a significant amount of its carbon emissions in offshore reservoirs and Geoscience Australia is assessing the viability of numerous sites which will allow the continued utilization of our extensive coal reserves, as well as the development of new industries such as coal-to-liquids which could improve Australia’s liquid transport fuel security.

The CCS Task Force is also undertaking a national mapping project to match key industrial hubs with prospective geological storage sites and infrastructure requirements for CO2. This work will be greatly assisted by the introduction of CCS legislation by the States and Territories.

—Martin Ferguson, Minister for Resources and Energy, Minister for Tourism
The Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association (APPEA), supported the passage of the bill, saying that it had fought hard to ensure that existing petroleum titleholders are given a high level of protection for existing property rights while allowing, and in the case of some operators, facilitating, greenhouse gas storage.

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A team of researchers at South Korea’s Hanyung University led by professor Cho Jaephil (pictured), has claimed a breakthrough that could extend lithium ion battery charge life up to 8 times current values that means extending laptop battery life to 16 or 32 hours. Such a breakthrough is big news, not just for shiny gadgets but for electric vehicles and micro-generation as well.

The limiting factor in current battery technology is the ability of the cathode material, graphite, to store lithium ions. Cho Jaephil’s team applied a three-dimensional porous silicon, which can hold up to eight times more lithium ions. Patent applications are being applied for, and potential applications in solar panel technology may be next on the Hanyung team’s agenda.

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