Yesterday Nevada Geothermal reached an agreement with Ormat to provide infrastructure for its Blue Mountain geothermal power plant. The agreement calls for a $20M fixed price procurement and construction plan under the guise of a “Limited Note to Proceed” agreement. After the characterization of the resources at Blue Mountain, this is another step toward commercialization and harvest of the resource, which appears to be about 10MW per well and a 190C (375F) temperature.

Drilling at Blue Mountain, Nevada

Photo Credit: Nevada Geothermal

The image above is a screenshot from the film Office Space. If you work in a large, soulless corporation, it’s a film you can’t miss. The scene above is perhaps, one of the funniest I’ve seen in a movie where the fax machine that torments the entire office staff is taken out into a field and beaten to pieces by angry employees. You can watch the clip below, I think you have to have seen the relentless torment this machine caused to be able to fully appreciate the release created by its demise. But nevertheless, without context it might still be funny too…

One of the more interesting things I’ve learned over the past month is the difference in conversion rates that focused content brings. On this blog, the topics are all over the place and while I’m prohibited to share actual data, I can characterize the conversation rates around here as being very low, in the less than 1% range.

Since converting the Renewable Energy Journal to a monetized platform I’ve been able to benchmark focused content that appears there (energy, renewable, geothermal, and conservation topics) vs. the pot pourri over here. The average conversion rate overall is 5 to 12 times better on the focused content over the same time period. That is very interesting indeed as a learning mechanism to better gain benefit from the traffic through these sites.

What to expect going forward? Well, since there seem to be a number of topics I write about, look for a dedicated site for each in due course, but I’ll still aggregate them here for convenience. If you’re only interested in one topic, then you the reader can determine if you’d like to read the single topic site or stay here for the melange of things covered. Hopefully, this will give you more choices while increasing the financial return from the investment in time.

Stirling engine manufacturer Infinia closed a $50M series B investment with a veritable who’s who of funders including: Vinod Khosla’s Khosla Ventures, Bill Gross’ Idealab and Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital. The firm intends to use the funding to accelerate the productization of their stirling engines attached to generators for use in large scale solar thermal installations.

So what is a stirling engine anyway? It’s a loose piston setup that works on temperature differential between the two sides of the piston. Just like a regular piston engine, that reciprocating stroke can be transformed into rotation with torque. The novel approach in this case is to concentrate the sun’s heat and use that to generate the heat differential required to make the engine run. These engines have been around since the early 1800’s when Robert Stirling advanced the concept. See the illustration to the right from the Infinia website.

Each unit is rated at just over 3kw AC and are projected to list at around $20,000 per unit. It is believed that standard automotive parts manufacturing techniques can be used to fabricate the Infinia units. Operational costs associated with the units is believed to be low as stirling engines are low friction devices with relatively few moving parts and very loose tolerances used in design and assembly. As with all technologies, the cost should come down as the volume goes up.

The iWash was great, don’t get me wrong. But this, is a great screen cleaner…click image to activate.

Watch it in action at CleanTheScreen.com.