The Energy Information Administration (part of DoE) has launched a new website that provides a comprehensive overview of energy consumption, production, and distribution across the US, with deep dives into each state. It’s pretty cool (though there is room for improvement as the Imperial Valley in California is missing as a geothermal producer for example.) It seems to use much of the same data from the Electric Power Monthly report and much more aggregating it into a more consumable format. It’s certainly a great start.

When clicking around a bit, one of the things that struck me was that California, with 12% of the US population is responsible for only 2.2% of carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide emissions and 0.2% of sulphur dioxide emissions in the US. While the share was wildly disproporitionate, the absolute tonnage of emission is still enormous. The image below shows a summary of California, click the picture to get the detail that goes along with the image.




21 days until OSU plays for the national championship
Ohio State’s 2006 record: 12-0 Next up: Florida 1/8/2007
Tune: Rivers of Babylon by Sublime
Technorati Tags: Energy | Reports | DOE | Mike Harding Blog

Back in October, Western GeoPower (TSX: WGP) announced their intent to rebuild a power plant on the site of old “PG&E Unit 15” commencing operations in 2009. This is interesting in that there was a plant on that site producing 65MW from 1979-89. By resizing the plant to 25MW (net,) Western GeoPower believes that they’ll get 50 years of operation from the site producing some 200,000 MWh per year.


24 days until OSU plays for the national championship
Ohio State’s 2006 record: 12-0 Next up: Florida 1/8/2007
Tune: Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be Cowboys by Willie Nelson
Technorati Tags: Energy | Geothermal | Electricity | Mike Harding Blog

AKA, another term for a very foggy day. Since I wrote the entry about how nice it’s been, the weather has been terrible (apparently I do have some massive unknown power to affect weather by tempting fate, but I digress.) Here are a couple of images, before tempting fate:



As you can see lovelier than one has a right to experience in North America during December. Now, after tempting fate (same shot, add fog and drizzle:)



Be careful what you comment on, you might possess these amazing powers too!


25 days until OSU plays for the national championship
Ohio State’s 2006 record: 12-0 Next up: Florida 1/8/2007
Tune: Gumbo by Jimmy Buffet
Technorati Tags: Coast | Weather | Fog | Mike Harding Blog

…knowing Princess Diana was neither murdered nor pregnant.

Puh-leaze!!!! Does anyone really care about this stuff? I mean, she was killed in a car accident nearly 10 years ago, why is this still news?


25 days until OSU plays for the national championship
Ohio State’s 2006 record: 12-0 Next up: Florida 1/8/2007
Tune: How many licks? by Lil’ Kim
Technorati Tags: News | Irrelevant | Waste of Time | Mike Harding Blog

The Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) is a fancy name for a binary system taking heat from a source and transferring it to a working liquid in a closed system to be vaporized and pressurized, typically turn a turbine, then condense back to liquid form before flowing through the heat exchanger again to repeat the cycle. The diagram below breaks out the typical components of an ORC system.



These systems can vary in size from a few hundred kilowatts clear up to hundreds of megawatts. A picture of a 200Kw system is displayed below.



These ORC systems have several key benefits over traditional steam turbines including lower operating temperature (down to 75C,) less wear and tear on turbines (clean single fluid environment,) and no requirement to expose heat source to the environment (no emission power generation is possible using these units in a closed geothermal system for instance.) The major disadvantage to this approach is that energy is lost during the heat transfer process relative to direct use systems.


26 days until OSU plays for the national championship
Ohio State’s 2006 record: 12-0 Next up: Florida 1/8/2007
Tune: Go ‘Head by Ali Gipp featuring Chocolate Tai
Technorati Tags: Energy | Science | Geothermal | Mike Harding Blog