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.




Technorati Tags: Energy | Reports | DOE

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.


Technorati Tags: Energy | Geothermal | Electricity

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.


Technorati Tags: Energy | Science | Geothermal

Garden variety data center photo


Yesterday I had a conversation with a colleague who is now working in a large, and I mean large, server environment. There are many challenges he faces, but chief among them is power consumption and cost. They are now having to place their data centers according to power supply capabilities and cost rather than other business factors like proximity to trained work force and real estate cost.

My colleague mentioned that they’re spending, fully loaded with lighting, cooling, etc., some $428 per server instance per year in power costs. I agreed to not disclose the name of the company (you’d recognize it) or his name (you wouldn’t recognize it) – but the scale of this is huge. Tens of thousands of servers and tens of millions of dollars spent on power annually.

One other thing worth noting is an unwanted and unused by product of all that activity – millions and millions of excess BTUs at about 25C in temperature.

There is certainly room for improvement in this situation, even with the work that AMD and Sun have done on the power consumption side for servers.


Technorati Tags: Energy | Heat | Data Center

You know fuel prices are going up and carbon emissions standards are tightening when we return to a prior age to harvest technology. Now admittedly, the picture above isn’t your garden variety xebec (great scrabble word btw,) but it is interesting that the hybrid technology of the 19th century is making a comeback.

This kind of reminds me of kite surfing technology wed to a cargo ship. Pretty different than the prior implementations that combined coal burning steam engines with traditional sailing ship technology. I’m looking forward to seeing one of these things pass by my window.


Technorati Tags: Sailing | Ship | Hybrid