Cargill subsidiary Emerald Renewable Energy announced recently it plans to build 4 new ethanol plants in the US each with 100 million gallon per year throughput.

Each plant will use nearly 40 million bushels of corn annually and produce 100 million gallons of ethanol and over 300,000 tons of dry distillers grains for animal feed each year. The plant sites being considered include greenfield locations as well as co-locations with Cargill grain elevators and other utility infrastructure providers. The plants are expected to create about 40 jobs per location.

I think that Cargill and other ethanol producers ought to be focused on the distribution problem. This is the time (new Congress and all) to get something interesting to happen; like mandating E85 replaces the useless middle grade at US gas stations. We’ll see how it goes.


Technorati Tags: Ethanol | Transportation | Biomass

Chevy’s Volt


Forget the current breed of hybrid, the Chevy Volt is a new approach. It’s got a 3 cylinder 1.0 liter turbocharged gas (E85) engine attached to a 53 KW generator, batteries that store 16KWh, and a 120KW (160hp) electric motor. The gas powered motor is not attached to the drivetrain, only to the generator. The range on pure electric is 40 miles, when the generator kicks it, it extends to 640 miles. It plugs into standard 110v power for recharge. If only they’d stop trying to make things look futuristic and just make a sensible car design with this power train, I would think they’re on to something…


Technorati Tags: Electric | Car | Hybrid

A colleague sent this to me yesterday. I’m warmed (pun intended) to see Walmart take a bold move toward energy efficiency. Using the roof space on it’s massive buildings to host solar arrays may make some sense. Certainly Google thinks so and Federal Express (Oakland, CA sorting facility) has had solar cells on the roof for some time now.

Independent of this specific proposal, it’s great to see some large corporations make concentrated efforts to lead in this area.

Note to Mr. LaMonica (author of the CNet piece) – the largest proposed single instance of solar generation is in China at 100MW and Germany has a 12MW plant in production now. While Walmart could aggregate into 100MW size, it’s not quite the same thing. Still beneficial, no doubt.


Technorati Tags: Renewable | Energy | Solar

One of our Partners brought this to my attention this morning and I thought it was worthy of a mention. Polaris Geothermal has completed it’s first round of equity financing recently using what looks to be a “spec company” approach – they seem to have a different approach in Canada to getting this done. See the press release here for details. Polaris is developing a 66MW geothermal power generation project near Leon, Nicaragua.


Technorati Tags: Renewable | Energy | Geothermal