In an update today, US Geothermal reports major progress on the 13MW Unit 1 plant at Raft River, Idaho:

• All major power plant equipment has been delivered to site and set on foundations.
• The prime electrical construction contract was awarded to Merit Electric Incorporated in May.
• Piping and electrical connections are proceeding on schedule.
• The control room and motor control center building has been erected and switchgear installed.
• The cooling tower is 95% complete.
• The geothermal injection pumps and motors have been set in place.
• High voltage interconnection to BPA substation with Idaho Power and Raft River Electrical Co-operative metering is nearing completion.
• The cooling water supply piping system is approximately 75% complete for initial operations.

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Ormat and Kinder-Morgan recently signed a contract to harvest 4MW of electricity from waste heat generated at a Colorado-based natural gas compression station near Denver. It’s clear that Ormat is attempting to expand it’s footprint from pure geothermal to include waste heat for its binary power units.

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Family Car Model



Mr. Guy Nègre of Moteur Developpment International (MDI) has created an air engine (in vehicles) that can be recharged by a compressor in 3 minutes or via an electric connection in 4 hours and has a range of 200km. The cars use regenerative braking and have models including a taxi, truck, van, runabout, and family car. An interesting approach to be sure. Energy storage in compressed air form is reasonably efficient and could be widely available. Let’s see where this concept goes…

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With over 150 delivery trucks (lorries if you prefer,) McDonalds consumes over 6 million litres of diesel fuel each year. That many people have been asking the restaurant (and others) for their used cooking oil has not gone unnoticed and as a result, McDonalds UK plans to use a mix of 85% recycled cooking oil and 15% rafeseed oil to power their fleet.

At the beginning of this month, a subset of 50 trucks was converted to run on the bio fuel and the full fleet should be converted shortly. From a financial perspective, this is great news for the company as they could realize savings of up to $12M per year in fuel costs and potentially have excess fuel to resell providing even more bottom line boost. Reuters published an interesting writeup on this earlier in the month.

Another case where recycling and smart ecological thought translates to positive cashflow.

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This car is a two seater, luxury, 640hp vehicle designed to have a range of 250 miles and accelerate from 0 – 60mph in less than 4 seconds…If the battery issues and weight can be worked out (the weight is missing from the specifications) the electric sport car segment will thrive. Everyone knows Tesla, but these other competitors should at least make it interesting. The Lightning Electric Car may be a worthy UK-based competitor.

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