Energy Department Defends Funding of Foreign-Owned Renewables Projects

Matt Rogers, the senior adviser to the energy secretary, told a Senate committee last week that the agency’s distribution of recovery funding to foreign renewables companies was creating American jobs.

Amid mounting criticism, the Energy Department last week defended its allocation of stimulus funding to foreign companies developing renewable energy projects in the United States.

Matt Rogers, the senior adviser to the energy secretary, told the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources on Thursday that 100 percent of the $2.6 billion it gave out through the renewable energy grant program included in last year’s economic recovery plan went to fund American projects and that the $2.3 billion in tax credits it provided for 183 clean energy manufacturing projects in 43 states will generate more than 17,000 jobs.

A day earlier, four senators, led by Senator Charles E. Schumer, a Democrat of New York, called on the Obama administration to halt spending on a renewable energy program in the economic stimulus package until there were rules to assure that the projects use predominantly American labor and materials.

But at the hearing Thursday, Mr. Rogers said it is probably true that nearly 80 percent of the companies that received grants were based abroad, as cited in a recent analysis by the Investigative Reporting Workshop, a nonprofit journalism program affiliated with American University. But the funding, together with the manufacturing tax credits, resulted in $10 billion of foreign investment in the United States over the last year, Mr. Rogers said.

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Congo Dam Projects Evolve and Draw Critics

International Rivers Big plans for more dams on the Congo River are causing concern among conservationists.

BHP Billiton, the Australian company that is one of the world’s largest mining companies, appears set to build a $3.5 billion hydroelectric plant in the Democratic Republic of Congo to power a $5 billion aluminum smelter.

Details of a presentation revealing plans to generate 2,500 megawatts from the Congo River were reported last week by Reuters.

“Even despite the global economic crisis, BHP Billiton always considered its aluminum smelter project in D.R.C. a priority,” the presentation stated, according to the news agency.

The project — called Inga X — is designed to replace a hydroelectric dam project proposed by a rival company, Western Power Corridor, or Westcor. That project aimed to generate 5,000 megawatts of electricity for Congo, South Africa, Angola, Namibia and Botswana.

But earlier this month, the Congolese government rejected the Westcor proposal, which involved drawing water from an existing reservoir created by two other World Bank funded dams.

Separate reports indicate that those hydro plants — called Inga 1 and Inga 2 — are generating 700 megawatts from a potential capacity of 1,700 megawatts. The World Bank has applied for a three-year extension of the those projects
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Scientists Develop Highly Recyclable Plastic

I.B.M. Researchers have developed a new way to make plastics that can be continuously recycled — a challenge for many plastics currently used in consumer products.

Researchers at I.B.M. and Stanford University said Tuesday that they have discovered a new way to make plastics that can be continuously recycled or developed for novel uses in health care and microelectronics.

In a paper published in Macromolecules, a journal of the American Chemical Society, the California researchers describe how they substituted organic catalysts for the metal oxide or metal hydroxide catalysts most often used to make the polymers that form plastics.

Chandrasekhar Narayan, who leads I.B.M.’s science and technology team at its Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., said the presence of metal catalysts in plastics means that they often can only be recycled once before ending up in a landfill.

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Drought Has Venezuela Looking at Alternatives to Hydropower

Reuters An electrician went to work on power cables in Caracas, Venezuela, on Monday. The country has come dangerously close to a major collapse in electricity generation because of falling water levels in reservoirs at its main hydroelectric dam.

A severe drought in Venezuela appears to be pushing the country’s president, Hugo Chávez, to ramp up efforts to diversify the country’s energy portfolio.

Up to now, hydropower has been the major energy source in Venezuela — providing residents and industry with up to two-thirds of the total electricity produced. But a record lack of rainfall has resulted in low water flows and several power interruptions — as well as angry recriminations of the government from some Venezuelans ahead of upcoming legislative elections scheduled for September.

Mr. Chávez, citing the electricity crisis, declared a state of emergency last month, and the government has pointed to rapidly rising electricity demand as a chief component of the problem.

Critics have said poor management and underinvestment in the energy sector are also to blame.

Now the country is hunting for new ways to produce electricity, and according to Bloomberg News, Mr. Chávez is urging his government to pursue wind and nuclear projects as alternatives.

According to the news agency, Venezuela aims to add 5,000 megawatts of capacity this year alone.

That’s slightly less than half of the total wind power capacity added in Europe last year.

A “national electricity fund” — with $2 billion of seed financing — has already been established to kick off the projects.

Both General Electric and Gamesa of Spain have already recieved orders for wind turbines from Venezuela, and the country’s first wind farm is expected to be completely installed by Gamesa this summer.

Situated in the northern province of Falcón and slated for a total capacity of 100 megawatts, it is the first of a number of farms planned near the 4,000 kilometer long coastline.

Mr. Chávez also vowed to ramp up development of nuclear power in Venezuela — a touchy topic in inter-American relations. Mr. Chávez has long argued that the United States and other nuclear powers do not have the right to prevent poorer nations from developing nuclear technology of their own. He has also been a staunch defender of Iran’s nuclear program.

“The U.S. can say whatever they want to say, but we’re going to develop nuclear energy,
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A Rough Rollout for Smart Meters in Texas

CenterPoint Energy The road is getting bumpy as Texans become acquainted with so-called “smart” electric meters.

So-called smart electric meters, heralded as vital for an energy-conscious era, are having a rough rollout in Texas.

The devices, which enable utilities to vary their rates according to the time of day, allow consumers to save money — in theory. But according to The Dallas Morning News, hundreds of Texas customers have called to complain that the meters, which are being installed by a Dallas-based electric company called Oncor, are inaccurately raising their electric bills.

A town hall-style meeting was held on the issue last Sunday in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and drew a number of anxious residents. The anti-smart meter crowd has also posted an online petition, calling for a moratorium on installations until the concerns are resolved.

A Texas lawmaker has gotten involved: Troy Fraser, a state senator, called on Texas’s Public Utility Commission to suspend the introduction of smart meters. The regulators, meeting last week, declined to halt the installations, but did commit to bringing in an outside company to check the accuracy of smart meters put in by Oncor and Centerpoint Energy, which has been installing the devices in the Houston area.

In a letter to the commission before last week’s meeting, Bob Shapard, Oncor’s chairman and chief executive, acknowledged receiving several hundred complaint calls, especially in the Temple-Killeen area (which is between Dallas and San Antonio). From the letter:

Our research and one-on-one conversations with these electric customers indicate that, in nearly every case, the factors driving higher electric bills in the Killeen-Temple area are extreme winter temperatures and inefficient electric heating sources.

In other words, unusually cold weather — which makes electric heating systems work harder — was a key reason for the higher bills.

But several homeowners told The Dallas Morning News that that their bills were unusually high, even when the weather was taken into account. Oncor has said it is looking into customer complaints, and Mr. Shapard, in his letter, outlined a number of ways his company was prepared to work with regulators to resolve the issue.

The troubles in Texas are reminiscent of similar problems in California. There, Pacific Gas & Electric, the major Northern California utility, has been installing millions of smart meters — only to encounter concerns about their accuracy.

In Bakersfield, the complaints were particularly vociferous because electric bills soared last summer right after smart meters were installed. P.G.&E. blamed a scheduled rate increase, coupled with a bout of unusually hot weather (which gave air-conditioners a workout).

Under pressure from a state senator, California’s Public Utilities Commission has just said that it will appoint an independent consultant later this week to look into the meters’ accuracy, The San Francisco Chronicle reported.

E-mail This Print ShareCloseLinkedinDiggFacebookMixxMy SpacePermalink Commerce, Consumers, Conventional Energy, Energy Business, General Business, Government Policy, conservation, oncor, pacific gas and electric, smart meters, Texas Related Posts From Green Inc. From Smart Meters to Smart ThermostatsGoogle Rolls Out Home Energy SoftwareSetting Wind Power Records in TexasA Utility Will Help Homeowners Go SolarThe Dawn of Plug-In Priuses and Smart Meters From Around the WebEnvironmental and Urban EconomicsOld School vs. New School: The Case of the Smart Grid and Real Time Electricity MeteringLos Angeles TimesBattle heats up over Southern California Gas smart meter proposalThe GuardianWill smart meters help reduce energy bills?Seeking AlphaWill Surging Smart Grid Investment Result in Surging Electric Prices?What's This?

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Increasing Yields and Decreasing Fertilizer Waste on Subsistence Farms

International Fertilizer Development Center A new technique for applying urea, a nitrogen fertilizer, involves burying briquettes like those above in the soil, rather than sprinkling granules on top of the soil.

A new agricultural technology that cuts nitrogen fertilizer waste in half while increasing rice yields is spreading quickly in Bangladesh and is being investigated by 15 other nations, including more than a dozen in sub-Saharan Africa.

Chemical fertilizers  are critical to raising crop yields, but their cost has been prohibitive for many subsistence farmers, particularly those in Africa.

The inefficiency of fertilizer application is also a major problem. By some estimates, as much as 70 percent of nitrogen fertilizer applied to crops in developing nations is lost to runoff or released into the atmosphere, contributing to coastal
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California Utility Regulators Not Quite Ready for Fuel Cells

fuel flexible’’ power source.

While Google, Wal-Mart and other corporations have embraced fuel cells, California regulators have turned down requests from the state’s two biggest utilities to install the technology.

In a preliminary decision, an administrative law judge with the California Public Utilities Commission found unwarranted an application from Pacific Gas and Electric and Southern California to spend more than $43 million to install fuel cells that would generate six megawatts of electricity.

The technology transforms hydrogen, natural gas or other fuels into electricity through an electrochemical process, emitting fewer or no pollutants, depending on the type of fuel used.

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