Tag Archives: Renewable

Federal money could help build Healy wind farm

From The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, Sunday, May 9, 2010:

Electric utility managers say it’s a federal clean energy program that has them poised to build a big wind farm near Healy.

The program would repay more than two-thirds of construction costs for a $93 million Eva Creek farm, Golden Valley Electric Association president Brian Newton said Friday.

The utility has weighed the proposed farm for years and recently tested markets for renewable energy aid. Newton said they learned last month the project falls under the federal Clean Renewable Energy Bonds program and would be reimbursed from the federal treasury. They are talking of building the 24 megawatt wind farm immediately.

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Report: Wood, wind could help meet rural Alaska energy needs

From The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, Saturday, May 1, 2010:

Fort Yukon could turn to wood-fired power to ease its reliance on diesel fuel. Tanana could install wind turbines and start using half as much fuel within a few years.

The Alaska Energy Authority published those scenarios and about 200 more, including cost estimates, this week. The report comes less than a month after the Legislature set, as official state policy, the target of using wind turbines, hydroelectric dams and other renewable projects for at least half Alaska’s electricity by 2025.

“This gives you the pathway to get there,” said Steve Haagenson, director of the authority.

The agency released the report, an “energy pathway,” to coincide with a three-day rural energy conference in Fairbanks that ended Thursday.

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University of Alaska Fairbanks student helps campus go green

From The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, Monday, May 3, 2010:

If Michael Golub isn’t readying cars to run on electricity there’s a chance he’s spending his time on bigger conservation projects. 

Golub is one of a handful of staff, faculty and students at the University of Alaska Fairbanks working on an emerging, student-initiated directive to make the campus greener. 

Golub had been converting vehicles to run on batteries when last year students approved a fee to improve energy efficiency and conservation, and invest in renewable energy. 

That money, matched by campus administrators, could mean close to a half million dollars per year during the next decade. The task of deciphering the 2009 student vote and putting that interpretation into motion has fallen to elected and administrative student leaders. 

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GVEA proposes Healy wind farm to boost renewable power

From The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, Wednesday, April 28, 2010:

The Golden Valley Electric Association announced  plans Tuesday at its annual meeting to pursue the Eva Creek wind project, a $93 million effort to generate about 24 megawatts of power near Healy.

“After almost a decade of planning, study and research we finally think that we have a project that makes economic sense,” said Brian Newton, the GVEA president and CEO.

He said the final decision on the project is to be made in the next few months. It would be the first wind project by any Railbelt utility and the largest of the dozen or so wind farms in Alaska.

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Europe Finds Clean Energy in Trash, but U.S. Lags

From The New York Times, Monday, April 12, 2010:

The lawyers and engineers who dwell in an elegant enclave here are at peace with the hulking neighbor just over the back fence: a vast energy plant that burns thousands of tons of household garbage and industrial waste, round the clock.

Far cleaner than conventional incinerators, this new type of plant converts local trash into heat and electricity. Dozens of filters catch pollutants, from mercury to dioxin, that would have emerged from its smokestack only a decade ago.

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A Grid of Wind Turbines to Pick Up the Slack

From The New York Times, Monday, April 12, 2010:

Like most other sources of alternative energy, the wind can be intermittent. It does not blow uniformly, so power output from wind turbines rises and falls. And when the wind doesn’t blow at all, output drops to zero.

Intermittency is not much of a problem now in the United States, since there are relatively few wind farms and plenty of interconnected conventional power plants to pick up the slack when wind output falls, keeping the power supply stable. But if the proportion of electricity supplied by wind were to grow to, say, 20 percent or more, it would become increasingly difficult to handle the fluctuations in output.

One proposed solution to the intermittency problem is to tie many wind farms together with a transmission line — making an electric grid, as it were, consisting of wind turbines. Now, Willett Kempton of the Center for Carbon-free Power Integration at the University of Delaware and colleagues have shown how this “all-for-one” approach might work with offshore wind farms along the Eastern Seaboard.

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What's that smell? Energy!

From Alaska Dispatch, Wednesday, March 31, 2010:

The methane gas produced by rotting trash smells awful and can even blow up, but Anchorage’s Solid Waste Services has a plan to put that gas to work.

SWS plans to take the gas emitted at the Anchorage Regional Landfill and use it as energy. Estimates say the landfill’s methane could produce about 3 megawatts of power, or enough to power 2,500 local homes. Right now the methane gas is burned off by flares.

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Small wind farm pays big

From Alaska Dispatch, Tuesday, February 23, 2010:

On Tuesday, the village of Unalakleet, seated on Alaska’s northwest coast, celebrated the town’s newest energy force — turbine number six. The awakening of the high-tech wind catcher completes the installation of the town’s new wind farm, which has already saved the village tens of thousands of dollars since the first turbines powered up a few months ago.

Since November, Unalakleet has cut utility costs by nearly $55,000 and generated enough electricity to power 86 homes for an entire year, according the wind farm’s new Web site. The site also claims the wind energy has significantly reduced carbon dioxide emissions that would otherwise have been pumped into the atmosphere through more traditional, diesel-only power generation — the equivalent of more than 580,000 miles of driving in the family car. According to our calculations, that’s about 111 one-way trips between Anchorage and Key West, Florida.

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Bills aim to foster geothermal power

From Alaska Dispatch, Thursday, February 11, 2010:

In terms of punctuation marks, Railbelt natural gas supplies are a bit of question mark, and fuel prices in the Bush are a big exclamation point. So, it’s safe to assume Alaska’s electricity producers and consumers would appreciate a little stability. At least one company wants to transform Alaska’s geothermal resource into a reliable source of electricity, and is hoping for a way around an oddball state law that taxes hot water pulled from state land.

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President Touts His Alternative Fuels Plan

From The New York Times, Wednesday, Februrary 3, 2010:

President Obama moved on Wednesday to bolster the nation’s production of corn-based ethanol and other alternative liquid fuels and ordered the rapid development of technology to capture carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of coal.

The president is trying to expand the portfolio of American energy sources to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, a factor in global warming, and spur advances in alternative technologies. Last week he expressed support in his State of the Union address for increased generation of nuclear power and offshore drilling for oil and gas.

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