Abengoa Solar and Abound Solar Manufacturing will get the money to work on multiple solar plants in Arizona, Colorado and Indiana.

on the web: Abengoa and ABound Solar

via NYT: There are questions about whether the efficiency efforts will work as designed. “Most of what we put in our buildings is tried and true,” said Mr. Peck, of the G.S.A. “On some part of it, we’re prepared to be a beta tester. My dream,” Mr. Peck added, “is we will find a technology that needs a test and we will make the market for it.”

Yes, the GSA is going to take a risk and attempt a vertical farming solution, mostly for the heating and cooling benefits:

As part of a $133 million renovation, the General Services Administration is planning to cultivate “vegetated fins” that will grow more than 200 feet high on the western facade of the main federal building here, a vertical garden that changes with the seasons and nurtures plants that yield energy savings. The G.S.A. says the building will use 60 percent to 65 percent less energy than comparable buildings and estimates a savings of $280,000 annually in energy costs. Solar panels could provide up to 15 percent of the building’s power needs. The use of rainwater and low-flow plumbing fixtures will reduce potable water consumption by 68 percent. And energy for lighting will be halved.

“It will be one of the more energy-efficient high-rises in America, possibly in the world,” said James Cutler, whose architecture firm, Cutler Anderson, led the design work. [link]

This is nothing more than the kind of attitude in short supply. Just observe these statistics, just out, on the international race too energy independence:

China vaulted past competitors in Denmark, Germany, Spain and the United States last year to become the world’s largest maker of wind turbines, and is poised to expand even further this year. China has also leapfrogged the West in the last two years to emerge as the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels. [...] So while Americans are used to thinking of themselves as having the world’s largest market in many industries, China’s market for power equipment dwarfs that of the United States, even though the American market is more mature. That means Chinese producers enjoy enormous efficiencies from large-scale production.[link]

Lining its banks were millions of cylindrical holes full of water. On closer scrutiny, they turned out to contain black dust and soot that, having absorbed the warmth of the sun much faster than the reflective ice had, sunk through the ice, creating cylindrical holes.

Check out the full post and accompanying pictures here: NYRB Blog.

In fact, AltaRock immediately ran into snags with its drilling, repeatedly snapping off bits in shallow formations called caprock. The project’s safety was also under review at the Energy Department after federal officials said the company had not been entirely forthcoming about the earthquakes produced in Basel in making the case for the Geysers project.

The results of that review have not yet been announced, but the type of geothermal energy explored in Basel and at the Geysers requires fracturing the bedrock then circulating water through the cracks to produce steam. By its nature, fracturing creates earthquakes, though most of them are small.

On Friday, the Energy Department, which has put some $440 million into its geothermal program this year alone, said that despite the latest developments, it remained confident of the technology’s long-term prospects. Many geothermal methods do not require drilling so deep or fracturing bedrock. [full nytimes article]

Although they will be continuing similar programs in Oregon, spokemen said.

Dow Chemical said on Monday it would begin selling a new rooftop shingle next year that converts sunlight into electricity — and could generate $5 billion in revenue by 2015 for the company.
The new solar shingles can be integrated into rooftops with standard asphalt shingles, Dow said, and will be introduced in 2010 before a wider roll-out in 2011.
“We’re looking at this one product that could generate $5 billion in revenue by 2015 and $10 billion by 2020,” Jane Palmieri, managing director of Dow Solar Solutions, told Reuters in an interview.
The shingle will use thin-film cells of copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS), a photovoltaic material that typically is more efficient at turning sunlight into electricity than traditional polysilicon cells.
[link]

This is pretty good news, although it clearly aint the “American Industry” responding to market forces, or even real time needs… FTA, it also mentions word of the handout that clearly helped stimulate them:

“Dow received $20 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to help develop its BIPV products.”

not to mention their stock went up almost 5% after the announcement. Still, its progress. Rooftop solar systems have been kind of limited to roofing tiles, which have lower solar conversion efficiency than solar panels, and are pretty dang expensive. You see them mostly on celebrities pads or mcmansions. Dow says theyre rooftop solar shingle will be almost 30% cheaper, and cut the installation time in half. All good news for photovoltaic price points.

Here is an inconvenient truth about renewable energy: It can sometimes demand a huge amount of water. Many of the proposed solutions to the nation’s energy problems, from certain types of solar farms to biofuel refineries to cleaner coal plants, could consume billions of gallons of water every year.
“When push comes to shove, water could become the real throttle on renewable energy,” said Michael E. Webber, an assistant professor at the University of Texas in Austin who studies the relationship between energy and water.
[Full Article]

Although the article doesnt mention it, one solution might be to just turn off the water currently being used for coal and oil fired power generation plants, although it might be easier just to use a magical sorcerer to pull invisible water off another mystical plane. But then, we could just have them transmogrify manure into clean coal, yeah!

“At least three factors likely contributed to the methane increase,” said Ed Dlugokencky, a methane expert at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo. “It was very warm in the Arctic, there was some tropical forest burning, and there was increased rain in Indonesia and the Amazon.”

[NOAA Report]

This report comes on the heels of recent worries about Global Warming from the Copenhagen talks, Energy and Nuclear Energy Companies leaving the U.S. Chamber of commerce in a temper tantrum over energy policy, recent tsunami and earthquake activity, and general scientific 4-degree rises and unscientific doomsayers. We’ll stick with the (real) scientists on this one.

• Western Wind secures 24 year right of way extension for Mesa Wind Farm and the right to expand from 30MW to at least 50MW [link]
• Plum Creek has passed another round of regulatory approval for a round of Luxury Resorts in Moosehead, Maine [MPBN]
• Canada’s Environment Minister Jim Prentice Says December Climate Change Talks May Fail [link]
• Locavore movement detractors emerge [link]
• PSEG Solar investing $100M in 3 80+ acre Solar Farm projects [link]
• Amendment would drop land-use from U.S. biofuels rule: [A senator from the U.S. Corn Belt filed an amendment on Tuesday that would bar federal regulators from considering how land is used overseas when they write rules to expand use of biofuels.] [link]

The Hamburg-based renewable energy group Lichtblick and its automaker partner Volkswagen say the [home sized gas generators] plants would produce not only heating and hot water but also electricity, with any excess power fed into the local grid. The two firms said the concept of “SchwarmStrom” (literally, “swarm power”) would allow Germany to abandon nuclear and coal power stations sooner and help compensate for the volatility of renewables like wind and solar power.
[link]

Clearly a pretty ambitious move: the programme will attempt to build and install 100,000 of the mini plants, producing a total of 2,000 megawatts of electricity, the same as First Solar / China’s Solar Farm in the Mongolian Desert. It looks like everyone is aiming for the 2k megawatt mark, an easy number to try and hit because its the amount of energy two nuclear power plants generally produce.