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A clean-powered Better Place in Israel falls victim to environmentalists

Katie Fehrenbacher — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 17:21:23 +0000

Better Place’s electric car charging network in Israel won’t rely on much clean power at launch, Better Place CEO Shai Agassi tells me. That’s because Israel is caught up in the same battle that many clean power projects in the U.S. have faced: environmentalists opposing the construction of transmission lines.

Clean power companies trying to build large solar and wind farms in the deserts of the U.S. have long run up against opposition from environmentalists and local residents who don’t want large transmission lines running through protected lands and communities’ backyards. Turns out in Israel, despite its pro-solar stance, and new upcoming nationwide electric car charging network from startup Better Place, is getting caught in that mess, too.

At a meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation in San Francisco this week, I asked Better Place CEO Shai Agassi if his new electric car charging network in Israel, which is launching later this year, was going to utilize clean power. Back in early 2008, when Agassi announced the Israel project, he said in his speech that the grid infrastructure of his network will be powered by “batteries, that get their energy from green sustainable electricity sources.” Israel has an aggressive stance on promoting solar power, including supporting solar hot water heaters.

But Shai said that while he wanted the network to utilize clean power, the transmission lines needed to connect clean power to the grid to power the Better Place network, had hit a stand still after environmentalists had blocked the building of the lines over ground through certain areas. You can read up on some of the back and forth on the solar transmission lines in the Jerusalem Post. Agassi told me he would really like clean power to be part of the Israeli network, but that his hands are tied on the transmission lines right now.

The end result is that it looks like Better Place Israel won’t necessarily be run on clean power anytime soon. A similar situation has occurred for many of the large clean power projects, from Cape Wind, to BrightSource’s Ivanpah project (that one is moving ahead though).

And for some more positive news on Better Place’s Israel network, Agassi says that demand for the cars for Israel’s Better Place network are sold out for at least a year, practically for two years. The company is doing a controlled launch of the Israel network to make sure that nothing happens to degrade the customer experience. Israel is the first launch for Better Place — and essentially the perfect conditions for the company — and the company has to get the launch right, if it’s to succeed in other markets.

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Cape Wind: National Grid to Buy Half of the Project's Power

Josie Garthwaite — Fri, 07 May 2010 17:31:05 +0000

Today Massachusetts utility National Grid and Cape Wind announced an agreement for the utility to buy 50 percent of the power generated by the controversial 130-turbine project starting in 2013. For a typical residential customer, that could mean an increase of about $1.59 on their monthly utility bills.

Cape Wind, which plans to complete the offshore wind farm in Nantucket Sound in late 2012, won federal approval last week after nine years in the review process. But even that landmark decision for the project represented only a preliminary step to make the project a reality.

National Grid and Cape Wind will file with regulators for approval of the power purchasing agreement on Monday. Under the terms revealed today, however, National Grid will pay 20.7 cents per kilowatt hour for power and renewable energy credits in 2013. That compares to 24.4 cents per kilowatt hour that National Grid agreed to pay for power from the smaller Deepwater Wind project, under a power purchasing agreement that utility regulators rejected based on the high cost.

According to the Boston Globe, state officials have said National Grid needed a deal in the range of 17-21 cents per kilowatt hour in order for the power from Cape Wind to be competitive with conventional energy sources. So today’s agreement comes in just under that ceiling.

National Grid’s payments per kilowatt hour will increase 3.5 percent each year. But at the 2013 rate National Grid and Cape Wind said they expect residential utility customers who use 500 kilowatt hours per month to see an average increase of $1.59 (or about 2 percent) on their monthly utility bills as a result of the deal.

According to Cape Wind President Jim Gordon, while this agreement covers only half of the planned output (an estimated 91 megawatts), it’s enough to start paving the way to necessary equity investment and financing. He said utilities, retail electricity providers and others have expressed interest in the remaining power, and he’s hopeful that NSTAR or other utilities will “step up and achieve the benefit” of Cape Wind.

National Grid’s executive director Tom King said this morning that with this contract, Cape Wind will contribute about 3-3.5 percent of the utility’s total electric procurement load — a significant step toward the 15 percent of its power that state regulations require the utility to get from renewable sources by 2020.

Of course, with Cape Wind, it ain’t over ’til it’s over. Still ahead are potentially lengthy procedures for winning approval from utility regulators, building out the electrical connections (Gordon said Cape Wind is in the midst of “intensive negotiations” with offshore marine construction firms), ordering and receiving the turbines, and dealing with the lawsuits already filed to stop the project.

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Photo courtesy of Flickr user Phault

9 Years & Millions of Lobbying Bucks Later, Cape Wind Gets Federal OK

Josie Garthwaite — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 18:25:50 +0000

After nine years in the federal review process, a controversial wind farm planned for Nantucket Sound off the coast of Cape Cod, has won approval today from Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. If the 130-turbine project, dubbed Cape Wind, goes through as planned, it will be the first offshore wind farm in the country.

Salazar announced the green light for Cape Wind at a press conference in Boston Wednesday afternoon, just in time to meet a self-imposed deadline. In January Salazar said he would be reviewing the project and that a final decision on Cape Wind would be made by the end of April.

But as Katie has pointed out, Cape Wind has miles yet to go after having this door opened by the Obama administration. Still ahead are potentially lengthy procedures for winning public utility commission approvals, building out the electrical connections, ordering and receiving the turbines, and other issues that will be specifically related to the first offshore wind farm in the U.S.

The Cape Wind project has been the focus of lobbying efforts costing millions of dollars over its nine years in limbo, the Washington Post’s Post Carbon blog notes.

Today’s decision has drawn both criticism and cheers. Supporters are greeting the approval as a victory for green jobs and renewable energy, while critics have decried the project’s potential to spoil wildlife and views (best enjoyed from the stomping grounds of New England’s affluent elite), and desecrate tribal burial sites.

The American Wind Energy Association, an industry group, issued a statement this afternoon urging the creation of a renewable energy standard to help establish long-term market for wind power, both on land and offshore.

The group’s CEO Denise Bode noted that some U.S. turbine manufacturers have announced plans to set up factories in Europe to support the continent’s 20-year-old offshore wind industry, and said stronger incentives are needed to cultivate that manufacturing stateside.

The saga of Cape Wind is far from over, however. In the next chapter, we can expect a court battle to stop to project from going forward.

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Wake Me Up When Cape Wind Is Here

Katie Fehrenbacher — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 16:06:11 +0000

When I first started covering greentech, I paid close attention to the Cape Wind saga — the proposed first U.S. offshore wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts that has been in limbo for nine long years due to concerns over turbines disturbing local sea views. But I swiftly learned to tune out the ever-extended deadlines and proposals. It was all just too depressing and representative of how NIMBY-ism and political interests can crush clean power projects.

But is the end of the controversy actually near? Probably not, however, the fate of the project is looking somewhat more hopeful. On Wednesday Ken Salazar, secretary of the Department of the Interior, said he would be reviewing the project and that a final decision on Cape Wind would be made by the end of April. Public comments are being accepted until February 13.

The entrepreneur behind Cape Wind Jim Gordon released a statement that suggests he’s optimistic enough:

We are convinced that when Secretary Salazar has the complete record before him that the verifiable public benefits of creating jobs, greater energy independence, cleaner air and mitigating climate change will far outweigh any perception of negative impacts.

If the project is actually approved by April, there’s likely to be several more years of wait on public utility commission approvals, building out the electrical connections, ordering and receiving the turbines, and other issues that will be specifically related to the first offshore wind farm in the U.S.

OK, I know these things take a long time, but if these type of timelines become de rigueur for clean power in the U.S., we’re going to need a whole lot of help making it to any kind of near term domestic carbon emissions cuts.

Image of Nysted offshore wind farm off the coast of Denmark in the Baltic Sea, courtesy of Cape Wind.

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U.S. Interior Department Touts Offshore Wind

David Ehrlich — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 18:01:00 +0000

Despite the big benefits of offshore wind, there are still no wind turbines in the waters off the coast of the United States. The new administration, however, is looking to change that. The Department of the Interior released a report this week detailing the abundance of the country’s offshore energy resources. According to Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, the offshore wind potential exceeds the electricity demand of the entire country.

The report, which also notes the possibilities of tidal power, claims that there’s more than 1,000 GW of wind potential off the East Coast of the U.S., and more than 900 GW off the West Coast. A lot of that could already be spoken for — according to the Interior Department, the number of megawatts in the nation’s proposed offshore wind projects totals more than 2,000.

The first project to get up and running will probably be the long-delayed 420 MW Cape Wind development in Massachusetts, which received state approval earlier this month for power grid interconnections on Cape Cod. The offshore wind project passed another big hurdle back in January, and the Cape Wind group plans to start construction in 2010.

There are at least two other wind farms in the Northeast that could be next. In Rhode Island, Deepwater Wind is working on a 400 MW offshore project, and in New Jersey, Deepwater has teamed up with the Public Service Enterprise Group on a 350 MW offshore wind farm.

And while offshore wind can cost twice as much as onshore projects, some of the offshore potential might not have such a high price tag. The report said that wind resources in shallow water — with depths of typically no more than 98 feet — could account for at least 20 percent of the electricity needs of most of the coastal states. Setting a cost-conscious example is the Cape Wind project, which is set to be built in the shallow waters of the Nantucket Sound.

As for tidal power, the Interior Department didn’t have any estimates on its potential in the report, but did say the technology appears to be taking the lead over wave power, with predictable currents and good sites near the shore making it easier to develop.

Image courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

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Offshore Wind: Costly, But Big Benefits

David Ehrlich — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 01:00:09 +0000

With serious questions being raised about the costs of the world’s largest planned offshore wind farm, the London Array, and the never-ending saga that has crimped the controversial offshore Cape Wind project in Massachusetts, it’s easy to dismiss offshore wind as being too expensive and ultimately not viable.

After all, in a report on U.S. wind power potential last year, that country’s Department of Energy said the capital cost of offshore projects ranged from $2,400 to $5,000 per kilowatt, while onshore capital costs averaged $1,775 per kW. And a proposed offshore wind farm in Maine is being billed at $5 billion per gigawatt — or a whopping $25 billion.

But there are two big reasons to go offshore, particularly in the U.S: strong winds and location, location, location.

“The capacity factors are much higher, so the wind is actually stronger offshore than onshore,” Tyler Tringas, a wind analyst at New Energy Finance, told us. With more wind power, there’s more electricity that can be generated.

The Ocean Energy Institute — run by energy investment banker and energy adviser Matthew Simmons, as well as physicist George Hart — is banking on what they say are some of the strongest winds in the world in the Gulf of Maine.

“The second argument for offshore wind is that you can put the actual wind farms quite close to large metropolitan centers,” he said. And that could prove to be the linchpin.

Guess which states use the most electricity? The ones that are on the water. In the contiguous U.S., there are 28 states that have a coastal boundary, and they use 78 percent of the nation’s electricity, according to the Energy Information Administration. The DOE report said only six of those coastal states have sufficient onshore wind resources to generate more than 20 percent of their electricity needs.

And what about importing all that wind power potential from other states? One of the biggest hurdles, according to the DOE, is the lack of transmission lines that can get the power from the spots that have the best wind resources to the areas that need that power the most. The agency estimated that the U.S. could produce 20 percent of its electricity from onshore wind, but that it would cost at least $20 billion just to expand the transmission grid. And even if the money is there, there’s the headache of dealing with all the different states and municipalities which each control their little section of the transmission lines. Short of nationalizing the grid, it would be hard to get an expanded system in place anytime soon.

The idea of putting some turbines in the water, and just plugging them in to power, say, Boston, could actually be a reasonable idea, even in these troubled economic times.

And while Cape Wind has been waiting a long time to even start construction, regulatory hurdles abound for both offshore and onshore ind.

“I don’t think you can categorically say that it’s tougher to permit offshore, at least going forward,” said Tringas. “Maybe it was a few years ago, but you could easily run into just as many delays and difficulties trying to put a wind farm in Vermont.”

At least two more big offshore projects are on the way in the Northeast. Earlier this month, the governor of Rhode Island signed a final agreement with Deepwater Wind for a 400-MW offshore wind project for the tiny state, with construction expected to start in late 2010. Deepwater Wind is also working with the Public Service Enterprise Group on a 350-MW offshore wind farm in New Jersey.

And in the UK, a new report says there’s room for 5,000 to 7,000 more offshore wind turbines, which would be enough to power almost all of the homes in the country.

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Cape Wind Leaps Big Federal Hurdle

David Ehrlich — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 13:00:17 +0000

The controversial Cape Wind offshore project in Massachusetts took a step closer to becoming a reality on Friday, receiving a favorable review from the Minerals Management Service in a final environmental impact statement. The Cape Wind group said it could complete the permitting process by March.

There’s a mandatory waiting period of at least 30 days before the MMS can issue a final decision on approving a lease for the 420-megawatt wind farm, but it is expected to be approved, as the report found that the project’s environmental impacts will be mostly negligible.

Clearing this almost-final hurdle is positive news for other U.S. offshore wind projects that are still in the wings. Earlier this month, the governor of Rhode Island signed a final agreement with Deepwater Wind for a 400-MW offshore wind project. Deepwater Wind is also working on a 350-MW offshore wind farm in New Jersey, partnering with the Public Service Enterprise Group on that development.

It’s been a year since the MMS released the draft version of its report on Cape Wind, which received over 42,000 comments. The project, which was originally proposed in 2001, has received strong opposition from some locals, including Sen. Ted Kennedy, who would be able to see the wind farm from his beachfront Hyannis Port estate.

The offshore project still needs to get some other federal, state and local permits in order, but the Cape Wind group said most of those permits could be secured this winter, with a remaining Federal Aviation Administration permit likely to come through in the spring.

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Bloomberg: Ocean Wind Power for the Statue of Liberty?

Katie Fehrenbacher — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:50:07 +0000

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is calling for ideas for renewable power for the city, including offshore wind, wind turbines on skyscrapers, hydropower from the Hudson and East Rivers, geothermal and increased solar. Bloomberg made an announcement for a Request for Expressions of Interest at the National Clean Energy Summit on Tuesday.

Bloomberg was especially bullish on off-shoring wind, saying the technology could meet 10 percent of the city’s electricity within a decade. He opined:

I think it would be a thing of beauty if, when Lady Liberty looks out on the horizon, she not only welcomes new immigrants, but lights their way with a torch powered by an ocean wind farm.

Wow — an image using the best of Americana with the latest green buzz. But even though New Yorkers could be a more welcoming bunch to huge wind turbines in their ocean views, this could still present a major challenge to NIMBYism. Homeowners who don’t want turbines spoiling their views have led to cancelled and stalled projects around the country, like the off-shore wind farm Cape Wind that calls for 130 turbines for Nantucket Sound.

Like San Francisco’s Mayor Gavin Newsom, Bloomberg has a way of getting contentious proposals passed (seemingly through sheer charm), so perhaps New York will have an easier time approving an off-shore wind plan than its neighbor up north.

(For all those reading through RSS cache, a story with a similar headline was accidently published earlier that was just prebaked notes — kindly ignore that one.)

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Engadget high on top 100 products of the year; we figure to be 101st

Kevin C. Tofel — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 02:15:00 +0000

Props to the talent of Peter, Ryan and the whole gang over at Engadget as the site was named the 13th best product of the year in PC World’s best 100 products of the year. I’m sure they got a call with the good news; I’m watching out my door for someone to deliver a telegram saying we just missed the top 100…hmm…do they deliver telegrams in the dark? Actually, they don’t deliver telegrams any longer, do they? ;)

All kidding aside, this is a great honor for the Engadget team and they beat out some killer products like HD-DVD, Google and many, many more! Nice job guys!

-kct

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