I sometimes suspect that biofuel from algae will be the microbiology/alt-energy equivalent of fusion power: perpetually in the intriguing early research stage, never in production. Here’s a Press-Herald story about a Maine company seeking to tap lipids - fats - produced by a highly productive but slow-growing form of marine algae called botryococcus. Note this [...]

The skepticism meter went into the red on this story from the Portland Press-Herald, due to shortage of details, but it’s fun to contemplate if nothing else: According to the story (read it here), an inventor wants to use effluent from the town’s wastewater treatment plant and hydroelectricity from the Royal River to produce hydrogen [...]

I hadn’t realized that PSNH wants to build a large (up to 5 megawatt, or 5,000 kilowatt) solar farm atop the capped Manchester city landfill. This would be the first almost-utility-scale photovoltaic plant in the New England, 11 times the size of the Brockton Brightfield and 100 times the size of the biggest solar sites [...]

It’s tough to judge the reality of new inventions from news stories - reporters are usually liberal-arts majors, not engineers - so stories like this one in the Burlington Free-Press need to be taken with a grain of salt. It says that a tiny company in Willston, Vt. has patented a new time of wind [...]

The state’s Renewable Energy Fund, managed by the PUC, supports the residential renewable-energy rebate program, under which more than 240 homeowners have requesting rebates of up to $6,000 for photovoltaic and wind turbine systems under 5 kilowatts.  The combined generation capacity of these systems is roughly 600 kilowatts.
On Friday, Sept. 26 [...]

New Hampshire is puttering along in the rooftop-solar-power business, with homeowners having applied for more than 600 kilowatts worth of Renewable Energy Fund rebates, mostly in 5-kilowatt photovoltaic increments. That’s the solar-power equivalent of sandlot baseball.
With our climate we’ll never probably enter the big leagues, like a 400-megawatt PV plant proposed for the California desert, [...]

My alternative-energy Google Map of Northern New England (here it is, for those of you who have ignored that big ugly link over in the right-hand rail) has several pins pointing to tidal-energy projects, all of them still in the R phase of R&D.

One of the most promising, which I’ve written about a couple of times over the years, is by a company called Ocean Renewable Power, which puts what looks like a big horizontal-axis egg beater on the ocean floor; its double-helix design means it spins whichever way the tide is flowing, and its direct-drive system is relatively straightforward, reducing (in theory) maintenance. The units are stackable, making expansion easy.

The Portland Press-Herald has a big story today on the company’s preparation for a 60-megawatt test, and hopes for a 1-megawatt project operating within a year or so. That’s tiny by utility standards, enough for a couple hundred homes perhaps, but would be a big step forward for a power source that has always seemed promising but which faces lots of obstacles. If nothing else, keeping electronics and spinning mechanical systems going amid constantly surging sea water is tough.

The Portland Press-Herald has a story about a wave-energy development company that wants to do testing at some of the sites off Maine which have been designated as test sites for offshore wind power. Read the story here. This is all very preliminary, as is most wave-energy work - a field that, in the U.S. [...]

PSNH has gotten a lot of attention for one of the more charming alternative-energy programs around: burning coca bean shells in its Schiller power plant in Portsmouth. Even the Economist magazine wrote about it.
They should get more attention now, following the announcement that last year’s test has convinced the New Hampshire’s Department of Environmental [...]

A proposal is being floated for a 30-megawatt wood-burning power plant in Hopkinton - which is fine. The interesting part is that it would also build 20 acres of greenhouses and pump CO2 and excess heat there, to boost growth of whatever the business plan calls for (maybe cut flowers, which make big profit on [...]

A new research paper argues that converting coal-burning power plants to using biomass can be an effective way to fight greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels. I read about it in the NY Times’ very fine Green Inc. blog (read it here) - which cites PSNH’s 2007 conversion of part of the Schiller Power Plant [...]

A company called SunHydro wants to put 11 hydrogen refueling stations that use electrolysis technology from Proton Energy, which uses solar-power electric to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, all along the East Coast - including one in Portland, Maine, and one in Braintree, Mass. Each station costs about $3 million and will have a [...]

Excellent story in the Portland Press-Herald (read it here) about the noise effect of utility-scale (1.5 megawatt) wind turbines, which have turned some pro-wind folks on Vinalhaven Island into doubters. (Note: For more details about sound from windmills, see Earle Rich’s comment after the article.) From the story:
Workers will make small modifications to the equipment [...]

ADDENDUM: Britain’s Royal Academy of Engineering says in a report that small-scale, rooftop wind turbines are virtually always a waste of time, accomplishing little. Story here. It includes this potent quote: “The things that save the money are not done, because they are not sexy.”

There’s something about designing wind turbines that brings out the Alexander [...]

Geothermal wells - meaning heat exchange rather than Iceland-like power from underground - are an obvious way to reduce energy usage. Basically, you circulate water through tubes in underground rock or gravel, where temperatures are stable compared to the air, and use that to reduce the cost of heating a building.
The system is growing by [...]