Weatherization Assistance Program

Weatherization Assistance Program Announces Request for Information on Proposed Sustainable Energy Resources for Consumers Grants


March 09, 2010

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Weatherization and Intergovernmental Program today announced a Request for Information (RFI) regarding the Department’s proposed Sustainable Energy Resources for Consumers (SERC) Grants for up to $109 million.

Under the Recovery Act, states and local service providers are accelerating the pace of weatherization to create jobs and increase the number of families who can benefit from the energy and cost savings available through the Weatherization Assistance Program. The Weatherization Assistance Program works in partnership with states and more than 900 local service providers to weatherize homes of eligible low-income families.

The purpose of the proposed SERC grants are to speed delivery of weatherization assistance services, promote increased leveraging of federal funding with other funding sources, and identify and develop sustainable energy funding models that are not currently deployed by the Weatherization Assistance Program network.

The Department seeks comments from potential applicants, which include state weatherization agencies and local services providers, and also from other stakeholders.

Contact: scotty@stlouisrenewableenergy.com for additional info

PAYGO imposes spending restrictions on Congress

As someone who has contacted me with your concerns about the budget deficit and the national debt, I wanted to reach out to you now to let you know about important legislation, known as PAYGO (Pay-As-You-Go), that has just been signed into law. PAYGO imposes spending restrictions on Congress and will help bring down the deficit.


PAYGO rules require spending increases and revenue cuts to be paid for by offsetting cuts or revenue-raisers elsewhere in the budget. For example, a proposal to increase spending on highway construction would have to be balanced by increased fees on drivers or a cut to education spending. PAYGO rules were in effect and contributed to the balanced budget of the 1990s, but they were allowed to expire in 2002, leading to irresponsible budget deficits during the past decade.

PAYGO will require Congress to spend wisely on what works and only fund programs and tax cuts that deliver the most bang for the buck. To this end, the legislation also requires the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to assess initiatives across the government to find inefficient or duplicative programs.

PAYGO will help us bring down the deficit responsibly over the long-term. For now, however, the deficit will remain large because the recession has reduced tax revenues and has required the government to take extraordinary measures to save the economy. Extending unemployment and health insurance benefits to the unemployed, temporary and targeted tax cuts to boost demand, and investments in infrastructure, schools and alternative energy help save jobs now and will deliver benefits for years and decades to come. In fact, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently concluded that the Recovery Act of last year has already saved or created 1-2 million jobs, and economists agree that many more jobs will be saved or created this year.

Restoring fiscal responsibility will also require us to address several long-term challenges, such as spending on defense and Medicare. Last year, I was pleased to vote in favor of a new law to reform wasteful contracting procedures for military spending. Congress is also continuing to debate health insurance reform legislation that will reduce the deficit over the next decade by spending our health care dollars more effectively. PAYGO will help Congress maintain its discipline in these efforts to reduce spending.

Please do not hesitate to contact me with your views on the budget deficit or any other issue of concern. I also hope you will find my website, carnahan.house.gov, a useful resource for keeping up with my work in Washington and the 3rd District of Missouri, and I welcome you to sign up for my e-newsletter at carnahan.house.gov/update.

A New Solar Energy Source

A New Solar Energy Source from the Common Pea
Provided by: http://www.stlouisrenewableenergy.com/  Submitted by Green Prophet Staff on March 5, 2010 – 2:38 pm

If harnessing the unlimited solar power of the sun were easy, we wouldn’t still have the greenhouse gas problem that results from the use of fossil fuel. And while solar energy systems work moderately well in hot desert climates, they are still inefficient and contribute only a small percentage of the general energy demand. A new solution may be coming from an unexpected source — a source that may be on your dinner plate tonight. Peas!

“Looking at the most complicated membrane structure found in a plant, we deciphered a complex membrane protein structure which is the core of our new proposed model for developing ‘green’ energy,” says structural biologist Prof. Nathan Nelson of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Biochemistry. Isolating the minute crystals of the PSI super complex from the pea plant, Prof. Nelson suggests these crystals can be illuminated and used as small battery chargers or form the core of more efficient man-made solar cells.

Nanoscience is the science of small particles of materials and is one of the most important research frontiers in modern technology. In nature, positioning of molecules with sub-nanometer precision is routine, and crucial to the operation of biological complexes such as photosynthetic complexes. Prof. Nelson’s research concentrates on this aspect.

The mighty PSI

To generate useful energy, plants have evolved very sophisticated “nano-machinery” which operates with light as its energy source and gives a perfect quantum yield of 100%. Called the Photosystem I (PSI) complex, this complex was isolated from pea leaves, crystalized and its crystal structure determined by Prof. Nelson to high resolution, which enabled him to describe in detail its intricate structure.

Described in 1905 by Albert Einstein, quantum physics and photons explained the basic principles of how light energy works. Once light is absorbed in plant leaves, it energizes an electron which is subsequently used to support a biochemical reaction, like sugar production.


“If we could come even close to how plants are manufacturing their sugar energy, we’d have a breakthrough. It’s therefore important to solve the structure of this nano-machine to understand its function,” says Prof. Nelson, whose lab is laying the foundations for this possibility.

Since the PSI reaction center is a pigment-protein complex responsible for the photosynthetic conversion of light energy to another form of energy like chemical energy, these reaction centers, thousands of which are precisely packed in the crystals, may be used to convert light energy to electricity and serve as electronic components in a variety of different devices.

“One can imagine our amazement and joy when, upon illumination of those crystals placed on gold covered plates, we were able to generate a voltage of 10 volts. This won’t solve our world’s energy problem, but this could be assembled in power switches for low-power solar needs, for example,” he concludes.

Solar Power News

Article supplied by: Scotty, St Louis "Renewable Energy" Missouri, written By: JAD MOUAWAD

c.2010 New York Times News Service

INDIANTOWN, Fla. — In former swamplands teaming with otters and wild hogs, one of the nation’s biggest utilities is running an experiment in the future of renewable power.

Across 500 acres north of West Palm Beach, the FPL Group utility is assembling a life-size Erector Set of 190,000 shimmering mirrors and thousands of steel pylons that stretch as far as the eye can see. When it is completed by the end of the year, this vast project will be the world’s second-largest solar plant.

But that is not its real novelty. The solar array is being grafted onto the back of the nation’s largest fossil-fuel power plant, fired by natural gas. It is an experiment in whether conventional power generation can be married with renewable power in a way that lowers costs and spares the environment.

This project is among a handful of innovative hybrid designs meant to use the sun’s power as an adjunct to coal or gas in producing electricity. While other solar projects already use small gas-fired turbines to provide backup power for cloudy days or at night, this is the first time that a conventional plant is being retrofitted with the latest solar technology on such an industrial scale.

The project’s advantages are obvious: Electricity generated from the sun will allow FPL to cut natural gas use and reduce carbon dioxide emissions. It will provide extra power when it is most needed: when the summer sun is shining, Floridians are cranking up their air-conditioning and electricity demand is at its highest.

The plant also serves as a real-life test on how to reduce the cost of solar power, which remains much more expensive than most other forms of electrical generation. FPL Group, the parent company of Florida Power and Light, expects to cut costs by about 20 percent compared with a stand-alone solar facility, since it does not have to build a new steam turbine or new high-power transmission lines.

“We’d love to tell you that solar power is as economic as fossil fuels, but the reality is that it is not,” Lewis Hay III, FPL’s chairman and chief executive, said on a recent tour of the plant. “We have got to figure out ways to get costs down. As we saw with wind power, a lot has to do with scale.”

For solar power, scale is still a relative term. At its peak, the solar plant will be able to generate 75 megawatts of power, enough for about 11,000 homes. But that is dwarfed by the adjacent gas plant, which can produce about 3,800 megawatts of power. (A megawatt is enough to power a Wal-Mart store.)

Utilities are being pulled in different directions. They must ensure that the lights remain on at all times as well as provide the lowest-cost power to their customers. At the same time, they are being pressed to find ways to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and invest in renewable power sources.

The latter is critical if the nation is to succeed in reducing its emissions of carbon dioxide. Power plants account for over a third of domestic greenhouse gas emissions that are responsible for global warming.

“We believe there is a cost to society associated with carbon emissions and not having energy security and not having domestic energy supplies,” Hay said. “But it’s not a level playing field for renewable versus fossil fuels right now.”

Mark Brownstein, an energy and grid specialist at the Environmental Defense Fund, praised FPL’s innovative thinking. “When we talk about getting to a low-carbon, clean-energy economy,” he said, “we know there is not going to be a single technology that is going to transform the industry.”

Currently, 29 states require utilities to increase the amount of power produced from renewable energy, which includes solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal and biomass. Last year, Congress considered a federal mandate for 25 percent of renewable power by 2025 as part of its energy and climate legislation. (The bill has since stalled.)

Utilities have been scrambling to meet the state requirements, and many will not be met, according to electrical utility experts.

While renewable power is growing, its share of the nation’s electrical generation remains small. Wind power, which has surged in recent years, accounts for less than 2 percent of the nation’s electrical output. Solar is even smaller. Coal, meanwhile, generates half of the nation’s electrical output, followed by natural gas and nuclear energy.

Part of the challenge in increasing the share of renewable energy sources is to make up for their variable nature — at night, for example, or when the wind does not blow. Because electricity cannot be stored easily, utilities must always produce enough power to meet electric demand at any given time. In practice, this means they need keep a lot of idle plants that can be fired up rapidly when demand spikes.

About 20 percent of the generation capacity overseen by PJM Interconnection, a regional transmission operator covering 13 northeastern and mid-Atlantic states, is used less than 100 hours a year, according to Lester B. Lave, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon’s school of business.

“As long as the contribution of wind and solar is very small, utilities can handle it very well,” Lave said. But what happens once the share of renewable power rises to 10 percent? Or 20 percent? “No one knows what the magic number is.”

Spain, which generates more than 12 percent of its electricity from wind, has struggled with wind variability, Lave said. Similar problems are also cropping up in the United States, especially in states where solar and wind power are on the rise. In 2008, for example, Texas narrowly avoided a blackout when wind power, which supplied 5 percent of demand at the time, experienced an unexpected lull, driving wind electricity generation down to 350 megawatts, from 2,000 megawatts, in less than four hours, according to Lave.

It is a problem the industry is beginning to focus on, and hybrid plants could provide part of the answer. By adding renewable power to existing fossil fuel plants that operate around the clock, the thinking goes, utilities could have readily available power that could be fired up instantly whenever their wind or solar resources dropped off.

The Electric Power Research Institute is working on two pilot programs that seek to integrate solar power with traditional coal and gas plants in New Mexico. A dozen hybrid projects similar to FPL’s plant are planned around the world, said Cara Libby, the institute’s project manager for renewable energy.

“Intermittency is probably the challenge utilities are putting the most efforts into researching at the moment,” Libby said. “The biggest concern, of course, is how to keep the power on.”

Instead of adding new capacity, smart grid designs and investments in transmission lines could also help balance the contribution of intermittent resources, said Tim Stephure, an analyst at Emerging Energy Research, a consulting firm. Some regional operators, such as PJM, are also encouraging their large customers to cut consumption when demand is at its peak to reduce the overall power requirements on the grid, said Brownstein of the Environmental Defense Fund.

At FPL, part of the challenge will be to fine-tune the system so that its gas and solar components provide just as much electricity as needed at any given time — day or night, cloudy or clear. At a cost of $476 million, the solar project, known as the Martin Next Generation Solar Energy Center, will be second-biggest, after the 310-megawatt Solar Electric Generating System in the Mojave Desert in California. That system, also owned by FPL, was built in the 1980s.

FPL estimates it will cut its natural gas use by 1.3 billion cubic feet each year, the consumption of 18,000 American homes. It will also cut carbon emissions by 2.75 million tons over 30 years, the equivalent of taking 19,000 cars off the road. The solar panels concentrate the sun’s rays into a vacuum-sealed tube that contains a synthetic oil, which heats up to 748 degrees Fahrenheit. The oil is then used to produce steam that is fed into an existing turbine to produce electricity. Using small sensors, the mirrors will be able to rotate during the day to track the sun’s movement. In case of a hurricane, they will flip upside down for protection.