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In a remarkable 30-day proposal-to-award cycle, the DOE announced on Tuesday the recipients of over $500 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act awards for large wind and solar projects located in eight states. The funding is expected to generate 2,000 new jobs.

This is the first round of awards. The Obama administration and the DOE originally planned on providing $3 billion for the projects in the form of tax credits, but restructured the awards to provide immediate cash instead of later-arriving tax credits.

According to a DOE news release, the agency believes the payments will eventually support an estimated 5,000 renewable energy production facilities in all regions of the country over the life of the program.

The DOE and the Treasury Department began accepting applications for the program on July 31, 2009 and was required to make the awards in 60 days. DOE and Treasury note that these first awards were made in half the mandated time. The DOE promised that the names of additional award winners would be “announced in the coming weeks.”

Here are the first round awardees:

A story in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, however, noted that half of the projects and $340 million of the funding is going to two companies headquartered outside the United States, Iberdrola SA (Spain) and Energias de Portugal SA. The WSJ also reports that despite the original $3 billion estimate, there apparently is no cap on funding and the DOE has pledged to award grants to all qualified applicants through 2011. The newspaper reports that some bankers estimate the total amount of awards could reach $10 billion.

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Via the state-run Third Frontier technology development program, the Ohio Department of Development has announced that it is seeking $27 million worth of “requests for proposals” for its 2010 fiscal year (July 1, 2009 - June 30, 2010).

ODD and Third Frontier are particularly interested in investing in projects related to fuel cells, photovoltaics, wind energy, biomass energy and energy storage.

The Third Frontier program is designed to assist companies in the precarious development stage referred to as the “Valley of Death” for start-up ventures. It assists by injecting investment monies to aid innovators in the crucial incubation and demonstration steps of growing their businesses. The National Governor’s Association and Pew Center for the States described Third Frontier as “a comprehensive, professionally run effort to build world-class research capacity, promote interaction between research and industry, and commercialize research and development.”

ODD/Third Frontier reps will conduct a bidder’s conference on Aug. 14, 2009, at the TechColumbus center located near the Ohio State University’s main campus. Letters of intent are due to ODD by Aug. 25. Formal proposals will be accepted until Sept. 18 at 2 p.m.

Department officials say the proposals will be evaluated independently and externally, then reviewed by members of the Third Frontier Commission before final approval by the legislature’s State Controlling Board. ODD says the program awards will be announced in December.

Complete RFP materials are available at: www.thirdfrontier.com.

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Wired Magazine reported last week that 28 years of wind data from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction and the Department of Energy have been analyzed to study geographical distributions, persistency of winds, intermittency issues and global climate effects of large-scale energy extraction of high-altitude winds. The analysis titled “Global Assessment of High Altitude Wind Power” is published in the online journal Energies by Cristina Archer at the Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences, California State University, Chico, and Ken Caldeira at the Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Stanford.

Two approaches are proposed that hope to harness wind power from high altitudes. The mechanical energy can be transmitted from high altitude to the earth’s surface, where generators would produce the electricity at the ground, or electricity could be generated aloft and transmitted to the surface using a tether.

Most concepts are still at an early stage of development, in which patents have been obtained. But neither business entities nor commercial-scale prototypes exist. No high-altitude wind power technology to date has produced a prototype that has been tested long enough to provide a solid record of electricity generation and associated costs.

One mechanical concept the researchers look at is an Italian technology called Kite Gen. Conceptually, Kite Gen would consist of several tethered airfoils (kites) connected to a ground-based generator with two lines, which are pulled and released by a control unit. The energy generated during the traction phase is greater than the energy needed in the recovery phase. A single unit of 100 square meters is expected to generate 620 kW of electricity. Arrays of several kites can be arranged in a carousel configuration around a circular rail for electricity generation of up to 100 MW. This approach appears most suitable for the lowest few kilometers of the atmosphere.

But the lure is powerful. Even with seasonal movements, the jet streams are relatively persistent features of the midlatitudes in both global hemispheres. The total wind energy in the jet streams is roughly 100 times the global energy demand. The abundance, strength and relative consistency make jet stream winds particularly interesting in wind power development. It’s a huge resource and it is accessible, albeit a giant engineering challenge.

The design proposed by Sky Windpower has four rotors mounted on an airframe, tethered to the ground via insulated aluminum conductors wound with Kevlar cords. The rotors both provide lift and power electric generation. The aircraft can be lofted with supplied electricity to reach the desired altitude, but then can generate up to 40 MW of power, with angles of up to 50 degrees into the wind. Multiple high altitude wind turbines (rotorcrafts) could be arranged in arrays for large scale electricity generation. For this approach, the aim would be to capture energy closer to the jet streams.

Sky Windpower’s flying
electric generators concept

As the altitude increases, the density of the air decreases lessening the power of the wind. The authors provide the mathematics needed to assess the potential power. They even briefly cover the interference with aviation.

Regions best suited for harvesting this energy match with population centers in eastern U.S. and eastern Asia, but the fluctuations in wind strength still present a challenge for exploiting this energy source on a large scale. Caldeira says, “There is a huge amount of energy available in high altitude winds. These winds blow much more strongly and steadily than near-surface winds, but you need to get up miles to get a big advantage. Ideally, you would like to be up near the jet streams, around 30,000 feet.”

Jet streams are meandering belts of fast winds at altitudes between 20,000 and 50,000 feet that shift seasonally, but otherwise are persistent features in the atmosphere. Jet stream winds are generally steadier and 10 times faster than winds near the ground, making them a potentially a vast and dependable source of energy.

“We found the highest wind power densities over Japan and eastern China, the eastern coast of the United States, southern Australia and northeastern Africa. The median values in these areas are greater than 10 kW per square meter. This is unthinkable near the ground, where even the best locations have usually less than 1 kW per square meter.” The analysis assessments included the high altitude wind energy for the world’s five largest cities: Tokyo, New York, Sao Paulo, Seoul and Mexico City. “For cities that are affected by polar jet streams such as Tokyo, Seoul and New York, the high-altitude resource is phenomenal,” said Archer. “New York, which has the highest average high-altitude wind power density of any U.S. city, has an average wind power density of up to 16 kW per square meter.”

Now for the bad news. Caldeira says, “While there is enough power in these high altitude winds to power all of modern civilization, at any specific location there are still times when the winds do not blow.”

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Mobile testing unit. Credit: Fraunhofer WKI

Air inclusions (yellow) in rotor blade. Credit: Fraunhofer WKI

German researchers soon will be demonstrating a new method to test the integrity of laminates such as those used in wind turbine blades. The group, from Fraunhofer’s Wilhelm Klauditz Institute, says their infrared method is a cost-effective way of using thermography to check for defects such as trapped air.

The concern, of course, is identifying areas that, when subjected to mechanical, chemical and lightning-induced stress, might crack and eventually fail prematurely (and catastrophically). And, there is a lot of material in these blades that can be 50-70 meters in length.

WKI claims (surprisingly, to me, since this seems a little old school) that the most prevalent method currently used to find blade defects is the “percussion method,” i.e., someone taps on the material - or in this case - the rotor blade - and uses the sound and vibration to “feel” the defect. At best, that has got to be very time consuming and logistically difficult, given what must be entailed in lifting an inspector high enough to examine the blades. And, costly - especially if whoever is insuring the turbine is insisting on frequent inspections.

Understandably, the push is on to find a more precise, cheaper and easier method. That’s where WKI steps in. “Infrared thermography is well suited to this task, as it is fast, relatively cheap and doesn’t cause any damage,” explains WKI project manager Dr. Hiltrud Brocke. “The surface is briefly heated with an infrared radiator. A special camera shows how the heat front spreads inside the material. If the front hits on any air inclusions or delaminated areas, it accumulates because heat spreads less in air than in solid laminate.”

“Because the equipment - the infrared radiator, a camera and a computer - is mobile, we can carry out measurements during production, at the end of the transport route, and also on fully assembled wind energy plants,” says Brocke.

Brocke says the equipment can provide images from several centimeters deep into the material

WKI’s system is a semi-automatic process that can inspect several square meters per minute. That’s is, it can inspect that fast if the blade is off the turbine. WKI is still somewhat stumped about how to use the thermography system on a working turbine. Research is going on to develop “climbing robots” that could automatically move along the rotor blades with the equipment.

Brocke and his team of researchers will be doing demonstrations at the upcoming Hannover-Messe tradeshow, April 20-24.

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