Sagging Energy Rates Creates An Opportunity for Power Purchasers

Real-Time Pricing: Now is the Time. From the September 2009 issue of Building Operating Management magazine. The facililities management resource.

Our Perspective:

Below you will find a great article providing the savings opportunity in the deregulated gas and electric market.

It is true we are finding substantial savings for our clients. Energy Prices are the lowest they have been in the last 3 to 4 years. Our clients are saving from 10% upto 25% over what they paid over the last 12 months on gas and electric supply cost.

Based on annual usage, we have seen small clients saving a couple of thousand dollars over the next year, to our larger clients saving from $90,000 upto $300,000 over the next year. 

What would be the potential savings for your company?

All you have to do is ask. There are no fees involved, the savings fall to the bottom line.

Should you like to know more about the utility savings available for your company call 856-857-1230 or send an email to george@hbsadvantage.com

Enjoy the article, click on the link provided below.

via Sagging Energy Rates Creates An Opportunity for Power Purchasers.

Natural Gas Market

Apr 30, 2009 –

As was the case with other industries that have been deregulated, natural gas deregulation has resulted in competition which helps lower the cost of natural gas and increase customer choices.

Deregulation is the process of lessening the amount of government restrictions an oversight applied to private companies. The natural gas industry has been gradually deregulated over the past ten years.

Before deregulation, utilities charged their customers for all the necessary steps to get the natural gas from the gas well to the customer’s home or business. This included purchasing the natural gas, delivering it to the customer, measuring the customer’s use,providing emergency service, and billing the customer.

One effect of deregulation has been that customers may now choose to purchase only part of the full line of services that are offered by the utility. This ability to choose is called
unbundling. The complete package of services has been unbundled so that a customer can choose to separate the gas purchasing transaction from the delivery — or transport — transaction.

Our Perspective:

Natural Gas prices are the lowest they have been in 3 to 4 years. For companies spending more than $3000 a month we are finding 20% to 30% saving over what they have paid over the past year.

One of our new clients signed up today and will see more that $42,000 savings over the next year.

Like to know more? Feel free to contact us. There are no additional fees, your savings fall to the bottom line.

Email george@hbsadvantage.com  or call 856-857-1230

Texas Electricity Rates Skyrocket

By Dave Montgomery

dmontogomery@star-telegram.com 

AUSTIN – Electricity rates in Texas have soared well above the national average under a 10-year-old deregulation law, according to a study by a coalition of cities.

“As this report illustrates, consumers have paid too much for too long under deregulation,” said Jay Doegey, chairman of the Cities Aggregation Power Project, a non-profit coalition of 103 municipalities.

An industry group immediately challenged the findings, saying the report was based on “flawed reasoning” that resulted in erroneous conclusions.

“The simple fact is that in most parts of the state, there are lower competitive prices today than when prices were regulated,” said the Association of Electric Companies of Texas. “The Texas competitive market is working, even if CAPP thinks otherwise.”

The conflicting viewpoints point to a contentious battle in the 2009 Legislature over electricity rates. Several lawmakers say they plan to pursue legislation to protect consumers from rising costs on a number of fronts, including insurance and utility rates.

The CAPP report examined the impact of Senate Bill 7, which was passed by the Legislature in 1999 in what its sponsors said was an attempt to rein in rising electricity rates.

Our Perspective:

The deregulated utility market was set up to make utility costs more competitive. So far, it seems not to have worked. Prices have increased instead of becoming more competitive. Supply prices have tripled in the last 8 years.

As electric supply cost continue to increase, so does the demand for electricity and this is going to create another problem. It is projected that the demand for electricity is growing about 11/2% a year. In the next 8 – 10 years, we will not be able to support this growth in demand with the existing facilities we have.

What are our options?

Some are saying rolling brownouts! That doesn’t sound like a solution.

What are we going to do about this problem?

The real answer, reduce the demand off the grid and rebuild the existing electric infrastructure and start investing in alternative energy.

Let us know your thoughts? You may leave a comment or email george@hbsadvantage.com

Stimulus and Energy

As reported in Huffington Post Green

By T Boone Pickens

President Obama’s team is settling into their new offices and the new Congress is getting used to those new people talking about new approaches to America’s problems. A major issue they should all pay close attention to is the national security threat posed by Russia.

In the deepest part of this winter, Russia held most of Europe hostage to a natural gas fight it was having with Ukraine. This wasn’t the first time. In fact, this was the eighth time since the mid-90s that Russia has used natural gas supplies as a weapon to impose its will on its customers.

What is the U.S. national interest in this? Our interest is about $500 billion per year.

We import more than two-thirds of the oil we use every day. Look at where we are now. The recession is getting deeper and oil prices have dropped $100 per barrel since last summer. Even with all that, in December, 2008 we imported two-thirds of the oil we used; a total of 379.6 million barrels of oil which cost us of $19.3 billion. One month.

That’s at currently (and, I believe, temporarily) reduced prices. Even if oil stayed at these prices for a full twelve months, we would spend more than a quarter of a trillion dollars per year in 2009 and every year into the future.

If oil prices reach the price point that OPEC seeks — $75 per barrel — that annual bill will go up by an additional $100 billion over the next 12 months.

We won’t have to worry about what’s in the stimulus package. We won’t be able to afford any of it in five years.

About half of the oil we import comes from countries which we know don’t have our best interests at heart, or are from unstable areas of the world, or both. According to the Energy Information Agency, 51 percent of our oil is imported from the Middle East, Africa and Venezuela.

Russia, which used to send a few observers to meetings of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) recently sent 22 high-ranking officials to an OPEC meeting. Russia is going to be a full member of OPEC. And soon.

So, we will have Russia, which has more than a decade of practice using fuel as a weapon in Europe, teaching the other OPEC members how to run that same tactic against the United States.

The last time there was a major disruption in oil imports was in the early 1970s during the “oil embargo.” That was when OPEC wanted to change America’s foreign policy in the Middle East.

I remember the disorder that embargo caused. I was in the oil business at the time. But, here’s the important point to keep in mind: In 1970 we imported less than a quarter of our oil; about 24 percent.

Today, we import nearly 70 percent of our oil. Even a minor disruption in oil deliveries — in the Russian style — would be a huge jolt to our economy which is already on the rocks and would send oil prices through the roof.

We don’t have to be at the mercy of OPEC, with or without Russia as a member. We have the capacity to reduce our dependence on foreign oil by 50 percent overall which would allow us to reduce to zero the amount of oil we import from the Middle East, Africa and Venezuela.

In his inaugural address, President Obama called on us to utilize our wind and solar resources to generate electricity. No matter what your position on “clean coal,” it is obvious that a generation system which uses no fuel whatever is going to be cleaner than even the cleanest fossil-based generation method.

The U.S. wind corridor is a huge swath of the Great Plains which runs, two states wide, from northern Texas to the Canadian border.

A Department of Energy study in 2007 said that building out our wind capacity in that corridor could provide up to 20 percent of our power needs and, in addition to generating electricity would also generate 138,000 new jobs in the first year and up to 3.4 million jobs over a 10-year span.

Those numbers don’t take into account the additional energy and jobs which would be generated by building out our solar capacity in the corridor running east and west from western Texas to California.

But all that, plus building a 21st century transmission grid, will take time and every day which goes by without reducing our oil imports is another day which sends nearly $650 million dollars out of the country.

The fastest method to cut down on oil imports is to incentivize trucking companies — large and small — to replace their heavy trucks burning diesel fuel with trucks which will run on natural gas.

A battery will not move an 18-wheeler. That technology will come, but it doesn’t exist now. The only fuel which will replace imported diesel is domestic natural gas. Natural gas is in abundant supply in the United States.

We should subsidize truckers to replace 350,000 trucks with natural gas engines in the normal course of fleet renewal. There are about 6.5 million heavy trucks on the road. That’s about five percent of the U.S. fleet.

That one program would have the effect of reducing our petroleum imports by over five percent. As manufacturers ramp up to meet an increasing demand, the cost-per-truck will come down and a subsidy will no longer be necessary.

With lay-offs announced by companies in the business of building heavy-duty engines, like Caterpillar, building hundreds of thousands of engines using natural gas would save jobs which are on the chopping block or add jobs for those already laid-off.

Over the course of the next 10 years, getting 18-wheelers off diesel and on to natural gas would reduce our imports by 50 percent. That would be the 50 percent we now import from the Middle East, Africa and Venezuela.

OPEC would no longer be a threat and we would replace a intuitively dirty, expensive, imported fuel — diesel — with natural gas; a fuel which reduces carbon emissions by 30 percent and produces 93 percent fewer toxic emissions; which is cheaper (in fact, the United States has the cheapest natural gas in the world); and which is domestic (about 98 percent of our natural gas comes from North America).

Natural gas is not a permanent solution as a transportation fuel. It is the bridge to reduce our dependence on foreign oil by up to 50 percent while the technologies are developed to completely remove fossil fuels for transportation.

These are the basic tenets of the Pickens Plan. The Congress and the Obama administration can address the environment, the economy, and our national security by adopting these steps as part of its larger strategy.

The Economic Wisdom of a Green Recovery

by David Sassoon          As reported in Huffington Post Economy 

Welcome to a periodic interview series SolveClimate is inaugurating with this video called A New York Minute with Dan Greenwood: Why the Recession is a Good Time to Invest in Green Infrastructure.

Usually, you will find Professor Dan J.H. Greenwood teaching in a classroom at the Hofstra University School of Law. He’s spent a good part of his career understanding corporations and their role in politics, and his work sheds light on why global warming is not something that corporations will be able to solve without government regulation.

We enticed him on camera to explain to us a thing or two about the pending economic recovery package. With the feds set to print a trillion dollars of new currency and give it away, we were alarmed. After all, if you or I tried to do that, we’d be thrown in jail.

For the good professor, there’s no such thing as a dumb question, and so he answered our concerns. He also explained a good deal more: why the current recession is an especially good time to invest in green infrastructure projects; how the poor have been impoverished over recent decades (no, that’s not a redundancy); and why the jobs we create are the truest measure of an economy that works.

To view the feature, click on the link below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vS2tVyUSWg&eurl=http://solveclimate.com/blog/20090127/video-economic-wisdom-green-recovery&feature=player_embedded

Let us know your thoughts? You may leave a comment or email george@hbsadvantage.com

Some Things You Should Probably Know About Natural Gas

Josh Nelson

Editor, theseminal.com

Originally posted at The Seminal.

Natural gas does not get nearly as much attention as oil or coal. But the role this resource plays in our lives has been steadily increasing for decades. We must begin to address natural gas now, or we will leave future generations with a natural gas dependency reminiscent of our current dependence on foreign oil.

Here are some things you should probably know about natural gas.

Consumption of natural gas in the united states has remained relatively stable for the past 35 years.

But natural gas imports in the United States have more than quadrupled in the past 20 years.

And the price we pay for imported natural gas has more than tripled in the past 15 years.

This probably has something to do with the fact that production of Natural Gas in the United States peaked about 35 years ago, in 1973.

Recent enthusiasm for natural gas is due in large part to drastically increased shale gas production, particularly in the Barnett Shale. But the production process for shale gas, which includes fracturing the shale rock with water mixed with toxic metals and chemicals, is already polluting drinking water for hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Russia, Iran and Qatar have about 55% of the world’s known natural gas reserves. They are planning to create a cartel for natural gas, much like OPEC. Russia has already shown how far they are willing to go to manipulate prices. Natural gas proponents in the United States like to point to the fact that natural gas is, for the most part, not a fungible commodity. This is true because compressed natural gas is very difficult and expensive to transport, especially over long distances. But this is only true for compressed natural gas. The rapidly growing market for liquified natural gas, which can be transported relatively inexpensively, changes the equation quite a bit.

This is a dangerous path we are heading down. We have been increasing natural gas imports and expenditures at a healthy clip for the past several decades, while domestic production has struggled to remain flat. Industry points to new domestic production potential, but the potential costs include access to clean drinking water for millions of Americans in the surrounding areas. Meanwhile, a handful of countries control a majority of the world’s reserves, and are planning to organize a cartel to manipulate prices. Their ability to do so is likely to increase in the coming years, due to market realities (increasing fungibility).

While replacing coal-fired power plants and drastically reducing oil consumption remain the two key components of transitioning to a sustainable energy policy, those who are interested in long-term solutions must look beyond natural gas as well. Yes, natural gas will play some role as a “bridge fuel”. It is clear that we will continue to use it in power generation for years and years to come. And I’ll grudgingly admit, the percentage of vehicles running on natural gas will almost certainly go up before it goes down. But we should be very cautious and smart about how we produce our natural gas, how quickly we use our reserves, and how we can use them most effectively. Above all we must begin thinking about how we will prevent the global power dynamics behind the oil trade from being replicated with yet another finite fossil fuel. I’m sure even T. Boone Pickens would agree with that.

Low Demand Keeps Natural Gas Cheap

By BEN CASSELMAN

Frigid temperatures and winter storms have blanketed the country from New Orleans to Chicago this month, weather that usually leads to a spike in the price of the most popular fuel for home heating, natural gas.

But not this year.

Natural-gas prices remain in a slump because manufacturers, which are even bigger users of gas than chilly homeowners, have cut back their operations in response to the recession. And low demand means low prices.

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Associated Press

Despite a cold, stormy start to winter in much of the U.S., natural-gas prices have stayed relatively low as the recession hits industrial usage.

“It all boils down to the economy,” said Ray Deacon, an analyst for Pritchard Capital Partners in New York.

Despite an uptick this week, natural-gas futures have fallen 9% this month, to $5.910 per million British thermal units, and are down 16% from last year despite colder weather. Prices haven’t been this low in December since 2003.

Storage levels remain 3.4% higher than normal even after the frigid start to the season. According to federal data released Wednesday, the U.S. withdrew 147 billion cubic feet of gas from storage last week, about normal for this time of year, but less than would be expected after a bout of cold weather.

Boon for Consumers

Low prices are a rare piece of good news for consumers, who might get smaller bills this year for home heating and electricity.

But the price slump spells bad news for gas producers, who have been forced to slash spending on drilling, and for gas-producing states like Texas and Colorado, which had been shielded from the national economic slowdown by their strong energy industries.

The low prices come despite an unusually cold start to winter, which has seen rare snowstorms in New Orleans, Houston and Las Vegas, subzero temperatures in Chicago and a devastating ice storm in the Northeast.

Michael Schlacter, chief meteorologist for the forecasting service Weather 2000, said the weather so far this season has been the most extreme in at least eight years.

“Mother Nature’s doing all she can,” Mr. Schlacter said.

Manufacturing Downturn

But rising residential and commercial heating demand has run up against slumping industrial demand for natural gas, which is used to make everything from diapers to fertilizer.

“Industrial demand is going away in a big way,” said Abudi Zein, senior vice president at Genscape Inc., which monitors electricity generation and fuel supplies.

Forecasters expect the weather to warm up in at least parts of the country early in the new year, but industrial demand isn’t likely to recover for months because the recession has knocked down industries like auto manufacturing.

“We know industrial demand is going to be impacted in 2009 — it has to be,” said Dave Pursell, an analyst at energy-focused investment bank Tudor Pickering Holt & Co. in Houston. “Everything that goes into a car — steel, glass, plastic — is natural-gas intensive.”

Adding to the downward pressure on prices, natural-gas production has remained relatively high. Gas producers such as Chesapeake Energy Corp., Range Resources Corp. and Exco Resources Inc. have been slashing drilling budgets since autumn in response to falling prices. But it has taken months for those spending cuts to show up on the ground in the form of reduced drilling activity, and it will take months more for production to fall significantly.

Rebound Is Seen

Longer term, many analysts think prices are likely to rise. Tudor Pickering, for example, predicts gas will drop as low as $4.75 per million BTUs in the third quarter of 2009, but will rebound in 2010.

Subash Chandra, an analyst at Jefferies & Co., is predicting a faster recovery. Even though a lot of gas is in storage, he said, it can’t all be tapped right away, so the immediately available supply of gas is lower than many people think.

But after a year of ups and downs, no one can have much confidence in price predictions, he said. “Gas has thrown so many head-fakes in the past,” Mr. Chandra said. “Anybody who thinks they’ve had it figured out in December, even if they’re freezing their noses off, well, history tells a different story.”

Now is the Time for Renewable Energy Tax Credits

Written and posted by Representative Jerry McNerney

I spent more than 20 years of my professional career researching and developing renewable energy sources. I can say definitively that we haven’t yet begun to realize the benefits that new energy technology development can offer to this country.

Doing so will mean good jobs in the United States. It will also mean an increasingly diversified economy developing energy efficient and environmentally friendly technologies, producing products and ideas for the rest of the world.

Estimates are that launching down this path will mean the creation of hundreds of thousands of new, stable, clean energy jobs in our country — at all levels of the economic ladder.

In my former field, wind energy, 9,000 new jobs have been created in the past 17 months alone. Think about it: that’s engineers who decide where to locate new turbines, technicians who erect them, mechanics who maintain them, steelworkers who manufacture them and drivers who transport them from place to place.

And that’s just for wind energy. Don’t forget about solar, geothermal, tidal, biomass — and a whole host of other types of new, clean energy that may not have even been discovered yet.

That’s why it is so critically important that we continue a series of tax credits to help spur investment in all these new forms of energy. These investment and production tax credits are set to expire at the end of the year, along with more than 100,000 renewable energy sector jobs.

Each day that passes without legislative action means greater potential for job loss, decreased investment and ultimately less domestic production of renewable energy.

The pending expiration and the uncertainty surrounding the extension of the tax credits means that investors will soon walk away from clean energy projects. Due to the significant time between conception and implementation of renewable energy projects, financing for many projects is on hold pending extension of the renewable energy tax credits. What’s more, financing for projects currently under construction could also dry up in the coming weeks if it becomes clear that they cannot be completed before the end of the year.

Now, as we face a mounting energy crisis and an uncertain energy future, is not the time to play games with renewing these important tax credits. In fact, if we are serious about addressing the energy crisis we face here in America, I can think of no better investment than to support wind, solar, biomass, geothermal and other new energy forms that continue to become more affordable and available.

After all, renewable energy means not only economic security as we create good jobs while producing increasingly less expensive, clean, domestic power, but environmental and national security, as well.

 

I was proud to vote for legislation in the House last week that extends these valuable renewable energy tax credits. I encourage all of my colleagues to join me immediately so that, as a nation, we can truly become energy independent.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wind, Solar Investments In Jeopardy As Tax Credits Are Set To Expire

 As reported in Huffington Post

WASHINGTON — Congress is putting the short-term future of renewable energy companies in jeopardy even as the presidential candidates and most lawmakers hail windmills, solar panels and biofuels as long-term solutions to high gasoline prices and global warming.

Some $500 million in investment and production tax credits will expire Dec. 31 unless Congress renews them. Without that help, solar and wind power companies say they will reverse planned expansions and, in many cases, cut payrolls and capital investment.

Schott Solar has visions of quadrupling its operation in Albuquerque, N.M., to reach 1,500 jobs and $500 million in investment. But the investment tax credit, company spokesman Brian Lynch said, is what makes solar power cost-competitive. Without it, expansion plans must be reconsidered.

“We don’t want to build a giant factory that the market doesn’t need or want,” Lynch said.

The Solar Energy Industries Association says some 20 utility-scale solar power plants, many in California and together capable of producing power for a million homes, are at risk because of the uncertainty in Congress.

Proponents of wind power, a nascent industry that relies on skittish investors, are in a similar predicament. Greg Wetstone of the American Wind Energy Association says his group is predicting a loss of 76,000 jobs and $11.4 billion in investment if Congress allows its production tax credit to expire.

“Investors like to know what tax policies apply when they are putting millions of dollars down on a project. There’s a pretty clear history that these projects are less likely to go forward without a credit,” he said.

Congress let the credit expire in 2000, 2002 and 2004. In those three years, wind capacity installation dropped 93 percent, 73 percent and 77 percent, respectively, from the previous year.

Navigant Consulting, which advises on renewable energy technology, estimated that investments in wind and solar power in 2009 would amount to $26.6 billion with the credits; that would fall to $7 billion without them.

The credits are expected to total $334 million, according to congressional estimates.

“These companies are shutting down projects, firing people and it’s Congress’s fault,” said Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Investment tax credits, available to homeowners and businesses that invest in solar power equipment, and the production tax credit, based on kilowatt hours of energy produced by wind, geothermal, biomass and other renewables, are only two of dozens of temporary tax breaks that die out after a year or two if Congress does not revive them.

This year Congress is considering tax-extenders worth more than $50 billion over the next decade. The production tax credit would cost $7 billion and two solar investment credits would cost $2.7 billion over 10 years.

In addition to breaks for renewable energy and energy conservation, several dozen other tax breaks are targeted to businesses and individuals. They include people paying state and local sales taxes; parents with higher education tuition costs; and teachers with out-of-pocket expenses.

Almost all the provisions are popular. But Senate Republicans have blocked consideration of tax-extender plans by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont. GOP lawmakers are protesting efforts to offset the costs with other taxes or other items attached to the proposals. In the House, conservative Democrats promise to block any extension that adds to the deficit.

That’s nothing new.

In 2006, Congress did not come together on a tax-extender deal until December, forcing the Internal Revenue Service to delay processing returns claiming several of the tax breaks. In 2007 Congress never agreed on extenders and again waited until December, causing more IRS disruption, to settle another annual tax crisis, the alternative minimum tax.

That tax was, enacted 40 years ago, was supposed to keep a tiny number of very rich people from avoiding taxes. But it never was adjusted for inflation and now reaches into the pockets of 4 million people, mainly upper middle-income. Millions more are threatened every year until Congress steps in, usually at the last possible moment. The Baucus bill has provisions to keep those affected by the tax from growing to 25 million, at a cost of $61 billion over the next decade.

“A big part of the problem is uncertainty,” said Marie Lee, a tax analyst with the American Electronics Association. “Our companies are getting tired of this game.”

The biggest concern for high-tech companies and manufacturers is the research and development credit, which expired at the end of last year. Some 17,700 corporations claimed $6.6 billion in credits in 2005, according to a recent study by Ernst & Young LLP. About 70 percent of that went to pay wages of scientists and engineers.

The credit has been allowed to expire 13 times since it was adopted in 1981. One repercussion, said Monica McGuire, executive secretary of the R&D Credit Coalition, is that more companies are taking their research dollars overseas.

“It’s a global race for R&D dollars,” she said, and the odds are not good when at least 20 developed nations offer tax incentives and the United States currently has nothing.

Putting expiration dates on tax breaks is a useful budget gimmick for lawmakers seeking to mask the growing federal budget deficit.

Because they are set to expire at a certain date by law, they do not count as revenue losses after that date even though most people assume Congress eventually will act to extend them. The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 are the biggest extenders of all in this respect. Trillions of dollars will be added to the federal debt if Congress chooses to make them permanent after they are set to expire in 2010.

Our perspective:

How Congress addresses this issue will tell the American people how they really feel about our energy future. As shown, they have been toying with this issue for the last 5-6 years.  Congress must commit to lead the the energy evolution. Several states are now taking the lead but we need a unified message. Passing this bill will send the message loud and clear.

Let us know your thoughts? email george@hbsadvantage.com

A Guide To Geothermal Energy

As reported in Huffington Post Green

Maybe you’ve been hearing more about geothermal energy lately — it gets mentioned more in the mix with solar and wind these days, especially when politicians are listing off, quickly as possible, all the forms of renewable energies they can think of. In case you don’t know much about it, HuffPost Green has compiled this little FAQ.

What is geothermal energy?

Geothermal energy is a cheap and largely untapped natural energy resource. It’s an intriguing sustainable energy source due to its unlimited supply, 24-hour availability and ability to decrease reliance on fossil fuels.

The EPA defines geothermal for us:

Geothermal energy is produced from the constant temperature of the earth. This can be accessed by drilling into the earth and extracting that heat and turning it into usable energy. Geothermal energy is an enormous underused resource that provides clean renewable energy in virtually unlimited supplies.

Blogger Michelle Bennett of CleanTechnica praises geothermal energy’s non-stop energy supply:

The potential return could be as enormous as the forces of nature at work: clean, green, unlimited energy for the rest of this geologic era. Unlike solar and wind, geothermal generates a steady supply of energy 24 hours a day, everyday. Anything so abundant and predictable won’t go untapped for long.

What geothermal energy is, can essentially be described with the sentence; heat contained and produced by the heating of the earth in two different ways. The more powerful geothermal energy comes from deep within the earth, where the temperature is hot enough to melt the surrounding rocks. The second source of geothermal energy is as a results of the suns rays beating down on the land surface. We shall now look into these two main sources.

How Does It Work?

One of the methods to generate electricity from geothermal energy is by pumping hot water into sedimentary hotspots. The steam generated by this method is used to produce electricity. The condensed steam is again circulated into the permeable sedimentary stream of a hotspot.

Another method is by using volcanic magma. The temperature of partially molten magma is approximately 650 degree Celsius. This heat is used to boil water to generate electricity.

Some geothermal plants also use the hardened magma that is extremely hot. This system uses hot dry rock. Pipes are looped through these hot dry rocks through which water is circulated. The heat of the rocks converts the water into steam prior to transferring the heat to a steam generator.

How Much Energy Could Be Generated?

Google will invest $10 million to the development of enhanced geothermal systems (EGS). According to Treehugger, it takes just 2% of the heat present beneath North American soil to fulfill the United States’ energy needs. Last week, scientists asserted that just 1% of Australia’s geothermal energy potential is enough to power the nation for 26,000 years. This change in Australia’s energy source will help to drastically reduce worldwide carbon emissions.

Currently Australia generates about 77% of its electricity from coal and is the world’s largest per-capita carbon emitter, with individual emissions being five times those of China.

Where Is It Currently In Use?

Geothermal energy is currently used in homes throughout Europe and is most popular in Iceland, Sweden, Norway and increasingly in the United Kingdom. In June, Germany instituted a tariff to build up its geothermal electricity use. By 2015, the German government hopes to run hundreds of geothermal power plants.

An increasing amount of organizations are utilizing geothermal energy such as the Oregon Institute of Technology, which is the first university to be fully sustained by geothermal power.

But if you’re a politician and want a chance to list off as many renewable energy types as possible, check out the new visitor center at the Queens Botanical Garden: \

It’s considered the greenest public building in New York City due to its advanced green construction and energy-saving technology. The NRDC hails the building as the “model of efficiency.”

It gets 17% of its energy from rooftop solar panels, it heats its water using geothermal power and has an 8,000 square foot green roof that is performing beyond expectations. According to Jennifer Souder, the Garden’s Director of Capital Projects, preliminary tests from last summer measured the building’s green roof temperature at 82 degrees, while nearby white and black tar roofs were cooking at 115 and 170 degrees respectively. Expect significant energy savings and a reduction in the “urban heat island” effect to result from this facility.

Our Perspective:

As I have previously stated, there is no silver bullet solution. In order to make strides in achieving energy independence we must bring together all the possibilities that show promise and makes sense.

Bottom line, in order to build momentum, incentives must be offered to produce a ROI that makes sense. As advances are made in green solutions, prices will fall and these incentives will disappear. 

We have backed ourselves into a corner. We ignored all the warning signs over the last 30 to 40 years. Nobody thinks twice about where the energy is coming from when they walk into a room and turn on a switch, or they walk over to the thermostat and turn it down to get the room nice and cool. Energy was always there. Problem being, with the increasing demand for energy, the utilities will not be able to handle this increase in demand in the next 8 to 10 years.

What seemed loke a good idea 30 years ago, alternative energy is now becoming a needed solution to help us meet this increased demand.

To learn more about alternative energy solutions and opportunities in NJ and PA email george@hbsadvantage.com