======================================================================
EERE NETWORK NEWS -- July 30, 2003
A weekly newsletter from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE)
Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE).
<http://www.eere.energy.gov/>
======================================================================
Featuring:
*News and Events
University of Missouri-Rolla Wins American Solar Challenge
Massive New Wind Power Plants Planned for Texas and Wyoming
Ten Northeast States to Cooperate to Lower Carbon Emissions
Research Advances Show Promise for Solid-State Lighting
AstroPower Accounting Crisis Leads to Delisting from NASDAQ
*Energy Connections
EIA Maps Out U.S. Household Energy Use by Region
*About this Newsletter
----------------------------------------------------------------------
NEWS AND EVENTS
----------------------------------------------------------------------
University of Missouri-Rolla Wins American Solar Challenge
The University of Missouri-Rolla took first place last week in the
American Solar Challenge, the 2,300-mile solar car race from Chicago
to Los Angeles. Missouri-Rolla took the lead on the fourth day and
never let it go, averaging nearly 43.3 miles per hour overall and
beating the record time from the 2001 race by more than four hours.
The University of Minnesota came in second, nearly five hours behind
Missouri-Rolla, while the University of Waterloo took third place. The
race is sponsored by DOE, DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory,
BP Solar, and EDS. See the July 23rd press release from DOE at:
<http://www.energy.gov/engine/content.do?BT_CODE=PR_PRESSRELEASES>.
See also the American Solar Challenge Web site:
<http://www.americansolarchallenge.org/>
Meanwhile, the Houston Solar Car Team won the Dell-Winston Solar
Challenge last week. The high-school team from Houston, Mississippi,
logged 689.2 miles on the road (as opposed to transporting the vehicle
by trailer), hit a top speed of 64 miles per hour, and averaged
23.1 miles per hour along the 1,500-mile course. Rainy weather toward
the end of the race slowed the average speed of the vehicles. This
year marked the tenth anniversary of the solar car race for high-
school students. See the July 24th press release from Dell Inc. at:
<http://www.dell.com/us/en/gen/corporate/press/pressoffice_news.htm>.
See also the Dell-Winston Solar Challenge Web site at:
<http://winstonsolar.org/race/>.
Massive New Wind Power Plants Planned for Texas and Wyoming
Two wind power plants totaling more than 300 megawatts in capacity
will be built in Texas and Wyoming by year-end, and those are just
two of eight wind projects planned for five states -- yielding
636 megawatts of wind power capacity -- that were announced in the
past two weeks.
In Texas, Shell WindEnergy Inc. and Padoma Wind Power are building a
160-megawatt wind power plant near the town of Brazos in Scurry and
Borden counties, about 90 miles southeast of Lubbock. Cielo Wind
Power, LLC and Orion Energy LLC will develop the wind plant, and Green
Mountain Energy Company and TXU Energy have agreed to buy all the
power generated by the facility. Called the Green Mountain Wind Farm
at Brazos, the plant will consist of 160 Mitsubishi wind turbines and
is expected to be operating by year-end. See the press releases from
Green Mountain Energy Company and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd.
at: <http://www.greenmountain.com/about/press_events/2003_07_23.jsp>
and <http://www.mhi.co.jp/enews/e_0954.html>.
A 37.5-megawatt wind power project is also under construction south of
Sweetwater, Texas, about 40 miles west of Abilene. GE Wind Energy is
supplying 25 of its 1.5-megawatt wind turbines for the Sweetwater Wind
Project, considered Phase I of an eventual 400-megawatt wind power
project. DKR Development LLC is building the wind plant and TXU Energy
will buy all the power that it produces. See the July 22nd press
releases from TXU Energy and GE Wind Energy at:
<http://www.txucorp.com/media/newsrel/detail.asp?prid=730> and
<http://www.gepower.com/dhtml/wind/en_us/newsroom/pr.jsp>.
In Wyoming, FPL Energy, LLC is preparing to build, own, and operate a
144-megawatt wind power facility in Uinta County, about 10 miles
northeast of Evanston, near the southwest corner of the state. Orion
Energy developed the project, which is the largest yet in Wyoming.
FPL Energy will start construction later this year and complete it by
the end of this year. The U.S. subsidiary of Denmark's Vestas Wind
Systems A/S is supplying 80 1.8-megawatt wind turbines for the
project. See the FPL Energy and Vestas press releases at:
<http://www.fplenergy.com/news/2003/contents/03081.shtml> and
<http://www.vestas.dk/nyheder/presse/2003/UK/press20030723_UK.html>.
New projects throughout the rest of the country include another FPL
Energy project to build a 30-megawatt wind plant near Meyersdale in
southwestern Pennsylvania. The Meyersdale Wind Energy Center will
employ 20 1.5-megawatt wind turbines and will be complete by year-end.
In Illinois, Spanish wind developer Gamesa Energia is building its
first U.S. plant, a 50.4-megawatt project. The company's U.S.
subsidiary, Mendota Hills, LLC, is building the facility using 63 of
Gamesa's 800-kilowatt wind turbines. In Wisconsin, We Energies has
signed 20-year power purchase agreements with the developers of three
wind projects totaling 214 megawatts in capacity. Navitas Energy will
develop two 80-megawatt wind projects -- the Blue Sky Wind Farm and
the Green Field Wind Farm -- both in eastern Wisconsin, and Midwest
Wind Energy, LLC will develop the 54-megawatt Butler Ridge wind farm
in southeastern Wisconsin. See the press releases from FPL Energy,
Gamesa, and We Energies at:
<http://www.fplenergy.com/news/2003/contents/03079.shtml>,
<http://www.gamesa.es/ingles/noticias/cont_noticias.jsp?cod_nucleo=1>,
and <http://www.we-energies.com/news_20030728.htm>.
Ten Northeast States to Cooperate to Lower Carbon Emissions
New York Governor George Pataki announced last week that nine other
northeast states have agreed to join New York in a regional strategy
to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. The governors of
Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Delaware, Maine, New Jersey,
Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island have sent letters
expressing their interest in working with New York to develop a cap-
and-trade program for carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.
Maryland has indicated that they may participate in the discussions at
a later date. See the Governor's press release at:
<http://www.state.ny.us/governor/press/year03/july24_03.htm>.
Governor Pataki formed a Greenhouse Gas Task Force in June 2001 and
had an independent facilitator, the Center for Clean Air Policy
(CCAP), work with the task force to prepare a report examining ways to
reduce New York's greenhouse gas emissions. That report, provided to
the governor in April 2003, included the recommendation to take a
regional approach to reducing greenhouse gases -- a recommendation
that the governor responded to by writing to the ten governors. Other
recommendations included setting an aggressive greenhouse gas
emissions target for New York, establishing a variety of energy
efficiency programs, requiring that the state draw on renewable energy
for a percentage of its electricity use, and establishing a greenhouse
gas emission standard for passenger vehicles. See the New York
Greenhouse Gas Task Force page on the CCAP Web site at:
<http://www.ccap.org/NYGHG.htm>.
New York State's most recent action to encourage clean energy use was
the award of $14.5 million on July 18th to support 36 distributed
generation and combined heat and power projects throughout the state.
The projects will enable commercial, agricultural, and industrial
energy users to generate their own electricity. The projects will also
use waste heat from the electric generation equipment for productive
purposes, such as space or water heating. See the governor's press
release at:
<http://www.state.ny.us/governor/press/year03/july18_3_03.htm>.
Research Advances Show Promise for Solid-State Lighting
Separate research advances at DOE's Sandia National Laboratories and
at GE Global Research are encouraging for two different approaches to
making solid-state lights. Lights made from solid-state materials,
including light-emitting diodes (LEDs), could potentially operate at
much higher efficiency than incandescent or fluorescent lights,
providing a new way to save energy. Already, LED traffic lights are
saving energy for cities throughout the United States, but the true
"holy grail" for solid-state lighting is a bright white light that can
be used to illuminate homes and businesses.
Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories are using an innovative
approach to solid-state lighting, building their lights from "quantum
dots" -- nanometer-sized dots of light-emitting material. The
microscopic phosphors emit light without scattering it, so they are an
efficient light source, and can be "tuned" to emit the right
frequencies of light by changing their size and their surface
chemistry. The trick, though, is encapsulating the dots without
letting them clump together. Sandia solved that problem by chemically
attaching the dots along the long-chain molecule that forms the
encapsulating plastic. In the center of the plastic is an LED that
emits near-ultraviolet light; the surrounding quantum dots absorb that
light and emit white light. The lights produced by the Sandia team
convert 60 percent the energy supplied to them into light. See the
July 14th press release from Sandia National Laboratories at:
<http://www.sandia.gov/news-center/news-releases/index.html>.
Researchers at General Electric's research organization, GE Global
Research, are taking a totally different approach to solid-state
lighting, building their lights from organic LEDs, or OLEDs. OLEDs can
be produced from thin sheets of plastic material that could be
produced using inexpensive roll-to-roll technology, much like the
machines used to print newspapers. The result would be a revolutionary
paper-thin light that could be applied to walls or ceilings like
wallpaper. The problem tackled by GE researchers was the tendency for
one short circuit to cause an entire sheet to stop emitting light. To
make a more "fault tolerant" OLED, the researchers found a way to
break up the surface of the sheet into smaller sections, so that a
failure in one part of the device would not cause the whole sheet to
go black. See the July 8th press release on the GE Web site at:
<http://www.ge.com/en/company/news/archiveExpand.htm>.
Meanwhile, a number of companies continue to develop traditional LEDs
for use as lighting sources. For instance, Toshiba America Electronic
Components, Inc. (TAEC) has added bluish green and reddish purple LEDs
to its line of high-luminosity LEDs. And Lumileds Lighting, another
maker of high-luminosity LEDs, has seen its products used in
everything from car headlights to stage lighting. The company plans to
produce a "warm" white light, mimicking the color of an incandescent
bulb, beginning in August. See the press releases from TAEC and
Lumileds at: <http://www.toshiba.com/taec/press/to-315.shtml> and
<http://www.lumileds.com/newsandevents/press.htm>.
AstroPower Accounting Crisis Leads to Delisting from NASDAQ
AstroPower, Inc. -- a U.S. solar electric manufacturer and a leading
provider of solar electric systems for residences -- was removed from
the NASDAQ market listings on Friday after the company failed to meet
an extended deadline to file its annual report for 2002 and its first-
quarter report for 2003. In an announcement, the company cited its
"ongoing review of revenue recognition matters" and noted that the
delisting meant that the stock can no longer be traded on the OTC
Bulletin Board, a quotation service for over-the-counter securities.
The company intends to file its reports as soon as possible, but notes
that "there can be no assurance that the filing of those reports will
result in the relisting of the common stock on the NASDAQ National
Market or the common stock to becoming eligible to trade on the OTC
Bulletin Board." The company notes that the delisting may have an
adverse effect on AstroPower's business and operations as well as the
company's stock price. See the AstroPower announcement at:
<http://www.astropower.com/financial_highlights.htm>.
AstroPower has been facing a management crisis since late May, when
both the president and chief executive officer and the chief financial
officer resigned their posts, and the vice-president of sales and
marketing left the company. On Friday, the company engaged Bridge
Associates LLC, a nationally known restructuring and turnaround
management firm, to take charge of the day-to-day operations of
AstroPower and its subsidiaries and to stabilize the company's
financial position. See the AstroPower announcements at:
<http://www.astropower.com/manchng.html> and
<http://www.astropower.com/press_releases.htm>.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
ENERGY CONNECTIONS
----------------------------------------------------------------------
EIA Maps Out U.S. Household Energy Use by Region
DOE's Energy Information Administration (EIA) has prepared a set of
"residential energy maps" for nine regions of the United States. The
maps are divided based on U.S. census divisions, and each map
graphically displays the average annual household use of natural gas,
fuel oil, electricity, and gasoline in each state. In addition, the
maps indicate the amount of heating and cooling needed in each state
and the average precipitation. As a bonus, the maps also show the
location of coalitions participating in DOE's Clean Cities Program.
EIA completed the new series of maps on July 10th. See the residential
energy maps on the EIA Web site at:
<http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/reps/recmap/rec_contents.html>.
For more information about DOE's Clean Cities Program, see the Web
site at: <http://www.ccities.doe.gov/>.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER
----------------------------------------------------------------------
You can subscribe to this newsletter using the online form at:
<http://www.eere.energy.gov/news/about.cfm>.
This Web page also allows you to update your email address
or unsubscribe to this newsletter.
The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE)
home page is located at: <http://www.eere.energy.gov/>.
If you have questions or comments about this
newsletter, please contact the editor, Kevin Eber, at
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Free shipping on all inkjet cartridge & refill kit orders to US & Canada. Low
prices up to 80% off. We have your brand: HP, Epson, Lexmark & more.
http://www.c1tracking.com/l.asp?cid=5510
http://us.click.yahoo.com/GHXcIA/n.WGAA/ySSFAA/FGYolB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->
Biofuel at Journey to Forever:
http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html
Biofuels list archives:
http://archive.nnytech.net/
Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address.
To unsubscribe, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
