These days, President George W Bush’s home state also claims the world’s largest wind farm, a symbol of booming US interest in renewable energy that has Americans playing catch-up with Europe.
According to monstersandcritics.com, high oil prices and growing public concern about global warming have helped fuel a surge of private investment in clean technology. And Americans see clean tech’s potential for jobs, though the companies creating them are often based in Europe or Asia.
’The growth is really here in our area,’ said Jeffrey Leonard, chief executive of Global Environment Fund, a Washington-area investment firm. ’The same thing that happened in Europe and Japan with wind and solar is happening in the US.’
’Off of a low base--because we’d fallen behind--the US is growing very rapidly,’ he told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
Venture capitalists pumped 1.14 billion dollars into North American clean-tech projects in the third quarter of 2007, double the previous quarter’s amount, according to Cleantech Network, a US firm that tracks the industry. By contrast, Europe garnered 472 million dollars.
Former US vice president Al Gore, fresh from sharing the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, is joining a top California venture capital firm that channels investments to fight global warming.
Venture capital tells only part of the story for Europe, where governments have promoted clean energy for years with regulation, subsidies and the Kyoto Protocol’s binding cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions.
In the US Senate, the 1997 UN treaty was overwhelmingly opposed by Republicans and Democrats. Former oil industry executive Bush later rejected it as bad for the US economy when he took office in 2001, infuriating Europeans.
Now, a growing number of inventors, investors and local officials see fighting climate change in the US as good for the economy, a market waiting to be tapped.
Measured by venture capital, the small-company funding that is often seen as a gauge of innovation, the US easily outpaces Europe. But established players are also pumping dollars into the United States, smelling the opportunities in clean power.
Building on the success of wind energy in Europe, four wind turbine makers opened new US manufacturing and assembly plants in 2006, including some in the northeastern US ’rust belt’ where smokestack industries once ruled.
Just 70 kilometers northwest of Bush’s White House, British Petroleum is expanding the largest solar-cell plant in North America, investing 97 million dollars and creating some 70 new jobs in Frederick, Maryland.
Clearly, renewable energy has huge possibilities in the US. A study found that just North Dakota, a northern state of 640,000 people twice the size of Portugal, has vastly more wind generating potential than Germany, the world leader in wind power.
Yet sun and wind power still cost about two to three times as much as conventional sources like nuclear or fossil fuels.
Also, Bush has focused attention and federal research dollars on corn-based ethanol and biofuels so Americans can keep their car and truck engines running while depending less on foreign oil.
It has largely been up to US states to forge ahead with incentives and ambitious goals to promote clean power, a complicated task mixing the interests of politicians, utility companies and a public already faced with rising electricity and petrol prices.
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bush’s fellow Republican, wants the economic powerhouse state to have 1 million solar roofs by 2018 to help ’turn back the clock on pollution.’
But despite the boom-and-bust history of clean technology in the United States since the 1970s, insiders believe the new upswing can only get better as US businesses go greener.

Gene Coan does not worry about the price of gasoline, nor is he concerned with his gas and electric bill. Gene powers his home and car with solar photovoltaics [PV] and also uses solar hot water heating. With his Zenn electric-vehicle [EV] Gene rides on sunlight, evworld.com reported.
Gene is following his beliefs. He is a senior advisor to the executive director of the Sierra Club. From PV to EV, Gene is living zero-emissions from energy source to wheels.
The Zenn is a stylish three-door hatchback, which makes it handy for hauling stuff from stores. It is fully enclosed. It is a light electric vehicle with a curb weight of only 1,200 pounds because of its aluminum frame and ABS plastic body panels. It has a range of 35 miles and a legal speed limit of 25 miles per hour.
There are over 25,000 battery-electric vehicles on the road in California. Most are the $9,000 to $12,000 light electric vehicles [LEV] such as Gene’s Zenn. These electric vehicles are often referred to as neighborhood electric vehicles [NEV]. LEVs are popular in university towns, such as Palo Alto, California, where Gene lives.
There are over 100 in use at nearby Stanford University. Many silently zip around the campus carrying the people, goods, and equipment necessary to keep the university running.
New Year’s resolutions are easy to make, but often not kept, especially when the price tag is $45,000. In January 2002, Michael Mora convinced his wife that they should buy a Toyota (TM) RAV4 electric vehicle for $45,000. Michael had to practically beg the dealer to sell his last one.
Today, Michael could sell his RAV4 as a used-vehicle for $20,000 more than he paid for it. After a showdown with the California Air Resources Board, all major auto makers including Toyota stopped selling their EVs. Freeway speed EVs are in hot demand. Now Michael could pocket a handsome twenty grand after driving the vehicle for almost six years.
Michael is not selling. He powers his RAV4 with the solar power installed on his roof. The daily cost to drive the vehicle is zero. Because the RAV4 has NiMH batteries, he can achieve up to 100 mile range. Freeway speeds are a piece of cake.Hundreds of individuals are lining-up to order freeway-speed electric vehicles from Tesla, Miles Motors, AC Propulsion, and others. Price tags of up to $100,000 do not faze these electric vehicle enthusiasts.
Electric vehicles are equally popular with individuals and with fleets. The US Marine Corps is vitally concerned about the nation’s energy security. At Camp Pendleton, in Oceanside, California, the Marines use 320 LEVs for routine maintenance, goods hauling, and transportation on the vast base.
Over 40 million electric vehicles are in use globally, often silently whisking by without attracting our attention. Increasingly those driving will experience the added joy of riding on sunlight.

Tarapur Nuclear Power Plant, India

Is the power ministry’s target of adding 78,577 MW of generation capacity during the 11th fiver-year plan (2007-12) realistic? The issue is being hotly discussed even as energy security becomes a key concern for the country.
R.V. Shahi, former secretary at the ministry of power and currently chairman of Energy Infratech, said the target for the current plan, though difficult, is achievable.
Kuljit Singh of consultancy firm Ernst and Young (E&Y) is, however, not so optimistic, in.news.yahoo.com reported.
’Going by the historical performance of various states and the private sector in generation capacity addition, it is unlikely that all their projects will be commissioned on schedule,’ said the E&Y consultant.
The magnitude of the task can be gauged from the fact that India was able to add just 56,618 MW generation capacity in the three previous five-year plans between 1992-93 and 2006-07.
The power ministry had envisaged generation capacity addition of 41,110 MW for the previous five-year, out of which only 19,015 MW could be implemented.
For the 11th plan, the ministry set a target of 67,000 MW but subsequently added another 11,000 MW of capacity addition, which was not achieved in the 10th five-year plan.
’The generation capacity envisaged for the 11th Plan period can be achieved if an out-of-the box approach is adopted,’ Shahi told IANS.
’There is not much to worry, at least for now, about projects of about 50,000 MW capacity where implementation has begun. However, there are thermal projects with envisaged 25,000 MW capacity addition, where orders for equipment supply have not yet been placed by developers,’ he said.
’This is where the power ministry’s intervention is required,’ Shahi added.
’If developers of these projects can be persuaded to expedite and complete the process of placing orders for equipment supply by March, 2008, it will be a big boost to the capacity addition program.’
Apart from this, the power ministry should also put in a mechanism to hold follow-up meetings to monitor the capacity expansion program of Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (BHEL) expansion program, said Shahi.
BHEL is spending Rs.32 billion to expand its manufacturing capacity to 15,000 MW a year by 2011-12 from the existing 6,000 MW a year.
BHEL has said that it should be able to have enhanced manufacturing capacity of 10,000 MW available by end 2007.
’However, supply of the balance-of-the-plant package equipment like ash handling, coal handling and cooling water systems, remains a critical area’, Shahi said.
’It is because BHEL does not have in-house manufacturing facility for these equipment and depends on outside vendors for their sourcing,’ he explained.
BHEL will have to accordingly expand its vendor base if it is to meet its commitments to deliver equipment on schedule.
’BHEL also needs to increase the number of its commissioning personnel,’ Shahi said.
Singh of E&Y is also sceptical of the sector’s performance in executing hydropower projects on time.
’Around 14,000 MW of hydro capacity is targeted in the current plan. But all these projects are unlikely to be commissioned,’ he maintained.
’It is because most of the hydropower projects encounter geological ’surprises’. There are also problems of rehabilitating people displaced due to their implementation. That leads to undue delay in completion of these projects,’ he added.
Jawant Srinivas Kawale, joint secretary at the power ministry, said that hydropower projects in India face problems of geological ’surprises’ mainly because they follow uniform specification in plant design.
’These ’surprises’ can be avoided to a large extent if developers design their plants keeping in mind local geological complexities,’ Kawale said.
He admitted that land acquisition for hydropower projects remained a sensitive issue, often leading to delays.

Hydrogen will be a clean, renewable energy source of the future, University of Massachusetts scientists said, if only researchers can map the route the molecule’s protons travel.
With this challenge in mind, and charged with the task of building a better hydrogen fuel cell, UMass launched a new Fueling the Future Chemical Bonding Center, amherstbulletin.com.
UMass is now host to one of three renewable energy centers in the country funded by the National Science Foundation’s chemistry program.
“Energy is the most important challenge facing us today,“ said Sankaran “Thai“ Thayumanavan, a UMass associate professor of chemistry and principal investigator for the new center.
“We can’t rely on fossil fuels, it has to be a renewable source of energy. That’s important to the environment, economics, this country and the world, also homeland security,“ Thayumanavan said during a morning press conference in the UMass Campus Center. “We have to be self reliant in energy.“
The benefit of hydrogen as a fuel is twofold: It’s a renewable source of energy that gives off water as a by-product of energy production. Meanwhile, the world’s limited supply of fossil fuels is dwindling and the fuels release the pollutant carbon dioxide.
Hydrogen fuel cells operate a bit like batteries, with positive and negative charges coursing through the cell.
While hydrogen fuel cells are already used in some transportation applications, scientists have yet to optimize the necessary, but mysterious and rapid, movement of hydrogen’s protons from one side of a cell to the other during electricity generation.
The power yield could be greater, researchers said.
“We’ve all seen that cartoon in our science textbooks that shows this process, the proton starts here and ends up over there, but we don’t know how this process happens,“ said Katharine Covert, program director of chemistry coLlaboratives and special projects for NSF.
“If proton transportation is understood, then we can make everything better,“ she said.
Fuel cells harvest the electricity released when the chemical bonds of a molecule breaks. When the bonds break, negatively charged electrons are stripped from the gas, in this case hydrogen.
These electrons are attracted to the positive end of the cell, but due to the cell’s design, are forced to travel to the attractive side through an external circuit, which provides the electricity that powers a device.
While the electrons are moving through a circuit, the protons are traveling to the positive side of the cell through a special membrane that divides the cell and is only permeable by protons. When the protons and electrons finally meet up, they combine with oxygen and form water.
“We are working on a device that will make this harvest of energy in the most efficient way possible--that’s what this project is all about,“ said Thayumanavan, who is among a number of UMass professors already working to develop better renewable energy fuel cells.
The UMass Fueling the Future Chemical Bonding Center proposal beat out 10 other universities seeking the $1.5 million phase one grant from the foundation.
If in three years UMass can prove it is making advances in the realm of hydrogen fuel cells, the university will be eligible for two $15 million allotments over 10 years.
The new center will operate under the umbrella of the already established Massachusetts Center for Renewable Energy and Science Technology.