Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Director Tommy P. Beaudrea announced on Thursday that an environmental assessment found that there would be "no significant environmental or socioeconomic impacts from wind energy development" on the Outer Continental Shelf off the Mid-Atlantic Coast states of Maryland, Virginia, New Jersey and Delaware.

“Offshore wind holds incredible potential for our country, and we’re moving full-steam ahead to accelerate the siting, leasing and construction of new projects,” Secretary Salazar said.

The greatest offshore wind energy potential in the U.S. lies off the Atlantic Coast, which holds 1,000 gigawatts of electricity, or one quarter of national demand, according to a 2009 Interior Department report.

“Today’s announcement opens up the ‘sweet spots’ off the mid-Atlantic coast for development of our nation's remarkable offshore wind resource,” said Deputy Secretary of the Interior David J. Hayes.

Facing the expiration of the wind energy Production Tax Credit at the end of 2012, a policy tool that has been crucial for commercial-scale wind energy development in the U.S., the wind industry welcomed Thursday's announcement with open arms.

Calling the announcement a "significant milestone," Denise Bode, CEO of the American Wind Energy Association, said developing offshore wind energy "will help us capture a new American manufacturing opportunity and create thousands of new American jobs."

Transmission infrastructure in the Mid-Atlantic could ultimately be provided by the Google-backed Atlantic Wind Connection, an undersea transmission cable stretching from northern New Jersey to southern Virginia. First announced in 2010, the transmission project is currently being reviewed by the Interior Department.

Photo credit: Some rights reserved by Vattenfall

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Two years ago, I tweeted that I was waiting for the day that our environmental heroes are honored during the little shout-out portion of the State of the Union. Well, if the list of Mrs. Obama's guests released by the White House before Tuesday's State of the Union are any indicator, that day may be today. Of the 21 named guests, 5 are directly involved in the clean energy industry. And while the guests may not consider themselves heroes — more than anything they will help President Obama tell a story and highlight some of the major themes of the speech — they are the closest we've come to having environmental heroes recognized in a State of the Union in a long time. Those 5 named guests are:

Alicia Boler-Davis, plant manager, General Motors Orion Assembly Detroit. Responsible for overseeing the production of the first new small car program from General Motors to be manufactured in the United States.

Jackie Bray, process operator at the Siemens Charlotte Energy Hub King's Mountain, N.C. A single mother who got laid off and then attended community college to qualify for her present job.

Mayor Julian Castro, San Antonio, Texas. Mayor Castro (has) announced that CPS Energy, a municipally owned utility, has entered negotiations to bring at least 800 jobs and $100 million in capital investment to San Antonio. This is expected to be one of the nation's largest solar projects resulting in 400 megawatts of zero-emissions solar energy.

Dr. Hiroyuki Fujita, founder, president and CEO of Quality Electrodynamics Cleveland, Ohio. Fujita is creating high tech, advanced manufacturing jobs in the healthcare and energy sectors in the United States.

Bryan Ritterby, lab technician, Holland, Mich. A lab technician for Energetx Composites conducting material tests in the company's laboratory verifying materials to be used in wind turbine blades, as well as working on blade validation tests for all of the community scale wind blades Energetx is manufacturing.

On twitter? Use the #ecoSOTU hashtag to follow and participate in the energy and environment discussion about the State of the Union.

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In his keynote keynote address at the opening ceremony of the fifth annual World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi, United Nations Secretary-General Ban-ki Moon announced the plan for his initiative that aims to bring clean energy to all parts of the world, and in particular, to developing societies in need of any energy at all.

"It is not acceptable that three billion people have to rely on wood, coal, charcoal or animal waste for cooking and heating," Secretary-General Ban said, citing a statistic that 1 in 5 people do not have access to energy required for basic human needs.

In December 2010, the UN General Assembly declared 2012 the International year of Sustainable Energy for All, officially recognizing that access to modern affordable energy services in developing countries is essential for sustainable development and achievement of the internationally agreed upon development goals including the Millennium Development Goals.

“Across the world we see momentum building for concrete action that reduces energy poverty, catalyzes sustainable economic growth, and mitigates the risks of climate change," Ban told the packed hall at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Center. "Achieving sustainable energy for all is both feasible and necessary."

The plan has three targets:  universal access to modern energy services; doubling the rate of improvement in energy efficiency; and doubling the percentage of renewable energy capacity currently in the global mix.

Co-chair of the Secretary General's High-Level Group on Sustainable Energy for All, Kandeh Yumkella, emphasized that this initiative will emphasize business models to drive investment.

"We need business models, not charity," co-chair Yumkella said. "We want real leverage, real cash and real change."

Regional rollouts of The International Year of Sustainable Energy for All will begin in New Delhi, India and will continue, region by region, through mid-April. Those meetings will produce a report for the UN General Assembly in September and ultimately create the underpinnings for an action agenda to come out of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro in December.

Disclosure: Tim Hurst's travel expenses for the 2012 WFES were covered by summit host, Masdar.
Photo: UN Photo/Evan Schneider

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In front of a packed house of dignitaries, delegates and energy industry leaders assembled for the 2012 World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Korean Prime Minister Kim Hwang-sik each independently reaffirmed their country's commitment to nuclear power as an essential part of a low carbon future. Speaking at the opening ceremony of the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi on Monday morning, the two leaders outlined their country's clean energy and energy efficiency accomplishments over the last several years, and outlined the framework for transitioning to a low carbon energy economy in the years to come.

"We will gradually change the current energy mix dominated by coal," Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said at the opening session of the 2012 World Future Energy Summit, by raising the output of "natural gas, renewable energy and nuclear energy," referring to nuclear as "safe, reliable and technologically mature."

Premier Wen outlined a long list of Chinese accomplishments in renewable energy and energy efficiency, capping them off by reporting that China now gets 11% of its electricity from renewable energy.

But Premier Wen underscored that the transition to clean energy would not be sudden. "Fossil fuels will continue for a long time," Wen told conference attendees. "So we need to follow a low-carbon approach to carbon-intense technologies," Wen said.

Premier Wen was not alone in committing to nuclear energy in the long term. In the second keynote address at the opening session of the 2012 WFES, Korean Prime Minister Kim Hwang-sik told conferees that "To accelerate the worldwide spread of renewable energy and for it to replace fossil fuels we must promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy."

The message from Prime Minister Kim was very clear: climate change is a serious issue that poses a threat to people all over the planet. "Humanity faces a serious challenge with global climate change," Kim said.

And if you take Prime Minister Kim's words at face value, his government is backing up their clean energy talk with clean energy action. According to Kim, the "green government has invested 2% of GDP [gross domestic product] in renewable energy and clean technologies and has set a goal to be the worlds fifth largest clean energy economy."

Wrapping up the morning's powerhouse session of Asian leaders, UN Secretary-General Ban-ki Moon praised the promise of "sustainable energy," demanding that "energy poverty must end."

"It is not acceptable that 3 billion people have to rely on wood, coal and charcoal and animal waste for cooking and heating," said the Secretary General.

Note: Tim Hurst's travel expenses to the 2012 World Future Energy Summit were covered by Masdar.
Photos: 1. @NouraAlamimi via Twitter; 2.  China's Daya Bay Nuclear Power Plant via Wikimedia Commons

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With environmental-cartoon topics ranging from Michelle Bachmann to Tim DeChristopher, Breastfeeding to Big Coal, it was an interesting year in environmental cartoons.

Follow this link and spend a few minutes looking over what were my eleven most-viewed cartoons of 2011.

Happy New Year!
Joe Mohr (aka "Mean Joe green")

Joe's cartoon archive, twitter ramblings and StumbleUpon page...

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Earth’s natural resources grow increasingly more limited every day, but humanity’s consumption guarantees an abundance of one unlikely  “resource.” A typical American throws out about four pounds of trash per day, or more than 240 million tons every year. Most of that garbage winds up in landfills and releases methane as it decomposes. But what if that gas could be harnessed as a clean energy source for vehicles?

energyNOW! correspondent Peter Standring visited a California landfill to see how one waste disposal company is turning trash from landfills into clean-burning fuel for trash trucks. The full segment is available below:

Waste Management, Inc, (WM) operates the largest waste removal trucking fleet in North America, about 22,000 vehicles, but the company thinks trash gas from its landfills can significantly reduce its environmental footprint. Converting trash to clean fuel isn’t a new idea – the EPA says landfill gas currently powers more than a million homes. What is new, however, are WM’s efforts to use the technology to reduce oil use and lower emissions.

The initiative centers on WM’s Altamont Landfill, one of the largest in California. It runs around the clock, every day, and receives an average of 5,000 tons of garbage each day. That’s a lot of trash – and a lot of fuel. More than a thousand of WM’s California trash trucks run on liquefied natural gas (LNG) harvested from landfills. “This year we did not buy one single diesel vehicle,’ said Scott Germann, a WM fleet manager. “They’re all natural gas.”

Methane is one of the most potent greenhouse gases, and landfills are the third largest source of methane emissions in the U.S. Federal law requires landfill operators to destroy 75 percent of the methane they produce, but at Altamont 93 percent of the methane is captured and converted to energy. “We can take what could be a bad thing for the environment and completely turn it around to make it an excellent thing for the environment,” said Jessica Jones, a WM engineer.

The process is relatively simple. WM installed nearly 200 wells across the landfill, and each well contains perforated pipes to pull up methane through a vacuum system. The captured gas then travels through a network of pipes to a processing plant, where it is dried and scrubbed of unwanted gases. The purified methane is cooled to -260 degrees, turned into a liquid, pumped into transfer trucks, and sent to regional distribution locations.

WM currently produces 13,000 gallons of LNG from the Altamont landfill every day, and it burns with 80-90 percent less carbon emissions than diesel fuel. That’s a positive step for state regulators. “A well-to-wheels calculation of the carbon intensity of the fuel as delivered is very, very low compared to any other alternative,” said Peter Ward of the California Energy Commission.

While trash gas is better for the environment, it does require significant investment. The Altamont trash gas conversion plant cost more than $15 million to build. But it also represents a significant opportunity to cut oil consumption. “When you start looking at the numbers, LNG from landfill gas has the potential to displace millions of gallons of petroleum fuel,” said Richard Battersby of the East Bay Clean Cities Coalition.

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One of the biggest challenges facing wind energy is intermittency. Wind often blows strongest when power demand is lowest, and weakest when electricity is needed the most. Because today’s power grid needs electricity to be consumed the moment it’s generated, that means wind turbines send energy to the grid half as often as an average coal plant.

What if wind farms could store the power that isn’t needed right away and sell it later when demand is high? energyNOW! correspondent Patty Kim visited an energy storage system built alongside a wind farm in the heart of coal country. The full video is available below:

Wind energy has come a long way in the United States. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry that employs 75,000 people in 42 states and generates about 2 percent of the nation’s electricity. And, the Department of Energy says that number could grow to 20 percent of America’s electricity by 2030.

That potential is far from reality though, mainly because of wind’s intermittent nature. In order to reach 20 percent, one in five new turbines will have to be built offshore where the wind is faster and more consistent, and offshore wind is stalled in this country. But intermittency is only a problem because the energy industry hasn’t come up with an efficient way to store electricity on a large scale – until now.

A massive new battery storage system has sprung up in the heart of coal country, and it could change wind energy forever. AES Corporation, a global power project developer, has built a wind farm of more than 60 turbines spread across twelve miles of West Virginia’s Laurel Mountains. The farm generates enough power for 20,000 homes, and feeds power into the PJM Interconnection regional grid.

But the really impressive aspect of this wind farm is a series of white shipping containers, nondescriptly nestled into the hills, containing 1.3 million lithium ion batteries. Each battery is about the size of a typical C or D cell, and together they provide frequency regulation to the grid.

Grid operators at PJM send signals to the battery system every four seconds, telling it to either send the electricity generated by the wind farm onto the grid, or store it for later use when the wind isn’t blowing. “It’s a level of control over power that we haven’t seen,” said Praveen Kathpal, Vice President of Market and Regulatory Affairs for AES Energy Storage.

The storage system technology is impressive, but for now, its impact is relatively small. The West Virginia project can only hold enough electricity at any one time to power about 5,000 homes for 15 minutes. “Projects like these are the beginning of a long wave of energy storage projects to come,” said Kathpal. AES is taking the next step in West Texas, where it want to build a second battery project, roughly three times larger than the West Virginia system.

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