Posts Tagged ‘geothermal’
Are we flushing a heat source down the drain?
(Photo by Evan Long via Creative Commons)
A northern Minnesota start-up company wants to recover a waste heat source that’s currently flushed down the drain.
Hidden Fuels of Brainerd, Minnesota, is trying to develop a municipal sewer heat recovery system, which would heat buildings using warmth from the city’s sewers — minus the stench.
Jeff Aga, one of the company’s principals, said it would work similar to geothermal, but that sewers have an advantage of warmer starting temperatures than ground wells.
“We did some tests throughout their system and found where there’s good heat that can be captured,” Aga said.
The company placed temperature sensors throughout the city’s sewer system as part of a 16-month, federal stimulus-funded feasibility study that was completed in January. They found temperatures ranged from 38 to 78 degrees, but were mostly between 45 and 60 degrees. The warmest temperatures were found near a commercial laundry facility.
Aga said they’ve identified the police department as a good potential customer for the system, which might also be able to heat the local high school and a nearby apartment high rise.
“The fact that no one else has really thought about tapping into that until we did this study, I thought, was kind of fascinating,” says Scott Sjolund, technology supervisor at Brainerd Public Utilities, which sponsored the study after the city was approached by Hidden Fuels.
The company believes the system would be the first of its kind in the United States, though Vancouver built something like it as part of its 2010 Olympics village. The New York Times reported that the Vancouver project was the first district energy system in North America to draw heat from untreated wastewater, and that three others existed in Oslo and Tokyo.
The fact that so few systems exist is probably a sign of their challenging economics, said John Whitehouse, vice president of business development for Recycled Energy Development, an Illinois company that designs, builds, owns and operates cogeneration and waste heat recovery projects around the country.
“Unless you have really high energy prices, it’s going to be a hard sell,” Whitehouse said of the concept in general.
Low natural gas prices mean the payback time is likely to be long, he said. That’s especially true for projects that will involve retrofitting buildings rather than incorporating systems into new construction.
And while there is heat in sewers that’s technically recoverable, “there’s just not that much there,” Whitehouse said. His company normally looks for opportunities where the temperature is at least 180 degrees.
Hidden Fuels has presented the results of its feasibility study at public meetings in Brainerd. Next, it hopes to find funding to build a system at the police station.
Carbon storage technology licensed to South Dakota company
>> St. Paul Pioneer Press
The University of Minnesota has licensed a technology to a South Dakota startup to capture carbon dioxide, a prime greenhouse gas from coal-fired power plants, and inject it deep underground to tap geothermal energy and create electricity.
Biomass, geothermal replacing coal on campuses
>> Midwest Energy News
Michigan State University students hold up petitions calling for clean energy and not coal on campus at a rally on Wednesday. (Photo by Kim Teplitzky / Sierra Club)
April 13, 2012
By Dan Haugen
The Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla was founded in 1870 as a school of mining and metallurgy, supporting the Ozark region’s lead and zinc industries.
Next week, school officials will celebrate the start of a new chapter, one that involves extracting heat from the ground rather than minerals.
Missouri S&T will break ground Tuesday on a $32 million geothermal energy facility — a system of wells and pipes that will provide heat to 15 buildings, as well as chilling for the campus’ water system.
The project, which will replace an aging coal-fired steam plant, is expected to cut the school’s energy consumption in half and reduce carbon emissions by 25,000 tons a year.
It’s one of twenty victories the Sierra Club is counting as part of its Campuses Beyond Coal campaign, in which student groups have put pressure on administrators to shutdown coal-burning power plants (the Sierra Club is a member of RE-AMP, which also publishes Midwest Energy News).
A dozen Midwest universities have recently committed to phase out coal-burning power plants on their campuses. They include schools in Ohio, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin.
Support for transition
At Missouri S&T, it wasn’t much of a fight.
Graduate student Eric Farrow led a brief campaign in late 2010 that involved tabling and a petition drive. But by then, administrators had already announced plans to replace the coal-fired power plant with a geothermal facility. All that remained was for the school’s governing board to approve bonding money, which it did in November 2010.
“It was more of a showing of student support for the administration’s decision,” says Farrow.
Ted Ruth, the school’s director of design construction management, says several factors were behind the decision to mothball the coal- and wood-burning campus steam plant. For starters, it’s old, inefficient and in need of about $26 million in deferred maintenance.
Meanwhile, new environmental regulations are making it more expensive and complicated to keep operating coal plants.
“We’re trying to stay ahead of that curve,” says Ruth.
Sustainability concerns played a role, too. In addition to energy savings, the school expects to conserve about 8 million gallons of water per year using geothermal instead of steam heat.
Missouri S&T’s campus was built around the coal plant, which sits right in the center of it. Crews will remove the coal yard, elevator chute, and other pieces of the plant, but no decision has been made yet on how to repurpose the building, says Ruth.
“No coal plant I know is aesthetically appealing,” he says.
The geothermal project is expected to be completed in 2014. The school also plans to increase its reliance on natural gas in order to fully replace the energy it currently gets from the steam plant.
A mix of solutions
That type of hybrid approach is a pretty common one for schools that are working to phase out coal on campus, says Kim Teplitzky, a national press secretary for the Sierra Club campaign.
When the campaign began in September 2009, the organization identified 60 schools with coal-burning power plants on campus. It’s worked to organize or support student groups at each of those schools to encourage administrators to shut down the plants.
“Really the pitch is about leadership, it’s about preparing students for [clean energy] jobs, and about saving money in the long run by investing in clean energy solutions,” says Teplitzky.
So far, about a third of the schools on its target list have committed to phase out coal. Some have done so simply by switching to natural gas. Others have pursued major renewable projects.
Eastern Illinois University celebrated the opening of one of the country’s largest biomass facilities last fall. The Renewable Energy Center includes two biomass gasifiers and are expected to reduce the school’s annual carbon emissions by about 20,000 metric tons.
Other Midwest universities that have pledged to stop burning coal on campus include Case Western Reserve, Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), Miami (in Oxford, Ohio), Minnesota (Crookston and Twin Cities), Oberlin College, Ohio, Southeast Missouri State, Western Illinois, and Wisconsin (Madison).
Other schools that haven’t signed the pledge are also moving forward with renewable energy projects, including Ball State and the University of Toledo.
Many of the early pledgers were, like Missouri S&T, already predisposed to moving off of coal. “The ones that are left are going to be the tougher campaigns,” says Teplitzky, citing Southern Illinois, Carbondale, in the heart of coal country, as an example.
Michigan State vote today
A two-story-tall inflatable inhaler went up this week at Michigan State University, where students demonstrated Wednesday against an Energy Transition Plan they say is inadequate.
MSU Beyond Coal says the document, which calls for an eventual transition to 100 percent renewable energy, lacks concrete benchmarks and ignores the urgency of retiring the campus coal plant.
“We feel that there is a lot more potential to be more aggressive and use resources that are here now,” says sophomore Mollie VanOrsdol, one of the group’s organizers.
Environmentalist Bill McKibben spoke at the school this week to support the student group’s cause.
Michigan State’s board of trustees is expected to vote on the energy plan at its monthly meeting today.
Update: Michigan State’s board of trustees Friday morning unanimously approved the school’s Energy Transition Plan, which calls for the university to use 40 percent renewable power by 2040.
The MSU Beyond Coal student group issued a statement after the vote:
“We’re really disappointed that the board chose to move this so-called plan forward even though it lacks innovation, real clean energy goals or a plan for retiring the dirty coal plant on campus,” said student Talya Tavor. “This could have been an opportunity for MSU to be a national clean energy leader, but instead the transition plan simply puts off any real investments or dedication to clean energy to an unknown future date with no accountability.”
Dan Haugen is an Energy Journalism Fellow at Midwest Energy News. Contact him at dan@danhaugen.com.
Energy Dept. to revitalize loan guarantee program
>> New York Times
Six months after the expiration of a federal loan guarantee program that backed $16 billion in loans to solar, wind and geothermal energy projects, the Energy Department has decided to offer a smaller set of similar guarantees.
Geologists revise Minnesota’s potential for geothermal energy
>> Minnesota Public Radio
Minnesota is a cold place. But a new study released Tuesday shows the state has more geothermal energy potential than previously understood.
Ball State University dedicates first phase of geothermal system
>> Indianapolis Star
The geothermal project will extract heat from the ground during the winter and put heat into the ground during the summer to help heat and cool 47 buildings on campus when fully operational.
Secretive commission would control Ohio energy bond funds
>> Columbus Dispatch
Under a proposed Ohio renewable-energy ballot issue, $13 billion in investments in wind, solar, geothermal and other energy projects over 10 years would be solely controlled by a secretive Ohio commission incorporated in the state of Delaware.
North Dakota sees 26 percent increase in geothermal installations
>> Fargo Forum
Geothermal energy caught on fire last year in North Dakota, increasing installations by 26 percent from 2010, officials said Friday.
Warren Buffett’s long quest for geothermal power
>> Forbes
It’s a sobering sign of the challenges facing the geothermal industry: Even Warren Buffett has spent the better part of a decade trying to build a single geothermal power plant in California.
David Roberts: Renewables growing fast, but not fast enough
>> Grist
Non-hydro renewables remain a small part of the U.S. energy story. More to the point, the sexy renewables — solar, wind, and geothermal — are a rounding error.
