Green Tech

Wind turbines collectively offering a 781.5-megawatt capacity now dot the landscape around Roscoe, Texas.

(Credit: E.ON Climate & Renewables)

One of the world's largest wind farms is now operational in the area surrounding Roscoe, Texas, E.ON Climate & Renewables (EC&R) announced Thursday.

The series of 627 wind turbines providing a 781.5-megawatt capacity covers about 100,000 acres and four Texas counties. But it's not an isolated wind farm per se, nor a uniform series of turbines.

The wind complex is a collaborative wind project with the community that included negotiations with over 300 landowners, and a mix of different turbines made by several companies including Mitsubishi, General Electric, and Siemens.

"Texas continues to lead the nation in the development of renewable energy and has more wind generation capacity than any other state and all but four countries," Texas Gov. Rick Perry said in a statement.

The wind turbines of the Roscoe, Texas, wind complex span 100,000 acres.

(Credit: E.ON Climate & Renewables)

The project took approximately 500 workers, and an investment of over $1 billion dollars to be implemented, according to EC&R.

But the investment should pay off in the end. At 781.5 megawatts, the Roscoe wind complex has the capacity to power 230,000 residences, according to EC&R.

The company said in a statement that the Texas project is "the completion of the world's largest wind farm near Roscoe, Texas (sic)" and that once completed, its London offshore wind project will be "the largest offshore wind farm in the world."

The announcement follows Perry's Wednesday meeting with Texas business leaders to express his views against proposed federal carbon cap-and-trade legislation, which are in opposition to those who feel the bill would encourage green technology innovation.

"Texas has shown you don't need federal mandates to improve the environment or foster the next generation of energy technology," Perry said in a statement.

"Texans should be wary about a cap-and-trade bill that would not only impose the largest tax hike in the history of the United States, but also inject the federal government further into every Texas home, farm and workplace," he said.

Energy start-up Baryonyx has won bids for three land leases from the state of Texas to build data centers powered primarily by wind farms.

The Texas-based company's leases include two offshore sites in the Gulf of Mexico and one on land in the Texas panhandle. One of the offshore tracts is submerged land off Mustang Island near Corpus Christi; the other is submerged land off South Padre Island. Both sites are each over 19,000 acres.

According to the Texas General Land Office, the Baryonyx coastal projects are poised to be the "biggest offshore wind farms in the nation."

Baryonyx said its offshore farms will each produce a minimum of 750 megawatts of power and use turbines that produce up to five megawatts each.

The third lease includes 8,064 acres in Dallam County, an area in the northwest corner of the Texas panhandle.

"Developing wind energy for Texas is just plain smart, it's not just sustainable energy to power our businesses, it's sustainable funding for public education too," Jerry Patterson, commissioner of the Texas General Land Office, which granted Baryonyx the leases, said in a statement.

Patterson is referring to the lease provisions in which Baryonyx--once the wind farms are operational--will provide power to the Texas General Land Office. The land office will, in turn, sell the electricity to schools, prisons, and cities. The money from the sale of that electricity will then go directly into the state's Permanent School Fund, which holds the rights to all income garnered from the state's submerged coastal lands.

Over the 30-year lease, the wind farms must provide the school fund with a minimum of $338 million, according to the Texas General Land Office's statistics on the deal's agreed energy royalties.

Baryonyx's goal is to become a "leading provider of both renewable energy and low-carbon, on-line data storage and computational services," according to a company statement on the deal. The start-up plans to build Tier 4 data centers--the most secure type of data centers typically used to house mission-critical systems.

Baryonyx's offshore projects in Texas could be the largest wind farms in the U.S. when completed.

(Credit: Baryonyx)

Artist's rendering of the Universal Freight System loading a standard shipping container on to a train.

(Credit: Texas Transportation Institute)

A group of Texas researchers would like to resurrect the train as chief freight mover in the U.S.

The Universal Freight Shuttle is the brainchild of Stephen Roop, assistant director Texas Transportation Institute (TTI), a branch of Texas A&M University's system chain.

The automated train, which is designed to accommodate standard shipping containers and trailers, would move forward along a track by linear induction motors powered with electricity.

Roop and others at TTI have been working on the concept and design for eight years, keeping in mind not just the technology, but how such an infrastructure would impact federal and state transportation departments, freight companies, shippers, and border security.

In addition to providing a cleaner option for shipping freight, the UFS includes a conveyor-like system to screen standard shipping containers at ports and borders while they're in motion, and automatically divert suspect containers to an area for further human inspection.

"It's moving into a commercial phase with prototyping and proposals for application in both Texas and California. This system is designed to offer an alternative to over-the-road trucking for heavily congested corridors. It is of course an electric, zero-emission solution," Roop said in an e-mail.

Wind power is worth it, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.

ERCOT studied the costs and benefits of wind power in three scenarios and concluded that expanding wind power in Texas would outweigh the total costs of boosting the state's electrical grid with conventional technologies. (Renewable Energy Access has a more detailed story here.)

The organization estimated the costs of putting in 5.1 gigawatts (GW), 11.6GW, and 18GW of new wind energy as well as the required grid connections. The 5.1GW plan would bring with it a $3.8 billion premium, but save $1.2 billion in fossil fuel costs a year. The 11.6GW plan would cost $4.9 billion, but save $1.7 billion in fuel costs annually. (Estimated fuel cost savings were not included for the 18GW scenario, but will be included in a future study.) Either way, both programs would pay off in about three years. Wind turbines last for decades; thus, new turbines would save billions over time as well as cut down on greenhouse gas emissions.

If you assume 2 kilowatts a house, 5.1GW is enough for 2.6 million homes.

Wind, according to many, is the cheapest form of renewable energy and in many places it is quite plentiful. Ireland could nearly supply all of its power through wind and some companies are developing technology to store wind power so that these plants could provide power on calm days. Wind harnessed at night, for instance, could pump water up a hill, which could be released during the day. The high demand of turbines, however, has created a shortage.

Texas gets 49 percent of its electricity from natural gas plants, says Renewable Energy Access. The U.S. has 16.8GW of wind power installed and 4.4GW is in the flat, windy plains of Texas.

Texas Instruments wants to export what it knows about curbing power consumption in phones to the world outside.

The Dallas-based company has already come up with a series of chips that can be inserted into portable ultrasound devices to cut power consumption by up to 20 percent. The new chips also reduce signal noise by 40 percent.

The idea behind the push is fairly simple. The company has already made the silicon, and with some tweaks, can sell it to other customers. Much of the work TI has conducted in power management for cell phones was not performed because of high electricity prices, said Bill Krenik, chief technical officer of the wireless terminal business unit at TI.

TI later this year hopes to make a splash with the third generation of its OMAP platform, a collection of chips for making cell phones.

Cell phones used to be huge and batteries are one of the more costly components. (Remember Michael Douglas with that shoe phone in the movie Wall Street? He probably gave himself radiation therapy.) TI thus originally concentrated on energy efficiency to reduce the size and costs associated with lithium ion battery packs. Carriers also continued to want longer run times on their phones, he added.

"In a phone, you are limited to a couple of watts," Krenik said during a visit Monday to CNET News.com. "There is a thermal limit too."

Along with medical equipment, the company will also look at digital TVs. No one wants to put a 50-inch plasma on the wall that's blowing more heat than the furnace, after all. TI has come up with one component that cuts digital TV power by 6 watts, said Dave Freeman, system engineering manager at TI. (Freeman further added that TI sells a lot of digital signal processors, the same chips TI sells for cell phones, and for the inverters that go with solar panels.)

Rice University and the University of Texas, in conjunction with some of the world's largest energy companies, have banded together to form the Advanced Energy Consortium, which will try to exploit material science and natural gas to expand oil and gas production.

One of the decades-long problems in the oil industry has been getting the stuff out of the ground. The underground pressure is relieved relatively quickly; although oil drillers can artificially increase pressure by injecting gases underground and other techniques, it only improves yields incrementally. Typically, more than 60 percent of the oil in a given deposit stays in the ground. In many fields, the amount of recovered oil is even less.

Rice brings nanotechnology expertise while Texas has one of the leading geosciences departments. Participating companies include Baker Hughes, ConocoPhillips, Halliburton, Marathon Oil, and Occidental. (BP and Synthetic Genomics, meanwhile, have a similar project. Those two will try to identify microbes inside wells that can help increase extraction.) These aren't exactly clean energy projects, but oil will likely remain a staple of the energy picture for some time.

Meanwhile, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Italian energy company Eni said they will collaborate on energy research, including improving solar cell efficiency. Eni, which will also join the MIT Energy Initiative, will give the school $50 million over five years.

Although the government has increased the amount of money it will put into energy research, leading universities are increasingly partnering with private sector companies to fund research. Some activists complain that these partnerships could compromise research, but there is little evidence to support this theory, at least according to several academics who have studied it.

Other partnerships include a $500 million collaboration between BP, the University of California, and the University of Illinois and Stanford's energy program, which is partly underwritten by ExxonMobil and Toyota.