Advanced Energy Perspectives

This week's news includes some big news for the nascent American offshore wind industry and more calls for updates to the utility business model. Come along with us to the shores of Rhode Island for this week’s news round up.

This is the year, folks, it's finally happening! Offshore wind in the U.S.A.! Off the coast of Rhode Island, the Block Island project, which “broke water” last year, is set to install actual wind turbines that will actually deliver actual wind-generated electricity to the actual grid. This week GE Renewable Energy announced that the company is shipping five 6 MW offshore wind turbines to Rhode Island from the company’s manufacturing facility in France. From there, Deepwater Wind will install the turbines beginning in August, and voila! The race for offshore wind is over… or at least it has finally begun.

This week’s transportation news was a rollercoaster, which is ironic only because the only thing lacking was advanced trains. Instead, we’ve got a new (old) player vying for the title of top electric car magnate, plus solar panels on boats and planes and cars. Plus, the latest from the wild world of utility mergers. Please keep your hands and feet inside the moving vehicle – it’s this week’s news round up!

Solar Impulse 2 takes a nighttime flight over the Statue of Liberty.

Advanced energy moves pretty fast, and this week we’ve got more movement in planes, trains, and automobiles, as well as some interesting storage solutions, plus some really small modular reactors being developed abroad. Phew! Buckle your seatbelts: This week’s news wrap-up could be a bumpy ride.

This week we saw wind turbines reaching heights, new opportunities for energy storage in California, and the grid’s “best kept secret.” (Spoiler: it’s Combined Heat and Power, but that’s apparently not sexy enough for your average consumer). But let’s begin this week in Iowa, where time-lapse footage from MidAmerican Energy gives us a look into the construction of the tallest wind turbine ever built in the United States. Working night and day, construction crews build the turbine, which has a capacity of 2.4 MW. And you can see it put together in just 5 minutes and 42 seconds! 

Montana's big sky. Photo by Lexie Briggs. 

This week, the news was shining bright with solar energy, both new generation and new policies. We’re used to those stories coming from a few key states, but this week it’s like Kevin Spacey’s entire oeuvre: not just the usual suspects. Take Montana, for instance. Though the state is known as an energy producer, it’s mostly been in the news as an example of the resurgence of the U.S. gas and oil drilling industry or of the country’s growing wind generation capacity. This week, however, Tom Lutey, writing for the Billings Gazette reported that recently, solar has become the rage.