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Expect to see the DOE, the EPA and other federal agencies make some major announcements next week to coincide with the big Copenhagen conference. The DOE, for example, just issued a news advisory that it will be holding a news conference that will include a fascinating group that includes Secretary Chu, Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property David Kappos, Arun Majumdar, director of the new Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy and “green technology patent holders.” So, next week should be interesting for the science community.

Along the same vein, today the DOE announced nearly it was investing nearly $1 billion in three projects planned by some of the major utilities located in coal-producing regions in the U.S. that “demonstrate advanced coal-based technologies that will capture and sequester or put to beneficial use carbon emissions.” The DOE monies are supposed to also leverage more than $2 billion in private-sector funds, presumably from the utility companies, themselves, and their partners.

The agency says the general goals are to 1) reach a CO₂ capture efficiency of 90%, 2) develop capture/sequestration methods that add less than 10% to the cost of electricity for gasification systems and less than 35% for combustion and oxycombustion systems, and 3) capture and sequester or put to beneficial a minimum of 300,000 tons of CO₂ per year.

The 10-year American Electric Power Company (Columbus) project involves a chilled-ammonia process to capture and store CO₂. According to the DOE, after AEP captures the CO₂ it will be treated, compressed, and sent via pipeline to  injection sites located near the capture facility. Two injections sites (saline formations) are located approximately 1.5 miles below the surface. Besides AEP, the big players in the project ar APCo, Schlumberger Carbon Services, Battelle Memorial Institute, CONSOL Energy and Alstom.

Southern Company Services (Birmingham) will have an 11-year project to retrofit a CO₂ capture plant on a 160 megawatt flue gas stream at an existing coal-fired power plant. The CO₂ will be compressed and transported through a pipeline, and up to one million metric tons per year of CO2 will be sequestered – also saline formations. SCS is also going to test the use of pumping CO₂ underground to increase oil recovery in existing petroleum wells. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries America, Schlumberger Carbon Services, Advanced Resources International, the Geological Survey of Alabama, EPRI, Stanford University, the University of Alabama, AJW Group and the University of Alabama at Birmingham are also involved.

Finally Summit Texas Clean Energy will be spending eight years attempting to match a 400-megawatt gasification system in Texas with carbon capture technologies that they hope will be 90 percent efficient. Like SCS, Summit is says it will used pump the CO₂ into oil wells. The Univ. of Texas will design and assure compliance with monitoring, verification and accounting program goals.

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UPDATE: Okay, the problem was that the Obama administration was installing a new version of its main Recovery website. The new site does look better and those who have poked around it more than I have say it offers more transparency.

The DOE made announcements this week about several new grants and loans. These include

• A $528.7 million loan to Fisker Automotive for two lines of luxury plug-in hybrids. $169.3 million is supposed to be allocated to manufacturing process improvements and engineering integration costs related to U.S. suppliers for the Fisker Karma. The Karma is supposed to go on sale in mid-2010. Another $359.36 million of the loan is earmarked for Fisker’s Project Nina, aimed at another generation of hybrids that are supposed to hit the market in 2012. DOE says it will be making additional loans under this program over the coming months.
• $106 million to in funding for Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Indiana, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Vermont and Virginia the development of an energy efficiency and conservation strategy, energy efficiency audits and retrofits, transportation programs, the creation of financial incentive programs for energy efficiency improvements, the development and implementation of advanced building codes and inspections, and installation of renewable energy technologies on municipal buildings.
• Another $550 million in renewable energy awards.
• And, $144 million for Smart Grid “transitional” costs, most of which is going for utility worker training and retrainining, plus funding for state public utility commission staff training.
  

Meanwhile over at the NSF, the agency announced it is giving $20 million to each of six states to assist in research projects. Several of them have a potential tie to materials scientists and engineers (such as monies for basic science energy research in Kansas and South Dakota), but one thing that may be of particular interest is the funding earmarked for South Carolina for research related to “biofabrication–an emerging technology defined as computer-aided, layer-by-layer deposition of biologically relevant material with the purpose of engineering functional 3-D tissues and organs.”

[Also updated] Here are the new charts:

Department of Energy - 5.5% paid out

National Science Foundation - 1.1%

Source: Recovery.gov

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According to a company press release, Consolidated Edison Co. plans to launch a $6 million, 18-month Smart Grid pilot program in northwest Queens that will test how various technologies support efforts to modernize the electric grid.

The initiative includes a distributed-generation project with the City University of New York to study how solar energy can be integrated into the Big Apple’s electric grid. The solar energy will be obtained from a 100 kW photovoltaic system on the roof of LaGuardia Community College.

The program will take place within the company’s Long Island City network, an 8.3 square-mile area, an area that has a customer density mixture representative of other areas in the company’s system, says Con Edison.

Approximately 1,500 customers will receive smart meters, the main component of an “advanced metering infrastructure.” Other AMI features include automatic outage notification, remote meter reading, remote reconnection and the ability to communicate energy usage information via other smart building technology to Web portals or in-home displays.

The demonstration program also will test grid integration issues in three areas: underground intelligent systems that can monitor, isolate and correct distribution problems to improve reliability; commercial customers’ energy-generation capacities including traditional (e.g., diesel) and renewable resources (e.g., solar); and plug-in electric vehicles and their charging stations.

The company plans to file proposals with the DOE by the end of August for stimulus funds. Approximately $375 million in Smart Grid projects would include the addition of more than 40,000 smart meters, i.e., meters that link consumer usage to time-of-day data. Indeed, Con Ed just announced it had filed for $172 million in projects.

One idea behind the smart meters, at least the first generation of them, is that they would be a tool to create an incentive for consumers to use power during non-peak times, when consumers would be charged less; conversely, consumers would be charged a premium for peak-use power. Unfortunately, Con Ed doesn’t reveal what, if any, proposal it has for restructuring smart-meter rates. Without clear policies and incentives in place regarding these rate structures, it will be hard to take this project too seriously.

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MIT’s online Technology Review has posted an interesting interview with Mark Little, GE’s director of research, on a number of energy-related topics. He reveals some interesting thoughts on GE’s plan for building a 350-employee sodium-nickel-chlorine battery manufacturing plant (that hinges on the approval of its request for DOE funding), Smart Grid technology and the company’s strategies to respond to anticipated markets created by carbon emission legislation.

Little says GE sees opportunities in the approach of a world that is considerably carbon constrained, and notes that this is why the firm is working on solar, wind, nuclear and Smart Grid applications. The emphasis is both on materials research and new manufacturing techniques.

Regarding nuclear power, he describes a new reactor proposal before the NRC and an additional advance system under construction in Asia, but notes that these are essentially refinements and simplifications of current traditional boiling-water approaches.

Check out the video here.

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Back in April, Ceramic Tech Weekly reported that the Obama administration had plans to invest a little under $4 billion for Smart Grid projects, but was still trying to work out the details. Now, it appears the DOE is one step closer to getting the funding moving.

The big news is that DOE Secretary Steven Chu has announced the agency is ready to actively solicit applications for $3.9 billion in grants and has released the final Funding Opportunity Announcements.

The DOE has divvied up the monies into one large and one small pot, with $3.3 billion for the Smart Grid Investment Grant Program (cost-sharing grants up to $200 million to support manufacturing, purchasing and installation of existing smart grid technologies that can be deployed on a commercial scale) and $615 million for Smart Grid projects (grants up to $100 million that demonstrate applications, integration and cost effectiveness).

The final FOAs are available at www.fedconnect.net. Search public opportunities for the following reference numbers: Smart Grid Investment Program (DE-FOA-0000058) and Smart Grid Demonstrations (DE-FOA-0000036).

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