Day: September 9, 2009

Capstone metering will begin marketing the “first intelligent water meter for residential use” this month, reports SmartGridToday.

The meter’s upside seems to be the ability to use water flow to generate and store its own power in a rechargeable battery.

The meter’s downside is that it will allow local water companies to remotely “monitor and restrict water flow due to conservation program requirements.”

Not a good trade-off.

First Solar, Inc. will build the world’s largest solar field in Mongolia, reports the Wall Street Journal. A few interesting points:

• The field is slated to produce 2 gigawatts of power — equal to the output of two coal-fired power plants.
• The field will take up 25 square miles (16,000 acres), as compared to about 200 acres for two coal-fired plants.
• Unlike coal plants, however, no electricity will be produced at night– so the field will need to be backed up by conventional (most likely coal-fired) power plants.
• The estimated cost of such a field in the U.S. would be on the order of $6 billion — twice as much as the cost of two coal-fired power plants. Keep in mind that back-up coal plants (at additional cost?) would be needed to back up the solar field. But First Solar expects the costs to be much lower as it would be using “lower-cost Chinese” (slave/child?) labor.
• First Solar expects China to place a $0.15 – 0.25 tariff (tax) on the electricity produced by the plant — about tripling to quintupling the consumer price of electricity in China.

Is this considered renewable because there seems to be an endless supply of green chicanery?