I was recently discussing opportunities in alternative energy with a colleague. This got me thinking that, despite the fact that you absolutely cannot avoid reading in the popular press about how much money there is to be made in alt energy, at least down the road, I would not be able to articulate where the opportunities actually are. I mean, cut through the hype, what’s left in terms of real business prospects, you know?
This blog post will not answer that question. However, I will share some interesting links I turned up:
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Wal-Mart’s recent RFP to outfit as many as 340 of its stores in five US states with solar panels. This particular blogger/consultant seems to have been referenced by a variety of news sources, including NPR and C|NET: http://makower.typepad.com/joel_makower/2006/12/walmarts_solar_.html. In summary, compared to what’s been done to-date, this would be a gigantic deployment of that technology.
One comment I believe I heard on NPR’s Marketplace show is that Wally-World wants to accomplish this feat without putting so much price pressure on solar power technology as to drive (or continue to drive, I suppose) its research and manufacturing overseas. Can anyone else corraborate this statement? Isn’t lots of price pressure on alternative energy technologies exactly what the world needs right now? We’re willing to save the planet, but only if we can use stuff made in the US?
Side note - I remember back in the early 1980s some kid’s rich parents came to our class and gave a presentation about the solar panels they’d just installed on the roof of their house (in the Chicago area, where during the winter it’s dark by 4pm, but whatever). Anyway, their panels would automatically rotate toward to brightest light source, which at some point during the day became, rather than the sky above, their neighbor’s porch light. This was bad because the mechanism wasn’t designed to rotate that far, and would be damaged. Hopefully such issues have been worked out in the ensuing years.
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On the ethanol front, here’s a comparison of E100 gallon vs Retail gasoline prices by state - http://www.dtnethanolcenter.com/index.cfm?show=10&mid=32. Interestingly, Washington state appears to be one of few places listed where a gallon of ethanol is cheaper than a gallon of gas. However, I perceive that we’re not exactly comparing apples to apples (heh heh) here, since the resources have neither the same energy yield by volume, nor the same production cost, nor the same government subsidization.
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Finally, a chemical engineer (who works for an oil company) takes on Vinod Khosla’s ethanol claims - http://energybulletin.net/18576.html. It’s always nice to hear both sides of a story.
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