Remember Home Star, the killer bill that would incentivize thousands of home energy retrofits across the country, reduce energy bills for struggling homeowners, put some of America’s hardest hit trades back to work, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions? The one backed by a coalition of more than 1,700 organizations including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers? (The one that’s not called “cash for caulkers” and please for the luvagod stop using that stupid, misleading name.)

The House passed the bill back in May and it’s been sitting in the Senate ever since. Homeowners are putting off retrofits, waiting to see if it will pass. Construction trades are holding off on hiring, waiting to see if it will pass. Members of the Home Star coalition now populate all 50 states and they are holding their breath, waiting.

Now the bill’s on the knife’s edge. There’s been talk of including Home Star in the Small Business Jobs Bill that’s pending in the Senate Finance Committee. A final decision about whether to do so will be made on Wednesday.

If it isn’t included, it may get caught up in the energy bill mishegas, or may not get taken up again until Fall. That would be incredibly counter-productive and short-sighted on the part of the Senate. This bill is as close to a no-brainer as will ever grace Capitol Hill, supported by left and right and of benefit to every single Congressional district. Surely if the Senate can do anything any more, it can do this.

Power Partners, Inc. has revealed that it is teaming up with the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and Arkema Inc. on a $2.54 million research programme to improve the efficiency and test new refrigerants in a type of air conditioning unit that runs on waste heat or heat from solar thermal collectors.

The funding was announced mid-July by DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, otherwise known as ARPA-E, and is part of the agency’s Building Energy Efficiency through Innovative Thermodevices, or BEET-IT programme.

Power Partners is a US manufacturer and marketer of energy-efficient, environmentally friendly ECO-MAX adsorption chillers. The adsorption chiller is a type of air conditioner that is powered by waste heat or by heat from solar collectors. It has few moving parts and uses almost no electricity to operate.

During the three-year programme, the team will design, assemble and test an adsorption chiller that takes advantage of PNNL’s metal-organic heat carrier technology and new types of refrigerants. The goal is to utilize PNNL’s advanced materials and develop adsorption chillers that are smaller, more efficient and affordable enough to be used more frequently in commercial buildings.

Opportunity for energy saving

“More efficient methods of cooling represent a great opportunity to reduce energy consumption in buildings, and in doing so, greenhouse gas emissions as well,” said PNNL Laboratory Fellow Pete McGrail, who is leading the research project. “The ARPA-E program represents a unique opportunity to move a recent laboratory discovery to the mainstream HVAC and commercial buildings marketplace in just a few years,” he said.

“Buildings account for 40% of energy use in the United States,” said Mike Stonecipher, Business Segment Leader at Power Partners. “Cooling is one of the primary uses of energy in buildings, yet the basic approaches for cooling have not changed in decades. We are excited about this joint effort to develop a commercially viable product that can meet the demand for energy conservation.”

Power Partners will lead engineering and testing efforts as the project advances from a bench-scale prototype to a 5-ton cooling capacity demonstration unit, utilizing its state-of-the-art test facility. Adsorption chiller technology is attractive to retail stores, hospitals, universities, office complexes, data centers, trigeneration facilities, processing plants, manufacturing plants and government facilities because it saves energy.

According to business intelligence provider, IntertechPira, the total value of clean technologies by end-use category globally is expected to rise by over 250% to a sizeable $525 billion in 2019. This represents average annual growth of 13.5% for the ten year period from 2009.

Clean technologies include products and technologies designed to be economically competitive by using less material and energy to reduce their environmental impact compared with incumbent technologies. “The Future of Clean Technologies” report published by IntertechPira takes an in-depth look at the future of clean technologies with quantitative market forecasts to 2019 broken down by product, technology and end-use sector. It details prospects for raw material and technology suppliers and identifies the key materials, products, technologies and end-use sectors most likely to undergo significant growth over the next ten years.

The report covers the global market for clean technology devices and materials. Global is defined as including western Europe, eastern Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and parts of Africa, principally South Africa. The report finds that growth rates in clean technologies “greatly outperform those aimed at the traditional power generation industry”. According to IntertechPira, the pace of growth, and the promise it may hold, has a lot to do with the high-profile involvement of governments and private investors in many of the sectors.

Clean-tech still seen as expensive

Clean technology investments are still seen as astronomically costly by many venture capital firms, who tend to become nervous when faced with capital-intensive industrial segments. As such, most are making smaller sums available for small R&D teams to work with, rather than releasing larger sums, more appropriate for project finance-type capital investments. The emphasis seems to be very much upon supporting ventures headed by people with operational experience and technical expertise.

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By: T. Boone Pickens

The Congressional Independence Day recess is here. The amount of time available to pass substantive legislation before both houses adjourn is dwindling.

Between the end of the July 4th Recess and the August Recess, Congress will try to pass the financial reform bill, and the Senate will fulfill its Constitutional duties on Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. With all that, the single largest unfinished piece of business for the 111th Congress remains the adoption of a comprehensive energy bill.

I have been around this business for a long time, and I understand that an energy bill is likely to contain a great deal of compromise on key issues. That’s the nature of the system — you have compromise to get the things you really need and serve what you believe to be the greater good. The debate surrounding the balance between our environmental and energy polices, while important, should not delay us from adopting legislation to reduce our dependence on OPEC oil.

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The U.S. Department of Energy probably didn’t know what it was getting itself into when it announced an interpretive rule in early June that would effectively ban multi-head shower systems.

Plumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors – National Association has called on its members to strongly protest a DOE proposal that would ban multiple head showers. DOE proposes to interpret the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, as amended, to mean that a showerhead is anything past the mixing valve. That would mean that all fittings could not spray more than 2.5 GPM combined.

“Without advance notice to stakeholders, the United States Department of Energy has issued an interpretive rule defining showerheads which will have an impact on the installation of higher-end bathrooms such as spas and showers that have both a showerhead and hand shower or shower towers,” PHCC-NA said in its alert.

DOE interprets that a showerhead is all components that are supplied standard together and function from one inlet (i.e., after the mixing valve) forming a single showerhead for purposes of the maximum water use standards.

Using this rule, DOE will find a showerhead to be noncompliant with the Energy Policy and Conservation Act’s maximum water use standard if the showerhead’s standard components, operating in their maximum design flow configuration, taken together use in excess of 2.5 GPM when flowing at 80-psi, even if each component individually does not exceed 2.5 GPM.

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