Hydropower

Hydropower worked by catching the energy from falling water and is by far the most heavily used of the renewable energy sources. However many argue if it really is a renewable resource and by definition I would say yes it is a renewable energy source.  This does not mean that I am completely behind hydropower, due to the fact that in most cases you have to destroy surrounding ecosystems to harvest this energy.  Rivers need to be damned up and thus valleys are flooded and people are displaced in some cases. It may be emission free but this energy is not without damage.

In the past Rhode Island has been free of hydropower but things are trying to change.  There is tons of research being done on the potential hydropower in Rhode Island. Mostly people have been looking into converting the hundreds of damns, which are spread through out Rhode Island, into hydroelectric damns.  They wanted to see how much energy could be produced from each of these damns and how much it would cost to convert these old almost pointless damns into something that can be used to produce electricity.  However recently I have spoken with one of the major researchers and it appears that Rhode Island will remain hydropower free. 

I’ve included a video below about some of the negative affects of hydro dams in China.

Solar Energy

There are many different types of solar energy. There are photovoltaic solar panels, which are what people generally think of when they hear solar energy but solar energy is not limited to these.  There is also passive solar (heating a home through letting the sunlight in through windows) and solar water heating systems to name a couple.  There are some examples of solar energy being used in Rhode Island but are limited mostly to smaller privately owned projects.  There is one large-scale solar energy project in Rhode Island owned by Toray Plastics.  The reason there aren’t many solar projects in Rhode Island is simple…there’s not that much sunlight here.  You will typically see more solar project the farther south you so and in dessert environments where there is no shortage of sun.

Toray Plastics put up a 375 kW photovoltaic solar panel installation at their North Kingstown location.  There are two solar fields that add up to 3.5 acres and are made up of 1,650 panels. The panels are mounted on concrete foundations using single-axis trackers.  The single-axis trackers move from west to east and are meant to maximize the sun exposure to each panel, thus allowing them to produce the most electricity.  These made the Toray Plastics solar farm the largest in the state. 

If you would like to know more about this Solar
Farm, you can find more information here. 

Block Island Wind Farm

The Block Island wind farm will be a 30-megawatt wind energy farm being developed by Deepwater Wind, construction is set to start in 2013.  It will be located three miles southeast of Block Island and will be barely visible to the naked eye on a clear day.  It will consist of five turbines and deepwater claims it will generate over 100,000 megawatts hours annually.

          
The wind farm will supply Block Island with the bloke of it electricity.  National grid has agreed to distributive the electricity to the citizens at a set price using a feed-in tariff.

Feed-in Tariffs are policy mechanisms designed to help renewable energy technologies get started.  They do this by providing a contract with the renewable to buy a certain amount of energy at a certain price for a number of years.  This way there is defiantly a market for the product the renewable to producing and there is almost no uncertainty of its success. This will help companies get investors to start the renewable energy technologies going.  An example of this would be the wind turbine in Portsmouth.  If a feed-in tariffs were not in place then the wind turbine would be selling it’s energy at market price which would be to low for the turbine to make back it’s initial investment.

Block Island is currently getting their electricity from a dirty and very expense diesel plant.  This will reduce the pressure on Block Island citizens and give them a clean energy supply.

          
In addition to the wind farm being built, there will also be a transmission line build from the island to the main land to serve as a bidirectional electricity flow.  Excess energy from the wind farm will be transmitted to the main land and in times of low winds energy will be able to be transferred to the island from the mainland.  This will provide Block Island with a steady supply of energy. The project it’s self is positioned to be a demonstration wind farm for future investors in wind energy.