Bangladeshi officials have announced that there are now over one million homes powered by solar energy in the country.  In a flurry of expansion, Bangladesh went from 7,000 solar-powered homes in 2002 to the one million mark only 9 years later.

The reason solar power has caught on so quickly there is that most rural homes are off the electricity grid and renewable energy is the easiest way to for those people to get access to power.  Approximately 60 percent of the population doesn’t have access to reliable electricity, so non-governmental organizations have been working in the country to provide low-cost loans for solar panel installations.

The country hit the one million milestone 18 months ahead of schedule and officials believe that there will be 2.5 million solar-powered homes by 2015.

via Yale e360

Denmark will be the first country to start a program for EV owners that lets them earn money on power they feed to the grid from their charged car batteries.  An EV owner could make as much as $10,000 over the life of the car.

US-based company Nuvve chose the country as the pilot for its Vehicle-to-Grid technology because Denmark has already made a lot of smart grid improvements to cater to intermittent energy sources, like wind power.  In September, the program will start with 30 cars outfitted with drive trains that allow a bidirectional grid power connection.  Many EVs are being built with this technology.

The program should expand quickly over the following months and participating Danes can start making some cash back on their EVs.

via Cleantechnica

The EcoRide BE-35 is a lightweight, composite body transit bus with battery-electric drive that offers a 600 percent fuel efficiency as compared to a typical diesel bus. A test fleet is currently in operation near Pomona, California, and other tests are being planned for San Antonio TX and Tallahassee FL later this year as the company seeks federal validation in order to begin large scale production.

Although buses are an efficient way of moving numbers of people, a typical diesel bus only gets less than 4 miles per gallon (but that makes it equivalent to 40 passenger miles per gallon if there are 10 riders on the bus). Hybrids increase the efficiency to about 4.5 miles per gallon, which can be significant for a transit authority’s operations, but is still not a drastic improvement. The EcoRide, however, gets the equivalent of 24 miles per gallon by running solely on electricity.

Power storage for these buses is in lithium-titanite battery packs with a capacity of 54 to 72 kWh. The EcoRide buses have a 40 mile range, and can be recharged in just 10 minutes using a roof mounted system called FastFill that was also developed by the company. While the EcoRide doesn’t have the range for a typical full day of operation (generally 80 to 100 miles), its ability to quickly recharge could make that less of an issue.

GM Ventures, the investment and development arm of General Motors, has just invested $6 million with Proterra for continued development of the EcoRide. Whether GM will seek a larger stake in the company, or seek to incorporate Proterra’s technology into its own systems remains to be seen.

via: GM Press Release

Next month, New York State will have a completed 20 megawatt flywheel energy storage system connected to its electrical grid to provide frequency regulation and help maintain the stability of the electrical grid.

The system is already up and running at 90% capacity, and the installation of the remaining units to bring it to full capacity is expected to be completed later this month.

We’ve been following developments, particularly with this project as it has progressed, and we will continue to be interested in seeing how this first large-scale installation performs.

Flywheel energy storage is not so much a battery as it is a compensating mechanism to balance the load on the grid as power plants come on-line or go off-line. Electrical demand varies over the course of a day, and sometimes can rise (or fall) more quickly than power plants are able to respond. Grid storage systems such as this can help ease those transitions, rather than relying on peak power plants running on natural gas or other carbon emitting fuels.

Bill Gates has turned his philanthropic sights to cleaner energy solutions in developing countries and his current pet project is a new waste-to-fuel facility in Accra, Ghana.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is calling it a “Next-Generation Urban Sanitation Facility,” but we know that behind that impressive title, it’s really just human feces being turned into usable fuel.

The facility is being funded by a $1.5 million grant from the foundation and is being developed by Columbia University professor Kartik Chandran, Waste Enterprises and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology.  It will process waste sludge into two energy sources:  biodiesel and methane.

While a cheap source of fuel will be of great benefit to the area, the possibly even greater benefit is that it will also keep human waste out of the local water supply, meaning less water-borne illnesses and a better quality of life for the local people.

via Fast Company