A while back we reported (with some skepticism) a report coming out of China that said that country would be producing over 100 gigawatts of wind by 2020, a 1,500% increase.

Little did I know that the United States was, at the same time, on track to actually beat that! A report from Emerging Energy Research, a cleantech consulting firm, points out that the U.S. is now the world's fastest growing market for wind power. Last year, 5 gigawatts of wind power were installed, and 2008 will break the record again with 8 new gigawatts under construction. The U.S. will shortly be the world's largest producer of wind energy, surpassing Germany's 22 gigawatts.

If the rate of growth continues, and ideal wind energy areas are exploited, the report says we could hit 150 gigawatts of wind power by 2020! For those of you wondering how much power that is, the average coal plant produces about 800 megawatts of power. So this is enough to displace about 180 coal plants. That's a sizable hunk of America's power generation!

Of course, a few obstacles could stand in the way. First, if the investment tax credit isn't renewed, the economics of wind power will change significantly. Second, right now there simply aren't enough manufacturing plants building wind turbines. GE already has already sold about $12 B of turbines that they have not yet produced. And in some areas the permitting process is greatly slowing the rate at which the plants come online.

Via CleanTech Media and Emergy Energy Research

Researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute have just done a batch of research that they hope will help turn the world's roads into cheap collectors of solar power.

They started with the assumption that asphalt gets frakking hot when the sun shines on it, and then started making some serious leaps.

First, they decided to figure out what part of the asphalt gets hottest, which turns out to be about two centimeters below the surface. Then they tried to figure out how to make it even hotter. The painted an anti-reflective coating to their test blocks, and then added highly thermally conductive quartzite to the mix.

The result is blacktop that gets even hotter and stays hotter for longer than regular asphalt. Of course, this left them with the problem of how to get the energy out of the road. By laying down a series of flexible and highly conductive copper pipes before pouring the asphalt they were able to pump water through the asphalt, picking up the heat, for use in power generation.

However, project leaders hoped to replace the copper pipes with a "highly efficient heat exchanger." Whether or not that would be water based, or exchange heat some other way, we don't know.

The system has several large advantages over traditional photovoltaic power.

1. It's really cheap
2. They don't need to find extra land
3. It's invisible to the average person
4. Blacktop stays hot, and could produce power for hours after the sun goes down
5. There are roads and parking lots everywhere power is needed.

There are already a examples of similar technology in use around the world, but modifying the chemistry of the asphalt specifically to make it a good solar collector is a new move.

Via WPI.edu