CON ED LOSES WINDPLANT BATTLE. In a landmark ruling, the New York Public Service Commission last May ordered Consolidated Edison-which had said it would not buy the excess electricity produced by a 2-kilowatt wind generator mounted atop a tenement building at 519 E. 11th St. in New York City-to purchase the surplus wattage anyway. Now-thanks to this ruling-any Con Ed customer who wants to install a windplant on his/her property may do so legally . . . and-if the installation includes a device (such as the Gemini Synchronous Inverter) that can feed excess "juice" back into the utility lines-Con Ed must buy the customer-produced electricity at the rate of 2.3d per kilowatt-hour.
U.S. ENERGY CONSUMPTION WILL RISE 6% IN 1977 (well above past rates of increase), according to latest Institute of Gas Technology predictions. IGT-whose projections have been accurate in the past-further predicts that this year, for the first time, more than 50% of the total petroleum used in the U.S. will be of foreign origin.
COLORADO WINS SERI. After months of delays, the U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration has selected Golden, Colorado (just outside Denver) as the site of the coveted Solar Energy Research Institute. SERI-with an initial staff of 75 professionals and a first-year budget of $4 to $6 million-will function in concert with universities, corporations, and other federal, state, and local government agencies to coordinate domestic solar energy research.
WHAT MAY BE THE LARGEST DARRIEUS ROTOR IN THE COUNTRY is now in operation at the Energy Research and Development Administration's Sandia Laboratories facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The machine-a vertical-axis wind turbine with eggbeater-like blades-stands seven stories tall and has a rotor diameter of 55 feet. Peak power output (in a 28-mph wind) is said to be 60 kilowatts . . . enough electricity to power about 30 homes.
"WE ARE NOT RUNNING OUT OF ENERGY. But we are running out of cheap oil and gas . . . . We are running out of the environmental capacity needed to handle the pollutants generated in conventional energy production. And we are running out of time to adjust to these new realities." So says Denis Hayes in Energy: The Solar Prospect, the 11th in a series of incisive monographs published by the Worldwatch Institute. To get your copy of this handsomely produced, richly informative 80-page book, send $2.00 to: Worldwatch Institute, 1776 Massachusetts Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.
ELECTRIC MASTER-METERING OF APARTMENT BUILDINGS wastes 7 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, according to a recent study by the Midwest Research Institute of Kansas City, Missouri. The lack of feedback in the form of an individual electric bill-the study says-causes residents of master-metered buildings to develop poor energy-use habits . . . habits that lead to the use of 35% more electricity (on the average) than normal.
NAZI COAL CONVERSION METHODS UNDER REVIEW. Texas A & M University professor Arnold Krammer says he'll be spending the next couple of years looking for hitherto unknown coal-to-oil conversion methods in roughly one million pages of captured Nazi documents now on file at the National Archives. (The papers were obtained by Allied forces in a sweep of German oil companies at the end of World War II.) A futile undertaking? Dow Chemical, General Motors, Union Carbide, Diamond Shamrock, and Texas Utilities don't think so . . . they've donated $289,000 to the project.
CONSERVATION AND SOLAR TECHNOLOGIES WILL PROVIDE FULL EMPLOYMENT at less cost (and with less degradation of the environment) than continued expenditures on large-scale, centralized energy sources. That's the bottom line from Jobs and Energy, a comprehensive review of the employment impact of alternative energy technologies, just released by Environmentalists For Full Employment. You can obtain your own copy of EFFE's 21-page report by sending $2.00/copy ($5.00/copy for institutions) to Environmentalists For Full Employment, 1785 Massachusetts Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.
MAFIA EYES ENERGY SCENE. Kentucky Securities Director Jack Bunnell reports that authorities in his state have uncovered attempts by underworld figures to acquire coal companies and/or coal leases in Kentucky, Alabama, Pennsylvania, and the Virginias. According to Bunnell, the organized crime operations surfaced only recently because of the cold winter . . . . Sweden's Professor Goesta Wranglen-president of the International Society of Electro-Chemistry-warns that there's only ONE WAY TO BURY NUCLEAR WASTES SAFELY, and that's to encapsulate them in gold. Only gold, says Wranglen, can withstand radiolysis (the corrosive effect of the "hot" water that surrounds the wastes) for thousands of years . . . . Got an energy-related invention you'd like the government to help you develop? The first step is to fill out an evaluation request form, which you can obtain from the OFFICE OF ENERGY-RELATED INVENTIONS, National Bureau of Standards, Washington, D.C. 20545. NBS will evaluate your invention free of charge and put you onto sources of funding if they think it's good . . . . MORE THAN 1,000 DEMONSTRATORS WERE ARRESTED following an April 30 protest gathering at the Seabrook, New Hampshire nuclear power plant construction site. Although the gathering was peaceful, Governor Meldrim Thompson told protestors they were "trespassing" . . . . The Housing and Urban Development Department's TOLL-FREE SOLAR HOTLINE (see Energy Flashes, MOTHER N0. 44) rang a record 3,215 times during the last week of April. As a result, the folks at HUD's National Solar Heating and Cooling Information Center now request that information-seekers write-not call-them at P.O. Box 1607, Rockville, Md. 20850.
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