500 Homes is 500 Homes and combining wind power with storage is Wind WIND for everyone!

Xcel Tests Wind Power Battery

(ABC 6 NEWS) — A groundbreaking project in southwest Minnesota could spark a new way to store renewable energy.

Xcel Energy’s “Wind to Battery” project is the first test in the country to store power generated by wind farms.

The project uses breakthrough technology to harnesses wind power in a battery.

The battery weighs about 80 tons and is the size of two tractor trailers stacked on top of each other.

“This, of course, is a small test by utility standards, but it should be able to provide us the seed information that would help us determine what the impact might be,” says Xcel Energy spokesman Frank Novachek.

When it is fully charged, the massive battery can power 500 homes for about seven hours.

How bad is the worlds economy????? When one mans trash is NOT another mans Cash, we in trouble………
Faced with a dramatic slump in the recycling market, the director of the Kanawha County Solid Waste Authority has cut 20 of his 24 employees’ work week to four days from five, shuttered six of the authority’s drop-off stations and is urging residents to hoard their recyclables after informing municipalities with curbside recycling programs that the center will accept only paper until further notice.

“The market is just not there anymore,” Steenstra said.

Just months after riding an incredible high, the recycling market has tanked almost in lockstep with the global economic meltdown. As consumer demand for autos, appliances and new homes dropped, so did the steel and pulp mills’ demand for scrap, paper and other recyclables.

Cardboard that sold for about $135 a ton in September is now going for $35 a ton. Plastic bottles have fallen from 25 cents to 2 cents a pound. Aluminum cans dropped nearly half to about 40 cents a pound, and scrap metal tumbled from $525 a gross ton to about $100.

Wind is on pace to deliver clean energy and clean air by 2020 if we dont pollute China before 2020.
Already today, wind energy is working in over 70 countries around the world, saving hundreds of millions of tons of CO2 emissions and delivering clean, reliable energy. However, for wind energy to meet its full potential we need ambitious and legally binding emissions reduction targets and expanded carbon market mechanisms to facilitate the broadest dissemination of wind power. Wind is the leading electricity generation technology that can deliver major emissions reductions in the critical timeframe up to 2020,” said GWEC’s Secretary General Steve Sawyer.

In its recently published ‘Wind Energy Outlook 2008’, GWEC set out a scenario under which wind energy could provide 12% of global electricity needs and save 1.5 billion tonnes of CO2 every year by 2020. This would add up to 10 billion tonnes of CO2 mitigated by wind power within this time frame.

Nothing big but every MW counts when you compare the amount of carbon footprints we do not use producing carbon free wind………
France’s Largest Wind Project Commissioned
EDF Energies Nouvelles (EDFEN) has commissioned the 52-megawatt (MW) Chemin d’Ablis wind farm, the country’s largest such project to date. The project, which is spread across eight communes of the Eure-et-Loir department and is built alongside a 17-kilometer stretch of the A10 autoroute, comprises 26 wind turbines.

the current price is NOT the reality down the road………BUY APWR MONDAY with both hands wide open!!!!
I am not sure a lot of people realize just how significant a player APWR can become in the wind turbine business if it can execute its’ game plan. Let’s say that APWR right now was operating at full capacity at its’ Shenyang facility (without the 30% planned expansion) as well as operating at full capacity at the Bayan City facility (still to be completed). If all that capacity was on line now, which it is not, APWR would be producing 1800 MW of wind turbine output. In 2007, Vestas, the world’s largest wind turbine seller, supplied 4503 MW of wind turbine power. Those 4503 MWs amounted to 23% of the world market share. GE was in second place with 3283 MW, Gamesa supplied 3047, Enercon 2769, and Suzlon was in fifth place with 2082 MW. If APWR was delivering the 1800 MW it plans to produce, it would have been the sixth largest wind turbine producer in the world in 2007.
To put all this in another context, the current APWR plant in Shenyang has the capacity by itself, to produce 1125 MW of wind turbine power. In 2007, the largest China turbine manufacturer, Goldwin, produced 830 MW. Goldwin is not only the largest turbine builder in China, but it is also the 8th largest worldwide.
Let’s try to convert the numbers above into dollar flow. APWR says they expect the first two plants (Shenyang and Bayan) to be operating at full capacity in 2010 and producing 1800 MWs of the large wind turbines. Full capacity is often hard to achieve so let’s say that the two plants will produce 1260 MWs (70 % of 1800) of the large 2.7 MW turbines and a small amount of the smaller turbines which we won’t even consider here. In my earlier post I suggested that turbines of the 2.7 MW size will sell for $1.5 million per MW (in 2010) so the 1260 MWs will generate $1.890 Billion dollars in revenue. If the DPG business adds another $1 Billion in 2010 (which should not be too tough since the current backlog is $789 million without the Thai contract), then total 2010 revenue is $2.890 Billion. If we then use a very conservative 8% net margin, we earn $231 million or $6.42 per share on 36 million shares. By 2010 we hopefully will be back to more normal PEs and I will let you apply whatever PE you think applicable. But a 15x PE puts the stock price at $96.
At this point you should keep a few things in mind. First, the 2010 big turbine actual production could be well above 1260 KWs since I used just 70% of expected production and did not include any of the production capacity of the Phase 2 expansion at Shenyang. Second, I did not include any small turbine (750 KW) production in my projections at all, but there surely will be a bunch. And finally, the 8% net margin is unrealistically low because the DPG business is already operating at net margins higher than that, and the company has said the net margin for the wind turbines will be in the 10 – 12% range as they begin to get components from China sources. If you replace the 8% margin with a 10% margin, the 2010 EPS becomes $8.03 instead of $6.42, and a 15x PE now puts the stock price at $120.

grabbed from the Economist……..
Wind power is growing fast

THE first wind farms sprouted in California in the early 1980s, thanks to generous tax credits. Today’s machines typically have a capacity of 1.5-2.5 megawatts, or 30 to 50 times that of early turbines. Although wind generates only about 1% of all electricity globally, it provides a respectable portion in several European countries: 20% in Denmark, 10% in Spain and about 7% in Germany. Capacity in America jumped by 45% last year to reach nearly 17 gigawatts (GW). China has nearly doubled its capacity every year since 2004. Globally, wind power installations are expected to triple from 94GW at the end of 2007 to nearly 290GW in 2012, according to BTM Consult, a Danish market-research firm.

I cannot stress the NEED for SPEED in the purchase as the NEWS is about to flow!!!!
It’s been almost 3 weeks since the company released news. I feel more good news coming – probably on Monday. Announcements I expect in the next week or two include (1) new CFO, (2) a re-affirmation that the huge Thai DPG contract for $300M is on track in spite of the (usual) unrest in the country, (3) an update of the backlog since the end of Q3 – pushing it over $1 Billion – with the names and locations of those projects (like they did in the 3Q conf call), (4) the receipt of payment for the first 2.7MW Fuhrlander wind turbine sales with the intial package of 10 ($40 Million), (5) announcements of more contracts (over and above the initial 55 turbines) for sale of the 2.7MW wind turbines (6) the commencement of 750KW Norwind wind turbine sales with the first package of 20 ($15 Million), (5) announcements of more contracts for sale of the 2.7MW wind turbines, (6) a pre-announcement of record Q profit in 4th Q ($.48) (which is almost over already), (7) a pre-announcement record quarterly sales in 4th Q ($145 Million in sales in one quarter – 1.2 times the Market Cap), etc((((Borrowed from Idiot_Bashe on Yahoo)))

Renewables might finally catch some updraft with OPEC going to cut production

AP Interview: OPEC head predicts output cuts
Sunday December 7, 4:16 am ET
By Alfred de Montesquiou, Associated Press Writer
AP Interview: OPEC head warns of ’surprise’ in oil output cuts, hints they may be deep

ALGIERS, Algeria (AP) — Oil markets should brace for a surprise decision on output cuts when OPEC meets Dec. 17, the cartel’s president said Saturday, suggesting that reductions could be deeper than expected.