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On World Water Day, DOE Announces Investments to Advance Water Power as a Source of Clean Energy

Collegiate Competitions, Fellowship Selections, and New Prize will Advance Marine Energy and Hydropower Technologies and Workforce

From the U.S. Department of Energy

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today, on World Water Day, launched a $2.3 million prize to advance new technologies to harness power from ocean waves. DOE also opened applications for the next rounds of the hydropower and marine energy collegiate competitions and announced five students selected for fellowships to advance marine energy research.

Marine energy and hydropower are versatile, reliable sources of renewable energy that will play key roles in meeting the Biden administration’s goals of a carbon-free electricity sector by 2035 and a net-zero-emissions economy by 2050. To capture these resources, DOE invests in research and development to advance these technologies and supports workforce development efforts to build the future clean energy workforce.

Today, DOE announced:

The launch of the Innovating Distributed Embedded Energy Prize (InDEEP) to advance new technologies to harness and convert power from ocean waves. The three-phase prize will foster the development of distributed embedded energy converter technologies (DEEC-Tec), which combine many small energy converters, often less than a few centimeters in size, into a single, larger ocean wave energy converter. InDEEP aims to support early-stage DEEC-Tec research that lays the foundation for the eventual deployment of these technologies at all scales, including providing power to electricity grids.

The opening of applications for the second annual Hydropower Collegiate Competition and the fifth annual Marine Energy Collegiate Competition. These two competitions help undergraduate and graduate students prepare for jobs in hydropower, marine energy, and related industries by challenging them to develop unique solutions to advance these technologies. These competitions strive to engage students with a wide range of skills, experiences, and perspectives to prepare them for many different roles in these fields.
Five Ph.D. and master’s students were selected to participate in the Marine Energy Graduate Student Research Program. These students will undertake research to advance the understanding and development of marine energy resources through work with DOE’s national laboratories and other government and industry partners, including the Department of Defense.

Marine energy uses natural energy from moving water—such as waves, tides, and river and ocean currents—to produce renewable power. The power coursing through oceans and rivers equates to nearly 60% of the United States’ total electricity needs in 2019. Even if only a small portion of this technical resource potential is captured, marine energy could make significant contributions to the nation’s energy needs.

Meanwhile, hydropower is one of the oldest and largest sources of renewable energy. In 2021, hydropower accounted for 31.5% of U.S. renewable electricity generation, while pumped storage hydropower remains the largest contributor to U.S. energy storage, representing roughly 93% of all commercial storage capacity in the United States.

These initiatives are led by DOE’s Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO).

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Nine-car PATH trains debut on the Newark-World Trade Center line

Longer PATH nine car trains start rolling — Construction crews had to drill rock in order to lengthen platforms at the Exchange Place PATH station in Jersey City in 2022. That work allowed PATH to run longer nine-car trains which begin operation Thursday, March 23.

By Larry Higgs | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

The first nine-car train in the PATH’s 100-year history will start rolling on the busy Newark-World Trade Center line Thursday morning, Gov. Phil Murphy and Port Authority officials announced Wednesday.

Murphy and Port Authority of New York and New Jersey officials made the announcement Wednesday at the Harrison station that spells relief for commuters who’ve coped with crowded trains and platforms. The longer trains will be phased in gradually during the next 12 months, with a goal for nearly all trains on the NWK-WTC line at peak times to be nine-car trains by the beginning of 2024, officials said.

Harrison Council Jame Doran recalled the situation that PATH’s $1 billion expansion program and nine-car trains are addressing.

“It was a little like getting in a sardine can it was so crowded,” he said. “I thank the Port Authority for recognizing it with the extended trains and building a new (Harrison) station.”

Nine-car trains start a gradual roll-out starting with the Thursday morning rush and afternoon, which will increase over time.

The longer trains are being made possible by two separate projects – one completed last year to lengthen five New Jersey station platforms to accommodate nine cars, and the other which began last September when the first of 72 new PATH PA-5 railcars started arriving in Port Newark.

Read the full story here

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Warehouse developer moves quickly to avoid a ban

By EVAN JONES, The Morning Call

Jaindl applied to build the warehouses the day before a Lehigh Valley township passed a ban on such projects.

Truck access to a proposed 450,000-square-foot warehouse in Lower Nazareth Township in the Lehigh Valley has drawn concern from a few members of the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission’s Comprehensive Planning Committee.

The warehouse, which is being developed by Jaindl Farms, is located at 523 Nazareth Pike, just north of the intersection of Routes 191 and 946. The LVPC’s study of the project found that it would generate 500 passenger vehicles and 270 truck trips per day. The stretch of Route 191 already averages about 10,000 vehicles per day, according to PennDOT.

A second warehouse — measuring 72,850 square feet — has also been proposed by Jaindl at 4215 Lonat Drive, across the street from the first.

Read the full story here

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A study says New York utilities must chart a new course if the state is to reach its climate goals

Utilities can’t keep spending on pipelines, and alternative fuels can’t scale. But electric heat and thermal networks could save utility business models and jobs.

Pipeline being installed in a city street — *National Grid’s North Brooklyn Pipeline phase 4 construction in the Bushwick area of Brooklyn (Erik McGregor/LightRocket/Getty Images)*

By Jeff St. John, Canary Media

If New York wants to meet its climate goals, the state’s gas utilities can’t stick to business as usual. Nor can they keep investing billions of dollars in maintaining and expanding the nearly 50,000 miles of gas pipeline they’ve laid over the course of the past half-century.

Instead, state regulators have to start acting now to force the nearly 150-year-old industry to undergo a “managed, phased transition” to a new carbon-free path — or the consequences could be catastrophic.

That’s the key takeaway of the Future of Gas in New York State report released last week by the nonprofit Building Decarbonization Coalition. It concludes that New York must not only halt existing plans to expand and maintain gas pipelines crisscrossing the state but also replace them with alternatives such as underground “thermal energy networks” and electric heat pumps and appliances.

Without a state-guided shift, New York won’t just fail to meet the decarbonization goals it passed into law in 2019, said Lisa Dix, the coalition’s New York director. “If we continue business as usual — which is what we’ve been doing since the climate law passed — we’re going to see ballooning costs, and a potential energy crisis, for New York gas customers,” she said.

Read the full story here

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Goodness gracious, great blob of seaweed!

Here's the Real Story behind the Massive 'Blob' of Seaweed Heading toward Florida — Sargassum piles up on the sands of Juno Beach, Fla., in July 2020. Sargassum has plagued Palm Beach County beaches in recent years, with ample amounts reaching the Gulf Stream. Credit: Joe Forzano/The Palm Beach Post/ZUMA Wire/Alamy Live News

By Meghan Bartels, Scientific America on March 17, 2023

A loose raft of brown seaweed spanning about twice the width of the U.S. is inching across the Caribbean. Currently, bucketloads of the buoyant algae are washing up on beaches on the eastern coast of Florida earlier in the year than usual, raising scientists’ concerns for what the coming months will bring.

The seaweed is made up of algal species in the genus Sargassum. These species grow as a mat of glops of algae that stay afloat via little air-filled sacs attached to leafy structures. The algae form a belt between the Caribbean and West Africa in the Sargasso Sea in the North Atlantic Ocean and then ride the currents west. Scientists say that reports of a massive blob of seaweed slamming into coastlines are overblown because the Sargassum algae are scattered across the ocean, and much of the seaweed will never reach the coast’s sandy shores. But in recent years researchers have generally seen larger so-called Sargassum blooms. And once the seaweed begins washing up on beaches and rotting, it can cause serious problems, local communities say.

Among annual Sargassum censuses in the Atlantic Ocean, “2018 was the record year, and we’ve had several big years since,” says Brian Lapointe, an oceanographer at Florida Atlantic University, who has studied seaweed for decades. “This is the new normal, and we’re going to have to adapt to it.”

The seaweed “blob” has been dubbed the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, and though it’s sprawling, the algae in the belt cover only about 0.1 percent of the water’s surface, says Chuanmin Hu, an oceanographer at the University of South Florida, who has used satellites to study Sargassum for nearly 20 years.

Hu and his colleagues estimate the total mass of Sargassum in the Atlantic every month, tracking a yearly cycle that typically peaks in June. To do so, they use data collected by NASA satellites such as Terra and Aqua, as well as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellites. Last year the seaweed broke the record for the highest amount ever recorded in the Atlantic, with some 22 million metric tons of the stuff found across the ocean, according to the team’s calculations.

Hu says the team estimated that the Atlantic contained about six million metric tons of Sargassum in February and that he’s confident March’s mass will be higher. “This month there should be more. There’s no doubt,” Hu says. “Even in the first two weeks, I have seen increased amounts.”

Read the full story here

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Anemic post-Covid ridership forces NJ’s oldest bus company to end commuter service

By Larry Higgs | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

One of New Jersey’s legacy bus companies, which started as a stagecoach line in 1870, is ceasing commuter bus service on April 7.

DeCamp Bus Lines, which will continue to operate charter and casino service, will stop operating its seven commuter routes due to ridership that never returned to pre-COVID 19 pandemic levels, said Jonathan DeCamp, vice president and chief operating officer of the Essex County-based bus company.

“The ridership hasn’t returned, on a monthly basis, we are carrying less than 20% of what did pre-COVID, that’s why the tough decision was made,” he said. “We were able to sustain it up to this point because of the various federal and state programs.”

But that aid has run out and the company can’t keep running that service at a loss, meaning the last commuter routes will be run on April 7, he said. Pre-COVID, DeCamp ran seven commuter routes; three of them returned to service on abbreviated schedules.

Passenger levels dropped from an average of 6,800 riders pre-COVID to 1,250 passengers, DeCamp said.

Read the full story here

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On World Water Day, DOE Announces Investments to Advance Water Power as a Source of Clean Energy

Nine-car PATH trains debut on the Newark-World Trade Center line

Warehouse developer moves quickly to avoid a ban

Jaindl applied to build the warehouses the day before a Lehigh Valley township passed a ban on such projects.

A study says New York utilities must chart a new course if the state is to reach its climate goals

Goodness gracious, great blob of seaweed!

Anemic post-Covid ridership forces NJ’s oldest bus company to end commuter service

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