Less than a year after announcing its deal with Merrill Lynch, Raser Technologies is set to open its first low-temp geothermal plant tomorrow in Utah. While it remains to be seen what happens when the switch is flipped, the company has so far made good on its promise to build geothermal plants in record time — it typically takes up to five years, and Raser has done it in less than one.

The 10-megawatt plant pulls together 50 small units to tap into a small sliver of 120,000 megawatts of low- and medium-temperature geothermal resources cataloged by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and U.S. Geological Survey. Raser claims accessing low- and medium-temp geothermal power could eventually help meet about a third of U.S. energy needs. “Many geothermal wells have already been drilled and capped in the past, but laid dormant because they were thought to be not hot enough to be economically viable,” says David West, VP of marketing for the company.

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Coal has been both a major sponsor of and a political weapon during the presidential campaign. And there’s a lot of news from the coal industry this week. A DOE-funded clean coal project began in Colorado, while, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity said today that coal’s public approval is up near 70 percent which gives the next president “a mandate” to use more coal.

U.S. coal interests aren’t the only ones garnering public support for their lobbying efforts. Vattenfall, a Swedish power company that burns tons of coal, is pushing its climate manifesto with a unique publicity twist - they’re placing a plastic figure for each signature in the middle of Place Luxembourg in Brussels for policy makers and the public to see.

ADA-ES Starts $3.2 Million Carbon Capture Project: ADA Environmental Solutions, an emissions controls developer based in Littleton, Colo., said today that it has started work on a project to capture and store carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants. The project focuses on developing materials to chemically and physically absorb CO2 from flue gases. The DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory is providing $2 million while private investors, including AEP, Luminant, Southern CO. and Xcel Energy, have agreed to foot the remaining $1.2 million.

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The eighth annual World Toilet Summit and Expo, which opens today in Macau, looks at how to provide affordable, environmentally friendly and basic access to sanitation. Forty percent of the world’s population — 2.5 billion people — do not have access to a hygienic toilet, according to the Singapore-based World Toilet Organization, and that leads to sewage flowing directly into waterways, affecting coastal and marine ecosystems and exposing millions of people to disease. The U.N., which has declared 2008 the International Year of Sanitation, says about 90 percent of sewage and 70 percent of industrial waste in developing countries are discharged, untreated, into waterways, often polluting the usable water supply.

At the summit, companies like Switzerland’s Geberit International will be on hand to show off the latest in sanitation technology, and this year’s conference features a Sustainable Sanitation Pavilion exhibiting the latest in low-water and waterless toilet systems. Some low-water toilets have a dual flush system, using a larger amount of water for solid waste and a smaller amount for urine. But the WTO believes advanced dry toilets could be the future of the technology.

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This year has brought more than its share of surprises to the energy industry, but the bankruptcy of ethanol giant VeraSun Energy was one that few would have predicted at the beginning of the year.

The stock started the year at $15.28, down from its June 2006 IPO price of $23 a share, but there was little indication of the sequence of hardships that would prompt the company to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which it did on Oct. 31. In VeraSun’s own words:

The Company suffered significant losses in the third quarter of 2008 from a dramatic spike in its corn costs, reflecting in part costs attributable to its corn procurement and hedging arrangements, and historically unfavorable margins. Beginning in the third quarter, worsening capital market conditions and a tightening of trade credit resulted in severe constraints on the Company’s liquidity position.

Corn and oil prices had been soaring when VeraSun locked into those arrangements. They have since plunged, making those contracts costly to maintain. Meanwhile, ethanol prices have also plunged, and cheaper oil means less demand for alternative fuels for now.

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Regulators are preparing to draft rules for the development of offshore wind projects in the Great Lakes, even though no official projects have been proposed just yet. Cuyahoga County in Ohio is spending $1 million on an offshore wind task force to create a feasibility study on the potential for a wind farm in Lake Erie near Cleveland. But before any turbines go up, regulators and lawmakers will have figure out zoning and leasing rights, and with eight states and two Canadian provinces bordering the lakes, it will take a coordinated interstate and international effort to lay the ground rules.

Regulators and wind energy companies have been eying the Great Lakes for years. In 2006, the U.S. Department of Energy hosted the Great Lakes Offshore Wind Technical Gathering, and just last month a study from the Michigan State University Land Policy Institute estimated that 100,000 turbines in Lake Michigan could generate 321,000 megawatts of energy. But if the progress of offshore wind projects in Rhode Island, New Jersey and Massachusetts is any indication, it will be years before any turbines start spinning up on the Great Lakes.

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The debris from Hurricane Ike, a depleted oil field and some biomass power expertise could soon start delivering clean power to the city of Houston, which is still recovering from the third-most destructive hurricane to hit the U.S. Biofuels Power Corp. signed an agreement today to create a biomass plant that will use wood chips and debris from the ongoing Hurricane Ike cleanup to produce 4 megawatts of clean energy and then sequester the carbon emissions in a depleted oil field.

Under the terms of the agreement, six acres of land will be leased from DSMC of Humble, Texas, a waste wood storage facility operator which has been the primary collector of debris for the City of Houston’s Hurricane Ike cleanup effort, and which will also supply the fodder for the plant. The land includes a number of abandoned oil wells that will be retrofitted for exhaust gas sequestration by Texoga Technologies Corp.. The end result will be a pilot-scale power plant that burns the city’s waste debris to produce power while safely storing the emissions underground. “We don’t expect our carbon sequestration activities to result in significant oil production, but surprising things can happen in old oil fields,” Fred O’Connor, president and CEO of Biofuels Power, said in a statement.

Biofuels Power will manage the project and contribute a 2.5-megawatt steam turbine, a 1.5-megawatt diesel electric generator and transformer and grid interconnect equipment. Based in The Woodlands, Texas, Biofuels Power currently operates two grid-connected biodiesel-powered plants and a biodiesel refinery.

Network-connected appliances that can be remotely turned off and on at various times of the day have largely been stuck in the realm of dark corporate labs; at least that’s how Andrew Tang, senior director of California utility PG&E, explained it to us recently. But this week, General Electric is actually taking the smart energy appliance plunge.

This week, GE announced that in the first quarter of next year the company will “introduce” energy management-enabled appliances that can be controlled remotely by the local utility. GE says it is working on smart refrigerators, ranges, washer and dryers, dishwashers and microwave ovens, and it will use some of the first smart appliances in select homes in a pilot program in Louisville, Ky., with Louisville Gas and Electric Company.

Why would GE want to do this? GE thinks that “within 10 years, energy management-enabled appliances could easily occupy the market space held by Energy Star products today.” That prediction could come true depending on how smart appliances are priced and marketed — and on how much money they can save consumers on electricity. But as Celeste pointed out, “the idea of the Internet-enabled home appliance has been around since the heady days of the dotcom boom.”

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It’s easy to read too much rational thought into a market that is as volatile as U.S. stocks are these days, but it seems First Solar has just handed the solar bulls a couple of very good reasons to be optimistic.

The Tempe, Ariz.-based, maker of thin-film solar modules said sales in the third quarter reached $348.7 million, up from the $339 million that analysts had been forecasting. Net income came in at $1.20 a share, a long shot past the $1.01 number from analysts.

Gross margin in the quarter came in at 56.1 percent, up from 54.2 percent in the previous quarter and 51.6 percent in the third quarter of 2007. Even more encouraging in these days of tight credit, free cash flow was $41.6 million after being negative for the past two quarters. Being able to generate cash from operations is a big plus for solar companies these days.

But as 24/7 Wall Street noted in a post, more positive news came from the company’s guidance during the conference call. First Solar expects net sales to come in between $1.22 billion and $1.24 billion this year and between $2.0 billion and $2.1 billion next year. Analysts had been looking for $1.21 billion this year and $2.13 billion next year.

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Wearing her giant polar bear pin and touring a thin-film solar plant, Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin looked ready to embrace the cleantech world with a major policy speech on energy today.

Alas, it was not to be. Instead, Palin delivered a speech on “energy independence” that made just a brief mention of “alternative sources of energy, like wind and solar.” Speaking at thin-film solar startup Xunlight’s Toledo, Ohio facility (previous coverage here), Palin reiterated her call to “drill here and drill now!” We’re not sure how much oil there is under Xunlight’s facility, and the startup has yet to return phone calls.

Snark not withstanding, Palin’s speech offered nothing new in terms of hard policy, but pulled the Republican’s energy plan into sharper focus using the lenses of energy independence and national security. While oil prices have slipped far from their summertime high, Palin warned that “the dangers of our dependence on foreign oil are just as they were before” and said that our enemies might use “energy as a weapon.”

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Plastic parts maker Cascade Engineering is bringing a small rooftop wind turbine called the SWIFT to North America. The company says the SWIFT is significantly quieter than traditional small wind turbines — less than 35 decibels, compared with 40 to 50 decibels for competing products. The tiny turbine is already available in the UK, Belgium, New Zealand and the Netherlands through its Scottish designer, Renewable Devices. Cascade has licensed the technology to bring it to the U.S.

Several cities, including San Francisco and New York, have called for more small wind systems to be installed on city buildings, so perhaps the Grand Rapids, Mich.-based Cascade could be a hit with urban planners concerned about noise pollution from wind turbines. Renewable Devices says the SWIFT is “the quietest wind system currently available,” due to a ring that connects the outer edges of the blades, which causes air to move silently off the rotor.

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