NPR has an excellent site to visualize the US electricity grid, sources of power, power plants, solar power, and wind power.

This is the existing grid

and in yellow are proposed lines

and here are power sources according to the EPA’s egrid database.

The Economist discusses the the issue of creating jobs by focusing on renewable energy projects may be not as good a deal as it looks.  The good thing for the data center industry we don’t look at green as a job creation benefit.

The grass is always greener

Apr 2nd 2009
From The Economist print edition

Saving the planet and creating jobs may be incompatible

Illustration by Jac Depczyk

“THINK of what’s happening in countries like Spain, Germany and Japan where they’re making real investments in renewable energy,” Barack Obama instructed Americans earlier this year. “They’re surging ahead of us, poised to take the lead in these new industries. This isn’t because they’re smarter than us, or work harder than us, or are more innovative than we are. It’s because their governments have harnessed their people’s hard work and ingenuity with bold investments—investments that are paying off in good, high-wage jobs.”

Mr Obama is right that many governments, not least his own, are spending heavily in a bid to create green jobs. Countries as diverse as Canada, China, France and Indonesia have vowed to cultivate greenery in an effort to fertilise their wilting economies. Religious leaders, trade unionists and the secretary-general of the United Nations, among others, have hailed green stimulus as a cure for the world economy’s ills. After all, it holds out the hope of a triple benefit: a return to economic growth, deliverance from global warming and an escape from dependence on imported fuels, all wrapped up in an appealingly high-tech package.

As the greenwashing goes, who can figure out what is going on?

There is no shortage of studies on green jobs that support this optimistic view. The Center for American Progress, a think-tank with close ties to Mr Obama’s administration, called last year for the government to spend $100 billion on various green initiatives. The reward, it calculated, would be 2m jobs.

Critics jump in

Critics of these studies, however, argue that they leave important questions unasked. For one thing, it is hard to know how impressive the employment figures are without considering how many jobs would be created by spending the money in other ways. A recent paper from the Peterson Institute of International Economics and the World Resources Institute, two think-tanks, tries to do just that for America’s stimulus package. It finds that $1 billion in green-tinted spending creates 30,100 “job-years”. That compares well with 25,200 job-years for road construction and only 7,000 for temporary tax cuts (permanent ones do better).

And special interests like the coal industry.

In 2006, in a study prepared for a pro-coal lobbying group, Adam Rose and Dan Wei of Pennsylvania State University looked at how increasing the share of renewables in electricity generation at the expense of coal might affect employment. Displacing a third of generation from coal by 2015 would put 1.2m people out of work, they concluded, and displacing two-thirds would raise the figure to 2.7m. The job losses came chiefly as a result of higher energy prices.

They do think of models to analyze the impacts.

Those findings, however, are based on modelling, with all the complications and caveats that entails. Mr Rose’s subsequent research, using different assumptions, has produced more ambiguous results. By contrast, Gabriel Calzada Álvarez, a professor at King Juan Carlos University in Madrid, has tried to use empirical data to estimate how Spain’s subsidies for renewables, which so impressed Mr Obama, will affect employment. He calculates that the subsidies for existing renewable-electricity plants, which the government has promised to pay for 25 years, will cost €29 billion. Those subsidies, in turn, have created 50,200 jobs, according to data from the European Commission. That equates to a subsidy of over €570,000 per job.

here is an example for Spain.  and, the author does close with the point, the biggest benefit is the environment.

Solar eclipse

Spain’s private sector, on the other hand, creates a job for every €260,000 or so invested, by Mr Calzada’s reckoning. So if the government had left the €29 billion in the hands of the private sector, it would have created 113,000 jobs with it—2.2 times as many. In other words, the government, Mr Calzada finds, is destroying 2.2 ordinary jobs for every green one it creates.

The result is particularly garish because Spain’s subsidies for renewables have been so generous (it recently scaled them back for new projects). Green subsidies bring other benefits that Mr Calzada does not consider, such as reducing demand for, and thus the price of, fossil fuels. The biggest benefit of all, of course, is to the environment, in the form of reduced emissions of greenhouse gases. Taking all of that into account would doubtless make the numbers look better. Nonetheless, Mr Calzada’s paper does suggest that Mr Obama should temper his enthusiasm for Spain’s “bold investments” in renewable energy. As all the studies discussed suggest, some ways of creating jobs—or fighting global warming, for that matter—are cheaper than others.

News.com has a post on Massachusetts microwind turbine project.

Study: Microwind turbines a tough sell in Mass.

by Martin LaMonica

BOSTON--Despite the growing enthusiasm for home wind turbines, an analysis of microwind turbines in Massachusetts found that they fell short of performance expectations.

The Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust commissioned a study last year to review electricity output from 21 small wind turbines in the state and the results were surprising: the data showed that the estimated production was about three times higher than the turbines' actual production.

Oops, the estimated production was three times higher?  And as the article states few ever go back and measure the performance in the field.

The analysis is not the final word on small wind generators, but is significant because few states have done similar reviews, say the study's authors.

The Swift wind turbine from Cascade Engineering, one of many new small wind turbines now available or being developed.

(Credit: Cascade Engineering)

The Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust was "taken aback" at the discrepancy in expected versus actual performance and made changes to its "small wind" rebate program earlier this month to address the issue, said James Christo, a program director from the quasi-public state agency. Christo spoke on a panel on small wind--defined as less than 10-kilowatt capacity machines--at the Northeast Sustainable Energy Building Energy Conference here last week.

What are some of the issues.

Data problem
The Massachusetts state analysis tried to pinpoint the reason for the underperforming turbines and found that installers often worked without sufficiently good information.

Area wind maps for the region tended to overestimate on average by 10 percent how good the wind was for certain locations, according to Shawn Shaw, an analyst at the Cadmus Group who worked on the study.

Another problem is the rated capacity--how much electricity a turbine can produce--that manufacturers publish aren't always reliable for extrapolating expected performance, Shaw found. Industry associations are trying to come up with standard ways of reporting capacity which will help, he added.

"You want to be internally honest about your (wind resource) assessments," Shaw said. "The economics are going to probably be the best driver in Massachusetts."

A state like Massachusetts has a good wind resource near the coast, but its hilly and woody terrain means that finding a good site requires some investigation.

Installers and customers should be aware, for example, that nearby obstructions can have a significant impact. A 100-foot wind tower placed next to a 50-foot tree is effectively the same as a putting turbine on top of a 50-foot tower, which means it will get a lot less wind, Shaw said.

The results from the Massachusetts study echoes a similar survey done in the U.K. over the past two years, called the Warwick Trials.

That study focused specifically on urban microwind turbines, some of which were roof-mounted. Overall, it found that the performance of these systems fell below expectations as well and that a number suffered technical glitches.

"The truth of the matter is that (urban wind) hasn't been studied very much, at least in the U.S.," said Shaw. "There's a tremendous amount of uncertainty."

And, now they are going to do what should have been done in the beginning.  Set up a performance lab to evaluate devices.

To test urban wind turbines, Christo said the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust is sponsoring a "science experiment" to put up five turbines from different manufacturers at the Museum of Science, a project expected to go up this spring.

MSNBC.com has an article on coal’s issues.

King Coal's reign challenged in courts, D.C.

Environmentalists sue, lawmakers use stimulus for cleaner renewables

This coal-fired power plant is one of some 600 across the U.S. that provide half of the country's electricity. Coal companies are scrambling after federal subsidies to develop cleaner coal — a strategy they hope will end the beating the industry is taking over climate change.

updated 22 minutes ago

BILLINGS, Mont. - Beneath the frozen plains of eastern Montana and Wyoming lie the largest coal deposits in the world — enough to last the United States more than a century at the nation's current burn rate.

The fuel literally spills from the ground where streambanks cut into the earth, hinting at reserves estimated at 180 billion tons. But even here lawsuits over global warming and the changing political landscape in Washington are pummeling an industry that has long been the backbone of America's power supply.

How bad is it?  Here are few examples of changes in coal plants.

In recent weeks, a group of rural Montana electric co-ops abandoned a partially built 250-megawatt coal plant, ending a four-year legal campaign by environmentalists to stop the project. The co-ops plan to instead get their electricity from a natural gas plant — more expensive for customers but also more likely to get built.

A few miles away, the U.S. Air Force dropped plans for a major coal-to-jet fuel plant once touted as the harbinger of a new market for coal. There are no signs it will be revived.

Other plants are moving forward in Montana and at least a dozen other states, but the exodus from coal has hit every corner of the country. On Thursday, two more were shelved — plants in Iowa and Nevada that would have generated enough power for 1.6 million homes.

In Nevada, LS Power said it was postponing a 1,600 megawatt coal plant and will instead focus on tapping the state's geothermal, wind and solar potential. Iowa's Interstate Power and Light dropped a 630 megawatt plant as it pursues a 200 megawatt wind farm.

"In the last year the world has changed 180 degrees," said Bruce Nilles, director of the Sierra Club's "Beyond Coal" campaign.

But coal still produces 50% of the US’s electricity.

Still provides half of electricity
But Lucas and other point out that despite the setbacks, the coal-fired power industry continues to enjoy its largest expansion in three decades. The Department of Energy tallies 28 plants now under construction.

They will join an estimated 600 coal plants that currently provide about half of the nation's electricity. The rest comes from a mix of natural gas, fuel oil and renewables such as wind and geothermal.

The Sierra Club's Nilles acknowledged his group's anti-coal campaign has so far made little headway with existing coal plants. Those plants produce about 2 billion tons annually of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide — roughly a third of the United States' total global warming emissions.