According to the AWEA (American Wind Energy Association), the U.S. wind industry broke all previous records by installing nearly 10,000 megawatts (MW) of new generating capacity in 2009 (enough to serve over 2.4 million homes), but still lags in manufacturing, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) said today in its Q4 report. These new projects place wind power neck and neck with natural gas as the leading source of new electricity generation for the country.  Together, the two sources account for about 80% of the new capacity added in the country last year.

But is this enough?

“The U.S. wind energy industry shattered all installation records in 2009, chalking up the Recovery Act as a historic success in creating jobs, avoiding carbon, and protecting consumers,” said AWEA CEO Denise Bode. “But U.S. wind turbine manufacturing – the canary in the mine — is down compared to last year’s levels, and needs long-term policy certainty and market pull in order to grow.  We need to set hard targets, in the form of a national Renewable Electricity Standard (RES), in order to provide the necessary stability for manufacturers to expand their U.S. operations and to seize the historic opportunity we have today to build up a thriving renewable energy industry.”
Where is this wind power?

Amongst other places, deep in the heart of Texas.

See the table below, showing the top 5 states in terms of  MW of power installed.

Texas, the nation’s wind-power leader, set a new record for wind generation today, March 5, 2010, when — at 6:37 a.m. — about 19 percent of the electricity on the state’s main grid was supplied by turbines.

But sometimes, the problem – strangely enough – is that the wind turbines are shut down because they are generating too much power, yielding an effect in which the value of the electricity they generate is actually lower than zero.  Read this snippet from the New York Times eco blog, GreenInc:

“Texas’s progress in installing turbines is testing the bounds of just how much wind the electrical grid can handle. Some turbines are slowed or shut down on windy days because the state does not have sufficient transmission wires to move all the power from the remote, windy areas of West Texas to cities like Dallas and Houston that need it. Last night and this morning, for example, the prices for wind generation offered on the main Texas grid actually fell below zero, a sign of oversupply that usually prompts wind generators to shut their turbines down.

Texas is spending nearly $5 billion to fix the transmission problem. It plans to build a web of power lines that would be able to deliver the wind energy from congested West Texas, home to 89 percent of the wind capacity on the state’s main grid, to power-hungry cities. That process, however, looks likely to be delayed by a recent court decision.”

Whoa.  Here at EarthPM that sparks (yes, a pun!) a lot of ideas for projects.  Power transmission projects.  Power storage projects.  So we’d like to hear about some record number of project managers being hired…

Gina Abudi is the creator the Peak Performance blog and an accomplished PM leader, having earned a place in PMI’s “Power 50″ – the 50 most influential people in our field.

There she is, below.

She’s invited us to guest post on her blog, and of course we took her up on the offer.

Take a peek at our posting,  and see if this Peak Performance posting piques your interest.

http://www.ginaabudi.com/greenality-and-projects/

Have you ever heard of “hypoxia”?  Perhaps you’ve heard of the more informal moniker: Dead Zones.

Should you be interested?  Perhaps only if you eat.  Have a look at this quote:

“More than 212,000 metric tons [235,000 tons] of food is lost to hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico,” says marine biologist Robert Diaz of The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., who surveyed the dead zones along with marine ecologist Rutger Rosenberg of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. “That’s enough to feed 75 percent of the average brown shrimp harvest from the Louisiana gulf. If there was no hypoxia and there was that much more food, don’t you think the shrimp and crabs would be happier? They would certainly be fatter.”

Hypoxic, or “dead” zones, are becoming more prevalent, and may trigger projects to try to reduce their effect and/or prevent them from getting so severe.  The Hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico, pictured above, is about the size of New Jersey.  Although the basis for hypoxia is natural and this occurs without the help of humans (or pollutants), the prevalence, severity, and size of these zones has been increasing and is traceable to – well, to you and me – because the farmers that fertilize their land along the Mississippi, for example, are doing so on our behalf.

We suggest you watch this fast-moving video before continuing: click here. Or this one.  Or, click here.

Only a few dead zones have ever recovered, such as the Black Sea, which rebounded quickly in the 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union and a massive reduction in fertilizer runoff from fields in Russia and Ukraine. Fertilizer contains large amounts of nitrogen, and it runs off of agricultural fields in water and into rivers, and eventually into oceans.

This fertilizer runoff, instead of contributing to more corn or wheat, feeds massive algae blooms in the coastal oceans. This algae, in turn, dies and sinks to the bottom where it is consumed by microbes, which consume oxygen in the process. More algae means more oxygen-burning, and thereby less oxygen in the water, resulting in a massive flight by those fish, crustaceans and other ocean-dwellers able to relocate as well as the mass death of immobile creatures, such as clams or other bottom-dwellers. And that’s when the microbes that thrive in oxygen-free environments take over, forming vast bacterial mats that produce hydrogen sulfide, a toxic gas.

Diaz continues: “The primary culprit in marine environments is nitrogen and, nowadays, the biggest contributor of nitrogen to marine systems is agriculture. It’s the same scenario all over the world,” Diaz says. “Farmers are not doing it on purpose. They’d prefer to have it stick on the land.”

In addition to fertilizers, the other primary culprit is the consumption of fossil fuels. Burning gasoline and diesel results in smog-forming nitrogen oxides, which subsequently clear when rain washes the nitrogen out of the sky and, ultimately, into the ocean.

Technological improvements, such as electric or hydrogen cars, could solve that problem but the agricultural question is trickier. “Nitrogen is very slippery; it’s very difficult to keep it on land,” Diaz notes. “We need to find a technology to keep nitrogen from leaving the soil.”

Here is a “Hypoxia 101″ tutorial from the EPA.

To read a detailed PDF from which we got the quotes above, click here.

For a general page about the Mississippi Basin covering many threats to that extensive region, click here.

We discuss hypoxia in our upcoming book.  We do this not to be alarmist, but to be practical.  As project managers we sense that this is an important phenomenon to be aware of, conversant about – you may be asked to manage a project to reduce nitrogen content of a fertilizer.  Who knows?

You can find out whether your Alma Mater is making a difference in Sustainability.  We’ve found a great site that allows you to check out most colleges in terms of their efforts to keep themselves green with green projects, green buildings, even in their transparency about the way environmental decisions are made.

If you are an Alum of the University of New Hampshire, you’ll probably be happy with what you see.  If you happen to be from Duquense University, however, well… er…not so much.

The site does a tremendous job in allowing you to search by school, by state, even by athletic conference.  You can also see how a school’s grades in each of the subcategories are improving (or not!) from year to year.

This is a non-profit organization which appears to put a great deal of thinking into their analysis.

From their site:

What is the College Sustainability Report Card?

The College Sustainability Report Card is the only comparative evaluation of campus and endowment sustainability activities at colleges and universities in the United States and in Canada. In contrast to an academic focus on sustainability in research and teaching, the Report Card examines colleges and universities, as institutions, through the lens of sustainability.

The Report Card is designed to identify colleges and universities that are leaders in sustainability. The aim is to provide accessible information for schools to learn from each other’s experiences and establish more effective sustainability practices.

The College Sustainability Report Card 2010 has the highest participation rate of any sustainability ranking or rating, with 318 of 332 schools (96 percent) responding to at least one Report Card survey.

What is the Sustainable Endowments Institute?

The Sustainable Endowments Institute is a nonprofit organization engaged in research and education to advance sustainability in campus operations and endowment practices. The College Sustainability Report Card and GreenReportCard.org are initiatives of the Institute.

Founded in 2005, the Institute is a special project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. Please see About SEI for more information.

Here is a summary of their methodology.

• Selection: The College Sustainability Report Card 2010 evaluates environmental sustainability efforts at 332 schools in the United States and Canada.
• Survey Composition: Four surveys were designed to gather information about sustainability in campus operations, dining services, endowment investment practices and student activities. This year, for the first time, the complete survey responses are available online.
• Data Collection & Verification: Data collection for the College Sustainability Report Card 2010 took place from June through August 2009. The research process included sending surveys to administrators and students at all 332 institutions. Researchers also gathered information from publicly available sources.
• Assessment: A school’s overall grade is calculated from the grades received in nine equally-weighted categories. A total of 48 indicators are used to evaluate performance within the categories.
• Recognition:The Overall College Sustainability Leaders award is given to schools that have made notable achievements i

For our international readers, unfortunately this is focused on the US and Canada only but it’s a great model, not only for schools but other organziations.

Check out your school’s report card here:

http://www.greenreportcard.org/

Looks like EarthPM is starting to gain some notoriety, and luckily, it’s of the good kind.

We were recently put on the list of Top 100 Project Management Blogs, in the ’specialty’ section, as ranked by Construction Management Degrees. Have a look.  And please help spread the word about our site – we’re getting flooded with hits, it’s true, but we’re trying to reach an even broader audience of project managers.

Thanks.