Denver international airport

As part of my never ending effort to stay aware of the world around me, this week I attended a Renewable Energy presentation offered by XCEL Energy.  Allow me to list a few presented facts:

• 11% of the energy sold by XCEL Energy today is renewable
• XCEL’s year 2020 goal is to sell 29% of or their energy product from renewable sources
• There will continue to be increasing state and Federal mandates on implementation of renewable energy.
• Everyone should become familiar with the terms “LEED“, “REC“,and “Green-E“
• The average American home uses 1000 Kilowatt Hours of electricity per month
• Coal and Gas powered electricity plants expend between 2 and 5 cents to generate a Kilowatt Hour (kWh) of Electric Energy
• “Big Wind” (turbine farms) expend 3 to 9 cents to generate a kWh of electric energy.
• “Small Wind” (single user) expend 12 to 25 cents per kWh.
• Solar energy costs vary between 20 and 30 cents per kWh
• The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, located in Golden, Colorado, is conducting research in many ways to generate energy
• Current practical applications being pursued include “wind to hydrogen conversion”, “wind to battery”, and “distributed home generated power”.
• Colorado ranks #5 in solar power capacity
• There is an 8.2 Megawatt (MW) solar facility operating in Alamosa, Colorado; current XCEL requests for proposal’s (RFP’s) to build solar generating facilities are set to produce 75 MW of power, with potential RFP’s slated for an additional 300 MW’s of power.
• The solar generating facility recently installed at Denver International Airport has a 2 MW capacity.
• In the United States today there are 71,000 customers using purchased wind energy, and over 1000 business customer’s.
• A New Mexico company, Hyperion Generation, has a 5 year plan to market a small nuclear power plant (the size of a storage shed or hot tub)  that will generate 25 MW of electric power, or enough for 20,000 American homes and related infrastructure.

The “green collar” jobs that will have to be created in order to move the United States away from the use of coal and oil energy use will tax our available labor pool in 5 to 10 years.  Colorado and the Denver area are well suited to capture an increasing share of business’s that will provide the facilities and infrastructure for renewable energy.

Written by Larry D. McGee, Denver Realtor - Visit Website Sphere: Related Content