Oil prices close at $114.65 a barrel today, the lowest closing price since May 1st. Record high oil prices aren’t bad news for everyone, especially companies in the business of building infrastructure to help support the growing demand for natural gas and nuclear projects.

Fluor Corporation, a leading contractor in energy infrastructure development, saw its second quarter net income double. Every sector of the company grew last quarter, but industrial-and-infrastructure grew 500%. The company is benefiting from high oil prices as consumers and politicians plan for alternatives such as increased use of nuclear power.

The Wall Street Journal reports that as long as crude oil prices remain above $70 a barrel, Fluor will have room to continue investing in capital projects in the energy sector.

Well, it only took 8 days and the help of my brother to find what I was looking for in thermal solar energy (Can We Harness More Solar Energy From The Sun – Heat?). An Australian based company named EnviroMission has plans to build a Solar Tower to leverage thermal energy from the sun on a large scale. The first installment of the project will provide power to an estimated 200,000 homes by delivering 200 megawatts of electricity.

So what is the project and how does it work? The video below illustrates it best.

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Basically, a massive tower is built in the middle of an array of “solar collectors” which is one giant greenhouse that heats the air which is then sucked up through the tower. As the hot air rises up through the tower and out of the greenhouse, it passes through several turbines that rotate to generate electricity. A nice animation can be found here on the EnviroMission website.

To get some scope of just how large this tower could be, comparisons are being made to the Sears Tower in Chicago which rises 1,705 feet above the ground (including its antennas). According to CNN Money, “A half-mile-tall version is in the works for China…”. That’s roughly 2,600 feet tall, almost twice the height of the Sears Tower. It’s easy to see how massive amounts of electricity could be generated with such a large volume of air passing through turbines at the base of one of these towers. The thermal tower will still be able to operate at night because heat will be stored during the day and then released during periods of darkness.

The most evident advantage to this type of power supply is the infinite energy available from the sun. This electricity will be sustainable and almost unlimited. The only limit we can see is available ground space to build these massive structures, and of course, several days of cloud cover.

T. Boone Pickens is most known for his early career as a takeover operator in the 1980’s. Pickens founded a company called Mesa Petroleum, which he successfully leveraged to acquire many other undervalued oil companies. Pickens became so popular for his bids to take over such well established companies as Gulf Oil and Unocal that he considered running for president in the 1988 elections.

On July 8, 2008, Pickens proposed a policy that would shift roughly 22% of the nation’s electrify production from gas to wind. The goal is to reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil, by shifting the natural gas used to produce electricity to fuel for transportation. Pickens predicts natural gas could reduce foreign oil imports by 38%, with a calculated savings of about $300 billion annually. The plan is illustrated below by Pickens himself.

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So how do we accomplish this? In order to pursue wind energy as a realistic replacement to gas for 22% of our power supply we need support from the general public to help leverage the massive wind corridor that stretches from north to south across the entire mid-section of our country, mapped below.

The proposed plan won’t work by just building several massive wind farms. All available land within the wind corridor needs to be used. Pickens believes people will be eager to sacrifice their their land to wind turbines because of the income they’ll be able to generate from it. This will most likely be the biggest challenge to the plan’s success.

What’s interesting and refreshing about this plan is that the person behind it is someone who has been incredibly successful at making profitable business out of traditional energy development. It is rare to have someone with that kind of success focus their experience and talents on renewable energy.

There are several forms of naturally existing energy that can be converted into electricity. Wind, running river water, ocean currents, and light from the sun are all examples of natural energy. We can convert this natural energy into electricity with simple generators. For example, a river’s moving water can turn a wheel connected to a generator that converts the turning wheel’s energy into electricity. Wind energy can be converted in much the same way - as wind passed through the rotator blades, they turn a shaft that is connected to a generator. Generators are fairly simple. They generate electricity by leveraging the properties of electromagnetic induction.

The current method for converting solar energy into electricity is to absorb the sunlight’s energy and transfer it to a semiconductor - the standard solar panel. This energy knocks electrons loose, which allows them to flow through a solar cell that has an electric field itself which forces the electrons to flow in a certain direction. This flow of electrons is a current. By placing metal contacts on the top and bottom solar cell, we can draw that current off to use externally.

There is another form of natural energy that the sun gives off; heat. Most people have intensified sunlight with a magnifying glass at some point in their life to escalate the natural heat given off from sunlight.

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Can heat be generated on a large scale by magnifying the sun’s light? And if so, can this heat be easily converted into electricity. The answer is no. That’s why we use solar panels to generate electricity directly from sunlight instead of first creating heat that would then have to be converted into electricity.

However, in a recent post on CleanTechnica, a new material was discussed that can efficiently convert heat waste into electricity. Can this new technology be applied to heat generated from sunlight to increase its efficiency in generating electricity? And if so, can the real-estate on solar panels be optimized to use heat energy as well?

We have discussed in the past that one of the few positives related to the growing cost of fuel is the urgency for innovation that is created. I really don’t believe we have hit that breaking point yet, however, concerns are growing and we are getting closer.

One innovative person that believes we should act now is Shai Agassi. Shai is the founder of a company called Project Better Place. The company launched in 2007, is backed by 200 million dollars and has the goal of moving a countries transportation from gasoline to electric. The companies plan is to create an infrastructure for inexpensive electric cars. Rather than buying an expensive gasoline powered automobile, you would purchase miles for an electric car on the Project Better Place system. Each subscriber would receive an electric car, a battery and have access to recharging stations across the country. The company is also looking to power the recharging of the electric cars using solar energy to create a truely green system. The first 500 cars should be available in Israel by this time next year.

More than innovation I think this is really an example of an individual pushing forward and actually making something happen. Not surprising, the driving force of this revolution is coming from the private sector, where financial incentives prevail.