Willingboro Municipal Utilities Authority Breaks Ground New 1.05 MW Solar Wastewater Treatment Plant
March 19th, 2010 Posted in Green News | Comments Off
Survey: Consumers intrigued by electric cars
March 19th, 2010 Posted in Green News | Comments Off Consumers Reports finds about one quarter of adults will consider a plug-in when shopping for new cars, even though there are few available.U.S. wind power growing fast but still lags
March 19th, 2010 Posted in Green News | Comments Off The wind industry in the U.S. is being outpaced by other government-subsidized power providers in what one insider calls "a global footrace."India & Turkey on Track To Be Wind Powers
March 18th, 2010 Posted in Green News | Comments Off
India and Turkey are both poised to become world players in the wind industry thanks to good wind resources, growing demand for electricity and emerging political frameworks to support the development of gigawatts of wind projects in the coming years.
Skyscrapers Give Back to the Environment with Solar Energy Use
March 18th, 2010 Posted in Green News | Comments Off
Solar panel development brings solar energy to large companies by switching from windows to solar panels. Skyscrapers can now run on energy from to sun in order to protect earth's nonrenewable resources.
EnergyPeriscope.com Enters Production Mode
March 18th, 2010 Posted in Green News | Comments Off EnergyPeriscope is a professional-level renewable energy project performance estimating and financial analysis engine. Use it to create financial performance reports for single- or multiple-technology energy solutions. Includes sales and project management tools to help improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your operations. Model solar electric (PV), solar water heating, solar pool/spa heating, solar hydronic radiant floor systems, wind turbines and energy efficiency projects. Accommodates retrofit applications, new construction buildings, and "Energy Farms" for selling solar PV or wind generated electricity.GE Makes Thin-film Solar R&D Push
March 18th, 2010 Posted in Green News | Comments Off GE this week announced it is focusing its research and development efforts on thin-film solar photovoltaic (PV) technology in conjunction with PrimeStar Solar Inc., the startup firm in which GE is a majority investor.Poll: Support Strong for Utility-Scale Solar
March 18th, 2010 Posted in Green News | Comments Off
As more utilities support the development of large-scale concentrating solar power (CSP) and photovoltaic (PV) plants in the around the U.S., some citizens have raised questions about the environmental sustainability of certain projects. However, a new poll released yesterday by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Gotham Research Group shows that an overwhelming number of Americans support utility-scale projects on public lands that have not been designated as preserves.
Energy Storage’s Quiet Revolution
March 18th, 2010 Posted in Green News | Comments Off
When A123Systems saw its shares jump more than 50 percent in a successful Nasdaq debut back in September, some industry insiders expected it would be the first of a bevy of big energy-storage headlines. Instead, energy storage seems to have fallen out of the limelight, getting nothing near as much hype as Bloom Energy, a fuel-cell company focused on electricity generation instead of energy storage, generated when it launched last month.
SCE Launches 250-MW Solar RFO
March 18th, 2010 Posted in Green News | Comments Off Southern California Edison (SCE) this week launched a request for offers (RFO) from independent power producers for the utility's solar photovoltaic program.SG Biofuels Launches First Elite Jatropha Cultivar
March 18th, 2010 Posted in Green News | Comments Off SG Biofuels said that it has launched its first JMax 100 cultivar, a proprietary cultivar of Jatropha optimized for growing conditions in Guatemala with yields 100 percent greater than existing varieties.Victor Valley College Installs 1-MW SolFocus System
March 18th, 2010 Posted in Green News | Comments Off Victor Valley College and SolFocus announced that they are installing a 1-megawatt (MW) system of concentrator photovoltaic (CPV) systems for Victor Valley College in Victorville, California. The Victor Valley College solar facility will produce 2.5 million kilowatt hours per year, which is roughly 30 percent of the college's electricity demand.NREL Launches Strategic Energy Analysis Institute
March 18th, 2010 Posted in Green News | Comments Off The U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has established a new global institute dedicated to analyzing, speeding and smoothing the transition to sustainable energy worldwide. NREL Senior Scientist Doug Arent has been named executive director of the new Joint Institute for Strategic Energy Analysis (JISEA) by its institutional partners, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, the University of Colorado, Colorado School of Mines, Colorado State University and NREL.Toshiba says good-bye to incandescent era
March 18th, 2010 Posted in Green News | Comments Off Japanese manufacturer's 120-year relationship with incandescent lighting ended this week in favor of LEDs.Ben Saunders and the Future of Exploration
March 18th, 2010 Posted in Green News | Comments Off
Our friend and ally Ben Saunders, polar explorer and contributor to the Worldchanging book, is about to head off on a new expedition, North2, where he will attempt to set a new world's record for fastest solo trip to the North Pole on foot.
As he explains on his blog, though technology has made the Arctic profoundly more accessible (a subject I'll be returning to in a piece in April), and satellites and submarines have made the mapping part of polar exploration unnecessary, today's polar explorers are pushing themselves to see new parts of the world in ways human beings were never able to before:
Falcon Scott (Captain Scott's grandson) said: "It's a lot easier to do than in my grandfather's day."And it's not just Falcon. Everyone says much the same thing. Including me, up until a week ago. It's a no-brainer, surely: in Scott's era you sailed to Antarctica in a leaky wooden ship and got scurvy en route, nowadays my buddy Patrick Woodhead will fly you and your friends there in a Gulfstream private jet, and you'll be met by a private chef when you land.
During Douglas Mawson's four-month Antarctic expedition in 1912, his two team mates died, the soles of his feet fell off (due to vitamin A poisoning from eating the livers of his dogs after they died as well), he tied the skin on again with bandages and walked alone for another four weeks before reaching his base camp (where he was welcomed with the words, "My God! Which one are you?"). They didn't sail home until the next year.
By contrast, 21st-century Antarctic explorers, if the ghost-written books and five-part documentaries are to be believed, consist largely of tearful TV celebs trailed by film crews in pick-up trucks and complaining about blisters. Clearly we've gone soft. Clearly the Golden Age is over. Adventurepreneurs? Luxpeditions? Glamping? Pass me the puke bucket.
But wait. Hold. Your. Horses. The platitudes about polar expeditions being easier nowadays make about as much sense, it strikes me, as saying that surfing is easier now than it was a century ago. Or skiing, or climbing, or sailing round Cape Horn, or driving a racing car, or any one of a million pursuits. Duke Kahanamoku surfed in Shackleton's heyday on a wooden board that weighed 52kg, and it would have taken months to travel by ship from London to Hawaii, yet it's clear that today's surfers (and skiers, climbers, sailors, racing drivers et al.) are pushing limits that would have been utterly unattainable to those of 90 years ago, and the same is true of polar expeditions – travelling solo would have been unthinkable, as would swimming across areas of open water, or hauling 180kg (the start weight of my sled in 2004 – in contrast Captain Scott's team pulled 200lbs, or 91kg each).
The polar regions are infinitely more accessible than they were a hundred years ago, but I would argue that the toughest polar expeditions are getting more challenging, not less so.
I expect that ultimately, on a finite planet, all explorations of the Earth will become about people pushing new performance limits and discovering worlds inside themselves, not trying simply to be the first person to set foot on some particular piece of land. And, frankly, I don't think we'll see meaningful manned exploration of unknown Outer Space -- that which can't be more easily mapped by probes and rovers -- in my lifetime; and explorations of Space that make no discoveries that couldn't be made in some other way are really just unbelievably expensive versions of setting records on Earth, the interplanetary equivalent of "first!"
Finding more about the unknown reaches within ourselves and the unknown workings of our planet is probably the new frontier. Discovering home, and ourselves.
You can follow Ben on Twitter: @polarben
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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Imagining the Future at 11:45 AM)
Japan, China, and the Low-Carbon Economy
March 18th, 2010 Posted in Green News | Comments Off
I've had the good fortune to view the world through a Japanese lens over the past 10 days — specifically, the worlds of green business and clean technology, about which I've come to Japan to speak.
My host is the U.S. State Department, whose Office of International Information Programs invites a range of speakers to various foreign outposts at the host countries' request. (I did a similar speaking tour in Europe last fall, and another, in India, in 2000.) This latest trip took me to four cities — Tokyo, Fukuoma, Nagoya, and Osaka — to give presentations and to participate in two international symposia. My overall focus was on green innovation in the U.S. toward the goal of a "low-carbon economy."
That's a term that seems to be gaining currency in Asia, Europe, and elsewhere, though it isn't uttered often in the U.S., where, at best, adherents of green business, renewable energy, and sustainable commerce typically refer to the more generic "green economy." "Low carbon" demonstrates the growing focus on climate change among business and governmental leaders in Japan and elsewhere.
It was an interesting time to be here. On Friday, Japan's Cabinet approved a major piece of climate legislation — Japan's first. And while it represents a major hurdle, it is less than it's cracked up to be. As the English-language Daily Yomiuri reported this past weekend:
The bill incorporates bold reductions first touted by Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama when he addressed the United Nations in September, saying Japan would cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent from 1990 levels by 2020.The bill also includes policies that were rejected by past Liberal Democratic Party-led governments due to concerns by business circles. If the bill becomes law, it will mark a major turning point in the country's global warming policy.
However, details of the policies incorporated in the bill are still to be discussed, and there are differing opinions within the government. The government will be required to tackle a mountain of problems in the days ahead to resolve these issues.
Among those issues is that the 25 percent reduction goal has the precondition "that all major greenhouse gas-emitting nations will agree on a fair and effective international framework and ambitious goals," the paper reports. Suffice to say, that precondition doesn't seem forthcoming any time soon.
Nonetheless, Japan's enlightened business leaders are focused on how to move forward on a low-carbon economy, though my conclusion is that they don't have much more of a plan to get there than do the Americans. At the events I attended, there was much discussion about how to achieve the green vision of Hatoyama, the first prime minister who seems to "get it," when it comes to the economic potential of cleantech and a green economy, but whose vision is thwarted by the legislature. That was one recurring theme. Another was commiserating over how to motivate employees to engage in green practices. They expressed frustration in Japanese consumers' willingness to buy green products. They wondered how stable oil prices will affect progress, not to mention the impacts of the global economic recession. They asked repeatedly about President Obama's "New Green Deal," a remnant of the 2008 campaign that, far as I can tell, has disappeared into the ether.
For an American visitor, it seemed, much as I wrote during my visit here in 2007, that "I was six thousand miles from home, but I could have been anywhere in the U.S., given the stories I was hearing."
But far more than I expected, the conversation that took place seemed less about Japan than about China. Japan's neighbor to the southwest seems to be causing a mild case of dyspepsia in the Land of the Rising Sun. Though the events I attended featured only one Chinese speaker, there was much conversation, and more than a little handwringing, about the role China will play in the low-carbon economy.
The conversation about China has taken a dramatic turn over the past year or so. In the past, it had more to do with "What happens when 1.3 billion Chinese want to achieve the same standard of living as their Western (and Japanese) counterparts?" That's still a concern, of course. But the conversations I've been hearing lately, in both the U.S. and Japan, have more to do with "What happens when China produces the clean technologies we'll all be needing?"
That's Japan's concern. Indeed, it seems a cruel turn of fate from just a quarter-century ago, when American leaders were asking the same question about Japan. At the time, that country seemed to be eating our proverbial lunch, outperforming us in producing a wide range of goods that had been invented in America, from solar panels to televisions.
Japan now worries that China will be a similar threat, with its weak intellectual property laws, which mean that it can easily "own" the technological secrets of things invented elsewhere, made cheaply due to its low-cost labor and manufacturing prowess. Already, for example, Japan has dropped from the number-one producer of solar panels to the number-three producer, behind China and Germany, according to the Earth Policy Institute. (The U.S. is fifth, just after Taiwan and ahead of India.) As the Institute reported last week, "Chinese annual production skyrocketed from 40 megawatts in 2004 to 1,848 megawatts in 2008, nearly five times the output of the United States."
It's that state of affairs that has Japan — and the U.S. — fretting. Not just about climate change but also about the economic climate that may see their global competitiveness fall further and further behind.
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(Posted by Joel Makower in Bright Green Economy at 10:52 AM)
Bright spot for one California college: A solar farm
March 18th, 2010 Posted in Green News | Comments Off SolFocus is teaming up with Victor Valley College, building an on-campus solar farm that will also be used as a teaching facility.Climate Action: Burning Forests to Avoid Megafires
March 18th, 2010 Posted in Green News | Comments Off
Prescribed burns in the forests of the western U.S. will prevent larger wildfires and significantly cut the nation’s carbon footprint, according to a new study. Controlled burns, a forestry management strategy used to destroy underbrush and prevent wildfires, would protect the larger trees that store carbon dioxide and help offset greenhouse gas emissions. Using satellite imagery and models that calculate carbon emissions related to wildfires from 2001 to 2008, researchers predicted that prescribed burns could reduce such emissions by 18 to 25 percent — and as much as 60 percent in some areas. The burns would cut carbon emissions by 14 million metric tons annually across 11 western states. “If we reintroduce fires into our ecosystems, we may be able to protect larger trees and significantly reduce the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere by major wildfires,” said Christine Wiedinmyer, a scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and lead author of the study being published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. U.S. officials say forests in the West have become overgrown and vulnerable to large wildfires. That risk could be exacerbated in the future as a warming climate threatens to make forests even hotter and drier. Prescribed burns also may reduce the severity of recent insect infestations that have killed large areas of western forests.
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(Posted by Yale Environment 360 in Biodiversity and Ecosystems at 9:38 AM)
GE places solar bets on thin-film cells
March 18th, 2010 Posted in Green News | Comments Off Working with start-up PrimeStar Solar, General Electric is developing solar modules that use low-cost, cadmium telluride thin-film solar cells.New CEO Unveils Three-Year Plan; Southwest Windpower Poised for Worldwide Growth and Product Expansion
March 17th, 2010 Posted in Green News | Comments Off
Dixon Thayer has taken the reins at Southwest Windpower and has wasted no time leveraging his experience in driving companies to their next level of success. Mr. Thayer, with a background in senior executive positions at companies like Ford Motor Company, Kimberly Clark and Sunbeam, knows how to quickly focus a company's strategy on achieving breakthrough results. "I see so much potential in this dynamic company," says Thayer. "We are ready to move to the next level and actively pursue a worldwide game-changing strategy."