Green Building & Manufacturing
Smart Grid spending set to grow worldwide
The days of the conventional electricity power grid are numbered and business opportunity, pragmatism and the need to better monitor both use and users of electricity have combined to raise the prospect of a multi-billion dollar industry growing worldwide.
A report by Pike Research, based in Boulder, Colo., said global investment in replacing antiquated systems with Smart Grid technologies could total $200 billion by 2015.
Pike Research specializes in analysis of global clean technology markets, including demand assessment and technology trends.
Although electricity has served as the foundation for numerous technological innovations, the electrical grid itself is based on decades-old technology that has attracted very little investment.
This is about to change, Pike Research said. "Governments and industry leaders are coming together with new-found urgency to drive an overhaul of grid infrastructure," the research consultancy said.
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Large fuel cells at risk without U.S. aid
The United States leads the world in manufacturing stationary fuel cells - large sources of clean energy - but the industry is warning Congress that the technology and expertise could be shipped overseas unless the federal government does more to encourage domestic production and use.
Stationary fuel cells are on-site power generators that emit almost no pollutants while producing energy. They are powerful enough to supply electricity, heating and air conditioning for a 1,000-room hotel, a 33,000-student college campus or large industrial structures such as the Pepperidge Farm plant in Connecticut and Sierra Nevada brewery in California.
The energy source is pricey, though, ranging in the millions of dollars per unit. Yet demand for the fuel cells in Japan and South Korea far outstrips domestic supply, partly because foreign governments provide tax incentives or subsidies to companies that import and use the stationary fuel cells.
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How to retrofit 40 percent of American homes
A Primer on the HOME STAR Program
Bracken Hendricks explains the HOME STAR program, which provides incentives to make homes and offices energy efficient while creating jobs.
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Growing Up: Skyscraper Farms Seen as a Way to Produce Food Locally--And Cut Greenhouse Emissions
Dear EarthTalk: What is "vertical farming" and how is it better for the environment? -Jonathan Salzman, New York City
"Vertical farming" is a term coined by Columbia University professor of environmental health and microbiology Dickson Despommier to describe the concept of growing large amounts of food in urban high-rise buildings-or so-called "farmscrapers."
According to the vision first developed in 1999 by Despommier and his students, a 30-story building built on one city block and engineered to maximize year-round agricultural yield-thanks largely to artificial lighting and advanced hydroponic and aeroponic growing techniques-could feed tens of thousands of people. Ideally the recipients of the bounty would live in the surrounding area, so as to avoid the transport costs and carbon emissions associated with moving food hundreds if not thousands of miles to consumers.
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Colbert Steam Plant has high CO2 output
COLBERT COUNTY - Colbert Steam Plant ranked 99th in the nation in its production of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas under the watchful eye of the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
Colbert Steam Plant spouted off 1.4 million cars' worth of carbon dioxide in 2007, according to a report from the Environment America Research and Policy Center, a nonprofit environmental advocacy organization.
The study, based on data from the EPA, ranked the country's power plants and concluded that power generation is both old and dirty - an observation made previously, but now quantified.
The majority of power plants, 83 percent, built before 1980 produced more than 5 million tons of carbon dioxide pollution in 2007, the report states. The Tennessee Valley Authority built the Colbert power station in 1954.
In 2007, the fossil-fueled power plant, one of 18 controlled by TVA, released 8 million tons of carbon dioxide - the equivalent to 800 Eiffel Towers.
"Power plants are the single largest source of U.S. carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, the main pollutant that fuels global warming," wrote Courtney Abrams, author of "America's Biggest Polluters: Carbon Dioxide Emissions from Power Plants," in 2007.
The study found that overall, power plants generated three times as much carbon dioxide as all vehicles in the U.S.
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Ecosystem, Vegetation Affect Urban Heat Island Effect
NASA researchers studying urban landscapes have found that the intensity of the "heat island" created by a city depends on the ecosystem it replaced and on the regional climate. Urban areas developed in arid and semi-arid regions show far less heating compared with the surrounding countryside than cities built amid forested and temperate climates.
"The placement and structure of cities -- and what was there before -- really does matter," said Marc Imhoff, biologist and remote sensing specialist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "The amount of the heat differential between the city and the surrounding environment depends on how much of the ground is covered by trees and vegetation. Understanding urban heating will be important for building new cities and retrofitting existing ones."
Goddard researchers including Imhoff, Lahouari Bounoua, Ping Zhang, and Robert Wolfe presented their findings on Dec. 16 in San Francisco at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
Scientists first discovered the heat island effect in the 1800s when they observed cities growing warmer than surrounding rural areas, particularly in summer. Urban surfaces of asphalt, concrete, and other materials -- also referred to as "impervious surfaces" -- absorb more solar radiation by day. At night, much of that heat is given up to the urban air, creating a warm bubble over a city that can be as much as 1 to 3°C (2 to 5°F) higher than temperatures in surrounding rural areas.
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What Are the Amounts of Greenhouse Gases Released in Your Area and What Are the Sources?
ScienceDaily (Dec. 22, 2009) - The European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) has developed a high resolution digital view of artificial greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for any 10 x 10 kms area in the world. Using JRC's work on emissions and Google Earth, this new tool allows the visualisation of the levels of emissions locally from 1970 to 2005 and the identification of the main sources.
Scientists from the JRC Institute for Environment and Sustainability (IES) have made it possible to visualise the distribution of GHG emissions all over the world at local level through an add-on layer to Google Earth. Their grid size is a tenth of a geographical degree of latitude by the same extension in longitude, or simplified, a circa 10 km x 10 km square, roughly the size of central Paris. Data used in the visualisation come from JRC and the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency's (PBL) Emission Database for Global Research (EDGAR), and its dataset released in May this year (EDGAR v4.0).
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Builders Zero In on New Goal of Energy-Neutral Housing
The green building movement is targeting a goal once thought virtually unattainable: zero net energy use.
While the trend is nascent, dozens of "net zero" and "near net zero" developments -- projects designed to use only about as much power from the public grid as they can save or produce on their own -- have sprung up across the U.S. over the past five years.
In Greenfield, Mass., nonprofit Rural Development Inc. has completed eight of 20 planned duplex homes that use almost no net energy. In Berkeley, Calif., ZETA Communities Inc. plans to build a 30-unit net-zero apartment building after opening a factory that can construct 400 to 500 prefabricated net-zero homes a year. And in Green Valley, Ariz., builder Pepper Viner Homes says it plans to incorporate green techniques into a senior housing community so that it reduces energy use more than 50%. U.S. officials are working to wean federal buildings off fossil fuel by 2020, a step they say will help the buildings become almost
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Glitter-Sized Solar Photovoltaics Could Revolutionize the Way Solar Energy Is Collected and Used
ScienceDaily (Dec. 23, 2009) - Sandia National Laboratories scientists have developed tiny glitter-sized photovoltaic cells that could revolutionize the way solar energy is collected and used.
The tiny cells could turn a person into a walking solar battery charger if they were fastened to flexible substrates molded around unusual shapes, such as clothing.
The solar particles, fabricated of crystalline silicon, hold the potential for a variety of new applications. They are expected eventually to be less expensive and have greater efficiencies than current photovoltaic collectors that are pieced together with 6-inch- square solar wafers.
The cells are fabricated using microelectronic and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) techniques common to today's electronic foundries.
Sandia lead investigator Greg Nielson said the research team has identified more than 20 benefits of scale for its microphotovoltaic cells. These include new applications, improved performance, potential for reduced costs and higher efficiencies.
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Drilling Wastewater Disposal Options in N.Y. Report Have Problems of Their Own
Environmentalists, state regulators and even energy companies agree that the problem most likely to slow natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale in New York is safely disposing of the billions of gallons of contaminated wastewater the industry will produce.
At least 2,500 wells per year could eventually be drilled into the huge natural gas reserve, state regulators say [2]. Other estimates run several times higher [3] (PDF). Each well will produce about 1.2 million gallons of wastewater that can contain chemicals introduced during the drilling process and dredged up from deep within the earth. That means the industry will have to find a way to dispose of as much as 3 billion gallons a year, enough to fill 5,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
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