Green Building & Manufacturing News
U.S. a gas guzzler no more - Relatively speaking
American consumption has declined the past two years, and it's not expected to return to 2007 highs.
KANSAS CITY, MO. -- In 2007, the United States used more gasoline than ever and far more than any other country. It appeared America's growing appetite for gas would go on forever.
Well, it won't -- and things may never be the same.
Gasoline consumption has been down the past two years, in part because of the recession. But when the economy picks up, three underlying trends mean the United States might never use as much gas again:
*New standards for cars and light trucks, including SUVs, will make U.S. vehicles more fuel-efficient.
*The number of U.S. vehicles, after surging the past 30 years, is likely to plateau. The country now has more than four vehicles for every five people, including children.
*Alternative fuels will grow enough to cover increased fuel needs.
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A new wire twist on silicon solar cells
CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. researchers have devised a way to make flexible solar cells with silicon wires that use just 1 percent of the material needed to make conventional solar cells.
The eventual hope is to make thin, light solar cells that could be incorporated into clothing, for instance but the immediate benefit is cheaper and easier-to-install solar panels, the researchers said.
The new material, reported on Sunday in Nature Materials, uses conventional silicon configured into micron-sized wires (a micron is one-millionth of a meter) instead of brittle wafers and encases them in a flexible polymer that can be rolled or bent.
"The idea is it would be lower cost and easier to work with by being more flexible than conventional silicon solar cells," Michael Kelzenberg of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, who worked on the study, said in a telephone interview.
Solar cells, which convert solar energy into electricity, are in high demand because of higher oil prices and concerns over climate change.
Many companies, including Japanese consumer electronics maker Sharp Corp and Germany's Q-Cells SE, are making thin-film solar cells using organic materials such as polymers, but they typically are less efficient at converting solar energy into electricity than conventional cells using silicon.
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China's fears of rich nation 'climate conspiracy' at Copenhagen revealed
Rich nations furthered their "conspiracy to divide the developing world" at December's UN climate summit in Copenhagen, while Canada "connived" and the EU acted "to please the United States", according to an internal document from a Chinese government thinktank obtained by the Guardian.
The document, which was written in the immediate aftermath of Copenhagen but has only now come to light, provides the most candid insight yet into Chinese thinking on the fraught summit.
"It was unprecedented for a conference negotiating process to be so complicated, for the arguments to be so intense, for the disputes to be so wide and for progress to be so slow," notes the special report. "There was criticism and praise from all sides, but future negotiations will be more difficult."
The authors - all members of a government environmental research institute - were not part of the Chinese negotiating team, but their paper was commissioned by the environment ministry and circulated internally to the minister, vice-ministers and department chiefs in the days after the conference. The ministry currently plays only a marginal role in climate policy making but many of the paper's observations were echoed by China's chief climate negotiator, Xie Zhenhua, in a recent speech given at Beijing University.
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Life's a bitumen nightmare as cities get hotter than hell
We cooked on Friday. In between the deluges. Walking to the office across the breezeway at Darling Harbour - except there was no breeze - I overheard a young women say to her friend, "It's supposed to be 29 (84 F) but it feels like 40 (." She was right, the forecast was wrong. It hit 38 (100 F) degrees in the Sydney CBD. Even that figure is misleading. On the streets it was worse - oppressive, debilitating.
One year ago, the City of Sydney council, keenly aware we are cooking ourselves in our cities, commissioned a thermal-image map of the CBD. The mapping flight took place in the early morning of February 6 last year. The maximum temperature that day was 29 (84 F) degrees and the minimum 22 (71 F) degrees. The thermal map, however, showed something else.
The streets, glowing red in the image taken, recorded a maximum temperature of 33 (92 F) degrees. The bitumen surrounded by concrete were fully 4 (7 F) degrees hotter than the maximum temperature recorded at Observatory Hill that day. The most conspicuous red zone on the map was the huge rectangle of concrete at the Hungry Mile, west of the Harbour Bridge. (The Hungry Mile is officially known as Barangaroo, a ridiculous name for a major new precinct.) What is proposed for the Hungry Mile/Barangaroo? A new forest of office towers with barely a fig leaf of trees. What is proposed for the expansion of Sydney? More density, more tower clusters, more hot spots built along major transport arteries.
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Algae to solve the Pentagon's jet fuel problem
US scientists believe they will soon be able to use algae to produce biofuel for the same cost as fossil fuels
The brains trust of the Pentagon says it is just months away from producing a jet fuel from algae for the same cost as its fossil-fuel equivalent.
The claim, which comes from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) that helped to develop the internet and satellite navigation systems, has taken industry insiders by surprise. A cheap, low-carbon fuel would not only help the US military, the nation's single largest consumer of energy, to wean itself off its oil addiction, but would also hold the promise of low-carbon driving and flying for all.
Darpa's research projects have already extracted oil from algal ponds at a cost of $2 per gallon. It is now on track to begin large-scale refining of that oil into jet fuel, at a cost of less than $3 a gallon, according to Barbara McQuiston, special assistant for energy at Darpa. That could turn a promising technology into a market-ready one. Researchers have cracked the problem of turning pond scum and seaweed into fuel, but finding a cost-effective method of mass production could be a game-changer. "Everyone is well aware that a lot of things were started in the military," McQuiston said.
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Are we Funding Saudi Solar? SOLAR FOR SAUDI ARABIA.
Someday Saudi Arabia could become the Saudi Arabia of solar energy. It's possible that someday the world's largest oil producer could become the world's largest developer of energy from the Sun.
According to a press release from the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia, "The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has begun building the first solar-powered water desalination plant, the first step in a three-part program to introduce solar energy into the Kingdom. The program, launched by the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), aims to help stabilize future power and water supplies inside Saudi Arabia through the creation of solar-powered desalination facilities."
The Embassy did not offer details of the other two steps of the program, but gave other information:
--- Saudi Arabia produces 18 percent of the world's desalinated water.
--- Saudi Arabia is a prime location to harness solar energy because of its year-round sunshine.
--- The Sun in Saudi Arabia emits about 7,000 watts of energy per square meter over an average of 12 hours, every day.
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IBM Creates High-Efficiency Breakthrough Solar Cell Made from Earth-Abundant Materials.
IBM has announced that it has built a solar cell -- where the key layer that absorbs most of the light for conversion into electricity, is made entirely of readily-available elements -- that set a new world record for efficiency and holds potential for enabling solar cell technology to produce more energy at a lower cost. Comprised of copper (Cu), tin (Sn), zinc (Zn), sulfur (S), and/or selenium (Se), the cell's power conversion demonstrates an efficiency of 9.6 percent -- 40 percent higher than the value previously attained for this set of materials.
The IBM researchers describe their achievement of the thin-film photovoltaic technology in a paper published in Advanced Materials, highlighting the solar cell's potential to accomplish the goal of producing low-cost energy that can be used widely and commercially.
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Energy giants turn up the heat for dirty power
Two of Britain's biggest energy companies are lobbying the Conservative Party to keep some of the nation's most polluting power stations operating beyond a deadline set by the European Union, The Times has learnt.
RWE npower and E.ON, the two German-owned companies, have held private talks with senior Conservative politicians about the legal position of nine coal and oil-fired power plants due to close by the end of 2015 under new EU pollution rules.
Together, the six coal and three oil-fired plants generate 12.3 gigawatts of electricity, about 15 per cent of total UK electricity supplies.
E.ON and RWE are pressing for at least some of the plants to be exempted from the EU rules on the grounds that, without them, Britain could face blackouts by 2015 because not enough replacement stations are being built.
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SMARTER GRIDS, APPLIANCES, AND CONSUMERS
More and more utilities are beginning to realize that building large power plants just to handle peak daily and seasonal demand is a very costly way of managing an electricity system. Existing electricity grids are typically a patchwork of local grids that are simultaneously inefficient, wasteful, and dysfunctional in that they often are unable, for example, to move electricity surpluses to areas of shortages. The U.S. electricity grid today resembles the roads and highways of the mid-twentieth century before the interstate highway system was built. What is needed today is the electricity equivalent of the interstate highway system.
The inability to move low-cost electricity to consumers because of congestion on transmission lines brings with it costs similar to those associated with traffic congestion. The lack of transmission capacity in the eastern United States is estimated to cost consumers $16 billion a year in this region alone.
In the United States, a strong national grid would permit power to be moved continuously from surplus to deficit regions, thus reducing the total generating capacity needed. Most important, the new grid would link regions rich in wind, solar, and geothermal energy with consumption centers. A national grid, drawing on a full range of renewable energy sources, would itself be a stabilizing factor.
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Everyday Grass Could Provide Green Fuel
ScienceDaily (Feb. 18, 2010) — A five-year research project has come up with a way of generating green energy from a humble everyday grass.
Researchers at Teesside University's Contaminated Land and Water Centre began the project in 2004 to see which plants could best be grown on brownfield sites as a way of improving unsightly blots on the landscape.
Now, the research by the BioReGen (Biomass, Remediation, re-Generation) project team has revealed that reed canary grass can be turned into an excellent fuel for biomass power stations and, on a smaller scale, boilers in buildings like schools.
The native British grass is turned into bricks and pellets. These not only burn well but also don't add to greenhouse gases or contribute to global warming.
The team experimented with four types of plant, willow trees, the current favourite for biomass power stations, and the miscanthus, reed canary and switch grasses.
Tests were carried out on sites around the region with work supported by a 1.2m Euros grant from the European Union's LIFE-Environment research programme.
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Keeping the Lights On While Transforming Electric Utilities
Electric utilities operate now much as they did a century ago—but the environment in which they operate is changing dramatically. Now more than ever before, utilities whose regulators reward them in the traditional way for selling more electricity risk losing revenue as customers use their electricity more efficiently.
Climate change and energy security concerns, coupled with advances in disruptive technologies, may make conventional power-generating assets uncompetitive to build or even to run. Potential competitors armed with new technologies, new business models, and greater cultural agility are emerging in many sectors.
A New Electricity Paradigm
Responding to these disruptive forces requires a shift to a fundamentally new paradigm of electricity generation and use—business-as-usual incrementalism is simply insufficient.
The new paradigm will be based on a highly integrated network of advanced technologies including energy efficiency, demand response (which affects the timing rather than the efficiency of usage), renewables such as solar and wind, energy storage, and distributed generation.
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The USGBC's Top 10 Lists of Green Building Bills
Washington , DC — The U.S. Green Building Council released its Top 10 lists of green building legislation in the House and Senate today and honored Rep. Ben Chandler and Sen. Olympia Snowe for supporting energy efficiency and sustainable design in the buildings.
The USGBC's announcement comes just a year after the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was signed into law.
The Recovery Act, which heads the USGBC's Top 10 list for the House, provides for $787 billion in stimulus funds of which $22 billion has been set aside for energy efficiency projects, including $346 million for energy efficient building
The organization is lauding Chandler, a Kentucky Democrat, for his work on H.R.3021, 21st Century High-Performing Public School Facilities Act and Maine Republican Snowe for her efforts involving S.1637, the Expanding Building Efficiency Incentives Act of 2009.
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China doubles wind power capacity in one year
Somebody forgot to tell the Chinese there was a slowdown in renewable energy investment last year. China doubled its installed wind power generation capacity from 12 gigawatts (GW) to 25 GW in 2009.
The Global Wind Energy Council says China became the world's largest market for wind turbines last year. And moving forward, that isn't likely to slow down. The nation plans to expand its wind power generation capacity to 150 GW by 2020.
Worldwide, total wind power capacity increased 31 percent last year, reaching almost 158 GW. The U.S. currently ranks as the world's No. 1 user of wind power electricity with 35 GW of installed generation capacity, even though that represents only about two percent of our annual total electricity consumption.
The European Community, by comparison, gets about 9 percent of its electricity from wind power. Globally, the 2009 wind turbine installation market hit about $63 billion, employing an estimated 500,000 people.
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Wal-Mart to cut 20 mln metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions
* Says effort will reduce energy use, cut costs
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 25 (Reuters) - Wal-Mart Stores Inc (WMT.N) plans to massively cut greenhouse gas emissions from its global supply chain within five years -- an effort the retailer said is equivalent to taking more than 3.8 million cars off the road for a year.
Wal-Mart will reach that goal by having its suppliers reduce emissions involved in the sourcing, manufacturing, transportation, and disposal of the thousands of products it sells in its stores.
The plan to eliminate 20 million metric tons of greenhouse gas from its supply chain by the end of 2015 was announced in a Webcast on Thursday.
Chief Executive Mike Duke said the effort would cut energy use, which in turn would mean lower costs for Wal-Mart and lower prices.
"We do plan and want to continue to build stores. We want to add square footage. That's the reality of our business," Duke said. "Yet we know we need to get ready for a world in which energy will only be more expensive, and that there will only be a greater need to operate with less carbon in the supply chain."
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