Green Building & Manufacturing
Climate and clean energy bill boosts farmer income
Inaction threatens farm income
It remains conventional wisdom ignorance that a climate and clean energy jobs bill would not be good for farmers. In fact, the future prosperity of U.S agriculture is tied to clean energy and the effects of climate change. Farmers are particularly vulnerable to the increased water shortages, widespread drought and floods, and lower crop yields that would result from global warming. And they are on the front lines every day, living and working the land, highly aware of these devastating consequences to farm productivity (see "A Stormy Forecast for U.S. Agriculture").
Clean energy legislation, on the other hand, creates 3 new paychecks for farmers: a pay check for leasing a small portion of land for sustainable energy development like putting in a wind turbine that can earn them $3,000 to $15,000 per year, a paycheck for sequestering carbon in their soils by engaging in more sustainable and productive farming practices, and a paycheck for producing 2nd generation biofuel crops. CAP Director of Agriculture and Trade Policy Jake Caldwell has the story in this repost.
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White-hot energy
New power sources could be made using magnesium
STORING energy is one of the biggest obstacles to the widespread adoption of alternative sources of power. Batteries can be bulky and slow to charge. Hydrogen, which can be made electrolytically from water and used to power fuel cells, is difficult to handle. But there may be an alternative: magnesium. As school chemistry lessons show, metallic magnesium is highly reactive and stores a lot of energy. Even a small amount of magnesium ribbon burns in a flame with a satisfying white heat. Researchers are now devising ways to extract energy from magnesium in a more controlled fashion.
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New polls show Latinos and African Americans support bipartisan climate and clean energy jobs bill
And are more likely to vote for Senate candidate who supports action
Poll after poll shows that the general public STILL favors the transition to clean energy. Two new polls show that the majority of African Americans and Latinos believe that switching to clean energy will create jobs and keep the economy strong while also combating climate change. CAP Energy Opportunity intern Sarah Collins has the story.
Not only do majorities of the polled groups feel that global warming is a serious problem that needs addressing, but majorities of both Latino and African American participants also say they will vote on climate in 2010. African Americans were polled in Arkansas, Indiana, Missouri, and South Carolina, while Latinos were polled in Colorado, Florida, and Nevada – all key states in the upcoming 2010 midterm elections.
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Big funding for little inverters
Investors in March gave big support to Enphase Energy's push to bring a small technology to residential and commercial solar. The Petaluma-based solar microinverter company secured $40 million in funding from investors including Bay Partners, Horizon Technology Finance and Bridge Bank (Nasdaq: BBNK).
Microinverters could be a "transformative piece of technology," Daniel Kammen, director of University of California, Berkeley's Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory told Sustainable Industries. In a traditional solar setup, modules are connected to one central inverter, which converts power from DC to AC. That can create what Enphase co-founder Raghu Belur called a "Christmas light problem," in which failure or decreased output of one module can compromise output of the entire system.
Enphase's microinverters attach to the racking of each solar module and convert its power from DC to AC, essentially allowing each module to function as an independent energy producer, Belur says. The result is an increase in energy yield of up to 25 percent and a decrease in installation costs of up to 15 percent, according to Enphase. The company's microinverters, which are compatible with about 90 percent of solar modules, also collect and transmit performance data from each module, which can be monitored through a Web-based interface.
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Recurve releases efficiency tool
Home energy auditor and retrofitter Recurve says it has funneled its expertise into a new software offering that will streamline the residential energy auditing process.
Touting it as being designed "by contractors, for contractors," San Francisco–based Recurve recently launched its Recurve software-as-a-service platform. Recurve Software will get more auditors out in the field and allow contractors to do more retrofits in the face of increasing demand driven in part by increased homeowner incentives and Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) programs, such as San Francisco's GreenFinanceSF, says Recurve co-founder Adam Winter.
The software compiles data from a 20-point inspection, which includes windows, ductwork, insulation levels and blower door test results, and creates an energy efficiency "prescription" for each home, Winter says. Based on customized pricing algorithms, it then generates prices for different retrofit packages and creates a customer contract.
Founded in 2004 as Sustainable Spaces, Recurve changed its name in 2009, the same year it received certification from the Building Performance Institute. The company launched another program in April to meet demands of PACE programs, which may require energy efficiency upgrades before financing renewable energy installations. Through its Hybrid Home program, Recurve plans to partner with solar installers to offer bundled home energy audits and upgrades.
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Downloads: Green Office Guide 2010
Our annual supplement is filled with ideas and tools to help businesses further their commitment to environmental and social responsibility.
Clean Energy Handbook for Business 2009
Tackle energy improvements
Invest in renewables
Find verifiable carbon offsets
Clean Energy Handbook for Business
Sponsored by Allied Waste, Green Building Services, Ice Energy, MacDonald-Miller Facility Solutions, CH2M Hill, Ecos, and Gloria Spire Solar
Supplement to Sustainable Industries October 2008
Featuring:
Energy reduction
Renewable energy
Carbon offsets
NOTE: Right click on the link below to save the file to your desktop. It is a large file and may a few minutes to download.
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How to really green your home, deep down
As we've said repeatedly here, sustainability is not something we can achieve little bit by little bit, and, in fact, focusing on small steps can even lead us to ignore the bigger picture. Paper versus plastic is a silly debate when we're driving home from the store through a sprawling suburb.
That said, a lot of us are starting to get it about systems, about footprints, about embodied energy and virtual water and offshored emissions. People are really beginning to understand the need to get a handle on the whole systems in which they're enmeshed, and start to torque those systems towards sustainability, both through political action (like pushing our cities towards carbon neutrality) and high-leverage personal choices (about the kinds of places we live, the homes we live in and our relationship to consumption). This is the bright green approach at its core, and the speed with which it's spreading is the most hopeful thing about environmentalism in the developed world.
Catherine Mohr gets it. In this TED talk she explains how she tried to take on her ecological impact in a comprehensive way when building a new home:
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Building Green
The U.S. Green Building Council for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design has awarded its LEED® Gold certification to Building 4601, an engineering facility at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. -- recognizing the standard of excellence set by the state-of-the-art, environmentally friendly facility.
The building, which opened in June 2009, was designed and built according to efficient energy and water principles, making it eligible for registration with the building council.
The LEED rating system offers four certification levels for new construction -- "Certified," "Silver," "Gold" and "Platinum" -- which correspond to a specified number of credits accrued in five environmentally conscious design categories: sustainable sites; water efficiency; energy and atmosphere; materials and resources; and indoor environmental quality.
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New Material for More Ecological, Efficient and Economic Refrigeration Systems
ScienceDaily (Apr. 16, 2010) — Two teams based at the Barcelona Knowledge Campus, one from the University of Barcelona (UB) and one from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), have worked with a group from the University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany) to develop a new solid material that produces a caloric effect under hydrostatic pressure (solid-state barocaloric effect). The work was carried out using a high-pressure system developed by the UPC, which is the only one of its type in Spain.
The research is described in an article published in the scientific journal Nature Materials and was inspired by guidelines in the Kyoto protocol on renewing current refrigeration systems based on the compression of harmful gases.
Research into materials showing large caloric effects close to room temperature is one of the areas currently being explored to develop new refrigeration systems. Until recently, the most promising materials for applications in this field were giant magnetocaloric materials, which change temperature under the influence of an external magnetic field. The authors of this new study show that application of a moderate hydrostatic pressure to a nickel-manganese-indium alloy (Ni-Mn-In) produces results comparable to those achieved with the most effective magnetocaloric materials.
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Risk Mismanagement
Corporations love to talk about going green, but not many are planning for a changing climate.
About a decade ago, Miguel Torres planted 104 hectares of pinot noir grapes in the Spanish Pyrenees, 3,300 feet above sea level. It's cold up there and not much good for grapes—at least not these days. But Torres, the head of one of Spain's foremost wine families, knows that the climate is changing.
His company's scientists reckon that the Rioja wine region could be nonviable within 40 to 70 years, as temperatures increase and Europe's wine belt moves north by up to 25 miles per decade. Other winemakers are talking about growing grapes as far north as Scandinavia and southern England.
Torres' Pyrenees vineyards are a hedge, and may not be necessary. But if climate change redraws the map of Europe's wine world, he will be prepared. And his company will be one of a very few taking steps to adapt to the future effects of climate change.
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Green investments spur growth, emissions cuts
Households surpass industry as nation's largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.
Green investments are spurring significant growth across the U.S economy while decreasing industry's overall emissions per dollar of goods and services, according to two reports released Wednesday by the federal government.
Meanwhile households have replaced industry as the country's largest source of carbon dioxide emissions, according to government data.
The first report defines and measures the size of the domestic green economy; the other assesses how America's greenhouse gas emissions have changed over the past decade.
Together they provide "valuable analytic tools" necessary to understand the emerging green economy and guide future policy, said Rebecca Blank, undersecretary for economic affairs at the U.S. Commerce Department.
"There are many unknowns about how we are going to build a new energy economy," she said during a press conference unveiling the data. "These reports suggest we are making some progress."
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Green Manufacturing?
MANUFACTURING, long in decline in the United States, might rise again if the green economy were 100 percent homemade. But that big "if" is not what's happening and seems unlikely. Rather than "made in America," much of the green manufacturing to date is "assembled in America" from parts made overseas.
The Obama administration is trying to change that, offering generous tax credits to generate domestic production. But the impact has been modest, because assembly plants qualify for the credits.
"The act says that if you assemble in the United States, then you comply," said Tom Dyer, vice president for marketing and government policy for Kyocera Solar, a Japanese company that will assemble solar panels in San Diego from imported Japanese solar cells. "That is what we are doing, and that is what a lot of people are doing."
Very slowly, that reliance on imports might be changing. Gamesa North America, which is Spanish-owned, makes blades and nose cones in eastern Pennsylvania for assembly into wind turbines. A new company, SpectraWatt, a spinoff from Intel, started production of solar cells last month at a factory in Fishkill, N.Y., manufacturing a component of solar panels now often imported.
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Solar Power Sales Will Almost Double This Year, Isuppli Says
(Bloomberg) -- Global sales of solar power panels will jump 94 percent this year as developers rush to install systems before cuts in government incentives, according to industry publisher Isuppli.
Solar installations may climb to 13,600 megawatts this year, up from 7,000 megawatts in 2009, with Germany remaining the world's largest market, said Henning Wicht, an analyst at El Segundo, California-based Isuppli.
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Solar Power to the People, With a Lot of Public Help
IT'S Earth Day, and among the many activities planned for students at the Lagunitas school campus, about 30 miles north of San Francisco, is a field trip to visit a solar power installation, where they will learn how photovoltaic technology converts the sun's energy to electricity.
But they won't need permission slips from their parents to leave the school grounds, as the system sits on a sunny spot next to the school's soccer field.
In operation since 2008, the system provides about 70 percent of the school's annual electric needs and will save more than $100,000 on its energy bills over the next 15 years.
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Charging Up Electric Car Batteries in Environmentally-Friendly Way
ScienceDaily (Apr. 21, 2010) — Electromobility makes sense only if car batteries are charged using electricity from renewable energy sources. But the supply of green electricity is not always adequate. An intelligent charging station can help, by adapting the recharging times to suit energy supply and network capacity.
Germany aims to have one million electric vehicles -- powered by energy from renewable sources -on the road by 2020. And, within ten years, the German environment ministry expects "green electricity" to make up 30 percent of all power consumed. Arithmetically speaking, it would be possible to achieve CO2-neutral electromobility. But, in reality, it is a difficult goal to attain. As more and more solar and wind energy is incorporated in the power grid, the proportion of electricity that cannot be controlled by simply pressing a button is on the increase. In addition, there is a growing risk that the rising number of electric vehicles will trigger extreme surges in demand during rush hour.
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Solar Energy: Cheaper Solar Concentrator With Fewer Photovoltaic Cells
ScienceDaily (Apr. 21, 2010) — A new solar concentrator design from an electrical engineering Ph.D. student at the University of California, San Diego could lead to solar concentrators that are less expensive and require fewer photovoltaic cells than existing solar concentrators. The graduate student, Jason Karp and his colleagues at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering presented the new solar concentrator in a paper in the January 2010 issue of the journal Optics Express.
While engineers have already developed high-efficiency solar concentrators that incorporate optics to focus the sun hundreds of times and can deliver twice the power of rigid solar panels, the new design offers potential new benefits. Existing solar concentrator systems typically use arrays of individual lenses that focus directly onto independent photovoltaic cells which all need to be aligned and electrically connected. In contrast, the new solar concentrator collects sunlight with thousands of small lenses imprinted on a common sheet. All these lenses couple into a flat "waveguide" which funnels light to a single photovoltaic cell.
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GE to Debut Gearless Offshore Wind Turbine to Rival Siemens
April 22 (Bloomberg) -- General Electric Co., the world's second-biggest maker of wind turbines, plans to introduce a 4 megawatt gearless wind turbine for offshore use in 2012 in a challenge to market leader Siemens AG of Germany.
Government incentives and pricing pressure for onshore models amid the economic slowdown make the offshore market more attractive, Mete Maltepe, global sales leader for wind energy at GE, said in a telephone interview on April 20.
Customer feedback on the offshore turbine has so far been positive, Maltepe said. GE is using technology acquired in its August takeover of the ScanWind unit of Morphic Technologies AB in Sweden to take on Siemens and Vestas Wind Systems A/S of Denmark. The purchase marked a change in tack for the U.S. company, which has mostly focused on the onshore market.
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Big Energy Storage in Thin Films
New ultracapacitor material could be fabricated directly on chips and solar cells.
Energy storage devices called ultracapacitors can be recharged many more times than batteries, but the total amount of energy they can store is limited. This means that the devices are useful for providing intense bursts of power to supplement batteries but less so for applications that require steady power over a long period, such as running a laptop or an engine.
Micro ultracapacitor: This thin-film carbon ultracapacitor electrode, shown in a microscope image, is about 50 micrometers on each side. The zigzagging, porous regions are the active part of the device.
Now researchers at Drexel University in Philadelphia have demonstrated that it's possible to use techniques borrowed from the chip-making industry to make thin-film carbon ultracapacitors that store three times as much energy by volume as conventional ultracapacitor materials. While that is not as much as batteries, the thin-film ultracapacitors could operate without ever being replaced.
These charge-storage films could be fabricated directly onto RFID chips and the chips used in digital watches, where they would take up less space than a conventional battery. They could also be fabricated on the backside of solar cells in both portable devices and rooftop installations, to store power generated during the day for use after sundown. The materials have been licensed by Pennsylvania startup Y-Carbon.
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Geothermal Energy Association Report: Geothermal Grows 26% in 2009.
The April 2010 US Geothermal Power Production and Development Update, published by the Geothermal Energy Association (GEA), showed 26% growth in new projects under development in the United States in the past year, with 188 projects underway in 15 states which could produce as much as 7,875 MW of new electric power. The GEA identified new projects in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. In addition to large utility scale power projects, the survey continued to show expanding interest in small power systems (under 1MW) with projects in Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Oregon and Wyoming.
When completed, these projects will add over 7,000 MW of baseload power capacity; enough to provide electricity for 7.6 million people, or 20% of California's total power needs, and roughly equivalent to the total power used in California from coal-fired power plants.
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SunPower Partners with Flextronics to Manufacture Solar Panels in California.
The SunPower and Flextronics partnership is expected to create approximately 100 new jobs this year, and produce 75 megawatts of SunPower solar panels annually. The West Coast location will allow SunPower to quickly and cost-effectively supply SunPower panels to solar installations at homes, commercial and public facilities, and power plants throughout the Western U.S.
Establishing a U.S. manufacturing facility is a direct result of SunPower's three-year agreement with the US Department of Energy (DOE) under the Solar Energy Technologies Program. Under the agreement, which was initiated in 2007, SunPower may receive up to $24 million of federal funding to implement improvements across the value chain that reduce solar system costs through improvements in the design and manufacture of integrated solar power systems. Funding from the DOE supports the research and development of both the solar panel manufacturing equipment ordered for this facility as well as commercial rooftop and tracking power plant systems which will incorporate the solar panels.
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