Green Building & Manufacturing Articles
Europe Gets First Glimpse Of Solar And Windfarm Plans
Wind turbine farms are set to expand rapidly across Europe's coastal waters, throwing up challenges and opportunities for industry, according to a Reuters analysis of a leaked draft of EU energy strategies.
A picture of the European Union's renewable energy landscape for 2020 is emerging for the first time as the bloc's 27 member states scramble to meet a deadline for setting their "National Renewable Energy Action Plans."
The documents were due to be delivered to the European Commission by midnight on Wednesday, although most missed the deadline and none of the plans has yet been made public.
But a number of draft plans seen by Reuters point to massive growth in the onshore wind-farm capacity -- 30 percent in Germany, 130 percent in Ireland, 230 percent in Italy and 74 percent in Spain.
Offshore wind is also expected to soar, from virtually zero today to around 10,000 Megawatts in Germany, 2,300 MW in Ireland, 1,000 MW in Italy and 3,000 MW in Spain.
That is likely to pose a massive challenge for the wind industry's support services.
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Can the GSA Really Achieve a 'Zero Environmental Footprint'?
Executive Order (EO) 13514 continues to have enormous implications for the green building industry. As you'll recall, EO 13514 requires that federal agencies comply with a number of green building stipulations, including 95 percent of all applicable contracts meet sustainability requirements. While the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) invested over $25 billion in green building projects, the executive order will have a more long-lasting impact on the industry.
Why do I say this? General Services Administration (GSA) Administrator Martha N. Johnson's recent statement regarding the GSA's zero environmental footprint goal suggest how far agencies may go to implement the executive order:
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The cost of building green - perception vs. reality
One of the hottest issues in the green building world is whether there is a significant premium to building "green" as opposed to the use of standard building products and practices. It is not uncommon for some members of the construction industry to say that the cost of building "green" can add 10 percent or more to the cost of construction even though there are studies that indicate that this is not the case.
The chasm between perception and reality was highlighted in a recent study conducted by the Northeast Ohio Chapter of the United States Green Building Council and Sustainable Rhythm, a consulting organization that works within the commercial, office, residential, green-space and senior-housing markets.
The 24-page study titled "Opening the Door to Green Building" was issued June 18 and is based on the responses of 200 participations (90 percent in Ohio) to an online survey given in March and April to four groups:
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Gordon Murray Design Unveils the T.25, Low-Carbon City Car.
Gordon Murray Design, of the UK, has unveiled its T.25 City Car at Oxford University as part of the Smith School's World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment validating a low-carbon approach to transportation. The T.25 represents a major breakthrough in city car design in the areas of weight, footprint, safety, usability and efficiency.
The car is built using the company’s unique iStream (r) manufacturing process that reduces full lifecycle CO2 damage and increases production efficiencies.
"Our transportation sector is hugely dependent on fossil fuels and we need to de-fossilise our economy as quickly as possible," said Sir David King, Founding Director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. "The T.25 and iStreamÆ manufacturing processes are clear examples of what's possible in low-carbon transportation."
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RoseStreet Announces Breakthrough Multiband Solar Cell Technology.
RoseStreet Labs Energy (RSLE), of Phoenix, Arizona, has announced a breakthrough laboratory demonstration of the first known multiband photovoltaic device featuring three distinct light absorption regions integrated into a single layer thin film device. This breakthrough is based on RSLE's IBand(TM) technology and is the first known intermediate band solar cell reduced to practice in a laboratory demonstration. This technology illustrates great promise for high efficiency thin film solar efficiencies above 35% by potentially capturing the full spectrum of the sun's spectrum.
Efficient solar cells require optimized utilization of the whole solar spectrum. Currently this is achieved in a complex and expensive technology in which several solar cells with different band gaps are connected in series. A much simpler approach in which a single semiconductor has several different gaps sensitive to different parts of the solar spectrum has been proposed but never realized.
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Obama announces $2 billion investment in solar PV manufacturing
...and "the first large-scale solar plant in the U.S. to actually store the energy it generates for later use – even at night."
"What’s more, over 70 percent of the components and products used in construction will be manufactured in the USA"
In his weekly radio, the President announced he was putting $2 billion into two solar energy projects, including Concentrated solar thermal with storage (aka solar baseload).
CSP remains "The technology that will save humanity." And we are seeing more and more plants in various phases of construction (see "Total of 8500 MW of CSP planned for 2014 in U.S. alone").
The easiest way to deal with the intermittency of the sun is cheap storage — and thermal storage is much cheaper and has a much higher round-trip efficiency than electric storage. The ability to provide power reliably throughout the day and evening in key locations around the world (including China and India) is why CSP delivers 3 of the 12 – 14 wedges needed for "the full global warming solution."
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Super-High Pressures Used to Create Super Battery: 'Most Condensed Form of Energy Storage Outside of Nuclear Energy'
ScienceDaily (July 5, 2010) — The world's biggest Roman candle has got nothing on this.
Using super-high pressures similar to those found deep in the Earth or on a giant planet, Washington State University researchers have created a compact, never-before-seen material capable of storing vast amounts of energy.
"If you think about it, it is the most condensed form of energy storage outside of nuclear energy," says Choong-Shik Yoo, a WSU chemistry professor and lead author of results published in the journal Nature Chemistry.
The research is basic science, but Yoo says it shows it is possible to store mechanical energy into the chemical energy of a material with such strong chemical bonds. Possible future applications include creating a new class of energetic materials or fuels, an energy storage device, super-oxidizing materials for destroying chemical and biological agents, and high-temperature superconductors.
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Wind-turbine power is far healthier than coal or nuclear
If we take seriously the protection of human health, we have to phase out coal- and nuclear-powered electricity.
Coal kills hundreds of Ontarians and triggers more than 100,000 illnesses (e.g., asthma attacks) annually. It is also the most climate-destructive fuel around, emitting twice as much carbon as natural gas does. Whether the issue is respiratory disease or global warming, coal is a catastrophe.
But nuclear is extremely unhealthy as well. A scientific review by the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment found all functioning reactors release radioactive materials on a routine basis. A 2008 German government study showed children (younger than five) living within five kilometres of a nuclear plant are at elevated risk for leukemia. And Scientific American recently reported nukes harm the climate: "Nuclear power results in up to 25 times more carbon emissions than wind energy, when reactor construction and uranium refining and transport are considered."
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Report: U.S. Green Building Market Will Balloon to $173.5 Billion by 2015
Think the trend of businesses making green office renovations is just a passing fad? Not according to the latest issue of EL Insights, which reports that the U.S. green building market value will balloon from $71.1 billion now to $173 billion by 2015. Commercial green building is expected to grow by 18.1% annually during the same time period from $35.6 billion to $81.8 billion. In this case, green building is defined as building with resource use and employee productivity in mind.
The explosive projected growth can be attributed both to a growing recognition of green building's potential cost-savings as well as incentives from the government (i.e. the multi-million dollar Sustainable Communities Challenge Planning Grant program and the Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grant program). Green renovation will also comprise a significant portion of future green building, thanks in no small part to government projects like then Recovery through Retrofit initiative, which offers $80 billion energy and environmental retrofits for federal buildings.
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Road Surface Purifies Air by Removing Nitrogen Oxides, Researchers in the Netherlands Find
ScienceDaily (July 6, 2010) - Road surfaces can make a big contribution to local air purity. This conclusion can be drawn from the first test results on a road surface of air-purifying concrete. This material reduces the concentration of nitrogen oxides (NOx) by 25 to 45 per cent, said prof. Jos Brouwers in a recent inaugural lecture at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands.
The tests were carried out in the municipality of Hengelo, where the busy Castorweg road was resurfaced last fall. As part of the project, around 1,000 square meters of the road's surface were covered with air-purifying concrete paving stones. For comparison purposes, another area of 1.000 square meters was surfaced with normal paving stones.
Researchers at TU/e carried out three air-purity measurements on the Castorweg last spring, at heights of between a half and one-and-a-half meters. Over the area paved with air-purifying concrete the NOx content was found to 25 to 45 per cent lower than that over the area paved with normal concrete. "The air-purifying properties of the new paving stones had already been shown in the laboratory, but these results now show that they also work outdoors," said prof. Brouwers. Further measurements are planned later this year.
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The 21st Century Grid
Can we fix the infrastructure that powers our lives?
We are creatures of the grid. We are embedded in it and empowered by it. The sun used to govern our lives, but now, thanks to the grid, darkness falls at our convenience. During the Depression, when power lines first electrified rural America, a farmer in Tennessee rose in church one Sunday and said—power companies love this story—"The greatest thing on earth is to have the love of God in your heart, and the next greatest thing is to have electricity in your house." He was talking about a few lightbulbs and maybe a radio. He had no idea.
Juice from the grid now penetrates every corner of our lives, and we pay no more attention to it than to the oxygen in the air. Until something goes wrong, that is, and we're suddenly in the dark, fumbling for flashlights and candles, worrying about the frozen food in what used to be called (in pre-grid days) the icebox. Or until the batteries run dry in our laptops or smart phones, and we find ourselves scouring the dusty corners of airports for an outlet, desperate for the magical power of electrons.
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