Green Building and Manufacturing Articles
States To Reopen Appliance Rebate Program
Months ago, many states said they would use federal stimulus money to help spur sales of appliances. They thought an offshoot of the popular "cash for clunkers" program would lead to a boom in sales. Instead, consumers chose not to claim millions of dollars in rebates. Now there's a move to make sure all the money is used up.
Read More...
Keeping cool and green
Innovations in air-conditioning systems mean cooling down buildings is going to require less energy
"AN ABSOLUTE dog's breakfast" is how David Collins describes the standard of fan blades in air-conditioning systems. This might seem to be something that would vex only an engineer like Mr Collins, the boss of Synergetics Environmental Engineering, based in Melbourne, Australia. But it is a big problem. If blades were designed for better aerodynamic efficiency, instead of for being stamped from sheet metal as cheaply as possible, the electricity consumption of many cooling systems could, he says, be cut by a third.
Huge effort has gone into warming up buildings as efficiently as possible; less into cooling them down. Most air-conditioning units, like refrigerators, use tubes containing chemical refrigerants which vaporise as they draw heat out of the air passing over them. This chilled air is then circulated with a fan to cool a building, a train or a car. Regulations are outlawing certain refrigerants, such as chlorofluorocarbons, which contain ozone-depleting chemicals. New developments would make cooling systems greener still because they would use less power.
Read More...
Too much of a good thing: Growth in wind power makes life difficult for grid managers
On the afternoon of May 19, in a single chaotic hour, more than a thousand wind turbines in the Columbia River Gorge went from spinning lazily in the breeze to full throttle as a storm rolled east out of Hood River.
Suddenly, almost two nuclear plants worth of extra power was sizzling down the lines -- the largest hourly spike in wind power the Northwest has ever experienced.
At the Bonneville Power Administration's control room in Vancouver, it was too much of a good thing. More electricity than its customers needed. More than the available power lines could export from the region. And more than the grid could readily absorb by ramping down generation at the region's network of federal dams.
So the edict went out: Feather your turbine blades; slash output.
It was an unwelcome instruction for wind farm owners, whose economics depend on generating electricity whenever possible. Yet it's one likely to go out with increasing frequency.
Read More...
The incredible shrinking solar cell
With lilliputian collectors, almost anything could be sun-powered
The next generation of solar cells will be small. About the size of lint. But the anticipated impact: That's huge.
Some of these emerging electricity-generating cells could be embedded in windows without obscuring the view. Engineers envision incorporating slightly larger ones into resins that would be molded onto the tops of cars or maybe the roofs of buildings. One team of materials scientists is developing microcells that could be rubber-stamped by the millions onto a yard of fabric. When such cells shrink in size - but not efficiency - it becomes hard to imagine what they couldn't electrify.
"The idea is to develop ubiquitous solar power," says Greg Nielson of Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. Foldable and moldable modules crammed full of photovoltaic cells could directly power devices or recharge batteries. "You can imagine putting them onto every surface," he says. "Your cell phone, laptop, backpack, tent - whatever."
The U.S. Department of Energy is funding more than a dozen labs to investigate photovoltaic physics "at the nanoscale," notes Linda Horton, who works in the agency's Office of Science in Washington, D.C. "Our goal," she says, "is to understand and improve at a very fundamental level the process by which energy from sunlight is translated into electrical energy."
Read More...
Bizarre Wind-Powered Car Travels Downwind Faster than Wind (Video)
I am not sure if this one is awesome, pointless, or a bit of both.
It turns out that there is a huge debate in certain circles as to whether it is possible to create a purely wind-powered vehicle that can travel directly downwind, faster than the wind itself. But while some eminent people are claiming it is impossible, others are busy making it happen. And they have video to prove it.
The project is being run by aerodynamicist and avid kite surfer Rick Cavallaro, with the help of some friends, and some fat funding from Joby Energy and Google. Apparently having built a scale model that proved it was possible, and having been met not with contrition from former skeptics, but derision, Rick decided to vindicate his claims on a larger scale.
Read More...
Don't just go with the flow
Massive downpours can strain city water systems and cause sewage backup. But you can help
It's becoming a more common summertime occurrence in the Montreal area -intense storms that dump heavy rain on the city, temporarily overwhelming the city's sewer network and flooding some streets and homes.
For some people, that can mean more than just water soaking their stuff. There's a problem of sewer backflows during periods of heavy rain, where the sewer pipes reach their full capacity, and send rain water and sewage back into the building it came from.
That means brown, smelly liquid coming up through below-street level plumbing, like in basement shower drains, sinks and toilets, and flooding into basements, garages and other underground rooms.
The culprit, climate change, is making powerful storms with heavy rain a more frequent occurrence in Montreal. As the climate warms, the Earth's water cycle is affected, said Herve Loge, who heads Montreal's water-management department. With warmer weather, more water evaporates into the air, making it more humid. When a cold front moves in, the airborne water comes back to Earth in the form of heavy rainfall.
Climate modelling done by the Montreal climate research group Ouranos suggests that intense rainfall will happen here more often over the next 30 to 40 years, Loge said in an interview as heavy rain swept through the Montreal area last week.
Read More...
The Secret Danger of Everyday Things
Slow Death by Rubber Duck: The Secret Danger of Everyday Things
Slow Death by Rubber DuckFor two days, Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie confined themselves to a small room and did what on the face of it seem like some unremarkable things. They showered, shampooed, and shaved. They ate tuna sandwiches and canned food reheated in plastic containers. They sat on a couch and played Guitar Hero on a carpet treated with stain repellent.
Those are things that many of us might do on any given day -- but unlike the rest of us, Smith and Lourie closely monitored their blood and urine the whole time for seven toxic chemicals. Even though they made a conscious effort to avoid some of these chemicals before their experiment, after two days of "normal" activity, they found drastically elevated levels of toxics in their bodies.
"Pollution is now so pervasive that it's become a marinade in which we all bathe every day," they write in Slow Death by Rubber Duck. "Pollution is actually inside us all. It's seeped into our bodies. And in many cases, once in, it's impossible to get out."
Read More...
Breakthrough in Thin-Film Solar Cells: New Insights Into the Indium/gallium Puzzle
ScienceDaily (July 19, 2010) - Scientists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) in Mainz have made a major breakthrough in their search for more efficient thin-film solar cells. Computer simulations designed to investigate the so-called indium/gallium puzzle have highlighted a new way of increasing the efficiency of CIGS thin-film solar cells. Researchers to date have achieved only about 20% efficiency with CIGS cells although efficiency levels of 30% are theoretically possible.
Thin-film solar cells are gaining an ever increasing proportion of the solar cell market. As they are only a few micrometers thick, they offer savings on material and manufacturing costs. Currently, the highest level of efficiency of about 20% is achieved by CIGS thin-film solar cells, which absorb the sunlight through a thin layer made of copper, indium, gallium, selenium, and sulphur. However, the levels of efficiency achieved to date are nowhere near the levels theoretically possible.
Read More...
The incredible shrinking solar cell
With lilliputian collectors, almost anything could be sun-powered
The next generation of solar cells will be small. About the size of lint. But the anticipated impact: That's huge.
Some of these emerging electricity-generating cells could be embedded in windows without obscuring the view. Engineers envision incorporating slightly larger ones into resins that would be molded onto the tops of cars or maybe the roofs of buildings. One team of materials scientists is developing microcells that could be rubber-stamped by the millions onto a yard of fabric. When such cells shrink in size - but not efficiency - it becomes hard to imagine what they couldn't electrify.
Read More...
Helsinki data centre to heat homes
Water warmed while cooling a server centre installed in a cathedral bomb shelter will go on to heat 500 homes
A mini revolution in eco-friendly computing is taking place in the depths of the 19th-century Orthodox Uspenski Cathedral in downtown Helsinki.
The Finnish IT company Academica has installed a new 2MW database server centre in an empty second world war bomb shelter meant to protect city officials in the event of a Russian attack. Water warmed while cooling the servers will go on to provide heat for 500 homes or 1,000 flats in a city that often suffers winters of -20C. After the heat is extracted, the water will be recycled back to cool the servers again.
"There have been smaller implementations of similar systems," says Pietari Päivänen, head of sales at Academica. "Data centres being used to heat parking lots. No one has conducted the heat towards a central heating system however."
Around the world, vast and fast-rising amounts of information and data are being stored online, creating a huge demand for affordable data centres. But the servers consume vast amounts of energy, raising concerns about the greenhouse gas emissions produced. About 2% of the total electricity used in Britain powers data centres, making them expensive to operate and a significant factor in the causes of climate change.
Read More...
China Tops U.S. in Energy Use
Asian Giant Emerges as No. 1 Consumer of Power, Reshaping Oil Markets, Diplomacy
China has passed the U.S. to become the world's biggest energy consumer, according to new data from the International Energy Agency, a milestone that reflects both China's decades-long burst of economic growth and its rapidly expanding clout as an industrial giant.
China's ascent marks "a new age in the history of energy," IEA chief economist Fatih Birol said in an interview. The country's surging appetite has transformed global energy markets and propped up prices of oil and coal in recent years, and its continued growth stands to have long-term implications for U.S. energy security.
The Paris-based IEA, energy adviser to most of the world's biggest economies, said China consumed 2.252 billion tons of oil equivalent last year, about 4% more than the U.S., which burned through 2.170 billion tons of oil equivalent. The oil-equivalent metric represents all forms of energy consumed, including crude oil, nuclear power, coal, natural gas and renewable sources such as hydropower.
Read More...
Heat Waves and Energy Crunches: the Future is Now
Two stories I came across yesterday struck me as particularly indicative of the gulf between the speed at which global change is unfolding and our perceptions of the urgency of the issues. There's often a presumption that we have decades to change (so change can begin gradually) and decades more before we have to worry about impacts. The evidence, though, increasingly points to a much shorter horizon for action and adaptation.
The first story reports on a big Stanford study which combined the latest suite of climate models to understand how climate change already under way is likely to affect the hottest extremes of weather in the Western U.S.:
"The results were surprising. According to the climate models, an intense heat wave -- equal to the longest on record from 1951 to 1999 -- is likely to occur as many as five times between 2020 and 2029 over areas of the western and central United States. ...
The Stanford team also forecast a dramatic spike in extreme seasonal temperatures during the current decade. Temperatures equaling the hottest season on record from 1951 to 1999 could occur four times between now and 2019 over much of the U.S., according to the researchers.
Read More...
Cool Roofs Can Offset Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Mitigate Global Warming, Study Finds
ScienceDaily (July 20, 2010) - Can light-colored rooftops and roads really curb carbon emissions and combat global climate change? The idea has been around for years, but now, a new study by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that is the first to use a global model to study the question has found that implementing cool roofs and cool pavements in cities around the world can not only help cities stay cooler, they can also cool the world, with the potential of canceling the heating effect of up to two years of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions.
Because white roofs reflect far more of the sun's heat than black ones, buildings with white roofs will stay cooler. If the building is air conditioned, less air conditioning will be required, thus saving energy. Even if there is no air conditioning, the heat absorbed by a black roof both heats the space below, making the space less comfortable, and is also carried into the city air by wind -- raising the ambient temperature in what is known as the urban heat island effect. Additionally, there's a third, less familiar way in which a black roof heats the world: it radiates energy directly into the atmosphere, which is then absorbed by the nearest clouds and ends up trapped by the greenhouse effect, contributing to global warming.
Read More...
Cool roofs save money, save energy, cut pollution and directly reduce warming!
What wildly underfunded climate solution can achieve all of these goals simultaneously:
* Slow global warming by increasing the reflectivity of the Earth (geo-engineering)
* Reduce local temperatures in the hottest cities (adaptation)
* Reduce fossil CO2 emissions (mitigation)
* Save U.S. consumers and businesses billions of dollars in energy costs
* Reduce urban smog and hence cardio-pulmonary disease
* Create more than 100,000 jobs in two years?
The answer is a major effort to make roofs (and pavements) whiter and/or more reflective, which should be coupled with a major urban tree-planting effort.
This "urban heat island mitigation" (UHIM) may well be the single most cost-effective energy and climate strategy (see background here plus "White roofs are the trillion-dollar solution").
Read More...
Parched California: Severe water shortages loom
Over 1,100 U.S. counties - more than one-third of all counties in the lower 48 states - now face higher risks of water shortages by mid-century as the result of global warming and more than 400 of these counties – many within the Central Valley -- will be at extremely high risk for water shortages, based on estimates from a new report by Tetra Tech for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The report uses publicly available water use data across the United States and climate projections from a set of models used in recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) work to evaluate withdrawals related to renewable water supply.
The report finds that 14 states face an extreme or high risk to water sustainability, or are likely to see limitations on water availability as demand exceeds supply by 2050.
Read More...
Homebuyers to pay thousands more in stamp duty if their properties not energy efficient
Homebuyers would be forced to pay thousands of pounds extra in tax if they buy a property that doesn't meet tough climate change targets, under plans being considered by the Government.
The higher rate of stamp duty would hit millions of 'energy guzzling' homes with draughty windows, insufficient loft insulation and old inefficient boilers.
The controversial proposals are aimed at slashing the UK's greenhouse gas emissions.
Yesterday, critics warned that a hike in stamp duty could hit the property market and be disastrous for the economy.
The proposals would be introduced alongside the Government's Green Deal - a £90 billion scheme to cut the fuel bills of 14 million homes.
Under the Green Deal, householders will be offered "free" green makeovers by energy companies, local councils or DIY chains from 2012.
The money spent on new insulation, double glazing or replacement boilers will be claimed back from the savings made in energy bills.
The Government says the green makeovers are essential if the UK is to meet its legally binding targets of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 34 per cent of their 1990 levels within 10 years.
Read More...
Integrative Design: Amory Lovins at Autodesk University
Hear Amory Lovins, Chairman and Chief Scientist of the of Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), inspirational presentation on Integrative Design given at Autodesk University 2009. Learn how the next generation of designers and engineers can make a big change in the future of design.
Read More...
Stormwater Model to Inform Regulators on Future Development Projects
ScienceDaily (July 19, 2010) - North Carolina State University researchers have developed a computer model that will accurately predict stormwater pollution impacts from proposed real-estate developments -- allowing regulators to make informed decisions about which development projects can be approved without endangering water quality. The model could serve as a blueprint for similar efforts across the country.
"The model is designed to evaluate the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus found in stormwater runoff from residential and commercial developments -- particularly runoff from a completed project, not a site that is under construction," says Dr. Bill Hunt, an associate professor and extension specialist of biological and agricultural engineering at NC State who helped develop the model. "To comply with regional water-quality regulations, cities and counties have to account for nutrient loads," Hunt says, "but the existing tools are antiquated and aren't giving us sufficiently accurate data."
The researchers developed the model using chemical, physical and land-use data specific to North Carolina and surrounding states. This allowed them to account for regional conditions, which will improve the model's accuracy. "Because the model uses regional data, it could be modified easily for use east of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina and adjoining states," Hunt says.
Read More...
3D and BIM Guidance Available
The Specialty Contractor's Subforum of the AGC BIMForum has created the MEP Spatial Coordination Team Requirements for Building Information Modeling. This document provides guidance to companies and individuals involved in 3D MEP (Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing, and Fire Protection) spatial coordination. Its aim is to help the MEP spatial coordination process using 3D and BIM technology and to assist in developing team structures, definition of roles and responsibilities, recommendations for technical and IT considerations, social structure, and accountability. The document is available as a PDF file
Read More...
The World's Ever-Increasing Hunger for Coal
Coal-fired power stations are a major producer of the greenhouse gas CO2, but there is no alternative to the fuel in the near future. Energy companies are hoping that carbon capture and storage technologies may be the answer, but many local residents don't want CO2 stored under their backyards.
When Rolf Martin Schmitz, a manager with the German energy giant RWE, drove to the North Sea resort island of Sylt last summer, he immediately noticed the signs. Along the side of roads throughout the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, he was greeted by images of skulls. Residents had installed the billboards to protest against underground storage sites for carbon dioxide that may be built in the region.
Read More...
Vestas Climbs After Winning Largest Wind Turbine Order
Vestas Wind Systems A/S, the biggest maker of wind turbines, climbed in Copenhagen trading after winning its largest order for a single power-generation site.
Vestas will supply 190 turbines of its V90-3.0 megawatt model to Terra-Gen Power LLC's Alta Wind Energy Center near Tehachapi in California, the Randers, Denmark-based company said yesterday in a stock-exchange statement.
The order is the fifth Vestas signed in the U.S. this year after winning no contracts in 2009 in the biggest wind-turbine market as the credit crunch squeezed financing for projects. Vestas is spending about $1 billion to expand production capacity in the U.S. where it competes with General Electric Co. over a market that Chief Executive Officer Ditlev Engel has described as having the world's best wind resources.
Read More...
Housewatch: Building green without losing greenbacks
Although home builders have the opportunity to make a huge impact on reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing global warming, very few mention it in their sales pitches.
To make a difference, home builders do not have to reinvent the house; they simply have to build ones that use less energy. Their challenges are minor compared with those faced by automakers shifting to plug-in hybrids, electric, and hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered cars. Builders can achieve significantly higher rates of energy efficiency with only a few minor changes: plugging air leaks in the building envelope so that the owner will not be heating or cooling the great outdoors; sealing the ducts that deliver heating and air conditioning with mastic glue instead of tape, which can disintegrate; installing better windows with a low-emissivity coating; and adding more insulation to basements, crawl spaces, walls and attics.
Read More...
Graphene Organic Photovoltaics: Flexible Material Only a Few Atoms Thick May Offer Cheap Solar Power
ScienceDaily (July 24, 2010) - A University of Southern California team has produced flexible transparent carbon atom films that the researchers say have great potential for a new breed of solar cells.
"Organic photovoltaic (OPV) cells have been proposed as a means to achieve low cost energy due to their ease of manufacture, light weight, and compatibility with flexible substrates," wrote Chongwu Zhou, a professor of electrical engineering in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, in a paper recently published in the journal ACS Nano.
The technique described in the article describes progress toward a novel OPV cell design that has significant advantages, particularly in the area of physical flexibility.
Read More...
Charging Up Electric Car Batteries in Environmentally-Friendly Way
ScienceDaily (July 24, 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.
Read More...
The world's first molten salt concentrating solar power plant
'Archimede' demonstration solar plant in Sicily becomes the first to use molten salts to store energy overnight
This month, the Italian utility Enel unveiled "Archimede", the first Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plant in the world to use molten salts for heat transfer and storage, and the first to be fully integrated to an existing combined-cycle gas power plant. Archimede is a 5 MW plant located in Priolo Gargallo (Sicily), within Europe's largest petrochemical district. The breakthrough project was co-developed by Enel, one of World's largest utilities, and ENEA, the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development.
Several CSP plants already operate around the world, mainly in the US and Spain. They use synthetic oils to capture the Sun's energy in the form of heat, by using mirrors that beam sunlight onto a pipe where pressurised oil heats up to around 390°C. A heat exchanger is then used to boil water and run a conventional steam turbine cycle. Older CSP plants can only operate at daytime – when direct sunlight is available -, an issue that has been dealt with in recent years by introducing heat storage, in the form of molten salts. Newer CSP plants, as the many under construction in Spain, use molten salts storage to extend the plants' daily operating hours. Archimede is the first plant in the world to use molten salts not just to store heat but also to collect it from the sun in the first place.
Read More...
Barge hits well near Gulf, sends oil, gas spewing
NEW ORLEANS – A barge slammed into an abandoned well in a coastal inlet early Tuesday, sending a shower of water, natural gas and oil spewing about 100 feet into the air.
Emergency officials said about 6,000 feet of containment boom was in place around the site in a lake just north of Barataria Bay, which has already been fouled by oil from the massive BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
While there was no estimate of how much oil was spewing Tuesday, officials said the mile-long slick it created was small compared with the Gulf spill.
The Coast Guard said the towboat Pere Ana C was pushing the barge on Mud Lake when it hit the wellhead about 1 a.m. No one was hurt.
The towboat captain told investigators the well was not lit as required, Coast Guard Capt. John Arenstam said.
Read More...