Webcast: Grid-Connected PV Systems: Codes, Standards, and Specifications
September 9, 2010 at 11am PDT/1pm CDT/2pm EDT The design, installation, and commissioning of grid-tied photovoltaic (PV) systems are governed by a number of industry codes and standards. The National Electrical Code (NEC) which is NFPA 70 is adopted almost universally throughout the United States and provides the minimum requirements for PV systems. This includes NEC Article 690 entitled Solar Photovoltaic Systems that provides specific requirements for PV equipment and systems. In addition, both IEEE and UL publish standards addressing the operation and testing of PV systems and equipment that should be referenced in the project specifications when applicable.
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For Lean Budgets, a Plug-and-Play Solar System
For eco-conscious homeowners who have considered a solar system for their rooftops but have found the cost and complexity daunting, Clarian Power thinks it has an idea. The Seattle-based clean tech start-up is developing a "plug-and-play" solar appliance called the Sunfish that will generate clean solar electricity for the home. "You bring it home and plug it in, just like a refrigerator, and it will cost about the same," said the company's president, Chad Maglaque. Today's typical roof-mounted solar power systems start at $10,000 and go up from there depending on the amount of electricity generated and the home's location. The bigger and more expensive systems can meet most of a house's energy needs and even put electricity back on the utility grid, essentially turning the meter backwards. A contractor usually installs the solar power system and turns it over to the homeowner in ready-to-use condition. An electrician will connect the system to the home's electric panel through an inverter, a device that converts the DC power generated by the solar panels to the AC power used by lights and appliances.
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Magic Sticker Makes Solar Cells Up to 12 Percent More Powerful
Solar power harnessing technologies need to get better, but we also need to do something with older panels, which will be not so efficient a few years from now. That's why Genie Lens Technologies, a company from Englewood, CO, has developed the easiest solution yet: a sticker that applied to the solar cell, will direct the incoming light onto the light-sensitive surface, greatly reducing reflections and improving the efficiency. The numbers are pretty impressive, at a first glance: a 10 percent improvement in power output. For that matter, the lens features microscopic structures specially thought by using several algorithms that model how light enters the film and encounters various surfaces within the solar cell: protective glass cover, semiconductor, and the back surface of the cell. By optimally bending the light, these surfaces will have minimized their reflective properties.
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Wind Turbines Are Coming to New York, and Not Just Offshore
For years, New York officials have envisioned powering the region from a set of huge wind turbines in the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island. But well before an offshore wind farm would be up and running, giant turbines may soon be spinning much closer to the city. Within three years, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey hopes to have five wind towers, each more than 280 feet tall, operating on the west side of New York Harbor. Nearby, the City of Bayonne, N.J., plans to install an equally large turbine to power a sewage-pumping station. Meanwhile, the Department of Veterans Affairs is considering placing wind turbines on or near its hospitals in Manhattan and Brooklyn. New York, it turns out, is a windy city, well suited for turning stiff breezes into electricity. If open space were not so rare, the city might be a prime spot for harnessing the wind, said Bill Baroni, deputy executive director of the Port Authority. "Anybody who's ever stood out at the dock in Weehawken waiting for a ferry just knows it's a very windy area," Mr. Baroni said. "Apparently, it's a pretty good place to put windmills."
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Americans' sense of energy savings? Small change.
Survey finds Americans' perception of energy consumption favor what's easiest to do, rather than what's most effective at curbing their carbon footprints. Quick - what's the most effective way for you to save energy? If you're like many Americans, you'd say turn out the lights or turn up the AC's thermostat. And, like many Americans, you'd miss the mark. Turns out, when figuring what we can do to go green, most of us overstate. We think about curtailment - unplugging appliances, driving less, turning off lights - when improving the efficiency of our cars, appliances and home would take the biggest chunk out of our energy footprint. That's not a surprise to scientists who surveyed 505 Americans on their perceptions of energy consumption and savings. After all, curtailment is pretty easy: Flip a switch. Improving efficiency, on the other hand, requires research, effort, out-of-pocket expense: Does anybody want to buy a new washing machine when what's downstairs works just fine?
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Many Americans Are Still Clueless on How to Save Energy
ScienceDaily (Aug. 17, 2010) - Many Americans believe they can save energy with small behavior changes that actually achieve very little, and severely underestimate the major effects of switching to efficient, currently available technologies, says a new survey of Americans in 34 states. The study, which quizzed people on what they perceived as the most effective way to save energy, appears in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The largest group, nearly 20 percent, cited turning off lights as the best approach -- an action that affects energy budgets relatively little. Very few cited buying decisions that experts say would cut U.S. energy consumption dramatically, such as more efficient cars (cited by only 2.8 percent), more efficient appliances (cited by 3.2 percent) or weatherizing homes (cited by 2.1 percent). Previous researchers have concluded that households could reduce their energy consumption some 30 percent by making such choices -- all without waiting for new technologies, making big economic sacrifices or losing their sense of well-being.
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Creating 300 Tesla ... Without Applying A Magnetic Field?
Researchers have reported the creation of pseudo-magnetic fields far stronger than the strongest magnetic fields ever sustained in a laboratory, just by putting the right kind of strain onto a patch of graphene. Graphene is a form of carbon that consists of a single layer of carbon atoms. A carbon atom has four valence electrons. In graphene (and in graphite, a stack of graphene layers), three electrons bond in a plane with their neighbors to form a strong hexagonal pattern, like chicken-wire. The fourth electron sticks up out of the plane and is free to hop from one atom to the next. The latter pi-bond electrons act as if they have no mass at all, like photons. They can move at almost one percent of the speed of light.
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How Marketplace Economics Can Help Build a Greener World
Consumers now have little information about the true ecological impacts of what they buy. But that may be about to change, as new technologies that track supply chains are emerging and companies as diverse as Unilever and Google look to make their products more sustainable. With climate legislation dead in Congress and the fizzled hopes for a breakthrough in Copenhagen fading into distant memory, the time seems ripe for fresh strategies - especially ones that do not depend on government action. Here's a modest proposal: radical transparency, the laying bare of a product's ecological impacts for all to see. Economic theory applied to ecological metrics offers a novel way to ameliorate our collective assault on the global systems that sustain life. There are two fundamental economic principles that, if applied well, might just accelerate the trend toward a more sustainable planet: marketplace transparency about the ecological impacts of consumer goods and their supply chains, and lowering the cost of that information to zero. First transparency. A maxim in economics holds that transparency makes markets work more efficiently. This rule has long been applied to price, but why not also apply it to the ecological impacts of industry and commerce? At present when it comes to the ecological consequence of the things we buy, we have information asymmetry, where sellers know far more than buyers.
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LEED Building Standards Fail to Protect Human Health
LEED certification has emerged as the green standard of approval for new buildings in the United States. But the criteria used for determining the ratings largely ignore factors relating to human health, particularly the use of potentially toxic building materials. The LEED program - Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design - is playing an increasingly important role in the drive to make buildings in the United States greener and more energy efficient. LEED is now the most prominent and widely adopted green building certification program in the country, with architects and developers striving to earn LEED's coveted platinum or gold rating, and an increasing number of local, state, and federal regulations beginning to incorporate LEED standards into official building codes. But LEED - sponsored by the U.S. Green Building Council, an industry group - has a glaring and little-known drawback: It places scant emphasis on factors relating to human health, even as the largely unregulated use of potentially toxic building materials continues to expand. One of LEED's major accomplishments - saving energy by making buildings more airtight - has had the paradoxical effect of more effectively trapping the gases emitted by the unprecedented number of chemicals used in today's building materials and furnishings. Yet, as the threat from indoor air pollution grows, LEED puts almost no weight on human health factors in deciding whether a building meets its environmental and social goals.
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Cambrian prof develops heat-saving construction technique
Research recently published by Kameal Mina, professor and program co-ordinator for the Energy Systems Technology program at Cambrian College, proves a building's conductive heat loss can be reduced by using an alternative construction technique. Traditionally, buildings have been constructed with wooden frames that are supported by parallel studs, stated a press release from Cambrian College. Using applied research labs at Cambrian College, Mina compared this technique to an alternative framing method that uses staggered studs. The science behind the concept is that heat escapes more quickly through wood studs than insulation, so by reducing the number of studs and increasing the amount of insulation used, more heat can be retained by a building. This technique has been used by builders before, but Mina is the first to develop a mathematical formula that objectively proves staggered studs retain more heat than parallel studs, the press release said. Specifically, his research produced three main findings: -Staggered studs enhanced the thermal resistance (R-value) of the walls. -The increase in R-value reached more than 16 per cent in the case study considered in his paper. -Staggered studs reduced the amount of lumber required for framing, thereby reducing construction costs. A 41 per cent reduction was achieved in the case study considered in his paper. -The weight load on the floor below the staggered stud frame was significantly reduced, thereby increasing the long-term stability of the building.
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Windstalks Harvest Wind Energy In A Field
While traditional wind turbines do a great job of providing us with power, they're also kind of, well, ugly. In order to fix this a group of designers has created a new style of wind farm that takes a few cues from nature itself. Designed as a potential energy source for the planned city of Masdar in Abu Dhabi, the Windstalks, as they are known, resemble a wheat field. Only instead of stalks of wheat, the fields consist of 1,203 55-meter-tall carbon fiber-reinforced resin poles, each full of piezoelectric ceramic discs and electrodes. When the poles blow in the wind, the electrodes produce a current, which is then stored in two battery-like chambers located beneath the field. Each pole is outfitted with an array of LED lights on its tip, which either light up or go completely dark depending on how much the pole is actually moving. The creators say that a Windstalk field should be able to produce an amount of energy comparable to a traditional turbine array. Even though a single turbine can produce more power than a single pole, the Windstalks can be packed into much denser arrays.
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Delusions Abound on Energy Savings, Study Says
When it comes to saving energy, many Americans seem to get it - and at the same time they don't get it at all. That's the takeaway from a new study by researchers from Columbia University, Ohio State University and Carnegie Mellon University who found that people are far more likely to focus on switching off lights or unplugging appliances than on buying new bulbs or more efficient refrigerators. But people's perceptions of the relative savings of various actions are significantly at variance with reality. "Participants estimated that line-drying clothes saves more energy than changing the washer's settings (the reverse is true) and estimated that a central air-conditioner uses only 1.3 times the energy of a room air-conditioner (in fact, it uses 3.5 times as much)," the researchers wrote.
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HVAC Ducts Can Be Used for Wireless Monitoring Technology
ScienceDaily (Aug. 19, 2010) - A new study by a team including a professor from North Carolina State University has found a way to implement wireless monitoring technology -- with uses ranging from climate control to health and safety applications -- by tapping into a building's heating, ventilating and air-conditioning (HVAC) ducts. The finding could lead to significant time and cost savings for builders and building managers, since the systems can be put into place without the expense and effort of running wires throughout the buildings. At issue are radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, which can be equipped with sensors that allow them to transmit information -- such as temperature -- back to a reader. RFID systems use centralized readers to collect data from relatively small, lightweight tags equipped with radio antennas. In an RFID system, an electronic reader broadcasts a radio wave with a specific frequency. When an RFID tag receives the transmission it absorbs energy from that transmission, enabling it to respond to the reader by the way that it reflects the wave.
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Hydrogen Causes Metal to Break
ScienceDaily (Aug. 21, 2010) - Ask people to think of the ultimate future car, and their answer is often K.I.T.T. -- the legendary talking supercar from the US television series "Knight Rider." A hydrogen turbo motor fuels the fantasy vehicle and propels it on the chase for the bad guys at over 300 miles an hour. In the future, cars may be equipped with hydrogen propulsion not just in TV shows, but in real life as well. In the transportation and energy sectors, hydrogen is viewed as an eventual alternative to the raw materials of fossil-fuel power, such as coal, petroleum and natural gas. However, for metals like steel, aluminum and magnesium -- which are commonly used in automotive and energy technology -- hydrogen is not quite ideal. It can make these metals brittle; the ductility of the metal becomes reduced. Its durability deteriorates. This can lead to sudden failure of parts and components. Beside the fuel tank itself, or parts of the fuel cell, but ordinary components like ball bearings could also be affected. These are found not only in the car, but also in almost all industrial machinery.
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Thinking green? It's not just black and white.
Can a big house be green? Yes, but a smaller house will always be greener because fewer resources were used in its construction and less energy is needed to heat and cool it. This critical distinction is little understood by the general public, but in the world of green building, prudent use of resources, also called "sustainability," is a cornerstone. It means using resources to meet our needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. From a green perspective, the fewer resources and energy used the better. The number of different resources tapped for homebuilding is relatively small, but their quantity is staggering, even for a modest-size house, said Dan Chiras, author, educator and director of the Evergreen Institute in Gerald, Mo. To build a 2,200-square-foot house, an acre of forest will be clear-cut somewhere on the globe and a huge hole in the earth, roughly equal in size to the volume of the house, will be excavated to provide the raw materials that go into copper, aluminum, steel and concrete. A house that's twice as big (4,400 square feet) will require about two acres of clear-cut forest, and a much bigger hole. Homeowners could more readily connect the dots between greenness and house size if this information were more widely available, but most green building programs do not provide a way to make comparisons between houses of differing sizes, said Michael Horowitz, a green building expert based in Marshfield, Vt. When size is addressed, it's usually done obliquely; to qualify as green and earn a higher rating, you have to do more things as the house size increases.
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Climate change is bad for business
Look no further than today to get a glimpse of what the future holds if we continue with business as usual: Record temperatures in the United States, Europe, and Canada; wildfires and hurricanes in Russia; and flooding in Pakistan and China. Climate change is here and there's more to come. Thousands of lives have been lost, and millions of people have been displaced from these recent disasters. But the economic tolls are also hurting businesses. CAP's Rebecca Lefton and Richard W. Caperton have the story in this cross-post from the Center for American Progress. Economists estimate that Russia's economy will lose $15 billion this year from the country's recent disasters-a full percentage point of its expected GDP growth. About half of that loss will come from agriculture and the rest from "lower industrial output, lower demand and lower productivity." Russia had been gaining ground from a 7.9 percent GDP loss last year, but shoppers are staying home to avoid the toxic smog and heat during the hottest summer on record. Offices are closing and factories are shutting down. Rising food prices are already limiting spending power. Now the government has banned wheat exports through the end of the year as grain output is down by at least a third. Tourism is suffering, and the U.S. State Department issued a travel warning urging Americans to postpone trips to Russia this summer. To make matters worse, strong storms with hurricane-strength winds in northwestern Russia are further disrupting the country.
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