Manuel said:
"This is great news! I hope all cities pass this into law.The practice of using plastic bags just to quickly dispose of them has been going on far t..." [read]
Jay Knecht said:
"What are the performance stats for the Son of Max? ..." [read]
gazelle said:
"@ Dallas:
The book, and the supplementary videos in the "How It All Ends" youtube series, address this in detail, but I'll try to paraphrase:..." [read]
Barry said:
"Kofi Annan has about as much of a clue about electric cars and developing countries as Ann Ann the Panda.
He underestimates the ingenuity o..." [read]
JJ said:
"Very cool. I didn't thought that biodesel might be our future fuel...." [read]
Derek said:
""I guarantee you this will spark huge debates around the world," she said. "We have to delve into this in a way that hasn't been done in a long tim..." [read]
In Germany's Footsteps... And About as Sunny
Canada's most populous province has been signing deals left and right since it increased its feed-in tariffs (the danger is now arguably that they're too generous, and this could lead to a backlash from rate-payers). The Ontario Power Authority (OPA) has recently announced deals for 184 new projects, mostly wind, solar, run-of-river hydro, and landfill gas capture.
Though coal still provides the majority of China's power, there's some good news coming from Xinhua via Business Green: New official Chinese stats show that the nation's renewable energy capacity is now growing faster than its coal plants.
A quick one to keep an eye on and get your best booing voice reader for: New York Times is highlighting a bill passing through Connecticut's legislature that would slash in half the state's current renewable energy goal of getting 20% of its electricity from clean sources by 2020:
The American Wind Energy Association has just released its annual market report for the US and the super-quick summary is 2009 saw record installation of wind power but though manufacturing continues to see growth, it's happening more slowly than in 2008. Here are the fast facts to remember:
One of the solar-powered rickshaws back at the debut. Photo: Cleantech.
It was a pretty short run for Delhi's solar power rickshaws. After debuting almost eighteen months ago, the electric-assist vehicles have been rejected by their drivers ('pullers' in Indian parlance, a holdover from when rickshaws didn't have a bicycle attached to the front) as having too much added weight and the batteries being too slow to charge, taking nearly a full day once depleted, Indian Express reports.
"The ultimate nerd gadget" Image credit:GlobalPOV, excerpt from photo of printer out-puting plastic love doll.
For years I've been watching for news of an engineering break-though which indicated polymer-based solar photo-voltaic sheets could become cheap to manufacture and long lasting, perhaps using a process akin to computer printing. (Which would mean that solar power would at last enter the domain of computer geeks.)
Ideally, it would lead to a fabrication process which could be patented and kept under tight wraps during development: necessary to keep industrial spies at bay; so it would bring green jobs first and foremost to the USA. (Don't expect many details before prototypes are shown to potential investors.)
As transformational R&D; typically takes a several streams of work and decade or more to coalesce at the point of a pilot test, it's been a difficult optimism to maintain. But finally...
Over 30 historic properties will be permanently adversely affected by the project. Photo: Versageek via flickr.
Another twist in the long, ongoing saga of Cape Wind, the proposed 130-turbine wind power project planned for Nantucket Sound: The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation has advised that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar not approve the project on the grounds that the project's indirect and direct effects on historic properties in the area would be "pervasive, destructive, and, in the instance of seabed construction permanent. By their nature and scope, the effects cannot be adequately mitigated at the proposed site."
Out for nearly a week now, perhaps the most striking thing about the Silicon Valley Toxics Coaltion's solar power manufacturer scorecard is that only 14 companies bothered responding--something which GreenBiz reminds us is just about one quarter of the industry's module production. Among those not responding were several high profile companies: Solyndra, Nanosolar, Konarka, Suntech, and Sharp.
A facade covered with Piksols on a sunny day. Image by Drzach & Suchy (more images below)
After flexible solar panels and spray-on solar cells, Drzach & Suchy, an architect who works in Basel and a cryptographer and software engineer who works in Zurich, have designed Piksol; a solar pixel to harvest the sun and create decorative images on facades....
Image credit: vaxomatic/FlickrThis piece was written by my colleague J. Matthew Roney at the Earth Policy Institute.
Even in the face of a worldwide economic downturn, the global wind industry posted another record year in 2009 as cumulative installed wind power capacity grew to 158,000 megawatts. With this 31 percent jump, the global wind fleet is now large enough to satisfy the residential electricity needs of 250 million people. Wind provides electricity in over 70 countries, 17 of which now have at least 1,000 megawatts installed....
photo: Wayne National Forest via flickr.
Despite difficult financial circumstances, the global solar industry added additional capacity of 6.4 gigawatts in 2009, according to a new assessment by the European Photovoltaic Industry Association. That takes global capacity to more than 20 GW and represents an increase of 44% (Reuters). Germany remains the largest solar market, followed by Italy, Japan, and the United States....
photo: Warren Rohner via flickr.
Don't say COP15 amounted to totally nothing... Renewable Energy World has an interesting run down of what 25 of the developing nations are doing in terms of National Appropriate Mitigations Actions in the wake of the climate conference. It may be an overly wordy way of saying renewable energy plans, but their worth paying attention to. Here are some highlights:...
Image: Pew Environmental Group
"China Leads G-20 Members in Clean Energy Finance and Investment"
China might not be the most helpful country when it comes to putting together international carbon restrictions, but investors in the Middle Kingdom are forging ahead and putting more cash into renewables than any other country, including the United States, according to a new report by the Pew Environmental Group. They looked at renewable energy investments in 2009, and despite a pretty big hiccup due to the global recession, the overall trend is clear....
Lloyd Alter
Richard Heinberg invented the term "Peak Everything," a term we have used a lot on TreeHugger. He has written nine books on the subject of how "resource depletion and population pressures are about to catch up with us, and no one is prepared."
He concluded his recent talk in Toronto with the statement "Every crisis is an opportunity, and we are about to enter the biggest opportunity of our lives."
...
Photo: Michael Graham Richard
Well, it Depends... Not All Megawatts Are Created Equal
Power grid operators are looking at the coming wave of plug-in vehicles and trying to figure out what it will mean for them. A group of U.S. and Canadian companies just released a study titled Assessment of Plug-in Electric Vehicle Integration with ISO/RTO Systems (ISO = Independent Service Operator, RTO = Regional Transmission Organization) that looked into what would happen if 1 million plug-in vehicles were added to the grid in North-America. The findings are interesting....
Image credit: Good
For Coal River Wind and their supporters, saving one mountain in West Virginia is about more than protecting the environment, more than securing the health of nearby residents, and more than preserving a landscape famed throughout history for its beauty. While the battle to save Coal River Mountain is about all of these things, it's also a fight for a cleaner energy future....
Image credit: Trees Water People
Jeff has already reported how solar panels are supporting relief efforts in Haiti, and April has covered the use of biochar stoves to help Haitians too. (Though some commenters remained unconvinced.) Now another piece of appropriate technology is being deployed in this nation where many people are still struggling to meet their basic needs. And this one is about as simple as it gets—rocket stoves.
...
Image credit: Friendly Aquaponics & Makine Mekanik
While some folks may be busy debating whether soil-less agriculture can be organic or not, there's a lot of momentum behind aquaponics. As the name suggests, aquaponics is a system of food cultivation that combines hydroponics with fish farming, and which uses the waste from the fish to feed the plants, and the plants to filter the waste from the fish. From Worldwide Aquaculture's plans for industrial-scale aquaponics to Growing Power's urban aquaponics, many people believe that it holds at least one of the keys to feeding a growing population in a world of diminished resources. But as I've asked before, given the required energy inputs, from feed to heating and lighting, is aquaponics really an efficient way to feed ourselves? Now one farm in Hawaii is hoping to make that question a little easier to answer—experimenting with small-scale biogas to power its systems. ...
Guim Valls Teruel is travelling 5 continents on an electric bicycle to promote the use of cleaner energy and the non-reliance on fossil fuel worldwide. Currently in New Zealand, the Electric Bicycle World Tour has already clogged quite a lot of mileage so we decided to see how Guim's getting on so far. Guim started his tour on the 5th of June 2009 from the Olympic stadium in Beijing and his plan is to arrive in London in 2012. ...
Trees suck CO2 out of the air as they grow and then release roughly the same amount of CO2 when they're burned in the advanced power plants, said Jack Byrne, director of the college's Sustainability Integration Office. So the process of growing, harvesting, and burning wood is close to carbon neutral, Byrne said.
But is wood really carbon neutral in a meaningful way? Bruce Lourie doesn't think so....
Photo: Flickr, CC
Clean Energy Still Growing Strongly
Despite a very difficult year for most industries in 2009, the three major branches of the clean energy sector have shown some significant growth. "In 2009, combined global revenue for the three major clean-energy sectors - solar photovoltaics (PV), wind power, and biofuels - grew by 11.4 percent over 2008, reaching $139.1 billion. These three sectors are expected to reach $325.9 billion by 2019, according to the Clean Energy Trends 2010 report issued today by Clean Edge Inc., a research and publishing firm devoted to the clean-tech sector."...
Video profile of University of New Hampshire Ecoline™ project. Video credit:UNH and Waste Management.
The beginning of a new decade
reminds us to also look back at the past 10 years to see how everything from
daily tasks to new technologies have evolved. Back in 2000, the thought of
using our garbage to produce renewable energy was barely a blip on the radar.
In fact, it was only two years ago that Waste Management became the first in
its industry to partner with landfill owners to develop landfill gas-to-energy
(LFGTE) projects, breaking group on a LFGTE facility near Syracuse, New York.
photo: Wikipedia
This is one you definitely don't hear about too often: Over at Green Biz Marc Gunther is highlighting the efforts of Contour Global to extract methane from Lake Kivu, on the border of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Here's how they are doing it:...
Photo: Google Maps
Loblaw Couldn't Resist Ontario's Generous Feed-in Tariff?
Loblaw is announcing today that it will put solar panels on the roof of 4 supermarkets in a pilot program, with the ultimate goal of installing solar arrays on more than 100 stores in Ontario. This is not surprising considering how insanely generous the feed-in tariffs for solar power are in the province (between 53.9 and 80.2 ¢/kWh, with 20-year contracts). I just hope that measures have been taken to avoid repeating what happened in Spain. ...
Image: MIT
Could Store Power at 100x More Energy/Weight Than Lithium-Ion
A team of scientists at MIT has discovered a new way to generate power with carbon nanotubes. In a paper titled "Chemically driven carbon-nanotube-guided thermopower waves" published in Nature Materials, they describe how they made "thermopower waves" flow through the nanotubes, generating a significant amount of power relative to the size of the nanotubes. This opens up new areas of research in energy generation and storage....
photo: Alex Lang via flickr.
Here's a new twist on biomass gasification, one which more or less merges it with solar thermal. Technology Review is highlighting the efforts of Colorado-based Sundrop Fuels to develop a system which uses the heat of the sun to vaporize biomass and turn it into syngas:...
Distributed generation for utilities is part of the mandate. Photo: Solar Dave via flickr.
Now this is getting somewhere... Climate Progress reports that the Colorado House of Representatives has passed an increase in the state's renewable energy standard, bringing it to 30% by 2020. Only California has a higher standard, albeit by only 3%. The previous state standard was 20% by the same date....
Photo: Public domainFor a Little While, %19 of the State's Electricity Came from Wind Power
It looks like the wind is blowing strong these days in Texas. On Sunday Feb. 28th, it broke a wind power electricity generation record with 6,242 megawatts on the ERCOT grid, and that record was broken again 5 days later on Friday March 5th with a 6,272 megawatts peak, and this is just for ERCOT, it doesn't include wind turbines on the "Panhandle" part of the state because they are connected to a different grid - so the real total for the state would be even higher. ...
We'll be working on better category archives soon. In the meantime, take a look at the weekly archive if you really want to dig around, or use the search box at the top of the page.
on 04.13.10
A facade covered with Piksols on a sunny day. Image by Drzach & Suchy (more images below)
After 
Image credit: 
photo: 
photo: 
Image: Pew Environmental Group
"China Leads G-20 Members in Clean Energy Finance and Investment"
China might not be the most helpful country when it comes to putting together international carbon restrictions, but investors in the Middle Kingdom are forging ahead and putting more cash into renewables than any other country, including the United States, according to a new report by the 
Lloyd Alter
Richard Heinberg invented the term "Peak Everything," a term we have used 
Photo: Michael Graham Richard
Well, it Depends... Not All Megawatts Are Created Equal
Power grid operators are looking at the coming wave of plug-in vehicles and trying to figure out what it will mean for them. A group of U.S. and Canadian companies just released a study titled Assessment of Plug-in Electric Vehicle Integration with ISO/RTO Systems (ISO = Independent Service Operator, RTO = Regional Transmission Organization) that looked into what would happen if 1 million plug-in vehicles were added to the grid in North-America. The findings are interesting....
Image credit: Good
For 
Image credit: 
Image credit: 
Guim Valls Teruel is travelling 5 continents on an electric bicycle to promote the use of cleaner energy and the non-reliance on fossil fuel worldwide. Currently in New Zealand, the 
Photo: 
photo: 
Photo: Google Maps
Loblaw Couldn't Resist Ontario's Generous Feed-in Tariff?
Loblaw is announcing today that it will put solar panels on the roof of 4 supermarkets in a pilot program, with the ultimate goal of installing solar arrays on more than 100 stores in Ontario. This is not surprising considering how insanely generous the feed-in tariffs for solar power are in the province (between 53.9 and 80.2 ¢/kWh, with 20-year contracts). I just hope that measures have been taken to avoid repeating 
Image: MIT
Could Store Power at 100x More Energy/Weight Than Lithium-Ion
A team of scientists at MIT has discovered a new way to generate power with carbon nanotubes. In a paper titled "
photo: 
Distributed generation for utilities is part of the mandate. Photo: 
Photo: 
