Month: September 2009

5 Things to Make the World better Everyday

- Adam Clare 3 Comments

Everyday you can make the world a little better by doing very small actions. The more people that do small things can add up to a very large movement – so join in on the fun 🙂

Read the list of five things you can do here.

Don’t throw it away! We have a tendency not to think about items we throw away. They disappear from our sight, so they are out of our minds. But all those things that the garbage truck hauls away every week do have to go somewhere, and that place is a landfill. Landfills are a major cause of greenhouse gasses and ozone depletion. So next time you get ready to throw something away, ask yourself if you could possibly use the item in another way or donate it.

Nanosolar Takes Solar Power to the Next Level

- Adam Clare 8 Comments

A relatively new startup called Nanosolar has announced that they have $4 billion in contracts to sell their solar panels that produce $1 per watt. That is a low enough price point to take on those awful fossil fuels.

The key to their success is how they propose electric utilities make use of their technology. You can read all about it in Wired.

Two big announcements marked its coming out party: The company has $4 billion in contracts and can make money selling its products for $1 per watt of a panel’s capacity. That’s cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels in markets across the world.

Specifically, the company’s management thinks it can help utilities avoid the difficulties of getting big coal and nuclear power plants built by offering the option to build small solar farms they can set up close to cities.

“Cost-efficient solar panels such as ours can be deployed in 2- to 20-megawatt municipal solar power plants that feed peak power directly into the local distribution without requiring the expense of transmission and with a plant deployment time as short as six months,” said Nanosolar CEO Martin Roscheisen in an e-mail to Wired.com. “Coal or nuclear can’t do that, can’t do it as cost efficient and can’t do it as rapidly deployable.”

Thin-film solar has been a major focus of U.S. alternative energy research and development efforts since the early 1980s because it was seen as a true “breakthrough” solar technology. Silicon cells are easy to manufacture, dependable and efficient, but some researchers viewed them as inherently limited. As they are currently produced, they require a lot more silicon than thin-film solar cells. They might reach efficiency levels of over 40 percent, but they’d never compete with fossil fuel energy sources, even with carbon taxes.

Thin-film solar was different. On the one hand, it was definitely harder to make efficient cells. However, it allowed researchers to dream of printing semiconducting chemicals onto a metal sheet and having it convert photons into electricity. Thin-film cells seemed like they’d be perfect for the applications researchers imagined like “solar shingles” for building-integrated solar installations.

Safe Sex is Good for the Planet

- Adam Clare 2 Comments

Researchers at the London School of Economics have released an argument that posits that family planning is one of the best things we can do to fight climate change.

Every Ă‚ÂŁ4 spent on family planning over the next four decades would reduce global CO2 emissions by more than a ton, whereas a minimum of Ă‚ÂŁ19 would have to be spent on low-carbon technologies to achieve the same result, the research says.
The report, Fewer Emitter, Lower Emissions, Less Cost, concludes that family planning should be seen as one of the primary methods of emissions reduction. The UN estimates that 40 per cent of all pregnancies worldwide are unintended.
If these basic family planning needs were met, 34 gigatons (billion tonnes) of CO2 would be saved – equivalent to nearly 6 times the annual emissions of the US and almost 60 times the UK’s annual total.

Five Ideas to Avert Global Warming

- Adam Clare

National Geographic has a short article on crazy-sounding ideas that could avert global warming. Read all five ideas here.

Digging for a Solution

Dissolving mountains of rock might sound like a mad scientist’s dream. But it’s one of the proposals for speeding up the natural process of rock weathering, as a way of absorbing CO2.

Normal rainfall is slightly acidic, and over hundreds of thousands of years, it dissolves away mountains and other rocks.

The process pulls CO2 out of the air, locking it away in the form of minerals such as limestone.

A big operation for artificial rock weathering would need big mines, and a lot of electricity to chemically split seawater to make an acid that would be sprayed over the rocks.

The approach is “basically feasible,” said Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in California and a co-author of the Royal Society report.

Bangladesh Bans Business Suits

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Bangladesh has decided to change their dress code to reflect their local climate and save energy. By dressing for the weather it is expected that the country will consume less energy by using air conditioners. Wouldn’t it be grand if people dressed for the weather?

Read all about at the BBC.

Bangladesh’s official dress code has been rewritten – after Sheikh Hasina ordered government employees to do more to ease the country’s energy shortage.
Even ministers now will no longer be expected to wear suits and ties.
During the hot months between March and November, men have been ordered to wear trousers and shirts instead, and these do not have to be tucked in any more.
Officials and ministers have also been told not to turn their air-conditioners below 24C.
In June, the government introduced daylight saving, and the clocks moved forward by one hour, in another attempt to cut energy consumption.

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