Month: March 2011

Organization Positivity

- Adam Clare

Dr. Beth Cabrera is all about making the workplace a more positive space for people and lucky for us she has a blog informing people on positive changes they can make!

Here’s a more recent post on how volunteering helps organizations, companies, and individuals:

In addition to lifting employees up, volunteering can also help them to develop new skills that can be transferred to their jobs. Volunteers build leadership capabilities, hone their communication skills, and learn to work with people from a wide range of backgrounds. Another benefit is that employees who volunteer together develop closer relationships. This is especially valuable when employees from different organizational levels or departments have the opportunity to work together. So it isn’t surprising that a recent study in Germany found that employees who volunteer not only are more satisfied, but they perform better at work.

Volunteering can be equally beneficial for college students. I graduated from Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee not too long ago. I was proud to see that Rhodes topped Newsweeks’ 2010 list of “Most service-minded schools”. Rhodes has always had a strong commitment to service. The Kinney Program, based on volunteerism, leadership and civic engagement, was established in the 1950’s and Rhodes has the oldest collegiate chapter of Habitat for Humanity in the country. The newer Bonner Scholars Program focuses on service-learning, social change and servant leadership. The positive emotions that Rhodes students experience through volunteering provide benefits that help them to excel in school. Volunteering also teaches them skills that will help them to be successful after they graduate.

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No Fracking way! Quebec Says no to Fracking

- Adam Clare

Fracking, also known as hydraulic fractiruing, is the process of extracing gas from shale using copious amounts of water to destroy the environment so you can drive, err get gas. Quebec has a made a great move to ban fracking in the province, let’s hope that other places follow Quebec’s lead!

Normandeau said the ban will apply to fracking both for gas and oil, but that fracking could be done for scientific purposes.

A panel of independent experts, which the government has yet to name, will determine whether an individual fracking operation will add to scientific knowledge about the impact of the controversial technique used to extract natural gas from shale rock formations.

In announcing the ban, Normandeau noted that the BAPE, Quebec’s Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement, said in its report recommending further study before shale-gas exploration goes ahead that there is a lack of knowledge.

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Solar Power with Salt

- Adam Clare

Thermal solar power plants uses energy from the sun to heat up water and then run the resulting steam to power turbines. Simple enough, but now Siemens is looking to make that whole process more efficient by using salt.

Solar thermal power plants that produce hotter steam can capture more solar energy. That’s why Siemens is exploring an upgrade for solar thermal technology to push its temperature limit 160 °C higher than current designs. The idea is to expand the use of molten salts, which many plants already use to store extra heat. If the idea proves viable, it will boost the plants’ steam temperature up to 540 °C—the maximum temperature that steam turbines can take.

Siemens’s new solar thermal plant design, like all large solar thermal power plants now operating, captures solar heat via trough-shaped rows of parabolic mirrors that focus sunlight on steel collector tubes. The design’s Achilles’ heel is the synthetic oil that flows through the tubes and conveys captured heat to the plants’ centralized generators: the synthetic oil breaks down above 390 °C, capping the plants’ design temperature.

Startups such as BrightSource, eSolar, and SolarReserve propose to evade synthetic oil’s temperature cap by building so-called power tower plants, which use fields of mirrors to focus sunlight on a central tower. But Siemens hopes to upgrade the trough design, swapping in heat-stable molten salt to collect heat from the troughs. The resulting design should not only be more efficient than today’s existing trough-based plants, but also cheaper to build. “A logical next step is to just replace the oil with salt,” says Peter Mürau, Siemens’s molten salt technology program manager.

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SkySails Signs a Deal

- Adam Clare

In 2007 we looked at SkySails when they were still in the startup phase of their company and today they have signed a large deal with Cargill, a large shipping company. Cargill will use SkySails starting later this year to save up to 30% of their fuel costs.

SkySails are a sails that attach to the front of the boat to help tow a boat along in open seas. The use of a rather large sail helps lower transportation costs while lowering the shipping industry’s impact on the environment.

Plans are in place next December to install one of these giant kites on a handysize vessel of between 25,000 and 30,000 deadweight tonnes, which the company has on long-term charter, making it the largest vessel propelled by a kite in the world. It is hoped to have this system fully operational in the first quarter of 2012.

G.J. van den Akker, head of Cargill’s ocean transportation business, said that “the shipping industry currently supports 90 percent of the world’s international physical trade. In a world of finite resources, environmental stewardship makes good business sense.” A recent United Nations study cited by Cargill says that up to 100 million tons of carbon dioxide could be saved every year by the broad application of the SkySails’ technology on the world merchant fleet.

Read some more here.

Iceland Thinking of Electrifying Europe

- Adam Clare

Iceland uses sustainable geothermal energy production to provide power and hot water to its people and now they are thinking of exporting surplus power to Europe. They are wrapping up their research into the feasibility of running so much electricity underwater to Europe and if it’s completed even more people can benefit from renewable energy.

Plus, just imagine how rich Iceland can become from supplying cheap renewable energy to the rest of Europe.

The project aims for the exportation of some five terawatt-hours (or five billion kilowatt-hours) each year, Jonsdottir said.
At current power prices in Europe, that corresponds to between 250 and 320 million euros ($350-448 million) in exports annually, and is enough to cover the average annual consumption of 1.25 million European households.
“The idea is to meet demand during peak hours in Europe, as well as some base load,” Jonsdottir said, refusing to estimate how much the project might cost to implement.
Landsvirkjun, which is state-owned, produces about 75 percent of all electricity in Iceland

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