Energy

Energy for All, All the Time!

- Adam Clare 2 Comments

Today I just want to remind readers that there is indeed enough renewable energy out there to power the needs of humanity on the planet. In fact, wind, solar, and other renewable power sources can provide enough energy to power us and have extra juice to spare.

The shift from our current fossil fuel based economies to sustainable renewable energy economies is usually presented as a great challenge. That is also the message coming from the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen. Oil companies tell us that it can be done but that we need decades to get there. The numbers tell a bit of a different story. Total world energy consumption is about 15 terawatts (2005). All that energy can be generated by today’s solar panel technology on a sunny piece of land of about 550 by 550 kilometers (340 square miles). That is for instance about 3% of the surface of the United States and China, 4% of the surface of Australia, 3.5% of Brazil and 9% of India. And we just need to capture about 20% of the solar energy that hits such an area. Of course the beauty of solar energy is that it can be generated locally. So we are not going to see such a centralized production. But the numbers clearly convey that the challenge is not as huge as it is often presented.

Keep reading at the Huffington Post.

Self-Cleaning Solar Panels

- Adam Clare 2 Comments

Solar panels work best outside and as a result nature tends to get dust, dirt, grime, and such on the panels which lower the efficiency of the panels. Now some researchers have accidentally found a way to have self-cleaning solar panels to cut back on maintenance costs and increase efficiency.

Molecular microbiology and biotech professor Ehud Gazit and his team research ways to control peptide atoms and molecules. People with Alheimer’s disease have a peptide called beta amyloid found in the plaques that form in their brains. While working on self-assembling nano-tubules in the lab, the scientists made an interesting discovery.

They got the peptides to self-assemble in a vacuum, forming tiny tubes that look like grass. The resulting nanocoating repels dust and water, which would be useful for protecting desert solar arrays, reducing maintenance. Plus, the material has potential as a super-capacitor, which could give lithium batteries more kick. The assembly technique is detailed in Nature Nanotechnology

Keep reading about it at Discovery.

Wind Turbines are not a Health Risk

- Adam Clare 2 Comments

A small group of people have complained and argued that wind turbines can cause health problems. A new study confirms that those people are wrong and in fact wind turbines are not a health risk at all.

The study acknowledges that a minority of people find the intermittent swooshing noise emitted by the turbines’ giant blades to be annoying, but it also concluded: “Annoyance is not a pathological entity.”

The study says there’s “nothing unique” about the noise or vibrations emitted by wind turbines and no evidence that the audible or sub-audible sounds have any direct adverse effect on health.

It suggests that those who are bothered by turbines simply have a lower tolerance for annoying sounds of all sorts.

“A major cause of concern about wind turbine sound is its fluctuating nature. Some may find this sound annoying, a reaction that depends primarily on personal characteristics as opposed to the intensity of the sound level.”

Keep reading at the CBC.

Solar Power for the Masses

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

A chain of department stores in the USA has begun selling solar panels off the shelf. This is a great sign that the market for solar panels is growing and this increased production will only make the panels cheaper in the long run.

Lowe’s has begun stocking solar panels at its California stores and plans to roll them out across the country next year.
This shows how far the highest of the high-tech alternative energy technologies has come. Solar power is now accessible to anyone with a ladder, a power drill, and the gumption to climb up on a roof and install the panels themselves.
For Lowe’s, it’s an opening into a new and potentially lucrative DIY business.
“There’s definitely a growing market for this with the number of people moving toward energy efficient homes,” spokesman Steven Salazar said.

Keep reading the article.

What You Can do to Stop Climate Change

- Adam Clare

Here’s an example of what a German family are doing to lower their environmental impact and make the world a little better for their children:

Georg Fürtges’s pride and joy is a green monstrosity standing in the basement of his house in the western German city of Essen, hissing quietly and consuming dark little pellets that look like worms. The pellets, stored in bins reaching up to the ceiling in another room, are made of compressed sawdust. And the monstrosity is a furnace that is at least three times as big as a modern condensing gas boiler. Fürtges, 55, and his wife Karla, 49, have 6.4 tons of the pellets stored in their basement, enough to meet their heating needs for a year and a half. The couple has decided to live in an environmentally friendly way.
They have been doing so for more than 20 years, partly because they have three children and are thinking ahead, beyond their own life spans. They have made mistakes, but they have also learned a lot. They remain convinced that their approach is the right one, but they also know that a life devoted to living green can only be had at a high price. Georg Fürtges spent an entire year researching heating systems before he recently replaced his old gas furnace with a pellet furnace combined with a solar thermal heating system. Some of the pipes in the house had to be replaced. All told, it cost Fürtges €27,000 ($40,200) to retrofit his home. He would have paid about €10,000 for a modern gas furnace.

“We believe that it will pay off in the long term,” says Karla Fürtges. The couple bought their small 1930s house in Stadtwald, an Essen neighborhood, 16 years ago. The heating system was old, the windows weren’t insulated and the house lacked effective heat insulation.

The couple began by insulating the outside walls. Then they purchased the costly new gas furnace and had vinyl thermopane windows installed. The insulation alone brought down their annual natural gas consumption from 22,000 to 12,000 kilowatt hours. An average household currently consumes almost twice as much gas.

Keep reading at Der Spiegel

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