Energy

China Rules the Air

- Adam Clare

We just saw that Mexico has a huge wind farm, well it’s apparently nothing compared to what China is up to. China is now the world’s largest producer of wind energy, and this is only in a couple years of installing wind-powered generators.

China last year doubled its wind energy capacity – for the fourth straight year – adding 6,300 megawatts of new electricity generation for a total capacity of 12,210 megawatts. A third of the world’s new wind capacity last year was installed in Asia, with China accounting for 73% of that power. China reached its 2010 target of generating 5,000 megawatts of wind-powered electricity in 2007 and is expected to hit its 2030 goal of 30,000 megawatts years early.

“In 2009, new installed capacity is expected to nearly double again, which will be one third or more of the world’s total new installed capacity for the year,” Li Junfeng, Secretary General of the Chinese Renewable Energy Industry Association, said in a statement.

Mexico Gets Winded

- Adam Clare 2 Comments

Mexico is firing up the largest wind farm in Latin America. It’s great to see so many countries using renewable energy!

According to Spanish energy company Acciona Energia who has been assigned the project, the farm will produce enough energy to power a city of 500,000 people, while reducing carbon monoxide emissions by 600,000 metric tons each year.

The new, $550 million project is in a region so breezy that the main town is named La Ventosa, or “Windy.” It’s on the narrow isthmus between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean, where winds blow at 15 mph to 22 mph, a near-ideal rate for turbines. Gusts have been known to topple tractor trailers.

Conserving Energy Starts at Home

- Adam Clare

It goes without saying that saving energy is a good thing, and it’s something that everyone can do. It’s really easy to save energy and sometimes it’s easy to forget how easy it is, luckily the internet is filled with tips on how to save energy at home.

2. Make sure that the rooms in the house are neither too cold nor too warm.
Heating and cooling systems takes up most of the energy which is being consumed by a typical household. By making sure that each individual room in the house has just the right temperature, you will be saving a lot on CO2 emissions.
3. Make sure that the air filters are cleaned and the heaters are well-insulated.
Again, heating and cooling takes up most of the energy consumption in a typical home. When you see to it that your air filters are cleaned or replaced regularly, the energy will not be lost. Dirty air filters need to work doubly hard and take twice as much energy to work properly.
The same thing applies when you make sure that the heaters are well-insulated – it’s a good way to observe that no heat is escaping and you’re not using any more energy than you have to.

Coal Mine Now Mined for Heat

- Adam Clare


This is pretty neat for what it is and the symbolism behind it. An old coal mine has been transformed into a geothermal plant. Renovating an old-school mine that burnt up non-renewable natural resources and turning it into a place of renewable non-polluting energy is pretty awesome.

The area supplied by the Minewater is a relatively new development and includes a supermarket and a brand new cultural center and library as well as many homes and businesses. While the cost of the heating and cooling is not much different than before, customers can be assured of stable prices in the future compared to the cost they could incur by using fossil fuels.

The Netherlands, which is also experimenting with energy generation from chicken manure, is just one of the test sites for this new technology. Other test sites for the Minewater Project include Aachen, Germany and Lorraine, France. Much of the technology for this project is being developed as needed, since there is no precedent for this type of geothermal energy project. At the beginning of October the Minewater Conference was held in Heerlen to discuss the technology and hold workshops and meetings to improve the project. The attendees produced a very interesting video on their work and progress.

Algae: The Energy of the Future

- Adam Clare

Esquire has a short little article outlining the top four ways that algae can be used for energy production.

Dark Fermentation
Most scientists believe photosynthesis is the key to algae oil. Solazyme sees it as the problem. Algae can convert sunlight into chemical energy, but not nearly as efficiently as other materials–industrial wastes, switchgrass, low-grade molasses–can. So Solazyme designed a process that lets algae feed in the dark on input biomass rather than sunlight, cutting down the conversion process from weeks to days. The company’s end-product diesels meet the same standards as nonalgal diesels, and it expects their price to be on par in two to three years. Until then, the company, which signed a development agreement with Chevron this year, will continue to clock miles in its algae-powered cars, standard vehicles purchased straight off the lot.

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