Energy

Nanosolar Producing Cheap Solar Energy

- Adam Clare 2 Comments

A company in California, Nanosolar, as produced solar chips that generate electricity at $0.90 per watt. If sales go well this is a massive breakthrough for solar energy as this a milestone in solar electricity.

After five years of product development – including aggressively pipelined science, research and development, manufacturing process development, product testing, manufacturing engineering and tool development, and factory construction – we now have shipped first product and received our first check of product revenue.

… Today we are announcing that we have begun shipping panels for freefield deployment in Eastern Germany and that the first Megawatt of our panels will go into a power plant installation there.

As far as the first three of our commercial panels are concerned:

Panel #1 will remain at Nanosolar for exhibit.

Panel #2 can be purchased by you in an auction on eBay starting today.

Panel #3 has been donated to the Tech Museum in San Jose.

Carbon Monitoring for Action

- Adam Clare

CARMA
CARMA is an organization that monitors carbon produced by power plants around the world. They have an interactive map to visualize what parts of the world are the worst offenders, you can also see which companies are the worst polluters. It’s great to see a site that puts all of this information into one place for activists and researchers to access easily.

The objective of CARMA.org is to equip individuals with the information they need to forge a cleaner, low-carbon future. By providing complete information for both clean and dirty power producers, CARMA hopes to influence the opinions and decisions of consumers, investors, shareholders, managers, workers, activists, and policymakers. CARMA builds on experience with public information disclosure techniques that have proven successful in reducing traditional pollutants.

For several thousand power plants within the U.S., CARMA relies upon data reported to the Environmental Protection Agency by the plant operators themselves as required by the Clean Air Act. CARMA also includes many official emissions reports for plants in Canada, the European Union, and India. For non-reporting plants, CARMA estimates emissions using a statistical model that has been fitted to data for thousands of reporting plants in the U.S., Canada, the EU, and India. The model utilizes detailed data on plant-level engineering and fuel specifications. CARMA reports emissions for the year 2000, the current year, and the future (based on published plans).

UK Gives Big OK to Massive Wind Farms

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

ure-2.pngThe UK is going to expand their wind farms so that half of their energy will come from wind. Interestingly, they are taking a purely economically-driven take on this. I hope that people like Harper and Bush will soon start to notice that saving the planet creates jobs and helps create an economy that can prosper; after all, the Brits are doing it.

“The UK is now the number one location for investment in offshore wind in the world and next year we will overtake Denmark as the country with the most offshore wind capacity.

“This could be a major contribution towards meeting the EU’s target of 20% of energy from renewable sources by 2020.”

Hutton made clear the scale of the plans. The “first round” of offshore wind farms, in 2001, comprised a few small demonstration projects. The “second round” in 2003 limited development to the Thames estuary, the Greater Wash and the northwest.

And the BBC reports on the wind farm:

Business Secretary John Hutton says he wants to open up British seas to allow enough new turbines – up to 7,000 – to power all UK homes by the year 2020.

He acknowledged “it is going to change our coastline”, but said the issue of climate change was “not going away”.

African Desert can Power Europe

- Adam Clare 3 Comments

There’s a new plan being hatched in North Africa that will see solar panels placed all along the region. The energy produced by the solar farms would then be transfered to Europe using undersea power cables.

Billions of watts of power could be generated this way, enough to provide Europe with a sixth of its electricity needs and to allow it to make significant cuts in its carbon emissions. At the same time, the stations would be used as desalination plants to provide desert countries with desperately needed supplies of fresh water.

Last week Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan presented details of the scheme – named Desertec – to the European Parliament. ‘Countries with deserts, countries with high energy demand, and countries with technology competence must co-operate,’ he told MEPs.

The project has been developed by the Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Corporation and is supported by engineers and politicians in Europe as well as Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Jordan and other nations in the Middle East and Africa.

How the USA Can Cut 28% of Greenhouse Gases

- Adam Clare

A new study has been released that looks at how the United States can cut 28% of their greenhouse gas emissions. They looked primarily at the wastefulness of energy use and notice problems that can be solved from the level of the consumer, to the landlord, and to every level of government. By knowing the problem, we can begin to solve and, indeed they have a couple suggestions.

“What the report calls out is the fact that the potential is so substantial for energy efficiency,” said Ken Ostrowski, a leader of the report team. “Not that we will do it, but the potential is just staggering here in the U.S. There is a lot of inertia, and a lot of barriers.”

The country can do the job with “tested approaches and high-potential emerging technologies,” the study found, but doing the work “will require strong, coordinated, economywide action that begins in the near future.”

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