Energy

Ontario Goes Solar

- Adam Clare

After recently banning old light bulbs, the province of Ontario has permitted a Californian company permission to build a rather large solar power facility.

The Ontario government has approved a California company’s plan to build North America’s largest photovoltaic solar farm, the provincial energy ministry announced Thursday.

OptiSolar Farms Canada Inc. of Arthur, Ont. — a subsidiary of California-based OptiSolar Inc. — will install more than one million solar panels at four farms outside Sarnia, Ont., providing the province with 40 megawatts of power by 2010. Ontario Energy Minister Dwight Duncan said that’s enough to power 6,000 homes.

Solar Skyscraper

- Adam Clare

Skyscrapers are bombarded with solar rays and all they did before was heat the building, now an entire skyscraper is being covered in solar panels! No more wasting of that precious light.

Buy 10 million dollars of solar panels and cover the building with them! They’re just as pretty as any facade, and produce hundreds of kilowatts of power for use in the building. In concert with 24 roof-mounted wind turbines, 10% of the CIS tower in Manchester will be powered by building-bound renewable energy. While that might not seem like much, it is a very big building. Only the building’s service tower (shown) will be covered with panels. The attached office building (which gets to have windows instead of solar panels) is much larger.

Ontario Bans Bad Blubs

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Canada’s largest province has decided to ban old light-bulbs. Entire nations have already done this, at least Australia and Venezuela have, and it is good to see other regions following in their lead.

“It’s the equivalent of taking 250,000 cars off the road,” said Environment Minister Laurel Broten.

Sun is the Greenest

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Computers burn a lot of energy on our planet, in fact it’s 4-5% of total world power consumption. Well, Sun Microsystems knows this and is doing something about it. I wonder how they stack up to sustainable linux, black google, but, they are better than windows and Apple.

For him, this is just good business. “Energy responsibility is about to become a society-wide business imperative,” he says. “All my projects have measurable business benefit. You might say the ‘eco’ in my title is for economics as well as ecology.”

“We’re not only part of the solution but also part of the problem,” he confesses. What he means is that computers are egregious energy hogs. Data centers alone, Sun calculates, account for 2-3 percent of total world energy use, with all IT making up more like 4-5 percent. At big companies, 20 percent of total energy costs can typically be accounted for by information technology.

Solar Goodness

- Adam Clare

picture-1.png Solar power is always seeing new advancements. It can be something fun like building your own solar powered iPod charger or finding that solar dyes can be used for creating electricity. This month Georgia Tech has developed a solar panel that uses nano-towers to create a more efficient solar cell.

The difference is in the design. Traditional solar panels are often flat and bulky. The new design features an array of nano-towers – like microscopic blades of grass – that add surface area and trap more sunlight.

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