Environment

Ice Can Help Power Grids During Peak Use

- Adam Clare

Air conditioners use a ton of energy and when everyone has their’s running the load on the power grid can be pushed to the limit. At night, when it’s generally cooler, the power grid isn’t being used nearly as much. A company called Ice Energy is using that extra night time capacity to make ice, which is then used to cool buildings as a compliment to exiting AC setups.

The building owner gets cheaper power, and the utility gets a solution to its peak power problems, said Mike Hopkins, executive vice president of corporate development. That all comes at a cost of roughly $2,200 per kilowatt of installed capacity, a figure that’s quite competitive with other forms of distributed energy storage, he said.

It’s a growing business. Ice Energy is now roughly halfway through fulfilling the 53 megawatts of Ice Bear units it has contracted to provide its biggest customer, the Southern California Public Power Authority, which buys power for municipal utilities around the SoCal region. That relationship also led the company to relocate from Windsor, Colo. to Glendale, Calif. last month, and to decide to focus on California as its key market, Hopkins said.

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Farming Could Save Detroit

- Adam Clare

Detroit has been hit hard by the ongoing economic claptrap that’s plaguing the global economy; the once-thriving oil-driven economy of the city is not fairing well. The city of Detroit is now looking to environmentally friendly sources of renewing their economy: farming.

Housing in Detroit is so cheap that it actually makes sense to tear down old lots and start planting!

Mr. Bing has long campaigned for a new master land-use plan that would rezone depopulated residential areas for other purposes, including farming. But after being sidetracked amid a fiscal crisis, city officials are now working on crafting a comprehensive farm policy that can satisfy investors like Mr. Hantz, residents, local activists and the state’s Right to Farm law, which limits municipalities’ power to regulate agriculture.

Hantz Farms officials acknowledge their self-funded venture would create few new jobs in the short term, and only modest revenue for Detroit. Hantz is offering only $300 a parcel, one-tenth of what city officials wanted. It has agreed to clear the land and demolish as many as 200 structures—at an estimated cost of more than $2 million, offset in part by tax credits and state assistance—before beginning to pay roughly $60,000 a year in taxes on the land.

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USA Urban Population Growth Outpaces the Suburbs

- Adam Clare

Regular readers know that in the modern world an urban lifestyle is more sustainable than a suburban lifestyle so it’s pretty good news to see that more people in the USA are moving into urban centres. America is where the suburbs started and have had the largest cultural impact and seeing a transition away from unsustainable suburban living in America is definitely a good thing!

Even among those who are buying homes rather than renting, there is a strong preference now for close-in locations, where sales prices driven by demand have increased while those in outer suburbs have plummeted. Where home purchase prices are still recovering, the recovery has been much stronger in inner, urban locations than in outer suburbs.
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Roughly 52 of the 73 US cities with population of greater than 250,000 showed faster annual growth (or slower rates of losses) in 2011 than their average growth over the last decade. Primary cities in large metropolitan areas with populations of more than one million grew by 1.1 percent last year, compared with 0.9 percent in surrounding suburbs. Cities switching from declines to gains included Pittsburgh and Milwaukee, both previously written off by some as “shrinking cities” because of what was perceived as irreversible decline because of the loss of manufacturing.

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Australia Creates Largest Network of Marine Parks

- Adam Clare

Australia has taken a step in the right direction when it comes to protecting their natural environment. The country has announced that they’ll be creating the largest network of protected marine areas in the world. Fishing and drilling for non-renewable resources has been been banned inside the network.

The announcement of the network was made a week before more than 130 heads of state and government will gather in Rio de Janeiro for the United Nations’ sustainable development conference as part of global efforts to curb climate change, one of the biggest conferences in U.N. history.

New reserves will be established from the Perth Canyon in the southwest to Kangaroo Island off the southern coast, but the “jewel in the crown” will be the protection of the Coral Sea area which surrounds the Great Barrier Reef in the northeast, Environment Minister Tony Burke said on Thursday.

“The Coral Sea marine national park … combined with the Great Barrier Reef area, becomes the largest marine protected area in the world,” Burke said.

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Renewable Energy Boosts Profits for UK Farmers

- Adam Clare

Farmers in the UK have benefited from complimenting their growing of crops with renewable energy production. Some farmers have installed wind turbines and others solar, but the result is the same: farmers can keep farming and profit from energy production.

Renewable energy is promising to overtake rural tourism as a secondary income for the agricultural sector, with 200 megawatts of power – enough for 40,000 households – installed, according to joint research by the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) and NatWest bank.

They found that one in six farmers will have solar photovoltaic (PV) systems in place by the middle of this year and one in five will be producing clean electricity by this date. If this trend continues, as much as 15% of all UK electricity from renewable sources come from the land by the end of this decade, they believe.

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