California

How California Tracks the Air That They Breathe

- Adam Clare

California has a law that dictates the quality of air, but that needs to be tracked so it can be enforced. Here’s a video about how Berkeley Lab keeps track of the air.

Last March, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientist Marc Fischer boarded a small airplane loaded with air monitoring equipment and crisscrossed the skies above Sacramento and the Bay Area.

Instruments aboard the aircraft measured a cocktail of greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide from fossil fuels, methane from livestock and landfills, nitrous oxide from agriculture, and industrially produced gases such as refrigerants.

The flight was part of the Airborne Greenhouse Gas Emissions Survey, a collaboration between Berkeley Lab, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the University of California, Davis to pinpoint the sources of greenhouse gases in Central California.

The airborne survey is intended to improve inventories of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions, which in turn will help scientists verify the emission reductions mandated by AB-32, the ambitious legislation passed by California in 2006 to slash the state’s greenhouse gas emissions 25 percent by 2020.

“In order to comply with AB-32, we need to know where the gases are coming from and how much,” says Fischer, a scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division.

Keep reading.

Gray Water Getting More Interest

- Adam Clare

Gray water is such a simple idea, but it is expensive to implement the infrastructure on a mass scale – particularly in the suburbs. There is however, more interest in the idea thanks to an increased knowledge about how important water is. Californians are now looking more at gray water – and in the USA California tends to set trends for the rest of the states.

The systems — which use water from sinks, tubs and washing machines to irrigate home landscaping — are touted as a way to keep lawns green and flowers blooming without abusing a scarce resource or inflating water bills.
Greywater Guerrillas launched its first jerry-rigged experiments with gray water in 1999, when the original guerrillas were trying to reduce the water bill for their house of six roommates. The systems and devices have become much more sophisticated since then, said Laura Allen, an educator with Greywater Guerrillas.
Gray water systems channel the used household water (though not from toilets) to irrigation ducts 9 inches below the surface of a home’s lawn or garden.
Advocates say it’s a practical use of water that otherwise would go into the sewer system, and therefore an expedient means of conservation. And conservation is important as water becomes an increasingly valued resource, proponents say.
“Our water bill is going to be like our oil bill in the future,” said John Russell, a landscape designer who heads WaterSprout, an Oakland company that specializes in residential and commercial irrigation, including gray water systems.

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.

Lights Out for Climate Change

- Adam Clare

Sydney turned of their lights earlier this year to raise awareness about climate change and now it appears that the idea is spreading. San Francisco will be powering down for an hour in the near future.

For one hour, on October 20, San Francisco will experience a partial blackout in an effort to raise awareness of climate change and to promote long-lasting energy saving.

Remember that you can save the planet everyday by conserving energy!

Tesla Motors Humming Along

- Adam Clare

Tesla makes electric cars that go fast, real fast. Auto Blog Green is wondering if we’ll soon see “gas stations” for electric cars in California.

The company won a grant to develop recharge stations to power the electric vehicles in an effort to encourage people switching from infernal-compustion engines to more environmentally friendly alternatives.

When CARB solicited proposals this year, they said that, “Electric fuel vehicles have the largest potential to reduce climate change emissions and petroleum dependency relative to any other alternative fuel vehicle under consideration.” The awards list shows more money being sent to biofuels ($12 million for ethanol and biodiesel) than EVs and PHEVs ($5 million), though.

Previously on Things Are Good.

Scroll To Top