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Scotland finally cleared for resumption of normal sheep trade, 26years after Chernobyl, though NorthWales and Cumbria continue to have regions under ban.
quote:California's Latino and Asian voters are significantly more concerned about core environmental issues, including global warming, air pollution and contamination of soil and water, than white voters, according to the latest Los Angeles Times/USC poll.
For example, 50% of Latinos and 46% of Asians who responded to the poll said they personally worry a great deal about global warming, compared with 27% of whites. Two-thirds of Latinos and 51% of Asians polled said they worry a great deal about air pollution, compared with 31% of whites.
Similarly, 85% of Latinos and 79% of Asians said they worry a great or a fair amount about contamination of soil and water by toxic waste, compared with 71% of whites.
Obamacare was suppose to create 4 million jobs. Pelosi wasn't lying. Spain "created" 1 green job at the expense of 2.2 non-green jobs. They still "created" new jobs. Brand new job...shifting the cost. Pan handling is now illegal in my neighboring city....the pan handler population has doubled in mine while dropping in the other. My neighboring city's policy solved their homeless problem. Maybe every city should follow their lead?
Mexico is now complaining about China taking it's jobs. What happens when the world runs out of Mexico's, China's and India's?
quote:Originally posted by malanthrop: ... What happens when the world runs out of Mexico's, China's and India's?
We'll have turned developing countries into developed countries, largely eradicating poverty, and raising living standards?
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And with renewable energy portfolios in mind, here's an article from earlier this year talking about California's. California just misses 20% target in 2010. California upped its standard to 30% or more by 2020, and while many focus on the fact that California actually missed its target, it's important to note the dramatic gains they've made after only seven years of work (the original standard was adopted in 2003). The top three producers of power averaged 18%, not including hydro power. That's 18% just from solar, wind, biomass, geothermal and other "new" renewables. For people who were saying even a few years ago that the United States would never get more than 1 or 2 percent of its power from renewables, California at least has certainly pushed way beyond that. America by the way, as a whole, gets more than 10% of its power from renewables, though, that includes hydro. I don't know the number without.
And more on Texas: Extreme drought conditions have no end in sight. . A cousin of mine lives in Texas and some of her stories of green suburbs slowly dying and turning to brown dust is pretty surreal. The drought there is severe, and covers pretty much the entire state. It's an interesting look at what might be the future of water supply problems for some parts of the country. And it has major implications for energy production and business that is highly water dependent.
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Hmm. Are there (or perhaps, what ARE) the environmental side effects of offshore solar energy? It seems like it'd be better than a lot of alternatives on land, but I have an instinctive concern about it.
Posts: 4056 | Registered: Aug 2008
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Forgot I had so many good websites to mine for info:
Good news and bad for mass energy storage. For people trying to store dozens of megawatts of power from renewables, the technology has progressed from prototypes to actual projects built across the country, however, the price remains too high for widespread commercial success.
To get an idea on just how important these storage systems can be: Solar plant in Spain generates power continuously for 24 hours It does so using a molten salt heat transfer system, and can produce more than twice as much power as even slightly larger systems without storage capacity can.
Concentrating Photovoltaics making a comeback. The idea behind this technology (as the article explains), is to use mirrors and lenses to superconcentrate sunlight on a small area of solar cells, but these cells are super high efficiency cells that capture much more energy. It means usually expensive cells can be cost-effective in a smaller amount of space than traditional cells.
Iowa nows gets 20% of all power from wind alone. And I believe it. I drove through Iowa a couple weeks ago and saw wind farms all along I-80, along with truck after truck of turbine blades passing me along the freeway.
ETA: Here's the CNN story: Military: Renewable Energy saves lives Lives, money, and for that matter, makes the military more powerful in general by reducing logistical burdens.
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quote:Originally posted by Raymond Arnold: Hmm. Are there (or perhaps, what ARE) the environmental side effects of offshore solar energy? It seems like it'd be better than a lot of alternatives on land, but I have an instinctive concern about it.
I guess theoretically you'd have to be a little choosey about where you put it, otherwise some underwater plants and coral that rely on sunlight for growth, as well as some fish species that rely on sunlight for food, would be affected. But by and large, the ocean is a vast expanse of relatively empty space (I don't count bacteria, and the like), and even more so for some of the places they mean to put it, like canals and reservoirs.
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I'm not worried about any initial negative externalities, but I'm slightly worried about the ocean becoming a go-to place to set up large solar farms, and it turning out that doing so en mass messes with phytoplankton which messes with things that eat phytoplankton, etc. I don't have a good grasp of the scales involved.
I'm very confident that this is all a MUCH better situation to be in than most other alternatives, but I doubt the ecological cost is zero.
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Wind farms off coast of Rhode Island could produce 1TW of power. That's 1,000 gigawatts, or 10,000 megawatts. It's also a huge chunk of the total amount of power the United States uses. Big power plants in the United States, like a nuclear power plant, are generally measured by the hundreds of megawatts. So a 1.3GW power plant is big. A TW could power everything east of the Mississippi, at least.
Featured Article Solar Roadways get $750,000 funding for prototype. I posted about Solar Roadways a few years ago. The idea was to replace asphalt roads with glass roads composed of LEDs, solar panels, the power grid, cables for internet and television, and more. The creators said that replacing all of the US's paved surfaces with these would provide enough power to power the United States three times over. Now they've got enough funding to do a serious prototype project in a parking lot. There's a pretty cool video that talks about some of the science behind it in the link.
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While we're here, this is a project that I'm working on.
As far as helium goes, I asked that same question back when I worked for Praxair, which is the world's largest helium supplier. Part of the answer is that the U.S. government thought it was too expensive to maintain strategic reserves. I also suggested that for safety purposes, balloon helium should be mixed with 21% oxygen. The average party balloon it won't make any difference in terms of lift, but a few less people per year would die of helium asphyxiation.
Also, for blimps and balloons like the one in the article, you can mix in about 4% Hydrogen without creating a combustible gas (probably more, but I never played with the flammability limits before I left Praxair), to add lifting power, and dilute the precious helium. But people freak out about hydrogen and don't want to listen to reason.
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It's a significant improvement over older technologies, and by older I mean practically brand new from the last couple of years, which really shows how the technology is growing my leaps and bounds. No word yet on what sort of price per kwh this will produce, since the manufacturing process is almost more important than the efficiency rate when figuring out cost effectiveness, but it's still good news nevertheless.
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This is about EGS, or Enhanced Geothermal. As the article notes, and as I have posted in the past, EGS is available almost anywhere, because you drill down to hot rock and pump the water in, rather than looking for naturally hot, shallow areas to build on.
Estimates for US geothermal say if universally tapped it could power the entire country several hundred times over. It's expensive, as almost all drilling is, at the moment. But it has a number of advantages that might make it the best long term renewable energy source. Underground is always hot, unlike solar and wind. You can put it literally anywhere. And the stations are the size of half a football field rather than measured in square miles. Plus you can create them small and locally, which reduces transmission loss and cuts down on infrastructure costs.
Still a long way to go, but I'm glad someone is putting the time and money into it.
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We priced geothermal a few years ago when we were replacing our HVAC system and the break-even point for the additional cost was something like 15 years out. That was beyond the horizon we felt comfortable with at the time, but it's getting close to being practical for normal people.
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Global solar capacity has doubled in the last four years alone, adding 20GW.
Solar power is down to $2.30 per watt, from $3.51 per watt only a year ago. Price fluctuations in the United States are largely pegged to inconsistencies with national energy policy and subsidies, but major projects are still underway.
While solar is rapidly reaching price parity with other major forms of power, I'm actually going to revise my guess that it becomes a major source of power in the United States. I think the rest of the world will adopt it much more quickly, but with fracking on the rise here, gas-powered plants are simply going to be too cheap for the next few decades. Perhaps elsewhere as well as the fracking craze spreads.
Gas is certainly better than coal, I won't complain there.
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Yeah, I read something the other day that said that because fracking is driving gas prices down, power plants are switching to gas, and CO2 emissions in the U.S. may actually be going DOWN.
If that's truly the case, then I have to reevaluate my position on fracking. Coal really is filthy, in so many ways, so even with the ground water issues from fracking, it may still be a better solution, at least for the time being.
Posts: 3652 | Registered: Mar 2002
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Fracking proponents will tell you they've been coming up with new organic solutions for their fracking fluids that can actually be safely drunk by humans. In fact, at one conference, a gas executive actually drank a glass of what they said was a new fracking fluid made entirely of organic materials that pose no risk to groundwater sources. Takes that for what you will.
And yes, in general I'm in favor of fracking, but it's a cautious optimism. I still think regulators need to keep a tight grip on the industry, and they need to be doing studies to see what environmental fallout there is. But if we turned every coal plant into a gas plant in the US, we'd dramatically slash our emissions and improve our air quality until we ran out of gas. But estimates are that that could be as much as a century away. Surely increased usage would take that number down quite a bit, and importing gas in large quantities isn't quite as much an option as other energy sources. Even with LNG, it's still not the easiest to transport.
Still, if natural gas can drive down energy prices and emissions at the same time for the forseeable future while wind and solar continue to gain a toehold in the background, I guess I'm not going to have a heart attack over it. I'd just be shouting at the wind anyway.
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And waffling back in the other direction...
It appears that fracking releases methane into the atmosphere directly, which does more damage than the CO2 reduction. So I don't know where to stand on this. In general, I don't trust the fuel companies, but I don't see a clear cut answer on this one.
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I'm wondering if it's just a technical issue, like a good cap could fix it, or if it's too diffuse.
Like I said, my optimism is cautious. I think all of it's a bit of a mess and I prefer green...but even green has environmental costs during the production phase.
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: While solar is rapidly reaching price parity with other major forms of power, I'm actually going to revise my guess that it becomes a major source of power in the United States. I think the rest of the world will adopt it much more quickly, but with fracking on the rise here, gas-powered plants are simply going to be too cheap for the next few decades. Perhaps elsewhere as well as the fracking craze spreads.
it's weird to watch the percentage of solar energy in modern nations just take off. What's germany at now, 25%?
Posts: 12281 | Registered: Aug 2005
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Germany also has a booming advanced manufacturing sector bolstered by government investments and policies, which are wildly unpopular here, but work incredibly effectively for the Germans.
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An interesting recap on the overall solar industry, the effects of the global meltdown, and the effects of fracking on the market.
I had no idea China's solar industry was collapsing. I think fracking, worldwide, is going to send solar back to the R&D labs for another decade. Efficiency has increased dramatically in the last decade, and new manufacturing techniques have decreased price per watt by rates people in the 90s could only have dreamed of.
But even as its down so, fracking dropped the bottom out of the price of energy. That's going to set solar back a long way, and it'll probably mean several more breakthroughs to get the price that low.
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This is a shameless plug for my employer. The fuel cell alone is about 47% thermally efficient, but the combined cycle aspect makes very complete use of the thermal energy in the fuel.
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I've posted about EEStor's promised super battery for years. But it looks like they've quietly been making progress while the hype has passed them by. Now they're moving ahead with working prototypes and independent analyses.
It has all the properties of a capacitor (charges in seconds or minutes, impervious to elements) but has the storage capacity of a chemical battery. Constructed using carbon nanotubes.
All of these drive at making batteries cheaper and more functional for the applications we'd like to use them for. Electric cars might go 120 miles on a charge, but many people are put off by the hours of charge time. If you could stop and fill up on power the same way you fill up on gas, I think that changes the equation a bit. Price is still an issue, but it's one more problem ticked off the list.
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