Our Global Future in the 21st Century is based on "The Third Industrial Revolution" which finally connects our new ICT infrastructure with distributed energy sources that are both renewable and sustainable
DayStar Technologies, Inc. and Salamon Group, Inc., under contract with the Government of Samoa, shows the world the way on renewable energy in a bold and historical initiative.
Samoa's Prime Minister Hon Tuilaepa S Malielegaoi and his Cabinet have taken steps for Samoa to be the most solarized nation in the Pacific Region. Samoa is taking the lead in the South Pacific by reducing "Carbon Emissions" in the most significant way to date.
These actions will have an immediate short-term effect. They are also a real long-term sustainable reduction plan for the Country's carbon footprint. The planned first step will be the introduction of a 4 megawatt solar facility this year.
The first phase of the project is funded entirely by private investment. The steps that are being taken means that on a per capita basis Samoa will be one of the most solarized countries in the world.
Apparently, a citizens group in Berlin is looking to buy the capital city’s electricity grid. The group, Bürger Energie Berlin (BEB), wouldn’t be the first to do such a thing. As noted in this post on the documentary Power Play, Germans in the village of Schönau bought their grid decades ago and turned the area into a renewable energy leader. However, my guess is that this would the biggest such community grid purchase if it went through (correct me if I’m wrong).
BEB “has told Berlin’s Senate (as the City Council is called in the capital) that it is interested in buying the local power grid,” Craig Morris and Sven Ullrich of Renewable International writes. “The current contract with Sweden’s Vattenfall expires in 2014, and a new contract may be awarded in the next few months.”
How can you trap the most light through ultra-thin film solar cells — but keep costs down?
A question that’s kept many a researcher up at night. In the renewable energy industry, especially at such a fledgling stage, it is not only maximizing power output that is important. Unless new techniques ensure the resulting products are commercially viable and not so expensive that investors shy away, then projects are doomed to failure from the outset.
In solar cell arrays, it is the highly purified silicon elements that costs the most — in some cases, expenditure can be up to 40 percent of overall production.
So, how can you maximize the power output but keep silicon use — and cost — down to a minimum? MIT researchers in the Department of Mechanical Engineering have been working on a solution, and have created a new approach which may be able to reduce silicon usage by up to 90 percent, without detrimental effects for power output.
Instead of using thick, conventional layers of silicon, the team — Anastassios Mavrokefalos, professor Gang Chen, and three other assisting students — etched small inverted pyramids into the surface of the silicon. By creating this patterned texture, the team found that every indentation was able to trap light as effectively as thick silicon.
The International Finance Corporation (IFC) has invested equity of $35 million (about R294 million) in SA's Convergence Partners Communications Infrastructure Fund to boost AfricanICT.
A member of the World Bank Group, the IFC today announced the investment, which the organisation says will go towards supporting more rapid development of information and communications technologies across Africa.
“The fund is expected to play an important development role in Africa, where ICT infrastructure bottlenecks impede the growth of business and companies lack access to finance, especially risk capital and related expertise from investors that can help businesses succeed.”
The investment focus of the fund will be to address the lack of enabling infrastructure that provides quality and affordable communications services – especially broadband – across Africa. The fund aims to develop and invest in new wholesale, open access networks and related services, and will capitalise on the potential for communication technology platforms to deliver critical services such as banking, healthcare, education and government programmes that contribute to improved living standards.
The U.S. solar market is shaping up to be significantly larger than anticipated and could end up installing nearly 3.3 GW of solar panels in 2012, a roughly 18 percent jump from the previous forecast of 2.8 GW, according to a report from GTM Research and Solar Energy Industries Association on Wednesday. If the prediction pans out, the U.S. solar panel market will have seen a 75 percent growth from 2011.
The first quarter of this year saw 506 MW of solar panels installed in the country, an 85 percent jump from the same quarter in 2011, according to the report. New Jersey was the biggest market during this period with 174 MW of newly completed projects.
There’s a couple reasons contributing to this jump in the industry. Many solar power plants are being built at a faster pace than anticipated, so they will likely be completed by the end of this year. Developers who qualified for a federal subsidy program that expired at the end of 2011 can still claim the incentive provided that they show progress this year in eventually completing their projects. In addition, the market for installing solar panels on commercial buildings has been surprisingly strong in California and New Jersey, said Shayle Kann, vice president at GTM.
With the advent of renewable energy technology, such as wind turbines and solar photovoltaics, the public and quasi-public agencies that operate the U.S. interconnected power grid look for optimal ways to integrate traditional energy sources with new renewable energy sources. Power grid operators must decide how and when to switch on coal or gas back-up systems when wind or solar energy production drops in local areas. These decisions are made to provide continuity in the supply of electricity at lower costs.
Two UC Davis professors were recently awarded grant funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to research this coordination problem. Mathematicians refer to this coordination issue as the “electric power dispatch problem,” explained Roger J-B Wets, a professor in the UC Davis department of mathematics, and one of the researchers working on the project.
Wets is widely recognized as a pioneer in a branch of mathematics known as “variational analysis,” and has worked on mathematical techniques which are being applied to the current problem for many years. When applied to real situations involving significant levels of uncertainty, the application becomes extremely complex.
Can a humble system of gravel and a heat pump provide a breakthrough for utility-scale energy storage? British startup Isentropicthinks so, and this week announced that they’ve raised $22 million in project funding and an equity investment from the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI), a collaboration between the U.K. government and companies in the energy industry.
I covered Isentropic back in 2009, and back then the company was looking for a $5 million Series B round. The five-year-old company, previously raised a Series A round from Credit Suisse Securities Europe and won a £250,000 ($380,112) research grant from The Carbon Trust.
The innovation behind Isentropic’s idea is an advanced heat pump connected to a super simple, low cost energy storage design. Heat pumps are basically engines that can work in reverse and Isentropic’s device can store and release energy when needed. Founders and engineers Jon Howes and James Macnaghten developed the design of the heat pump a decade ago, and then brought on Mark Wagner as chairman to help with business direction.
Global investment in renewable energy reached a record of $257 billion last year, with solar attracting more than half the total spending, according to a U.N. report released Monday.
Investment in solar energy surged to $147 billion in 2011, a year-on-year increase of 52 percent thanks to strong demand for rooftop photovoltaic installations in Germany, Italy, China and Britain.
Large-scale solar thermal installations in Spain and the United States also contributed to growth during a fiercely competitive year for the solar industry. Several large American and German manufacturers fell victim to price pressure from Chinese rivals that helped to halve the cost of photovoltaic modules in 2011.
Electric energy storage systems are crucial for the further development and transformation of a range of sectors including renewable energy, automotive, grid stabilization, smart grid, back-up power and portable devices. Big scale, reliable and durable electric energy storage technologies will enhance the usage and commercial attractiveness of intermittent renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar power.
Market Penetration and Road mapping research by Frost and Sullivan finds that electric energy storage systems are inscribed in the development strategies of intermittent renewable energy and electric vehicle (EV) developers, grid operators and utility companies.
If implemented, plans for massive cuts in support for onshore wind power would be a major setback for economic recovery and push up the costs of modernising our electricity system ("Osborne in bid to slash spending on windfarms", News).
As the costs of renewable power continue to fall, it is right that the support they receive does, too, and the deal struck by Chris Huhne with David Cameron to cut that by 10% was justified. Yet onshore wind is the lowest-cost renewable technology, so slashing its support by 25% would seriously jeopardise new projects, including community-owned initiatives.
The Environmental Audit Committee called on the government to show leadership on the green economy, in the same week that it emerged that William Hague had written to the prime minister to say exactly the same thing. We're now seeing repeated calls from inside government and from business to stop the Treasury blocking green growth and provide policy certainty for the development of the renewable energy sector.
Broken Hill will host one half of the largest solar energy project in the southern hemisphere, it was announced today.
The $450 million project will have an ultimate output of 159 megawatts, enough to power 33,000 homes, and will be constructed across two sites; Broken Hill and Nyngan.
The Broken Hill site will consist of nearly a million solar photovoltaic (Solar PV) panels and will be built to the west of the city.
Construction is hoped to begin in 2014 and is expected to bring 150 jobs to Broken Hill and a further 300 to Nyngan.
The solar farm is expected to be operating by 2015 and is a joint venture between the Federal and State Governments and Australian energy company AGL.
There’s been a series of Cleanweb Hackathons in recent months, where developers spend a weekend building web and mobile apps out of energy, water and sustainability data. But here’s a new one with a twist kicking off this weekend: a solar-focused Cleanweb Hackathon, coordinated by solar web startup Sungevity.
The event will take place at Sungevity’s headquarters in Jack London Square in Oakland, and will start at 5:30 PT, and run until Sunday evening. The hackers will spend 48 hours, supplied with pizza and Redbull, to build solar apps, and the best solar apps will win prizes at the end of the weekend. More info can be found here.
Click headline to read more and access hot links--
African Development Bank (AfDB) projects to develop concentrated solar power in Morocco and geothermal power in Kenya are two of some 20 renewable energy initiatives being covered by Africa Express, a year-long study of sustainable energy in Africa, and,what organizers hope will be the first successful tour of Africa by train.
The AfDB is a sponsor of the study conceived by French environmentalists and train enthusiasts, Jeremy Debreu and Claire Guibert. Over eight months, they will be travelling by rail through 26 countries to visit, study and document renewable energy projects that expand access to power.
The resulting white paper and documentary will highlight best practices and how to repeat them and identify key elements of successful project in terms of technologies, business models, policies and governance.
Twenty members of the statewide turbine opposition group Windwise met Thursday at Beacon Hill to lobby against two energy bills they say could lead to an increase in the number of turbines across Massachusetts.
Supporters of the first bill, titled "An act relative to competitively priced electricity in the commonwealth," say the bill doubles the amount of energy utilities must accept through net metering, or buy at retail price, making the energy market more competitive.
But Windwise members worry the emphasis on net metering will actually put pressure on local municipalities to build wind turbines to support the new demand. They also are opposed to the bill doubling the amount of renewable energy utilities must obtain through 10- or 20-year contracts.
"Our concern is that this bill will actually have an opposite impact than the Legislature expects," said Eleanor Tillinghast, an environmentalist who organized the Windwise lobbying effort. "You have these long-term contracts that lock in high, above-market rates."
The law would also require that instead of receiving real estate tax from developers, municipalities could receive only a payment of up to 5 percent of a facility's electric sales.
Sacramento’s school buses will likely soon run on one-hundred-percent renewable natural gas.
The California Energy Commission awarded yesterday Sacramento-based Atlas Disposal Industries a $300,000 grant to support the construction of the nation’s first anaerobic digestion-based renewable natural gas fueling station.
Atlas Disposal's Renewable Natural Gas Fueling Facility is under construction at the South Area Transfer Station in south Sacramento. The facility will use natural gas produced by converting food and organic waste collected by Atlas Disposal from area food-processing companies, restaurants and supermarkets into renewable natural gas.
One hundred percent of the electricity needed to run the fueling station will be generated by the Organic Waste Recycling Center operated adjacent to the facility.
The fuel that powered the U.S. from the industrial revolution into the iPhone era is being pushed aside as utilities switch to cleaner and cheaper alternatives.
The share of U.S. electricity that comes from coal is forecast to fall below 40 percent for the year -- the lowest level since the government began collecting this data in 1949. Four years ago, it was 50 percent. By the end of this decade, it is likely to be near 30 percent.
"The peak has passed," says Jone-Lin Wang, head of Global Power for the energy research firm IHS CERA.
Utilities are aggressively ditching coal in favor of natural gas, which has become cheaper as supplies grow. Natural gas has other advantages over coal: It produces far fewer emissions of toxic chemicals and gases that contribute to climate change, key attributes as tougher environmental rules go into effect.
Cap and trade went nowhere in Congress early in the Obama administration, but that’s not the end of the emissions-limiting scheme’s story in the United States, not by a long shot.
While Washington politicians fiddled on climate change legislation, 10 northeastern states embarked on their own scheme to reduce CO2 emissions, setting a total C02 limit and auctioning off allowances to fund energy efficiency and renewable energy programs. Supporters of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative say it’s helped to cut emissions – and a new report [PDF] backs up the claim.
So what’s Chris Christie’s problem?
A year ago, the New Jersey governor announced his state was pulling out of RGGI (often referred to as “Reggie”). Now, two environmental groups, the National Resources Defense Council and Environment New Jersey, have sued the Christie administration, charging that the governor and his Department of Environmental Protection violated state law in exiting the cap-and-trade compact.
Christie has said that RGGI “does nothing more than tax electricity, tax our citizens, tax our businesses, with no discernible or measurable impact upon our environment.”
But RGGI’s three-year progress report showed that with the system in place, average annual CO2 emissions fell by 23 percent in the Northeast U.S. over the last three years when compared to the previous three years.
Click headline to read more and access hot link to the report--
More people in Iran search Google for information about “distributed generation” than any other nation in the world, according to Google Insights for Search.
Considering that Iran seems to be on the brink of a new war after nearly every meal, it is not surprising that Iranians would have an interest in distributed energy generation. Say what you will about the smart grid, the strongest grid may be no grid at all. The future will be distributed and security is perhaps the primary reason why.
In September, a single utility worker knocked out power for more than 2.7 million customers served by six different utilities by tripping a 500 kilovolt (kV) transmission line at an Arizona substation.
It could have been worse. At several critical nodes of the electric power grid, the loss of high-voltage transformers could trigger prolonged multi-state power outages. Replacement transformers could take as long as two years to build and deploy, according to the EPRI’s Infrastructure Security Initiative.
Unlike the electric power grid, distributed generation is immune from cascading outages or systemic collapse.
EFA has secured a prime location at the intersection of three eco-systems: rainforest, mangrove and beach, just outside of Freetown, Sierra Leone, to build a Biodiversity Conservation and Renewable Energy Learning Centre.
By the end of 2011 and with the support of local, regional and international partners, the Learning Centre will be established in order to promote learning about biodiversity conservation and renewable energy in West Africa. The facility will be an epicentre for environmental protection and management in region.
With Climate Change and related environmental issues becoming more prominent in the agendas of governments and their partners, the need for information dissemination to all sectors of society is more important now than ever before.
This, as well as evidence of the growing pressure on the Upper Guinea Forest (UGF) and natural resources in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, inspired EFA to create a focal point for conservation education and environmental awareness. Environmental, economic and social issues affecting the Upper Guinean Forest including all of the region’s protected areas, will be showcased in the centre using interactive displays.
A new study by Michelle T. H. van Vliet, John R. Yearsley, Fulco Ludwig, Stefan Vögele, Dennis P. Lettenmaier, and Pavel Kabat released in Nature Climate Change finds that climate change will impact the 91% of US and 78% of European power that is produced by thermal power plants. In the near future, power potential is expected to be reduced from 4 to 16%, with the possibility of a complete system collapse tripling or more.
Click headline to read more and access hot link to the report--
Women in the Information and Communications Technology have expressed the need to reduce male dominance in the industry and maintain a 50-50 balance, writes DAYO OKETOLA.
Globally, the Information and Communications Technology industry is believed to be dominated by men. This, like other gender sensitive issues, has begun to elicit sympathy from stakeholders, who seem to see the compelling need to address the trend.
Expectedly, the World Bank and the United Nations, which emphasise the need to harness ICT for women and girls development, have declared support for initiatives that would address gender imbalance in ICT.
The International Telecommunications Union, a UN agency, subsequently responded by coming up with the ‘Girls in ICT Day’ with the aim of creating a global environment that will empower and encourage girls and young women to consider ICT careers.
This report addresses the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) organization’s desire to minimize the learning time required to understand the implications of smart-grid concepts so APEC members can advance their thinking in a timely manner and advance strategies regarding smart approaches that can help meet their environmental-sustainability and energy-efficiency policy goals.
As significant investments are needed to grow and maintain the electricity infrastructure, consideration needs to be given to how information and communications technologies can be applied to electricity infrastructure decisions that not only meet traditional needs for basic service and reliability, but also provide the flexibility for a changing the mix of generation sources with sensitivity to environmental and societal impacts.
Google is backing it. So is Warren Buffett, America’s most-watched investor. GE, one of the world’s biggest manufacturers, is too.
Each of these corporate icons is placing big bets and hundreds of millions of dollars on a future powered by wind and solar power. Apple just joined them, announcing plans to power its main U.S. data center in Maiden, North Carolina, entirely with renewable energy by the end of this year. So why – yet again – are pundits making dire warnings about prospects for renewable energy?
The answer is that the clean tech industry is at a critical crossroads.
Hill Farm, Tallentire, is squeezed between two of Britain’s loveliest landscapes, the Lake District National Park and the Solway Coast Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB), just at the point where they most nearly touch each other. Yet work will begin there next month on erecting six 300ft wind turbines.
Local planners had rejected the wind farm because of its “harmful effect on the landscape”, only to be overruled earlier this year by the Government’s Planning Inspectorate. The men from Whitehall agreed that the turbines would “reduce the sense of wildness and remoteness” of both specially protected areas and admitted that the they would make only a “small” energy contribution. But they still ruled that this outweighed the spoiled views.
The development is just one among many that show, as the Campaign to Protect Rural England says, that wind farms “are increasingly being directed towards more remote, tranquil areas”. Political concern, fuelled by this trend, came to a head this week when George Osborne proposed action against them.
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