Aug 2nd, 2010 | Alternative Energy | No Comments
By John O. Blackburn and Sam Cunningham
(NC Warn—Duke) Solar photovoltaic system costs have fallen steadily for decades. They are projected to fall even farther over the next 10 years. Meanwhile, projected costs for construction of new nuclear plants have risen steadily over the last decade, and they continue to rise.
In the past year, the lines have crossed in North Carolina. Electricity from new solar installations is now cheaper than electricity from proposed new nuclear plants. This new development has profound implications for North Carolina’s energy and economic future. Each and every stakeholder in North Carolina’s energy sector — citizens, elected officials, solar power installers and manufacturers, and electric utilities — should recognize this watershed moment.
Commercial-scale solar developers are already offering utilities electricity at 14 cents or less per kWh. Duke Energy and Progress Energy are limiting or rejecting these offers and pushing ahead with plans for nuclear plants which, if ever completed, would generate electricity at much higher costs — 14–18 cents per kilowatt-hour according to present estimates. The delivered price to customers would be somewhat higher for both sources.
NCW-SolarReport_final1.pdf (application/pdf Object).
Jul 21st, 2010 | Alternative Energy | No Comments
(Bloomberg) — China, the world’s biggest polluter, may spend about 5 trillion yuan $738 billion in the next decade developing cleaner sources of energy to reduce emissions from burning oil and coal, a government official said.
The government will submit plans to develop cleaner energy, including nuclear power and gas from unconventional sources, in 2011 to 2020 to the State Council, or Cabinet, for approval, Jiang Bing, head of the National Energy Administration’s planning and development department, said in Beijing today.
China needs between 500 billion and 600 billion yuan annually to develop energy-conservation and low-carbon technologies, according to the government’s 2050 China Energy and CO2 Emissions Report published last year. The country attracted $11.5 billion of asset financing in clean-energy technology in the second quarter, more than Europe and the U.S. combined, Bloomberg New Energy Finance said on July 13.
via China May Spend $738 Billion on Clean Energy Projects – BusinessWeek.
May 10th, 2010 | Alternative Energy | No Comments
Fuller bladeless wind turbine
By Jessica Shankleman
(BusinessGreen) A “bladeless” wind turbine that has been designed to pacify protestors who dislike the visual and noise impact of traditional three-blade turbines could soon be launched.
US startup Solar Aero Research claims its soon-to-be-released Fuller Wind Turbine circumvents many of the objections to the traditional three-bladed wind turbine by reducing noise levels and avoiding any form of radar interference or injuries to wildlife.
“As we see more and more of the population rising in opposition to the windmills due to noise and wildlife injury concerns, we see more opportunities for our system, so we are… redoubling our efforts to make people aware that there is an alternative,” chief executive Howard Fuller told BusinessGreen.com.
The completely enclosed device secured a patent last month and after six years of development Solar Aero is now looking to start manufacturing from next year and is in talks to find licensees around the world which can produce the units.
Fuller said that the company ultimately planned to target both the micro-generation and the utility-scale wind farm market.
Read the rest: “Bladeless” wind turbine firm aims to win over Nimbys – 07 May 2010 – BusinessGreen.com.
Apr 26th, 2010 | Alternative Energy | No Comments
April 23 Bloomberg — On windy nights in northern Germany, consumers are paid to keep the lights on. Twice this year, the nation’s 21,000 wind turbines pumped out so much power that utilities reduced customer bills for using the surplus electricity. Since the first rebate came with little fanfare at 5 a.m. one October day in 2008, payments have risen as high as 500.02 euros $665 a megawatt-hour, about as much as a small factory or 1,000 homes use in 60 minutes.
The wind-energy boom in Europe and parts of Texas has begun to reduce bills for consumers. Electricity-network managers have even ordered windmills offline at times to trim supplies. That hurts profit for wind-farm operators, said Christian Kjaer, head of the European Wind Energy Association, which represents RWE AG of Germany, Spain’s Iberdrola SA and Dong Energy A/S of Denmark.“We’re seeing that wind energy lowers prices, which is great for the consumers,” Kjaer said at his group’s conference in Warsaw this week. “We as producers have to acknowledge that this means operating the existing plant fewer hours a year, and this has an effect on investors” and profit.
Read the rest: Windmill Boom Curbs Electric Power Prices for RWE Update2 – Bloomberg.com.
Mar 19th, 2010 | Alternative Energy, Solar Energy | No Comments
Vermaland, a land holding company in Phoenix, will hold an auction on June 6 to sell off 1,938 acres that it says could accommodate 388 megawatts of electricity, according to the company. That would be enough to power 100,000 homes, says Vermaland.
Arizona has been trying to promote solar in its borders with credits and incentives for manufacturers and consumers. Arizona Public Service has a mandate to provide 4.5 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2014. The state offers a $3 per watt credit, nearly twice as high as California’s. Baseline power in the state, however, is comparatively cheap so some of the advantage is eroded. Nonetheless, some power providers want to produce power in Arizona to sell to California.
One of the state’s chief assets, of course, is the sun and empty land. Sempra Generation, an independent power provider, has said it will build more than 300 megawatts of PV parks on 4,000 acres it owns near Phoenix. Land was part of the motivation behind First Solar’s purchase of Optisolar. First Solar is discarding Optisolar’s technology but keeping the deals and land rights.
Read the rest A Solar Land Auction in Arizona : Greentech Media.
Feb 13th, 2010 | Alternative Energy, Solar Energy | No Comments
Today, 92 percent of all Americans want our country to develop solar energy resources, and 77 percent believe the federal government should make solar power development a national priority.That is why I was joined by 10 of my colleagues Senators Whitehouse, Cardin, Gillibrand, Merkley, Lautenberg, Leahy, Boxer, Menendez, Specter, and Harkin in introducing the Ten Million Solar Roofs Act.
The bill is all of 9 pages and is pretty straightforward. It calls for 10 million new solar rooftop systems and 200,000 new solar water heating systems over the next 10 years. When fully implemented, this legislation would lead to 30,000 megawatts of new photovoltaic energy, triple our total current U.S. solar energy capacity. It will increase by almost 20 times our current energy output from photovoltaic panels.
The legislation will rapidly increase production of solar panels, driving down the price of photovoltaic systems. It also would mean the creation of over a million new jobs. The passage of this bill would dramatically reorient our energy priorities and would be a major step forward toward a clean energy future for the United States.
Read the rest: Sen. Bernie Sanders: It’s Time For a Solar Revolution.
Jan 31st, 2010 | Alternative Energy, Architecture, Helping the Environment, Innovation, Sustainibility, Today's News | No Comments
PORTLAND, Ore. — Urban gardening used to seem subversive. People planted tomatoes in public parks, strung their hops to rooftops to make homebrew and reclaimed empty lots as community farms, never mind the property owner.
Yet here in one of the more thoroughly tilled cities in America, subversive has come full circle: the federal government plans to plant its own bold garden directly above a downtown plaza. As part of a $133 million renovation, the General Services Administration is planning to cultivate “vegetated fins” that will grow more than 200 feet high on the western facade of the main federal building here, a vertical garden that changes with the seasons and nurtures plants that yield energy savings.
“They will bloom in the spring and summer when you want the shade, and then they will go away in the winter when you want to let the light in,” said Bob Peck, commissioner of public buildings for the G.S.A. “Don’t ask me how you get them irrigated.”
To read complete article by William Yardley go to NYTimes.com
Jan 9th, 2010 | Alternative Energy, Solar Energy | No Comments
Solar-powered drip irrigation systems significantly enhance household incomes and nutritional intake of villagers in arid sub-Saharan Africa, according to a new Stanford University study to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The study found that solar-powered pumps installed in remote villages in the West African nation of Benin provide a cost- effective way of delivering much-needed irrigation water, particularly during the long dry season. The results are scheduled to be published the week of Jan. 4 in the online edition of PNAS.
via Solar powered irrigation systems improve diet and income in rural sub Saharan.
Jan 9th, 2010 | Alternative Energy, Solar Energy | No Comments
By Todd Woody
(LA Times) ESolar Inc. of Pasadena signed an agreement Friday to build a series of solar thermal power plants in China with a total capacity of 2,000 megawatts, in one of the largest renewable energy deals of its kind.
Coming four months after an Arizona company, First Solar, secured a contract to build an equally large photovoltaic power plant in China, the ESolar deal signals China's emergence as a major market for renewable energy.
“They’re moving very fast, much faster than the state and U.S. governments are moving,” said Bill Gross, ESolar’s chairman and the founder of Idealab.
Read the rest: Pasadena’s ESolar lands 2,000-megawatt deal in China – latimes.com.
Jan 7th, 2010 | Alternative Energy, Sustainibility | No Comments
The interior scenography of Physalia animates the debate on the water future into four thematic gardens dedicated respectively to every four elements bringing by symbiosis their typical aspect and complementarily to the final assembling of an amphibious global landscape.
- The “Water” garden: marks the main entrance of Physalia between the berthing gates and the square. A great glass platform is in suspension on top of the water surface reflecting thus on the interior vault the causticity of the floods. This reception space dedicated to the temporary exhibitions vibrates under the weightlessness and dances under the reflections of light. The façades of this true aquatic balcony can also open themselves totally on the fluvial landscape and let the space breathe towards the exterior caressed by the fluvial breeze.
- The “Earth” garden: constitutes the heart of the laboratory dedicated to international researchers who analyse the aquatic ecosystem crossed by the ship. On top of this panoramic room, a planted vault stands up. This vault is a fertile metaphor of earth filtering the stations of work and molecular analysis.
- The “Fire” garden: is a confined and protecting underwater lounge, truly out of time. The soft relaxation armchairs surround a huge fire timbale burning in the fireproofed hull of the vessel. We feel like in a subaquatic cockpit with delicate golden reflections. We access naturally to this garden from a soft and circular banister that spreads under the planted vault around flames. We can admire the floating line dancing under its sinusoidal volutes as well as the fauna and the flora of the middle through the two panoramic glass portholes. It is a space dedicated to the permanent exhibitions on the aquatic ecosystems.
- The “Air” garden: is a space of oxygen and light that spreads under a pneumatophorous lens. Actually, this ecologic amphitheatre opened towards the exterior landscape, towards the cities organised with chisels under an oblong ear of pneumatic and photovoltaic cushions. In the centre, we find “H2O” acronym extruded under the shape of a circular and rotating water bar such as a theatre stage. It is the meeting and debate point by excellence, a true citizen forum where we meet to reinvent the world and decide of the eco-political strategies of tomorrow!
Man is in the centre of this bionic project that recommends the balance between the human actions and the respect of environment. The architecture of this nomadic place, powerful concentrate of nature, of biotechnologies and information and communication technologies is thus the simple reflect of the contemporary citizen who wonders about the actions to conduct on its environment. It is an audacious avant-garde project that aims at mixing people around the notion of water respect, sharing in movement and dynamic balance. After the Copenhagen conference, it is a project of transeuropean leadership and a positive innovation of ecologic resilience.
Read the rest Vincent Callebaut Architecte PHYSALIA.
