Archive for May, 2009

One of oldest forms of energy used by humans — sunlight concentrated by mirrors — is poised to make an astonishing comeback. I believe it will be the most important form of carbon-free power in the 21st century. That’s because it’s the only form of clean electricity that can meet all the demanding requirements of this century.

Certainly we will need many different technologies to stop global warming. They include electric cars and plug-in hybrids, wind turbines and solar photovoltaics, which use sunlight to make electricity from solid-state materials like silicon semiconductors. Yet after speaking with energy experts and seeing countless presentations on all forms of clean power, I believe the one technology closest to being a silver bullet for global warming is the other solar power: solar thermal electric, which concentrates the sun’s rays to heat a fluid that drives an electric generator. It is the best source of clean energy to replace coal and sustain economic development. I bet that it will deliver more power every year this century than coal with carbon capture and storage — for much less money and with far less environmental damage.

Clearly, the world needs a massive amount of carbon-free electricity by 2050 to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions. The industrialized countries need to cut their carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation by more than 80 percent in four decades. Developing countries need to find a way to raise living standards without increasing electricity emissions in the short term, and then reduce those emissions sharply. And, over the next few decades, the world needs to switch to a ground transportation system whose primary fuel is clean electricity

This electricity must meet a number of important criteria. It must be affordable: New electricity generation should cost at most about 10 cents per kilowatt hour, a price that would probably beat nuclear power and would certainly beat coal with carbon capture and storage, if the latter even proves practical on a large scale. The electricity cannot be intermittent and hard to store, as is energy from wind power and solar photovoltaics. We need power that either stays constant day and night or, even better, matches electricity demand, which typically rises in the morning, peaks in the late afternoon, and lasts late into the evening.

This carbon-free electricity must provide thousands of gigawatts of power and make use of a low-cost fuel that has huge reserves accessible to both industrialized and developing countries. It should not make use of much freshwater or arable land, which are likely to be scarce in a climate-changed world with 3 billion more people.

Solar electric thermal, also known as concentrating solar power (CSP), meets all these criteria. A technology that has the beauty of simplicity, it has proved effective for generations. As the Web site of CSP company Ausra illustrates, solar thermal has a long and fascinating history.

Back around 700 B.C., the Chinese first used “burning mirrors” to ignite firewood. In 230 B.C., a colleague of Archimedes built a parabolic mirror, which focuses the sun’s rays to a single point, also better for starting fires. Around 212 B.C., Archimedes supposedly had Greek soldiers use their bronze shields to concentrate the sunlight on Roman ships and set them on fire.

In the 15th century, the Italians used burning mirrors to solder copper sections of the Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral. Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks contain many designs for solar concentrators, including some for industrial purposes, because he worried about the destruction of the earth’s vast forests in humanity’s search for fuel.

In the 1860s and 1870s, Augustin Mouchot built the first dish-shaped reflector that ran a heat engine, and he used solar thermal to heat a boiler that ran an ice maker. His assistant demonstrated a printing press running on concentrated solar. But all this work came to naught because of the general lack of direct sunlight in France and the abundance of cheap coal, which became a primary energy source for the Industrial Revolution.

A Swedish immigrant to America, John Ericsson, developed a motor driven by parabolic trough mirrors in 1870. In 1909, H.E. Wilsie added a critical component, a system for storing solar energy for when the sun did not shine. Heat is much easier to store than electricity, a fact that gives CSP a crucial — maybe the crucial — advantage over wind and solar photovoltaics.

In 1913, an American, Frank Shuman, installed a 55-kilowatt CSP water-pumping station using parabolic mirrors in Meadi, Egypt. The mirrors focused the sun on tubes whose heated fluid ran an engine to make electricity. This was perhaps the first commercial CSP plant. But it was shut down at the start of WWI, and, as Ausra notes, “the plant was never restarted because of the discovery of cheap oil in the Middle East.”

In the 1960s, the Italians developed two of the key CSP designs used today. The first uses a linear mirror to focus the light on a long tube, allowing the mirrors to be flat, cheaper to build and less exposed to the wind. In the second, called a power tower, many mirrors move in two dimensions, focusing on a central tower that holds the engine.

The 1970s oil shocks led to the first commercial developer of U.S. solar thermal electric projects, Luz International. The company built and sold nine solar plants in California’s Mojave Desert. The plants circulated oil in pipes, heating it to 700 degrees with long parabolic mirrors; the oil boiled water to drive a steam turbine. Although the technology functioned well, Luz was forced to file for bankruptcy in 1991. The reasons, detailed in this Sandia report, included uncertainty in the market, a delay of federal and state tax breaks, and the lack of economic value derived from environmental benefits. 

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General Electric Co aims to boost its investment in clean-tech research and development to $1.5 billion a year by 2010, the largest U.S. conglomerate said on Wednesday in its annual “Ecomagination” report.

The maker of products ranging from electricity-producing wind turbines to energy-efficient compact-fluorescent lights, wants to grow green-business revenues to what it called a “stretch” target of $25 billion next year, up from $17 billion in 2008 and $6 billion in 2004.

When GE unveiled the Ecomagination initiative in 2005, it set an initial revenue target of $10 billion by 2010. By last year it had raised the 2010 benchmark to $25 billion.

The Fairfield, Connecticut-based company last year spent $1.4 billion on green research, up from $700 million in 2004.

GE said it expects stimulus spending in the United States, China and elsewhere around the globe to create about $400 billion of new demand for green technologies and clean-energy products, including wind turbines and solar panels.

The industrial giant also makes traditional turbines that burn natural gas and coal, and equipment used in oil and natural gas production.

GE said in a 36-page report that in 2008 it released 6.49 million metric tons of greenhouse gases, which contribute to global climate change. That is down 13 percent from 2004 levels, even as it grew revenue 48 percent over that period.

The company earlier this month said it was building a plant near Albany, New York to build a new generation of high-capacity batteries that would power its upcoming hybrid railroad locomotive. Last month, it said it was working with Florida utility company FPL Group on the roll out of a “smart grid” system intended to encourage homeowners to lower their electricity consumption during peak demand times.

Source ; Reuters 

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Concentrating solar power (CSP) plants could meet 7 percent of the world’s power needs by 2030 and 25 percent by 2050, according to a new report by Greenpeace, the European Solar Thermal Electricity Association and the International Energy Agency.

Such systems currently make up just 430 megawatts of generation capacity, or less than one half of one percent of electricity needs worldwide.

CSP “is about to step out of the shadow of other renewable technologies and can establish itself as the third biggest player in the sustainable power generation industry,” the report’s authors write.

If that giant leap in capacity happens, they say, the sector would employ 2 million people in the next four decades and save 2.1 billion tons of global warming emissions in 2050.

Here’s a glance at what it would take:

• Long-term and stable feed-in tariffs that would help to overcome the solar cost disadvantage.
• Renewable Portfolio Standards that would specifically apply to CSP.
• Loan guarantees from banks and global environmental programs that would provide greater access to investment dollars.
• Rapid increase of new grid capacity (especially via High Voltage Direct Current) to export solar power from CSP plants to industrial countries and emerging economies.
• Investment of 21 billion euros a year by 2015 and 174 billion a year by 2050.

For Europe in particular, the report recommends engagement with North Africa, which has an “unlimited” solar resource that could power Europe by 2050 for a cost of $400 billion over 30 years. It’s a promising project that is clearly not yet on the horizon.

Investment in the CSP sector passed the $1 billion mark in 2008, according to the analysis. In 2009, it is expected to exceed $2.8 billion. Most of the installations so far are in Spain and the United States.

CSP uses vast solar mirrors that concentrate the sun’s rays to temperatures of between 750 to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit to drive steam turbines. The DESERTEC foundation claims that deploying a CSP supergrid on a stretch of desert 186 miles on each side could technically power the whole world.

The good news is the technology is proven. The first large-scale commercial CSP stations were built in California’s Mojave Desert some 25 years ago. Even better is that utility-scale installations are “now economically viable,” the report states.

High initial investment is required for new CSP plants. But, over the entire lifecycle of the plant, 80 percent of the cost is from construction and associated debt, and only 20 percent comes from operation. In fact, the report notes that the experiences with CSP plants constructed in California between 1984 and 1991 show that:

“Once the plant has been paid for, in 25 or 30 years, only operating costs, which are currently about 3 cents/kWh, remain and the electricity is cheaper than any competition; comparable only to long-written-off hydropower plants.”

Bottom line, the report says: 

“Only when funds are available without high-risk surcharges can solar thermal power plant technology become competitive with medium-load fossil-fuel power plants.”

True, investment funds and market incentives are vital to make CSP as cheap as coal. But the chances of these happening are dependent on something else that’s desperately needed and sorely lacking: the political will to carry out the CSP solar vision. 

Source: Solve Climate Change Blog 

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ScienceDaily (May 19, 2009) — The answer to the looming fuel crisis in the 21st century may be found by thinking small, microscopic in fact. Microscopic organisms from bacteria and cyanobacteria, to fungi and microalgae, are biological factories that are proving to be efficient sources of inexpensive, environmentally friendly biofuels that can serve as alternatives to oil, according to research presented at the 109th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.

“We have been charged to develop the next generation of cellulosic biofuels. When we successfully supply sources of energy to the grid from non-food, cellulosic, parts of plants we will mitigate the food versus fuel debate,” says Tim Donohue of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, one of two directors of Department of Energy Bioenergy Research Centers who spoke today in a session at the meeting.

When it comes to alternative fuels, currently ethanol is king. Almost all ethanol produced in the United States is fermented from readily available sugars in corn starch or corn kernels. Producing ethanol from corn has also come under much criticism lately, accused of being responsible for rising food prices.

Researchers are looking at alternate biomasses as food for microorganisms to ferment into ethanol. The most attractive are known as lignocellulosic biomass and include wood residues (including sawmill and paper mill discards), municipal paper waste, agricultural residues (including sugarcane bagasse), dedicated energy crops (like switchgrass) or the non-edible parts of corn like cobs, stalks or stover. The problem is, unlike corn starch, the sugars necessary for fermentation are trapped inside the lignocellulose part of this plant biomass. The key to ending the food versus fuel debate is unlocking the sugars trapped in cellulosic biomass.

To do that, some scientists have taken a page out of the playbook of the pharmaceutical industry. Pharmaceutical companies routinely use a process known as high throughput screening to rapidly test thousands of compounds for potential new drugs. Martin Keller at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the DOE bioenergy research center director, and his lab have adapted the method to rapidly test poplar tree samples for their ability to give up sugars.

“We for the first time ever have developed a super-screening pipeline to handle thousands of samples. We took samples from approximately 1,300 poplar trees in the northwestern United States and used the screening pipeline to see if there was a difference in sugar release,” says Keller. “Trees can be very different. Some trees can be easier to digest, even within the same species.”

Keller is not sure why some poplars are more likely to give up their sugars than others. It could be genetic or the result of some environmental factor or a bit of both. They are now conducting experiments, growing poplar saplings under controlled environments to better understand.

In addition to studying the biomass itself, Keller’s lab is also looking for microbes or microbial products that can help break it down into simple sugars. They are currently studying a bacterium found in a hot spring in Yellowstone known as Anaerocellum. It grows at approximately 80 degrees Celsius and is what is known as a consolidate bioprocessing microbe: It can not only break down the cellulosic biomass to sugars but ferment it to acetate and ethanol, saving time and money.

“Right now it is expensive to break down cellulosic biomass. That is why we don’t have a sustainable biofuels industry. This is what we as a center are working to overcome,” says Keller.

Once they have overcome that problem, there are companies ready to move forward. Andreas Schirmer from the company LS9 in South San Francisco describes a unique strategy. LS9 has engineered a proprietary microbe to produce UltraClean™ diesel in a one-step process. They have discovered a way to exploit the pathway that microbes use to make energy-rich fatty acids for the synthesis of cell membranes and energy storage compounds, and divert them for their own purposes. Inside the fermentor, the microbes and feedstock sit in water, so the oil-like fuel compounds rise to the surface and can be easily collected, much more efficiently than the energy rich distillation process necessary to produce ethanol.

Schirmer says they are currently using sugar cane as a cost-effective option and estimates an 80 percent reduction in carbon footprint compared to petroleum-based fuels.

“It is a bridge feedstock. Once second generation feedstocks come online we will be able to convert production over to them quickly and achieve even greater reductions in greenhouse gas emissions,” says Schirmer.

Beside ethanol and biodiesel, researchers are also looking at producing hydrogen from renewable resources. Donohue’s lab is working with purple bacteria called Rhodobacter sphaeroides that use photosynthesis to produce hydrogen from a combination of cellulosic feedstocks and sunlight. The hydrogen can then converted to electricity using fuel cells that his lab is also developing. They have completed laboratory scale prototype “microbial batteries” using the bacteria and the fuel cells in a single enclosed system that, when exposed to sunlight, produces enough electrical current to power a laptop.

“This is just a look under the hood at the types of activities that are going on in the United States to take advantage of microbial activities and deploy them to create the next generation of fuels,” says Donohue.

Rising demand for irrigation and drinking water is draining the aquifer faster than it can recharge, and a scheme to channel more water from the Andean highlands, which receive seasonal rainfall, is pitting big agribusinesses on the coast against Quechua-speaking llama herders in the mountains.

Experts say the conflict is just one sign of rising tensions over water use as supplies of the vital resource dwindle and shift with changes in climate.

“Water belongs to the people who need it most, and we need it most,” says Gino Gotuzzo, of the Farmers Association of Ica, who grows asparagus and some other crops on about 60 acres of desert. Up the mountain, however, Quechua-speaking farmers say plans to channel runoff to coastal farms will dry up the spongy high-mountain wetlands where they pasture llamas and alpacas, ruining their livelihood.

Peruvian officials brush aside the specter of “water refugees.” As supplies dwindle, they say, they can channel water from the highlands, where rain falls between October and April, or divert rivers that flow east to Amazonia, which receives more precipitation than its sparse population uses.

Nevertheless, droughts associated with El Niño events in the 1980s and 1990s spurred increased migration from rural areas to cities in Peru, and the exodus from Brazil’s chronically drought-stricken northeast is one factor in that country’s Amazonian deforestation.

With cities growing and agriculture expanding throughout South America, experts predict that climate change will exacerbate water scarcity, increasing conflicts between competing users, pitting city dwellers against rural residents, people in dry lands against those in areas with abundant rainfall, Andean mining companies against neighboring farm communities, and eucalyptus plantation operators on the Argentinean and Uruguayan plains against farmers who say the trees are sucking the water table dry.

In Peru, officials say the problem is not water scarcity, but Nature’s poor distribution. More than two-thirds of the country’s 29 million people live on the dry western side of the Andes, where less than 2 percent of the country’s water flows, while only one-fourth live in Amazonia, which can get more than 80 inches of rain a year.

But plans to redistribute water by rerouting rivers or drilling through the Andes raise questions for which neither politicians nor scientists have easy answers. How much water can be piped from reservoirs in the Andean highlands or Amazonian cloud forest without damaging those ecosystems? Who has priority: thirsty cities or food producers? Subsistence farmers or export agribusinesses? Poor rural communities or revenue-generating mines? Agriculture or hydroelectricity?

On Peru’s coast, virtually every city has its eye on an uphill neighbor’s water supply. In neighboring Bolivia, street protests in 2000 and 2004 known as the “water wars” forced two private companies, Bechtel and Suez, to give up water management concessions. City planners in Quito, Ecuador’s capital, are looking to the Amazon to replace water supplied by dwindling glaciers. And Brazil plans to meet its growing energy needs by damming rivers throughout the Amazon, which critics say could further disrupt the region’s hydrology.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that by 2020 upwards of 1.5 billion people worldwide will be facing water stress, including anywhere from 7 million to 77 million in Latin America.

“Inherent in these projections,” said IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri, “is the potential for conflicts and the disruption of peace.”

With nearly 9 million people, Lima, Peru’s capital, is the second-largest desert city in the world, after Cairo. It grew up beside a river that slices down from the Andean highlands to the Pacific Ocean. Many such coastal valleys contain vestiges of pre-Hispanic canals and irrigation systems, a sign that water management has been a challenge for several millennia.

“Lima is a thirsty city,” says Guillermo León, president of the board of directors of the state-run water and sanitation company, SEDAPAL. In shantytowns lacking water hookups, residents must buy water from tank trucks. They use less than one-third the amount of water used by residents of wealthier districts, but pay four or five times as much for the water.

Water stress is also serious on the Bolivian Altiplano, the two-mile-high plain near Lake Titicaca, an area that is home to more than 3 million people. That region’s rivers provide an average of 132,000 gallons of water per person per year – scarcely enough for household use, even if Bolivians are thriftier than US families, who can use up to 400 gallons a day, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Often, the scant water available is polluted. Three-quarters of wastewater in Peru is dumped untreated into rivers, lakes and the Pacific Ocean, and the Health Ministry has identified dozens of rivers polluted with lead, cadmium, arsenic, mercury and other metals from mining operations.

In the Andes, these problems are exacerbated by demand for water for irrigation. About 80 percent of Peru’s water goes to agriculture, and only 8 percent of farm land uses water-conserving systems like drip irrigation, according to Abelardo de la Torre, head of the new National Water Authority, which is overseeing the design of watershed management plans throughout the country.

The need for efficient irrigation will become critical within the next few decades, as ice caps disappear from the Andes, where most of the world’s tropical glaciers are located, and where small farmers depend on meltwater during the dry season.

Outside La Paz, Bolivia, the Chacaltaya glacier, once billed as the world’s highest ski resort, is nearly gone. And Ecuador plans to pipe water from the eastern side of the Andes to supplement the dwindling supply from two receding glaciers that provide Quito’s drinking water.

In 1991, tropical Andean glaciers covered some 1,065 square miles, with 70 percent in Peru, 20 percent in Bolivia, and the rest in Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela. Since then, glaciers have disappeared from Venezuela and are shrinking in the other countries. Calculations show a loss of nearly 10 percent per decade.

Ironically, the increased melting means a water bonanza now, but César Portocarrero, an engineer who helps small farmers install drip irrigation systems in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca, named for its snow-capped peaks, said he has seen an increase in conflicts between neighbors and communities, which may be an early sign of water stress.

It is not clear how much the loss of glacial runoff will affect drinking water supplies downstream. Experts say much of the decrease can be offset by expanding reservoirs to catch water during the rainy season.

But potable water will not be the only casualty. A World Bank study indicates that glacial melt it is likely to raise generating costs at hydroelectric dams on rivers fed by melt water.

Nevertheless, a hydroelectricity revival is underway in South America, especially in water-rich Amazonia. Not only will that add to the competition for water, but environmentalists also worry that dams like the controversial project on the Madeira River in western Brazil will block the flow of nutrient-bearing sediments and fish migration routes.

Dams may also change the hydrological cycle in Amazonia, which affects precipitation in the Andes. Climate models and scientists do not agree on exactly what changes will occur in Amazonia. Some will depend on whether El Niño cycles are more frequent or intense. Researchers are handicapped by a lack of historical data from Amazonian countries.

“We know more now than we did 20 years ago, but we still don’t know half of what we need to know,” said José Marengo of Brazil’s National Institute of Space Research in Sao Paulo. “There are few studies and little meteorological data. There are huge data gaps in all the countries. In hydrological data, there are series of 20 or 30 years, when we would need 100 years or more to see if there is a cycle of flooding and drought.”

Small farmers in the Andes, however, say there is already sufficient cause for alarm. Concerns over water shortages and salinization of pasture and crop land have spurred protests against large mines in Piura, in northern Peru, and near Oruro, in southern Bolivia, by farmers who say there is not enough water to go around.

Meanwhile, the tension continues between export agribusinesses on Peru’s southern coast and the small farmers upstream. Large-scale farmers on the coast have more efficient irrigation systems, but the profusion of wells is pumping water out of the aquifer nearly twice as fast as it can recharge, according to Javier Chiong of the Ministry of Agriculture in Ica.

Large farmers downstream are calling for a major infrastructure project to channel water from the highlands, dispersing some of it through canals in the desert to recharge the aquifer. Small farmers and llama herders upstream say the scheme could dry the Andean bogs, an ecosystem about which little hydrological data exist.

“There’s a lack of planning,” said Gotuzzo of the Farmers Association of Ica. “And it’s the poor people who will suffer the most. The rich will be able to solve their problems.”

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SOLAR heating technology has seen more than 300 Zanemvula housing project houses fitted with solar geysers in Port Elizabeth‘s Chatty 3, 4 and 5 areas.

The pilot project is the initiative of the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality. It was started at the beginning of April and “it is envisaged that it should be finished by July”, said municipal spokesman Luncedo Njezula.

“We are testing solar heating technology because we want to see if it‘s going to be useful for our people.”

The feedback from the community regarding the solar geysers would help the municipality in ensuring that the technology worked in an effective and sustainable way.

Resident Thembakazi Matyunu hailed the project as “a good initiative”, saying it was for the betterment of all people in the community. “It feels good waking up in the morning and using free hot water to bath kids and get them ready for school,” Matyunu said.

Neighbour Nosipho Mango echoed Matyunu‘s sentiments, adding that with this system “I use less electricity in the house”. Mango, whose geyser was installed a month ago, said: “When it‘s cold I use hot water to do my washing. This project has helped all of us a lot.”

“We are living very happy lives now because of this initiative,” said another resident, Misiwe Qheshana.

“Our lives have been drastically improved by the introduction of this project.”

She said the water became lukewarm in inclement weather, “but lukewarm water is better than cold water”, she quipped.

Njezula said the project was also aimed at creating job opportunities for the unemployed in the area because local residents were being used to install the geysers.

“The residents will also be trained to perform maintenance duties on the equipment,” he said, adding that such a practice represented “a genuine skills transfer to residents of Zanemvula”.

Source: Herald Reporter 

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Have a look at some of our collectors-installed .

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The organizations responsible for the world’s three leading environmental assessment systems for buildings have agreed to establish consistent methods for measuring and reporting carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. 

The goal of the efforts, according to the organizations, is to allow comparisons of buildings rated by different tools. The organizations have no plans to fold the various systems into one. “Each rating tool has grown in response to market needs in different countries, and it is healthy for them to be different in some respects,” says Townsend. Michelle Moore, UGBC senior vice president of policy and affairs, agrees: “We all just want to measure apples to apples,” she says.

For several years the USGBC has been working on a revamp of LEED to place more emphasis on reducing carbon emissions and mitigating global warming. Set to launch in late April, the new rating system, known as LEED 2009, could reflect further refinements that result from the London agreement within a year. “There’s an urgency relating to climate change and, if anything, greenhouse gas emissions are increasing more rapidly than we imagined,” says Moore.

In the U.S., buildings are the largest single source of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, contributing almost 40 percent of such emissions to the atmosphere, according to some estimates. “The economy is in the news right now because it’s the point of pain, but the clock is ticking on the environmental front,” says Moore, adding, “buildings are a big part of the problem and they can be a big part of the solution.” 

Source:  Architectural Record.com

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