Category — Uncategorized

Driving over the solar panels

Every once in a while you come across an article or a statement that initially sounds really far fetched and unrealistic. I had heard some time ago that the Dutch had created a new approach to roads. They build copper tubes or plastic tubes into the roads when they are repaved. During the summer, water that is being pumped slowly through these roads as they are warmed by the sun and then pumped back down into reservoirs deep in the ground. In the winter the warm water can be pumped back through the same pipes to avoid ice on the roads and increase saftey.

Another cool technology usede pressure sensitive chrystals to geenrate electricity in high traffic areas, although I hadn’t herd that the mats used for this approach are strong enough to be driven over.

Today, I like to bring you another intersting idea recently published in teh magazine Popular Science and written by John Bradley:

The road ahead is paved with photovoltaics. That’s how Scott Brusaw sees it, anyway. His company, Solar Roadways, is embedding PV cells and LED lights into panels engineered to withstand the forces of traffic. The lights would allow for “smart” roadways and parking lots with changeable signage, while the cells would generate enough energy to power businesses, cities and, eventually, the entire country.

Each 12-by-12-foot Solar Roadway panel would produce about 7,600 watt-hours a day, based on an average of four hours of sunlight. At that rate, a one-mile stretch of four-lane highway could power about 500 homes. “If we could ever replace all the roads in the U.S., then, yeah, we would produce more electricity than we use as a nation,” says Brusaw, an electrical engineer who completed his first prototype panel in February with funding from the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Brusaw’s goal is to get the cost per panel under $10,000. That’s roughly three times the cost of asphalt. But he wants to make panels that last three times longer than asphalt roads, which have to be resurfaced every 10 years in many places. “Then the cost is about the same,” he says. “But that’s just a break-even. We’re also generating electricity.”

The key to commercial viability will be the panels’ glass. It must be textured for traction, embedded with heating elements for melting away ice and snow, and able to survive years of traffic. “The toughest is going to be that fast lane on the highway,” Brusaw says, “where you’ve got a 40-ton truck, maybe with snow chains. It will have to be able to withstand all that.” At the same time, it has to be self-cleaning if sunlight is to reach the PV cells; Brusaw points to experimental hydrophilic glass that uses sunlight to break down organic dirt, and rainwater to wash it away without streaking.

Next up for Solar Roadways will be qualifying for Phase II funding, a two-year, $750,000 deal to develop a commercial plan for the panels. At the end of those two years, Brusaw would like to be ready for testing in parking lots, which he sees as the perfect proving grounds for the lights and the power-generation system. Directional arrows and parking lines could be reconfigured to deal with busy times, and the electricity generated could feed adjacent businesses. “I talked to the guy in charge of power for Wal-Mart,” Brusaw says. “Superstores are roughly 200,000 square feet, and parking lots are about four times that. I crunched the numbers for an 800,000-square-foot lot and told him how much power it could generate even if it was completely full of cars. It was 10 times the power they use.”

Brusaw wants to start smaller, though—on the scale of, say, a fast-food restaurant. A McDonald’s retrofitted with a solar parking lot could take itself largely or entirely off the grid or become a site for recharging electric vehicles (while the owners stopped inside for food, naturally). “Even the best electric cars have a range of about three hours,” he explains. “But if all I have to do is find a McDonald’s, I could drive from Idaho to the southern tip of Florida.” Improbable? Yes. But “Billions of watts served” would be a cool new tagline.

Today we have a great guest post form Jack Lundee

Eco-conscious is a term that I’ve been hearing a lot lately. Specifically, people have been taking a more action-oriented approach at making this a better planet. But it’s not just the efforts of large corporations and collaborative units (i.e. – Doug Band and the CGI) on issues like renewable energy, sustainable crops, and fuel emission reduction; it’s actually the act of the individual that’s providing for a greener future.

For instance, there’s been great development work on eco-gadgets, or items that allow us to do everyday tasks, while remaining safe for the environment and the user. This would include the lessened usage of batteries; one such example is a usb wireless optical mouse that feeds off a battery-less receiver. Another fine example would include green rags, which have become a hit over the past couple of years. Biodegradable and highly efficient, these can be used to clean windows, wash cars, dry hands, etc…

Although, gadgets aren’t the only thing that have provided noteworthy support for the green individual; acts such as travel, trash dispensing, and cell phone usage have turned eco-friendly. Subsequently, heavy ideals like marriage have yielded to the go green message. In a piece labeled “Green Marriage Ceremonies,” Larie Pawlik-Kienlen describes ways in which to effectively make your marriage eco-friendly. She goes on to tell her audience to use biodegradable paper for invitations; recycle dresses; donate your wedding gown to a good cause; rent a hybrid vehicle for transport; set up an organic gift registry, and so on and so forth. Off the top of my head I can generally think of one major thing that would support such an initiative and that would be to hold the ceremony outdoors! Ultimately, I feel as if this makes for a splendid organic wedding!

Eco-conscious is become more widely used as green and everything surrounding it becomes more action oriented. Large civil construction companies and business already understand the important of green lighting and LEED standards, but it’s up to the individual to make a significant change in the way we live and view our planet. In light of this, I hope you’ll take the time to visit http://www.earthday.org/ to find out what you can do to support your planet.

By J Lundee - Follower of all things green and progressive.

Floating Wind Generators

Wind Power Turbines to take root in the sea
By Hillary Rosner Posted 06.11.2009 at 6:26 am 2 Comments

Virgin Waters: The Hywind project aims to perfect technology for floating windmills in the deep ocean, opening up new room for wind power to breathe Stephen Toner/Getty Images
The Big Picture: Wind power is all about location — getting turbines where the breeze blows steady and strong. One of the best places for that is far out at sea. And because one of the biggest obstacles to expanding wind power is overcoming the objections of residents who don’t want wind farms blocking their views, deepwater wind, which is invisible from shore, has dual appeal.

Where We Are: 94 GW
What We Need by 2050: 2,000 GW
Tech to Watch: Deepwater Wind

According to the U.S. Department of the Interior, seabound wind farms off the Pacific coast could generate 900 gigawatts of electricity every year. Unfortunately, the water there is far too deep for even the tallest windmills to touch bottom. An experiment under way off the coast of Norway, however, could help put them anywhere.

The project, called Hywind, is the world’s first large-scale deepwater wind turbine. Although it uses a fairly standard 152-ton, 2.3-megawatt turbine, Hywind represents “totally new technology,” says Walter Musial, the principal engineer for ocean renewable energy at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy. The turbine will be mounted 213 feet above the water on a floating platform, or spar — a technology Hywind’s creator, the Norwegian company StatoilHydro, draws from its experience as Scandinavia’s largest gas and oil company. The steel spar, which is filled with ballast and extends 328 feet below the sea surface, will be tethered to the ocean floor by three cables; these will stabilize the platform and prevent the turbine from bobbing excessively in the waves. Hywind’s stability in the turbulent, wintry Scandinavian sea would prove that even the deepest corners of the ocean are suitable for wind power. If all goes according to plan, the turbine will start generating electricity six miles off the coast of southwestern Norway as early as September.

The Environment, deepwater wind, future of energy, july 2009, undersea turbines, wind power
To produce electricity on a large scale, a commercial wind farm will have to use bigger turbines than Hywind does, but it’s difficult enough to balance such a large turbine so high on a floating pole in the middle of the ocean. To make that turbine heavier, the whole rig’s center of gravity must be moved much closer to the ocean’s surface. To do that, StatoilHydro plans to engineer a new kind of wind turbine, one whose gearbox (the mechanism that transfers power between the rotor and the generator) sits at sea level rather than behind the blades.

Hywind is a test run, but the payoff for perfecting floating wind-farm technology could be enormous. Out at sea, the wind is often stronger and steadier than close to shore, where all existing offshore windmills are planted. Deep-sea farms are invisible from land, which helps overcome the windmill-as-eyesore objection that has derailed wind farms in the past. If the technology catches on, it will open up vast swaths of the planet’s surface to one of the best low-carbon power sources available.

One of my most favorite authors, Thomas Freidman, from the New York Times recently wrote an opinion piece about the situation in Iran and how oil plays a large role in any revolution since the beginning of the 20th century.

While we are trying to figure out how to overcome the current economic and fiscal crisis in the United States, another crisis is growing in the 5th largest oil exporting country in the world, Iran. It would be foolish for me to try to write what Friedman expresses so brilliantly. Here is what he wrote on June 23rd, 2009

There has been a lot of worthless chatter about what President Barack Obama should say about Iran’s incipient “Green Revolution.” Sorry, but Iranian reformers don’t need our praise. They need the one thing we could do, without firing a shot, that would truly weaken the Iranian theocrats and force them to unshackle their people. What’s that? End our addiction to the oil that funds Iran’s Islamic dictatorship. Launching a real Green Revolution in America would be the best way to support the “Green Revolution” in Iran.

Oil is the magic potion that enables Iran’s turbaned shahs — “Shah Khamenei” and “Shah Ahmadinejad” — to snub their noses at the world and at many of their own people as well. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad behaves like someone who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. By coincidence, he’s been president of Iran during a period of record high oil prices.

So, although he presides over an economy that makes nothing the world wants, he can lecture us about how the West is in decline and the Holocaust was a “myth.” Trust me, at $25 a barrel, he won’t be declaring that the Holocaust was a myth anymore.

The Obama team wants to pursue talks with Iran over its nuclear program, no matter who wins there. Fine. But the issue is not talk or no talk. The issue is leverage or no leverage. I love talking to people — especially in the Middle East — on one condition: that we have the leverage. As long as oil prices are high, Iran will have too much leverage and will be able to resist concessions on its nuclear program. With oil at $70 a barrel, our economic sanctions on Iran are an annoyance; at $25, they really hurt.

“People do not change when you tell them they should; they change when they tell themselves they must,” observed Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy specialist. And nothing would tell Iran’s leaders that they must change more than collapsing oil prices.

Mr. Obama has already started some excellent energy-saving initiatives. But we need more. Imposing an immediate “Freedom Tax” of $1 a gallon on gasoline — with rebates to the poor and elderly — would be a triple positive: It would stimulate more investment in renewable energy now; it would stimulate more consumer demand for the energy-efficient vehicles that the reborn General Motors and Chrysler are supposed to make; and, it would reduce our oil imports in a way that would surely affect the global price and weaken every petro-dictator.

That is how — as Bill Maher likes to say — we make the bad guys “fight all of us.”
Sure, it would take time to influence the regime, but, unlike words alone, it will have an impact. I believe in
“The First Law of Petro-Politics,” which stipulates that the price of oil and the pace of freedom in petrolist states — states totally dependent on oil exports to run their economies — operate in an inverse correlation. As the price of oil goes down, the pace of freedom goes up because leaders have to educate and unleash their people to innovate and trade. As the price of oil goes up, the pace of freedom goes down because leaders just have to stick a pipe in the ground to stay in power.

Exhibit A: the Soviet Union. High oil prices in the 1970s suckered the Kremlin into propping up inefficient industries, overextending subsidies, postponing real economic reforms and invading Afghanistan. When oil prices collapsed to $15 a barrel in the late 1980s, the overextended, petrified Soviet Empire went bust.
In a 2006 speech entitled “The Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia,” Yegor Gaidar, a deputy prime minister of Russia in the early 1990s, noted that “the timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to Sept. 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market.

“During the next six months,” added Gaidar, “oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms. As a result, the Soviet Union lost approximately $20 billion per year, money without which the country simply could not survive.”

If we could bring down the price of oil, the Islamic Republic — which has been buying off its people with subsidies and jobs for years — would face the same pressures. The ayatollahs would either have to start taking subsidies away from Iranians, which would only make the turbaned shahs more unpopular, or empower Iran’s human talent — men and women — and give them free access to the learning, science, trade and collaboration with the rest of the world that would enable this once great Persian civilization to thrive without oil.

Let’s get serious: An American Green Revolution to end our oil addiction — to parallel Iran’s Green Revolution to end its theocracy — helps us, helps them and raises the odds that whoever wins the contest for power, there will have to be a reformer. What are we waiting for?

As often before, I totally agree. The eco-conscious pioneers I am working with and new ones we hope to attract will do their part to move the green revolution forward. Please join us - together we can make a difference!

This post has been provided by my good friend Debbie Zachry

20 June 2009 

Plan Designed by Leading Architect to Revive Staggering Economy-
As the market recession rolls on, the housing industry is one of the many trades at a standstill. Founded by distinguished architect Edward Mazria, Architecture 2030 is a “One Year 4.5 Million Jobs Investment Plan” to help America invest in green homes building and revamp present homes to make them more energy efficient.

A place to start

Mazria claims that the private building division is the biggest solution toward enlivening the United States economy and creating green jobs, as the industry accounts for about 10 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. Construction produces demand in every division of the economy such as wholesale, retail, distribution, manufacturing, constructing, banking, development and professional services; utilizing expensive products such as rubber, steel, glass, insulation, lumber, electrical appliances, heating/cooling appliances, fabrics, paint, windows, tile and metal.
Apart from tax credit incentives applied to first time home purchasers, the $787 billion stimulus funds didn’t do much to support the housing market; causing many American residential home builders to feel the impact of layoffs. The Architecture 2030 Plan entails energy efficiency incentive grant offerings to “buy down the interest rate” on home mortgages used to buy new energy efficient homes or to remodel exisiting homes, proposing a 1 percent full interest rate buydown for a new home that uses 50 percent less energy than present energy standards, or a home energy modification that would lower energy consumption of an already existing residence to 30 percent below current requirements.

For example, if your mortgage interest rate quote is 4.75 percent, the plan would offer an interest buydown which would lower the interest rate a full percentage point, to 3.75 percent. The Architecture 2030 Plan is one of intelligence and fervor which may possibly guide the way out of America’s lingering recession; we can only wait to see how the Obama Administration and Congress respond to this powerful proposal.