GreenGab

Now this is cool stuff: I just read on Engadget that there’s an effort underway to get the town of Seville completely powered by a single solar tower.  This is how we need to get people thinking all the time.  There’s a lot of construction going on around San Francisco these days, and I can’t help but think how different things would be if the government put the right carrots and sticks in place.  Carrots helping builders and property owners who reduce their power intake/needs.  Sticks penalizing new construction that is a resource hog.

Any elected officials reading this?  I do vote nowadays, and I’m sure there’s a lot more people out there who’d like to see you paying more attention to projects like these, and using a few less of my tax dollars to figure out if baseball players are cheating or not…

In my eyes Solar power is one of those “obvious” things that I can’t believe humanity hasn’t done a better job with.  Humans seem to like sunlight.  We seem to have evolved such that we are supposed to spend less time in caves and underground, more time in the outdoors (although a little UV blocking is probably a good thing too).  One might even posit that we were meant to take advantage of the sun.  It is out there, you know, always…

But solar power, until extremely recently, was unbelievably inefficient.  The first few dozen years of innovation got less than 10% of the power absorbed by the cells actually stored and usable.  The first generation of nano-tech solar cells bumped that number to about 12%, but they are still primarily in labs.  According to CNET, some Australian researchers are now able to get 13-15% efficiency.  It’s better than nothing, but I sure hope we’re only at the tip of the iceberg to improving the market for solar power.

Hopefully this’ll soon make its way up to the great solar fields in Canada!

The Wall St Journal today featured an opinion piece by Holman W. Jenkins Jr taking a double shot at legislators trying to improve fuel efficiency standards and the US auto industry. His argument is that the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standard is being revamped this year is not because it is the most efficient technical or market solution to carbon emmissions, but because it is –as he puts it– a “political path to a purely political goal” and “the auto industry is the softest target politicians can find.” I think he has a point. We would be better served by policies that promote technical innovation and entrepreneurship, then let the free markets run with it.

GM’s vice-chairman Bob Lutz seems to agree in some backwards way, saying, “Toyota is miraculous and GM is run by a bunch of aging stumblebums who wouldn’t know technology if it hit ‘em in the face.”

However, Jenkins does offer one argument in defense of the auto industry, quoting an academic study that suggests while emmissions technology has improved, Americans have offset the advancements by getting fatter:

Americans are now pumping 938 million gallons of fuel more annually than they were in 1960 as a result of extra weight in vehicles. And when gas prices average $3 a gallon, the tab for overweight people in a vehicle amounts to $7.7 million a day, or $2.8 billion a year.

The free market might suggest a gym membership and the South Beach diet as an attainable way for individuals to contribute in the fight against global warming and stop pushing their congressmen towards poorly designed policies. In the end, though, I guess it’s not as politically efficient and the effort would have to find a replacement for Al Gore as spokesman…

DOE Secretary Bodman is developing quite an ethanol fetish, committing an additional $200m today to fund small-scale cellulosic plants in the US, bringing 2007 ethanol committments up to $585m.

In more serious news, a Wisconsin fetish club owner is being harrassed for her involvement in a local anti-ethanol effort.

I was in Vegas last month, and the region has three interesting things as it pertains to this story:

1. Lots of wide open spaces
2. A distinct lack of inclimate weather
3. Lots of SUN

Same is true of, shall we call it, the entire desert southwest.  Almost no snow, a little rain here and there, but sunlight.  Also, it being a little closer to the equator, there’s more hours in the day when the sun is out.  Sounds like the perfect spot to put some solar cells to my ignorant ears.

I must be wrong in my assumptions, as I read today about Silicon Valley-based (well, Hayward, but it’s close enough) Optisolar, a new startup that will “build the largest solar power “farm” in North America, using solar cells manufactured in Silicon Valley. The site, near Sarnia in Ontario, Canada, will be enough to power between 10,000 and 15,000 homes on sunny days, drawing on a monstrous 40-megawatt capacity.” 

Sounds great, but what’s going to power the homes on the 300 days of the year that aren’t sunny, eh?  I wonder if the energy costs to have people come clean the snow off the cells will exceed the energy gained?  By the way, did I mention I’m from Canada, whose weather is best described as “nine months of hockey followed by three months of crappy ice”.

It turns out the Ontario government offers financial incentives for alternative energy producers, just like unlike the USA, which considers oil from countries with stable governments “alternative”.

At least the solar guys are making some progress, unlike wind/turbine generators, a.k.a. “the Aquaman of alternative energy”.

Larry Dignan at ZDNet blogged today about the rapidly growing impact of the IT industry on global emissions.

Information and communication technology accounts for 2 percent of global CO2 emissions, according to Gartner. That’s the equivalent of the airline industry.

This amazes me.  As a fairly frequent traveler, I cringe a little everytime I see the cloud of nasty trailing a plane as it takes off the runway.  I’ve always assumed that the airlines generated a tremendous amount of pollution.  I would never have thought that servers running in closets and farms all around the world were just as bad.  It shows you how quickly the net effect of something can be - and yes, that was a deliberate pun.

Source: ZDNet

I saw on Treehugger today this post on Getting Ready for Earth Day.  You should read the post for details, but here are their four big tips:

1. Check out our top five tips for reducing computer energy use…
2. When it comes to batteries, rechargeables are the way to go…
3. Crank power can replace many common plug-in chargers…
4. For greener listening (list of speakers)…

And don’t forget to check out their guide to Greening Your Electronics!

A lot of the time when people think about “going green” they associate it with disheveled-looking people with dreadlocks wearing all-hemp clothes.  These days, green tech (and green living in general) is becoming so mainstream that you can still wear that fancy suit and tie, drive that fancy (hybrid) SUV, and go to your fancy home, yet still live an environmentally-conscious life.  CNET has a great article today on building green homes.

Many energy-consumption problems can be addressed with simple tweaks to conventional house design, according to the founder of eco-friendly home design company Michelle Kaufmann Designs. Windows and sliding glass doors placed on opposite walls, for instance, allow the sun to more evenly wash a room with light and eliminate contrast, which reduces the need for electrical light during the day. Windows also allow for natural air circulation, which reduces demand for heating and air conditioning.

…

Source: CNET

The headline almost doesn’t make sense, does it?  If a company is doing all its publishing online, well, that sounds great - paperfree is better than paperfull, right?  The problem is all this wonderful tech providing this wonderful content on the wonderful Internet is using a bunch of high-powered servers in heavily air-conditioned rooms.  The bigger the pub, the more servers, and worse yet, the more redundant servers and mirroring servers needed around the world.  Yahoo! announced last week they were taking a first step at reducing their environmental impact by going carbon neutral, which is definitely one way to help this rapidly growing problem.

When I read the headline at the New York Times (online) today that “As Environmentalism Grows, Online Publishers Go Green” I was excited to read on.  The first paragraph alone was enough to disappoint:

Buoyed by the breakaway success of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the film documentary of Al Gore’s environmental lecture, publishers like The Washington Post, National Geographic and others are increasing their offerings of “green” content, hoping to attract readers and advertising revenues from manufacturers and retailers who are suddenly walking the earth-friendly path.

The entire article is basically about these companies having new columns and subsites about green products.  More stuff we can all go out and buy and feel a little better about ourselves because we bought it.  On one hand I’m encouraged, seeing big players pay some attention to this space is great.  On the other, I’m discouraged, as I’m growing increasingly concerned that everyone’s looking for the “quick fix” to environmental issues, of which there are many, most of which aren’t quickly fixable.

Source: The New York Times

When looking to add new technology to a device or product, one of the biggest challenges can be figuring out how to do it without increasing the physical size of the device.  This is primarily because we, as consumers, like “smaller, faster, better” when it comes to our gadgets.  So as companies seek to introduce fuel cells or solar chargers into devices, they are significantly constrained by small form factors.  Congrats to Motorola for patenting a process in which the solar cell is integrated into the LCD screen!

Source: CrunchGear