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!

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

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

Announced yesterday:

Yahoo! has committed to going carbon neutral this year. Essentially, that means we’re going to invest in greenhouse gas reduction projects around the world to neutralize Yahoo!’s impact on the environment. While doing our homework on this, we measured our carbon footprint and discovered that Yahoo! going carbon neutral is equivalent to shutting off the electricity in all San Francisco homes for a month. Or, pulling nearly 25,000 cars off the road for a year.

That’s wonderful news, and standing ovation to the Yahoo! management team for taking a step like this.  I’m not sure how Google will respond, but my hunch is they might try to buy the environment as a pre-emptive long-term move.

FountainBlue is a Bay Area-based organization who puts on numerous events all year round for executives and entrepreneurs in the high tech, life sciences, and clean energy sectors.  The next event is about a month away, on May 8th, is entitled “Clean Energy Investor’s Forum - What’s Hot, What’s Not” and focuses on these topics:

• Renewable energy like solar, wind, bio-energy, and
  environmentally-friendly hydroelectric technologies 
• Energy efficiency and demand response—electricity end-use, buildings
  and grid applications 
• Environment-enhancing technologies—advanced flue gas clean-up,
  ultra-low emissions generation such as fuel cells, environmental
  remediation, and exceptionally efficient generation
• Enabling technologies—power electronics, storage, low-loss cables
  and wires, sensors and instrumentation, control systems, materials and
  manufacturing technology, and integrated clean energy applications.

Pre-Registration is now open, and is only $10-15, click here to sign up.  For more info on last month’s event, you can read their blog posting here.