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Archive for the ‘Go Green’ Category

Louisiana Fishing Capital Braces For Giant Oil Spill

VENICE, La.—Boat captains here boast that Venice, a remote outpost at the tip of the Mississippi Delta, is the fishing capital of the world. But a rapidly expanding oil slick from a leaking deepwater well could leave a permanent mark here.

Hundreds of shrimping boats sail from here, dragging their nets around the inland estuaries and the rich seabed of the Gulf, which teems with white, pink and brown shrimp. Fishermen, commercial and recreational, scour the area for kingfish, red snapper and marlin. The Gulf region accounts for about a fifth of total U.S. commercial seafood production and nearly three-quarters of the nation’s shrimp output, while nearly a third of all marine recreational fishing trips take place on Gulf waters, according to the Fisheries Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

“This is the Delta,” said Robert Cossé, the marine division commander of Plaquemines Parish Sheriff’s Office, while piloting a boat across the Pass-a-Loutre Wildlife Management Reserve. “Lots of life.”

The threat follows the explosion of a deepwater oil rig last week. Spill responders, who have so far failed to cap the flow of oil from the well, say the slick could hit shore before the weekend, prompting them to try to burn off the crude a few miles from shore.

Over 1000 Climate Change Protesters Arrested at Summit

By Colin Freeman
Published: 10:49PM GMT 12 Dec 2009

Demonstrators sit on the ground as police surround them at a rally outside the UN Climate Change Conference. Photo: REUTERS

Cobble stones were thrown through the windows of the former stock exchange building and foreign office buildings in the city, but police made a large number of pre-emptive arrests under a controversial anti-hooligan law.

Suspected troublemakers were herded into a closed-off street, made to sit down and then tied up with plastic cuffs. They were then bused to a detention centre set up for the climate conference.

Many of the exchanges were bad-tempered, souring an event that aspires to be a vehicle for better global co-operation. He Yafei, China’s vice minister of foreign affairs, said he was “shocked” at US climate change negotiator Todd Stern’s assertion that Beijing did not need any American money. “It’s not just about the US and China, it’s the whole international community,” he said, insisting that climate change was historically the fault of the West. “The US is a developed country and China is part of the developing countries.

To tackle global climate change we need to work together.”

Dow Unveils Solar Power Shingles

Dow Chemical has unveiled a residential roof shingle in the form of a solar panel designed to be integrated into asphalt-tiled roofs.

Jane Palmieri, managing director of Dow’s Solar Solutions unit, said the Powerhouse thin-film shingle slashes installation costs because it can be installed by a roofer who is already building or retrofitting a roof.

“As a roofer is nailing asphalt shingle on roof, wherever the array needs to be installed he just switches to solar shingle,” said Ms. Palmieri, who said the solar singles are similarly attached to the roof with nails.

“You don’t have to have a solar installation crew do the work or have an electrician on site,” she added. “The solar shingle can be handled like any other shingle – it can be palletized, dropped from a roof, walked on.”

An electrician is still needed to connect the completed array to an inverter and to a home’s electrical system, but unlike conventional solar panels that must be wired together, the solar shingles plug into each other to form the array.

Dow plans to begin test-marketing the solar shingle in mid-2010, initially targeting new-home construction. Ms. Palmieri said the market could be worth $5 billion by 2015 and noted that 90 percent of homes in the United States use asphalt shingles.

Ms. Palmieri said a solar shingle array is 10 percent to 15 percent cheaper than a standard rack-mounted solar panel system and about 40 percent less expensive than competing building-integrated photovoltaic products.

“Our objective is to prove that this can be a mainstream adopted product,” she said.

New Battery Could Change World

In a modest building on the west side of Salt Lake City, a team of specialists in advanced materials and electrochemistry has produced what could be the single most important breakthrough for clean, alternative energy since Socrates first noted solar heating 2,400 years ago.

The prize is the culmination of 10 years of research and testing — a new generation of deep-storage battery that’s small enough, and safe enough, to sit in your basement and power your home.

It promises to nudge the world to a paradigm shift as big as the switch from centralized mainframe computers in the 1980s to personal laptops. But this time the mainframe is America’s antiquated electrical grid; and the switch is to personal power stations in millions of individual homes.

Former energy secretary Bill Richardson once disparaged the U.S. electrical grid as “third world,” and he was painfully close to the mark. It’s an inefficient, aging relic of a century-old approach to energy and a weak link in national security in an age of terrorism.

Taking a load off the grid through electricity production and storage at home would extend the life of the system and avoid the expenditure of tens, or even hundreds, of billions to make it “smart.”

Solar energy has been around, of course, but it’s been prohibitively expensive. Now the cost is tumbling, driven by new thin-film chemistry and manufacturing techniques. Leaders in the field include companies like Arizona-based First Solar, which can paint solar cells onto glass; and Konarka, an upstart that purchased a defunct Polaroid film factory in New Bedford, Mass., and now plans to print cells onto rolls of flexible plastic.

The convergence of these two key technologies — solar power and deep-storage batteries — has profound implications for oil-strapped America.

“These batteries switch the whole dialogue to renewables,” said Daniel Nocera, a noted chemist and professor of energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who sits on Ceramatec’s science advisory board. “They will turn us away from dumb technology, circa 1900 — a 110-year-old approach — and turn us forward.”

Making It In America

Washington’s special genius is for gridlock. As we’re seeing in the health care debate, the entire system is designed to frustrate action — even when Democrats have a popular president, 60 votes in the Senate and a large majority in the House. Moneyed interests trump party loyalty. Partisan politics trumps national purpose. Congressional rules and egos favor dithering and delay.

But at least on health care, the administration is leading the charge. We haven’t even begun an adult conversation about the fundamental question of America’s global economic strategy. What is the economy we will build out of the ashes of the old?

Obama has raised the subject. He understands that we can’t go back to the old economy — and shouldn’t want to. We can’t go back to borrowing $2 billion a day, largely from the Chinese, to serve as consumer to the world. We can’t go back to an economy in which finance captures 45% of the nation’s profits.

We can’t keep shipping good jobs, technology, and manufacturing capacity abroad and expect to sustain a broad middle class at home. We’ve got to start making it in America again. As Obama has declared, “The fight for American manufacturing is the fight for America’s future.”

As Louis Uchitelle in the New York Times reports, the United States now ranks behind every industrial nation except France in the percentage of overall economic activity devoted to manufacturing. We’ve been shedding manufacturing jobs for years, and the recession has been brutal, with nearly two million industrial jobs disappearing since it began.

If the U.S. wants new energy to be the centerpiece of a new economy in which — in the president’s words, the U.S. “consumes less and produces more,” then it will have to have an industrial strategy.

A new global strategy is essential. But getting there won’t be easy. Just as the insurance companies impede sensible reforms in health care, and big oil and coal block vital changes in energy, and Wall Street guts vital reform of finance, global corporations and banks will spend a lot of money to defend the unsustainable trade policies of the old economy.

The New ‘Good Job’ $12 an Hour?

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Massive investment in renewable energy could ultimately create 4 million manufacturing jobs. But for the workers in the bottom rung of this movement, the shift to green jobs could very well mean a pay cut of nearly 60%, a trend spreading across the entire manufacturing sector.

Many of the entry-level jobs making green energy components start at $12 an hour, much less than the now extinct $28 an hour job that had allowed high school-educated workers in the auto sector to achieve middle class status.

Americans are betting that molding steel wind turbines, slicing silicon for solar panels and making batteries for electric cars will put them back on top of the manufacturing game. The 4 million new jobs, estimated by the University of California, Berkeley, would bring back more than half of all the manufacturing jobs lost in this country since the sector’s heyday in the late 1970s.

At a battery plant just outside Indiana, job growth could boom. The plant is owned by EnerDel, the car battery division of Ener1. Here, the company is racing to build a cost competitive battery for an all-electric car. If it gets a government loan it’s applying for, the company plans on hiring up to 3,000 people. That’s roughly what a big auto plant employs.

But $12 an hour is the starting wage for a production worker.

A level pay scale. The diversity of jobs in the renewable energy business is one thing supporters of green manufacturing tout. They say people should look beyond the starting wages for labor when judging the industry.

“I cannot think of an industry that has more diversity in wages,” said Jackie Roberts, director of sustainable technology at the Environmental Defense Fund.

Let’s Get Real About Alternative Energy

(CNN) — We need to introduce simple arithmetic into our discussions of energy.

We need to understand how much energy our chosen lifestyles consume, we need to decide where we want that energy to come from, and we need to get on with building energy systems of sufficient size to match our desired consumption.

Our failure to talk straight about the numbers is allowing people to persist in wishful thinking, inspired by inane sayings such as “every little bit helps.”

Assuming we are serious about getting off fossil fuels, the scale of building required should not be underestimated. Small actions alone will not deliver a solution.

Let’s express energy consumption and energy production using simple personal units, namely kilowatt-hours. One kilowatt-hour (kWh) is the energy used by leaving a 40-watt bulb on for 24 hours. The chemical energy in the food we eat to stay alive amounts to about 3 kWh per day. Taking one hot bath uses about 5 kWh of heat. Driving an average European car 100 kilometers (roughly 62 miles) uses 80 kWh of fuel. With a few of these numbers in mind, we can start to evaluate some of the recommendations that people make about energy.

Take, for example, the idea that one of the top 10 things you should do to make a difference to your energy consumption is to unplug your cell-phone charger when you are not using it. The truth is that leaving a phone charger plugged in uses about 0.01 kWh per day, 1/100th of the power consumed by a lightbulb.

This means that switching the phone charger off for a whole day saves the same energy as is used in driving an average car for one second. Switching off phone chargers is like bailing the Titanic with a teaspoon. I’m not saying you shouldn’t unplug it, but please realize, when you do so, what a tiny fraction it is of your total energy footprint.

In total, the European lifestyle uses 125 kWh per day per person for transport, heating, manufacturing, and electricity. That’s equivalent to every person having 125 light bulbs switched on all the time. The average American uses 250 kWh per day: 250 light bulbs.

Most of this energy today comes from fossil fuels. What are our post-fossil-fuel options?

Among the energy-saving options, two promising technology switches are the electrification of transportation (electric vehicles can be about four times as energy-efficient as standard fossil-fuel vehicles) and the use of electric-powered heat pumps to deliver winter heating and hot water (heat pumps can be four times as energy-efficient as standard heaters).

Among all the energy-supply technologies, the three with the biggest potential today are solar power, wind power and nuclear power.

It’s not going to be easy to make a energy plan that adds up, but it is possible. We need to get building.