Water distribution is the most energy-intensive activity in high and dry places. An estimated one quarter (25%) of America's electricity consumption is associated with moving and treating water. Is it any different in your city? Let us know.
Southern Nevada used about 853.8 million kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2008 to move 439,187 acre-feet of water into valley homes and businesses, according the Southern Nevada Water Authority. Another 119.2 million kilowatt-hours of electricity was used that year to treat 22,501 acre-feet of water and send it back to the lake.
When the power is mostly from coal, that means something! Utah is 93% coal dependent and has the largest average household size (3.01) - meaning water consuming appliances will be used intensively in the average home. The per-capita water consumption average in Utah is 250 gallons, way over the 75 gallon national average, with 60% of all water consumed going for yard irrigation.
The national standard in India is around 200 litres per capita per day and even in its silicon valley, Bangalore, the availability is much lesser. Equity issues aside, to pump around 900 mld of water from 300-600 depth, the BWSSB spends about 65 percent of its income (Rs 140 crores) on power!
What can you as a citizen do? For one, harvest rainwater and use recycled water for cleaning cars! Not water pumped from such distances at such costs, such power! Reduce your water print. And share your ideas.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Wasting all that energy
The developing world, where 44 percent of people lack access to electricity, could soon be one of the biggest markets for solar power, according to participants at the Solar Power International conference in California. To date, just 1 percent of solar panel production has been installed in poor nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In addition to finding financing to help low-income residents install solar panels, a major challenge will be to purchase and replace the batteries to store electricity at night and on cloudy days, said the experts.
Meanwhile, US firm SunPower Corp. announced that it has produced another record-breaking solar panel with a 20.4 percent total area efficiency. The new 96-cell, 333-watt solar panel is comprised of SunPower's third generation solar cell technology that offers a minimum cell efficiency of 23 percent. In addition, the larger area cells are cut from a 165 mm diameter ingot and include an anti-reflective coating for maximum power generation. With a total panel area of 1.6 square meters, including the frame, SunPower's 20.4 percent panel achieved the highest efficiency rating of a full sized solar panel.
What do you think prevents solar from taking off in India? Why, despite so many studies and reports, are investors hesitant? What innovative financing will do the job?
Meanwhile, US firm SunPower Corp. announced that it has produced another record-breaking solar panel with a 20.4 percent total area efficiency. The new 96-cell, 333-watt solar panel is comprised of SunPower's third generation solar cell technology that offers a minimum cell efficiency of 23 percent. In addition, the larger area cells are cut from a 165 mm diameter ingot and include an anti-reflective coating for maximum power generation. With a total panel area of 1.6 square meters, including the frame, SunPower's 20.4 percent panel achieved the highest efficiency rating of a full sized solar panel.
What do you think prevents solar from taking off in India? Why, despite so many studies and reports, are investors hesitant? What innovative financing will do the job?
Foul blows the wind?
The Normandy coast of France, once the scene of the combined onslaught against Hitler’s forces, and now a tourist attraction, is also in the center of another conflict. One that pits ecologists against renewable energy proponents. Windmills churning above the tidal flats of Mont-Saint-Michel will distract from the natural beauty of the medieval monument and potentially destroy the landscape in the future, say the former.
France has 2500 windmills producing 4500 megawatts per year; the goal is to have 8500 windmills producing 25000 megawatts by 2020. Recently, the EU recommended that it invest $ 70 million in clean energy over the coming decade, tripling windmill construction to produce 20 % of Europe’s electricity.
Interestingly, French law bans windmills closer than 1500 feet from historical monuments. The current court case concerns plans to build 300 foot high windmills on farmland in Argouges, on a plateau a bit more than 10 miles southeast of Mont-Saint-Michel. The monument attracts about 3 million visitors each year to admire the rock-top monastery.
If permitted, there are more plans for an additional 80 towers in farming communities across the entire ridgeline above Mont-Saint-Michel. Farmers embrace proposals to install windmills in their fields because of the payments they receive. They get stipends for use of the land and villages are provided tax revenue on income from electricity, which is sold to the national grid.
You can never win it all, as they say. Clean energy will require large expanses of land, whether for wind or solar energy. In India, there are accusations of fertile land being claimed as degraded land for such projects. Many question the labeling of 70 million hectares as ‘degraded land’.
But that is the price one must pay for clean energy. What do you think? Should windmills be set up regardless of any other criteria other than wind quality? Do you believe turbines affect bird life? Check out this site for a comparison on the loss of biodiversity due to climate change and windmills.
Friday, October 23, 2009
The power of the sun
Peak oil once again reared its head, this time at a lecture given by Nobel Laureate Walter Kohn in Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science.
Oil, which makes up around 35 percent of global energy use, and the other fossil fuels will soon be exhausted, as we ‘devour the laborious work of millions of bacteria over millions of years’. As world population will have increased by an estimated 30 to 40 per cent by mid-century, energy consumption will rise. What then? Energy prices will in two decades see a steep hike and unless something is done, life will get difficult, warned the professor.
So, as the vultures in Jungle Book asked, ‘what are we gonna do?’
Well, the professor believes solar and wind power are the most promising candidates. Although, at the present time they constitute only ~ 2 per cent of the global energy consumption, “their production has recently been rising by a spectacular 30 to 40% per year, or a factor 15 per decade and 225 in 20 years. This arithmetic suggests that the entire deficit stemming from the impending exhaustion of oil and gas might be compensated in about 10 to 20 years by continuing aggressive commitment to solar and wind energy.”
By 2021, he sees a world largely dominated by solar and wind energy. The trend aside, he believes the technology leaps will bring it all closer.
Solar power has been getting cheaper for years. Panel prices declined 31 percent from 1998 to 2008 because of lower manufacturing and installation costs and state and local subsidies, according to a study released Wednesday by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
But it did take a ramp up in US federal incentives to bring the cost within many people’s reach. Thousands of homeowners are finding they can pay off a rooftop solar system in just a few years and then start pocketing the energy savings. More than half the states in the U.S. and Washington D.C. offer enough incentives to cut the costs by 40 percent or more.
How many nations are willing to do that? And can afford to?
Meanwhile solar powered mobile phones are catching like fire in Africa and helping people unconnected to the grid make informed decisions.
And if land requirement was a big factor against big solar, things are changing now. The 4,500 acre solar thermal installation in California is being planned to enhance farming! From protecting tomatoes from rain (tomatoes do better if only their roots are fed), through shading cooler weather crops like salad and arugula as the climate heats up, to providing support for trellises and other crop infrastructure, symbiotic ways of harnessing food and energy are coming true.
So, do you think Prof Kohn is right?
Oil, which makes up around 35 percent of global energy use, and the other fossil fuels will soon be exhausted, as we ‘devour the laborious work of millions of bacteria over millions of years’. As world population will have increased by an estimated 30 to 40 per cent by mid-century, energy consumption will rise. What then? Energy prices will in two decades see a steep hike and unless something is done, life will get difficult, warned the professor.
So, as the vultures in Jungle Book asked, ‘what are we gonna do?’
Well, the professor believes solar and wind power are the most promising candidates. Although, at the present time they constitute only ~ 2 per cent of the global energy consumption, “their production has recently been rising by a spectacular 30 to 40% per year, or a factor 15 per decade and 225 in 20 years. This arithmetic suggests that the entire deficit stemming from the impending exhaustion of oil and gas might be compensated in about 10 to 20 years by continuing aggressive commitment to solar and wind energy.”
By 2021, he sees a world largely dominated by solar and wind energy. The trend aside, he believes the technology leaps will bring it all closer.
Solar power has been getting cheaper for years. Panel prices declined 31 percent from 1998 to 2008 because of lower manufacturing and installation costs and state and local subsidies, according to a study released Wednesday by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
But it did take a ramp up in US federal incentives to bring the cost within many people’s reach. Thousands of homeowners are finding they can pay off a rooftop solar system in just a few years and then start pocketing the energy savings. More than half the states in the U.S. and Washington D.C. offer enough incentives to cut the costs by 40 percent or more.
How many nations are willing to do that? And can afford to?
Meanwhile solar powered mobile phones are catching like fire in Africa and helping people unconnected to the grid make informed decisions.
And if land requirement was a big factor against big solar, things are changing now. The 4,500 acre solar thermal installation in California is being planned to enhance farming! From protecting tomatoes from rain (tomatoes do better if only their roots are fed), through shading cooler weather crops like salad and arugula as the climate heats up, to providing support for trellises and other crop infrastructure, symbiotic ways of harnessing food and energy are coming true.
So, do you think Prof Kohn is right?
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Zero cost homes?
Even without floods doing their bit, the numbers of homeless are millions. When they could easily be provided shelter simply by using the things the rest of us throw out as waste. Old tires. Old bottles. Beer Cans. Plastic containers.
So many birds in one stone! Turning waste into shelters. Reducing the dependence on scarce resources. Using less water and energy!
The ‘Earthship’ concept of American architect Michael Reynolds is slowly but surely catching up. The latest to join the crew is a small community in the San Juan Del Sur region of Nicaragua.
They have created an entirely off-grid, sustainable community, titled Casa Llanta ("Tire House"). In India, a similar concept was tried out at Kodaikanal.
Earthships use materials that can be found in the community to build "cheap" homes, coupled with rainwater catchment systems, solar panels and other construction techniques to develop a community with the lightest footprint possible.
Natural heating without electricity and a more reliable water supply through rainwater catchment and storage for cooking and for growing crops are some of its selling points. In addition, throwaway materials like tires, glass, plastic containers and aluminum cans are incorporated into construction, along with minimal construction materials like cement, for example, to create structures that are more easily reproduced.
The Nicaraguan project began back in December 2007 with preparation of materials, like packing tires with dirt as "bricks" and cutting/cleaning glass bottles. To get involved with Earthships in your local community, or by volunteering internationally, check out www.earthship.net
Home, as it was meant to be?? How about getting students at your nearby school to work on such ideas?
Between optimism & realism
The UK's Energy Research Centre recently released a study entitled "Global Oil Depletion - An assessment of the evidence for near-term peak in global oil production." (The report is available for downloading at the UKERC's website.)
The main conclusion of the British report is that there is a "significant risk" that conventional oil production will peak before 2020, and that forecasts which delay the event beyond 2030 are based on assumptions that are "at best optimistic and at worst implausible."
The IEA had in its reevaluation last year said that while conventional world oil production will peak around 2020, production of alternative fuels such as natural gas liquids and extracts from the Alberta tar sands will increase rapidly enough so that total liquid fuel production can keep growing through 2030.
It was the Deutsche Bank that last sent out a caution.
Going by conference-talk, a consensus has emerged that global convention oil production plateaued at the end of 2004 and is unlikely to ever grow very much again; that we are in brief period of balance between depletion from existing fields and production and this will last for another two to five years before world production starts to fall inexorably.
How prepared is the world today to tackle oil scarcity? How near do we need to reach before we apply the brakes?
The main conclusion of the British report is that there is a "significant risk" that conventional oil production will peak before 2020, and that forecasts which delay the event beyond 2030 are based on assumptions that are "at best optimistic and at worst implausible."
The IEA had in its reevaluation last year said that while conventional world oil production will peak around 2020, production of alternative fuels such as natural gas liquids and extracts from the Alberta tar sands will increase rapidly enough so that total liquid fuel production can keep growing through 2030.
It was the Deutsche Bank that last sent out a caution.
Going by conference-talk, a consensus has emerged that global convention oil production plateaued at the end of 2004 and is unlikely to ever grow very much again; that we are in brief period of balance between depletion from existing fields and production and this will last for another two to five years before world production starts to fall inexorably.
How prepared is the world today to tackle oil scarcity? How near do we need to reach before we apply the brakes?
New materials
Using the process of selective doping of a material, North Carolina State University engineers have created a new material that would allow a fingernail-size computer chip to store the equivalent of 20 high-definition DVDs or 250 million pages of text!
The process could also be used for boosting vehicles' fuel economy and reducing heat produced by semiconductors, and thus more efficient energy.
The engineers added metal nickel to magnesium oxide, a ceramic. The resulting material contained clusters of nickel atoms no bigger than 10 square nanometers, a 90percent size reduction that could boost computer storage capacity.
By introducing metallic properties into ceramics, engineers could develop a new generation of ceramic engines able to withstand twice the temperatures of normal engines and achieve fuel economy of 80 miles per gallon. And since the thermal conductivity of the material would be improved, the technique could also have applications in harnessing alternative energy sources like solar energy.
The discovery will aid the emerging field of "spintronics," which is dedicated to harnessing energy produced by the spinning of electrons. By manipulating the nanomaterial the electron spin can be controlled, helping to harness electron’s energy.
Materials are the promise of tomorrow. But will technofixes alone help?
The process could also be used for boosting vehicles' fuel economy and reducing heat produced by semiconductors, and thus more efficient energy.
The engineers added metal nickel to magnesium oxide, a ceramic. The resulting material contained clusters of nickel atoms no bigger than 10 square nanometers, a 90percent size reduction that could boost computer storage capacity.
By introducing metallic properties into ceramics, engineers could develop a new generation of ceramic engines able to withstand twice the temperatures of normal engines and achieve fuel economy of 80 miles per gallon. And since the thermal conductivity of the material would be improved, the technique could also have applications in harnessing alternative energy sources like solar energy.
The discovery will aid the emerging field of "spintronics," which is dedicated to harnessing energy produced by the spinning of electrons. By manipulating the nanomaterial the electron spin can be controlled, helping to harness electron’s energy.
Materials are the promise of tomorrow. But will technofixes alone help?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
