Posted by: Earl
on Feb 14, 2009
Your intrepid energy explorer is reporting this week from China. You’ve heard about the bad air no doubt. It’s no exaggeration. In an interior city, Changsha in the Hunan Province, a taxi driver was only partially joking today that he’d been living in the city for 4 years and had only seen a blue sky 3 times.
That said, it is no exaggeration that the Chinese government and people know they have a problem and are going to great lengths and great expense to improve the situation. The government has set aside 1 trillion yuan (~$150B – that’s B as in billion) to improve the situation. This isn’t future money, this is cash set aside for spending on improving the energy infrastructure; power distribution and improving efficiency.
The China Daily, about the only newspaper Earl can read over here, had a section in the 10 February edition on Energy/Environment. The section titled Mixed Energy Forecast gave an assessment on renewable energy. Here is a synopsis on what was reported about the gains made as a result of the Renewable Energy Law that has been implemented.
- Investment in wind power in 2008 was 88% greater than 2007 investment growing the wind output by 4GW to 10GW total.
- Nuclear power infrastructure investment increased 72% in 2008 over 2007
- The global financial crisis will cause a decline in investment in 2009
- The Chinese government has promised to offer more support to the renewable energy industry
- Several large hydro electric projects came on line adding 20.1 GW to the 2008 hydro output. In addition to the massive Three Gorges project there are 10s of thousands of micro-hydro stations throughout rural China.
- The bad news is that there is an absence of incentive policies for the solar industry. There are currently more than 70 grid-connected to photovoltaic projects but only two of them received feed-in tariffs and most have not benefitted from the Renewable Energy Law.
- Nuclear power goals have recently been increased with plan to bring total nuclear generated electricity to 5% of the demand by 2020.
The paper also reported that from October 2007 to June 2008 subsides of 2B yuan (~$22M) were provided to 148 renewable energy projects. This indicates that these projects are definitely gaining momentum. The global financial crisis has brought down global demand for raw materials such as steel and silicon. This is good news for the renewable energy industry bringing down costs for wind turbine and solar panel manufacturers. The net result of this is lower prices around the world. Stay tuned for more reports.
Posted by: Earl
on Dec 31, 2008
The World Community Grid is extending you the privilege to contribute to the research that will lead to the next generation of solar cells and later, energy storage devices. By harnessing the immense power of World Community Grid for the Clean Energy Project, researchers can calculate the electronic properties of tens of thousands of organic materials – many more than could ever be tested in a lab – and determine which candidates are most promising for developing affordable solar energy technology. They are attempting to create the world's largest public computing grid to tackle projects that benefit humanity.
Grid computing joins together many individual computers, creating a large system with massive computational power that far surpasses the power of a handful of supercomputers. Because the work is split into small pieces that can be processed simultaneously, research time is reduced from years to months. The technology is also more cost-effective, enabling better use of critical funds.
We've all heard that we should turn off our idle computers. Many of us are simply not able to do so either because of the criticality of staying connected or running a storage server. Here is your opportunity to put your computer to work in a meaningful way as long as it needs to stay on.
The Clean Energy Project is the site where you can download the program to run on your computer.
