Posted by: Earl
on Apr 19, 2009
Yesterday I attended a Living Green Expo. I was impressed by the number of exhibitors. Even more impressive was the number of attendees. I've been sensing for a while that there has been a change in momentum toward living green and interest in renewable energy. That's the good news.
Now the bad news. I talked to a lot of the vendor representatives in the booths. I didn't go with this intention but I starting asking the same questions to different people. I got a lot of different answers. None of them seemed to lack any confidence in their answers. Unfortunately, a lot of attendees were getting erroneous information. Some of the errors were perhaps innocuous The information that was provided may not have been critical but they were basic questions about the technology they were promoting.
There may be many thousands of dollars at stake for the system cost or for tax credits. The message is caveat emptor! You can't assume that the "expert" is in fact that. Get a second or third opinion. A lot of people have jumped on the bandwagon and have perhaps not committed the manuals to memory. Make them earn your trust.
Posted by: Earl
on Mar 10, 2009
Fox News ran a story yesterday on where some of the stimulus money is headed. I am in favor of intelligent, "REAL" stimulus spending as I am in favor of a National Energy Policy. Our elected officials prove that they are either clueless or worse when they rush to spend our money on poorly thought out programs and try to muster support by calling it something it's not. I'm still waiting for some honest leadership. I'm not seeing it in either party.
Fox News Story
If you are going to spend so much or OUR money the least you can do is be honest about it and make some attempt to do the right thing in lieu of politics as usual. I'll not be holding my breath.
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 Feb 11, 2009
NPR ran a story this week about job creation in the renewable energy and energy conservation areas. Earl can embrace this element of the stimulus bill and I think a large number of the population that are footing the bill. Have a listen at
What Kind of Green Jobs Will Stimulus Spawn?. If you agree please call or email your congressman, tell them that you support this spending, then please politely tell them what they can do with the PORK!
Posted by: Earl
on Jan 6, 2009
This past weekend President-elect Obama stated in his weekly address that he wants to see the U.S. renewable energy output to double as a result of an economic stimulus program. That's a laudable goal but let's put it into perspective. Bear with me but we have to wade through some numbers.
The U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Information Agency publishes the
Monthly Energy Review. The December 2008 edition documents the U.S. energy consumption through the first 9 months of 2008. It is interesting to note that over the past several years the totals have stayed quite consistent. After extrapolating the 2008 numbers out to 12 months it looks like the 2008 totals will be within 2% of the 2007 numbers. For sake of illustration I'll use the 2007 totals.
First a definition. The unit of energy measure used in the report is a Quad (short for 1 quadrillion BTUs). That is a one followed by 15 zeros. One barrel of oil (42 gallons) will provide approximately 5.8 million BTU. 1 Quad is roughly equivalent to 172 million barrels of oil.
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.
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