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Each month Sec. of Transportation Ray LaHood answers questions submitted to him via Twitter. This month, Sec. LaHood discusses high-speed rail, a national transportation plan and safety improvements for bike transportation, among other things. Enjoy!
The University of Chicago answers all of your questions.
The video above is the first of 23 lectures from the course PHSC 13400: Global Warming and is intended for non-science majors. The course “focuses on a single problem: assessing the risk of human-caused climate change.” Enjoy!
There is an ongoing competition to build the most efficient solar PV technology. As soon as one company claims the most efficient product, another comes along with a competing claim. Today, we have two new performance claims to share.
Two companies, Semprius and Alta Devices have recently released statements that their products have reached new levels of solar PV efficiency. The two companies have taken different approaches in their efforts toward achieving higher efficiencies and, thus, cost competitiveness for solar PV. One (Alta Devices) has thin film PV technology at the heart of its strategy, while the other (Semprius) uses a novel solar concentrating design to achieve its ends. Both seem to work – independent labs have tested both – so it will be interesting to see how far each technology can be pushed.
Friendly competition aside, we’re happy to report that both companies are based in the U.S. Alta Devices is located in California, while Semprius’ headquarters and manufacturing facilities are in North Carolina. Read more about the new efficiency claims at CEILeadership.org
M. Cristina Negri, an Argonne National Lab scientist, talks about phytoremediation, or the process of removing contaminants from the soil using plants. The renewable energy up-side? She’s using biofuel-suitable crops; growing them on land not typically used for mainstream agriculture.
Prof. Richard Lazarus of Harvard’s Law School spends 6:30 describing how unlikely it seems that climate change legislation will become law, and then spends the remaining time discussing how to overcome the barriers that prevent the law from being enacted. Just when you thought that there was no light at the end of the tunnel (the 6:30 mark) he shows us what might be a way out.
This interactive map from Columbia University is making headlines this week, and for good reason. The map shows New York City’s building energy consumption, block by block. Information for each block is provided in terms of total energy use and is also broken down by space heating, space cooling, electricity and hot water.
It goes without saying that it’s a pretty impressive collection of data presented in an easy to use format. And, with a building’s energy use out in the open, tenants can now point to hard data when they raise concerns about energy use in their buildings.
The EIA’s data for solar shipments is in, and the news is good.
The recently released report, available now, shows that PV shipments shot up in 2010, and their unit price continued to decrease. Good news for manufactures and purchasers, alike.
So, where are these PV modules being built, and where are they going? The EIA says that 82% are built in California, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee. These modules were sent to all 50 states and DC, but the vast majority (70%) went to California, New Jersey, Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado. Of these states, California and New Jersey received 39% and 15%, respectively.
We’ll have to wait to find out the 2011 data, but it is encouraging to see that, in a tough economic cycle, PV manufactures seemed to hold their own.
Scientists at Berkeley Lab do. One DOE-funded project at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab takes Berkeley scientists and pairs them with expertise from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and General Motors (GM). The net result? A plan to develop a cost-effective hydrogen storage system for vehicles.
The basic idea is to make a material that can store large volumes of hydrogen at low pressures. This makes using hydrogen more cost-effective (less energy use for high-pressure pumping) and safer (lower pressure makes it safer). So, how does one make a container store more of something without high pressures? Simple, make the storage container’s material a sponge for hydrogen. (That’s the material in the image above.)
A few years ago, MIT’s Smart Cities project developed the idea for the City Car. You may remember the City Car – it’s the one that folds up into itself when parked, the one that opens from the front, and the one that takes up 1/3 the space of a normal-sized vehicle on the street. Back in 2006 it seemed so advanced that the Discovery Channel and the BBC both included it in programs depicting what the future will look like.
It’s certainly not the future any longer. The City Car can now be found in Spain. It looks a lot like the concept, and should help with traffic problems in some of Spain’s crowded urban areas. Read more about the car here!
