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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!
(Clockwise, from top left: concentrated solar in red and wind; concentrated solar, wind and biomass in green; hydro in purple and geothermal; PVs and wave energy.)
It’s easy to spend a lot of time adding and removing layers from NREL’s RE Atlas tool. It’s simple to use, and provides a wealth of information. Recently, while using the RE Atlas we started looking at where the various RE resources intersected.
Why? Well, not so much for land-use questions (biomass and wind don’t really compete for land) but for investment. Yesterday’s post showed that the U.S. had a strong year for RE investment, but that different technologies fared better than others. So, we wanted to see which states had a diverse range of resources and which didn’t. Above, you see a few images of what we found.
One more thing that came to mind while using the RE Atlas, none of these places are that close to major urban areas on the east or west coasts. Which made us wonder, where are the transmission projects?
Did you know that global investment in renewable energy in 2011 set a new record? Despite the “sluggish global economy,” renewable energy investment increased by 5% over 2010 figures, to $260 billion, as reported by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
The Bloomberg report is full of detailed information on how the $260 billion was spent, but there was one item that stood out above the rest that we wanted to highlight:
In 2008, the US was by far the largest single country worldwide in terms of total investment in clean energy, but it was overtaken by China in 2009. China increased its lead in 2010. However in 2011, the US roared ahead once again, with total investment surging to $55.9bn, up 33%; China saw investment rise just 1% to $47.4bn.
Good news indeed. Read more about the report today.
Kirk Sorensen seems to think so. Watch his TED talk to learn more.
Even in the best car, I’m not likely to win the Indy 500. The same goes for high performance buildings. Even the best, LEED-certified, low-impact building can lose its green benefits if the building’s occupants don’t utilize the systems in place and follow good green practices.
In an effort to help building managers and occupants reach their environmentally-friendly potential, Ashley Halligan with the Property Management Software Guide blog has identified five ways to encourage green-friendly behaviors among occupants:
This seems like a pretty good list, so head over to the Property Management Software Guide blog to read more on each point.
Here’s a nice video, filmed at the Detroit Auto Show, that features a lot of Federal officials and automotive industry leaders discussing the benefits of DOE-Detroit collaboration.
