The Minnesota legislature Tuesday passed a bill designed to cause 25% of retail electric sales to customers in Minnesota to be supplied from renewable resources by 2025. The House overwelmingly approved the bill by a 123-10 vote, and the Governor has stated he will sign the legislation shortly.
The legislation includes renewable supply goals for most utilities of 7% by 2010, 12% by 2012, 17% by 2016 and 20% by 2020. The legislation allows for the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission to defer or change the schedule if it is in the public interest.
Renewable supply resources include wind, hydroelectric, solar, and hydrogen. Wind energy is specifically targeted to account for one quarter of the renewable supplies utilized.
Population growth plays a key role
By John Seager
February 13, 2007
Global warming is "unequivocal, " according to the recently released report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The most likely culprits are people - all of us. Yet there never has been much public discussion about the role of human population growth in global warming.
According to professor Timothy Dyson of the London School of Economics, a 40 percent cut by 2050 in per capita carbon emissions in the developed world could be canceled by global population growth.
It's time to open a "second front" in the battle against global warming by stressing the need for population stabilization - sooner rather than later.
Scientists warn that temperatures will continue to rise unless we stabilize greenhouse gas levels. Global warming will be accompanied by increased sea levels resulting in massive flooding of homes and destruction of fragile wetland habitats. To slow this process, experts report that global CO2 emissions must be slashed.
Yet the United Nations projects that by 2050, world population will rise 40 percent to more than 9 billion. And even if we change our ways, the environmental footprint of each human being will never reach zero. As population increases, the challenge of slowing climate change becomes ever more difficult.
After all, it is people, not birds or bears, who drive Hummers and who heat and cool homes and offices. Although the vast majority of population growth occurs in the least-developed nations, the people there, too, are using more fossil fuels every day.
What can we do? We know that family planning works everywhere. When women and couples are free to make informed choices and have access to family planning resources, they choose to have smaller families. Thirty years ago, for example, Mexican women had almost seven children each. Today, thanks to education and the availability of family planning, they have an average of 2.4 children.
Globally, at least 350 million couples lack family planning services. In the U.S., one-third of all births are unplanned. If we could cut in half the number of unwanted births in America alone, we'd have about 5 million fewer births over 20 years.
It's vital to focus on thorny technical issues such as tax credits, energy alternatives and emissions trading programs. These efforts are especially important in the U.S., where less than 5 percent of the world's population produces about one-quarter of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. But cutting energy consumption must be coupled with stabilizing population. More people use more energy. If we had zero population growth, part of the global warming problem would, well, melt away.
Global warming is too big a problem to be solved by energy experts alone. It's about people. It's about how many of us there are and how we choose to live our modern lives. It's about the very personal decisions we make about whether and when to have children - and how many.
We can start by supporting the notion that every woman and every couple should have the resources and power to control their reproductive lives.
If every child is planned, we'll go a long way toward solving global warming and making a less-crowded and healthier world.
John Seager is national president of Population Connection (formerly Zero Population Growth). His e-mail is
john@popconnect. org.
Copyright © 2007, The Baltimore Sun
What You Can Do:
1. Install a Home hydrogen fueling station
What could be cooler - or greener - than a hydrogen car in your driveway? Try a solar-powered hydrogen fueling station in your garage. Scientists in Melbourne, Australia, have developed a prototype of such a device. It's about the size of a filing cabinet and runs on electricity generated by standard-issue rooftop solar panels.
The first version of the home fueling station is expected to produce enough hydrogen to give your runabout a range of some 100 miles without emitting a molecule of planet-warming greenhouse gas. Road trips are out of the question, but it's enough juice for running suburban errands or powering fleets of urban delivery trucks.
"You don't need a hydrogen infrastructure to introduce the hydrogen economy," says Sukhvinder Badwal, a veteran fuel-cell scientist leading the project at Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.
The solar-fired fuel-station-in-a-box leapfrogs two big obstacles to the much-hyped hydrogen economy. One is the multibillion-dollar expense of building national networks of pipelines and fuel stations to replace the corner Chevron.
The other is the fact that today most hydrogen is produced by burning fossil fuel to create hydrogen gas - not exactly a clean and green process. The home hydrogen fuel station solves those problems in one package that Badwal hopes will ultimately sell for about $500.
The heart of the fuel station is an electrolyzer - essentially a fuel cell run in reverse. An electric current from solar panels (a home wind turbine would also do the job) separates water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen is compressed and stored, ready for use in a fuel-cell car or an electric/hydrogen hybrid with an engine converted to run on the gas.
CSIRO is in talks with potential commercial partners, so Badwal's lab is off-limits to visitors. But on his computer screen, he reveals a box that would fit easily in the corner of a garage next to the mountain bikes.
Real-world tests of the home fueling system were to begin early this year at RMIT University in Melbourne, with commercial trials two years off. Obstacles remain, including the cost of hydrogen cars, but the technology could go a long way to making the family wagon carbon-neutral. (Read more about home hydrogen fueling stations on the Green Wombat Blog).
2- Buy A Plug-in Hybrid!
Flexible Fuel Electric Plug-In Hybrids
Plug in my hybrid car? Why, you ask?
The reasons are simple and the technology doable today, but first let's make one thing clear. The current crop of hybrid cars from Toyota, Honda, Ford and Lexus do not need to be plugged in to recharge their batteries. In fact, they can't be plugged in. Anxious to not have their cars confused with pure electric cars, carmakers have gone to great pains and expense to reassure potential buyers that their products have none of the limitations associated with battery-only cars, including having to plug it in at all.
Instead, the batteries in today's gasoline-electric hybrids are kept recharged by an engine-driven generator. In addition, hybrids can also make use of the vehicle's own kinetic energy. Apply the brakes on your Prius or Insight or Escape and you actually engage the generator, which not only makes electricity, but actually helps slow down the car. You get back some of the energy (between 10-50% depending on how "mild" your hybrid is) you expended to move the car down the road and save wear-and-tear on your brakes at the same time.
Cool, huh?
Electric Hybrids -- An Idea Whose Time Has Come
What we call an "Electric Hybrid", also known as a plug-in hybrid, grid-connected hybrid, gasoline-optional hybrid or just PHEV, works pretty much the same as your conventional hybrid, but with one big exception: it has a bigger battery pack.
Take the much-in-demand Toyota Prius, for example. It has a 201 volt, 1.3kWh battery pack mounted under the rear passenger seat. It is a technological marvel all by itself. If the battery is fully charged and the engine warmed up, you can drive around the block without the gasoline engine turning on at speeds up to 42 mph. In effect, you're driving an electric car, and it's great for creeping along the congested 405 in Los Angeles. But wouldn't it be great if you could go further than a kilometer or two?
We could if we replaced that 1.3kWh, Panasonic NiMH battery pack with sometime a bit larger, say 9kWh? What would that -- and some nifty computer code hacking -- do for the Prius?
That's exactly what a California non-profit and small R&D company wanted to find out. The California Cars Initiative and EnergyCS have built prototype Electric Hybrids; CalCars building the first prototype, which they call "PRIUS+", with affordable, but heavier, low-energy density batteries, which will be replaced with NiMH; and Energy CS, using lighter Lithium-ion batteries.
In the case of Energy CS's Electric Hybrid Prius, the engineering teams estimates that the car, if carefully driven, can get between 120-to-180 mpg; while using only 115-150 Whr per mile. The last part, Watt hours per mile, is important. Here's why.
The 9kWh Lithium-ion pack provides enough energy to propel the car at freeway speeds for about 60 miles or so -- a really exciting improvement. At that point, the car returns to normal hybrid operation, running the gasoline engine for most of the time and getting about 50 mpg.
In effect, you didn't burn a little over one gallon of gasoline for the first 60 miles or so, as long as you don't go faster than 40 mph1. Instead, you consumed something less than 9kWh of electricity. Why less than 9kWh? It's a safety and durability precaution so you won't fully discharge the battery and shorten its life. So, let's say you used 80% of the 9kWh. That's 7.2 kiloWatt hours.
Now comes the fun part. Let's say you live in a city where electricity costs you 10 cents a kilowatt hour. To travel that 60 miles, it cost you 72 cents compared to the current national average price of gasoline at about $2.20/gallon in the US (as of April 2, 2005). In effect, for the same $2.20, you could drive up to 180 miles -- on three successive days, of course -- giving you the equivalent of 180 miles per gallon.
Nifty, don't you think?
Better yet, you generated no smog-forming tailpipe emissions and used American-produced energy including renewables, nuclear, coal, and natural gas, and virtually no imported oil. Can you start to appreciate the economic, environmental and national security implications here?
To learn even more about the benefits of hybrids that you can power from your home, see All About Plug-In Hybrids on the CalCar's web site.
Do I Have to Plug It In?
Of course not. That's the point. You get to choose which energy source is right for you. If there's not enough energy in the battery pack, no problem, you can drive on gasoline... but at about three times the cost, remember.
Like a battery electric car or your cellphone, when you get home at night, you'd plug the Electric Hybrid into a standard 110 or 220 outlet; the latter allowing you to recharge the car a bit faster, in case you care. Unlike most fully-electric cars, a night's charge from a 110V outlet is sufficient, and if not, it's not a problem.
CO2 Impact
If we run cars off of electricity, won't that generate more greenhouse gases?
No. They will generate significantly less. Here's why.
If your car gets 20 mpg, you will generate almost 24 pounds of carbon dioxide driving 20 miles, while burning one gallon of gasoline.
By contrast, a 20-mile-range plug-in hybrid might consume 5kW hours of electricity. Given transmission line and battery losses, it would take about 5 pounds of coal to go the same distance.
Depending on how much coal and natural gas your utility burns compared to other non-CO2 fuels like hydroelectric power or wind, every kilowatt might generate about 1.4 pounds of carbon dioxide. That's just 7 pounds to drive those 20 miles on electric power-only compared to the 24 pounds of the gasoline-only car. And since ethanol is virtually CO2-neutral, a flexible fuel plug-in hybrid would produce two-thirds less CO2 emissions than a gasoline-engine car.
So, while you sleep, the power company uses cheaper, off-peak electricity to recharge your car, saving you even more money and helping them get more efficient use out of their investment. You'd wake up each morning with a "full tank" of "fuel".
And depending on how much you use the gasoline engine for longer trips, you might have to refuel at a gasoline station maybe once a month, if that.
Need to drive further than 60 miles in a day? Again, no sweat. The car will operate just like any other hybrid using a mixture of both internal combustion engine and electric motor(s) to wring out the most efficient performance from the car.
Now Add Flexible Fuels
Okay, now you've got a car that will cost pennies to operate on a day-in-day-out basis using locally generated electricity, maybe even from your own solar panels.
There will be times, of course, when you'll need to switch on the internal combustion engine, but even here there's a neat, environmentally sustainable way to do this by switching from gasoline to E85 ethanol, a blend of 15 percent gasoline and 85 percent ethanol made from plant matter, principly corn at the moment, but eventually from any plant waste. Using E85 instead of gasoline is also good for the environment because it generates 30% less carbon monoxide and 27% less CO2 than a comparable gallon of gasoline; and most of that CO2 is carbon-cycle neutral because it's derived from plants, which need CO2 to grow. (E85 generates 17.06 pounds of CO2 to create 15,500 BTUs compared to the 23.95 pounds for gasoline).
Carmakers have built and sold millions of vehicles in America that can use E85 without modification, but no hybrids, so far. A flexible fuel plug-in hybrid would use only 15% as much gasoline as a conventional vehicle when running on its IC engine; the remainder would be made of renewable, carbon-neutral biofuels grown and processed in America.
When Can I Buy One?
You can't... not yet, at least. The cost of the batteries is a stumbling block, though even at current prices the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) has shown that the total lifetime cost of an Electric Hybrid is lower than that of a non-hybrid and not merely lower than that of a conventional hybrid. And as more hybrid cars are built, the cost of batteries should continue to come down. A bigger impediment may be the belief by many, especially auto industry leaders (who are now acknowledging they were wrong about hybrids) that there's no market for these vehicles.
The appearance of this new EV World section reflects a shift in perceptions about these cars. Institutions ranging from utilities to state governments to environmental, national security and other groups are starting to call for the production of these vehicles. Meanwhile, small groups like CalCars and Energy CS hope to offer installed "kits" until the car companies come around.
Eventually, EV World expects carmakers to offer an electric hybrid option that will let you choose which fuel you prefer to use: gasoline, biofuels or electric power.
That's when we'll have real choice.
1 A critical caveat: current plug-in hybrid conversions based on Toyota and Ford hybrid-drive systems operate in electric-only mode under 40 mph. Try to drive faster than this and the gasoline engine comes on. Plug-in hybrids with electric-only operation at freeway speeds greater than 40 mph are still in development.
Also see:
http://www.uuism.net/uuwiki/index.php?title=Threat_of_Global_Warming
New Solar Cell "Most Efficient Ever"
Alana Herro – December 20
solar cell
Scientists have created a solar cell device that is significantly more efficient than conventional photovoltaic cells.
For the first time, scientists have produced a photovoltaic (PV) cell with a conversion efficiency of 40.7 percent, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) reported on December 7. The collaboration of DOE and Spectrolab, Inc. (a subsidiary of Boeing) led to the achievement of a decades-long goal: to break the 40-percent efficiency barrier on solar cell devices. “We are eager to see this accomplishment translate into the marketplace as soon as possible,” Alexander Karsner, assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy at DOE, said.
The breakthrough cell was developed using a structure called a “multi-junction solar cell.” In this type of device, individual PV cells are made of layers, and each layer captures a portion of the sunlight reaching the cell. This allows the unit to capture energy from a greater range of the solar spectrum, leading to higher efficiency. According to Dr. Richard King, a principal investigator at Spectrolab, “The excellent performance of these materials hints at still higher efficiency in future solar cells.”
According to Spectrolab, the highly efficient units allow for the use of fewer cells overall to achieve the same power output as conventional silicon cells. As a result, the technology may allow for lower PV system installation costs, at $3 per watt, and electricity production costs of $0.08–$0.10 cents per kilowatt-hour. The acheivement has the greater potential of helping to reduce the U.S. reliance on imported oil and increase national energy security, DOE’s Karsner notes.
For more info see....
http://www.spectrolab.com/com/news/news-detail.asp?id=172
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.