Group items tagged

The explore Team travels to India, China, Costa Rica, and the Arctic to see the impact of humanity on the planet's most important resource: water.

Global Water Resources (GWRI) took the phrase "Think globally, act locally" to heart. The company provides water, wastewater, and recycled water utility services to 14 utilities and more than 60,000 people in its service area around Phoenix. Its recycled water is treated and purified wastewater used for non-potable and outdoor purposes, sent through a separate system of pipes than drinking water.

I've got another guest post from Neil Howes up at TOD, this one proposing a rough plan for North AMerica to obtain 50% of its power from wind by 2030 - A North American Wind Energy Scenario. Would a "50% of electricity generated by wind scenario" work in North America by 2030? In this post, I make a rough cut estimate of what might be required to make such a transition in about 20 years time. Most proposals that are being made rely on a very big increase in carbon free energy, both to charge electric vehicles (EV's) and to replace oil and natural gas (NG) presently used for hot water and space heating. In this post, I lay out a path by which 50% of North American energy might come from wind by 2030, including replacement of a large share of oil and natural gas use by electricity. ... High quality wind resources (wind speeds greater than 6.9m/sec) in the US are estimated to be >5,500GWa, about x10 all of N America's present electricity production of 550GWa. Canada's potential appears to be similar or greater than the US, while Mexico's wind resources are more limited (these figures do not include deep offshore resources that could be harnessed by floating wind turbines or higher altitude wind resources that could potentially be harnessed by airborne wind turbines).

Wastewater treatment is the process of converting wastewater into an effluent that can be discharged back into the environment with a legal standard, which is certified generally less impact on the water cycle; the effluent is directly reused for other purposes. At the same time, the Valuable components from wastewater could be enriched as resource recovering.

"Consumer Water & Air Treatment Systems to 2017"value demand is projected to advance 6.5 percent per year to $2.1 billion in 2017.

As of the end of 2011, China's seawater desalination capacity reached 660 kilotons per day, and the figure, as scheduled, will hit 2.2-2.6 million tons per day in 2015. In recent years, world's renowned corporations in the water treatment engineering field have sped up their inrush to Chinese seawater desalination market. Veolia Water entered Chinese water treatment market early in 1997, now with over 15 projects in China, mainly in Tianjin, Shanghai, Beijing, Shandong, Shaanxi, etc.

A Provo firm Thursday launched a project that could foreshadow the next revolution in renewable energy resources for Utah and the rest of the nation. Raser Technologies Inc. marked the completion of a 10-megawatt geothermal power plant with a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Beaver County facility located in Thermo. It is the first commercial-scale facility to utilize a new technology that allows the plant to generate electricity using geothermal heated water that is at a much lower temperature than was previously possible, said John Fox, general manager of UTC Power Corp.

The ABC recently had a report on plans to power north-west Queensland with low temperature geothermal power using hot water from the Great Artesian Basin. A Brisbane-based company says it could supply geothermal power to all of north-west Queensland. Clean Energy Australasia wants to build a $50 million geothermal power station near Longreach. But it has now also revealed plans to build a pilot geothermal project near BHP's Cannington mine at McKinlay, south of Cloncurry. The company's Joe Reichman says the Mount Isa region needs about 500 megawatts of power a year and geothermal resources could easily provide that. "It'll change the region into a powerhouse," he said. Mr Reichman says the company has applied for federal and state government grants and has support from the major mining companies in the region. If the projects proceed they would be the first geothermal power plants in Australia.

The challenges our society faces with depleted energy resources, water shortages, soaring food costs all point to environmental solutions.

A smart grid allows for resources which are renewable but not unlimited to be used more efficiently. The common misconception that people have about wind, water, and solar energy is that because they come from nature the supply is never ending.

The most renewable and most powerful resource on the planet is certainly solar energy. From solar collectors for water heating to photovoltaic panels for electricity, the sun has a lot to offer.