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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Chai Reddy

Chai Reddy

How Seawater Can Power the World - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • nuclear fusion
  • Fusion energy generates zero greenhouse gases. It offers no chance of a catastrophic accident. It can be available to all nations, relying only on the Earth’s oceans. When commercialized, it will transform the world’s energy supply.
  • What has been lacking in the United States is the political and economic will.
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  • Seven partners — the European Union, China, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States — have teamed up on an experiment to produce 500 million watts of fusion power for 500 seconds and longer by 2020, demonstrating key scientific and engineering aspects of fusion at the scale of a reactor.
  • A rough estimate is that it would take $30 billion and 20 years to go from the current state of research to the first working fusion reactor. But put in perspective, that sum is equal to about a week of domestic energy consumption, or about 2 percent of the annual energy expenditure of $1.5 trillion.
Chai Reddy

Bank of America rooftop solar project is world's biggest - Jun. 22, 2011 - 1 views

  • The total cost of the project is $2.6 billion, and will be financed by the private sector over a four year period. The loan guarantee -- made through the Department of Energy -- means the government is on the hook for part of the project's costs should it fail.
  • estimates the solar installations will result in 733 megawatts of solar energy production. That's about half the size of a nuclear reactor, or enough energy to power around 100,000 homes.
Chai Reddy

U.S. Said to Be Falling Behind in 'Green' Technologies - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • “The United States was a nearly untouched market with 120 million homes, most of them very energy-inefficient — it was a massive opportunity
  • Many European countries — along with China, Japan and South Korea — have pushed commercial development of carbon-reducing technologies with a robust policy mix of direct government investment, tax breaks, loans, regulation and laws that cap or tax emissions. Incentives have fostered rapid entrepreneurial growth in new industries like solar and wind power, as well as in traditional fields like home building and food processing, with a focus on energy efficiency.
  • A recent report by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that while the clean technology sector was booming in Europe, Asia and Latin America, its competitive position was “at risk” in the United States because of “uncertainties surrounding key policies and incentives.”
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  • The aggressive entry of Britain into the field over the last few years shows the power of government inducements to redesign a nation’s energy economy away from traditional fuel. The country’s Green Deal, as it is called, is currently being spearheaded by the Conservative-led coalition government. In Britain, reducing carbon dioxide emissions was one of the few policies supported by political parties of both the right and left, which both accepted that climate change was a serious problem and saw clean technology investment as a growth opportunity rather than an onerous obligation.
  • Dr. Arun Majumdar, senior adviser to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, said that the department’s $5 billion budget for research should be tripled as it currently financed less than 5 percent of proposed projects. He said the country needed better low-cost financing methods to bring companies into the market, as well as stricter energy-efficiency standards to stimulate customer demand.
Chai Reddy

Google, Tres Amigas Aim To Fix America's Electrical Grid With Novel Technologies - 0 views

  • Google and other investors plan to build a 350-mile long undersea cable off the Atlantic coast, while Tres Amigas wants to create a 22-square mile superconductor “Superstation” to synchronize the nation's three major electrical grids.
  • Google’s backbone could open up hundreds of miles of ocean territory for offshore wind farms, and the Tres Amigas project would open up wind and solar projects in remote parts of New Mexico and Texas.
  • So far Google has invested a total of $400 million in clean energy projects. Google says it is pursuing the projects both because they make good business sense and because they make the company more environmentally responsible.
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  • The Atlantic Wind Connection project is still at an early stage, and no one knows if Google and its co-investors can pull it off
  • While grid difficulties are not unique to renewable energy, the sector has the most to gain from improvements because wind and solar depend on the weather and thus need to be able to send their extra energy across large distances as flexibly as possible to balance out supply fluctuations, experts say.
  • Tres Amigas is trying to connect the western, eastern and Texas power grids -- an idea the federal government proposed but failed to execute in the 1950s -- with a $1 billion plus project that could ultimately send 30 gigawatts zooming across the country. Because the three grids don't quite operate on the same frequency, Tres Amigas would use novel technology to synchronize the electricity: superconducting high-voltage direct current cables and new computer programs. Power would first need to be converted from AC to DC, then whipped around the superstation on the superconducting cables and finally be converted back to AC to be shipped off to another grid
Chai Reddy

In Reversal, Germany to Close Nuclear Plants by 2022 - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The German government agreed on Monday to phase out all nuclear power by 2022, a sharp reversal by Chancellor Angela Merkel aimed at appeasing the country’s intensified antinuclear movement.
  • We want the electricity of the future to be safe, but also to remain reliable and affordable,” Mrs. Merkel said in a statement on the government Web site announcing the change.
  • The 48-page energy security report submitted Monday took an opposing view, saying the commission was “firmly convinced that an exit from nuclear energy can be achieved within a decade.”
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  • It identified wind, solar and water as alternatives, as well as geothermal energy and so-called biomass energy from waste, as alternative power sources.
Chai Reddy

With Eye on Climate Change, Chicago Prepares for a Warmer Future - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Public alleyways are being repaved with materials that are permeable to water. The white oak, the state tree of Illinois, has been banned from city planting lists, and swamp oaks and sweet gum trees from the South have been given new priority. Thermal radar is being used to map the city’s hottest spots, which are then targets for pavement removal and the addition of vegetation to roofs. And air-conditioners are being considered for all 750 public schools, which until now have been heated but rarely cooled.
  • Cities adapt or they go away,” said Aaron N. Durnbaugh, deputy commissioner of Chicago’s Department of Environment.
  • Insurance companies are applying pressure in high-risk areas, essentially saying adapt or pay higher premiums — especially in urban and commercial areas.
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  • Civic Consulting Alliance, a nonprofit organization that builds pro bono teams of business experts. In this case, the alliance convinced consulting firms to donate $14 million worth of hours to projects like designing an electric car infrastructure and planning how to move the city toward zero waste.
  • The city’s 13,000 concrete alleyways were originally built without drainage and are a nightmare every time it rains. Storm water pours off the hard surfaces and routinely floods basements and renders low-lying roads and underpasses unusable.
  • Chicago spends over $10 million a year planting roughly 2,200 trees. From 1991 to 2008, the city added so many that officials estimate tree cover increased to 17.6 percent from 11 percent. The goal is to exceed 23 percent this decade.
Chai Reddy

Renewable Energy Could Account For 80 Percent Of World's Needs By 2050: UN - 0 views

  • Renewable sources such as solar and wind could supply up to 80 percent of the world's energy needs by 2050
  • U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that to achieve that level, governments would have to spend significantly more money and introduce policies that integrate renewables into existing power grids and promote their benefits in terms of reducing air pollution and improving public health.
  • use of renewables is on the rise, their prices are declining
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  • The report reviewed bioenergy, solar energy, geothermal, hydropower, ocean energy and wind. It did not consider nuclear
  • From 2009 to 2010, Amin said investment in renewables has gone from $186 billion to $243 billion with China alone seeing a 30 percent increase.
Chai Reddy

Electric Avenue - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • the White House is standing behind a goal that could genuinely transform the nation’s automotive fleet: putting one million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.
  • But many of the electric vehicles that will count toward President Obama’s goal won’t run on electricity alone. They will combine batteries, electric motors and internal-combustion engines to use as little gasoline as possible while still doing everything Americans expect their cars to do. Electrification is not an all-or-nothing proposition
  • Department of Transportation statistics show that 78 percent of Americans commute 40 miles or fewer a day, so most people who drive a Volt won’t need to burn any gas on a normal day.
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  • Obama administration already supports incentives to encourage drivers to buy electric cars, and it has devoted $2.4 billion in stimulus money to the development of a domestic electric-car industry.
  • existing $7,500 tax credit
  • If we gut domestic clean-energy research, scientists in China or Germany or Japan will finish this work. But it would be far better to stick with the program we’ve begun — financing research into better batteries while deploying vehicles that replace gasoline with electricity as much as possible — and prove that when it comes to energy, America can, in fact, learn from its mistakes.
Chai Reddy

Solar Panels Take to the Water - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • several start-up companies see potential for solar panels that float on water
  • ompanies trying to develop a market for solar panels on agricultural and mining ponds, hydroelectric reservoirs and canals
  • Sunengy, for example, is courting markets in developing countries that are plagued by electricity shortages but have abundant water resources and intense sunshine
Chai Reddy

Pass the Boone Pickens Bill - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • an actual bipartisan piece of legislation — its official title is the New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions Act, or the Nat Gas Act, for short. People in the know, however, call it the Boone Pickens bill
  • that the country’s energy salvation depends on moving away from the fuel we don’t have — namely, oil, where imports, some of which come “from our enemies” (to quote Boone), account for two-thirds of our oil needs. Instead, we should move to a fuel we have in abundance: natural gas.
  • Boone’s convinced that modern drilling techniques will allow us to find enough for several centuries.
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  • The Pickens plan calls for increased use of wind, solar, nuclear, even coal. ”I’m for anything that’s American,” he said.
  • The Pickens bill creates tax incentives — $1 billion a year for five years — to encourage manufacturers to begin building heavy-duty trucks that will be powered by natural gas instead of diesel. It also gives some tax incentives to truck-stop owners who install natural gas filling stations to help create the infrastructure
  • Of the 20 million barrels of oil we use each day, 70 percent goes for transportation fuel. The 8 million heavy-duty trucks on the road today account for 23 percent of that fuel. Although the tax incentives in the Pickens bill would be enough to cover only about 140,000 new trucks, he hopes that it will catapult the industry toward natural gas even without the subsidies.
  • Natural gas is cheaper than oil. It’s cleaner.
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