THIN FILM SOLAR PANELS

Archive for September, 2009

MIT professor Daniel Nocera formed a company earlier this year to commercialize a new technology that can “split water” and store solar energy. The company’s key objective now: achieve a solar energy breakthrough.

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By 2011 the US Army’s Space & Missile Defense Command has plans to deploy a spy ship, which will be unmanned over Afghanistan. While this is a controversial move in itself, some eco-enthusiasts are applauding the consideration to model the aircraft after an experimental hybrid airship which took flight on a number of occasions in 2006.

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With the help of a high tech underground steam cleaning technology developed at UCal-Berkeley and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a creosote-soaked Superfund site in Visalia, California has been cleaned up more than 100 years ahead of schedule, saving millions of dollars and pointing the way toward a more efficient and sustainable means of dealing with polluted sites.

The site, which was just officially removed from the Superfund list, is known as Southern California Edison’s Pole Yard.  For 80 years utility poles were treated there with the wood preservatives creosote and pentacholorphenol.  By the 1970’s the site was saturated with contaminants up to 100 feet deep, and it won the dubious honor of making the original Superfund list when the program first started.  Almost miraculously, the Livermore cleanup has restored groundwater at the Pole Yard to drinking water quality.

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A team of researchers at MIT are engineering a strain of bacteria, which is similar to the type that causes tuberculosis, to produce biofuel.

The researchers say that the bacteria are useful because they are hungry for a number of sugars and toxic compounds and produce lipids that can be converted to biodiesel.

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What we call Cap and Trade, (and what China is now considering)  has already just been tried out in Europe, to meet Kyoto. They called theirs the EU Emissions Trading System. China will call theirs “Limit and Incentivize”. Regardless of whether we call it: capping or limiting emissions and trading or incentivizing to fund the switch to renewable energies - It worked.

In the first three-year phase; European carbon emissions dropped 300 million metric tons of carbon, according to a study by The German Marshall Fund; Ten Insights from Europe on the EU Emissions Trading System. US carbon emissions rose, during those three years from 2005 through 2007.

Here’s what we can learn from those who have gone ahead of us in forging Cap and Trade policy to reduce fossil energy use and increase renewable energies. The German Marshall Fund (remember The Marshall Plan?) has put together these ten tips from their experience.

The main takeaway? Don’t worry.

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