Monthly Archives: August 2008

How to create a dark night to see the stars

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New York Times: It’s easy to forget, 130 years after outdoor electric lighting first cast its glow through the night, that the sky is actually full of stars. But largely as a result of a remarkable partnership between science and business that took root in Tucson during the 1970s, an idea is gaining acceptance: that darker skies can be achieved with new products and technologies. Darker skies can generate real benefits not only for astronomers, but also for businesses from gas stations and parking lots to Nascar tracks.

Opinion: The difficulty with switching to renewable energy in under ten years

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Washington Post: Despite the current boom in green power, renewable sources such as the sun and the wind still provide just a tiny fraction of the U.S. electricity supply. The rest is mainly fossil fuels: coal, gas, oil. To replace one with the other over the course of a decade, energy experts say, would make the Manhattan Project look like a science-fair volcano.
And even if we wanted to try Gore’s plan to make the US 100% dependent on renewable energy in under 10 years, his goal is likely to get more distant every year. That’s because, even as Americans demand more action on climate change, their laptops and flat-screen TVs are demanding more electricity every year — and they’re not asking whether it’s clean or dirty.

“This goal is so far outside the realm of possibility,” said Richard Newell, a professor of environmental economics at Duke University. “It would be practically infeasible, politically impossible and economically and environmentally unwise.”

How earthquake science can predict presidential elections

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The Washington Post: While people who study elections usually scrutinize individual voters, politicians, advocacy groups, issues, campaign contributors and volunteers, historian Allan Lichtman and geophysicist Vladimir Keilis-Borok, decided to think about an election the same way geophysicists regard earthquakes. Getting too close to the phenomenon — the views of individual voters and campaigners — is like trying to study an earthquake by analyzing every single molecule of rock and soil.

“The systems that generate elections and earthquakes are complex systems,” said Keilis-Borok, who is now a professor of earth sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles. “They are not predictable by simple equations, but after coarse-graining — averaging — they become predictable.”

In a paper in the International Journal of Forecasting, Lichtman predicted a political earthquake this November: The incumbent party will crumble, and Sen. Barack Obama will be elected president.

Solar thermal power plant gets close to the cost of coal

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Christian Science Monitor: From five miles away, the Nevada Solar One power plant seems a mirage, a silver lake amid waves of 110 degree F. desert heat.

As the first commercial “concentrating solar power” or CSP plant built in 17 years, Nevada Solar One marks the reemergence and updating of a decades-old technology that could play a large new role in US power production, many observers say.

“Concentrating solar is pretty hot right now,” says Mark Mehos, program manager for CSP at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Co. “Costs look pretty good compared to natural gas [power]. Public policy, climate concern, and new technology are driving it, too.”

Today the United States has 420 megawatts of solar-thermal capacity across three installations – including Nevada Solar One. That’s just a tiny fraction (less than 1 percent) of US grid capacity. But Nevada Solar One could signal the start of a CSP building boom.