CNET News: SolarReserve and Preneal have garnered the necessary permit to build a 50-megawatt thermal-solar plant in Spain that will use molten salt to store and release solar energy.
The project will be built in Alcazar de San Juan, a town about 110 miles south of Madrid.
Physics Today: The next generation of energy efficient houses appeared in Washington this week as part of the Department of Energy's 2009 solar decathlon competition (pdf).
The competition, held on the Washington Mall, judged 20 homes based on aesthetics, functionality and energy measurements.
The University of Minnesota's 565 sq. ft solar home called ICON cost half a million dollars to build and came 5th in the competition.
Student's have to design in factors such as is there enough solar thermal hot water for the big and small dishwashers in the kitchen and the clothes washer in a cabinet next to the small bathroom? Was the temperature in the house just right? What about the humidity? Exactly how much power would the appliances, along with the lights—mostly LEDs—draw from the photovoltaic cells that covered the roof and south-facing wall?
"We build [ICON] specifically for the Minnesota climate," said Shona Mosites, a senior studying interior design at the University of Minnesota.
Like all of the houses in the competition, the Minnesota house is compact—about the size of a large house trailer. It is extremely energy efficient, producing more electricity during the day than it uses and feeding the excess into the regional power grid. At night, when the sun is down, the house draws from the grid, but less than it feeds into the system during the day.
And like all of the other houses, the ICON house makes extensive use of green materials.
"The sliding panels are made of recycled material, and the maple flooring is two-thirds reclaimed wood," Mosites said.
A difficult road trip
At the other end of the Mall, the team from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee was struggling. The team was in last place, and were struggling to get the house's sliding doors to move smoothly on their tracks. Their house, valued at $485,000, had tabletops made out of pressed paper and cashew shells and the ability to warm up just from the heat of the people inside.
But its last-place standing reflected a 3-inch problem in the design.
"The west end of the house was 3 inches too tall to go through Indiana [on the transport trailer]," said Eric Davis, the project's chief engineer. "So we had to go down through Illinois, then cross Kentucky."
There was another height regulation problem when they got to the edge of Washington, and it took another 20 hours to finally get their structure to the National Mall. While the other teams were fine tuning their home's systems, the Wisconsin team was still wearing hard hats and putting their house together.
"We missed the metering contest, so our score is down," Davis said.
The houses that make up the high-tech Solar Village are mostly from universities, shipped in multiple pieces from around the world. Germany, Spain and two teams from consortiums of Canadian universities also have entries in the competition. And the event is drawing crowds, with long lines of people waiting to tour the houses.
"About 2,000 people come through our house each day," said Thomas Rauch, media liaison and team member of Penn State University's Natural Fusion house.
The energy produced by these small structures, each limited to 800 square feet, powers all of the lighting, appliances and air conditioning within. And on sunny days, when the houses produce more electricity than is needed, they pump the extra energy directly into the regional electrical grid that powers the metro area.
The German team's house often gives back twice as much energy as it uses—enough in one day to light 400 incandescent light bulbs for one hour.
Home improvement
US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu helped to kick-off the event on Oct 8 (see picture left. Chu is on the right. Photo credit: DOE) by describing his own home-improvement experiences while working to make his home more energy efficient. "I started doing this long before I knew about climate change. And I have to confess the only reason I was doing that is because I'm fundamentally cheap," he said.
Chu said that during his time at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California he became convinced that houses could be made 75 or 80 percent more efficient in terms of energy usage—before adding any solar panels. He also announced an additional $87 million in DOE funding to further the solar research on display in the homes.
Several of the houses are smart phone-enabled—the interior lighting and temperature can be changed remotely with an iPhone application. Others adjust interior conditions automatically, using sensors that monitor time and weather data to tint electrochemical windows and dim light levels.
But the point of the contest isn't just to showcase new technology. Each team is scored in ten different categories. The buildings must provide all the basics of daily life. Several times a day, they must pump out 15 gallons of hot water that could be used for showering. Solar energy also powers a host of appliances that include dishwashers, clothes washers, refrigerators and televisions.
Teams that score well overall are those that focus not only on the individual pieces of the house, but on how the pieces fit together to create a the houses focus on a systems approach—designing a house not piece by piece, but as a giant system.
"As we went through the 70s and the 80s, we had terribly unreliable systems that gave solar a black eye," said Richard King, director of the Solar Decathlon. "As we move into the future, to do it right we have to start from the ground up and make the whole house a system, so it's all integrated."
King, who launched the first Solar Decathlon in 2002, said that the contest is designed not to be too restrictive, to give students a blank page and see what they come up with. This promotes a wide variety of engineering approaches and aesthetic designs, he said.
The team from Iowa State University in Ames built a house designed specifically to appeal to older, retired couples. It was the only structure to be certified under the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the unfinished white maple exterior is intended to feel comfortable and familiar.
"A lot of people have been saying that they could see themselves eating breakfast in this corner, that the house feels livable," said Melissa Sander of Iowa State University as she guided visitors through the house. Their house placed 3rd in market viability.
The average cost of a home on this solar-powered block is $490,000, but teams can spend as much on their project as they can afford. The cheapest house Rice University's ZEROW House—is intended for lower-income inner-city neighborhoods and is built with walls of galvanized metal that could retail for $140,000. The customized electronics and solar panels in the North House help contribute to a cost upwards of $800,000, a sum that Team Ontario/British Columbia from the University of Waterloo, Ryerson University and Simon Fraser University aim to target at young urban professionals.
Team California's house,—a collaboration between Silicon Valley's Santa Clara University and the Bay Area's California College of the Arts—was in 1st place throughout the first several days of the competition and featured a design utilizing bamboo as an alternative building material for its rafters, while Team Spain—from the Polytechnic University of Madrid—had constructed their walls from the solar panels themselevs.
Patents and prototypes
Many of the design elements have led to patents, and new prototypes from several companies were on display—from a heat-absorbing lining made of the same materials as insulating pizza boxes by Phase Change Energy Solutions of Asheboro, N.C., to a solar water heater that creates miniature hot geysers and collects the overflow by Sunnovations in Reston, Va.
On Tuesday, scores of middle and high school students from across the metro area crowded through the solar houses as their teachers held up flags and otherwise tried to keep them in order. As two middle-school boys walked between the houses, one turned to the other and said, "Wouldn't it be so awesome if one of these had a solar powered hot tub."
But that idea has already come and gone.
A house entered in the 2007 competition by the University of Texas in Austin actually included a working solar-powered hot tub, but the designs featured in this year's competition were all evidently spa-free.
Based on material from Inside Science News Service.
Jim Dawson and Devin Powell
Edited by Paul Guinnessy
csmonitor.com: Wind is the fastest growing renewable energy in Europe—making up a third of new energy there, with 20 turbines added every working day in 2008, according to EU statistics.
What the European wind energy industry now wants is to expand—offshore. Ocean winds are a stronger and more predictable form of energy than the ones on land, and the industry is pushing a $57 billion investment to allow broad-winged turbines to spin at sea.
csmonitor.com: Four technologies aim to use heat from the Sun to make electricity. But which one has the edge?
The Independent: Google is disappointed with the lack of breakthrough investment ideas in the green technology sector but the company is working to develop its own new mirror technology that could reduce the cost of building solar thermal plants by a quarter or more.
"We've been looking at very unusual materials for the mirrors both for the reflective surface as well as the substrate that the mirror is mounted on," the company's green energy czar Bill Weihl told Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday.
Bloomberg: First Solar Inc, a US–based renewable energy company, will build the world's largest solar power plant in China as the country plans to increase nonpolluting electricity generation.
The plant would be about thirty times larger than existing solar power stations operating in Europe, Dulce Qu, a Beijing-based spokeswoman for the company, told Bloomberg. The 2,000-megawatt complex will be built in Ordos City, Inner Mongolia, China, by 2019, said First Solar, a company based in Tempe, Arizona.
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China Outdoes U.S. in Making Solar Productsm New York Times
Nature News: Millions of hectares of land will be needed to meet growing energy demands in the United States over the next two decades, according to new 'energy sprawl' estimates. The researchers behind the study say that biomass production for fuel or electricity generation will have the biggest impact on landscape and habitats.
The broad analysis of potential US energy and climate-mitigation scenarios compared the land and habitat impacts of various energy mixes -- from nuclear power to biofuels -- resulting from an array of policy options. The study is published this week in PLoS ONE
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Energy Sprawl or Energy Efficiency: Climate Policy Impacts on Natural Habitat for the United States of America
latimes.com: In a lab in Caltech, Harry Atwater holds up a plastic panel, a fraction of a millimeter thick. Even in the bright room, the surface's panel remains jet-black—absorbing all the light that hits it.
The high-tech material is 10 times more efficient at absorbing light than the regular silicon cells that some homeowners install on their roofs to harvest the energy of the sun.
It is one of several projects that Atwater's team at Caltech is pursuing in a push to design the next generation of solar cells—ones that are cheap, long-lasting and flexible enough to be practical for homeowners and businesses.
Daily Telegraph: A draft report by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has called for a total ban on foreign shipments of terbium, dysprosium, yttrium, thulium, and lutetium. Other metals such as neodymium, europium, cerium, and lanthanum will be restricted to a combined export quota of 35,000 tonnes a year, far below global needs.
China mines over 95pc of the world's rare earth minerals, mostly in Inner Mongolia. The move to hoard reserves is the clearest sign to date that the global struggle for diminishing resources is shifting into a new phase. Countries may find it hard to obtain key materials at any price.
Rare metals play a vital role in most cutting edge technology, from hybrid cars and catalytic converters, to superconductors, and precision-guided weapons.
washingtonpost.com: On one of the fields where students learn about agriculture, the University of Maryland Eastern Shore will soon be planting a new kind of crop with a constantly renewable yield: 20 acres' worth of photovoltaic panels, the largest solar farm in the state.
The 2.1-megawatt system, to be built by Beltsville-based SunEdison, will generate electricity for the 4,100-student campus in Princess Anne, Maryland, when it's finished, which is expected to be by the end of the year.
Environmental News Network: China has started construction of the country's first 10-gigawatt wind power plant in Jiuquan of northwest Gansu province.
It is the first of six planned gigawatt wind farms.
Nature News: India's prime minister Manmohan Singh has approved a US$19 billion plan to make the country a global leader in solar energy over the next three decades. The ambitious project would see a massive expansion in installed solar capacity, and aims to reduce the price of electricity generated from solar energy to match that from fossil fuels by 2030.
Edmunds.com: Engineers have developed a method for creating high-performance membranes from crystal sieves that could increase the energy efficiency of chemical separations up to 50 times over conventional methods and enable higher production rates.
So say a team of researchers led by chemical engineer Michael Tsapatsis of the University of Minnesota, in an article that appeared in Science
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Grain Boundary Defect Elimination in a Zeolite Membrane by Rapid Thermal Processing
The Economist: Israel, with poor access to fossil fuels and a highly educated population, is growing its solar-power industry.
Shining sunlight onto silicon is the most direct way of turning it into electricity—the light knocks electrons free from the silicon atoms—but it is also the most expensive. Two small companies based in Jerusalem are trying, in different ways, to make solar energy cheaper.
The physicists and chemists at GreenSun Energy, led by Renata Reisfeld, think the way is to use less silicon. In their designs the solar cell uses only 20% of the silicon of existing solar cells.
Around the corner, Jonathan Goldstein of 3GSolar hopes to get rid of silicon altogether. 3G's "dye-sensitized" solar cells use titanium dioxide (more familiar as a pigment used in white paints) and complicated dye molecules that contain a metal called ruthenium. When one of the dye molecules is hit by light of sufficient energy, an electron is knocked out of it and absorbed by the titanium dioxide, before being passed out of the cell to do useful work.
NYTimes.com: In 2006, Markus O. Häring, a former oilman, drilled a hole three miles deep near the corner of Neuhaus Street and Shafer Lane in Basel, Switzerland, to look for geothermal energy—the heat simmering within Earth’s bedrock.
All seemed to be going well—until December, when the project set off an earthquake, shaking and damaging buildings and terrifying many in a city that, as every schoolchild here learns, had been devastated exactly 650 years before by a quake that sent two steeples of the Münster Cathedral tumbling into the Rhine.
Hastily shut down, Häring’s project was soon forgotten by nearly everyone outside Switzerland. As early as this week, though, an American start-up company, AltaRock Energy, will begin using nearly the same method to drill deep into ground laced with fault lines in an area two hours’ drive north of San Francisco. The New York Times article has worried residents. AltaRock Energy has published a response to the article on their web site.
London Times: Europe should scrap its support for wind energy as soon as possible to focus on far more efficient emerging forms of clean power generation including solar thermal energy, says Jack Steinberger, a physicist at CERN and a former Nobel Prize winner.
Steinberger said that wind represented an illusory technology — a cul-de-sac that would prove uneconomic and a waste of resources in the battle against climate change.
“Wind is not the future,” he told the symposium of Nobel laureates at the Royal Society. Instead, he said, technologies such as solar thermal power—for which parabolic mirrors reflect the Sun’s rays to generate heat and electricity—represent a more promising way of supplanting fossil fuels. “I am certain that the energy of the future is going to be thermal solar,” he told The Times. “There is nothing comparable. The sooner we focus on it the better.”
The Guardian: Europe's largest onshore wind farm, which is based in Scotland and already powerful enough to meet Glasgow's electricity needs, is to expand by more than a third as part of a major green energy initiative by Scottish parliament.
The first minister Alex Salmond announced that the 322 MW Whitelee wind farm south of Glasgow had been given permission to increase its capacity to 452 MW, as he officially switched on the wind farm last week.
The disclosure came as plans for an even larger scheme, to build a vast community-owned 150-turbine, 540 MW scheme on Shetland, were made public.
In this quickly evolving environment, investors must assess which technologies and companies are best positioned, policy-makers must assess what role PV generation should play in our energy mix, utility planners must assess the impacts this will have on the electric grid, government and industry must decide how to allocate research and development (R&D) funds, and citizens must sort through a barrage of conflicting messages.
Associated Press: The primary US lab for renewable energy will receive $110 million in federal stimulus funds and another $83 million will go toward wind energy and other alternative power and efficiency projects, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Wednesday.
Forbes.com: Kansas has the potential to become a major exporter of renewable energy, producing many new jobs and new tax revenue, a national study found.
"Leadership in science remains vital to America's economic prosperity, energy security, and global competitiveness," said Chu at a lunchtime press conference. "These projects not only provide critically needed short-term economic relief but also represent a strategic investment in our nation's future. They will create thousands of jobs and breathe new life into many local economies, while helping to accelerate new technology development, renew our scientific and engineering workforce, and modernize our nation's scientific infrastructure."
The money will mainly be directed to the 10 national laboratories run by DOE. The package also provides substantial support for both university- and DOE-based researchers, working on problems in fields ranging from particle and plasma physics to biofuels, solar energy, superconductivity, solid-state lighting, electricity storage, and materials science, among others.
The news came days after the Obama administration announced that current BP chief scientist Steve Koonin will serve as undersecretary of science at DOE. He would replace Ray Orbach once the position receives Senate confirmation.
Included among the approved projects are the following:
In addition, the Recovery Act funding provides $125 million for needed infrastructure improvements across nine DOE national laboratories: Ames Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, LBNL, ORNL, PNNL, SNAL, and TJNAF.
Related Links
Further information
But now with the economic crash and a silicon supply glut that's going to get worse before it gets better, the game has changed. Solar venture capitalists will lean away from innovative technologies toward sure bets closer to commercialization, according to a report released Wednesday by Lux Research.
The New York Times: Wind and solar power have been growing at a blistering pace in recent years, and that growth seemed likely to accelerate under the green-minded Obama administration. But because of the credit crisis and the broader economic downturn, the opposite is happening: installation of wind and solar power is plummeting.
Environmental News Network: The US overtook Germany as the biggest producer of wind power last year, new figures showed, and will likely take the lead in solar power this year, analysts said on Monday.
Salon.com: According to the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, the gas sulfur hexafluoride, commonly employed to clean reactors in silicon production, is considered by the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change to be "the most potent greenhouse gas per molecule; one ton of sulfur hexafluoride has a greenhouse effect equivalent to that of 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide."
Physics Today: President-elect Obama's transition team is expected to shortly announce that Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu will be nominated as secretary of energy, while Lisa Jackson, a former environmental policy official in New Jersey, has been picked to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Carol Browner, who led the EPA under President Clinton, will fill a new White House "energy czar" role. The announcements came from Democratic officials on Wednesday night.
Chu, who will be the first Nobel Prize winner to be appointed to the US cabinet, is the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and has played a key role in moving the lab in the direction of specializing in renewable energy, particularly in the field of new fuels for transportation. LBNL is experimenting with making biofuels from different types of biomass, using algae in fermentation tanks to make fuel, and applying solar energy to convert water and carbon dioxide to fuels. "[President-elect Obama] certainly needs somebody who can focus on the science and energy policies and I can't think of a better guy than Steve," says Mike Lubell from the American Physical Society.
Originally his father wanted him to be an architect as "the competition in physics was too strong." Chu did both his graduate and postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley. He then spent nine years at Bell Labs before joining Stanford University's physics department where he remained between 1987-2004. He shared the 1997 Nobel Prize with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Phillips for cooling and trapping atoms with lasers.
During the presidential campaign, Obama said he would invest $150 billion over 10 years in clean energy and proposed requiring that 10 percent of electricity in the United States comes from renewable sources by 2012. Chu, has been one of the most public faces of promoting renewable energy. At the National Clean Energy Summit held in August, Chu said "I think political will is absolutely necessary. But we need new technologies."
Chu is also one of the co-authors of the 2006 National Academy of Sciences' report Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future, in which he lobbied for the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) at the Department of Energy as a way of funding risky hich-tech technologies to solve the US energy crisis. ARPA-E, although legislation creating its existence has passed into law, has yet to be receive a budget as the proposal is not supported by the Bush administration. Chu's appointment increases the likelihood that the ARPA-E will finally be created.
The largest part of the Department of Energy's budget however, goes towards maintaining the nuclear weapons stockpile. It is too early to say what the implications are for Chu's appointment to the long term future of the three main nuclear weapons labs at Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia. According to the Wall Street Journal, Chu is likely to focus his attention on the Energy Department's core missions: basic science, nuclear weapons and cleaning up a nuclear-weapons manufacturing complex contaminated since the Cold War.
Related Physics Today articles
Chu Named Berkeley Lab Director (August 2004)
Politicians skeptical about need for ARPA-E (June 2006)
'Gathering Storm' Report Urges Strong Federal Action to Save US Science and Technology Leadership December 2005
Could 'green gasoline' displace ethanol as the biofuel of choice? December 2008
Blueprint for new energy institute February 2007
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Laser Beam Focus Forms Optical Trap for Neutral Atoms September 1986
New Mechanisms for Laser Cooling October 1990
Atom Interferometers Prove Their Worth in Atomic Measurements July 1995
Work on Atom Trapping and Cooling Gets a Warm Reception in Stockholm December 1997
Atom Interferometer Measures G with Same Accuracy as Optical Devices November 1999
How the Laser Happened: Adventures of a Scientist December 1999 (review by Steven Chu)
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Nobel Winner Chu To Land Top Energy Post (NPR)
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Various: The high price of fossil fuel energy earlier this year helped push renewable energy, and solar power in particular, into the public consciousness. The sudden drop in the price of oil however is an incentive to 'green' energy companies to make their products cheaper and more efficient to be price competitive. A 3% increase in the efficiency of a solar cell for example, can result in dropping the cost of solar energy production from $2.20 cents per watt today to $1 a watt--almost equal to the cost of coal writes Mark Clayton of the Christian Science Monitor. To do so requires manufacturing thousands of test samples to find out which combination of elements will create the best solar cells, and thousands of hours of production tests. One short cut to narrow down the testing time is to run million of computer simulations of how the different types of silicon behave. Scientists at Harvard University and IBM have created a giant virtual supercomputer by harnessing the idle computer cycles of home desktop computers to run these calculations, potentially shortening a solar cell project that could take 22 years to just two years writes Reuters reporter Matt Daily.
The New York Times: For all the support that the presidential candidates are expressing for renewable energy, alternative energies like wind and solar are facing big new challenges because of the credit freeze and the plunge in oil and natural gas prices.
Building offshore turbines to exploit it however, would leave Mandelstam against the local power companies, who didn't want the competition, and holiday resorts who didn't want their coastline view spoiled with windmills in the distance. It would lead to millions of dollars spent fighting one of the most protracted political battles in Delaware history, and the proposal to build a 200-megawatt wind farm off the coast of Delaware.
Mark Svenvold looks at the politics behind wind power, why states are shaping the state of the national energy grid, and the need for federal regulation and subsidies for renewable energy.
Japan's biggest shipping line Nippon Yusen KK and Nippon Oil Corp said solar panels capable of generating 40 kilowatts of electricity would be placed on top of a 60,000 tonne car carrier to be used by Toyota Motor Corp.
San Diego Tribune: The U.S. Department of Energy yesterday pledged nearly $500,000 in grants and technical assistance to San Diego as part of an effort to make the city a national model for solar power production.
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.
Silicon Republic: Ireland has landed in the top 10 countries worldwide for attracting investment in renewable energy.
Environmental News Network: Burkina Faso student teacher Hema Cecile has a lot more time to crack the books thanks to a recent initiative from the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation (IFC).
Nature News: Electricity generation provides 18,000 terawatt-hours of energy a year, around 40% of humanity's total energy use. In doing so it produces more than 10 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide every year, the largest sectoral contribution of humanity's fossil-fuel derived emissions. Yet there is a wide range of technologies — from solar and wind to nuclear and geothermal — that can generate electricity without net carbon emissions from fuel.
ENN: US wind capacity is expected to increase 45% in 2008 although Congress' failure to extend the production tax credit (PTC) for the renewable energy industry threatens to derail further development, according to the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA).
Total US installed wind power capacity now stands at 19,549MW, up 2,726MW from the end of 2007, making the US the world leader in wind electricity generation, according to the AWEA's second quarter 2008 market report. Germany has installed generating capacity of about 23,000MW, but the US produces more electricity because of stronger winds, the AWEA said.
USA Today: Semiconductor companies are rushing into the solar power business faster than a Pentium-driven computer, promising to turn a niche form of renewable energy into a mass-market product.
Since May, computer powerhouses Intel, IBM and National Semiconductor have barreled into solar energy, joining hundreds of fellow technology mainstays. Virtually every chipmaker is weighing a solar play, says Rhone Resch, head of the Solar Energy Industries Association.
The Guardian: Speaking at the Euroscience Open Forum in Barcelona, Arnulf Jaeger-Waldau of the European commission's Institute for Energy, said that the Middle East could supply Europe's energy needs by building solar power farms that would the capture of just 0.3% of the light falling on the Sahara and Middle East deserts on roughly an area the size of Wales.
Scientists are calling for the creation of these series of huge solar farms as part of a plan to share Europe's renewable energy resources across the continent.
The vision for the renewable energy grid comes as the EU commission's joint research centre (JRC) published its strategic energy technology plan, highlighting solar PV as one of eight technologies that need to be championed for the short- to medium-term future.
The JRC plan includes fuel cells and hydrogen, clean coal, second generation biofuels, nuclear fusion, wind, nuclear fission and smart grids. The plan is designed to help Europe to meet its commitments to reduce overall energy consumption by 20% by 2020, while reducing CO² emissions by 20% in the same time and increasing to 20% the proportion of energy generated from renewable sources.
Slate.com: Airlines are suffering because of high fuel prices in the worst downturn the industry has seen in 8 years. In the short therm the airlines are raising prices and canceling routes, but over the longer haul, they need to start looking at two kinds of changes: a different kind of plane and a different kind of fuel says reporter Christopher Flavelle.
Associated Press: Texas officials gave preliminary approval Thursday to the nation's largest wind-power project, a plan to build billions of dollars worth of new transmission lines to bring wind energy from gusty West Texas to urban areas.
Environmental News Network: Major technological progress needed to make renewable energy affordable says a study by the RAND corpoaration.
Houston Chronicle: Oil and gas may be the prime mover in Houston's economy, but a growing wind power business is proving there's more than one way to spell "energy" in the Bayou City.Houston is already home to a handful of major wind power project developers, including those owned by oil and gas giants BP and Shell, thanks in large part to the state's ample wind resources, renewable energy incentives created by lawmakers and competitive power markets.
And the industry blew this way again Monday when Danish powerhouse Vestas Wind Systems said it will open its first U.S. research and development facility here. The office will open in 2009 and grow to about 100 researchers by early 2010, not including support staff, with more positions likely to come.
[From Danish wind power giant to open Houston research center | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle]
