The Homely Scientist

 When I’m ranting and raving about alternative energy and lauding companies like Google, I talk about being able to feed into the system and get credit for it.  Looks like the Province of Ontario is finally getting it:

One of the key elements in the incentive programs is a solar “feed-in” tariff that pays people and organizations with solar panels cash for any electricity they feed into the grid. In the United States, utilities offer credits for solar power; a homeowner or business can reduce their electricity bill with these credits, but at best end up owing nothing to the utility.

With feed-in tariffs, solar panels become profit centers. In Germany, the government gives panel owners around 45 cents for every kilowatt hour fed into the grid, which is more than a kilowatt hour costs.

“You can go to financial planning meetings and you’ll see people with spreadsheets calculating hours of sunlight and the potential revenue,” said Jeff Osborne, an analyst with CIBC World Market in a recent interview. “Half of the solar power in Germany comes from farmers.”

Ontario has adopted a feed-in tariff for solar that will provide 42 cents per kilowatt hour. The response so far has been positive. After the feed-in tariffs were unfurled, a North American company has said it will build solar power plants that will produce 60 megawatts of power, said the representative from the Ontario Power Authority. Source: Ontario: The new frontier for alternative energy | CNET News.com

Now if we can get more governments and utilities on board with this, we’d be getting much farther along in our global need to reduce emissions.

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The big announcement from Google a while ago that they were going to cover the roofs of Googleplex with solar panels has come to pass:

It’ll still be quite a while before that free electricity offsets the initial cost of the system, but at least the panels have earned Google a little positive PR.  The Earth Times Online, for example, states, “The Google system is also now the largest solar installation on any corporate campus in the United States.”

To help people grasp the size of this development, Google has even created a new performance monitoring site; I’m told that, over the past day, those solar panels have generated enough electricity to run almost 6,000 loads of laundry.  There are interesting charts, as well - as it is solar power Google’s using, you’ll note that output drops to zero overnight. Source: Google’s Solar Panels Power Up | WebProNews

Google even lets you look at how much power has been generated. What does this mean for the rest of us?  We should do it.  Think about every building in a city with solar panels.  Think about an apartment building that generates enough power to cover, say, 50% of the residents’ requirements.  It’s powerful stuff.  No, this isn’t a 100% solution.  At night, well, no power generation, but if we’re trying to reduce the need for fossil fuels, being able to reduce power generation during daylight hours would be a huge step forward.

Now what we have to do is to get governments on the stick to allow homeowners to do this and be able to hook the panels to the grid so their power meter runs forward and backward.  On a long summer day you might not be at home using power, but your house could be pushing power onto the grid to keep you cool at work.

Not bad.

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What am I nuts?  Nope, while you might scratch your head at this, read what this C|Net article wraps up with:

With an infrastructure already in place due to commercial trucks never leaving the diesel fold, diesel seems like an obvious solution to help fulfill automakers’ immediate needs–to sell more vehicles while meeting emissions standards and consumer demand to save on fuel.

Today’s diesel engines and diesel fuel itself have come a long way. Advances in turbocharging and fuel injection have boosted performance. New kinds of particle traps and low sulfur diesel fuel have reduced the emissions and soot-producing byproducts. Source: And the winner is…diesel? | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

This is the thing, diesel engines are common.  Pumps and tanks are there and if you start cutting the petroleum diesel with biodiesel then you really have something.  I’d buy one of the cool little Smart Cars, if they weren’t so dang small!  A diesel hybrid would be a really great thing.  I think my next car will be a diesel, and here in Victoria biodiesel seems to be becoming more common so, yeah diesel is a good choice for alternative fuel.  Engines don’t have to be tweaked, like ethanol or other gasoline alternatives.  You don’t have to build a whole new ways to store, transport, or sell it, like hydrogen. And diesel can be “grown”.  Let’s get on it then!

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The industry group for coal mining wants the U.S. federal government to fund a project to locate and map all the coal left that can be mined–maybe even the stuff that can’t be.

In short, says the Council’s statement, “federal policymakers need accurate estimates of the amount, location and quality of mineable coal…mitigating dangers from explosions and fires should also be a research priority, as should improving mine ventilation…” There is a real question about the oft-quoted saw that the U.S. has enough coal for 250 years. Truthiness perhaps, but perhaps not the truth, says the Council. Source: Let’s find all the coal, say mining experts | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

Why?  Look I’m all for research and understanding our planet, but coal isn’t one of those things that is going to figure into the the alternative energy plan.  Coal no matter what is a “dirty” fuel source.  Let’s just leave it where it is.

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I saw this profiled on the Discovery Channel this week.  The boat looks, um, odd, but saved tons of fuel.

The boat, conspicuously named Sun21, is the first of its eco-friendly kind to attempt the journey. The 46-foot catamaran made the trip — from the Canary Islands to the Bahamas — in just under a month, and according to MW-Line, the operating costs are 20 to 45 times lower than traditional motorboats. Source: Solar-powered Swiss boat crosses the Atlantic - Engadget

So if we think about a ship with solar power plus a biddies-powered engine, you could make a huge dent in the consumption of fuel by maritime shipping.  Yes, we have to do something and fast and it’s going to take all of us working together with innovative and radical ideas to pull it off.

Yep this is one of them.

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 Nope, not kidding.  Cataclysm of Biblical proportions here.  Here’s the info from CNET:

We have 10 years, folks. And then it’s man the lifeboats, or head for the hills. That’s the conclusion of James Hansen and five other scientists. They’ve just published a paper with the Royal Society in England. It says melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctic could soon reach a point of no return. The team even says the recent reports from the United Nations’ global warming conferences are too conservative in their projections of what could happen. Source: Possible cataclysm due to melting ice | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

I’m not going to get into why I think this is true, or what I think can be done, I want to look at why we reach a point of no return.

The reason is that temperature is only part of the picture for ice melt.  Once the ice starts melting the ice front begins weakening and more ocean water gets in.  It’s like when you start pushing something downhill, it takes a good bit of effort to get it going, but once it is going, it takes more effort to stop it.  The more ice that falls the more surface area exposed, which begins to melt faster …

The scary thing is if (when?) the Ross Ice Shelf, which is grounded below sea level, loses its protective barrier..imagine dropping a large ice cube from about a foot high into a full glass of pop.

So … let’s start to take this seriously, eh?

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Pope Benedict XVI might not get kudos, or even consideration, for his green leanings, but he can certainly put his money (not to mention buildings) where his mouth is:

Yes, indeed, it’s a definite move toward green as the roof of the Pope Paul VI auditorium will be replaced next year with solar panels, a reflection of Pope Benedict XVI’s concern about energy use and conservation. Source: » The Vatican Goes Green » Blog Archive   Alice Hill’s Real Tech News - Independent Tech

So why, frankly, aren’t more places doing this?  How many large roofs are just sitting there doing nothing but shedding rain when they could be used to generate energy?  What about small wind turbines on the tops of skyscrapers?  While all our energy woes can’t be solved with solutions like these, they can put a dent in them.  Also, we all know that as these technologies are deployed more and more some smart cookie will say “hey I think I can improve on this…” and well you know the rest.

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 Every summer NASA flies over the Greenland ice sheet to determine its “health”–that is thickness, size, and height.  Essentially how fast is it shrinking:

This summer’s NASA expedition to Greenland has returned with fresh data. Now the analysis begins. One piece of equipment used is an ice-penetrating radar that can find bedrock up to 2 miles below the ice surface. NASA estimates an average drop of 9 inches in the height of Greenland’s glaciers would result in a 0.12-inch rise in global sea levels. Source:Greenland’s ice sheet: The annual checkup | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

 I’m sure when the news comes out later this summer, it isn’t going to be good.  The question, of course, is that fine we’re all hyped about global warming now, but is it too late?

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