All News

  • 7/25/2013   How Solar Parks Could Help Save Bumblebees
    Spain is still the world's leader, but the US currently has the largest CSP in the world and is building 4 more over 250MW in Cali and AZ and have 4GW of additional capacity planned (but only 1 with heat storage!. With only 7.7GW of PV capacity installed total, we may be seeing the new direction that solar is going in the US.
  • 7/18/2013   How Solar Parks Could Help Save Bumblebees
    While it likely wouldn't prevent the mysterious death of millions of bees worldwide, it does show that solar's thirst for land isn't necessarily a bad thing. If the land could be simultaneously used for bee breeding or farming, it might actually contribute to conservation.
  • 7/9/2013   CarLab Mixes Natural Gas and Gasoline for More Efficient Vehicle
    CarLab's conversion is ~3x cheaper than a battery and ~25% cleaner than pure gasoline, but storage is under pressure and downright dangerous for a large fast-moving metal object. Boom! Why Prof. Tim Zhao of HK UST told me they were NOT considering gases as a possible replacement for gasoline, only liquid and aiming for fuel cells.
  • 6/3/2013   U.S. Approves 520 Megawatts of Solar, Geothermal Energy Projects
    Obama continues use of federal land for renewable energy projects, this time mostly concentrated in the southwest. Of real interesting is the inclusion of what will be the second concentrated solar plant with molten salt energy storage in the US, limiting the need for coal or gas backup generation.
  • 11/21/2012   Alternative energy will no longer be alternative
    An interesting purpose and message, but a number of flawed facts take away from this article's legitimacy. The natural price of solar is $3/w, NOT the $0.75 that it has temporarily dropped to because of Chinese panel subsidies.
  • 9/6/2012   EU initiates anti-dumping investigation on solar panel imports from China
    A good step-by-step explanation of the EU's anti-dumping investigation into Chinese solar panels. Looks like we'll have tariffs by December 5th, 2013.

  • 5/30/2013   Elon Musk Has Plans For A New, Magical Form Of Transportation Called The 'Hyperloop'
    Win or lose, this is how all billionaires should think all the time. What better way to invest your excessive funds than on technology that will leapfrog mankind into the future? As an American, building the world's most expensive and slowest bullet trains years after every other developed country is about as impressive as building the 4th tallest skyscraper in the world to show how we're not phased by terrorists.
  • 5/14/2013   The Future of Solar in Latin America
    Looks unsurprisingly like Brazil will lead the way with excellent sun and a bustling economy to boot. The DR doesn't inspire my confidence politically, and Mexico's 25% renewables by next year seems absolutely, but may be a reason they will even more resources in solar to at least make an attempt.
  • 4/25/2013   In Two-Way Charging, Electric Cars Begin to Earn Money From the Grid
    These cars provide part of the energy storage needed the intermittency of solar or wind energy. Currently, on a cloudy day or when the wind dies down the system reverts to coal or gas, needed to be constantly running as a backup, but with this system it could sneak a few kilowatts from everybody's cars to keep the grid producing. It also incentivizes people to drive less because they earn money when their car is plugged in.
  • 5/1/2013   Cross-Country Solar Plane Expedition Set for Takeoff
    Bertrand Piccard, hot-air balloonist and enlightened philosopher, has finally completed his solar plane to cross the US and later the world. Watch his TED Talk. Its monocrystalline panels power batteries that can keep it in the air 24 hours a day at about 45mph. The one other application mentioned in the article is to keep drones from having to refuel: killer solar robots from the sky!
  • 4/21/2013   Could New York run on renewable energy alone?
    Mark Jacobson has put together the comprehensive plan to completely eliminate fossil fuels that I wish I had done. The new infrastructure would have a mix of solar, wind, and water, but he doesn't elaborate much on intermittency. Shrugging off THE main question regarding green energy by briefly mentioning grid upgrades and hydrogen storage doesn't fill me with confidence, but what a great project!
  • 4/23/2013   19-Year-Old Student Plans to Clean Up the Ocean
    After watching a documentary on the pacific garbage patch last year, I was pretty sure that we have absolutely no chance of preventing plastic from continuing to pile up. It's not great to solely rely on tech to dial down our environmental damage, but it's nice to know this kid created a potentially effective cleaning system that could finish the task in 5 years.
  • 4/22/2013   In China, Breathing Becomes a Childhood Risk
    The pollution readings we were all shocked by in Beijing last month are starting to be examined a little bit closer. The NYT reports that health problems from pollution are creating brain drain and the educated are moving away. Based on how concerned parents are in the states about even trivial problems, it wouldn't surprise me.
  • 4/9/2013   Vietnam launches electric motorcycle program in cooperation with Japan
    The Vietnamese government is encountering some resistance to replacing the millions of gas-powered scooters roaming Hanoi and Saigon, but it could fight air pollution, save money, and quiet their busy streets if successful.

  • 9/25/2012   1st Geothermal Plant in Vietnam Gets Approved
    This sounds great, but Hot Dry Rock geothermal has never been shown to work and I've had a source from the company that passed on this project, Ormat, that says it is dead on arrival. Apparently the problem is that too much of the water injected into these 3-4 km deep wells dissipates into the ground instead of being pumped back out, yielding uneconomical efficiencies.
  • 11/9/2012   Viet Nam embraces wind power
    Vietnam is slowly ramping up support for green energy, but as Professor Duong Ngoc Huyen of Hanoi University of Technology says, "beside the energy, Vietnam has some other different issues to worry about: food, infrastructure, literacy, etc".
  • 4/1/2013   Air Pollution Linked to 1.2 Million Premature Deaths in China
    Many people complain about outsourcing to the Chinese, but not too many people talk about how we are also outsourcing all the pollution that comes with production.

  • 3/31/2013   Tamar gas field has given Israel energy independence
    Israel is probably the country most in need of energy independence, but, domestic benefits aside, natural gas pollutes and discourages green energy investment by dropping energy prices. In this case, it looks like the Israeli people won't see much of this on their monthly bill.
  • 9/25/2012   1st Geothermal Plant in Vietnam Gets Approved
    Historically Vietnam hasn't invested heavily in renewables, but with new investment from Germany and the US and policies like net-metering on the way, things are beginning to develop.

  • 3/28/2013   Mystery Malady Kills More Bees, Heightening Worry on Farms
    A mysterious example of unsustainable something. Some say that it is due to pesticides now inherent in the plants, but all we really know is that it's poisonous to pretty much everything.

  • 1/29/2013   Has Belgium cracked the problem of storing Wind Power?
    Belgium is building a pumped-water electricity storage island to store wind power when the breeze dies down.

  • 3/26/2013   What does the collapse of solar-panel giant Suntech mean? Pricier panels, probably
    The end of China's Suntech is not surprising. The massive subsidies followed by oversupply and price drops are thinning China's solar herd, as well as others. The price will likely return to it's natural price level at about $3/watt.
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News

Here are some news articles I've come across that I find interesting for one reason or another. The articles are posted in the order that I find them, not by publication date.

IMG_2166

All News
New Tech
  • 7/25/2013   CSP Key Players Focus on the Desert
    Spain is still the world's leader, but the US currently has the largest CSP in the world and is building 4 more over 250MW in Cali and AZ and have 4GW of additional capacity planned (but only 1 with heat storage!.
  • 7/9/2013  CarLab Mixes Natural Gas and Gasoline...
    CarLab's conversion is ~3x cheaper than a battery and ~25% cleaner than pure gasoline, but storage is under pressure and downright dangerous for a large fast-moving metal object. Boom! Why Prof. Tim Zhao of HK UST told me they were NOT considering gases as a possible replacement for gasoline, only liquid and aiming for fuel cells.

  • 5/30/2013   Elon Musk Has Plans For A New, Magical Form Of Transportation Called The 'Hyperloop'
    Win or lose, this is how all billionaires should think all the time. What better way to invest your excessive funds than on technology that will leapfrog mankind into the future? As an American, building the world's most expensive and slowest bullet trains years after every other developed country is about as impressive as building the 4th tallest skyscraper in the world to show how we're not phased by terrorists.
  • 4/25/2013   In Two-Way Charging, Electric Cars Begin to Earn Money From the Grid
    These cars provide part of the energy storage needed the intermittency of solar or wind energy. Currently, on a cloudy day or when the wind dies down the system reverts to coal or gas, needed to be constantly running as a backup, but with this system it could sneak a few kilowatts from everybody's cars to keep the grid producing. It also incentivizes people to drive less because they earn money when their car is plugged in.
 Sustainability
  • 7/18/2013   How Solar Parks Could Help Save Bumblebees
    While it likely wouldn't prevent the mysterious death of millions of bees worldwide, it does show that solar's thirst for land isn't necessarily a bad thing. If the land could be simultaneously used for bee breeding or farming, it might actually contribute to conservation.
  • 11/21/2012   Alternative energy will no longer be alternative
    An interesting purpose and message, but a number of flawed facts take away from this article's legitimacy. The natural price of solar is $3/w, NOT the $0.75 that it has temporarily dropped to because of Chinese panel subsidies.
  • 4/21/2013   Could New York run on renewable energy alone?
    Mark Jacobson has put together the comprehensive plan to completely eliminate fossil fuels that I wish I had done. The new infrastructure would have a mix of solar, wind, and water, but he doesn't elaborate much on intermittency. Shrugging off THE main question regarding green energy by briefly mentioning grid upgrades and hydrogen storage doesn't fill me with confidence, but what a great project!
  • 3/28/2013   Mystery Malady Kills More Bees, Heightening Worry on Farms
    A mysterious example of unsustainable something. Some say that it is due to pesticides now inherent in the plants, but all we really know is that it's poisonous to pretty much everything.
Business
World

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Eco-damage: The road from Yingkou to Dalian




China vs the US: A look at lagging green investment
My internship working with OPV Tech, a company developing organic solar panels (DSSC) in the province of Liaoning, has really opened my eyes not only to this potential (and not far off) cheaper and cleaner replacement for silicon solar, but also to the environmental catastrophe that is occurring right now in China. The most amazing thing to see, especially as an American, is the difference in reasoning for avoiding green energy. Where Americans are still arguing about whether global warming is a reality, the Chinese can see the unmistakeable damage blotting out the skies and affecting their health on a daily basis. The will to change is there, but that change comes at a high cost to their inexorable progress forward into the first world. This contradictory situation they find themselves in lets them push off decreasing reliance on coal until they've reached first world status, ending up (ahead of, but) roughly where America is: investing excess capital in green with the majority still tied up in dirty energy.

On trips back and forth from the lab at Dalian University to the office in Yingkou, I saw evidence of this environmental damage firsthand:

The Coastal Plain
Taking the high speed rail from Dalian to Yingkou in the north eastern province of Liaoning was nothing short of dumbfounding. The smooth ride rumbles along at 200kmph (300kmph in summer) through one of the most desolate expanses of land I have ever imagined. You could see the horizon if the smog was not so thick. Images of bundled up babushkas exhaling clouds of frosty steam on a backdrop of smokestacks pumping coal into the air come to mind. But in THIS communist paradise the land is maybe not quite as frozen, but every inch COMPLETELY used. Leaving my camera in my bag the first go around, I made sure I got a few good shots on the way back, this time with my boss and driver to give thorough commentary on the scenery.

I live in the orange and white one...



Construction was stopped for winter on the
hundreds of new buildings we drove by
Big Ol' Boxes
The first things that caught my eye both ways were the frequent large groups of identical apartment complexes that dotted the barren landscape. Every one was completely empty, most still in construction missing windows and looking every bit little boxes from Weeds all grown up and Chinafied. So who's going to live in these big boxes? Workers of course.

How They Get Along
The area supports a few large industries including farming, coal mining, fisheries, and cement production for the large buildings to house all the workers for the farming, coal mining, and fisheries.


Although there was no evidence of any coal extraction, there were cement factories in the distance (no pics, sorry) pumping out billowing clouds of smoke and large chunks of land ripped out of the side of mountains (also no pics, maybe on the way back on monday) for cement making materials (and another use I'll talk about in a minute). Examples of its extravagant use are just everywhere! Every mile there is another group of those stoic sentinels destined to house the future laborers of local industry.



Between the apartment complexes, most of the land is large swaths sectioned off for what looked like rice farming. Nope! They are landlocked fisheries housing salt water fish in large pools. The most surprising thing (until the very next thing) is that despite all the cement production in the area, the pools have nothing separating the salt water and the soil, letting the poisonous water seep into the ground, seeming to explain why there is almost no vegetation there. Wrong again!


It just went on like this forever
And ever...



A Brief History Lesson
It turns out that the entire land area that we were driving on, including Yingkou city itself, used to be completely marshland. In 1858, the French, British, Russians, and Americans received all kinds of ridiculous compensation from the Chinese for winning the first part of the Second Opium War, including money, religious liberty for all the multitudes of Christians in China, not being referred to as "夷" (yí, barbarian) in official documents, and the opening of various trade ports (and legalization of opium), including Shen Yang. The British trade ships weren't able to navigate up the shallow river running from the Bohai sea and so they filled in the marsh bordering the mouth of the river, creating the port to be known as Yingkou.



The rest of the area was filled in about 20 years ago, using large chunks of rock from the surrounding hills and mountains, to make more room for more construction, fish farms, industry, and the shortcut between Dalian and Yingkou that we took. So THIS is the reason that there is almost no vegetation in the area.

365 Day Agriculture
Presumably carting off the last tree
in the area
Continuing south past the former marshland, you run into some very interesting farming techniques, a real gem in this cornucopia of unsustainable practices. Crops are all covered in plastic tarps on wire frames, keeping them warm enough to survive the winter and be sold locally at markets and supermarkets, saving energy and money on transportation. This strategy is excellent from a conservation standpoint and would work great in my hometown of Rochester up in upstate New York, but is not employed as far as I am aware.


They uncovered their wares
for a late customer
This is also why I was able to to meet a really friendly couple who run a small market in Yingkou to buy some eggplant, potatoes, tomatoes, and cilantro for an awesome experimental dinner (3rd in the series). The food was almost definitely locally grown in one of these "warm rooms" (暖室), but their claim that it was organic (only after I asked) was probably a bit of marketing according to my boss. Either way, it was a great example of sustainability working towards not just it's own goals, but also contributing to the community by establishing a central place for residents to gather that's a little more personal than the supermarket.

Crops covered for the winter are still able to supply large quantities
of produce and keep food local 


A Different View
You can almost see the wind turbines through the smog
The desolate land aside, it is an amazing experience to view a completely different approach to dealing with the environment, whether the outcome is positive or negative. The insight into the Chinese perspective of trying to develop rapidly enough to give people a high standard of living in modern terms balanced with providing an ecosystem that can still support human life is an intensely interesting one. Along with many places around the globe, China being a relatively extreme example, the capital forces that drive expansion are powerful and so far nature has lost to industry to a large extent.

My boss has frequently referred back to the idea that the mass production of silicon solar panels in the past few years (particularly relevant in his case because he is working to replace them with a cleaner solution) have contributed to devastating the environment in China. They produce a large amount of pollution locally in China through their large initial energy cost and cut emissions abroad where they are installed in America, Europe, and elsewhere. This is of course true for an enormous amount of products in China (think Foxconn), where coal is burned locally to produce products for rich foreigners.

My boss wants to produce energy that is clean for China, not just its customers.




Almost to Dalian...Gotcha! Just another huge group of half-built apartment buildings in the middle of nowhere!


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