Sixteen large-scale urban redevelopments on six continents will have on-site emissions below zero, if a new joint venture between former US President Bill Clinton's Climate Initiative and the US Green Building Council is successful. The scheme, revealed at last week's C40 summit of the world's largest cities, includes projects in London and San Francisco.
Australia's Labour government may face an early election if its proposed emissions trading scheme is defeated as a result of a Senate stand-off. The conservative opposition is being accused of stalling for the sake of climate scepticism.
Prince Charles, heir to the British throne and a life-time "greenie", has told a symposium of top scientists in London that mankind already has some of the answers to climate change, but we appear strangely reluctant to apply them, and has warned global decision-makers that action cannot be delayed.
Investor Warren Buffet's MidAmercian Energy is soon to begin testing new batteries from Chinese carmaker BYD that could deliver reasonable-cost large-scale power storage. MidAmerican is to build a 2MW storage facility in Portland, Oregon, to test the technology which, if successful, could help overcome the intermittent nature of supply from wind and solar power generation.
Rich and poor countries must address climate change together, because it is happening at an increasing and alarming rate, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has said in an apparent effort to keep the Copenhagen process on track.
The humble mouse is the staple animal test-subject for researchers world-wide. Now they should have a much clearer idea of why things work (or not) on mice because the entire mouse genome has finally been mapped after 10 years effort.
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"Onsite emmissions below zero". I don't know that is a laudable goal because it just shifts the emissions elsewhere and hides it, making it guilt free. When you use electricity your onsite emissions are zero, but you don't see the smokestack emissions at the generator 100 miles down the road. If you could see the smokestack, and see it increase when your air conditioning kicked in, you might get better feedback of your actions.
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It is a pity that the Big Battery article was not written by someone who has some basic knowledge of physics and electrical systems. Unfortunately just having a green heart is not enough when disseminating technical information.
"So-called pumped-storage systems, however, often consume more energy than they generate".... Well that's basic thermodynamics for you folks... you always get less out than you put in out of any system. Anything that does otherwise is a perpetual motion machine.
Pumped storage isn't actually that bad. Efficiency is pretty good and there are quite a few multi-hundred MW units running around the world. Batteries don't come that big and have a very limited lifetime. With a lifetime of a few hundred charges that battery system will be both expensive to run and environmentally damaging when it needs to be replaced every couple of years. Battery storage efficiency is around 75-90%, depending on technology, with more losses due to rectification and inversion.
The Drakensberg pump storage scheme in South Africa was commissioned in 1981 and has been quietly doing its thing for almost 30 years. It has a fully cycle efficiency of 73.7% and requires very little maintenance.
Why I absolutely support experimentation, I think we have yet another case of the technologies we need already existing and a lot of people out there trying to make money out of "green tech" by making dubious claims of superiority over existing tech.
Written in May