Global Warming Whitewash Proposed November 6, 2009

http://www.earthweek.com/2009/ew091106/ew091106c.html

Yerupaja mountain in the high Andes may be one area to be painted white after glaciers melt.

A Peruvian scientist told his country’s parliamentary commission on climate change that global warming could be combated by painting highly reflective white paint over rock and ground exposed by receding glaciers.

Eduardo Gold, president of Glaciers of Peru, says reflecting the sunlight would keep the ground from absorbing as much solar radiation.

He proposes using only environmentally friendly lime-based paint made without harmful chemicals.

His scheme has drawn interest from the World Bank, which is considering various “geoengineering” proposals to counter climate change.

Gold says hiring local residents to do the landscape painting could create about 15,000 jobs.

The glaciers of the tropical Andes have proven to be very sensitive to climate change.

Some scientists have estimated a loss in coverage of more than 30 percent over the past 30 years.

Saving money on sewage treatment

A regular sewage plant for  28,000 people costs about €225,000 a year to run according to figures from Germany. Installing a new form of digester unit (many sewage plants don’t have them) made by IGB, shortened the digestion process from 30-50 days down to 5-7 days. In addition there is reduction in the residue by about 1/3 which reduces disposal cost by €70,000 a year. In addition, sewage plants us a lot of electricity in the process. The biogas produced by the digester can provide enough electricity to reduce costs by a further €100,000 a year. A bit of a no-brainer?

The full article is here.

China Outpaces U.S. in Cleaner Coal-Fired Plants

May10 2009  New York Times Link

IANJIN, China — China’s frenetic construction of coal-fired power plants has raised worries around the world about the effect on climate change. China now uses more coal than the United States, Europe and Japan combined, making it the world’s largest emitter of gases that are warming the planet.

But largely missing in the hand-wringing is this: China has emerged in the past two years as the world’s leading builder of more efficient, less polluting coal power plants, mastering the technology and driving down the cost.

While the United States is still debating whether to build a more efficient kind of coal-fired power plant that uses extremely hot steam, China has begun building such plants at a rate of one a month.

While construction has stalled on a new generation of low-pollution power plants that turn coal into a gas before burning it in the US , China has already approved equipment purchases for just such a power plant, to be assembled soon in a muddy field here in Tianjin.

Western countries continue to rely heavily on coal-fired power plants built decades ago with outdated, inefficient technology that burn a lot of coal and emit considerable amounts of carbon dioxide. China has begun requiring power companies to retire an older, more polluting power plant for each new one they build.

This is not to say that China has got it all right. There are still old inefficient power stations producing electricity and some of the better ones are not being used to their best effects. Only half the country’s coal-fired power plants have the emissions control equipment to remove sulphur compounds that cause acid rain, and China has not begun regulating some of the emissions that lead to heavy smog in big cities.

After relying until recently on older technology, “China has since become the major world market for advanced coal-fired power plants with high-specification emission control systems.”

Recent international reports have cut its forecast of the annual increase in Chinese emissions of global warming gases, to 3 percent from 3.2 percent, in response to technological gains.

But by continuing to rely heavily on coal, which supplies 80 percent of its electricity, China ensures that it will keep emitting a lot of carbon dioxide; even an efficient coal-fired power plant emits twice the carbon dioxide of a natural gas-fired plant. So the next step is who will be first to remove all CO₂ from thermal energy production? Many countries, including the UK, say they are investigating it strongly. But China has just built a small, experimental facility near Beijing to remove carbon dioxide from power station emissions and use it to provide carbonation for beverages, and the government has a short list of possible locations for a large experiment to capture and store carbon dioxide.

But it does not stop there. China is making other efforts to reduce its global warming emissions. It has doubled its total wind energy capacity in each of the past four years, and is poised to pass the United States as soon as this year as the world’s largest market for wind power equipment. China is building considerably more nuclear power plants than the rest of the world combined, and these do not emit carbon dioxide after they are built.

Solar Power Experiences Strongest Year of Growth Yet

From an article by by Yingling Liu / June 18, 2009

http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6156?emc=el&m=258906&l=4&v=0acf32e1b9

The year 2008 saw the most phenomenal growth in the solar power market yet, with dramatic increases in installations of solar photovoltaics (PVs), which generate electricity directly from sunlight, and solar thermal plants, which use the sun’s heat to produce power. The latter include concentrating solar power (CSP)—a technology that uses mirrors to reflect and concentrate sunlight to heat water to drive a steam turbine for electricity generation—is expanding in many regions.

Newly added PV power installations amounted to 5,600 megawatts (MW), in one year increasing by more than half  cumulative total of 9,000 MW to almost 15,000 MW by the end of 2008.

Europe remains the leading market for PVs, accounting for over 80 percent of world demand in 2008. Spain overtook Germany to become the number one solar PV market worldwide, with its market increasing in one year from 560 MW to an estimated 2,600 MW in 2008. This 300+ % growth accounted for almost half of all new installations in 2008. Germany followed in second place, with new installations of about 1,500 MW.

The United States came in a distant third, adding approximately 348 MW, followed closely by Italy, South Korea, and Japan.

The phenomenal growth in the top two national PV markets—Spain and Germany—suggests that government support programs are pivotal in the development of the solar market. A feed-in tariff policy in Spain requires utilities to buy electricity generated from solar power projects at premium guaranteed long-term prices that are set by the government, an incentive introduced to encourage the adoption of renewable energy. The lucrative solar electricity rates in Spain fanned unexpected enthusiasm from the industry.

However in September 2008 the government considerably reduced the feed-in tariff payments and put a cap on annual PV installation from 2009 through 2010, aiming at a target of 3,000 MW by the end of 2010. This policy change is expected to slow the PV market in Spain significantly over the next few years.

Germany, which was the number one solar market for years, also has a feed-in tariff program for renewable energy. It aims to reduce the premium solar electricity rates gradually and predictably until solar energy achieves price parity with conventional power. As the result of amendments to the German law in mid-2008, payments for PVs declined considerably starting in January 2009, reflecting a reduction in installed cost. The stability and consistency of Germany’s feed-in tariff has proved beneficial for continuous market development, and the country is expected to regain the top PV market position in 2009.

The Chinese PV industry is leading in silicon-based cell production, primarily to meet soaring demand from Spain and Germany. Combined Chinese and Taiwanese production accounted for 39 percent of the global cell output in 2008, up from only 7 percent in 2004.

On an individual company basis, the German company Q-Cells was the number one producer of solar cells in 2008, First Solar of the United States ranked second, and Suntech of China came in third.²²

Cconcentrating solar power (CSP)— has seen considerable development in the United States, with more than 350 MW of CSP built in California between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s. The country also hosts one of the world’s largest CSP plants, the 64-MW Nevada Solar One CSP plant. The Mediterranean region has started to see increasing new CSP capacity as well, making Europe, North Africa, and Middle East a potential global hub for CSP generation. Two new CSP plants came on-line in 2008—the 50-MW Andasol-1 plant in Spain and a 5-MW plant in California. Projects with more than 6,000 MW of capacity are now in the pipeline in the United States, mostly planned for California, Arizona, and Florida. Over 3,000 MW of CSP projects have been announced in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East; out of these, 2,500 MW are to be built in Spain. Israel and the United Arab Emirates opened tenders for 350 MW projects in the Middle East during 2008, and projects are now planned for Algeria, Morocco, and Egypt.

Biomass made into electricty produces more miles than bio-ethanol

Electric vehicles using biomass converted into electricity travelled 81 percent farther per area of cropland than vehicles with internal combustion engines running on  ethanol, researchers in California found.

A small sport utility vehicle could do 36,000 km on the energy produced from a hectare of switch-grass converted into ethanol. But converting that biomass into electricity allowed a battery-powered SUV to get 56,000 km on the highway, the study published in Science magazine said.

But we do not yet produce enough switch grass to run power stations nor is the development of 2nd generation  bio-fuels sufficiently advanced for this to be a current reality. But certainly the idea that electric cars could prove to be more efficient than those run on bio-fuels is something to bear in mind.

Source: http://planetark.org/wen/52798

Further Antarctic melting

Click on this map to find the full article.

“The northern ice front of the Wilkins Ice Shelf has become unstable and the first icebergs have been released,” Angelika Humbert, glaciologist at the University of Muenster in Germany, said of European Space Agency satellite images of the shelf.

Humbert told Reuters about 700 sq km (270.3 sq mile) of ice — bigger than Singapore or Bahrain and almost the size of New York City — has broken off the Wilkins this month and shattered into a mass of icebergs.

Sewage could be used to heat half the homes in Britain

Bio-gas – in particular methane produced from sewage and other organic waste – could be added to the natural gas system as the gas from the North Sea begins to run out. They do it elsewhere in Europe so why not here? It would also help us to reach our renewable energy targets. Click here for the full article from the Telegraph

Stop Feeding Sardines To The Cat: Let Fish Poop Save The World!

The things you find out on the web!!

Apparently it is not just the plankton that make limestone! It has been found that fish in sea-water poop ‘gut rock’, which is calcium carbonate – hence trapping carbon dioxide from the air for sometime to come.

How and why? The weathering of mountains dissolves calcium sulphate, carrying it to the sea. The fish end up taking in too much calcium so they excrete it by combining it with CO₂ as calcium carbonate, or “gut rocks”. It ends up falling to the bottom to become sedimentary calcite or “limestone” (over millions of years). The earth is continuously heaving, compressing, and heating, shoving the calcite back up to the surface from which we start all over again – with fish poop – in the passing of geologic time.

The full article look here.

New Green House Figures

Click on the picture and it will take you to a map which is interactive. By clicking on individual countries, you will be able to find out whether they are making progress or not and what is the carbon footprint of each person in that country.

Samso: The isle of plenty

Want to know how green it can get? Samso, an island off Denmark took up the challenge.

Ten years ago, islanders drew nearly all their energy from oil and petrol brought in by tankers and from coal-powered electricity transmitted to the island through a mainland cable link. Today that traffic in energy has been reversed. Samsingers now export millions of kilowatt hours of electricity from renewable energy sources to the rest of Denmark. In doing so, islanders have cut their carbon footprint by a staggering 140 per cent. And what Samso can do today, the rest of the world can achieve in the near future, it is claimed.

Check out this Guardian article to see more. Then click on the piccie to see the sights!