CleanTechnica

Why Your Business Should Care About the Birds, the Bees and the Burrs

“Necessity is the mother of invention,” according to a well-known proverb.  Those words seem particularly apt in today’s world of environmental, political, and economic pratfalls.  Fortunately, Mother Nature holds many of the answers to our most basic questions regarding design and equilibrium.  Internationally-known scientist Danya Baumeister will make the argument Oct. 15 at the BuildGreen Conference in Philadelphia that many savvy researchers, designers, and manufacturers would do better to leave the lab and look instead at the 3.8 billion years of evolution everywhere around them.  Baumeister is hardly the first to view the world as an R-and-D goldmine – one that could bring us new products, designs, and services to help both our environment and economy – but she is one of today’s leading biomimicry proponents.  And if you think biomimicry is a new idea, think again.

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Coal power is not base-load electricity by itself. To enable coal to reliably deliver electric power, it took the creation of an entire other national infrastructure; the trans-continental railroad system.

Without the unceasing rail-car-load delivery, every 12 hours, on the hour, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, year after year, of every next 12-hour-supply of fuel for the fire; the fire would go out, the water wouldn’t boil, the steam wouldn’t rise, the turbine wouldn’t turn; the next 12 hours of electricity wouldn’t be made. The fire must never go out.

Coal plus railroad = base-load power.

Even today, a century later, every 12 hours in this nation a trainload of coal from Wyoming or Pennsylvania or Ohio, must arrive at an electric power station near your city, to make your coal power for the next 12 hours. No trainload of coal; no coal power. What does that have to do with wind storage?

Wind plus storage = base-load power.

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Turkey farmers growing greenhouse tomatoes have been using this technology since 2005. California is going to get it before the end of this year.

LA-based ClimateMinder now completely owns the Turkish company Kodalfa and it is eager to bring some of its technology to the US. This company’s “new” climate-monitoring and control system helps greenhouse farmers to monitor their crops and adjust the conditions of their greenhouses with wireless technology. This helps farmers and consumers in numerous and significant ways.
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Clean tech has passed biotech and IT as the top venture capital (VC) investment category in the world. This is after investments in leading clean tech markets increased by 10% in the third quarter of this year.

Cleantech Group released findings on Wednesday showing that the cleantech sector “accumulated $1.59 billion across 134 companies” and this was 10% more than the $1.2 billion it had accumulated in the second quarter.
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John Rowe, Exelon CEO, said yesterday that climate change legislation is an urgent issue. At the same time, he announced that the nation’s largest utility would not be renewing its membership with the US Chamber of Commerce because of the Chamber of Commerce’s opposition to climate legislation.

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Not every breakthrough in the solar industry comes from efficiency gains from esoteric new Silicon Valley start-ups (though these are being catapulted by the recent funding bonanza) and university labs.

Some come from understanding that half the cost of a solar installation is just the cost of getting boots up on your roof, like for any other roofing job. One block off the grid reduces that cost by aggregating homeowners into groups to go solar together.

Some breakthroughs come when utility-scale solar companies forge innovative partnerships with housing developers rather than keep on battling NIMBY transmission costs, as BrightSource just did to meet its contract with PG&E for RPS solar power.

Others are starting to happen as titans of industry like Dow Chemical gear up to develop the little extras that smooth the assembly line process to speed up production-lines.

Because in manufacturing, assembly-line efficiency determines production costs:
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It is easy enough for solar companies to sign contracts under new RPS laws requiring utilities to buy more and more renewable energy. But building any new power sites or transmission is fraught with difficulties, even when these are for a societal good like renewable energy.

But BrightSource has been creative in finding sites for its utility-scale solar thermal plants. Here’s a new example.

They have just made a deal with Nevada housing developer Coyote Springs Land Company to site a 960 MW solar thermal plant on 12 square miles of a 43,000 acre housing development planned before the economic real estate apocalypse. Some solar was part of Coyote’s original plan for its golfing community 50 miles north of Las Vegas, but not 12 square miles of it!

Now with housing in free-fall, the expertize of housing developers comes in handy to help us meet the need for more renewable energy. Solar power developers could piggyback on the experience of housing developers with the know-how to get through red tape.

This could be how renewable power overcomes siting hurdles - and how the construction industry digs its way out of a deep recession. A marriage made in heaven.
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A new report released today says that if we shift our economy — to a greener, low-carbon economy — we will have more jobs, not fewer.

Earlier this week, Tony Blair (former prime minister of the UK) and the Climate Group reported that if we worked to avoid climate change we’d create 10 million new jobs by 2020 — worldwide. Another recent study by Greenpeace and the European Renewable Energy Council says that such a shift could increase employment in the EU by 2.7 million jobs by 2030.

One more report, released today by the Global Climate Network (an alliance of nine influential think tanks) comes to similar conclusions.
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Not all clean tech companies need to produce more environmentally friendly products in order to make a difference; some are leaders in the industry because quite simply, they change their procedures in order to ensure that their practices reduce their carbon footprint. In this week’s Newsweek “Green Rankings” were released, and many of those higher up on the list include leaders in technology that are trying to make sure that their environmental impact is just that much cleaner.

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Apparently many modern electric power plants that are coal powered can also use natural gas. So, when the price of natural gas came down in the US, more power stations switched to the cheaper fuel.

The result has been a sharp drop in coal use. Unused coal is piling up at power plants. About 175 million tons of coal inventory is now backed up. Inventory is up 26% over last year.

This national backlog is now beginning to back up into coal fields too. Wyoming has a 6.5% drop in demand from utilities, especially in the Midwest. For the first time in 15 years, coal production has been slowed in Wyoming. And the future looks grim too. Read the rest of this entry »