CleanTechnica

The U.S. Department of the Interior reports that overall water consumption in the United States has declined in the past 25 years, even though the population has increased 30% and use by individual American households has increased.  The statistics were compiled by the U.S. Geological Survey.

What’s the secret?  The 25-year patterns of water consumption revealed in the DOI report provide tantalizing clues about the ability of the U.S. to sustain its legendarily consumer-centric lifestyle while stabilizing and ultimately decreasing its contribution to carbon emissions and other greenhouse gasses.

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Here’s a low carbon cooling technology that uses hot water from waste to make A/C without fossil fuels, saving 80% over fossil-fueled chillers.

This industrial scale chiller from the Chinese company Broad Central Air can convert many different kinds of waste heat into air conditioning. The waste heat can come from many industrial sources, including what the Chinese site calls “town gas”  - methane from town landfill, collected and burned to generate heat.
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Chances are, if you run a major polluting company, you’re not reading cleantechnica. But you never know. So here’s my advice, based on my experience writing about energy; gathered into one easy quick read for the non-eco reader, on how a polluting company can benefit from the new energy bill requirements to cut carbon emissions.
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Here’s a revolutionary plan from Sandbag that enables you and me to end carbon emissions by simply buying up and destroying European pollution permits by retiring them off the market, at $40 per permit or ton of CO2.

Sandbag buys up carbon credits from those who have already made energy efficiency  investments and as a result have cut their pollution to below their previous level. We buy these clean companies’ credits through Sandbag, and then destroy them so dirty companies can’t buy them.
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Looking to create products for the real world as soon as possible, a new research center in the UK is aiming to speed up the development and installment of a variety of low carbon technologies to ensure a greener future for us all.

This new £50 million ($80 million) center hopes to do this through more coordinated and focused efforts from four universities and a regional development agency. The four universities that have teamed up are Hull, Leeds, Sheffield and Yorkshire, and they are working with the regional development agency Yorkshire Forward. The name of the new center is Centre for Low Carbon Futures (CLCF).

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The new green-themed Reclaim made by Samsung is more than your standard phone with slick green branding — though there’s a bit of that too.

What’s green (or blue), smaller than a deck of cards and will remind you to unplug the charger from the wall after charging? The Reclaim, the new green-themed smart phone made by Samsung for Sprint, is loaded with a bunch of green content, a handful eco-conscious accessories and an attention to sustainable packaging that make it more “green” than most other phones out there.

But you can’t just slap a case made from forty percent corn plastic, dip it in green paint and call it green, can you? The folks at Sprint sent me the new Reclaim so I could answer those questions myself. Read the rest of this entry »

One year ago the French company Alstom began a year-long US test of capturing CO2 from the water+carbon-dioxide mix created using their chilled-ammonia technology, in the smokestack of the Pleasant Prairie Power Plant in Wisconsin.

This week the year’s results were announced. The years average CO2 capture rate was 90%, according to a joint announcement from the EPRI, We Energies and Alstom to the Society of Environmental Journalists.
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Norway committed to cut their greenhouse gas emissions 40% by 2020 this week. This is the most ambitious goal of any rich nation to date.

Norway’s prime minister Jens Stoltenberg (just re-elected) is meeting the requests of many developing nations and environmental NGOs with this commitment.
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President Obama has just signed an Executive Order that compels the largest consumer of energy in the US economy to invest in energy efficiency improvements to get to huge reductions in energy use by 2020.

Every Federal agency must measure, manage, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to meet specific targets by 2020. They have just 90 days to lay out a plan to meet these targets:

1. Use 30% less gas by 2020. Federal agencies buy 750,000 new vehicles every year. In normal times that’s almost 1 in every 17 vehicles sold per year. This Executive Order creates a rock-solid certain market for fuel-efficient vehicles every year from now till 2020.

2. Design all new government buildings from 2020 to be net-zero energy. Wow! Jimmy Carter might have gotten just a few solar panels up on merely one government building; The White House. But this means every new government building goes solar to cut fossil energy use to zero.

And they won’t just want solar power. They’ll need efficient windows, geothermal ground heat exchanges, efficient air conditioning, solar hot water heating, radiant flooring, tankless water heaters, great insulation… (and all this will take retrained architects, and doing that will take new classes, and those will need new instructors, who’ll need new suits…this is going to be a green jobs boom!)

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Every barrel of oil extracted in the US also produces ten barrels of hot fluids in addition to the oil. Why not use that potential energy in the waste heat?

Rather than discard that “geothermal” resource created by the process of oil extraction, the DOE is going to show the traditional energy industry how to tap into those waste fluids to power equipment at the site.

The renewable energy division (EERE) of Steven Chu’s energetic new Department of Energy is buying the waste heat geothermal unit from Ormat Technologies to do the demo. Ormat makes both geothermal and combined heat and power units.

The DOE’s Geothermal Technologies Program at the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) will collaborate with Office of Fossil Energy to make low temperature geothermal power from waste drilling fluids using a waste heat geothermal unit.

The electricity produced would be used to power field production equipment, which would offset purchased electricity. Because this would reduce the fossil energy needed to extract each barrel of oil, this would reduce the pollution costs the traditional oil industry would be liable for under new legislation pending.

If the Clean Energy Jobs & American Power Act passes, there will be an incentive to reduce carbon pollution.
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