But the industry still has a few hitches to work out—like solar panels burning birds
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Here’s a great idea: You have a fairly new and extremely unregulated technology that’s used to extract a natural resource with a known tendency toward explosion. Why not install that technology at a major international airport?
Alright – to be fair, applying the title of “major international airport” to Pittsburgh International Airport is a bit of a stretch these days. If you’re going by The New York Times’ description of its once-great terminals, it’s about two tumbleweeds shy of American ghost town candidacy. When US Airways abandoned PIT as a hub in 2004, its annual traffic dropped from 21 million passengers in 1997 to eight million in 2013. The airport is broke.
As has become business as usual in Pennsylvania, PIT has turned to the massive deposits of natural gas buried under its runways as a source of revenue. Consol Energy will set up a well right alongside the airport parking lot this month. The gas deposits themselves lie roughly a mile directly underneath the airport.
From The New York Times:
“It’s like finding money,” said Rich Fitzgerald, the county executive of Allegheny County, which owns the airport. “Suddenly you’ve got this valuable asset that nobody knew was there.”
As was made abundantly clear by the Times’ income-focused coverage, this has been painted as an economic boon for the county with no mention of the potential health and environmental hazards associated with fracking. But that policy has worked out great for Pennsylvania so far, so why not run with it?
The real potential for crisis, however, lies in endangering one of the state’s greatest monuments, which can be found opposite the airport TGI Friday’s. I’m talking about George Washington, our nation’s founding father, standing proudly next to Franco Harris, former Steelers running back, captured mid-Immaculate Reception:
This is fine art and it needs to be protected! Clean water, uncontaminated air, and potential for earthquakes are essentially an afterthought here. When Franco Harris is threatened, every limbic system in Western Pennsylvania should leap to attention, so I’m frankly appalled that no action has been taken against this well. Come on now, yinz!
Source
Now Arriving at Pittsburgh International: Fracking, The New York Times
Eve Andrews is a Grist fellow and new Seattle transplant via the mean streets of Chicago, Poughkeepsie, and Pittsburgh, respectively and in order of meanness. Follow her on Twitter.
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Fracking wells at the Pittsburgh airport? Sure — what could go wrong?
All new technology, no matter how innovative, arrives in a world of pre-existing laws and regulations. But not all technology catches the same breaks. A company like Lyft or Uber can do its thing right out there in the open for a surprisingly long time, despite being — essentially — appified versions of such already-illegal innovations as dollar vans and jitneys.
By comparison, solar energy, despite having made leaps and bounds both technologically and finance-wise, can’t show up at the block party without bringing down a lawsuit, a law, or some kind of extra fee.
Yet those impediments, intentional and unintentional, are beginning to remove themselves. A decision this week by the Building Code Council in Washington state is a prime example.
Until now, the process of legally installing solar panels on a building in Washington has been what it is in most of the U.S.: while there are state and national building codes, each county enforces them differently. What this meant was that the process of putting in solar ranged from the very simple (a solar panel installation was seen as the equivalent of putting on an extra layer of shingles) to the complicated and prolonged (any installation, no matter how much of a no-brainer, required a full set of plans, signed by a licensed structural engineer, which added between $800-$2,500 to the final bill.) Solar installers were spending a lot of time learning about how permits were handled from county to county, and avoiding some areas altogether because the process was so daunting.
Then this April, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee issued an executive order to deal with carbon emissions — and that order paved the way for the standardization and simplification of solar permitting. It was a surprisingly agreeable process, says Mia Devine, a project manager at Northwest Solar Communities, a coalition that helped with the rule changes. “The mandate of the governor’s office really made people pay attention. It actually passed unanimously.”
This whole “actually making it easy to put in solar” thing is still fairly rare, but the idea of having simpler rules seems like a popular one. In the coming months, expect to see more of these attempts to make rules around solar easier to navigate. It won’t be the wild west of the Silicon Valley startup world, but it’s shaping up to be a lot more open than it is today.
Source
Rooftop solar panels just got easier to install, The Olympian
Heather Smith (on Twitter, @strangerworks) is interested in the various ways that humans try to save the environment: past, present, and future.
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Washington state just lopped up to $2,500 off the cost of solar panels. Here’s how.
A gassy, icy concoction
Most people think the thinning of the sea ice at the top of the world is a bad thing. But not shipping and fossil fuel interests.
Shipping companies this week announced that they would use icebreakers to carve a new Arctic shipping route to help them deliver natural gas from a processing plant in western Siberia to customers in Japan and China. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Once virtually impassable, the Arctic Ocean is now attracting interest as a shipping route because global warming has reduced the ice cover within the Arctic Circle. More ships have been plying the northern route between Europe and Asia, which is roughly 40% shorter than the conventional path through the Suez Canal.
Last year, 71 ships crossed the Arctic Ocean between Europe and Asia, compared with four in 2010, according to Japan’s transportation ministry.
Mitsui O.S.K. characterized its planned route as the first regular service linking Europe and Asia via the Arctic, although it will operate the Arctic route only during the warmer months of the year.
“The shorter distance would be good for buyers, by cutting shipping costs and reducing other risks,” said Yu Nagatomi, an economist at Tokyo’s Institute of Energy Economics.
A truly less risky approach, of course, would be leaving the fossil fuels in the ground and off the ocean’s surface. But, hey, $.
Source
Shipping Firms to Add Arctic LNG Route, The Wall Street Journal
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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New shipping channel will carry natural gas through the Arctic
another bright idea
Thanks in part to Elon Musk, the world’s biggest and most advanced solar panel factory could be built in the U.S. in the coming years.
The Silicon Valley entrepreneur, fresh off announcing an effort to spur growth in the electric auto industry by opening up access to hundreds of Tesla Motors patents, on Tuesday pushed the cleantech envelope even further, announcing a bid to massively expand the solar panel industry.
Musk, chair of the solar panel installation giant SolarCity, told reporters that in the coming years the company plans to build a solar panel factory in the U.S. that’s “an order of magnitude bigger than any of the plants that exist” anywhere in the world today.
SolarCity is responsible for about a quarter of America’s residential solar panel installations every month — three times as much as its closest competitor. Its market dominance has been earned in part through its “zero-down” financing model. But that’s not enough. Musk says he worries that the company’s ongoing growth will be so rapid that it will start to encounter solar panel shortages, despite what now is an international glut of mostly Chinese-made panels.
So SolarCity is jumping into the development and manufacture of advanced solar panels through the acquisition for $200 million or more of Silicon Valley-based solar panel company Silevo, which has developed highly efficient rooftop photovoltaic cells. Using more efficient cells means fewer panels are needed for each rooftop, helping to push down the price of residential solar systems.
“If we don’t do this, we felt that there was risk of not being able to have the solar panels that we need to expand the business in the long term,” Musk said Tuesday during a call with reporters. “The rate at which solar panel technology is advancing — at least for the panels that are being made at large scale — it’s really not fast enough. We’re seeing high-volume production of relatively basic panels, but not high-volume production of advanced panels, so we think it’s important that the two be combined.”
In a blog post published Tuesday, SolarCity described its manufacturing ambitions:
We are in discussions with the state of New York to build the initial manufacturing plant, continuing a relationship developed by the Silevo team. At a targeted capacity greater than 1 GW within the next two years, it will be one of the single largest solar panel production plants in the world. This will be followed in subsequent years by one or more significantly larger plants at an order of magnitude greater annual production capacity.
Ultimately, Musk says, he wants to develop such advanced panels and manufacture them at such high volumes that fossil fuels simply cannot compete. “To be able to have solar power compete on an unsubsidized basis with fossil fuel energy coming from the grid, it’s critical that you have high efficiency solar panels,” he said.
Source
Solar at Scale, SolarCity blog
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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Republican politicians are railing against President Obama’s new draft power-plant pollution rules, portraying them as job killers that will leave the economy in unrecognizable tatters.
But their rank-and-file voters haven’t yet gotten the message.
The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, conducted from Thursday to Sunday as the media was ramping up coverage ahead of the rules’ release, included this question: “Do you think the federal government should or should not limit the release of greenhouse gases from existing power plants in an effort to reduce global warming?”
Not only did 70 percent of all respondents reply in the affirmative, but more than twice as many Republicans said “yes” as said “no.” Check it out:
Washington PostClick to embiggen.
There’s more good news from the poll on whether Americans would be willing to pay more for their electricity if it meant cleaner air and a more stable climate. From The Washington Post‘s write-up:
The cross-party agreement extends to a willingness to pay for such limits with higher energy bills, a flashpoint for debate and a key area of uncertainty in new regulations. Asked whether Washington should still go forward with limits if they “significantly lowered greenhouse gases but raised your monthly energy expenses by 20 dollars a month,” 63 percent of respondents say yes, including 51 percent of Republicans, 64 percent of independents and 71 percent of Democrats.
(And it’s not clear that the rules even would cost Americans anything; the Natural Resources Defense Council argues that they’ll save Americans money by increasing energy efficiency.)
This from a national electorate that’s better known for yawning at climate change — relegating it close to the bottom of their list of national concerns — than for caring about climate action.
It seems that even Republicans are tiring of boys who cry wolf.
Source
A huge majority of Americans support regulating carbon from power plants. And they’re even willing to pay for it, The Washington Post
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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Just one day after the Obama administration proposed new power plant CO2 rules, alerting the world that the U.S. is finally starting to take climate action seriously, the planet’s other climate-polluting giant is making similar headlines. China is considering imposing an absolute cap on carbon emissions in 2016, a senior government official announced in Beijing on Tuesday.
Few specific details are available, but a cap on emissions, which would likely incorporate the country’s nascent carbon-trading system, is being seen as a potentially major step in curbing the nation’s climate impacts.
“We hope to implement this in the 13th five-year plan, but the plan has not been fixed yet, so it isn’t government policy yet,” Professor He Jiankun, vice-chairman of China’s National Experts Panel on Climate Change, told the Financial Times following the announcement. “This is our experts’ advice and suggestion.”
Here’s more from Reuters:
Carbon emissions in [China’s] coal-reliant economy are likely to continue to grow until 2030, but setting an absolute cap instead of pegging them to the level of economic growth means they will be more tightly regulated and not spiral out of control.
“The Chinese announcement marks potentially the most important turning point in the global scene on climate change for a decade,” said Michael Grubb, a professor of international energy and climate policy at University College London.
It is not clear at what level the cap would be set, and a final number is unlikely to be released until China has worked out more details of the five-year plan, possibly sometime next year.
The rapid-fire announcements by the U.S. and China, which together spew out more than 40 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, are offering fresh hope that an effective climate treaty could be agreed upon during U.N. negotiations late next year in Paris. Without the support and participation of both of these countries, there’s little chance of meaningful global climate action.
Some world climate leaders had optimistically taken to calling 2014 the “year of ambition.” The developments of the last 48 hours won’t alone come close to solving the world’s climate woes, but the messages that they send to the rest of the world offer hope that 2014 might one day be remembered as the “year of resolve.”
Source
China climate adviser urges emissions cap, Financial Times
China plan to cap CO2 emissions seen turning point in climate talks, Reuters
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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green4us
Roads? Where we’re going, we need solar roads. Concept rendering by Sam Cornett/Indiegogo Four years ago, Scott and Julie Brusaw announced their provocative concept of “Solar Roadways,” a system of modular solar panels that could be paved directly onto roads, parking lots, driveways, bike paths, “literally any surface under the sun.” Since then, the Brusaws have received two rounds of funding from the Federal Highway Administration as well as a private grant to develop their project. They now have a working prototype featuring hexagonal panels that cover a 12-by-36-foot parking lot. In addition to the potential to power nearby homes, businesses, and electric vehicles, the panels also have heating elements for convenient snow and ice removal, as well as LEDs that can make road signage. According to the Brusaws’ calculations, Solar Roadways, if installed nationwide, could generate over three times the electricity currently used in the United States. Read the rest at The Atlantic Cities.
Taken from:
That Amazing ‘Solar Roadways’ Project Has a Working Prototype
The Quest for a Super-Light Electric Bike Powered by Solar Panels
Here Comes the Son: Barry Goldwater Jr. Fights for Solar Power in Arizona
Cities Are Still Too Afraid to Make Driving Unappealing
Can You Have Too Much Solar Energy?
Step Inside the World’s Largest Solar Boat
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That Amazing ‘Solar Roadways’ Project Has a Working Prototype
Bring out the big guns
America is coming under attack, say 16 retired generals and admirals, and the attacker is climate change.
In 2007, the Center for Naval Analyses Military Advisory Board sounded an unprecedented alarm over national security threats posed by global warming. Now the group has been asked again to advise the U.S. government on climate-change risks, and again it says there’s lots to be concerned about. In a new report released on Tuesday, the retired military leaders say, “we validate the findings of our first report” and, in many cases, “the risks we identified are advancing noticeably faster than we anticipated.”
Here are some highlights from the report:
We believe it is no longer adequate to think of the projected climate impacts to any one region of the world in isolation. Climate change impacts transcend international borders and geographic areas of responsibility. …
In Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, we are already seeing how the impacts of extreme weather, such as prolonged drought and flooding — and resulting food shortages, desertification, population dislocation and mass migration, and sea level rise — are posing security challenges to these regions’ governments. We see these trends growing and accelerating. To protect our national security interests both at home and abroad, the United States must be more assertive and expand cooperation with our international allies to bring about change and build resilience.
And here are the six high-level recommendations for the U.S. government and military from the report:
“This report contains some admittedly distressing findings in terms of political and social instability,” said retired Army Brigadier General Gerald Galloway, one of the authors of the report. “But amid the doom and gloom are some real opportunities to mitigate climate change and strengthen global security. Climate change is as much a catalyst for cooperation as it is one for conflict.”
As The New York Times writes, “Secretary of State John Kerry signaled that the report’s findings would influence American foreign policy” and “Pentagon officials said the report would affect military policy.”
But we’re betting it still won’t influence Republicans.
Watch a video that was released along with the report:
Source
National Security and the Accelerating Risks of Climate Change, Center for Naval Analyses
Climate Change Deemed Growing Security Threat by Military Researchers, The New York Times
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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Military experts are worried about climate change, & you should be too
Bring out the big guns
America is coming under attack, say 16 retired generals and admirals, and the attacker is climate change.
In 2007, the Center for Naval Analyses Military Advisory Board sounded an unprecedented alarm over national security threats posed by global warming. Now the group has been asked again to advise the U.S. government on climate-change risks, and again it says there’s lots to be concerned about. In a new report released on Tuesday, the retired military leaders say, “we validate the findings of our first report” and, in many cases, “the risks we identified are advancing noticeably faster than we anticipated.”
Here are some highlights from the report:
We believe it is no longer adequate to think of the projected climate impacts to any one region of the world in isolation. Climate change impacts transcend international borders and geographic areas of responsibility. …
In Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, we are already seeing how the impacts of extreme weather, such as prolonged drought and flooding — and resulting food shortages, desertification, population dislocation and mass migration, and sea level rise — are posing security challenges to these regions’ governments. We see these trends growing and accelerating. To protect our national security interests both at home and abroad, the United States must be more assertive and expand cooperation with our international allies to bring about change and build resilience.
And here are the six high-level recommendations for the U.S. government and military from the report:
“This report contains some admittedly distressing findings in terms of political and social instability,” said retired Army Brigadier General Gerald Galloway, one of the authors of the report. “But amid the doom and gloom are some real opportunities to mitigate climate change and strengthen global security. Climate change is as much a catalyst for cooperation as it is one for conflict.”
As The New York Times writes, “Secretary of State John Kerry signaled that the report’s findings would influence American foreign policy” and “Pentagon officials said the report would affect military policy.”
But we’re betting it still won’t influence Republicans.
Watch a video that was released along with the report:
Source
National Security and the Accelerating Risks of Climate Change, Center for Naval Analyses
Climate Change Deemed Growing Security Threat by Military Researchers, The New York Times
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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Military experts are worried about climate change, and you should be too
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