MORE NEWS, 11-11: WHERE THE SUN IS; FRIENDS OF THE EARTH, NOT OF EMISSIONS TRADING; HARVEST OCEAN COLD FOR COOLING; SAILING IN SPACE ON SUN

WHERE THE SUN IS
DOE and NREL Announce Open PV Mapping Project
October 26, 2009 (U.S. Department of Energy/Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy)

"The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced the beta release of the Open PV Mapping Project…a collaborative effort between government, industry, and the public that will develop a comprehensive database of photovoltaic (PV) installation data for the United States. The project is the largest installation database with over 50,000 entries."

click thru to the Open PV Mapping site for much more info or to participate

"…[Users can] easily understand the current status and past progress of the PV industry…[and see] current and recent trends of the PV market. Additionally, users may add their own PV installation data, browse PV data entered by others, and view statistics. Moving forward, NREL will add additional data…use this information to drive further analysis of market growth…[and] gauge the progress toward DOE's goal of reaching PV grid parity by 2015."


FRIENDS OF THE EARTH, NOT OF EMISSIONS TRADING
Carbon Trading: Does It Really Reduce Emissions?
Roger Harrabin, November 4, 2009 (BBC News)
and
Re-thinking the World’s Largest New Derivatives Market
September 22 and November 2, 2009 (Friends of the Earth)

"Carbon trading could trigger a financial collapse like the sub-prime loans crisis, according to [Subprime Carbon? Re-thinking the world’s largest new derivatives market] from the green group Friends of the Earth (FoE)… the latest in a series of assaults against carbon trading as the Copenhagen climate conference looms.

"The carbon trade allows dirty industries in rich countries to offset emissions targets by paying for clean development projects in poor countries…[a trade] which could reach trillions of dollars in the next few decades…But FoE says most trades are done not by polluting industries, but by speculative traders packaging carbon credits into complex financial products similar to those which triggered the sub-prime mortgage crash…[and] warns that this could lead to a future crisis of sub-prime carbon…"

Despite a tempestuous economy and an unexpected oversupply of allowances due to decreased power demand, the EU's emissions trading system has held surprisingly steady and foresees higher prices in the future. (click to enlarge)

"The allegation was instantly rejected by Patrick Birley from the European Climate Exchange, who accused Friends of the Earth of demonstrating a loose grasp of financial markets by relating carbon trading to complex sub-prime trading…Friends of the Earth's rhetoric in this case might indeed be loose - but it is inarguable that confidence in carbon trading has been eroded after investigations showed that a substantial proportion of clean energy projects in developing countries funded by carbon finance had benefited business but not the environment…

"A recent report from Greenpeace focused on what it regards as a carbon trading failure in the Noel Kempff forestry project in Bolivia…The Bolivian government is now fervently anti-trading, insisting that rich nations should take responsibility for all their own emissions themselves…American Breakthrough Institute studies of carbon trading…concluded that a straight carbon tax (if ever it could be politically achieved) would be much more effective."

From FriendsoftheEarthUS via YouTube

"The British government agrees that rich nations must make big emissions cuts - but insists emissions trading still has a cost-effective part to play…Indeed, the EU's promise of 30% emissions cuts if other nations agree tough targets is based on carbon trading…The US position relies heavily on carbon trading too - although right-wingers in the Senate insist it cannot be trusted…

"…[I]t is eminently clear that in theory it is much, much more efficient to provide clean infrastructure in a fast-emerging economy [like China] than in our sclerotic rich countries with so much of their energy infrastructure, factories and homes already set in concrete…But it will not work if people cannot trust the trade…This will have to be bolted down very firmly if agreement is to be reached on it in Copenhagen…FoE is by no means alone in its scepticism."


HARVEST OCEAN COLD FOR COOLING
Cold Ocean Water to be Turned Into A/C
Mark Niesse, November 9, 2009 (AP via U.S. News & World Report)

"The plan to pump frigid waters from the ocean's depths to air condition downtown Honolulu isn't a pipe dream, and it could reduce the state's dependence on fossil fuels while slashing power bills that are the highest in the nation.

"The long-studied cooling project by Honolulu Seawater Air Conditioning would extend plumbing nearly 5 miles offshore, suck 45-degree water from 1,800 feet deep, circulate frosty water into buildings' existing A/C systems and then dump it back into the sea."

Schematic of the concept. (click to enlarge)

"Hawaii's government recently approved an environmental study of the project, and the company said it plans to begin construction next year, with the 40-building system expected to come online in early 2012…If the $200 million undertaking is successful in downtown, it could later be extended a couple of miles down the road into tourist-filled Waikiki hotels. [Installation costs to customers can be offset by a $300 per ton rebate approved by the state Public Utilities Commission last year.]

"According to Honolulu Seawater Air Conditioning, buildings using the system would save up to 75 percent of the electricity they currently use on air conditioning…[even including] the electricity it will take to power the vast pumping system…[because] the buildings will no longer be using their power-hungry chillers, which are the machines that reduce water temperatures in order to cool the air in a standard A/C system."

This concept fits broadly into the category of Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion in Hawaii but at lakesides and riversides is a form of geothermal cooling. (click to enlarge)

"While the seawater A/C system is innovative, it's not revolutionary. This technology is already being used around the world in locations that have easy access to cold water, including Toronto, Stockholm, Bora Bora and Hawaii's Big Island…An early version of seawater air conditioning began nearly 30 years ago at the National Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority at Keahole Point, which initially used a truck radiator and box fan system…That rudimentary system lasted about six months, and the three-building system has since been upgraded to a system similar to the one planned for Honolulu…

"Honolulu Seawater Air Conditioning plans to cover downtown buildings including the 30-story First Hawaiian Center, the tallest building in Hawaii. Others include the federal courthouse, state government offices and the four-story headquarters of the state's main electric utility, Hawaiian Electric Co…The project will eliminate the equivalent of 84,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the air annually…roughly equal to 15,000 cars staying off the road…"


SAILING IN SPACE ON SUN
Setting Sail Into Space, Propelled by Sunshine
Dennis Overbye, November 9, 2009 (NY Times)

"…About a year from now, if all goes well, a box about the size of a loaf of bread will pop out of a rocket some 500 miles above the Earth. There in the vacuum it will unfurl four triangular sails as shiny as moonlight and only barely more substantial. Then it will slowly rise on a sunbeam and move across the stars.

"LightSail-1…will sail a few hours and gain a few miles in altitude. But those hours will mark a milestone for a dream that is almost as old as the rocket age itself, and as romantic: to navigate the cosmos on winds of starlight…Even as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration continues to flounder in a search for its future, [Dr. Louis Friedman, director of the Planetary Society] announced… that the Planetary Society, with help from an anonymous donor…[will, over] three years… build and fly a series of solar-sail spacecraft dubbed LightSails, first in orbit around the Earth and eventually into deeper space."

LightSail 1. (click to enlarge)

"…[ Ann Druyan, a film producer and widow of the late astronomer and author Carl Sagan, said it is in part for Sagan], who loved the notion and had embraced it as a symbol for the wise use of technology…There is a long line of visionaries, stretching back to the Russian rocket pioneers Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Fridrich Tsander and the author Arthur C. Clarke, who have supported this idea…The solar sail receives its driving force from the simple fact that light carries not just energy but also momentum…The force on a solar sail is gentle, if not feeble, but unlike a rocket, which fires for a few minutes at most, it is constant. Over days and years a big enough sail, say a mile on a side, could reach speeds of hundreds of thousands of miles an hour, fast enough to traverse the solar system in 5 years. Riding the beam from a powerful laser, a sail could even make the journey to another star system in 100 years, that is to say, a human lifespan.

"Dr. Friedman said it would take too long and involve too much exposure to radiation [for humans]…[T]he only passengers on an interstellar voyage — even after 200 years of additional technological development — [are] likely to be robots or perhaps our genomes encoded on a chip, a consequence of the need to keep the craft light, like a giant cosmic kite…In principle, a solar sail can do anything a regular sail can do…[Ii]t can act as an antigravity machine, using solar pressure to balance the Sun’s gravity and thus hover anyplace in space…And [requires little] rocket fuel…[M]any of NASA’s laboratories have studied solar sails…But efforts by the agency have dried up as it searches for dollars to keep the human spaceflight program going…Japan continues to have a program, and test solar sails have been deployed from satellites or rockets, but no one has ever gotten as far as trying to sail them anywhere…"

click thru for a complete NASA report on the concept

"[LightSail’s sail] is made of aluminized Mylar about one-quarter the thickness of a trash bag. The body of the spacecraft will consist of three miniature satellites known as CubeSats, four inches on a side…One of the cubes will hold electronics and the other two will carry folded-up sails…[T]he whole thing weighs less than five kilograms, or about 11 pounds…The LightSail missions will be spread about a year apart, starting around the end of 2010…[ piggybacking] on the launching of a regular satellite…[The first flight will be a brief proof-of-concept]…

"The next flight will feature a larger sail and will last several days, building up enough velocity to raise its orbit by tens or hundreds of miles…For the third flight, Dr. Friedman and his colleagues intend to set sail out of Earth orbit with a package of scientific instruments to monitor the output of the Sun and provide early warning of magnetic storms that can disrupt power grids and even damage spacecraft. The plan is to set up camp at a point where the gravity of the Earth and Sun balance each other — called L1, about 900,000 miles from the Earth — a popular place for conventional scientific satellites. That, he acknowledges, will require a small rocket, like the attitude control jets on the shuttle, to move out of Earth orbit, perhaps frustrating to a purist…"