Super Bowl Going Green
Sterling Planet today announced a partnership with the National Football League (NFL) Environmental Program and Florida Power & Light (FPL) Sunshine Energy program for business customers to make Super Bowl XLI and the NFL Experience Football Theme Park both 100% renewable energy events. This year’s NFL championship game will be the first Super Bowl to use 100% renewable energy.
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Community Based Renewable Energy
One of the most effective ways to make a lot of renewable energy with just a little patch of land is to use a large wind turbine. Solar too is always better when there is a lot of it. However large scale wind and solar don’t come cheap. One way around the high cost of these projects would be to get together with a bunch of your friends and neighbors and pool your resources.
This would allow you to buy a very large wind turbine, or set up a field of solar for your neighborhood, use the energy from it and sell the rest. The offset of not having an electric bill combined with the revenue sharing would be used to pay back your part of the investment. You would in essence be your own little neighborhood power company.
There is only one problem…
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Not Quite Green In The “Palm” Of Our Hands
Recently, there have been a lot of posts on the blog about renewable energy, its merits, and various forms. My awesome mom sent me a link to an article that appeared in the New York Times business section today. It is about palm oil and how it had once been thought to be about the best of biofuels and quite heavily used in Europe. Now there seems to be recent studies showing that plantation practices could heavily offset the carbon savings that the fuel has created for its users. A very good lesson for approaching things in a more w-holistic manner.
when scientists studied practices at palm plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia, this green fairy tale began to look more like an environmental nightmare.
Rising demand for palm oil in Europe brought about the clearing of huge tracts of Southeast Asian rainforest and the overuse of chemical fertilizer there.
Worse still, the scientists said, space for the expanding palm plantations was often created by draining and burning peatland, which sent huge amounts of carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
Become enlightened here!
Get It Where You Can
Geothermal power in Alaska, hmmm. Seems counter-intuituive to me. Turns out there are hot springs in Alaska - they’re just not very hot (comparatively). Traditional geothermal generators require steam. That means the water has to be hot (not just the 212 F temperature you are thinking)! From Wikipedia
The most common process is the steam flash process, which incorporates steam separators to take the steam from a flashing geothermal well and passes the steam through a turbine that drives an electric generator.
Commercial exploration and development of geothermal energy to date have focused on natural geothermal reservoirs—volumes of rock at high temperatures (up to 662°F or 350°C)
This process requires sources of heat close to the surface.
Although geothermal energy is present everywhere beneath the Earth’s surface, its use is possible only when certain conditions are met: (1) The energy must be accessible to drilling, usually at depths of less than 2 mi (3 km) but possibly at depths of 4mi (6–7km) in particularly favorable environments…
Do I have to have steam? Not necessarily.
A more efficient utilization of the resource can be obtained by using the binary process on resources with a temperature less than 360°F (180°C).
So what is this “binary process”? The Wiki gets a bit too technical so I’ll take over.
Simply put, utilizing heat without using steam is like a heat pump for your house. You take a second system (hence, binary) to utilize the temperature differential - you are moving heat. When substances heat they want to expand. When gasses heat they REALLY want to expand. You keep them under pressure until you are ready to use this energy. In the case of the home heat pump you typically let the gas expand in some coils, that makes the coils cold, then you blow air across the coils to cool your home. With power generation it’s a bit more intense. You let this hot gas out of a nozzle and spin a turbine to produce electricity.
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It’s Not How Much You Use It’s How Much You Waste
Rt’s post about fun ways to garner more energy from the maw of waste led me to recycle a post from way back here is a fun little graphic.
This image and the massive amounts of data that went into making this sweet chart is from The Lawernce Livermore National Lab’s Energy Flow Trends.
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