Couple Reduces Water Use By Hundreds Of Thousands Of Gallons And Saves Hundreds Of Dollars
Only to be sued by the city for having an ugly yard…
Some Southern California cities fine residents for watering their lawns too much during droughts.
But in Orange, officials are locked in a legal battle with a couple accused of violating city ordinances for removing their lawn in an attempt to save water.
…
But city officials determined the fix was not acceptable, saying city codes require that 40% of the yard be landscaped predominantly with live plants.
…
Meanwhile, the couple said they had reduced their water usage from 299,221 gallons in 2007 to 58,348 gallons in 2009.
Seriously? What the hell is wrong with these people, hasn’t Southern California been in a drought for the last couple decades?
Obama Announces Cash For Caulkers
I am pretty excited about this as I feel it will be a great one two punch, produce a tonn of jobs in an industry that was hit hard by the recession (construction) while dramatically reducing energy usage (can’t get the big money unless you reduce over 20% in the program.)
—————
Fact Sheet: Homestar Energy Efficiency Retrofit Program
WASHINGTON–In his State of the Union address, the President called on Congress to pass a program of incentives for homeowners who make energy efficiency investments in their homes. Today, while touring a training facility at Savannah Technical College, the President outlined more details of a new “HOMESTAR” program that would help create jobs by encouraging American families to invest in energy saving home improvements. Consistent with the President’s call for a HOMESTAR program, the Senate Democratic leadership included a proposal of this kind as part of their Jobs Agenda released on February 4, 2010. The President looks forward to continuing to work with Members of Congress, business, environmental and labor leaders to enact a HOMESTAR program into law.
Background on the HOMESTAR program
With unemployment in the construction sector near 25% and with substantial underutilized capacity in our manufacturing sector, the HOMESTAR program has the potential to jumpstart our economic recovery by boosting demand for energy efficiency products and installation services. For middle-class families, this program will help them save hundreds of dollars a year in energy costs while improving the comfort and value of their most important investment – their homes. In addition, the program would help reduce our economy’s dependence on oil and support the development of an energy efficiency services sector in our economy. Key components of the HOMESTAR Program include:
- Rebates delivered directly to consumers: Like the Cash for Clunkers program, consumers would be eligible for direct HOMESTAR rebates at the point of sale for a variety of energy-saving investments in their homes. A broad array of vendors, from small independent building material dealers, large national home improvement chains, energy efficiency installation professionals and utility energy efficiency programs (including rural utilities) would market the rebates, provide them directly to consumers and then be reimbursed by the federal government.
- $1,000 – $1,500 Silver Star Rebates: Consumers looking to have simple upgrades performed in their homes would be eligible for 50% rebates up to $1,000 – $1,500 for doing any of a straightforward set of upgrades, including: insulation, duct sealing, water heaters, HVAC units, windows, roofing and doors. Under Silver Star, consumers can chose a combination of upgrades for rebates up to a maximum of $3,000 per home. Rebates would be limited to the most energy efficient categories of upgrades—focusing on products made primarily in the United States and installed by certified contractors.
- $3000 Gold Star Rebates: Consumers interested in more comprehensive energy retrofits would be eligible for a $3,000 rebate for a whole home energy audit and subsequent retrofit tailored to achieve a 20% energy savings in their homes. Consumers could receive additional rebate amounts for energy savings in excess of 20%. Gold Star would build on existing whole home retrofit programs, like EPA’s successful Home Performance with Energy Star program.
- Oversight to Ensure Quality Installations: The program would require that contractors be certified to perform efficiency installations. Independent quality assurance providers would conduct field audits after work is completed to ensure proper installation so consumers receive energy savings from their upgrades. States would oversee the implementation of quality assurance to ensure that the program was moving the industry toward more robust standards and comprehensive energy retrofit practices.
- Support for financing: The program would include support to State and local governments to provide financing options for consumers seeking to make efficiency investments in their homes. This will help ensure that consumers can afford to make these investments.
The program will result in the creation of tens of thousands of jobs while achieving substantial reductions in energy use – the equivalent of the entire output of three coal-fired power plants each year. Consumers in the program are anticipated to save between $200 – $500 per year in energy costs, while improving the comfort and value of their homes.
BACKGROUND ON PARTICIPANTS IN TODAY’S PRESIDENTIAL EVENT
- Business Leaders
- Larry Laseter, President of Masco Home Services. Masco is a Fortune 150 company specializing in products and services for the home building and home improvement business, including windows and doors, installation, and contracting. After being hit particularly hard by the recession (40% reduction in workforce over a several year period), Masco created Masco Home Services (MHS) a year ago with the intent to provide residential energy efficiency retrofits to American households. Laseter is a Georgia resident, and MHS will open a Home Performance branch in Atlanta in May.
- Mike Lawrence, Vice President and General Manager for Insulation Systems, Johns Manville. Johns Manville is a leading manufacturer and marketer of insulation and roofing materials for commercial, industrial, and residential applications. Johns Manville is based in Denver, CO and has manufacturing facilities in Georgia as well as California, Montana, Arizona, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, Texas, and New Jersey.
- Mark Andrews, CEO, North America, Knauf Insulation. Knauf Mark was named to a newly created North American CEO position in January 2010. Knauf’s US headquarters is in Shelbyville Indiana, and Knauf has manufacturing facilities in Indiana, Alabama, and California.
- Local Efficiency Contractors
- Patrick Shay, Green Swap. Patrick is an architect and co-founder of Green Sweep, an energy efficiency company that works with residential, commercial and industrial customers on cost saving clean energy and energy efficiency upgrades. Pat is also a Chatham County Commissioner and chair of the Chatham Environmental Forum, which is addressing energy, climate and other sustainability issues in the Savannah Chatham area.
- Howard Feldman, Costal Green Building Solutions. Howard is a co-founder of Coastal Green Building Solutions. He is a builder, renovator and a certified RESNET HERS rater, which means he evaluates homes and businesses for energy efficiency opportunities and upgrades. Howard’s company works in both Georgia and South Carolina. In addition to Patrick Shay and Howard Feldman, several other Savannah-area contractors and small businesses who would create jobs if this program were passed are in attendance.
Hairy Solar Cells: Cheap, Efficient, Potentially Revolutionary
Using arrays of long, thin silicon wires embedded in a polymer substrate, a team of scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has created a new type of flexible solar cell that enhances the absorption of sunlight and efficiently converts its photons into electrons. The solar cell does all this using only a fraction of the expensive semiconductor materials required by conventional solar cells.
“These solar cells have, for the first time, surpassed the conventional light-trapping limit for absorbing materials,” says Harry Atwater, Howard Hughes Professor, professor of applied physics and materials science, and director of Caltech’s Resnick Institute, which focuses on sustainability research.
This is a photomicrograph of a silicon wire array embedded within a transparent, flexible polymer film.
[Credit: Caltech/Michael Kelzenberg]
The light-trapping limit of a material refers to how much sunlight it is able to absorb. The silicon-wire arrays absorb up to 96 percent of incident sunlight at a single wavelength and 85 percent of total collectible sunlight. “We’ve surpassed previous optical microstructures developed to trap light,” he says.
Atwater and his colleagues—including Nathan Lewis, the George L. Argyros Professor and professor of chemistry at Caltech, and graduate student Michael Kelzenberg—assessed the performance of these arrays in a paper appearing in the February 14 advance online edition of the journal Nature Materials.
Atwater notes that the solar cells’ enhanced absorption is “useful absorption.”
“Many materials can absorb light quite well but not generate electricity—like, for instance, black paint,” he explains. “What’s most important in a solar cell is whether that absorption leads to the creation of charge carriers.”
The silicon wire arrays created by Atwater and his colleagues are able to convert between 90 and 100 percent of the photons they absorb into electrons—in technical terms, the wires have a near-perfect internal quantum efficiency. “High absorption plus good conversion makes for a high-quality solar cell,” says Atwater. “It’s an important advance.”
The key to the success of these solar cells is their silicon wires, each of which, says Atwater, “is independently a high-efficiency, high-quality solar cell.” When brought together in an array, however, they’re even more effective, because they interact to increase the cell’s ability to absorb light.
“Light comes into each wire, and a portion is absorbed and another portion scatters. The collective scattering interactions between the wires make the array very absorbing,” he says.
This is a schematic diagram of the light-trapping elements used to optimize absorption within a polymer-embedded silicon wire array.
[Credit: Caltech/Michael Kelzenberg]
This effect occurs despite the sparseness of the wires in the array—they cover only between 2 and 10 percent of the cell’s surface area.
“When we first considered silicon wire-array solar cells, we assumed that sunlight would be wasted on the space between wires,” explains Kelzenberg. “So our initial plan was to grow the wires as close together as possible. But when we started quantifying their absorption, we realized that more light could be absorbed than predicted by the wire-packing fraction alone. By developing light-trapping techniques for relatively sparse wire arrays, not only did we achieve suitable absorption, we also demonstrated effective optical concentration—an exciting prospect for further enhancing the efficiency of silicon-wire-array solar cells.”
Each wire measures between 30 and 100 microns in length and only 1 micron in diameter. “The entire thickness of the array is the length of the wire,” notes Atwater. “But in terms of area or volume, just 2 percent of it is silicon, and 98 percent is polymer.”
In other words, while these arrays have the thickness of a conventional crystalline solar cell, their volume is equivalent to that of a two-micron-thick film. Or to put it yet another way, there is a lot of empty space in in there.
Since the silicon material is an expensive component of a conventional solar cell, a cell that requires just one-fiftieth of the amount of this semiconductor will be much cheaper to produce.
The composite nature of these solar cells, Atwater adds, means that they are also flexible. “Having these be complete flexible sheets of material ends up being important,” he says, “because flexible thin films can be manufactured in a roll-to-roll process, an inherently lower-cost process than one that involves brittle wafers, like those used to make conventional solar cells.”
Atwater, Lewis, and their colleagues had earlier demonstrated that it was possible to create these innovative solar cells. “They were visually striking,” says Atwater. “But it wasn’t until now that we could show that they are both highly efficient at carrier collection and highly absorbing.”
The next steps, Atwater says, are to increase the operating voltage and the overall size of the solar cell. “The structures we’ve made are square centimeters in size,” he explains. “We’re now scaling up to make cells that will be hundreds of square centimeters—the size of a normal cell.”
Atwater says that the team is already “on its way” to showing that large-area cells work just as well as these smaller versions.
In addition to Atwater, Lewis, and Kelzenberg, the all-Caltech coauthors on the Nature Materials paper, “Enhanced absorption and carrier collection in Si wire arrays for photovoltaic applications,” are postdoctoral scholars Shannon Boettcher and Joshua Spurgeon; undergraduate student Jan Petykiewicz; and graduate students Daniel Turner-Evans, Morgan Putnam, Emily Warren, and Ryan Briggs.
The Importance Of Science, And Why Your Opinions Don’t Matter So Much
science doesn’t have anything to do with your religious beliefs, or your political beliefs…you are going to just have to deal with that.
Scientists Dig Deep To Understand Ancient Climate
For eight weeks beginning in November 2009, off the coast of New Zealand, an international team of 34 scientists and 92 support staff and crew on board the scientific drilling vessel JOIDES Resolution (JR) were at work investigating sea-level change in a region called the Canterbury Basin. It proved to be a record-breaking trip for the research team.
The JR is one of the primary research vessels of an international research program called the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP). This research took place during IODP Expedition 317.
IODP is supported by two lead agencies, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology.
At present 10 percent of the world’s population lives within 10 meters of sea level. Current climate models predict a 50-centimeter to more than one-meter rise in sea level over the next 100 years, posing a threat to inhabitants of low-lying coastal communities around the world.
To better understand what drives changes in sea level and how humans are affecting this change, scientists are “looking to our past for answers and digging back as far as 35 million years into the Earth’s history to understand these dynamic processes,” says Rodey Batiza of the NSF’s division of ocean sciences.
From November 4, 2009 to January 4, 2010, the IODP research team drilled four sites in the seafloor. One site marked the deepest hole drilled by the JR on the continental shelf (1,030 meters), and another was the deepest hole drilled on a single expedition in the history of scientific ocean drilling (1,927 meters).
Another record was broken for the deepest sample taken by scientific ocean drilling for microbiological studies (1,925 meters).
A fourth record was achieved when the team recovered sediment from the shallowest water site (85 meters) ever drilled for science by the JR.
“This was one of only two JR expeditions that have attempted to drill on a continental shelf–this was not a routine operation for this ship,” says co-chief scientist Craig Fulthorpe of the University of Texas at Austin, who led the expedition with co-chief scientist Koichi Hoyanagi of Shinshu University in Japan.
The unstable, sandy composition of the sediments and the relatively shallow water of the shelf environment present unique challenges for a floating drilling platform like the JR, which relies on thrusters to maintain position and requires special technology to accommodate wave motion.
“We never expected we would be able to drill this deep in such a difficult environment,” says Fulthorpe.
Canterbury Basin is part of a worldwide array of IODP drilling investigations designed to examine global sea level changes during Earth’s “Icehouse” period, when sea level was largely controlled by changes in glaciation at the poles.
Before Canterbury, IODP sea level change studies included sites near the New Jersey coast, the Bahamas, Tahiti, and on the Marion Plateau off northeastern Australia.
Canterbury Basin was selected as a premier site for further sea level history investigations because it expanded the geographic coverage needed to study a global process. It displays similar sequence patterns to New Jersey studies.
Data from both the Canterbury Basin and the New Jersey shelf IODP expeditions will be integrated to provide a better understanding of global trends in sea level over time.
Global sea level has changed in the Earth’s past; these changes are influenced by the melting of polar ice caps, which increases the volume of water in the ocean.
Locally, relative sea level can also change as a result of tectonic activity, which causes vertical movement in the Earth’s crust.
Together, glaciation and tectonic forces create a complex system that can be difficult to simulate with climate models. This necessitates field studies like the Canterbury Basin expedition, say geologists, to directly analyze samples.
The Canterbury Basin expedition set out to recover seafloor sediments that would capture a detailed record of changes in sea level that occurred during the last 10 to 12 million years, a time when global sea level change was largely controlled by glacial/interglacial ice volume changes.
The research team also recovered samples documenting changes in ocean circulation that began when movements in Earth’s tectonic plates separated Antarctica from Australia, creating a new seaway between the two continents about 34 million years ago.
Canterbury Basin is one of the best sites in the world for this type of survey because it is located in a tectonically-active region and therefore has a relatively high rate of sedimentary deposition, which, like the pages of a book, record detailed events in Earth’s climate history.
Beyond breaking records, the IODP Canterbury Basin expedition achieved its goal of recovering a 10-million-year record of sea level fluctuations, with one drill hole extending back 35 million years.
Cores revealed cyclic changes in sediment type and physical properties (such as magnetic susceptibility) that are believed to reflect switches between glacial and interglacial time periods.
Even longer cycles were originally identified using seismic images generated using sound waves.
Understanding the relationship between these seismic “sequences” and global sea-level change is an important objective for post-expedition research, say expedition geologists.
The JR is operated by the U.S. Implementing Organization of IODP, which consists of the Washington, D.C.-based Consortium for Ocean Leadership, Texas A&M University, and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.
Additional program support for the IODP comes from the European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling (ECORD), the Australian-New Zealand IODP Consortium (ANZIC), India’s Ministry of Earth Sciences, the People’s Republic of China (Ministry of Science and Technology), and the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources.
RSS XML Feed
