Mobile. Buildings eat up a huge amount of energy—about two-fifths of the country’s total use—so to suppress their appetite for power, efficiency entrepreneurs are churning out a suite of nifty technologies, like automatically shading windows, smarter thermostats, and high-tech heating and cooling systems. But a new report from the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Preservation Green Lab concludes that constructing new, energy-efficient buildings almost never saves as much energy as renovating old ones. Renovated buildings outperformed new buildings on energy savings in every category: single-family homes, multifamily complexes, commercial offices, “urban village” mixed-use structures, and elementary schools. Though the conclusion may seem counterintuitive in an age of ambitious LEED standards in many new buildings, consider that it uses more energy and creates more impact to construct an entirely new building than to fix up one of the same size for the same purpose.
Genetically Engineered Stomach Microbe Converts Seaweed into Ethanol. Eastern Oregon biofuel refinery wins $235 million federal loan backing to make ethanol from poplar trees. In a few years, you could be filling up with fuel made from Oregon poplar trees, wheat straw and corn stalks. Financed in part with a $235 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced today, ZeaChem plans a $390 million biofuel refinery in Boardman capable of producing up to 25 million gallons of ethanol per year. The Colorado-based energy company expects to be producing fuel and valuable by-products by late 2014. It's the third U.S. commercial-scale advanced biofuel refinery on the drawing boards. The plant in Boardman, a town of about 3,500 along the Columbia River in eastern Oregon, will make what's called cellulosic ethanol. The plant will create 65 local jobs and 118 construction jobs, the company said.
U.S. "It's a combination of all of those factors that give us the opportunity to add the Boardman biorefinery to the list of other projects we've funded," Vilsack said. "One highlighted example shouldn't poison the well of a lot of good work," he said. EdSurge. Molly Miller: Hidden Costs of Design Decisions. Photo: GSA's U.S. Custom House, Baltimore , MD. Steven Forrester's small Colorado engineering firm is four years old. While he started DMA Engineering during tough economic times, he is holding his own because of clients like the city of Louisville, where his firm recently designed a solar thermal lap pool for a city recreation center.
In a competitive environment where many small firms have closed their doors, one of the ways DMA sets itself apart from other firms, large and small, is by incorporating life cycle cost analysis, or LCCA, into nearly all projects at no cost to the client. "When we present a design, 99% of the time, we do LCCA, " says Forrester. In the case of the solar-heated pool, the facilities manager had to go to City Council members for approval. Forrester uses LCCA mainly to compare different types of systems over the lifetime of the building.
It also can cover replacement costs. "Most equipment will be around for 20 years. Wanger Institute for Sustainable Energy Research. Students and researchers at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) are striving to improve the quality of life in our nation while preserving the natural resources and the environment for future generations. At the Wanger Institute for Sustainable Energy Research (WISER), more than 50 faculty members are currently involved in energy and sustainability research and educational activities across the colleges and institutes at IIT. Digital technology that collects, communicates and reacts to data, allowing the system to adapt to trends in electricity usage and to change supply accordingly. Advanced design tools for gasification processes based on the computational fluid dynamics approach, produced hot gas cleaning and novel sorbents for CO₂ removal and hydrogen separation.
Innovative sustainable high rise buildings that actually produce energy, utilizing renewable sources such as wind, sun and geothermal. IIT will become the most sustainable, urban university campus in the United States. Photovoltaic Research Center. This graphic shows color-coded simulation results from advanced computational models used to characterize the properties of materials used in organic photovoltaic solar cells in efforts to better understand the physics involved and to improve the technology.
The new Network for Photovoltaic Technology research center led by Purdue University and funded by the Semiconductor Research Corporation, aims to develop such computational capabilities for broad range of PV technologies for higher efficiency and reduced manufacture cost. (B. Ray, P. Nair, E. García, and M. Alam, Purdue University) Download image WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Purdue University will lead a new research center to improve photovoltaic solar cells as part of a national effort to bring alternative energy technologies to the marketplace.
The work is funded by the Semiconductor Research Corporation, a university-research consortium for semiconductors and related technologies. Wind Power Without the Blades: Big Pics. Magenn Power Inc. Wallace Energy Systems & Renewables Facility :: Oregon State University, College of Engineering. In 2007/2008, OSU, in collaboration with Columbia Power Technologies (CPT) and the U.S. Navy, evaluated 18 different direct-drive technologies, and down-selected to five promising designs. OSU and CPT built each of those prototypes at the 200W peak level and tested them on OSU's new wave energy linear test bed. OSU and CPT also comprehensively simulated each of the designs, and scaled the simulations up to 100kW, including full 100kW designs with costs, maintenance, operations etc., to give estimates for total costs of energy for each.
This has been a tremendous collaboration enabling the zeroing in on optimum designs, and based on this work, in September 2008, OSU and CPT completed a series of very successful bay and ocean testing (see pictures). CPT is now driving these efforts to commercialization, and OSU will continue to partner with them in a supporting/research role. The tech predictions for 2012 - Digital Life - Digital Life. Siliconrepublic.com editor John Kennedy goes through his tech predictions for 2012 from the fabled Apple TV and iPad 3 to the impact of Windows 8 and hybrid cloud on the enterprise. Apple iTV Writing in his biography of the late Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson told how the Apple co-founder realised he had “finally cracked it” in terms of how he would reinvent the TV for a world made weary of multiple remote controls.
In the wake of Jobs’ passing much of the world’s tech press began to speculate once more on the likelihood of an Apple-made TV. Not to be confused with the existing Apple TV – a wireless home hub product that brings digital content from the web to the home TV in high definition – the view is that since Apple has cracked music, smartphones and most recently tablet computers and was already a master in terms of display technologies like Retina, an iTV (suggested name) would be a natural stretch. Munster predicted the Apple TV will debut in the market in time for Christmas 2012. Data to be a defining tech trend in 2012. The start of this year was marked by a tech industry obsession with where to put growing mountains of information gathered online and by sensors increasingly woven into modern lifestyles. External drives boasted seemingly unfillable capacities and companies touted services for storing bits and bytes at massive data centers in the Internet "cloud.
" As 2012 approaches, focus has turned to searching for trends, patterns and other useful insights about people's preferences and behaviors that might be buried in troves of data. "Big analytics toward the end of the year became the big term and into next year it will be the big term," independent Silicon Valley analyst Rob Enderle told AFP on Friday. "Analytics is really the core of what will be happening in everything from medical research to advertising. " "Analyzing data can tell you want resonates and what doesn't," Enderle said. "Applied to elections it could be the difference between winners and losers. " 5 Steps To Measure The ROI Of Digital Media Channels. Many marketers have worked hard in 2011 to develop appropriately customized ROI measures for social media.
I have dedicated a few previous posts on how to approach these measures. As we move into 2012, I would like to raise a key question of measurement that isn’t consistently addressed but is of critical importance. That is: How are you measuring the interplay and overall performance of your combined paid, earned, and owned digital media channels?
How do you know which elements are driving the most value? Most marketers are starting to understand that the most effective digital communication plans seamlessly integrate content across paid, earned, and owned media channels. As marketers continue to build out ever more complex digital ecosystems, understanding how all elements, individually and in unison, are contributing to overall success is a cost of entry for effective optimization. We are measuring vast quantities of discrete elements within these channels. Let’s talk about solutions.
How to see the best meteor showers of 2012: Tools, tips and 'save the dates' (PhysOrg.com) -- Whether you're watching from a downtown area or the dark countryside, here are some tips to help you enjoy these celestial shows of shooting stars. Those streaks of light are really caused by tiny specks of comet-stuff hitting Earth's atmosphere at very high speed and disintegrating in flashes of light. First a word about the moon - it is not the meteor watcher's friend. Light reflecting off a bright moon can be just as detrimental to good meteor viewing as those bright lights of the big city.
There is nothing you can do except howl at the moon, so you'll have to put up with it or wait until the next favorable shower. The best thing you can do to maximize the number of meteors you'll see is to get as far away from urban light pollution as possible and find a location with a clear, unclouded view of the night sky. If you enjoy camping, try planning a trip that coincides with dates of one of the meteor showers listed below. Lastly, put away the telescope or binoculars. Swiss chemists emulate cheese rind to create self-cleaning surface material. (PhysOrg.com) -- Cheese lovers know that the milky white outer coating of Camembert cheese not only serves to offer a tart offset to the pungent inner cheese, but also protects it until ready to be eaten, much like plastic wrap does for other foods.
Now, a group of Swiss researchers have taken this idea heart, and have created a sort of artificial rind. As they describe in their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they have created a bio-sandwich of sorts using a type of cheese fungus to create a material that eats organic material that comes into contact with it. The idea was to create a material that mimics what the rind does for Camembert cheese, i.e. protect it from other microorganisms, while at the same time allowing the cheese inside to mature. To construct such a material, they started with a sheet of thin plastic which they covered with Penicillium roqueforti, a fungus mixture known more familiarly as the stuff that makes blue cheese blue. With new water desalination method, potable water for disaster areas. Environmental News, Commentary, Advice. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Chemist Invents Environmentally Friendly Plastics of Tomorrow | ScienceLives.
This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation. Marc Hillmyer loves plastic. He is fascinated by the incredible properties that these amazing materials exhibit. They can be stronger than steel, stop a speeding bullet, convert light into electricity, protect us from harmful pathogens, and help cure disease and repair our bodies. As a chemist, Hillmyer thinks hard about the polymer molecules that make up plastic and how to design new materials with even more advanced properties and applications. However, while plastic polymers are essential to myriad technologies we encounter every day, the production and disposal of these products presents inescapable environmental challenges that are costly to correct at a minimum and unsustainable in the long term.
Name: Marc A. What inspired you to choose this field of study? What is the best piece of advice you ever received? What was your first scientific experiment as a child? BrightSource Energy | Home. Year in Review: Solar industry puts Oregon at center of escalating trade dispute with China. View full sizeMotoya Nakamura/The OregonianREC Solar employees install solar panels at Gladstone High School. Plunging solar-panel prices and declining European subsidies are squeezing companies including SolarWorld, a German business that employs 1,000 in Hillsboro. Storms hit Oregon's fast-growing solar sector in 2011 as the state emerged at the center of an escalating international trade dispute rocking the renewable energy industry. State economic development officials had high hopes that solar manufacturing would succeed the semiconductor industry as a big employer, given that the two sectors use similar raw materials and worker skills. But by year's end the picture appeared decidedly cloudy.
The U.S. subsidiary of SolarWorld AG, a German company employing 1,000 in Hillsboro to make solar cells and panels, filed a trade complaint Oct. 19 against China. The companies contend China aims to drive manufacturers out of business and corner the U.S. market. The U.S. -- Richard Read. Scientists Develop Affordable Solar Panels That Work In The Dark. It's about damn time, don't you think?
Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory announced Wednesday that they have been able to confirm a new high-efficiency solar cell design that utilizes nearly the entire solar spectrum. Translation: They figured out a way to make solar panels generate electricity in the dark. CleanTechnica says , In earlier trials, the researchers used different alloys that achieved full spectrum responses but involved very high production costs. The advantage of gallium arsenide nitride is that it is very similar to a conventional semiconductor, gallium arsenide, and it can be produced with a commonly used fabrication method involving chemical vapor deposition. The Lawrence Berkeley breakthrough represents just one path to increasing the efficiency and lowering the cost of solar cells. In the meantime, you could just turn any metal surface into solar panels with photovoltaic spray paint .
[Photo: Norby /Flickr]