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GreenMonk news roundup 01/05/2009

  • What has NASA done lately to help the Earth?

    Dr Pete Worden of NASA presents on much of the Earth Science work NASA is doing – fascinating presentation to Google.

    At present, NASA has more than a dozen large Earth observing satellites in orbit, returning over a terabyte per day of physical, chemical, and climatological data about our planet. NASA gathers more data about the earth, and funds more research in the Earth Sciences, than the rest of the world combined.

    tags: nasa, google, pete worden

  • The World Watch has released a report (PDF) looking at a roadmap towards a lower carbon economy based on a wide range of new energy systems.

    “We are on the verge of an energy revolution,” says Flavin. “With strong political leadership, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to use policy and technology innovation to stave off the greatest human-caused threat our planet has seen.”

    World Watch believes that ‘these new energy sources will make it possible to retire hundreds of coal-fired power plants that now provide 40 percent of the world’s power by 2030, eliminating up to one-third of global carbon dioxide emissions while creating millions of new jobs.’

    tags: world watch, low-carbon energy, carbon

  • One of the planet’s most fragile and pristine ecosystems sits atop a bounty of untapped fossil fuels.

    Melting polar ice is making the Arctic more accessible to shipping and other industry.

    The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that 90 billion barrels of oil, 44 billion barrels of natural gas liquids and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of natural gas are recoverable in the frozen region north of the Arctic Circle.

    tags: polar ice, ice, arctic thaw, arctic ice

  • As the wind industry closes out another banner year, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) is looking ahead to further progress in 2009. Although the industry is buffeted by the financial crisis and economic downturn, it is also buoyed by a strong strategic position and the prospect of strong policy support from Congress and the new President. Here are some wind energy projections for the New Year:

    tags: wind energy, awea, trends

  • Two Chinese companies have proposed a massive, 1-gigawatt solar photovoltaic power plant in China’s northwest

    tags: photovoltaic, solar energy, china

  • San Diego, already home to dozens of companies involved in solar or wind energy, would be a major player in the nation’s multi-trillion-dollar energy economy if a group of local researchers succeed in turning algae into a commercially viable transportation fuel, something they think they can do within a decade.

    tags: algae, san diego, biofuel

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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GreenMonk news roundup 01/03/2009

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Britain readies for nation-wide Smart Meter rollout

Smart Meter

An article in the UK’s Sunday Times recently talked about the plans for a nationwide rollout of Smart Meters in Britain.

From the article:

Telecoms giants Vodafone, O2 and BT and system integrators Logica, Accenture, IBM and Capgemini are understood to have started talks to form bidding consortiums…

The government has put smart meters at the heart of its energy policy but progress on its implemen-tation has been slow. A consensus has emerged recently between the Department for Energy and Climate Change, Ofgem, the regulator, and the big six utility companies over how it will be done.

Each utility will be responsible for fitting new meters for its customers, starting a roll-out from 2010…

To ensure transparency, a “central communications” group would be set up to electronically collect, process and distribute data and serve as the go-between for energy companies and the meters in their customers’ homes…

Ofgem is expected to run the tender for the contract, which would operate from 2010 to 2020. The winning group would likely consist of a telecoms provider and a systems integrator. There is an outside chance that the contract could be broken down regionally.

This is great news for Britain as it will allow for demand response projects to be rolled out with the consequent nationwide energy savings and the possibilities to increase the penetration of renewables on the grid. Ireland continues to drag its feet in this area with a limited pilot to begin next year. With the irish government hoping to reach 40% penetration of renewables by 2020, they really need to pick up the pace if they want to come anywhere near achieving that target.

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GreenMonk news roundup 12/20/2008

  • New climate change scenarios quantify the idea that oil is only a small component of the total global warming problem — the real problem is coal.

    If the world replaced all of its oil usage with carbon-neutral energy sources, ecologist Kenneth Caldeira of Stanford University calculated that it would only buy us about 10 years before coal emissions warmed the planet to what many scientists consider dangerous levels.

    tags: coal, oil, global warming, coal burning

  • Launch of the Water Footprint Network: 16 December 2008!
    Download press release

    People use lots of water for drinking, cooking and washing, but even more for producing things such as food, paper, cotton clothes, etc. The water footprint is an indicator of water use that looks at both direct and indirect water use of a consumer or producer. The water footprint of an individual, community or business is defined as the total volume of freshwater that is used to produce the goods and services consumed by the individual or community or produced by the business.

    tags: water, water footprint

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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GreenMonk news roundup 12/19/2008

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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How Green is Cloud Computing?

Australian Open web traffic

This is a graph of traffic to the website of the Australian Open tennis championship. As you can see, the traffic spikes in January every year and then all but disappears for the other 11 months of the year. It is also important to note that the height of the traffic spike is increasing year on year.

If the owners of this site want to be able to serve all the traffic at the top peak of the peak, they can spend a fortune on servers capable of handling that level of traffic but these servers will be almost entirely idle for eleven months of the year. The alternative is that the owners put the site on a cloud platform and dial up the resources associated with it, as and when needed. This is obviously a vastly more efficient option for the site owners. However, that doesn’t mean that cloud computing itself is Green or efficient.

For cloud computing to be efficient, the individual servers need to be doing more work than they would be doing if not in a cloud infrastructure. The main cloud providers include Amazon, Google, IBM and more recently, Microsoft. As far as I know, none of these companies are providing utilisation data per unit, so it is not possible to know just how efficient cloud computing actually is.

There is another consideration. There are a number of start-ups who say that they couldn’t have built their infrastructure if it wasn’t for cloud i.e. theirs is additional consumption which wouldn’t haven’t existed without the cloud. Does this newly facilitated consumption mean that cloud computing is less Green?

And without usage data from the cloud providers will we ever truly know if cloud computing is Green?

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GreenMonk news roundup 12/17/2008

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GreenMonk news roundup 12/16/2008

  • Climate talks in Poznan, Poland, this week included a meeting to discuss the concept of a super-grid that would connect renewable-rich regions to energy-hungry regions via high-voltage, direct-current (HVDC) cables. It’s an attractive idea. If Iceland has all the geothermal, North Africa has the solar, Scotland has the offshore wind and the coasts can tap wave power, why not build a grid that can carry that emission-free power to inland population centres that rely on fossil fuels and nuclear?

    tags: supergrid, hvdc

  • The thickness of Arctic sea ice “plummeted” last winter, thinning by as much as one-fifth in some regions, satellite data has revealed.

    A study by UK researchers showed that the ice thickness had been fairly constant for the previous five winters.

    The team from University College London added that the results provided the first definitive proof that the overall volume of Arctic ice was decreasing.

    tags: arctic ice, arctic thaw, arctic sea ice

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.